Hearst's International Cosmopolitan

“ Cosmopolitanism is the attempt to deny the instinct of nationality. It works in three ways with us. It seeks to impose an English culture on our mixed races; it seeks to create an American type at one stroke ”

“ Yet during this same century, cosmopolitanism appeared as a characteristic trend in almost every nation, whether large or small. It was especially easy for the French to become cosmopolitans since their language and literature were universally known. ”

“ Gradually, with the growth of national feeling and the more definite demarcation of nations and the ever-increasing{173} sense of patriotism, that higher form of selfishness, cosmopolitanism went out of fashion. ”

“ Frantz. © 18Mar27; A972517. Kathleen
Norris (A) ; 19Mar54; R127226.
The shortest way home. (In Hearst's international-cosmopolitan, June 1926) © 10May27; B741521. Kathleen Norris (A) ; 14May54; R130550. ”

“ This is the life of which a foreign observer can never weary, if fortunate and sympathetic enough to enter into it—the life that forces him sometimes to doubt whether the course of our boasted Western progress is really in the direction of moral development. Each day, while the years pass, there will be revealed to him some strange and unsuspected beauty in it. Like other life, it has its darker side; yet even this is brightness compared with the darker side of Western existence. ”

“ I grant the theory; but I ask myself if I am really bound by it to love all these my fellow-citizens, whatever their conduct and character may be. Love is an elastic word; and, if I am to love the Germans, I must love them in some very different sense from that in which I love my country and my race. It really is, in another form, the old controversy between cosmopolitanism and patriotism. The "Enthusiasm of Humanity" is a noble sentiment; but the action of our fellow-members of the human family may be such as to render it, at least for the moment, impossible of realization. ”

“ Russia, unfortunately, has not always observed this principle.
It seems to me that in politics nothing is so dangerous as to be more carried away by cosmopolitanism than by patriotism, and to forget one's own feelings and duties in one's desire to please some other Power. Cosmopolitanism kills patriotism. I have spent many winters in England, and have known many Englishmen, but I have never met a true Briton who would boast of being a cosmopolitan and not a patriot. Happy England! ”

“ Hearst represents a West that has always been more or less, in Eastern opinion, an appendage to the political sentiment of the country. This interesting view was represented in the declaration of a distinguished statesman who said to the writer, within the last decade, that a political battle then imminent would have to be won by the forces he represented, in order "that the political control of the country might remain in the East." ”

“ What is to be desired is not cosmopolitanism, not the absence of all national characteristics that one associates with couriers, wagon-lit attendants, and others, who have had everything distinctive obliterated by multiple and trivial contacts with men of every civilized country. ”

“ The cosmopolitan spirit, whether for good or for evil, is hastily obliterating all distinctions. What is distinctly national in these countries is less valuable than the immense wealth of universal ideas ”

“ If you would enlarge the scope of your actions, you would grumble less—and perhaps, if I may say so, allow that other nations share some of your best boasted qualities. Now I am truly cosmopolitan; I regard no city as my home ”

“ Cosmopolitan finance is one example of such a tendency. Another, more morally sympathetic but not much less dangerous to nationalism in such a country as America, is cosmopolitan revolutionary idealism. ”

“ The deeper interest in the expression of national qualities and in the representation of provincial peculiarities is to-day accompanied by an increasing cosmopolitanism which seems to be casting down the barriers of race and of language. ”

“ Cosmopolitanism, the conception of humanity, the ideal of a “Society of Friends”—the Epicurean league—from which women were not excluded, and the precept of “not expecting from life more than it has to give,” take the place of the highly individualised commonwealth, with its strenuous masculine life of war and politics, and its passionate temper which felt that nothing had been accomplished so long as anything remained undone. ”

“ Because of their difference in all external matters, in all of the non-essentials of life, the people in a cosmopolitan city are forced to found their community of interests upon the basic and essential likenesses of their common human nature; for, after all, the things that make men alike are stronger and more primitive than the things that separate them. ”

“ According to his character and his faculty of perception, he will be more or less affected by those Oriental influences to which he submits himself. The conditions of Western life will gradually begin to assume for him new, undreamed-of meanings, and to lose not a few of their old familiar aspects. Much that he once deemed right and true he may begin to find abnormal and false. He may begin to doubt whether the moral ideals of the West are really the highest. He may feel more than inclined to dispute the estimate placed by Western custom upon Western civilization. ”

“ If they drop that separateness which is made their reproach, they may be in danger of lapsing into a cosmopolitan indifference equivalent to cynicism, and of missing that inward identification with the nationality immediately around them which might make some amends for their inherited privation. No dispassionate observer can deny this danger. Why, our own countrymen who take to living abroad without purpose or function to keep up their sense of fellowship in the affairs of their own land are rarely good specimens of moral healthiness ”

“ I am also convinced that much of what we call 'personality' and 'force of character' in the West represents only the survival and recognition of primitive aggressive tendencies, more or less disguised by culture. ”

“ Such civilization he could estimate only as one having no single emotion in harmony with it,—as one finding nothing to love while dwelling in its midst, and nothing to regret in the hour of leaving it forever. ”

“ Briefly speaking, the state of things obtaining in the West is based upon the free play of human selfishness, and can only be reached by giving full sway to that quality. Social disturbances are little heeded in the Occident ”

“ This has rather a shocking sound; it makes the cosmopolite appear invidious and narrow-minded. But I hasten to add that there seems no real reason why even the most delicate conscience should take alarm. The consequence of the cosmopolite spirit is to initiate you into the merits of all peoples; to convince you that national virtues are numerous, though they may be very different, and to make downright preference really very hard. ”

“ If nationality is to justify itself in the face of all this, it must be because the country which preserves its individuality does so with the profound conviction that its peculiar ideal is nobler than that which the cosmopolitan spirit suggests—that this ideal is so precious to it that its loss would be as the loss of the soul, and that it could not be realized without an aloofness from, if not an actual indifference to, the ideals which are spreading so rapidly over Europe. ”

“ Such manifestations of heroism and of a zealous ardour, unexampled in its extent and its intensity, offer assuredly, I repeat, some augury, some earnest of that which is to come, some pledge to the new century rising like a planet tremulous on the horizon's verge.
But a widespread error still confounds this imperial patriotism with Cosmopolitanism, this resolution of a great people with Jingoism. Now what is Cosmopolitanism? It is an attitude of mind purely negative; it is a characteristic of protected nationalities, and of decayed races. ”

“ There is a certain sort of cosmopolitanism without which no nation's life can be complete—nay, without which it cannot go on at all.
It is the cosmopolitanism of recognizing greatness outside our own borders. The cosmopolitanism of owning that there are as good fish in foreign seas as ever there were in the English Channel. The cosmopolitanism of a human brotherhood, whether it hails from the Sandwich Islands, from France, from Finland, or from Hungary ”

“ Such high-sounding and professedly disinterested cosmopolitanism appeals to a certain class of sentimental believers in democracy. It does not appeal, however, to any one who fully understands present-day industrial and political conditions. ”

“ Neither do we find her on literary exhibition as a dangerous beauty, a charmer of men; and in the real life of Japan she has never appeared in any such rôle. Society, as a mingling of the sexes, as an existence of which the supremely refined charm is the charm of woman, has never existed in the East. ”

“ And the guest must not allow himself to be less reserved. Unless possessing the privilege of great age, which would entitle him to paternal freedom of speech, he must never venture upon personal compliment, or indulge in anything resembling light flattery. What would be deemed gallantry in the West may be gross rudeness in the East. ”

“ After twenty-nine years of daily developing cosmopolitanism—years that have witnessed the rising of a new star in the East and an uninterrupted growth of interchange of ideas between the nations of the earth, whether in politics, literature, or science, without a single check to the ever-rising tide of internationalism—are we again to let the favourable moment pass unused, just for want of making up our minds? At present one language holds the field. ”

“ However psychologists may theorize on the absence or the limitations of personal individuality among the Japanese, there can be no question at all that, as a nation, Japan possesses an individuality much stronger than our own. ”

“ And in the light of this—for I think we may not unjustly attribute the host’s sentiments to the host’s author—he regarded the “political community as only an elementary stage”; nationality was at best preparatory for the “universal union” of men; while “the feeling of nationality is a onesidedness to be merged in a genuine and ardent cosmopolitanism.” Cosmopolitanism is the political correlative to a belief in culture. In the end there is a very general agreement among the visitors at Cordova Lodge. ”

“ And, finally, it is for us to take account also of the growth of what must be called "cosmopolitanism," that breaking down of the hostile barriers keeping one people apart from the others, ignorant of them, and often contemptuous.
Here, then, are four legacies from the nineteenth century to the twentieth:—first, the scientific spirit; second, the spread of democracy; third, the assertion of nationality; and, fourth, that stepping across the confines of language and race, for which we have no more accurate name than "cosmopolitanism." ”

“ But differences in national customs are natural and inevitable, and one gradually becomes accustomed to them, and enabled to live a happy life in spite of them, as appreciation grows when acquaintance has made one familiar with many interesting and excellent aspects of existence here. ”

“ Hearst has changed with them. He is older and graver, is no longer immune to ambition, and may have discovered that good-fellowship with his subordinates and gratification of his lone humor are not profitable in business and politics. ”

“ Uniformly mobile, and thus uniformly impressionable, the nation has moved unitedly in the direction of great ends, submitting the whole volume of its forty millions to be moulded by the ideas of its rulers, even as sand or as water is shaped by wind. And this submissiveness to reshaping belongs to the old conditions of its soul life,—old conditions of rare unselfishness and perfect faith. The relative absence from the national character of egotistical individualism has been the saving of an empire; has enabled a great people to preserve its independence against prodigious odds. ”

“ While cosmopolitanism is the dominant will that the purpose of the existence of humanity be actually realized in humanity, patriotism is the will that this end be first realized in the particular nation to which we ourselves belong, and that this achievement thence spread over the entire race. ”

“ Because of this, we call America 'the country of the young,' and we consider the New World as the great force which decomposes the old European social organization." That idea is, as Ferrero points out, an illusion due to distance. ”

“ It would be a fine national custom to act such a series of dramatic histories in orderly succession, in the yearly Christmas holidays, and could not but tend to counteract that mock cosmopolitism, which under a positive term really implies nothing but a negation of, or indifference to, the particular love of our country. By its nationality must every nation retain its independence;—I mean a nationality quoad the nation. ”

“ I was never more vividly reminded of the fact that human nature, from one pole to the other, falls naturally into certain categories, and that Respectability wears the same face in an Oriental harem as in England or America. ”

“ Few lacked honesty of purpose and sincerity and loyalty to ideals. But the ideals were those of their own national or racial interests. Aside from a desire to see justice done to France and Belgium, there was no unity, no internationalism in the views of my guests. Most of them I respected; many of them I admired; for some I came to have real affection. My husband and I formed personal ties that I trust will never be broken. But I confess that the more I listened to tabletalk and salon talk in my own home, the more bewildered I grew. ”

“ But, as a foreigner, you must also have observed their defects."
"What defects?"
"Defects in practical knowledge of the Western kind."
"But to judge the men of one civilization by the standard requirements of another, which is totally different in organization, would be unjust. It seems to me that the more perfectly a man represents his own civilization, the more we must esteem him as a citizen, and as a gentleman. And judged by their own standards, which were morally very high, the old Japanese appear to me almost perfect men." ”