Part 8
Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind, We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still, And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind. It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill; I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind, I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign’d.
It is easy enough to dismiss all this as mere vaporing. But it is a protest which must be heeded, for it expresses a real experience. There are things worse than war. A sordid slothfulness is worse. A cowardly acquiescence in injustice is worse. It is a real revelation when to the heart of youth comes a sudden sense of the meaning of life. It is not a treasure to be preserved with miserly carefulness. It is to be nobly hazarded. It _is_ better to fight for the good than to rail, however eloquently, against the ill. To feel for one’s native land, to unite in generous comradeship with one’s kind, to endure hardness for a noble cause,--these things are of the essence of manhood.
In times of national peril such awakening has come. Many a man has then for the first time discovered that he has a soul. He has cried out, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
Now just here we peace men may see our most inspiring bit of unfinished business. War has been idealized; it is left to us to idealize peace. It cannot be done till we bring out all its heroic possibilities. If it means dull stagnation, selfish ease, the prosperity that can be measured in dollars and cents, there is sure to come a revulsion against it. The gospel of the full dinner-pail and the plethoric pocket-book does not satisfy. If the choice is between commercialism and militarism we need not wonder if many an idealist chooses the latter as the less perilous course. It seems less threatening toward the things for which he cares.
The call is for a new chivalry. Our duty is not only to keep the peace, but to make a peace that is worth keeping. This is no easy task. It means the humanizing of all our activities. Everywhere a human ideal must be placed above every other kind of success. Religion must be lifted above ecclesiasticism; and business honor above the vulgar standards of commercialism. The machinery of civilization must be made subservient to man. More careers must be opened for men of the soldierly spirit whose ambition is for service. The new generation must be shown what opportunities the world’s business and politics offer to great-hearted gentlemen who are willing to risk something for a cause. The kind of peace which the world needs cannot be had for the asking. It comes high,--but it is worth the price.
THE LAND OF THE LARGE AND CHARITABLE AIR
[Illustration]
Are you not constrayned (my fellow Academicks) to subscribe to this my opinion that the knowledge of no nation is so necessary as the searching out of a man’s own Country and the manners thereof and the right understanding of that Commonweale whereof each one of us is a part and member. The Lamiæ that are a certaine kind of monsters are laughed at in the Poeticall Fables in that they were so blinde at home that they could not see their own affaires, could foresee nothing; but when they were once gone from home they were accounted the most sharpe-sighted and curious searchers of all others.... [Are not they] very ridiculous when as by taking long voyages unto farre remote people, after they have curiously sought out all matters amongst them are ignorant of the principall things at home and know not what is contayned within the precincts of their country, and are reckoned altogether strangers on their native soile?--CORYAT’S _Crudities_.
The remark that Boston is not so much a place as a state of mind is one of the highest compliments ever paid to that city. Places are common enough, the maps are dotted with them, but a state of mind is a mark of distinction. The Bostonian enjoys his state of mind none the less because he is aware that outsiders are not always able to enter into it.
Only those places which have become symbolic of mental or moral traits are remembered. Sodom and Gomorrah were once towns of some commercial importance. We think of them, however, not as trade centres, but as sins. Babylon, according to a doctrine of spiritual correspondences long since established, is another name for proud and cruel worldliness. It is likely so to remain, in spite of the discovery of clay tablets which show that many of its people were estimable citizens who practiced domestic economy and collected their debts by due process of law. All we have to say is that those who acted in this commonplace way were not typical,--in fact, they were quite un-Babylonian. In like manner, Zion represents no longer a hill whose altitude may be prosaically estimated according to the metric system. It is a highly exalted frame of pious joy.
It is strange that, with all the ingenuity that has been shown in inventing new text-books for the use of schools, no one has compiled a Psychological Geography. The materials are ample. It only needs some one with a scientific imagination, or, rather, with a capacity for writing imaginative science, to make it a success. Eliminating those communities whose states of mind are so mixed as to be unclassifiable, the way would be clear for a very pretty series of generalizations. There would be maps with isothermal lines uniting places of equal degrees of warmth of temperament or frigidity of manner. Weather charts would show the direction of the various winds of doctrine and the storm centres, religious and political. The theory of moral cyclones and anti-cyclones would be adequately explained. There would be maps in colors indicating the communities situated on the plateaus of conscious ethical and intellectual superiority. These often rise into the arid, or at least semi-arid, belt. In sharp contrast with these are the luxuriant bottom lands, where less favored peoples dwell in happy ignorance of their low estate. The “principal products” would be graphically illustrated. One section, being without natural resources, is given over to the manufacture of novelties, while another is rich in fossils. The distribution of fads may be shown to advantage. Some localities are almost barren, while others are naturally faddy.
When he comes to the Points of the Compass the most matter-of-fact psychological geographer will forget the cold mannerisms of his science and become poetical. North, South, East, West, these are vast symbols of psychic forces. He would not think of putting at the head of the chapter the picture, from the old Geography, of the disconsolate urchin with his face to the north and his arms extended in rigid but reluctant testimony to the fact that “East is East and West is West.” What does this featureless boy know of those tremendous forces whose age-long contests have made the history of the world? What does he know of the hardiness and the prowess that make the true North? If he were forcibly turned around, his face would be as expressionless as ever. Such a mannikin never felt a sudden longing for “a beaker full of the warm South.”
Art must be called to the aid of science. Each point of the compass has an expression of its own. One should be able by looking at the face of the man in the picture to know the direction. There is no mistaking the qualities which grow only where there is a northerly exposure. The Orient and the Occident are not to be confounded.
Were some affluent citizen to endow a chair of psycho-geographical science in one of our leading universities, especial attention should be paid to the teaching of Systematic Americanism. It is a branch now much neglected. The professor should take pains to instruct his “fellow Academicks” in the manners and customs of their own country, so that they should no longer be reckoned strangers on their native soil. They should be taught to avoid entangling analogies drawn from the experience of other lands, and to look directly at the subject-matter. When they see something going wrong, they should not jump at the conclusion that it is a repetition of the classic tragedy of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,--for it may be something quite different. When there is a popular movement on the prairies, they should not begin to talk of the French Revolution and of the excesses of the proletariat. Before they talk in European fashion of the “classes and the masses,” they should make certain that we have such things, and if we have, that there is a sure way of telling which is which. The Old-World generalizations about the upper and lower and middle classes should be well shaken before using.
Those who elect the course in Americanism should be taught to overcome the nervous fright to which bookish people are subject at the appearance of any man in public life who shows signs of unusual virility. It is a weakness of those who are more familiar with the careers of Cæsar and Napoleon than with the temper of their fellow-citizens. In the early seventies there were academic minds thoroughly convinced that they were watching the Republic in its death struggle with Cæsarism. Curiously enough, they fixed upon plain Ulysses Grant to act the part of Cæsar. It would have been hard to find one less fitted for the rôle. When we look back and contrast what really happened with what the well-read spectators thought was happening, we are reminded of the remark of the British matron to her husband as they left the theatre where they had been seeing the play of “Antony and Cleopatra,” “How unlike the home life of our dear Queen!”
The great thing, as President Roosevelt has often reminded us, is to “think nationally.” This is no small achievement. A nation is a psycho-geographical fact which it requires a very great effort of the imagination to conceive. The same word represents a land and the people who inhabit it. The physical features of the landscape have their spiritual counterparts. It may be that the landscape impresses itself on the imagination of the race, or, as may be maintained with equal plausibility, the imagination of a gifted race may interpret the landscape and impress itself upon it forever. In either case there is a recognizable harmony between the two elements. In reading the great literature of Israel we never forget that the nation was desert-born. “He found him in a desert place, he led him about, he instructed him.” In psalm and prophecy we are conscious of barren mountain ranges, of rocks in a weary land, of narrow valleys which laugh for very joy over the incongruity between themselves and the surrounding desolations. There is the passion of the desert, born of solitude and the stars. In the prophet of righteousness there is the same urgent note that Bayard Taylor catches in his “Bedouin Song:”--
From the Desert I come to thee On a stallion shod with fire; And the winds are left behind In the speed of my desire.
The impatient human cry is followed by the refrain natural to those whose lives are surrounded by the eternal calm of the desert,--
Till the sun grows cold, And the stars are old, And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold.
When we think of the Greeks we think at the same time of
the sprinkled isles Lily on lily that o’erlace the sea, And laugh their pride when the light wave lisps “Greece.”
England and her Englishmen are forever inseparable. “This happy breed of men” belong to “this little world, this precious stone set in a silver sea, this blessed plot, this England.” That Great Britain is an island is more than a fact of physical geography. It is the outward and visible sign of an insularity of sentiment which gives its peculiar quality to British patriotism. There is something snug and homelike about it, as of a family that enjoys “the tumultuous privacy of storm.”
We become conscious of Spain and her Spaniards as we read Longfellow’s lines:--
A something sombre and severe O’er the enchanted landscape reigned, As if King Philip listened near And Torquemada, the austere, His ghostly sway maintained.
When we come to the United States of America there is a peculiar difficulty in thinking and feeling nationally, because the imagination does not at once find the physical facts to serve as symbols. It is not easy to conceive the land as a whole. When we sing “My Country, ’tis of thee,” the country that is visualized is very small. The author of the hymn was a New England clergyman, and naturally enough described New England and called it America. It is a land of rocks and rills and woods, and the hills are templed, in Puritan fashion, by white meeting-houses; for the early New Englander, like erring Israel of old, loved to worship on “the high places.” Over it all is one great tradition: it is the “land of the Pilgrims’ pride.”
The farmer in North Dakota loves his country, too; but the idea that it is a land of rocks and rills and templed hills seems to him rather farfetched. His heart does not thrill with rapture when he thinks of these things. He can plow all day in the Red River valley without striking a stone, and he is glad to have it so.
The Texan cultivates an exuberant Americanism, but he does not think of his country as the “land of the Pilgrims’ pride.” Texas is not proud of the Pilgrims, and perhaps the Pilgrims would not have appreciated Texas.
When the American has come to feel, not provincially, but nationally, the words “my country” bring to his mind not merely some familiar scenes of his childhood, but a series of vast pictures. They are broad and simple in outline. “My country” is no tight little island shut out from “the envy of less happier lands.” It is continental in its sweep. It lies open and free to all. It is large and easy of access. There is a vision of busy cities serving as its gateways. Behind them is a pleasant home-like land with “a sweet interchange of hill and valley.” Beyond the mountains another scene opens. We see the sources of the strength of America and feel the promise of its future. To see the Mississippi valley is to believe in “manifest destiny,” and to take a cheerful view of it. To the ancient world the valley of the Nile was the symbol of fertility. It is a narrow ribbon of green in the midst of the desert. Here Plenty and Famine were in plain sight of one another. There was always the suggestion of Pharaoh’s ugly dream of the lean kine devouring the fat and well-favored. But in the valley of the Mississippi the fear of the lean kine is dispelled. One may travel at railroad speed day after day, and still the fields of wheat and corn smile upon him. Here the ample land gives happy confidence to men’s prayer for daily bread. And beyond the fertile prairies “my country” stretches in high plains and lofty mountain ranges. Here are new treasures waiting bold spirits who claim them. The land has a challenge and an invitation.
What a weary dearth Of the homes of men! What a wild delight Of space, of room! What a sense of seas Where seas are not! What salt-like breeze! What dust and taste of quick alkali!
And beyond the mountains lies the American Avilion, where never--
wind blows loudly; but it lies Deep-meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard lawns And bowery hollows: crown’d with summer seas.
And this great land is one; though it is “a nation of nations” it has achieved a national consciousness. There is an atmosphere about it all which we recognize. To breathe it is an exhilaration. One loves to think of it as the land of “the large and charitable air.”
* * * * *
The conception of the continental proportions of America did not at once dawn upon its new inhabitants. They thought and spoke as transplanted Englishmen. Each of the thirteen States was a tight little republic insisting on its own rights. Each plucky Diogenes sat in its own tub, saying to its neighbors, “Get out of my sunshine!”
It was only as they turned westward that Americans discovered America,--a discovery which in some instances has been long delayed. “The West” is not merely a geographical expression, it is a state of mind which is most distinctive of the national consciousness. It is a feeling, an irresistible impulse. It is the sense of undeveloped resources and limitless opportunities. It is associated with the verb “to go.” To the American the West is the natural place to go to, as the East is the place to come from. It is synonymous with freedom from restraint. It is always “out West.”
Just where the geographical West begins it is not necessary to indicate. On the coast of Maine you may be shown a summer cottage and told that it belongs to a rich Westerner from Massachusetts. Massachusetts is not thought of as exactly the Far West, but it is far enough.
The psychological West begins at the point where the centre of interest suddenly shifts from the day before yesterday to the day after to-morrow. Great expectations are treated with the respect that elsewhere had been reserved for accomplished facts. There is a stir in the air as if Humanity were a new family just setting up housekeeping. What a fine house it is, and how much room there is on the ground floor! What a great show it will make when all the furniture is in! There is no time now for the finishing touches, but all will come in due order. There is need for unskilled labor and plenty of it. Let every able-bodied man lend a hand.
One does not know his America until he has been touched by the Western fever. He must be possessed by a desire to take up a claim and build himself a shack and invest in a corner lot in a Future Great City. He must be capable of a disinterested joy in watching the improvements which other people are making. Let the man of the East cling to the old ways and seek out the old landmarks. The symbol of the West is the plank sidewalk leading out from a brand-new prairie town and pointing to a thriving suburb which as yet exists only in the mind of its projector. There is something prophetic in that sidewalk on which the foot of man has never trod.
One who has once had this fever never completely recovers. Though he may change his environment he is always subject to intermittent attacks.
I remember on my first evening in Oxford sitting blissfully on the top of a leisurely tram car that trundled along High Street. The dons in academic garb were on their way to dinner in the college halls, and they looked just as my imagination had pictured them. I was introduced to one of them. When he learned that I was an American, there was a sudden thaw in his manner.
“Have you ever been in Dodge City, Kansas?” he inquired eagerly.
I modestly replied that I had only passed through on the railway, but I was familiar with other Kansas towns, and, reasoning from analogy, I could tell what manner of place it was. This was enough. I had experienced the West. I was one of the initiated. I could enter into that state of mind represented by the term Dodge City. It appeared that in the golden age, when he and Dodge City were both young, he had sought his fortune for some months in Kansas. He had experienced the joys of civic newness, a newness such as had not been in England since the Heptarchy. He discoursed of the mighty men of those days when every man did what was right in his own eyes, and good-humoredly allowed his neighbor to do likewise. As we parted, he said, with mournful acquiescence in his present estate, “Oxford does very well, you know, but it isn’t Dodge City.” If poetry is emotion remembered in tranquillity, what could be more poetical than Dodge City remembered in the tranquillity of Oxford quadrangles?
In this case the poetical view was a sound one. The traveler across the newly developed States of the West has the traveler’s license to contrast unfavorably that which he sees with that which he left behind him in his home country. He may say a dozen uncomplimentary things, and each one of them may be true. He may exhaust all his stock adjectives, as “crude” and “raw” and the like. But when he remarks, as did a certain critic, that because the country lacks “distinction” it is uninteresting, he betrays his own limitations.
It is just that lack of distinction that makes America interesting. Here, no longer distracted by what is exceptional, one may take the welfare of the masses of men seriously.
Here the doings of men correspond to the broad doings of the day and the night, Here is what moves in magnificent masses, careless of particulars.
When Shelley was an undergraduate he was attracted to a lecture on mineralogy. It seemed to him a subject full of poetical suggestiveness. His expectations were disappointed, and he unceremoniously bolted and returned to his room. “What do you think the man talked about? Stones!--stones!--stones! I tell you stones are not interesting--in themselves.”
Shelley was right. Stones are not interesting in themselves; neither are railroads, nor stockyards, nor new unpainted buildings, nor endless cornfields. But for that matter, neither are crumbling columns, nor old manuscripts, nor the remains of feudal castles interesting--in themselves. Things become interesting only when seen in relation to the people whose thoughts they have stimulated and whose imaginations they have stirred.
America is a fresh field for human endeavor. Here are men busily making roads, bridging rivers, building new cities. They have been given the task of subduing a continent. But in such conflicts with Nature the conquered influences the conquerors. What impress does the continent make upon the minds of the hardy men who are mastering it? What visions of the future do they see which transform their drudgery into an heroic adventure?
In the case of the older nations such questions about the beginnings and the ideals of the beginners cannot be answered. The formative period, with all its significant aspirations, is buried in oblivion. “Who thinks any more as they thought?” we ask in regard to the pioneer of Britain. Poetry has license to picture him as a knight in armor and to tell how in romantic fashion he pitched
His tents beside the forest. And he drave The heathen, and he slew the beast, and felled The forest, and let in the sun.
It was all a long time ago, and the men who did these things are not clearly revealed. Not being able to get at their ideals, we attribute to them those which we think appropriate.