The Nineteenth
CenturyVol. XXIII.--No. 134. April 1888.
...But we must get
nearer still to the heart of the question raised as to the character and worth
of American civilisation. I have said how much the word civilisation really
means--the humanisation of man in society; his making progress there towards
his true and full humanity. Partial and material achievement is always being
put forward as civilisation. We hear a nation called highly civilised by reason
of its industry, commerce, and wealth, or by reason of its liberty or equality,
or by reason of its numerous churches, schools, libraries, and nevrspapers. But
there is something in human nature, some instinct of growth, some law of
perfection, which rebels against this narrow account of the matter. And perhaps
what human nature demands in civilisation, over and above all those obvious
things which first occur to our thoughts--what human nature, I say, demands in
civilisation, if it is to stand as a high and satisfying civilisation, is best
described by the word interesting. Here is the extraordinary charm of the old
Greek civilisation--that it is so interesting. Do not tell me only, says human
nature, of the magnitude of your industry and commerce; of the beneficence of
your institutions, your freedom, your equality; of the great and growing number
of your churches and schools, libraries and newspapers; tell me also if your
civilisation--which is the grand name you give to all this development--tell me
if your civilisation is interesting.
An American friend of
mine, Professor Norton, has lately published the early letters of Carlyle. If
any one wants a good antidote to the unpleasant effect left by Mr. Froude’s
Life of Carlyle, let him read those letters. Not only of Carlyle will those
letters make him think kindly, but they will also fill him with admiring esteem
for the qualities, character, and family life, as there delineated, of the
Scottish peasant. Well, the Carlyle family were numerous, poor, and struggling.
Thomas Carlyle, the eldest son, a young man in wretched health and worse
spirits, was fighting his way in Edinburgh. One of his younger brothers talked
of emigrating. ’The very best thing he could do!’ we should all say. Carlyle
dissuades him. ’You shall never,’ he writes, ’you shall never seriously
meditate crossing the great Salt Pool to plant yourself in the Yankee-land.
That is a miserable fate for any one, at best; never dream of it. Could you
banish yourself from all that is interesting to your mind, forget the history,
the glorious institutions, the noble principles of old Scotland--that you might
eat a better dinner, perhaps?’
There is our word
launched--the word interesting. I am not saying that Carlyle’s advice was good,
or that young men should not emigrate. I do but take note, in the word
interesting, of a requirement, a cry of aspiration, a cry not sounding in the
imaginative Carlyle’s own breast only, but sure of a response in his brother’s
breast also, and in human nature.
Amiel, that
contemplative Swiss whose journals the world has been reading lately, tells us
that ’the human heart is, as it were, haunted by confused reminiscences of an
age of gold; or rather, by aspirations towards a harmony of things which every
day reality denies to us.’ He says that the splendour and refinement of high
life is an attempt by the rich and cultivated classes to realise this ideal,
and is ’a form of poetry.’ And the interest which this attempt awakens in the
classes which are not rich or cultivated, their indestructible interest in the
pageant and fairy tale, as to them it appears, of the life in castles and
palaces, the life of the great, bears witness to a like imaginative strain in
them also, a strain tending after the elevated and the beautiful. In short,
what Goethe describes as ’was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine--that which holds
us all in bondage, the common and ignoble,’ is, notwithstanding its admitted
prevalence, contrary to a deep-seated instinct of human nature and repelled by
it. Of civilisation, which is to humanise us in society, we demand, before we
will consent to be satisfied with it--we demand, however much else it may give
us, that it shall give us, too, the interesting.
Now, the great sources
of the interesting are distinction and beauty: that which is elevated, and that
which is beautiful. Let us take the beautiful first, and consider how far it is
present in American civilisation. Evidently this is that civilisation’s weak
side. There is little to nourish and delight the sense of beauty there. In the
long-settled States east of the Alleghanies the landscape in general is not
interesting, the climate harsh and in extremes. The Americans are restless,
eager to better themselves and to make fortunes; the inhabitant does not strike
his roots lovingly down into the soil, as in rural England. In the valley of
the Connecticut you will find farm after farm which the Yankee settler has
abandoned in order to go West, leaving the farm to some new Irish immigrant.
The charm of beauty which comes from ancientness and permanence of rural life
the country could not yet have in a high degree, but it has it in an even less
degree than might be expected. Then the Americans come originally, for the most
part, from that great class in English society amongst whom the sense for
conduct and business is much more strongly developed than the sense for beauty.
If we in England were without the cathedrals, parish churches, and castles of
the catholic and feudal age, and without the houses of the Elizabethan age, but
had only the towns and buildings which the rise of our middle class has created
in the modern age, we should be in much the same case as the Americans. We
should be living with much the same absence of training for the sense of beauty
through the eye, from the aspect of outward things. The American cities have
hardly anything to please a trained or a natural sense for beauty. They have
buildings which cost a great deal of money and produce a certain
effect--buildings, shall I say, such as our Midland Station at St. Pancras; but
nothing such as Somerset House or Whitehall. One architect of genius they
had--Richardson. I had the pleasure to know him; he is dead, alas! Much of his
work was injured by the conditions under which he was obliged to execute it; I
can recall but one building, and that of no great importance, where he seems to
have had his own way, to be fully himself; but that is indeed excellent. In
general, where the Americans succeed best in their architecture--in that art so
indicative and educative of a people’s sense for beauty--is in the fashion of
their villa-cottages in wood. These are often original and at the same time
very pleasing, but they are pretty and coquettish, not beautiful. Of the really
beautiful in the other arts, and in literature, very little has been produced
there as yet. I asked a German portrait-painter, whom I found painting and prospering
in America, how he liked the country? ’How can an artist like it?’ was his
answer. The American artists live chiefly in Europe; all Americans of
cultivation and wealth visit Europe more and more constantly. The mere
nomenclature of the country acts upon a cultivated person like the incessant
pricking of pins. What people in whom the sense for beauty and fitness was
quick could have invented, or could tolerate, the hideous names ending in
ville, the Briggsvilles, Higginsvilles, Jacksonvilles, rife from Maine to
Florida; the jumble of unnatural and inappropriate names everywhere? On the
line from Albany to Buffalo you have, in one part, half the names in the
classical dictionary to designate the stations; it is said that the folly is
due to a surveyor who, when the country was laid out, happened to possess a
classical dictionary; but a people with any artist-sense would have put down
that surveyor. The Americans meekly retain his names; and indeed his strange
Marcellus or Syracuse is perhaps not much worse than their congenital
Briggsville.
So much as to beauty,
and as to the provision, in the United States, for the sense of beauty. As to
distinction, and the interest which human nature seeks from enjoying the effect
made upon it by what is elevated, the case is much the same. There is very
little to create such an effect, very much to thwart it. Goethe says somewhere
that ’the thrill of awe is the best thing humanity has’:--
Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Theil. But, if there be a discipline in which the Americans are
wanting, it is the discipline of awe and respect. An austere and intense
religion imposed on their Puritan founders the discipline of respect, and so
provided for them the thrill of awe; but this religion is dying out. The Americans
have produced plenty of men strong, shrewd, upright, able, effective; very few
who are highly distinguished. Alexander Hamilton is indeed a man of rare
distinction; Washington, though he has not the high mental distinction of
Pericles or Caesar, has true distinction of style and character. But these men
belong to the pre-American age. Lincoln’s recent American biographers declare
that Washington is but an Englishman, an English officer; the typical American,
they say, is Abraham Lincoln. Now Lincoln is shrewd, sagacious, humorous,
honest, courageous, firm; he is a man with qualities deserving the most sincere
esteem and praise, but he has not distinction.
In truth everything is
against distinction in America, and against the sense of elevation to be gained
through admiring end respecting it. The glorification of ’the average man,’ who
is quite a religion with statesmen and publicists there, is against it. The
addiction to ’the funny man,’ who is a national misfortune there, is against
it. Above all, the newspapers are against it.
It is often said that
every nation has the government it deserves. What is much more certain is that
every nation has the newspapers it deserves. The newspaper is the direct
product of the want felt; the supply answers closely and inevitably to the
demand. I suppose no one knows what the American newspapers are, who has not
been obliged, for some length of time, to read either those newspapers or none
at all. Powerful and valuable contributions occur scattered about in them. But
on the whole, and taking the total impression and effect made by them, I should
say that if one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole
nation the discipline of respect, the feeling for what is elevated, one could
not do better than take the American newspapers. The absence of truth and
soberness in them, the poverty in serious interest, the personality and
sensation-mongering, are beyond belief. There are a few newspapers which are in
whole, or in part, exceptions. The New York Nation, a weekly paper, may be
paralleled with the Saturday Review as it was in its old and good days; but the
New York Nation is conducted by a foreigner, and has an extremely small sale.
In general, the daily papers are such that when one returns home one is moved
to admiration and thankfulness not only at the great London papers, like the
Times or the Standard, but quite as much at the great provincial newspapers
too--papers like the Leeds Mercury and the Yorkshire Post in the north of
England, like the Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald in Scotland.
The Americans used to
say to me that what they valued was news, and that this their newspapers gave
them. I at last made the reply: ’Yes, news for the servants’ hall!’ I remember
that a New York newspaper, one of the first I saw after landing in the country,
had a long account, with the prominence we should give to the illness of the
German Emperor or the arrest of the Lord Mayor of Dublin, of a young woman who
had married a man who was a bag of bones, as we say, and who used to exhibit
himself as a skeleton; of her growing horror in living with this man, and
finally of her death. All this in the most minute detail, and described with
all the writer’s powers of rhetoric. This has always remained by me as a
specimen of what the Americans call news.
You must have lived
amongst their newspapers to know what they are. If I relate some of my own
experiences, it is because these will give a clear enough notion of what the
newspapers over there are, and one remembers more definitely what has happened
to oneself. Soon after arriving in Boston, I opened a Boston newspaper and came
upon a column headed: ’Tickings.’ By tickings we are to understand news
conveyed through the tickings of the telegraph. The first ’ticking’ was: ’Matthew
Arnold is sixty-two years old’--an age, I must just say in passing, which I had
not then reached. The second ’ticking’ was: ’Wales says, Mary is a darling;’
the meaning being, that the Prince of Wales expressed great admiration for Miss
Mary Anderson. This was at Boston, the American Athens. I proceeded to Chicago.
An evening paper was given me soon after I arrived; I opened it, and found
under a large-type heading, ’We have seen him arrive,’ the following picture of
myself: ’He has harsh features, supercilious manners, parts his hair down the
middle, wears a single eyeglass and ill-fitting clothes.’ Notwithstanding this
rather unfavourable introduction I was most kindly and hospitably received at
Chicago. It happened that I had a letter for Mr. Medill, an elderly gentleman
of Scotch descent, the editor of the chief newspaper in those parts, the
Chicago Tribune. I called on him, and we conversed amicably together. Some time
afterwards, when I had gone back to England, a New York paper published a criticism
of Chicago and its people, purporting to have been contributed by me to the
Pall Mall Gazette over here. It was a poor hoax, but many people were taken in
and were excusably angry, Mr. Medill of the Chicago Tribune amongst the number.
A friend telegraphed to me to know if I had written the criticism. I, of
course, instantly telegraphed back that I had not written a syllable of it.
Then a Chicago paper is sent to me; and what I have the pleasure of reading, as
the result of my contradiction, is this: ’Arnold denies; Mr. Medill [my old
friend] refuses to accept Arnold’s disclaimer; says Arnold is a cur.’
I once declared that in
England the born lover of ideas and of light could not but feel that the sky
over his head is of brass and iron. And so I say that, in America, he who
craves for the interesting in civilisation, he who requires from what surrounds
him satisfaction for his sense of beauty, his sense for elevation, will feel
the sky over his head to be of brass and iron. The human problem, then, is as yet
solved in the United States most imperfectly; a great void exists in the
civilisation over there: a want of what is elevated and beautiful, of what is
interesting.
The want is grave; it
was probably, though he does not exactly bring it out, influencing Sir Lepel
Griffin’s feelings when he said that America is one of the last countries in
which one would like to live. The want is such as to make any educated man feel
that many countries, much less free and prosperous than the United States, are
yet more truly civilised; have more which is interesting, have more to say to
the soul; are countries, therefore, in which one would rather live.
The want is graver
because it is so little recognised by the mass of Americans; nay, so loudly
denied by them. If the community over there perceived the want and regretted
it, sought for the right ways of remedying it, and resolved that remedied it
should be; if they said, or even if a number of leading spirits amongst them
said: ’Yes, we see what is wanting to our civilisation, we see that the average
man is a danger, we see that our newspapers are a scandal, that bondage to the
common and ignoble is our snare; but under the circumstances our civilisation
could not well have been expected to begin differently. What you see are
beginnings, they are crude, they are too predominantly material, they omit
much, leave much to be desired--but they could not have been otherwise, they
have been inevitable, and we will rise above them;’ if the Americans frankly
said this, one would have not a word to bring against it. One would then insist
on no shortcoming, one would accept their admission that the human problem is
at present quite insufficiently solved by them, and would press the matter no
further. One would congratulate them on having solved the political problem and
the social problem so successfully, and only remark, as I have said already,
that in seeing clear and thinking straight on our political and social
questions, we have great need to follow the example they set us on theirs.
But now the Americans
seem, in certain matters, to have agreed, as a people, to deceive themselves,
to persuade themselves that they have what they have not, to cover the defects
in their civilisation by boasting, to fancy that they well and truly solve, not
only the political and social problem, but the human problem too. One would say
that they do really hope to find in tall talk and inflated sentiment a
substitute for that real sense of elevation which human nature, as I have said,
instinctively craves--and a substitute which may do as well as the genuine
article. The thrill of awe, which Goethe pronounces to be the best thing
humanity has, they would fain create by proclaiming themselves at the top of
their voices to be ’the greatest nation upon earth,’ by assuring one another,
in the language of their national historian, that ’American democracy proceeds
in its ascent as uniformly and majestically as the laws of being, and is as
certain as the decrees of eternity.’
Or, again, far from
admitting that their newspapers are a scandal, they assure one another that
their newspaper press is one of their most signal distinctions. Far from
admitting that in literature they have as yet produced little that is
important, they play at treating American literature as if it were a great
independent power; they reform the spelling of the English language by the
insight of their average man. For every English writer they have an American
writer to match. And him good Americans read; the Western States are at this
moment being nourished and formed, we hear, on the novels of a native author
called Roe, instead of those of Scott and Dickens. Far from admitting that
their average man is a danger, and that his predominance has brought about a
plentiful lack of refinement, distinction, and beauty, they declare in the
words of my friend Colonel Higginson, a prominent critic at Boston, that ’Nature
said, some years since: "Thus far the English is my best race, but we have
had Englishmen enough; put in one drop more of nervous fluid and make the
American." And with that drop a new range of promise opened on the human
race, and a lighter, finer, more highly organised type of mankind was born.’
Far from admitting that the American accent, as the pressure of their climate
and of their average man has made it, is a thing to be striven against, they
assure one another that it is the right accent, the standard English speech of
the future. It reminds me of a thing in Smollet’s dinner-party of authors.
Seated by ’the philosopher who is writing a most orthodox refutation of
Bolingbroke, but in the meantime has just been presented to the Grand Jury as a
public nuisance for having blasphemed in an alehouse on the Lord’s day’--seated
by this philosopher is ’the Scotchman who is giving lectures on the
pronunciation of the English language.’
The worst of it is,
that all this tall talk and self-glorification meets with hardly any rebuke
from sane criticism over there. I will mention, in regard to this, a thing
which struck me a good deal. A Scotchman who has made a great fortune at
Pittsburg, a kind friend of mine, one of the most hospitable and generous of
men, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, published a year or two ago a book called Triumphant
Democracy, a most splendid picture of American progress. The book is full of
valuable information, but religious people thought that it insisted too much on
mere material progress, and did not enough set forth America’s deficiencies and
dangers. And a friendly clergyman in Massachusetts, telling me how he regretted
this, and how apt the Americans are to shut their eyes to their own dangers,
put into my hands a volume written by a leading minister among the
Congregationalists, a very prominent man, which he said supplied a good
antidote to my friend Mr. Carnegie’s book. The volume is entitled Our Country.
I read it through. The author finds in evangelical Protestantism, as the
orthodox Protestant sects present it, the grand remedy for the deficiencies and
dangers of America. On this I offer no criticism; what struck me, and that on
which I wish to lay stress, is, the writer’s entire failure to perceive that
such self-glorification and self-deception as I have been mentioning is one of
America’s dangers, or even that it is self-deception at all. He himself shares
in all the self-deception of the average man among his countrymen, he flatters
it. In the very points where a serious critic would find the Americans most
wanting he finds them superior; only they require to have a good dose of
evangelical Protestantism still added. ’Ours is the elect nation,’ preaches
this reformer of American faults--’ours is the elect nation for the age to
come. We are the chosen people.’ Already, says he, we are taller and heavier
than other men, longer lived than other men, richer and more energetic than
other men, above all, ’of finer nervous organisation’ than other men. Yes, this
people, who endure to have the American newspaper for their daily reading, and
to have their habitation in Briggsville, Jacksonville, and Marcellus--this
people is of finer, more delicate nervous organisation than other nations! It
is Colonel Higginson’s ’drop more of nervous fluid over again. This ’drop’
plays a stupendous part in the American rhapsody of self-praise. Undoubtedly
the Americans are highly nervous, both the men and the women. A great Paris
physician says that he notes a distinct new form of nervous disease, produced
in American women by worry about servants. But this nervousness, developed in
the race out there by worry, overwork, want of exercise, injudicious diet, and
a most trying climate--this morbid nervousness our friends ticket as the fine
susceptibility of genius, and cite it as a proof of their distinction, of their
superior capacity for civilisation! ’The roots of civilisation are the nerves,’
says our Congregationalist instructor again; ’and, other things being equal,
the finest nervous organisation will produce the highest civilisation. Now, the
finest nervous organisation is ours.’
The new West promises
to beat in the game of brag even the stout champions I have been quoting. Those
belong to the old Eastern States; and the other day there was sent to me a
Californian newspaper which calls all the Easterners ’the unhappy denizens of a
forbidding clime,’ and adds: ’The time will surely come when all roads will
lead to California. Here will be the home of art, science, literature, and
profound knowledge.’
Common-sense criticism,
I repeat, of all this hollow stuff there is in America next to none. There are
plenty of cultivated, judicious, delightful individuals there. They are our
hope and America’s hope; it is through their means that improvement must come.
They know perfectly well how false and hollow the boastful stuff talked is; but
they let the storm of self-laudation rage, and say nothing. For political
opponents and their doings there are in America hard words to be heard in
abundance; for the real faults in American civilisation, and for the foolish
boasting which prolongs them, there is hardly a word of regret or blame, at
least in public. Even in private, many of the most cultivated Americans shrink
from the subject, are irritable and thin-skinned when it is canvassed. Public
treatment of it, in a cool and sane spirit of criticism, there is none. In vain
I might plead that I had set a good example of frankness, in confessing over
here, that, so far from solving our problems successfully, we in England find
ourselves with an upper class materialised, a middle class vulgarised, and a
lower class brutalised. But it seems that nothing will embolden an American
critic to say firmly and aloud to his countrymen and to his newspapers, that in
America they do not solve the human problem successfully, and that with their
present methods they never can. Consequently the masses of the American people
do really come to believe all they hear about their finer nervous organisation,
and the rightness of the American accent, and the importance of American
literature; that is to say, they see things not as they are, but as they would
like them to be; they deceive themselves totally. And by such self-deception
they shut against themselves the door to improvement, and do their best to make
the reign of das Gemeine eternal. In what concerns the solving of the political
and social problem they see clear and think straight; in what concerns the
higher civilisation they live in a fool’s paradise. This it is which makes a
famous French critic speak of ’the hard unintelligence of the people of the
United States’--la dure inintelligence des Américains du Nord--of the very
people who in general pass for being specially intelligent--and so, within
certain limits, they are. But they have been so plied with nonsense and
boasting that outside those limits, and where it is a question of things in
which their civilisation is weak, they seem, very many of them, as if in such
things they had no power of perception whatever, no idea of a proper scale, no
sense of the difference between good and bad. And at this rate they can never,
after solving the political and social problem with success, go on to solve
happily the human problem too, and thus at last to make their civilisation full
and interesting.
To sum up, then. What
really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a
want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting,
which are elevation and beauty. And the want of these elements is increased and
prolonged by the Americans being assured that they have them when they have
them not. And it seems to me that what the Americans now most urgently require,
is not so much a vast additional development of orthodox Protestantism, but
rather a steady exhibition of cool and sane criticism by their men of light and
leading over there. And perhaps the very first step of such men should be to
insist on having for America, and to create if need be, better newspapers.
To us, too, the future
of the United States is of incalculable importance. Already we feel their
influence much, and we shall feel it more. We have a good deal to learn from
them; we shall find in them, also, many things to beware of, many points in
which it is to be hoped our democracy may not be like theirs. As our country
becomes more democratic, the malady here may no longer be that we have an upper
class materialised, a middle class vulgarised, and a lower class brutalised.
But the predominance of the common and ignoble, born of the predominance of the
average man, is a malady too. That the common and ignoble is human nature’s
enemy, that, of true human nature, distinction and beauty are needs, that a
civilisation is insufficient where these needs are not satisfied, faulty where
they are thwarted, is an instruction of which we, as well as the Americans, may
greatly require to take fast hold, and not to let go. We may greatly require to
keep, as if it were our life, the doctrine that we are failures after all, if
we cannot eschew vain boasting and vain imaginations, eschew what flatters in
us the common and ignoble, and approve things that are truly excellent.
I have mentioned
evangelical Protestantism. There is a text which evangelical Protestantism--and
for that matter Catholicism too--translates wrong and takes in a sense too
narrow. The text is that well-known one: ’Except a man be born again he cannot
see the kingdom of God.’ Instead of again, we ought to translate from above;
and instead of taking the kingdom of God in the sense of a life in Heaven
above, we ought to take it, as its speaker meant it, in the sense of the reign
of saints, a renovated and perfected human society on earth, the ideal society
of the future. In the life of such a society, in the life from above, the life
born of inspiration or the spirit--in that life elevation and beauty are not
everything; but they are much, and they are indispensable. Humanity cannot
reach its ideal while it lacks them: ’Except a man be born from above, he
cannot have part in the society of the future.’