Ariel (9 page)

And, when he wrote his master work, there still radiated from Boston, the Puritan home, the city of learning and tradition, a glorious pleiad which holds in the intellectual story of our century a universal fame. Who since has picked up the heritage of Emerson, Channing, Poe? The levelling by the middle classes tends ever, pressing with its desolating task, to plane down what little remains of
intelligentsia :
the flowers are mown by the machine when the weeds remain.

Long since their books have ceased to soar on wings beyond the common vision. To-day the most actual example of what Americans like best in literature must be sought in the gray pages of magazines or periodicals which seldom remind one that that mode of publication was employed in the immortal “Federalist.”

In the domain of moral sentiment, the mechanical impulse for the utilitarian has, indeed, encountered a certain balance” wheel in a strong religious tradition; but one may not conclude that even this has given to the direction of conduct a real, disinterested principle.... American religiosity, derived from the English and exaggerated, is merely an auxiliary force for the penal law, and would disappear on the day it was found possible without it to give to utilitarian morality that religious sanction which Mill desired for it. The very culmination of that morality is only that of Franklin; a philosophy of conduct which has for its goal a commonplace sagacity, a prudent usefulness, in whose bosom will never rise the emotions of holiness or heroism; and which, fit only to give to one’s conscience in the common affairs of life a certain moral support — like the apple-tree cane with which Franklin ever walked — is but a fragile staff with which to surmount great heights. And yet his was its supreme height: it is in the valleys where one must seek for its
a
ctuality. Even if the moral critique were not to descend below the probity and moderation of Franklin’s standard, its necessary termination, as de Tocqueville wisely said of a society educated narrowly with similar notions of duty, would surely not be in that superb and noble decadence which gives us to measure a Satanic beauty of tragedy in the downfall of empires, but rather a kind of pallid materialism, drab culture, and finally the sleep of an enervation without brilliancy in the silent decay of all the mainsprings of the moral life. In that society whose precept tends to put outside of what is obligatory the higher manifestations of abnegations and of virtue, practical considerations will always make the limits of obligation recede indefinitely. And the school of material prosperity, always a rude teacher of republican austerity, has carried even further that simplicity of the conception of a rational conduct which now obsesses the
mind. To Franklin’s code have succeeded others franker still in their expression of the national wisdom. A book by one Swett Marden was recently
¹
published in Boston, “Pushing to the Front,” which announced, apparently with much popular approval, as a new moral law, that success is the final end of life; this book was praised even in church circles, and compared to the “Imitation” of à
Kempis!...

¹
1894. The book seems to have had less effect than
Rodo
feared.

And public life does not escape the consequences of the growth of this germ of disorganization in society generally. Any casual observer of their political customs will tell you how the obsession of material interest tends steadily to enervate and eradicate the sentiment of law or right; the civic virtue of a Hamilton is as an old and rusty sword, every day the more forgotten, lost in the cobwebs of tradition; venality, beginning at the polls, spreads through the working of all their institu
tions;
the government by a mediocrity renders vain that emulation which exalts the character and the intelligence, and imposes itself even on the imagination as an unavoidable future. A democracy not subject to a superior instruction, not trained in liberal schools to the understanding of true human excellence, tends always to that abominable brutality of the majority which despises the greater moral benefits of liberty and annuls in public opinion all respect for the dignity of the individual. And to-day a new and formidable power arises to accentuate this absolutism of numbers: the political influence of a plutocracy represented only by the agents of the trusts, monopolies of production, and lords of the economic life, one of the most noteworthy and significant features of the United States of to-day. Their advent has caused almost everybody to recall to mind the coming of that proud and over-rich class which at the end of the Roman Republic
preceded
the tyranny of the Caesars and the ruin of liberty. And the exclusive preoccupation with material aggrandizement, the deity of such a civilization, has its logical result on the State as on the individual, putting the
struggle-for-life
principle also at the head of national policy, and making its representative the supreme personification of the national energy— the
postulant
of Emerson, the ruling
p
er
sonage
of Taine.

To the impulse which drives the spiritual life toward that deorientation of the ideal to the selfishly useful corresponds physically that other principle which in the astounding increase of that people impels both the multitude and the initiative ever in the direction of that boundless West which in the times of their first independence was all mystery, veiled behind the forests of the Mississippi. In fact that improvised West — which grows so formidable to the older Atlantic States and
already claims hegemony in the near future—is where the most faithful representation of American life is to be found at this moment of its evolution. It is there where the definite results, the logical and natural fruits of the spirit that has guided the great democracy from its origin, are brought into relief for the observer so that he can picture to himself the aspect of its immediate future. To the Virginian, the Yankee, has succeeded the master of the yesterday empty prairies, of whom Michel Chevalier predicted, half a century since, “The last shall one day be the first.” Utilitarianism, empty of all ideal content, a certain cosmopolitan levity of spirit, and the levelling of a falsely conceived democracy, will in him reach their ultimate victory. Every noble element of that civilization, all which binds it to the generous traditions and lofty origin of its historic dignity — the arrival of the men of the Mayflower, the memory of the Patricians
of
Virginia
and the warriors of New England, the spirit of the people and lawmakers of the Emancipation — will remain only in the older States, where a Boston or a Philadelphia still maintain “the palladium of the Washingtonian tradition.” Chicago will arise to reign. And its overweening superiority over the original States of the Atlantic shore is based on its belief that they are reactionary, too European, too subject to tradition. History confers no claims on any, where popular election confers the purple.

As fast as the utilitarian genius of that nation takes on a more defined character, franker, narrower yet, with the intoxication of material prosperity, so increases the impatience of its sons to spread it abroad by propaganda, and think it predestined for all humanity. To-day they openly aspire to the primacy of the world’s civilization, the direction of its ideas, and think themselves the forerunners of all culture
that is to prevail. The colloquial phrase, ironically quoted by Laboulaye, ‘‘America can beat the world,” is taken seriously by almost any virile Westerner. At the bottom of their open rivalry with Europe lies a contempt for it that is almost naive, and the profound conviction that within a brief period they are destined to eclipse its glory and do away with its spiritual superiority; thus once more fulfilling, in the progress of civilization, the hard law of the ancient mysteries, whereby the initiated shall put to death the initiator. It were useless to seek to convince them that, although their services to inventions and material advance have been doubtless great, even rising to the measure of a universal human obligation, they do not of themselves suffice to alter the axis of the earth. It were useless to seek to convince them that the fires lit upon European altars, the work done by peoples living these three thousand years gone by about the shores of the Medi
terranean,
though rising to glorious genius when bound with the olive and the palm of Athens, a work still being carried on and in whose traditions and teachings we South Americans live, makes a sum which cannot be equalled by any equation of Washington plus Edison. Would they even revise the Book of Genesis, to put themselves upon the front page?

But, aside from the insufficiency of the part that is given them to play in the e
ducation of humanity, their own character itself precludes all possibility of their hegemony. Nature has not granted them the genius for propaganda, the vocation of he apostle. They lack that great gift of amiability — likeableness, in a lofty sense; that extraordinary power of sympathy with which those races endowed by Providence for the task of education know how to make of their culture a beauty, as did Greece, loveable, eternal, a
nd yet always with something of their own.

North
American
civilization may abound — it does abound — in fertile suggestions, profitable examples; it may inspire admiration, astonishment, respect; but it is rare for the foreigner to feel his heart come to his mouth with strong emotion when first he sees that Bartholdi statue holding high its torch of Liberty over New York Harbour; that thrill profound with which the ancient traveller saw the rosy light of the marble and the sheen of Athena’s spear over the early dawn on the Acropolis.

But please remember that when I, in the name of their soul’s rights, deny to their utilitarianism the right to impose itself as typical of the future on the world as mould or model, I do not in the least assert that its labours are wasted even in relation to those things which we may call soul-interests.... Without the arm which clears and constructs, there might now be no shelter for the brain that thinks; without some certain conquest of the
materialities, the rule of the spiritualities in human societies becomes impossible. Renan’s aristocratic idealism recognized, even from the point of view of the moral interest of the race and its future spiritual development, the import of the utilitarian labour of this century; “To get away from need is to redeem oneself.” In the remote past even the prosaic and selfish activities of the merchant resulted in putting for the first time a people in relation with others, and thus had a far-reaching effect on men’s ideas; since this had much to do with multiplying the means of intelligence, refining and softening manners, perhaps even showing the way to a more advanced morality; and the same positive force appears later, favouring the higher ideals of civilization. It was the gold accumulated by the merchants of the Italian republics that paid, says Saint-Victor, for the works of the Renaissance. The ships that came back from the countries of the
Thousand and One Nights, laden with ivory and spices, made it possible for Lorenzo di Medici to renew in Florentine merchants’ houses the feast of Plato. All history shows a definite relation of growth between the progress of utilitarian activity and the ideal. And just as the former can be turned into a shelter and protection for the latter, so the ideas of the mind often give rise to utilitarian results, above all when these latter are not sought directly. For instance, Bagehot remarks that the immense positive benefits of navigation might never have been attained for humanity if in earliest times there had not been dreamers, apparently idle — and certainly misunderstood by their contemporaries — who were interested solely in the contemplation of the movements of the stars.

This law of harmony bids us also respect the arm that labours arduously in what seems a barren and prosaic soil. The work of North American positivism will also at the end serve the cause of Ariel. That which this people of Cyclops have achieved for the direct purpose of material advantage, with all their sense for what is useful and their admirable faculty of mechanical invention, will be converted by other peoples, or later, even by themselves, to a wealth of material for the higher selection. Thus that most precious and fundamental invention of the alphabet, which gives the wings of immortality to the spoken word, originated in Phoenician shops, the discovery of merchants who only desired to keep their accounts. Using it for purposes merely mercenary, they never dreamed that the genius of a superior race would transfigure and transform it to a means of perpetuating the light and the learning of their own being. The relation between material good and good that is intellectual or moral is thus only a new aspect of that modem doctrine which we call the transformation of energy; material wellbeing may be transformed into spiritual superiority.

But North American life does not as yet offer us any new example of this indiscutable relation, nor even dimly suggest it as the triumph of the generation to come.

Our wish and our belief, indeed, incline us to hope that a superior destiny may be reserved for that civilization in a time not too remote for prophecy; the more that, under the spur of their energy, even the brief time that separates them from their dawn has sufficed to satisfy the expenditure of the vitality required for such immense achievement. Their past, their present, must be but the entry-way to a great future. Yet all shows that this is still far away from its definitive. The assimilative energy which has so far enabled them to maintain a certain uniformity as well as some touch of genius, despite the enormous inrush of ethnic elements opposed to those which have so far made the basis of their character, will have to do battle every day more strenuous, and in their utilitarianism, which proscribes all ideality, will find no inspiration sufficiently strong to maintain their solidarity with the older ideal. The illustrious thinker, who compared the slave of olden times to an atom outside the attraction of the social orbit, might well use the same comparison to characterize that numerous colony of German origin now peopling the Middle and Northern West, which preserves intact in their nature, their society, and their customs, the impression of that German spirit which in many of its profoundest and strongest characteristics must be considered as the actual antithesis of the American
...
And also, a civilization which is destined to survive and spread throughout the world; which has not mummified itself in the manner of the Chinese by losing all capability of change; cannot indefinitely prolong the direction of its energies to one order of things alone. Let us hope, then, that the spirit of that Titanic organism, which has so far been utility and will-power only, may some day also be intelligence, sentiment, ideality; that from that mighty forge may arise, in last result, the noble human figure, harmonious, select, that Spencer foreshadowed in the discourse I have adverted to. But we may not look for him in the present reality of that people, nor in their immediate future; and we must give up hoping to find the perfect type of an exemplary civilization in what is now but a rough sketch, huge and misshapen, having to pass through many correcting hands before it assumes the serene, the perfect shape of a people that have fully developed their genius and contemplate their work,
finis coronat
,
gloriously crowned. So, in his “Dream of the Condor,” Leconte de Lisle depicts the ascension on strong wings and at last
the Olympian tranquillity far above the snowpeaks of the Cordilleras!