“ The flashing beauty of form, the rising step of confident animalism, the quick smile of fertile minds—must all these things, too, be reduced to a drab uniformity because we lack the courage to proclaim their sheer physical loveliness? Has not the magic of America been hidden under a fog of ugliness by those who never really loved it, who never knew our natural gaiety and high spirits and eagerness for knowledge? ”

“ Frost is gentle, whether in irony, humour, or sense of pain: if it is the pathos of decay which most moves him, he sees it, none the less, at dewfall and moonrise, in a dark tree, a birdsong. The inflections of the human voice, as he hears them, are as tender as in the hearing of Mr. Masters they are harsh. And can Mr. Robinson be thought a commensal of either? His again is a prolonged enquiry into the why of human behaviour, but how bared of colour, how muffled with reserves and dimmed with reticence! ”

“ But how can one begin to enumerate the elements in our society that contribute to form a selection constantly working against the survival of the creative type? By cutting off the sources that nourish it, by lending prestige to the acquisitive and destroying the glamour of the creative career, everything in America conspires to divert the spirit from its natural course, seizing upon the instincts of youth and turning them into a single narrow channel. ”

“ As a traveller’s city New York is near perfection. An association of cigar salesmen or an international congress of social scientists, meeting in one of the auditoriums of a big hotel, dining together, mixing in the lounge, and finding recreation in the theatres hard by, discovers an environment that is ordered, within its limits, to a nicety. It is this hotel and theatre district that we must charitably think of when we are tempted to speak about the triumphs of the American city. Despite manifold defects that arise from want of planning, this is the real civic centre of America’s Metropolis. ”

“ In short, it may be that we have carried the notion of litigation as a contest of wits between two sides so far that the interests of society have not been adequately safeguarded.
If laymen have erred in concentrating on minor points, lawyers have been far too ready to deny laymen any right to discuss law at all. It is just as if school-teachers should maintain that parents and citizens in general have no concern in the problems of education. The time has come to close the gulf in American life between the legal profession and the people who are ruled by laws. ”

“ If there is anything that American life can be said to give least of all, it is training in taste. There is a deadness of artistic feeling, which is sometimes replaced or disguised by a fervour of sociological obsession, but this is no substitute for the faculty of imaginative sympathy which is at the heart of all criticism. When the social historian is born, the critic dies; for taste, or æsthetic enjoyment, is the only gateway to the critic’s judgment, and over it is a flaming signpost, “Critic, abandon all hope when this gate is shut.” ”

“ SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM It is natural for the musician to think any land barbarous if it has produced no great composers, the painter if it has produced no great painters, the critic or the scholar if it has produced no great scholars and critics, and so on for all the other arts and sciences. But it is idle to insist that every race should express itself in the same way, or to assume that the genius of a nation can be tested by its deficiencies in any single field of the higher life. ”

“ The haphazard empiricism of English criticism and the faded moralism of our own will serve us no more. We must desert these muddy waters, and seek purer and deeper streams. In a country where philosophers urge men to cease thinking, it may be the task of the critic to revivify and reorganize thought. Only in this way can we gain what America lacks, the brain-illumined soul.
The second need of American criticism can be summed up in the word scholarship—that discipline of knowledge which will give us at one and the same time a wider international outlook and a deeper national insight. ”

“ The American heart appears to go out to bulk, to scale, and to efficiency. The American has neither the time nor the temperament to test and weigh. His affections, even his loyalties, seem to be at the mercy of aspects that impose and impress. I know no other country where the word “big” is used so constantly as a token of affection. Every community has its “Big Tims,” “Big Bills,” “Big Jacks,” great hearty fellows who gambol and spout on public occasions with the abandonment of a school of whales. Gargantuan “Babe Ruth,” mountainous Jack Dempsey are the idols of its sport-loving crowds. ”

“ I shall say nothing of the other arts, though the vital conditions of all the arts have surely much in common; I shall say nothing of America before the Civil War, for the America that New England dominated was a different nation from ours. But what immediately strikes one, as one surveys the history of our literature during the last half century, is the singular impotence of its creative spirit. That we have and have always had an abundance of talent is, I think, no less evident: what I mean is that so little of this talent succeeds in effectuating itself. ”

“ ADVERTISING Do I understand you to say that you do not believe in advertising? Indeed! Soon you will be telling me that you do not believe in God. Though, to be sure, in so doing you would be committing less of a crime against the tenets of modern American civilization than in doubting the existence of a power so great that overnight it can raise up in our midst gods, kings, and other potentates, creating a world which for splendour and opulence far surpasses our own poor mortal sphere—a world in which every prospect pleases and only the reluctant spender is vile. ”

“ So much for the conditions, or at least a few of them, that have prevented our literature from getting its head above water. If America is littered with extinct talents, the halt, the maimed and the blind, it is for reasons with which we are all too familiar; and we to whom the creative life is nothing less than the principle of human movement, and its welfare the true sign of human health, look upon this wreckage of everything that is most precious to society and ask ourselves what our fathers meant when they extolled the progress of our civilization. ”

“ My purpose is not to write even a short history of American art, but to enquire into its character and accomplishment. The test of these is evidently not what each period or school meant to the American artists before or after it, but how it compares with the rest of the world’s art at its time. The thought occurs to one forcibly on hearing of the wildly exaggerated esteem—whether measured by words or by money—in which the more celebrated of American artists are held; one asks oneself how the given work would be considered in Europe by competent men. ”

“ Until there comes a change of heart or a new faith or a deep inner searching, scholarship must continue to live this thwarted and frustrated life. Only a profound realization of its high purpose and special function, and the pride that comes from this realization, can give the scholar his true place in an American world. For this special function is none other than to act as the devoted servant of thought and imagination and to champion their claims as the twin pillars that support all the spiritual activities of human life,—art, philosophy, religion, science ”

“ The end of the revolutionary mood came as soon as the signing of the Constitution by the States, that admirable working compromise in government which made no attempt to underscore democracy, as we understand it to-day, but rather to hold it in proper check and balance. Free, then, of any common heritage or tradition which might question his values, free, also, of the troublesome idealism of the older revolutionary mood, the ordinary man could go forth into the wilderness with singleness of purpose. He could be, as he still is to-day, the pioneer toujours. ”

“ That normal congressman, as year chases year, tends to descend to such depths of puerility, to such abysses of petty shysterism, that he becomes offensive alike to the intelligence and to the nose. His outlook, when it is honest, is commonly childish—and it is very seldom honest. The product of a political system which puts all stress upon the rewards of public office, he is willing to make any sacrifice, of dignity, of principle, of honour, to hold and have those rewards. He has no courage, no intellectual amour propre, no ardent belief in anything save his job, and the jobs of his friends. ”

“ The man who feels wronged by a prosecution for bigamy, or for stealing bread when he is starving for lack of employment, cannot expect to change the law without also changing the views of the community on monogamous marriage and the organization of industry. These institutions of society show themselves in the law just as the veins in a block of marble show themselves at the surface, but it is as futile for him to blame the law for “capitalism,” private property, or our present semi-permanent marriages as to try to get rid of the veins by scraping the surface of the marble. ”

“ If their verbiage often aims at and sometimes seems to attain the sublime, if the American leader is forever dedicating, consecrating, inspiring something, the altitude is like the elevation given a shell in order that it may travel further. The nimble presentation of antithesis of a Lloyd George, the dagger-play of sarcasm of an Asquith, are conspicuously absent from the speeches of American leaders. There is something arrogant and ominous, like the clenching of a fist before the arm is raised, in this sonorous presentation of a faith already securely rooted in the hearts of all its hearers. ”

“ That an institution which holds so fair an outlook on society, which is on such easy and sympathetic terms with all that is important in the nation, which commands the avenues by which men go forward in the world, should be able to guarantee success in life to its worshippers is nothing at which to be surprised. Hence we find the poor of different grades making every sacrifice to send sons and daughters through high school, through college, in the same pathetic faith with which they once burned candles to win respite for the souls of their dead. ”

“ But literary scholarship is in far worse plight in our Universities. No great work of classical learning has ever been achieved by an American scholar. It may be unfair to suggest comparison with men like Gilbert Murray, Croiset, or Wilamowitz; but how can we be persuaded by the professors or even by a dean that all culture will die if we forget Greek and Latin, until they satisfy us by their own work that they themselves are alive? Asia beckons to us with the hand of Fate, but Oriental scholarship is a desert through which a few nomadic professors wander aimlessly. ”

“ But if in some freak of disinterestedness, we wish if for only a moment to see American poetry with no concern save that of inordinate and intelligent curiosity, then it is to all of these views that we must turn, rather than to any one, and to the obverse of each, as well as to the face. For if one thing is apparent to-day in a study of American letters, it is that we must heroically resist any temptation to simplify, to look in only one direction for origins or in only one direction for growth. Despite our national motto, American civilization is not so much one in many as many in one. ”

“ Do we not know what depths of disappointment underlay the cynicism of Mark Twain and Henry Adams and Ambrose Bierce? Have we failed to recognize, in the surly contempt with which the author of “The Story of a183 Country Town” habitually speaks of writers and writing, the unconscious cry of sour grapes of a man whose creative life was arrested in youth? Are we unaware of the bitterness with which, in certain letters of his later years, Jack London regretted the miscarriage of his gift? There is no denying that for half a century the American writer as a type has gone down in defeat. ”