Introducing the American Spirit Part 3

"If I were suggesting a motto for a new coinage I would put on one side of it 'In Gold We Trust,' and on the other 'The Biggest and The Best.'"

Ignoring this somewhat merited slur I said: "The first and only doctrine of our national creed which we have as yet formulated is that we have a great national destiny."

At that the Herr Director jumped excitedly from his seat, and said somewhat sneeringly, "Oh, you mean you have a place under the Sun. All nations have such a creed, but when we Germans try to realize it, you call us a menace to civilization."

It was a tense moment in my relations.h.i.+p to my guests, but I ventured to say: "We have a better reason for the faith which is in us than most other nations, for we are trying to realize it without killing off other people. In fact we are trying to realize it at a greater hazard than that of being conquered by an alien enemy. We are keeping open these doors which have swung both ways freely, for nearly three hundred years, and your Old World weary ones have been coming; bringing their traditions, their ideals, their worn out faiths and their heaped up wrath. We did not forbid them; they have come to our towns, our schools, our homes, they are here for better for worse, and we cannot divorce them, or drive them away.

"Yes," I continued, much to the discomfiture of the Herr Director, "we _have_ a meaning to the Old World, a larger meaning than you think. We have a place under the Sun, not to satisfy national ambitions; but to keep alive faith in humanity."

The Angels around the table were disquieted by our vehemence, the Frau Directorin urged that it was growing late, and we left that center of quiet which we had so disturbed, to return to our hotel. We entered a street car crowded beyond its capacity by burly Irishmen the worse for liquor, good-natured Slavs none the better for it, aggressive looking Russian Jews and sleek Chinamen. There were mothers with their crying babies, and thoughtless boys and girls chewing gum most viciously.

After the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin had been jostled unmercifully, we left the uncomfortable car, and when we were again breathing unpolluted air the Herr Director asked quizzically:

"Do you still believe in humanity?"

Boldly and bravely I answered: "Yes, I believe," and lifting my face to the stars I whispered: "Lord, help my unbelief."

III

_The Spirit Out-of-Doors_

Much to my regret the Herr Director did not sleep well that second night in the United States. His nerves had suffered from those first thronging impressions, he looked pale and was decidedly irritable; "for how could a man sleep or be expected to sleep in this business canyon, loud from the thunder of the elevated, and bright from the flas.h.i.+ng of illuminated signs?" Together they had the effect of an electric storm upon him.

When he did fall asleep he dreamed that the Metropolitan Tower, the Woolworth Building and St. Patrick's Cathedral were dancing Tango upon his chest.

This nightmare may have been due to the fact that just before retiring we witnessed an exhibition of this modern madness, which seemed to be indulged in everywhere except in the churches and possibly the barber shops. Partly also, perhaps, because the Herr Director insisted upon eating lobster shortly before midnight, in spite of the fact that I warned him against that indulgence. It was one of those generous, United States lobsters, and not the diminutive sh.e.l.l-fish with which cultured Europeans merely tickle their palates.

The Herr Director had repeatedly pointed out our bad habit of leaving a great deal of food on our plates, and to impress upon me his better manners, he had eaten the entire lobster.

I had not slept well that night either, in spite of the fact that I had eaten sparingly. I think it was the Herr Director himself who had "got on my nerves," and I was finding this task of "showing off" my beloved United States difficult and exacting.

That morning we were to leave New York and I would introduce my guests to the great American out-of-doors, and the prospect added to my already uncomfortable frame of mind.

If only we might start from that marvellous Central Station in the heart of the city; but in order to reach our destination, which was Lake Mohonk, we had to cross the West Side where it is irredeemably tawdry and ugly, and take one of the ferry-boats to Weehawken. This somewhat inconvenient procedure made the Herr Director doubly critical.

The Fates were against us, for it was a hot, humid day, the car was crowded, and the start from Weehawken anything but auspicious.

In Europe the Herr Director travels second cla.s.s when he travels officially (the first, as is well known, being reserved for Americans and fools), and third when he travels _incognito_, for he is a thrifty soul. Nevertheless, he did not like our cars, they were "obtrusively decorated," and privacy was impossible. Why should he have to look at a hundred or more human heads variously "_frisired_"?

I suggested that we take seats in front, which we succeeded in doing, and then he found that if he wished to take off his collar, he would have to do it with two hundred or more human eyes fastened upon him, when the hundred people possessing them had no business to see what he was doing.

I have already confessed how sensitive I am to criticism of anything American, no matter how just the criticism may be. So sensitive am I, that had he reflected upon the good looks of my wife, he could scarcely have hurt me more than when he reflected upon the beauty and arrangement of an American railway car.

And yet I have often wondered why our American genius seems to have exhausted itself when it evolved the present type of car, having done nothing to it except adding or taking away some of its "gingerbread."

Nevertheless I lost my patience and told him that if he liked to travel cooped in with seven other pa.s.sengers, four of whom he must face and two of whom might at any moment poke their elbows into his ribs; if he preferred to breathe air polluted by seven other people, and have a fresh supply of ozone only at periods and in quant.i.ties regulated by law, I did not admire his taste. As far as I was concerned I preferred to travel in this big room on wheels, rather than in a jail-like box to which the conductor alone had the key. Anyway this represented American democracy with its unpart.i.tioned s.p.a.ce; but if he really wanted it, I could get him a stateroom in the Pullman, and he could ride in isolated splendor and be aristocratically stuffy and uncomfortable.

When the Frau Directorin in typical German phraseology complained about the draft: "_Um Gottes Willen ein Zug!_" I decided to save the day, and we retreated to the Pullman stateroom.

There they rested themselves back and looked tolerably happy while I, silently but fervently, prayed that this particular train would not disgrace itself by "committing" an accident.

The big, American out-of-doors, even where it is old and its waste s.p.a.ces are cultivated and hedged about, has something which is characteristically American. Of course nature knows no political boundary; the gra.s.s is green everywhere, the sky is blue, cattle and sheep, like man, have a long and honorable ancestry. Yet there is a difference which may not be due to what nature is, but to man's att.i.tude towards her and his treatment of her.

I have noticed this in pa.s.sing through Europe; how unerringly one knows where Germanic boundaries end and those of the Slav begin. German fields and forests are trim and orderly; Slavic territory so ill kept and ill used that when one has a glimpse of a village even from the swift moving train, the difference is obvious.

Sometimes I am inclined to believe that this att.i.tude of man affects his environment as much as we know the environment affects him. I wonder just how much of the American out-of-doors, with its generous but not gentle aspect, its subdued but untamed spirit, is due to those valiant men who came from across the sea, and in so doing restored a bit of their long-lost courage, and made masters of men who so long had been serfs and knaves.

I had hoped that the sudden burst of the Hudson upon my guests' vision would thrill them; but if they were thrilled, they were careful to conceal it. When I suggested the likeness of the Hudson to the Rhine, the Herr Director took it as a personal affront and said you might as well compare St. Patrick's Cathedral and that of Cologne. They are both churches and Gothic; the Hudson and the Rhine are two rivers, and both are big.

Nevertheless I insisted that there is an evident resemblance which would be complete if the Hudson had a ruined castle here and there, or a picturesquely cramped village huddling against the hillside.

"Yes, and beside castles and picturesque villages," the Herr Director replied tartly, "you need a thousand years of culture and the same traditions which make the sh.o.r.es of the Rhine sacred to us; you also need generations of patiently plodding peasants who have made a sacrament of their toil. One glance at your rotting boats lying along the sh.o.r.e, at the untilled, gaping s.p.a.ces and glaring, inartistic sign-boards which disfigure it, is sufficient to distinguish the two rivers or perhaps even the two countries."

Having thus forcefully delivered himself, he scornfully pointed out the waste places and the unkempt-looking fields, asking me whether I still dared compare anything in this out-of-doors with the fine economy and splendid supervision of the natural resources of his own country.

Shamefacedly I acknowledged my country's guilt, and the guilt which was evident on the majestic sh.o.r.es of the Hudson. We are wasteful, extravagant and reckless--great defects in our national spirit, and most in evidence in our treatment of nature's beauty and wealth. We shall have to remedy that, in fact we are just beginning to do it; if not from any sense of guilt, from the same sheer necessity which makes the nations of the Old World careful of their national wealth.

"The Conservation of our National Resources" is a fine phrase; it represents not only an economic, but a spiritual gain--this feeling of responsibility for the next generation. It is a new and most valuable a.s.set of our national spirit; yet I must confess that I fear the coming of a day when we, too, shall have to practice the sordid little economies of the Old World and think with anxiety about the to-morrow.

It has always seemed to me that here the miracle of the loaves and fishes might be performed indefinitely, and that there always would be left over the baskets full of fragments. Somehow, in common with the rest of mankind, I have a.s.sociated generous plenty with the American spirit, and I trust we shall never have just our dole and no more.

I recall walking one evening with the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin through the well-regulated, officially trimmed and "_Streng Verboten_" forest which encircles his native city. My children were with us--young, vigorous, American savages, who have a superabundance of the American spirit although they have not a drop of American blood in their veins. We pa.s.sed a small mound of freshly mown hay and they promptly jumped into it, tossing a few handfuls as an offering to their aboriginal deity, the wind. If they had dashed into the plategla.s.s window of a jeweler's shop or had desecrated the most holy shrine, they could not have caused greater consternation.

"_Um Gottes Himmels Willen die Polizei!_" cried the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin echoed: "_Die Polizei!_"

Although this happened about ten years ago, my children have not forgotten their fright.

I suppose we still lack this virtue of economy, and yet I hope we may not lose that certain largeness of nature and that generosity of spirit which have characterized us.

I love the generous s.p.a.ces, the unfenced lawns, which make of the whole village one common park; the gra.s.s and clover free to the touch of our children's feet, the fragrant flowers wasting their bloom, and berries and cherries enough for the wild things of the woods. May the future not bring more high walls and narrow lanes, big game preserves for the rich, and scant patches of soil for the poor; castles for capital and tenements for labor. And may we never see written over every blade of gra.s.s: "_Streng Verboten_."

I realized that the Herr Director spoke truly when he said that what we lack over here is a healthy cla.s.s spirit, which the German farmer has. A sort of pride in his calling which makes him care for the soil and nourish it with a lover's pa.s.sion. To him robbing the soil is as great a crime as it would be to rob his children. It is not only the Emperor who regards himself as a partner with G.o.d, and sometimes the senior partner; the commonest, poorest peasant is apt to say as he drenches his field with the acc.u.mulated compost: "_Ich und Gott_."

Speaking of the farmer, the Herr Director admitted that in Germany as elsewhere there is a trend to the city; but the tide is held back by the pride of the German farmer, who glories in having his traditions, his folksongs, and, above all, this sense of partners.h.i.+p with G.o.d.

We scarcely have such a thing as a farmer cla.s.s; we have merely merchandizers in dirt who sell not only the products of the soil, but unhesitatingly the soil itself.

The land which we see from the car window, which the pioneers won from this boundless s.p.a.ce, these houses and sheltering groves, the homesteads in which a great race was cradled, are all for sale, now that the soil is robbed of its fertility and the robbers have moved on to repeat the process elsewhere. We are doing something, he admitted, to stem the tide to the cities; we are introducing agricultural training into our public schools and are making the raising of corn and wheat a science, but not as yet a sacrament.

We stayed over night in one of the half-asleep towns on the sh.o.r.es of the river, a town whose history is written upon the headstones in the cemetery, in the center of which the stately meeting-house stands. We met the descendants of those who sleep there, whose pride lies in the fact that their forefathers were the pioneers who fought the Indians, the fevers and each other. Their houses are full of old furniture s.h.i.+pped from England and Holland, and we ate their food and drank their tea from costly silver and exquisite china which they have inherited.

We looked upon the portraits of their ancestors and were told of their virtues and their fame; we saw fine memorials to the past in churches and town halls and rode in their automobiles, to see the farms bequeathed to them. One thing, alas! they have not and never will have--descendants.

On one of the farms we saw a swarthy Italian with a bright red rose behind his ear. His wife and children were working with him in the field, and they were doing this strange thing as they pulled weeds from the onion beds--they were singing. The Herr Director said significantly, "These are the heirs to all this," and I think he was a true prophet.

It is a wonderful thing to invent agricultural machinery and to discover new methods by which two blades of gra.s.s can be made to grow where but one grew; yet if only some one could tune our dull American ears, so that our farmers might catch the melody of the singing land and sing with it; if our boys and girls would love wild roses well enough to wear them--if, and that is a very big if--some one could teach us Americans to be proud of having descendants, we might add a new note to the great American out-of-doors, and keep it American.