Westerner

“ He led them, perspiring but pleased, from prospect to prospect, from shaft to shaft, from hill to hill. He showed them leads, fissure veins, red quartz, white quartz, water supplies, timberings, hanging walls, country rock, pan tests, and he talked about it all with that easy fluency of eloquence, that flattering assumption of the other man's sophistication, which is so peculiarly a talent—nay, a genius—of the Westerner.
Some trades there are for which all men imagine themselves qualified without especial training—such as horse buying, writing stories, judging pictures, and mining. ”

“ There was an impression common in my youth that culture of the highest order was not only possible in the West but that we Westerners were peculiarly accessible to its benignant influences and very likely to become its special guardians and apostles. Those were times when life was less complex, when the spirituality stirred by the Civil War was still very perceptible, when our enthusiasms were less insistently presented in statistics of crops and manufactures. ”

“ The sterling simplicity that makes Westerners great is easily frittered away in the East. Men go in for display. They keep what they call “establishments.” They are much given to drink. Too often they debauch. ”

“ The typical Westerner wishes to be the cause of as many changes as possible in his environment; the typical Chinaman wishes to enjoy as much and as delicately as possible. ”

“ Verinder, properly scandalized at this free give and take with a haphazard savage of the wilds, interrupted in the interest of propriety. "I'll not detain you any longer, my man. You may get at your fishing."
The Westerner paid not the least attention to him. "My gracious, ma'am, we think we're a heap more civilized than England. We ain't got any militant suffragettes in this country—at least, I've never met up with any."
"They're a sign of civilization," the young woman laughed. "They prove we're still alive, even if we are asleep." ”

“ What is the spirit, what is the civilization of the West? I have not the presumption to expect to answer these large questions to any one’s satisfaction—least of all to my own—but if I may be permitted to talk about them familiarly, in the manner that one speaks to his friends of what interested him most in a journey, and with flexibility in passing from one topic to another, I shall hope to contribute something to a better understanding between the territories of a vast empire. ”

“ Life in the West, especially away from the larger towns, lacked, indeed, the finer enjoyments of civilization to a degree hard to bear to those who had been accustomed to them and who did not find a compensation in that which gave to Western life—and American life generally—its peculiar charm: a warm, living interest in the progressive evolution, constantly and rapidly going on, the joy of growth—that which I have attempted to call in German “die Werdelust.” ”

“ If therefore we are to discover in what form the destiny of the Western Culture will be accomplished, we must first be clear as to what culture is, what its relations are to visible history, to life, to soul, to nature, to intellect, what the forms of its manifestation are and how far these forms — peoples, tongues and epochs, battles and ideas, states and gods, arts and craft-works, sciences, laws, economic types and world-ideas, great men and great events — may be accepted and pointed to as symbols. ”

“ The people out there were so alive, so go-ahead; and they took such an interest in all forms of culture too, in literature, music, painting, the drama. “Why, look at the big magazines,—they depend for their circulation on the West.” And then, the homes of the West! “Oh, if I lived in Europe, I should lose my faith in human nature. Western people are so warmhearted. ”

“ Attempts are made—well meant, no doubt—to foist that state of culture which the West calls “modern civilization,” or “civilization” pure and simple, upon the reluctant people of the Near and Far East. We are forgetful of the fact that these nations have had a civilization of their own, and that something more important is included in this forcible change than the change of a dress. ”

“ But the news has reached me even here that in the West you seek a moral standard, and this quest always fills me with wonder. There are priests among you, I can see that, and soldiers, and fishermen, and artists and princes and folk who labor in the fields--now do you expect all these men, living in different conditions of life, to live under the same rule? I am afraid that the East and the West will never understand each other. ”

“ In temperament, in feeling, in mind, and even in unreason, they are Western, with an absolute comprehension of all Western modes of thought, even of those which are remote from their historical experience. ”

“ THE close of the sixteenth century saw western Europe undergoing a curious and comfortable change. Civilization, with her handmaid, luxury, and her schoolmaster, the printing-press, had seduced the souls of men. ”

“ The West has taken strength, thought, training, selected aptitudes out of the old treasures of the East,—as if out of a new Orient; while the East has itself been kept fresh, vital, alert, originative by the West, her blood quickened all the while, her youth through every age renewed. Who can say in a word, in a sentence, in a volume, what destinies have been variously wrought, with what new examples of growth and energy, while, upon this unexampled scale, community has passed beyond community across the vast reaches of this great continent! ”

“ Sundry sturdy European ideas, transplanted into this western soil, have triumphed over all competitors and thriven so mightily as to react upon all parts of the Old World, some more, some less, and thus to modify the whole course of civilization. ”

“ But the absurdity of the West is the living reality of the East. There we may still find all the chief races which have ever occupied the country, still remaining distinct, still keeping separate tongues, and those for the most part, their own original tongues. ”

“ The simplification of life, the decrease of "vital" demands, strips the arts and culture of the West of all efficacy and worth. To these men, whose longing was for the inner, spiritual freedom of man, Western progress, with all it connoted, was an abomination. We are not surprised, therefore, to find the Westernizers, the rationalists, strongly arrayed against them. ”

“ Just as sure as history records the existence of an early West—a West where the gun and knife settled men’s heated controversies, a West where, for many years, there was a dearth of woman’s soft voice and tender smile—just so sure are the writings of the Western poets, philosophers and storytellers of this period a vital part of our early American literature. The literature of the West, as with the literature of any country, needs only be a true, sincere, worthy expression of the life it professes to portray. ”

“ All the nations of the West have, broadly speaking, a common past, a common fund of ideas, from which everything that they have and everything that they are springs naturally as part of a correlated whole,—one Roman Empire in the background, one Christian religion at the centre, one gradual emancipation, first from feudalism and next from absolutism, worked out or now in process of being worked out together, one art, one music, one kind of idiom, even though the words expressing it vary from land to land. ”

“ I like to study pictures of the East, and of the earliest period of the cultivation of our race in opposition to the West—that promised land which I am approaching with a thousand questions in my soul. ”

“ Western is a country squire, a good fellow in the main, but a drunkard, always in the saddle, full of oaths, ready with coarse language, blows, a sort of dull carter, hardened and excited by the brutality of the race, the wildness of a country life, by violent exercise, by abuse of coarse food and strong drink, full of English and rustic pride and prejudice, having never been disciplined by the constraint of the world, because he lives in the country ”

“ To the philanthropist and christian, the character and manners,—the institutions, literature and religion of so wide a portion of our country, whose mighty energies are soon to exert a controlling influence over the character of the whole nation, and in some measure, of the world, are not less matters of momentous concern.
"The West is a young empire of mind, and power, and wealth, and free institutions, rushing up to a giant manhood, with a rapidity and power never before witnessed below the sun. ”

“ The West had turned back towards the East, and, although the intent was hostile, the minds of the western men had been fecundated, their imagination fired by contact with the mother of all religions and all cultures. ”

“ When the Western man goes East he carries the consciousness of playing a great part in the making of an empire; his horizon is large; but he finds himself surrounded by an atmosphere of indifference or non-comprehension of the prodigiousness of his country, of incredulity as to the refinement and luxury of his civilization ”

“ It constitutes the key-conception of historical progress, and is the very life of that highest stage of this which we designate and praise by the name of Western Civilisation. It is at the mental summons of this ideal, that the West as a stadium in historic progress emerges from the hoary and impassive East; and the entire history of the West as divergent from the oriental spirit, as the scene of energetic human improvement, the scene of the victory of man over Nature and over his merely natural self, has its controlling and explanatory motive in this ideal alone. ”

“ You Westerns feel so sure of your superiority over us Easterns that you refuse even to attempt a fair or correct interpretation of past and present historical events. You deliberately stuff the minds of your growing generations with a series of ostensible events and shallow generalities, because you wish to convince them for the rest of their lives how immeasurably superior you are to us, how there towers a range of differences between the two civilizations, how East is only East, and the West such a glorious, wonderful, unique West. ”

“ This nation is destined to blaze the way in the East to a new birth of civilization and freedom, as that did in the West more than a hundred years ago. And our young friend here is but another who shall assist in bringing these mighty forces together. ”

“ The central coordinating theme for Liberal Studies courses up to this point has been the deliberately ambiguous phrase Issues in Western Culture, and while this has never meant or led to the exclusion of anything from elsewhere, it has meant that, for the most part, our attention is focused on works obviously relevant to the history and development of what we call Western Culture, loosely defied. ”

“ Western civilisation, or rather Western ideas, and education had brought the natives of the Eastern Empire to such a degree of culture and enlightenment that the subjugated ones realised that they had become the equal of their masters long before the dawn of the twenty-first century. ”

“ Inferior and superior human races are contrasted in this respect. Many travelers comment on the unchangeable habits of savages. The semi-civilized nations of the East, past and present, were, or are, characterized by a greater rigidity of custom than characterizes the more civilized nations of the West. ”

“ Let us picture for ourselves this first restless American, this West-bound man. We must remember that there had been two or three full American generations to produce him, this man who first dared turn away from the seaboard and set his face toward the sinking of the sun, toward the dark and mysterious mountains and forests which then encompassed the least remote land fairly to be called the West. Two generations had produced a man different from the Old-World type. ”

“ The new life of the West has reacted all the while—who shall say how powerfully?—upon the older life of the East; and yet the East has moulded the West as if she sent forward to it through every decade of the long process the chosen impulses and suggestions of history. ”

“ Here in the West you are near the centre of a vast empire, you feel its mighty pulse, the throb and heartbeat of its immense and growing strength. Some of you have seen this great civilization actually grow on the vacant prairies, in the unoccupied wilderness, on the sandy shores of the inland seas. ”

“ While the great West suffers from a want of the virtues that attend a fixed society, as it undoubtedly does, it does not find itself obliged to contend against its prejudices. There are no arbitrary lines drawn, based upon mere ideas—no venerable fictions in the way. ”

“ The West has witnessed more changes than has the East. The common impression, and one to which all Americans are bred, leaves paleface Western occupation to a modern day. Whenever one’s thought wanders to what is old in this country one inevitably sets his face towards the East. ”

“ The West, which at first drew us on to itself, has forcibly flung us back upon an intense consciousness of our personality. The breath of inspiration, coming from the West, has kindled the original spark in us into a flame that lay smothered in the ashes of dead habits and rigidity of traditional forms. This has been illustrated by the course our literature has taken, almost completely abandoning its earlier foreign bed, finding its natural channel in the mother tongue. ”

“ The superior strength and skill of the West are to-day generally admitted throughout the East, but in many quarters the first receptivity to Western progress and zeal for Western ideas have cooled or have actually given place to a reactionary hatred of the very spirit of Western civilization. ”

“ Distinctions of class, profession, or nationality, entering so largely into European life, separating man from man, lose their hold upon Europeans meeting in the distant East. The great [Pg 288] West, seen at that distance, becomes their common country; they are drawn together by the bond of common views, feelings and modes of thought which obliterate the artificial lines of nationality—nay, they feel for, and treat each other as only blood relations and brothers would in Europe. ”