Poor Little America!

I

AMERICA is slowly wasting away from fear. A nation of 120,000,000 souls is gradually succumbing to the terrors of suggestion. We have been diagnosed so often of late, and the doctors have found so many things wrong with our internal economy, that we have despaired of recovery. Every morning when we pick up the paper we shiver in anticipation of what the front page will reveal. When an imported lecturer — or the average domestic product, for that matter — comes to the fore to tell us what is wrong with us, we crowd into the halls, fearing the worst and yet powerless to stay away. Like the snake-fascinated rabbit or the Ancient Mariner’s wedding guest, we are hypnotized by the prospect of the unknown. Every book hot from the presses, every magazine that the postman flings at our doors, every course that we attend in college or night school, reveals a new humiliation, a fresh cancer of the body politic.

This is far from being an exaggeration. Consider for a moment some of our so-called mortal ailments. We are a nation of gold grabbers, we are told, intent on the almighty dollar at any cost. We have no culture — no music, no art, no literature, no architecture, no art of conversation beyond the sales talk. We are a nation of Babbitts, of Rotarians. Our native stock is being swamped by immigrants. Our traffic situation will tie us up in bowknots within twenty years. We are machineridden, helpless robots, soulless automatons. We do not know how to play games. We are Puritanical hypocrites. We are squandering all our resources; in a hundred years we shall have neither fuel, clothes, nor building materials. We are speed-mad. We are despoiling the beauties of nature with safety-razor and cigarette advertisements and filling stations. We are insular, provincial, ignorant of the world. We are imperialistic, would-be monarchs of all we survey. We extol disarmament in one breath and build new cruisers in the next. Our so-called democracy is a sham and a pretense. Our educational system is crumbling to bits; in fifty years our college graduates will have learned nothing but millinery, canoeing, and cookery. Our young people are without religion or morals. Our cherished classics are sickly pabulum for a three-year-old infant. The Victorians were fools and idiots, and we who read and admire them are worse than they. Washington was a self-centred aristocrat and Lincoln a gawky rustic with a flair for shady anecdotes. We have created our heroes in the image of our ideals, and been bewitched like Pygmalion by our own creation. Only a fool would believe in heroes.

But I need not continue the list. After the first sentence we recognize the familiar sinking of the heart. We agree in toto and in futuro to the whole indictment, plead guilty to every count.

II

Now just there comes the rub. We are becoming a nation of underdogs. We specialize in pleading guilty. We have developed a technique of bowing to the lash of the satirist and calumniator. In this age of statistics, we are helpless before a row of figures. To anyone who says, ‘I have studied with infinite care the population of a MidWestern town of 32,649 people, and I find that there are 32 murders, 95 divorces, and 127 deaths from alcoholism to the thousand, 25 cinema palaces and a library of 2175 books, 2 churches and 73 bootleggers,’ we say meekly, ‘Yes, sir.’ We swallow any number over two figures, no matter how absurd or incredible. And we believe that anyone who rips us up the back must necessarily, ipso facto, be a teller of truth and the friend of humanity. If a man tells us we have some good points, we cry, ‘Hypocrite! Victorian! Puritan!’ and rush away from him as from the pestilence. But let one excoriate us, tell us we are criminals, Philistines, and morons, and we fall on his neck. We live on the theory that an ounce of blame is worth a pound of praise.

We have, after all, the same point of view that used to prevail in the pews of John Donne and Jonathan Edwards. Those fiery denunciators used to ascend their pulpits and draw for their congregations such a lurid picture of hell-fire and the souls of the unregenerate or unelect dangling over the blazing fires of eternity that the members of the congregation would froth at the mouth and writhe on the floor in agony — and come back the next Sunday for more. The Donnes and the Edwardses nowadays preach from the lecture platforms, the magazines, and the novels, but we writhe just the same — and come back for more. Our hell has changed from fire and brimstone to the survival of the unfittest and to rows upon rows of figures stretching off into the desolate wastes of a frozen eternity, but the feeling is the same. We love the rod of the chastiser.

We dote on melodrama. It has moved from the theatres to the halls of respectability, from Broadway to Newspaper Row, but it is with us still. If the villain still pursues on the stage, and the hero and the heroine five happily ever afterwards, we laugh with ridicule. But in the daily news we gobble it up. What Oscar Wilde maintained as a piquant paradox is come true in sober reality. Nature is meekly imitating art. Crime waves, suicide waves, Babbitt waves, robot waves, have flowed out of our novels into the headlines.

The joke is that we realize, when we stop to think about it, that we are the victims of a colossal hoax. We are like the sermon connoisseur of an earlier day, who listened avidly to the minister’s invectives against drunkenness, adultery, and avarice, and thought how well they fitted Thomas, Richard, and Henry across the aisle. Faced with the accusations against ourselves, we should be shocked at their inapplicability. But we will believe anything — against someone else. All that we can safely be sure of is that the other nine tenths of us are guilty. We ignore the rules of common sense and legal decency and condemn them without a hearing, judging our neighbors guilty till they are proved innocent.

The stupidity of some of these accusations needs only to be seen to be appreciated, as the real-estate dealers say. Take the theory that mechanical work deadens because of its monotony. Now by that theory Mozart and Wagner, who practised tiresome and mechanical scales many hours a day on a very complicated machine,— a piano, — must have lost all their intelligence by the age of fourteen. A clergyman who repeats the old familiar prayers week after week must degenerate into a mere piece of clockwork. The teacher who repeats the same course year after year and corrects thousands of similar themes and reports can watch his pia mater shrivel to a crisp. The doctor who listens to hundreds of pulses in a week comes to think of the whole world as one sick pulse.

Obviously, then, the only sensible course for us all to pursue is to go home and shut the windows, turn on the gas, and end it all here and now. Yet it is seldom that even the wellknown robot who attaches the Ford nut to the famous Ford bolt ends it all in such a way. On the contrary it is usually the man who has achieved the most freedom from monotony who commits suicide.

In short, life even at its worst cannot be wholly monotonous or mechanical. And our present age may be no worse than preceding ones and probably is not nearly so bad. I doubt whether even the Russian serf of past ages, who was as remote from our mechanized civilization as he well could be, and who never saw a machine, was filled with the joy of life to a much greater extent than the Ford nutfitter of to-day. ‘ Slave of the machine ’ is a beautiful phrase, as is fin de siècle, but neither of them has any basis in fact. No one can be a slave of a machine any more than a century can be juvenile, adolescent, or senescent. Some people have a more restricted life and outlook than others, and there is undoubtedly some relation between work and the point of view. But a poet need be no less a poet for having to put nuts on bolts; neither will a clod become a poet by sitting on the peaks of the Sierras. In fact, a case might be made for the factory as a better training ground for poets than the Sierras; but that is aside from my point.

III

What we need is to stop fretting and to cultivate serenity. This suggestion involves more than Emerson’s doctrine of self-reliance; it includes a tolerance and optimism that are not necessarily implied in his phrase. Nervousness is a sign of adolescence, and America, as we are so often told, is coming of age. It is high time, then, that we settled back and began to enjoy ourselves. A country three hundred years old ought to have outgrown its childish fear of the dark.

There is no reason why we should n’t be serene. The accusations which make us shiver are obviously overdrawn, exaggerated. Only a negligible per cent of us know anything at first hand about murder, arson, divorce, lawlessness. We live decent, orderly, and comparatively contented lives. Most of our horrors are the result of exaggeration. Figures will prove anything, but they are dead, and America is very much alive.

Our lack of serenity is based on neglect of the ancient virtue of the golden mean. We insist on extremes. To a poet, only a poet has a right to be alive: all other people cumber the earth. We can see only black and white; we recognize no grays. There can be no compromise. We must be either emancipated radicals or hidebound conservatives, Puritans or iconoclasts, Republicans or Democrats, Babbitts or Goethes. The middle-grounder is a piker, a weakling, a trimmer, a dud. Sir Roger de Coverley, of beloved memory, who lived on the assumption that there was much to be said on both sides, would meet with short shrift in our times. Tennyson is not a poet with certain merits or defects: he is either an absurd, driveling Victorian or an archangel, and if you cannot prove that he is an archangel you must perforce admit th it he is a driveler. Ibsen is the only dramatist since Shakespeare: the only way to meet the assertion is to prove conclusively that he was a moron whose plays were the outgrowth of a cancer.

This course is fatally easy to follow. Exaggeration lends itself to epigrams; epigrams are easy to remember. No one whose motto is ‘There is much to be said on both sides’ can hope to impress. But one who maintains that Homer was a woman; that Shakespeare was Bacon; that there has been no poet since Dante; that there is only one good theatre in America and that that one is in South Dakota; that 99 per cent of Americans are mentally only twelve years old; that the idea of God is merely a sop to infants; that there are only two classes of politicians, those who are grafters and admit it and those who don’t admit it — a man who proclaims these extreme theses rides to popularity on a golden chariot with silver klaxons clearing his path.

Yet many of the world’s greatest seers have recognized the beauty of the life of the mean, of serenity. Horace took life pretty much as he found it and has charmed all succeeding generations. Molière hammered into his audiences and readers the absurdity of the extremist in all fields of life, and steadily taught the value of the golden mean. Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Hamlet and Lear and Sir Toby Belch and Rosalind mean more to the world to-day than do Ben Jonson’s Volpone and Sir Epicure Mammon.

It is high time for us to aspire to moderation and serenity. Everything in reason, and nothing to excess — this is a good guide to life. We need some business men, some poets, some hewers of wood — even some critics. All have their place, but never to the exclusion of the others. We have come of age, and we need no longer cringe to every critic. Let the sun and the wind and the rain have their way with us and we shall grow and germinate and bring forth fruit. All we need to do is to wait quietly and serenely and let Nature do her work. She knows her job and will see us through.