I repeat once more-the essential spirit of America, its real contribution to civilization, is a psychic quality intimately associated with the geography of the continent, and far more involved with mystic nuances of feeling than with the making of Arrow Collars, Chevrolets, caskets, plow-shares, chewing-gum, kodaks, dynamite and steel-rails.

Factories enough, industries enough, the traveler sees, from the old Dutch villages of New York State, through the small towns lost in the rich dark loam-lands of the Middle West, to the inhuman fastnesses of the Rocky Mountains; but these Mills of Progress no more really dominate human character in these places-its drifting resilience, its humorous patience than they dominate the cosmogonic landscape which engulfs them.

For between this landscape and this character there has grown up a psychic reciprocity older than any science. What those old Indians breathed in from the earth-spirits of this land—an evasive sensitiveness in womankind, a rooted withdrawnness in mankind—can still supply its

fluidity and its reserve to the modern mind that waits upon its spirit.

Americans themselves, isolated in particular portions of their native land, are ready enough to defend their predilection for New England or the Far West or the Old South; but what a wanderer like myself cannot help noticing is that the quality I speak of can be found. in a measure everywhere you go, found in the most diverse places, be they prairie or desert, be they pastoral uplands or the littered débris of city environs.

The thing I am thinking of, with its blending of human and natural elements is what Walt Whitman had in mind when he used the term "calamus-root" to express the spirit of his democracy of the wild, of his camaraderie of the waste.

I have caught this "genius loci" of America, so furtive, so shy, many times off-guard and exposed. I have caught it in the upper reaches of the Hudson, when islands of green reeds and greener willows, backwaters of blue coolness and bluer irises, have broken through the mists of dawn.

I have caught it with a pang of capricious nostalgia, even in New York itself, when the name "Marion, Ohio," upon a crane-shovel has brought in a flash to my mind that Acadian perspective of names, Bellefontaine, Greencastle, Terre Haute, leading out of the metallic labyrinth of Manhattan, like the milestones of a highroad, into solitudes of frame-houses, picket-fences, cows, chickens and red barns of the Middle West!

I have caught it above the muddy banks of the Mississippi where the

city of St. Louis plants itself with four-square solidity, the richly gathered masses of the separate buildings rolling up, mounting up together ledge upon ledge, tier upon tier, as if inclosed, like the cities of old, by walls and ramparts-now seen all confusedly and vaguely imminent, through its own atmosphere of heavy smoke, penetrating all its interstices, the dusky pall of its identity!

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I have always felt that there was something "rich and strange" and dimly formidable about St. Louis; and so apparently did the crowds at Le Bourget! Has not this city turned out to be the palpable fulfilment of that weird prophecy of Leonardo, quoted by Paul Valéry? "The great bird will take its first flight on the back of its great swan, filling the universe with stupor" and bringing "gloria eterna al nido dove nacque"-"eternal glory to the nest where it was born!"

What aplomb, full of old long sun-baked siestas of forgotten Congo dreaming, do those St. Louis negroes show, sprawling on creaking balconies, hunched up on rusty fireescapes great savage athletic bodies in flimsy modern clothes but with bare black feet, and women whose immense ebony faces seem to expand into the inhuman contours of idols between their jangling gilded earrings!

That wide steep declivity of slippery cobblestones descending to the water's edge-cobblestones not green with weeds or brown with mud, but of a forlorn phantasmal gray worthy of the very wharf of Lethe!

And those vast outlandish riverboats, whose winter quiescence has

all the indescribable melancholy that belongs to old deserted woodwork, rain-soaked and sun-bleached—the timber-life fled out of it and a sinister wraith-life entered into it instead!

All these things have something about them that passes from Nature to Humanity; and back again from Humanity to Nature.

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I recollect finding myself once in Fargo, North Dakota, at a time. when the great plains would naturally have been constricted under frozen snow. In place of this, long before her time, a strange uprising of the Spring Goddess had occurred. The atmosphere was full of a power that was like the presence of invisible flowing sap. The languid noonwinds seemed to carry on their breasts clouds of such impregnated balminess that one felt as though there were green shoots up there in the air.

I recollect skipping several paces down one of those long “dirt” roads in sheer childish happiness. Nor was this feeling lessened when, in the very lumber-yard of the freight-station I came upon the stone image of some early Viking settler, mildly receptive to that relaxing warmth, and close to this monument an old Dakotan who, himself like some decrepit Eric the Red, uttered the words: "I feels growth abroad, mister!"

Easy enough is it to pour forth pseudo-cultured abuse upon the thousands of prairie-lost "Main Streets" between Kansas City and Omaha. For civilization to "burn with a hard gemlike flame" it must undoubtedly have its roots in the deep past and its wavering decisions

at some vital “parting of the ways"; but there are other moods, other conscious moments, other visions of the world which have also their human value. Life goes on, whether a man associates or does not associate his plowing and sowing, his business and barter, his loves and his frustrations, with the Greeks and the Romans, with the theology of the Middle Ages, with the philosophy of the Renaissance! Grant that the intellectual continuity of the ages is broken, there is a primitive poetry of life, simple and natural, like the life of the aboriginals themselves, where the smoke rises from unlettered hearths and the corn is cooked and eaten on platters virginal of all esthetics. Men's thoughts can sink into themselves with a more earthy taciturnity, women's feelings can gather an ampler largeness, a freer grandeur, where they are not teased and fretted by the insidious pressure of these layers upon layers, strata upon strata, of old sophistries.

And in this life of bed-rock simplicity one psychic quality profoundly essential to all great vision is not lacking, and that is a limitless intellectual humility. I have always regarded "humility" as the most creative inheritance of spiritual Christian culture; and when I think of the banked-up conceit of intelligent Europeans, so opaque to the free flow of new ideas, I cannot help recognizing that in the possession of this quality alone Americans release a hope of immense moment, not only for their own future but for that of other races as well.

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When I have sometimes wandered at nightfall past the huge brazen

boots and brazen trousers, past that tragically woeful countenance, of the Barnard statue of Lincoln in Cincinnati, I have known well enough that I was face to face with a spiritual emanation from all these dusty highways and "boardwalk" hamlets such as was a sufficient answer to the sophisticated accusations of the old world. But not an obvious answer! An answer rather, dependent upon what one has observed, round the Franklin stove in many a remote Arkansas hostelry, in many a wayside Missouri station. Something coming and going on these sad prairie-winds, something advancing and retreating with these drenching rains and burning suns, a breath, a rumor, a movement in the air, a stir in the grass, a whisper over the wooded fences, a wild-goose cry above the tethered buggies in the meager squares, indicates to one old-world mind at least that the human spirit can find grist for its mill in a land where "Ben Hur" represents romance and the Bible represents philosophy!

And the value of what might be called the American "quota" to the psychic ascent of the human race springs from the present situation. For here are all those "mechanical improvements" with regard to the effect of which on human character sages are so suspicious. But here between these vast horizons and these staggering inventions the denizens of these multitudinous little country towns continue to live out their lives in almost Biblical simplicity. In such places there are no class divisions, no sophisticated vices. A spontaneous humanism such as would have delighted the soul of

Rousseau himself answers to the clearness and freshness of the freeblowing airs. Hard-worked men and women seem to have energy enough left for an active friendliness such as makes the ingrown suspiciousness of old-world countrysides seem mean and bitter. It must be of this sort of primordial simplicity combined with hygienic science that Americans think, when in Berlin, Paris or Rome they cry aloud for their "home-town." But if they are women perhaps they have an even more definite homesickness. For the feminine influence in American culture is quite a new thing in the world, so it seems to me, and a thing of extraordinary interest. The truth is that the timbre of masculine activities in this vast country is still attuned to the pioneer note; so that through all their politics and business and camaraderie there is that rough, untidy, adventurous casualness which men naturally assume when left to themselves.

And, except among professional students, the tougher "he-men" as they call them—the word itself is suggestive of what I am describing are content to leave culture pretty much in the hands of their "womenfolks." The result of this seems to be that all over this country the feminine attitude to life has invaded fiction and poetry and the decorative arts to an extent unparalleled in human history. And this feminine attitude is far less cramped and cynical and flippant than the attitude of a great deal of European literature. Not that it is in the least sentimental or banal. The poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, of Elinor Wylie, of Lola Ridge, holds its own with the best on the other side; while the

fiction of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Martha Ostenso, Zona Gale, Ellen Glasgow, drives straight deep honest furrows through the heart of many a mysterious field of human feeling quite remote from the experiences of the old world.

The casualness, the litter, the toughness, the pioneer chaoticism of the "he-man's" America finds its esthetic expression in Theodore Dreiser's work. But there is also a new group of "super-sophisticates,' mostly young men, poets and critics, like E. E. Cummings and Edmund Wilson, who seem to combine the psychic imagination of this vast fluctuating crowd of women with a sharp witty rigorous attempt to turn into a kind of mocking beauty those aspects of modern American life such as radio, jazz, prize-fighting, aëroplanes, circuses, futurist patterns of steel and iron, streams of consciousness, "claviluxes" of color, which poise themselves like a phantasmagoric mist of acrobatic shapes, on a high stretched tight-rope, raised aloft above both masculine activity and feminine emotion.

This silly parrot-cry about Americans' love of money ought to be answered; and the way I shall answer it will seem to many Europeans a monstrous paradox in the face of the aggressive possessiveness and the resonant social "climbing" of the very rich and the nouveaux riches in this country. But it must be remembered that the vast majority of Americans are neither very rich nor nouveaux riches; any more than they are class-conscious "proletarians." They are that completely new thing in the history of our race,

which one can only simply call American and leave it at that. Struggle for money they certainly do-day in, day out-but it is not, as it is with us Europeans, for the sake of the palpable benefits that money brings that they make it so fast and furiously. We Europeans treasure it because it brings social prestige, attractive possessions, and above all leisure. But the American pursues money for the sake of one of the craziest, vaguest, fantasticalest ideas that has ever entered a rational brain. He pursues it for the sake of what might be called "powerin-the-abstract," an idealistic, subjective, cerebral thing; a dream in fact without substance, without habitation, an “airy nothing," a floating will-o'-the-wisp!

This is why Americans who are making money leave their landscape, their houses, their streets, their gardens, their very automobiles, so littered, untidy and ramshackle. They are pursuing something that is a fantastic ideal. And how is this ideal of the average small-town citizen to be metaphysically defined? I suspect that if we really could get to the essence of it, this tedious European tag about the Almighty Dollar would be proved the fallacy it is.

Well! Is not this "power-in-theabstract" something parallel to the quests for intellectual truth, for esthetic beauty, for sensual pleasure as we know them in the old world? Average Americans are as completely devoid of any epicurean "art of life" as were the monks of the Thebaid! They have no taste for these things, no interest in them. Gourmands, virtuosos in meat and drink, hardly exist in America. Still less are Amer

icans misers. What money represents to them is something thinner than a ghost, less ponderable than a cloud. It is not even power in the European sense of that word that they are after-not power, that is to say, over people, over things, over the destinies of nations. It is, as it were, the Platonic idea of power-power for its own sake, or if you will, the diffused potentiality of power; the sense of being in a position to experience all human experiences; to give every form of privilege, every form of knowledge, every form of adventure, what they would call the "once over." It is in pursuit of this intangible Quest that, like so many standardized Don Quixotes they "post over land and sea," traveling—often with their whole families-not only from Salisbury Cathedral to the Parthenon, but from Mobile to Omaha and from Omaha to Detroit; while, for all their fantastic ideal of being au courant with every level of human savoir-faire from Dan to Beersheba, they leave their littered country and return to their littered country with no more palpable possession "added unto them" than as if some airy mirage, some Fata Morgana had been luring them on.

For, deep down, out of sight of the vision of any European critic, there emerges from the subconsciousness of millions of quiet Americans a strange and mystic restlessness. There is quizzical humor about this restlessness. It is not discontented or morbid. But it is at the extreme opposite pole from anything materialistic or self-satisfied. It is a sort of psychic answer to some drifting whisper from the cosmos itself—flowing in from the unknown—prophesying