New England Dilemma

I

THE first annual report of James Bryant Conant to the Board of Overseers of Harvard College may in retrospect prove as significant as Turner’s famous essay on the closing of the frontier. The report is dated January 8, 1934. It said: —

‘Our Puritan ancestors thought of education and theology as inseparably connected. It is hard for us to recapture their point of view. . . . For a long period . . . Cambridge was located more nearly in the center of the population of the United States than it is at present. The problem of the immediate future is to devise ways and means to insure that we shall continue to obtain men of the greatest promise.’ ‘If we have,’ wrote Mr. Conant, ‘in each department of the University the most distinguished faculty which it is possible to obtain, we need have little worry about the future. If we fail in this regard, there are no educational panaceas which will restore Harvard to its position of leadership.’ ‘In the future even more than in the past,’ he remarked, ‘we should attract to our student body the most promising young men throughout the whole nation. To accomplish its mission Harvard must be a truly national university . . . we should be able to say that any man with remarkable talents may obtain his education at Harvard, whether he be rich or penniless, whether he come from Boston or San Francisco.’

I call this report significant because it marks the close of an epoch. Our oldest collegiate institution, an institution which had been a New England university enjoying national repute, declared through its president that henceforward it was to be a national university which happens to be located in New England. Had Mr. Conant been president of Yale or Brown or Dartmouth, however, he might have said exactly the same thing.

Although Harvard has never drawn its staff exclusively from New England, the implication of the report is that it is now idle to think New England alone can supply the brains for a national university. Until the World War, New England exported scholars and scientists to the hinterland — an example is the arrival of William Vaughn Moody, Robert Morss Lovett, Robert Herrick, and John Matthews Manly on the campus of the young University of Chicago in the ‘90s. But in 1934 the president of Harvard expressed his anxiety lest scholars and scientists should fail to come from the hinterland to New England. ‘There are no educational panaceas which will restore Harvard to its position of leadership.’ The stream has reversed its flow.

When President Conant wrote, ‘Our Puritan ancestors thought of education and theology as inseparably connected,’ when he said, ‘It is hard for us to recapture their point of view,’ the implication was that an intellectual tradition has been exhausted. When he declared that ‘ to accomplish its mission Harvard must be a truly national university,’ he turned from Cambridge to the United States. President Conant did not kill a threehundred-year-old tradition. He merely recognized its extinction, and like a good administrator proposed the creation of a new intellectual order.

It is appropriate that the funeral oration should be pronounced by the president of Harvard College. The last stronghold of the New England intellect was not literature but the college; and New Englanders, though they saw their farmlands idle, their financial supremacy gone, their culture brushed aside by newer and more vigorous racial stocks, had comforted themselves with scenery and education. Scenery remains one of the most profitable New England industries, but it is difficult to say what intellectual outlook differentiates a New England college from a college located west of the Hudson. Formerly the New England colleges shared a philosophy compounded out of Congregationalism, Unitarianism, and Transcendentalism; formerly they shared a belief in culture exemplified by James Russell Lowell. But culture is a word without meaning in the modern world, and the philosophy is bankrupt. There remain a pleasant social tradition, a pleasant tradition of liberalism. But neither the social tradition nor the liberal tradition is any longer specific or unique. Colleges elsewhere have equally pleasant social traditions. Universities elsewhere have equal traditions of liberalism. The intellectual liberalism of Yale and the intellectual liberalism of the University of Chicago are now for practical purposes one. Contrast with this the difference between the intellectual outlook of Yale and the intellectual outlook of the University of Virginia in, let us say, 1850.

The fact that no New England college stands for a specific New England philosophy does not necessarily mean that New England colleges are for that reason inferior. Quite the contrary. But the development of a point of view in these institutions has been in large measure a development away from a representative philosophy and sectional values. President Conant’s proclamation that Harvard is a national university has, for example, taken practical form in national scholarships, a program of reading in American history for undergraduates, and a program for graduate students leading to the Ph. D. in the history of American civilization. The most prominent member of the Harvard faculty recently in the public eye has been Felix Frankfurter, and the elevation of Mr. Frankfurter to the Supreme Court was not due to anything specifically Yankee in Mr. Frankfurter’s philosophy of the law.

Yale has nourished Mr. Thurman Arnold, but Mr. Arnold’s attack on the folklore of capitalism is, to put it mildly, not a defense of State Street. Yale has also published the admirable Chronicles of America series and nourished the excellent historical work of Seymour, Gabriel, Monaghan, and others, but these interpretations of history do not represent a New England interpretation of history in the sense that Mr. Douglas Freeman’s The South to Posterity represents a Southern interpretation of history.

Again, the liveliest college faculty in the region seems to be at the moment at Williams, but the essays of Max Lerner do not discuss democracy in the brahmin spirit of Lowell’s famous address. Professor Hans Kohn of Smith would, I surmise, write exactly as he does if he were at Washington University, St. Louis. No group of philosophers continues the traditions of Emerson and Alcott, or, for that matter, the traditions of Royce and James. Dartmouth, Amherst, Wellesley, Bowdoin, Wheaton, Bennington, the University of Maine, the University of Vermont, are good schools, but they do not seem to be militantly New England schools.

Nobody goes from a college post cast of the Hudson to a college post west of the Mississippi with that sense of Ovidian exile among the Goths which led George Edward Woodberry, teaching at Nebraska in 1877, to write pathetic letters to Charles Eliot Norton; Norton responding, ‘What a chance it affords to study Primitive Institutions!’ The University of Nebraska is not a primitive institution, and Westerners find it superior to the effete East. As Mr. Conant dryly observed, Cambridge was once located more nearly in the centre of the population of the United States than it is at present.

II

What is a New England point of view? What is a New England philosophy? What is the New England way of life?

The fact that nobody can answer these questions is, of course, precisely the point. In the nineteenth century the questions would have been answerable. They included what Poe acidly summed up as Frogpondism. They meant a Protestant outlook, even if one were a member of no particular church. They meant a placid consciousness of intellectual superiority to barbarians in Broadway and the West. They meant all that is apparent in Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s claim that, though he was not genuine Boston, he was Bostonplated.

Writing Bayard Taylor in 1866, Aldrich said: —

I miss my few dear friends in New York — but that is all. There is a finer intellectual atmosphere here [in Boston] than in our city. It is true, a poor literary man could not earn his salt, or more than that, out of pure literary labor in Boston: but then he couldn’t do it in New York, unless he turned journalist. The people of Boston are full-blooded readers, appreciative, trained. The humblest man of letters has a position here which he doesn’t have in New York. To be known as an able writer is to have the choicest society opened to you . . . here [he] is supposed necessarily to be a gentleman. In New York — he’s a Bohemian! outside of his personal friends he has no standing.

This is the unadulterated snobbery of the genteel tradition, but it is snobbery concerning something real. A provincial is merely a man who is proud of belonging to a cultural tradition which he believes to be per se superior to any other cultural tradition. When a writer stands outside such a tradition and looks at it without believing in it, the result is The Late George Apley. When he stands inside of it and believes in it, the result is the creation of the Atlantic Monthly with Lowell as editor and Holmes as chief contributor. The Late George Apley has its chuckling excellence, but its excellence is not that of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. Contemporary New Englandism is an inheritance, not a belief; a mode of behavior, not an idea.

The difference is made clear by a glance at the South. It is commonly said that in the twentieth century the South enjoys an intellectual renaissance. Though the intellectual life of the South, like the middle class, is always rising, the production of books and magazines about that region has undeniably increased. Good work has come out of various parts of that region, but a fructifying influence has poured especially from two centres — Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee. At the University of North Carolina, though it is possible that no one could give a definition of the Southern way of life, a group of men arose determined not merely that the Southern way of life should be improved, but also that it should be preserved. A second group arose at Vanderbilt.

In the one university, men like Howard W. Odum, Frederick H. Koch, Rupert B. Vance, Paul Green, Edgar W. Knight, E. C. Branson, L. R. Wilson, and others decided to focus the best brains they could assemble upon the problem of Southern values. The result was not only a rich historical and sociological literature; their activities also had important repercussions in imaginative writing from the Carolina folk plays to the novels of Thomas Wolfe. In the other university a group of young poets, weary of Southern sentimentalism, determined that the South was entitled to an intelligent literature. They were presently forced by the logic of their philosophy to consider the question of Southern values, and the result was the agrarian pronouncement, I’ll Take My Stand. One may debate endlessly the question whether the Tarheels or the Tennesseans advanced the right solution, but the point is that a solution was looked for. And that solution focuses upon the assumption that the Southern way of life is both valuable and defensible. There is no similar focus for a philosophy of value, so far as I can see, in all New England. New England is centrifugal, not centripetal.

To be sure, literature in New England now resembles the multitudinous laughter of the waves. In the summer not a country lane in Connecticut, New Hampshire, or Vermont but resounds with the click of typewriters; not a village on the coast of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, or Maine but in it novelists, poets, dramatists, critics, artists, college professors, and musicians outnumber the local population which they support. New England advertised itself as the vacation land, and all the muses moved in — from New York. But there is a difference between writing books in New England and writing New England books, and there is an even more crucial difference between describing New England and believing in it. When local color peers in at the door, regional philosophy flies out at the window. In July and August, New England is a vast antique shop rummaged for ancient articles. Admiring grandfather’s clock, however, is not synonymous with that deep, unconscious act of faith which led Hawthorne to produce Grandfather’s Chair.

III

New England literature has always tended to fall into two broad categories — the historical and the argumentative. The golden days of New England have always been in the past. Bradford and Winthrop lamented the degeneration which time soon wrought at Plymouth and Boston; Cotton Mather’s Magnalia is as much a picture of the good old times as the histories of Samuel Eliot Morison; and the solemn purpose of the Connecticut Wits embalmed the Revolution in the cold coffin of epic poetry. Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Henry Adams, were all more or less reminiscent. The standard textbook phrase for the fictions of Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and others of that generation is ‘chroniclers of New England decline.’ Tilbury Town had already been painted and analyzed by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mourning Becomes Elcctra was no revelation to anybody who had read The House of the Seven Gables.

The notion that the New England way of life has decayed is perhaps the liveliest tradition in the literary history of three centuries. But, though the complaint that New England is not what she was is perennial, the habit of looking backward engenders the habit of looking away from the present. The concept of New England as the Old Curiosity Shop comes in time to negate everything that Concord once stood for. Antiques are not culture.

It is curious how much of the organized intellectual energy of New England goes into a past which almost nobody attacks and ignores a present which almost nobody defends. The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, the Essex Historical Institute, the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, the American Antiquarian Society — one could add indefinitely to such a roll call. Doubtless these venerable institutions are flavorsome and valuable, but they march resolutely away from the twentieth century. I observe with interest that the Trustees of Public Reservations have just purchased the Old Manse. I am glad they will preserve the Old Manse, but who will preserve Emerson — him who wrote, ‘The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant.’ He also wrote, ‘We will speak our own minds.’ I think he referred to more than academic freedom.

The other side of New England letters is argumentative. Up to the World War, New England had something or other to defend. It might be Calvinism or the colonial charters, the Hartford Convention or Daniel Webster, transcendentalism or the Union, civil service reform or the Republican Party. It might even be culture. I suppose the last New Englander who really fought for culture was Charles Eliot Norton, who, though he was capable of disliking Alice in Wonderland, had in his quiet way a fighting philosophy. ‘The concern for beauty, as the highest end of work, and as the noblest expression of life, hardly exists among us,’ he wrote in an essay, ‘and forms no part of our character as a nation.’ This is at least perfectly definite, and he labored for twenty-three years to reform the national character by culture. We still believe in education, but who, even in New England, militantly believes in culture? The polemical strength of New England letters has vanished for the sufficient reason that New England has nothing to defend.

I suppose the two events of recent years that have most deeply stirred emotion in this region have been the SaccoVanzetti case and the hate-Roosevelt ground swell. In the Sacco-Vanzetti case my sympathies were with the opposition. I believe these men were innocent, and I am therefore prejudiced. But what seems to me the most disheartening thing about that tragedy is not that the men were executed, but that nobody defended the state. They died because justice and the commonwealth demanded it. No one, however, ringingly demonstrated what concept of justice and the state made this inexorable demand.

If strong conservative convictions existed, they were not adequately expressed. Conservatism usually takes refuge in silence, but Massachusetts was under attack, and who effectively defended Massachusetts?

Characteristic of certain classes and communities in New England is the strong, stubborn, covert opposition to the New Deal. But it docs not take intellectual form. If President Roosevelt’s policies really threaten the New England way of life, who explains or trenchantly defends what is threatened? What public man now stands for this region as Daniel Webster once stood for this region? What Congressman is essentially Yankee as John Quincy Adams was Yankee? I do not refer to his accent but to his stubborn belief in the right of petition.

Who presents a program or a policy? Is there any economic theory concerning these states which is even as articulate or as vocal as the Townsend plan? We have half a dozen governors, twelve senators, a regiment of representatives, and local leaders by the gross. Can any one of them say what he st ands for and why he stands for it in terms that cut through the blurred phraseology of politics?

Of course brains are rare and statesmen do not grow on every blackberry bush, but it is felt that a whole way of life is threatened, and it would seem that six commonwealths, scores of colleges, innumerable newspapers, and a battery of magazines could produce something beyond emotionalism and platitudes. Clay and Calhoun had no doubt what New England stood for; they ran into it.

I suppose a typical problem before New England at the moment is whether existing shoe factories shall be injured by the setting up of a shoe factory in Maryland imported from Czechoslovakia. Fears for the extinction of New England industries lead their bondholders to denounce Secretary Hull and vote the Republican ticket. It is true that world trade is choked up and must be unchoked, but not until every dividend is paid. However, industry and commerce will presumably continue to exist even if Jim Farley should be the next President, but is that the height of our great argument? The same low practicality is common and universal. The tariff has always been a local issue, but it is a local issue in Wisconsin no less than in Rhode Island. I do not recall what stand Emerson and Alcott took on the tariff. When New England calls the roll of its great men, it has not hitherto rated them by the money they earned or kept. I am told the tariff is basic in history, and there are those who say it lies at the bottom of the Civil War. Despite the economic historians, however, New England has assumed that the men who got themselves killed at Bunker Hill or Gettysburg died, not for their pocketbooks, but for their convictions. If New England is synonymous with the interest rate, President Conant’s remarks are superfluous.

IV

The New England way of life has been a Yankee way of life, and of course the Yankee has traditionally looked after his savings. Let us, however, broaden the perspective to include the late George Apley. The New England way was also the ‘Old American ‘ way, and the ‘Old Americans’ are now an outnumbered clan, grimly holding on to financial and social power where they can, yielding only to death and superior taxes. The social cleavage they have thus created is of course the New England tragedy. Such heroism may be magnificent, as the holding of Thermopylæ was magnificent, but the Spartans yielded in the end. It took a more active strategist to rout the Persian host.

It is disheartening to trace the blindness of ‘Old Americans’ from the mild bewilderment of Emerson and Thoreau, confronted by Irish laborers on the Fitchburg railroad, to its climactic expression in Aldrich’s ‘Unguarded Gates,’ a poem which is pure snobbery in classic verse. Lovely as it is to be conscious of superior rectitude, by refusing to reinvigorate virtue from the common people the New England intellect has run thin and bloodless; and so long as it persists in regarding Irishmen, Italians, Jews, Portuguese, French Canadians, and other late arrivals as interlopers, it cannot fully renew itself on its own soil. For these are precisely the groups which are rich in the qualities the New England intellectual tradition gravely needs — earthiness, emotion, a deep sense of life, a belief that intellect is not all. Finding they are not wanted, the ‘immigrants’ have struck back by two characteristically American attacks: they have conquered at the polls, and they are trying to conquer in the countinghouse. New England is therefore a house divided against itself. In contrast, the superior flexibility of the New Yorker has made his city, despite transient racial strains, the metropolis of the future, rich in the arts and the sciences. Mr. Apley, however, refuses to admit that a profitable amalgam of cultures can take place. After him, the deluge.

The rising culture in New England is a Catholic culture, the traditional culture of New England is a Protestant culture, but it does not follow that the twain shall never meet. A large and influential section of the Catholic Church in New England is Irish, and if anything is characteristic of Irish Catholicism it is that it constitutes the Puritan branch of the church universal. Like the Puritan faith, it has been a persecuted faith, and, like the Pilgrims, Irish Catholics sought refuge in a foreign land. Irish Catholic morality is, moreover, singularly like Puritan morality: it stresses the domestic virtues; it demands thrift and sobriety of its parishioners and, to an astonishing degree, succeeds in obtaining them; and its censorship is precisely the Puritan censorship. I have heard a college professor, descended from a long line of New England aristocrats, and an Irish priest express identical (and, as I thought, mistaken) opinions of James Joyce’s Ulysses. On the other hand, Charles Francis Adams and Father Ahern, speaking at a dinner held to check racial antagonism, uttered similar sentiments and did not seem incongruous. The Charitable Irish Society points with pride to a history older than that of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Though the mayor of Boston is named Tobin and the governor of Massachusetts is called Saltonstall, neither has proposed to tear down Faneuil Hall. To be sure, there are difficulties, and it is likeness rather than difference which holds men apart — witness Massachusetts and South Carolina in the Civil War. A low order of political morality may justly be charged against certain Irish wards and certain Irish politicians; but, having recently reread Mr. Winston Churchill’s Coniston and Mr. Crew’s Career, I learned that a low order of political morality could once be justly charged against the sovereign state of New Hampshire. The political boss in Coniston is named Jethro Bass. The present governor of that reformed commonwealth is named Murphy. He is a vast improvement on Jethro.

But though the parallel is as striking as the difference between these two traditions, George Apley still clings to the inviolable shade. Hibernia for him is embodied in that low fellow, the ward boss, who is so singularly uninterested in the taxes imposed on the ancestral Apley home. Of course, even an Irishman in Mr. Apley’s opinion is entitled to courtesy and political rights. So likewise is the Jew, concerning whom Mr. Apley has forgotten that Puritanism has been defined as Old Testament religion. There is likewise the Italian. In Norton’s day some knowledge of Italy, even if it was no more than engravings of Italian masterpieces hung on the library wall, was a part of culture, but Mr. Apley fails to comprehend that the race which produced the Sistine Madonna might eventually create its American counterpart. As for the French Canadians, forgetting that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Canada was a nearer neighbor than New York, Mr. Apley remembers only that they work in mills, the bonds of which have regrettably depreciated since the advent of that man Roosevelt. Besides, there are yet dimmer races — Portuguese and Poles, Swedes and Finns, the Negro, in whose cause Mr. Apley’s ancestor lost an arm at Antietam. Are there not social workers? Is there not a Community Fund? Mr. Apley subscribes to it. Accredited agencies do this sort of thing so well.

Yet Mr. Apley cannot stand forever, a Yankee Marius surveying, not the ruins of Carthage, but the ghost of Rome. The province of New England long since disappeared; it has been replaced by a Federal Reserve District. Six states occupy the kingdom which formerly gave laws to the barbarians, and Mr. Apley, who voted for Calvin Coolidge, has done all he could in his own political tradition to federalize his native state. Regrettably, when Vermont and Massachusetts joined hands to manufacture silent Cal for the export trade, the result was not the conquest of the barbarians, but the rout of economic royalty under F. D. R.

I wonder what Emerson, who found even Webster inadequate, would have said about the last New England President? He declared that the god who made New Hampshire taunted the land with little men. When a little man became consul, New England, which had fought to force South Carolina back into the Union, was herself forced to rejoin the republic. Now, through various federal agencies, the republic is trying to preserve New England, and only Vermont and Maine are coy.

I heard some days since of two decaying towns. In one, a young Polish girl is writing verses. I thought of Emily Dickinson. In the other, young Yankees graduating from high school find nothing more to do than play games in the house of a benevolent member of the community. Does not even the sin of having ‘nothing to do’ awaken reverberations? All over New England young men and women stand idle, looking for leadership. It Can’t Happen Here may yet happen here. They are not, I think, afraid of poverty, — their ancestors were not, — but they are afraid of the poverty of the spirit. We have tinkered with the situation at Ware or in the case of the Amoskeag mills or elsewhere, but who has told us whether these efforts are panaceas or remedies?

Meanwhile, great minds in these states concentrate on international affairs. What shall we do about Finland? Russia? Germany? The Allies? Japan? What shall we do in the forthcoming presidential campaign? What shall we do about the interest rate? A more pertinent question is: What shall we do about New England? It is just possible that if New England began to set its house in order the country would beat a path to its door. If the moral leadership in Jonathan Edwards’s country mounts no higher than the Christian Front and the fantastic red-shirt group recently ejected from the Harvard Yard, New England has indeed rejoined the rest of the country.

Young men are sick and weary waiting for a moral leadership that nowhere appears. Men who read Robert Frost strangely say that moral idealism is no longer possible. The same persons who are daily outraged by events in China, Finland, Germany, and Spain deny the possibility that morality exists, and do not see they are inconsistent. The world is very evil, the times are waxing late. But the world has always been evil, sometimes more and sometimes less, and it is always too late. Men of conviction, however, also come too early and are therefore misunderstood and martyrized, but I am not interested in the precise position of the hour hand on the clock. I observe rather that refugees are still arriving in Boston harbor because, with all its clouds and darkness over it, they believe in the promise of American life. One of them said to me tonight, ‘Oh, it is good to be in a free country.’ Having Czechoslovakia in mind, we despair too easily. The New England village stands white and clean like other mortuary monuments, but at any rate it stands, and the steeple on the empty church points unwaveringly upward. All that is lacking is a speaker, a congregation, and a burning word. I call for a statement of human integrity.

V

There used to be an annual conference at Williams College on international affairs. Why not an annual conference on New England affairs? We cannot reform the nation wholesale, but only piece by piece. Men who contribute money to fight injustice in California do not even contribute brain power to fight poverty in Vermont. What is done in New York and Colorado affects New England, but what is done in New England also affects Colorado and New York. We hear so much about the shrinking sides of the world that there are those who regard Connecticut as a borough of New York City. In New York, however, Boston is more remote than Hollywood. I have not heard Mayor La Guardia discuss rural slums or the decay of New England mills. I have not even read in the Saturday Review of Literature the pertinent question: Who are the heirs of Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau ? I hear much talk of Moby Dick, which was written in Lenox almost a hundred years ago, but that book is supposed to prove that the universe is evil. I had thought it had something to do with the dauntless spirit of man.

Catholic or Protestant does not matter; Old American or New American does not matter; communist or economic royalist does not matter; even George Apley does not matter. What matters is the sense of deadness and the desire of life. We have two needs in what was formerly a theocracy: conviction and application.

What is to be done for the Merrimac Valley, the abandoned farms, the silent villages, the metropolitan slums, the broken windows of the mills? I am not economist enough to say, but I suppose there must be economists who can take their eyes off Washington. All machinery is ridiculous, and committees and conferences abound with stupidity, like the Chardon Street Convention, that byword for the ridiculousness of the come-outers and the vegetarians. But cannot we do better than an annual governors’ conference? Is Harvard, is Yale, is Brown, are the colleges forever to centre their attention on what is sublime and historical? Shall our debates concern only the world? If rugged individualism is a failure in the economic sphere, rugged determination is not therefore to be abandoned. We cannot be passive and silent forever. I have read of a balanced economy, but I never saw it in New England, and I do not think that State Street and welfare workers between them will attain it. One’s ancestors are, conceivably, dead. A Cambridge poet of some renown and orthodox ancestry once wrote, ‘Act,— act in the living Present!’ I am told the poem is old-fashioned, and begin to believe it.

The next line is ‘Heart within, and God o’erhead!’ I assume that Catholic, Protestant, and Jew equally admit His existence, but they seem, some of them, dubious about His power. Very well. Let us know the worst. Let us welcome skeptic and atheist if necessary, remembering that Heaven helps those who help themselves. As for heart, a thousand testimonies declare its existence. Read the ads for charitable associations in the Boston Evening Transcript. A heart beats in the Irish, the Italian, the Polish breast. I read in a Quaker poet, not unknown to the anthologies:—

This is dated from Amesbury, eleventh month, 1847. I heard similar sentiments more rhetorically expressed at a St. Patrick’s Day dinner in 1939.

The cry is for a program. Programs are born, not made, is apparently the assumption, as if the Pilgrims knew precisely where they were going and what they were going to do. As a matter of history, they were tricked and deceived. Having only the pragmatic belief that they could create an economy in the wilderness, they merely began New England. We, too, live in a wilderness equally threatening, but nothing less than a declaration of bankruptcy and a total reorganization of society will satisfy us. Softly, softly. Let us take one step at a time, being, indeed, unable to walk otherwise. The calm belief that Yankee ingenuity is not confined to bolts and screws is enough for the moment. Dilemmas are not susceptible of logical resolution. An old and battered program concerns the rights of man. If we cannot agree about church and ancestry, let us at least agree that we stand where we stand. By common consent certain things are evil and remain so, among them being starvation, idleness, and disbelief.

If we must have a platform, I suggest we reinstitute the Concord school of philosophy, though there be not a transcendentalist on the faculty. Our books are disparate, atomic, descriptive. Save for Robert Frost, there is none who stands for the New England way. I read the social history of Virginia in the novels of Ellen Glasgow, but where shall I turn to read the social history of Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island? Moving pictures in costumed prose are not what most we need. Once the Saturday Club expressed something, but what do these admirable historical novels express except an artistic arrangement of the past? Even Sam Slick and Shore Acres have vanished from the theatre. Fishermen still put out of Gloucester, but it is now some decades since Kipling, a transient Englishman, wrote Captains Courageous. I have read no short stories about the Portuguese since Wilbur Daniel Steele. The Yale Review discusses everything except Connecticut, the Atlantic Monthly is now a national magazine.

And yet it is not magazines and reviews we need, nor yet fishermen or Portuguese or comic Yankees or farmers, but a passionate belief in values and in a way of life some centuries old. There are times when Little Women seems more masterly than The Last Puritan. Miss Alcott did what she did, and not something else. We tire of fine skepticism, and long for an affirmation, even if it concern only simple things. What shall it profit an author if he gain royalties and lose his own soul? What contract did Longfellow make, and did he bargain for the movie rights of Hiawatha?

To be sure, it is easy to drop into a scolding tone. To be sure, also, New England — there she stands. But how long she shall stand, or rather how long she shall stand as New England, once the home of men who believed there were eternal verities, or whether she shall stand simply as a territory belonging to the United States — this is the New England Dilemma.