itself. But, on the other hand, it has given the American that sureness of motive, that healthiness of appetite, that boyish frolicsomeness, that purity of sex-instincts, that quickness and litheness of manners, which distinguish him from most Europeans; it has given to him all those qualities which insure success and make their possessor a welcome member of any kind of society. If, in contradistinction to this fundamental American trait of self-possession, I designate the passion for self-surrender as perhaps the most significant expression of National German character, I am well aware that here again, I have touched upon the gravest defects as well as the highest virtues of German National life. The deepest seriousness and the noblest loyalty of German character is rooted in this passion. "Sich hinzugeben ganz und eine Wonne Zu fühlen die ewig sein muss, that is German sentiment of the most unquestionable sort. Not only do the great names in German history—as Luther, Lessing, Schiller, Bismarck, and so many others - stand in a conspicuous manner for this thoroughly German devotion, this absorption of the individual in some great cause or principle, but countless unnamed men and women are equally typical representatives of this German virtue of self-surrender: the housewife whose only thought is for her family; the craftsman who devotes a lifetime of contented obscurity to his daily work; the scholar who foregoes official and social distinction in unremitting pursuit of his chosen inquiry; the official and the soldier, who sink their personality in unquestioning service to the State. But a German loves not only to surrender himself to a great cause or a sacred task, he equally loves to surrender himself to whims. He loves to surrender to feelings, to hys terias of all sorts; he loves to merge himself in vague and formless imaginings, in extravagant and reckless experience, in what he likes to call "living himself out." And thus this same passion for self-surrender which has produced the greatest and noblest types of German earnestness and devotion, has also led to a number of paradoxical excrescences and grotesque distortions of German character. Nobody is more prone to forget his better self in this so-called "living himself out" than the German. Nobody can be a cruder materialist than the German who has persuaded himself that it is his duty to unmask the "lie of idealism." Nobody can be a more relentless destroyer of all that makes life beautiful and lovely, nobody can be a more savage hater of religious beliefs, of popular tradition, of patriotic instincts, than the German who has convinced himself that by the uprooting of all these things he performs the sacred task of saving society. THE “DIVINE AVERAGE”1 G. LOWES DICKINSON THE great countries of the East have each a civilization that is original, if not independent. India, China, Japan, each has a peculiar outlook on the world. Not so America, at any rate in the north. America, we might say, does not exist; there exists instead an offshoot of Europe. Nor does an "American spirit" exist; there exists instead the spirit of the average Western man. Americans are immigrants and descendants of immigrants. Putting aside the negroes and a handful of Orientals, there is nothing to be found here that is not to be found in Western Europe; only here what thrives is not what is distinctive of the different European countries, but what is common to them all. What America does, not, of course, in a moment, but with incredible rapidity, is to obliterate distinctions. The Scotchman, the Irishman, the German, the Scandinavian, the Italian, even, I suppose, the Czech, drops his costume, his manner, his language, his traditions, his beliefs, and retains only his common Western humanity. Transported to this continent all the varieties developed in Europe revert to the original type, and flourish in unexampled vigor and force. It is not a new type that is evolved; it is the fundamental type, growing in a new soil, in luxuriant profusion. Describe the average Western man and you describe the American; from east to west, from north to south, everywhere and always the same masterful, aggressive, unscrupulous, egotistic, at once good-natured and brutal, kind if you do not cross him, 1 Appearances, part IV, chapter I. Reprinted through the generous permission of the author and of Doubleday, Page & Co. ruthless if you do, greedy, ambitious, self-reliant, active for the sake of activity, intelligent and unintellectual, quickwitted and crass, contemptuous of ideas but amorous of devices, valuing nothing but success, recognizing nothing but the actual, Man in the concrete, undisturbed by spiritual life, the master of methods and slave of things, and therefore the conqueror of the world, the unquestioning, the undoubting, the child with the muscles of a man, the European stripped bare, and shown for what he is, a predatory, unreflecting, naïf, precociously accomplished brute. One does not then find in America anything one does not find in Europe; but one finds in Europe what one does not find in America. One finds, as well as the average, what is below and what is above it. America has, broadly speaking, no waste products. The wreckage, everywhere evident in Europe, is not evident there. Men do not lose their self-respect, they win it; they do not drop out, they work in. This is the great result not of American institutions or ideas, but of American opportunities. It is the poor immigrant who ought to sing the praises of this continent. He alone has the proper point of view; and he, unfortunately, is dumb. But often, when I have contemplated with dreary disgust, in the outskirts of New York, the hideous, wooden shanties planted askew in wastes of garbage, and remembered Naples or Genoa or Venice, suddenly it has been borne in upon me that the Italians living there feel that they have their feet on the ladder leading to paradise; that for the first time they have before them a prospect and a hope; and that while they have lost, or are losing, their manners, their beauty, and their charm, they have gained something which, in their eyes, and perhaps in reality, more than compensates for losses they do not seem to feel, they have gained self-respect, independence, and the allure of the open horizon. "The vision of America," a friend writes, "is the vision of the lifting up of the millions." This, I believe, is true, and it is America's great contribution to civilization. I do not forget it; but neither shall I dwell upon it; for though it is, I suppose, the most important thing about America, it is not what I come across in my own experience. What strikes more often and more directly home to me is the other fact that America, if she is not burdened by masses lying below the average, is also not inspired by an élite rising above it. Her distinction is the absence of distinction. No wonder Walt Whitman sang the "Divine Average." There was nothing else in America for him to sing. But he should not have called it divine; he should have called it "human, all too human." Or is it divine? Divine somehow in its potentialities? Divine to a deeper vision than mine? I was writing this at Brooklyn, in a room that looks across the East River to New York. And after putting down those words, "human, all too human," I stepped out on to the terrace. Across the gulf before me went shooting forward and back interminable rows of fiery shuttles; and on its surface seemed to float blazing basilicas. Beyond rose into the darkness a dazzling tower of light, dusking and shimmering, primrose and green, up to a diadem of gold. About it hung galaxies and constellations, outshining the firmament of stars; and all the air was full of strange voices, more than human, ingeminating Babylonian oracles out of the bosom of night. This is New York. This it is that the average man has done, he knows not why; this is the symbol of his work, so much more than himself, so much more than what seems to be itself in the common light of day. America does not know what she is doing, neither do I know, nor any man. But the impulse that drives her, so mean and poor to the critic's eye, has perhaps more significance in the eye of God; and the optimism of this continent, so seeming-frivolous, is justified, may be, by reason lying beyond its ken. |