Chapter Eighteen: Literature…

Chapter Eighteen: Literature

What does the American read? In “Jörn Uhl,” the apprentice in the Hamburg bookshop says to his friend: “If I am to tell you how to be wise and cunning, then go where there are no books. Do you know, if I had not had my father, I should have gone to America—for a fact! And it would have gone hard with anybody who poked a book at me.” In that way many a man in Europe, who is long past his apprenticeship, still pictures to himself America: Over in America nobody bothers about books. And he would not credit the statement that nowhere else are so many books read as in America. The American’s fondness for reading finds clearest expression in the growth of libraries, and in few matters of civilization is America so well fitted to teach the Old World a lesson. Europe has many large and ancient collections of books, and Germany more than all the rest; but they serve only one single purpose—that of scientific investigation; they are the laboratories of research. They are chiefly lodged with the great universities, and even the large municipal libraries are mostly used by those who need material for productive labours, or wish to become conversant with special topics.

Exactly the same type of large library has grown up in America; and here, too, it is chiefly the universities whose stock of books is at the service of the scientific world. Besides these, there are special libraries belonging to learned societies, state law libraries, special libraries of government bureaus and of museums, and largest of all the Library of Congress. The collection of such scientific books began at the earliest colonial period, and at first under theological auspices. The Calvinist Church, more than any other, inclined to the study of books. As early as 1790 the catalogue of Harvard College contained 350 pages, of which 150 were taken up by theological works. Harvard has to-day almost a million books, mostly in the department of literature, philology, history, philosophy, and jurisprudence. There are, moreover, in Boston the state library of law, with over a hundred thousand volumes; the Athenæum, with more than two hundred thousand books; the large scientific library of the Institute of Technology, and many others. Similarly, in other large cities, the university libraries are the nucleus for scientific labours, and are surrounded by admirable special libraries, particularly in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Then, too, the small academic towns, like Princeton, Ithaca, New Haven, and others, have valuable collections of books, which in special subjects are often unique. For many years the American university libraries have been the chief purchasers of the special collections left by deceased European professors. And it often happens, especially through the gift of grateful alumni, that collections of the greatest scientific value, which could not be duplicated, come into the possession even of lesser institutions.

In many departments of investigation, Washington takes the lead with the large collection of the various scientific, economic, and technical bureaus of the government. The best known of these is the unique medical library of the War Department. Then there is the Library of Congress, with many more than a million volumes, which to-day has an official right to one copy of every book published in the United States, and so may claim to be a national library. It is still not comparable to the many-sided and complete collection of the British Museum; the national library is one-sided, or at least shows striking gaps. Having started as the Library of Congress, it has, aside from its one copy of every American book and the books on natural science belonging to the Smithsonian Institution, few books except those on politics, history, political economy, and law. The lack of space for books, which existed until a few years ago, made it seem inexpedient to spend money for purposes other than the convenience of Congressmen. But the American people, in its love for books, has now erected such a building as the world had never before seen devoted to the storing of books. The new Congressional Library was opened in 1897, and since the stacks have still room for several million volumes, the library will soon grow to an all-round completeness like that at London. This library has a specially valuable collection of manuscripts and correspondences.

All the collections of books which we have so far mentioned are virtually like those of Germany. But since they mostly date from the nineteenth century, the American libraries are more modern, and contain less dead weight in the way of unused folios. Much more important is their greatly superior accessibility. Their reading-rooms are more comfortable and better lighted, their catalogues more convenient, library hours longer, and, above all, books are much more easily and quickly delivered. Brooks Adams said recently, about the library at Washington as a place for work, that this building is well-nigh perfect; it is large, light, convenient, and well provided with attendants. In Paris and London, one works in dusty, forbidding, and overcrowded rooms, while here the reading-rooms are numerous, attractive, and comfortable. In the National Library at Paris, one has to wait an hour for a book; in the British Museum, half an hour; and in Washington, five minutes. This rapid service, which makes such a great difference to the student, is found everywhere in America; and everywhere the books are housed in buildings which are palatial, although perhaps not so beautiful as the Washington Library.

Still, all these differences are unessential; in principle the academic libraries are alike in the New and Old Worlds. The great difference between Europe and America begins with the libraries which are not learned, but which are designed to serve popular education. The American public library which is not for science, but for education, is to the European counterpart as the Pullman express train to the village post-chaise.

The scientific libraries of Boston, including that of Harvard University, contain nearly two million printed works; but the largest library of all is distinct from these. It is housed on Copley Square, in a renaissance palace by the side of the Art Museum, and opposite the most beautiful church in America. The staircase of yellow marble, the wonderful wall-paintings, the fascinating arcade on the inner court, and the sunlit halls are indeed beautiful. And in and out, from early morning till late evening, weekday and Sunday, move the people of Boston. The stream of men divides in the lower vestibule. Some go to the newspaper room, where several hundred daily newspapers, a dozen of them German, hang on racks. Others wander to the magazine rooms, where the weekly and monthly papers of the world are waiting to be read. Others ascend to the upper stories, where Sargent’s famous pictures of the Prophets allure the lover of art, in order to look over more valuable special editions and the art magazines, geographical charts, and musical works. The largest stream of all goes to the second floor, partly into the huge quiet reading-room, partly into the rotunda, which contains the catalogue, partly into the hall containing the famous frescoes of the Holy Grail, where the books are given out. Here a million and a half books are delivered every year to be taken home and read. And no one has to wait; an apparatus carries the applicant’s card with wonderful speed to the stacks, and the desired book is sent back in automatic cars. Little children meanwhile wander into the juvenile room, where they find the best books for children. And everything invites even the least patient reader to sit down quietly with some sort of a volume—everything is so tempting, so convenient and comfortable, and so surpassingly beautiful. And all this is free to the humblest working-man.

And still, if the citizen of Massachusetts were to be asked of what feature of the public libraries he is most proud, he would probably not mention this magnificent palace in Boston, the capital of the state, but rather the 350 free public libraries scattered through the smaller cities and towns of this state, which is after all only one-third as large as Bavaria. It is these many libraries which do the broadest work for the people. Each little collection, wherever it is, is the centre of intellectual and moral enlightenment, and plants and nourishes the desire for self-perfection. Of course, Massachusetts has done more in this respect than any other part of the country—especially more than the South, which is backward in this respect. But there is no longer any city of moderate size which has not a large public library, and there is no state which does not encourage in every possible way the establishment of public libraries in every small community, giving financial aid if it is necessary.

Public libraries have become the favourite Christmas present of philanthropists, and while the hospitals, universities, and museums have still no reason for complaint, the churches now find that superfluous millions are less apt to go to gay church windows than to well-chosen book collections. In the year 1900 there existed more than 5,383 public libraries having over a thousand volumes; of these 144 had more than fifty thousand, and 54 had more than a hundred thousand volumes. All together contained, according to the statistics of 1900, more than forty-four million volumes and more than seven million pamphlets; and the average growth was over 8 per cent. There are probably to-day, therefore, fifteen million volumes more on the shelves. The many thousand libraries which have fewer than 999 books are over and above all this.

The make-up of such public libraries may be seen from the sample catalogue gotten out by the Library Association a few years since, as a typical collection of five thousand books. This catalogue which, with the exception of the most important foreign classics, contains only books in English, including, however, many translations, contains 227 general reference books, 756 books on history, 635 on biography, 413 on travel, 355 on natural science, 694 in belles-lettres, 809 novels, 225 on art, 220 on religion, 424 on social science, 268 on technical subjects, etc. The cost of this sample collection is $12,000. The proportions between the several divisions are about the same in larger collections. In smaller collections, belles-lettres have a somewhat greater share. The general interest taken by the nation in this matter is shown by the fact that the first edition of twenty thousand copies of this sample catalogue, of six hundred pages, was soon exhausted.

The many-sidedness of this catalogue points also to the manifold functions of the public library. It is meant to raise the educational level of the people, and this can be done in three ways: first, interest may be stimulated along new lines; second, those who wish to perfect themselves in their own subjects or in whatsoever special topics, may be provided with technical literature; and third, the general desire for literary entertainment may be satisfied by books of the best or at least not of the worst sort. The directors of libraries see their duties to lie in all three directions. The libraries guide the tastes and interests of the general public, and try to replace the ordinary servant-girl’s novel with the best romances of the day and shallow literature with works which are truly instructive. And no community is quite content until its public library has become a sort of general meeting-place and substitute for the saloon and the club. America is the working-man’s paradise, and attractive enough to the rich man; but the ordinary man of the middle classes, who in Germany finds his chief comfort in the Bierhalle, would find little comfort in America if it were not for the public library, which offers him a home. Thus the public library has come to be a recognized instrument of culture along with the public school; and in all American outposts the school teacher and librarian are among the pioneers.

The learned library cannot do this. To be sure, the university library can help to spread information, and conversely the public library makes room for thousands of volumes on all sorts of scientific topics. But the emphasis is laid very differently in the two cases, and if it were not so neither library would best fulfil its purpose. The extreme quiet of the reference library and the bustle and stir of the public library do not go together. In the one direction America has followed the dignified traditions of Europe; in the other, it has opened new paths and travelled on at a rapid pace. Every year discovers new ideas and plans, new schemes for equipment and the selection of books, for cataloguing, and for otherwise gaining in utility. When, for instance, the library in Providence commenced to post a complete list of books and writings pertaining to the subject of every lecture which was given in the city, it was the initiation of a great movement. The juvenile departments are the product of recent years, and are constantly increasing in popularity. There are even, in some cases, departments for blind readers. The state commissions are new, and so also the travelling libraries, which are carried from one village to another.

The great schools for librarians are also new. The German librarian is mostly a scholar; but the American believes that he has improved on the European library systems, not so much by his ample financial resources as by having broken with the academic custom, and having secured librarians with a special library training. And since there are such officials in many thousand libraries, and the great institutions create a constant demand for such persons, the library schools, which offer generally a three years’ course, have been found very successful.

Admittedly, all this technical apparatus is expensive; the Boston library expends every year a quarter of a million dollars for administrative expenses. But the American taxpayer supports this more gladly than any other burden, knowing that the public library is the best weapon against alcoholism and crime, against corruption and discontent, and that the democratic country can flourish only when the instinct of self-perfection as it exists in every American is thoroughly satisfied.

The reading of the American nation is not to be estimated wholly by the books in public libraries, since it also includes a tremendous quantity of printed material that goes to the home of every citizen. Three hundred and forty American publishers place their wares every year on the market, and the part bought by the public libraries is a very small proportion. A successful novel generally reaches its third hundred thousand; of course, such gigantic editions are limited to novels and school-books. The number of annual book publications is much smaller than in Germany; but it must be considered that, first, the American electrotype process does not lend itself to new and revised editions; and that small brochures are replaced in America by the magazine articles. On the other hand, the number of copies published is perhaps larger than in Germany. And then, too, among the upper classes, a great many German, French, and Italian books are purchased from Europe.

The great feature for all classes of the population is the tremendous production of periodical literature. Statistics show that in the United States in the year 1903, there were published 2,300 daily papers, more than 15,000 weeklies, 2,800 monthlies, and 200 quarterlies—in all, 21,000 periodicals. These are more periodicals than are published in all Europe; in Germany alone there are 7,500. The tremendous significance of these figures, particularly as compared with the European, becomes clear only when one considers the number of copies which these periodicals circulate. Not merely the newspapers of the three cities having over a million inhabitants, but also those of the larger provincial towns, reach a circulation of hundreds of thousands; and more surprising still is the unparalleled circulation of the weekly and monthly papers. Huge piles of magazines, containing the most serious sort of essays, are sold from every news-stand in a few hours. And anybody who knows New England is not surprised at the statement which T. W. Higginson makes in his recollections, that he came once to a small Massachusetts village of only twenty-four homes, nineteen of which subscribed to the Atlantic Monthly, a publication which is most nearly comparable to the Deutsche Rundschau.

The surprisingly large sales of expensive books among rich families is quite as gratifying as the huge consumption of magazines among the middle classes. Editions de luxe are often sold entire at fabulous prices before the edition is out, and illustrated scientific works costing hundreds of dollars always find a ready sale. These are merely the symptoms of the fact that every American home has its bookcases proportionate to its resources, and large private libraries are found not merely in the homes of scholars and specialists. In the palaces of merchant princes, the library is often the handsomest room, although it is sometimes so papered with books that it looks as if the architect had supplied them along with the rugs and chandeliers. One more commonly finds that the library is the real living-room of the house. If one looks about in such treasure apartments, one soon loses the sense of wonder completely; rare editions and valuable curiosities are there brought together with the greatest care and intelligence into an appropriate home. There are probably very few German private houses with collections of books and paintings comparable, for instance, to that of J. Montgomery Sears in Boston. The whole interior is so wonderfully harmonious that even the autograph poems and letters of Goethe and Schiller seem a matter of course. But from the book-shelves of the millionaire to the carefully selected little shelf of the poor school-ma’am, from the monumental home of the national library to the modest little library building of every small village, from the nervous and rapid perusal of the scholar to the slow making-out of the working-man who pores over his newspaper on the street corner, or of the shop-girl with the latest novel in the elevated train, there is everywhere life and activity centring around the world of print, and this popularity of books is growing day by day.

By far the most of what the American reads is written by Americans. This does not mean that any important book which appears in other parts of the world escapes him; on the contrary just as the American everywhere wants only the best, uses the latest machines and listens to the most famous musicians, so in the matter of literature he is observant of every new tendency in poetry, whether from Norway or Italy, and the great works of the world’s literature have their thoughtful readers. There are probably more persons who read Dante in Boston than in Berlin. Of German intellectual productions, the scientific books are most read, and if strictly scientific they are read in the original by the best educated Americans; the popular books are mostly read in translation. Of the belles-lettres, Schiller and Lessing are generally put aside with the school-books, while Goethe and Heine remain welcome; and beside them are translations of modern story-writers from Freytag and Spielhagen down to Sudermann. French literature is more apt to be read in the original than German, but with increasing distaste. The moral feeling of the American is separated by such a chasm from the atmosphere of the Parisian romance that modern French literature has never become so popular in America as it has in Germany.

As a matter of course, English literature of every sort has by far the greatest influence; English magazines are little read or appreciated, while English poetry, novels, dramas, and works of general interest are as much read in America as in England. Books so unlike as the novels of Mrs. Ward, of Du Maurier, and of Kipling have about the same very large circulation; and all the standard literature of England, from Chaucer to Browning, forms the educational background of every American, especially of every American woman. In spite of all this, it remains true that the most of that which is read in the United States is written by Americans.

How and what does the American write?

Europe has a ready answer, and pieces together a mental picture of “echt amerikanische” literature out of its unfriendly prejudices, mostly reminiscent of Buffalo Bill and Barnum’s circus. It is still not forgotten how England suddenly celebrated Joaquin Miller’s freakish and inartistic poems of the Western prairie as the great American achievement, and called this tasteless versifier, who was wholly unrecognized in his own country, the American Byron. He was not only unimportant, but he was not typically American. And of American humour the European observer has about as just an opinion. Nothing but ridiculous caricatures are considered. Mark Twain’s first writings, whose sole secret was their wild exaggeration, were more popular in Germany than in America; while the truly American humour of Lowell or Holmes has lain unnoticed. The American is supposed to be quite destitute of any sense for form or measure, and to be in every way inartistic; and if any true poet were to be granted to the New World, he would be expected to be noisy like Niagara. In this sense the real literature of America has hitherto remained un-American, perhaps too un-American. For the main thing which it has lacked has been force. There have been men like Uhland, Geibel, and Heyse, but there has so far been no one like Hebbel.

There is no absolutely new note in American literature, and especially no one trait which is common to all American writings and which is not found in any European. If there is anything unique in American literature, it is perhaps the peculiar combination of elements long familiar. An enthusiastic American has said that to be American means to be both fresh and mature, and this is in fact a combination which is new, and which well characterizes the literary temperament of the country. To be fresh and young generally means to be immature, and to be mature and seasoned means to have lost the enthusiasm and freshness of youth. Of course, this is not a contradiction realized. It would be impossible, for instance, to be both naïve and mature; but the American is not and never has been naïve. Just as this nation has never had a childhood, has never originated ballads, epics, and popular songs, like other peoples during their naïve beginnings, because this nation brought with it from Europe a finished culture; so the vigorous youthfulness in the national literary temperament has in it nothing of naïve simplicity. It is the enthusiasm of youth, but not the innocence of boyhood. It would also be impossible to be both fresh and decadent; the American is mature but not over-ripe, not weakened by the sceptical ennui of senility.

To be fresh means to be confident, optimistic and eager, lively, unspoiled, and courageous; it means to strive toward one’s best ideals with the ardour of youth; while to be mature means to understand things in their historic connection, in their true proportions, and with a due feeling for form; to be mature means to be simple, and reposeful, and not breathlessly anxious over the outcome of things. To be sure, this optimistic feeling of strength, this enthusiastic self-confidence, is hardly able to seize the things which are finest and most subtle. It looks only into the full sunlight, never into the shadows with their less obvious beauties. There are no half-tones, no sentimental and uncertain moods; wonder and meditation come into the soul only with pessimism. And most of all, the enthusiasm of youth not only looks on but wants to work, to change and to make over; and so the American is less an artist than an insistent herald. Behind the observer stands always the reformer, enthusiastic to improve the world. On the other hand, the disillusionment of maturity should have cooled the passions, soothed hot inspiration, and put the breathless tragic muse to sleep. It avoids dramatic excitement, holds aloof, and looks on with quiet friendliness and sober understanding of mankind. So it happens that finished art is incompatible with such an enthusiastic eagerness to press onward, and sensuous emotion is incompatible with such an idealism. And so we find in the American temperament a finished feeling for form, but a more ethical than artistic content, and we find humour without its favourite attendant of sentiment. Of course, the exceptions crowd quickly to mind to contradict the formula: had not Poe the demoniac inspiration; was not Hawthorne a thorough artist; did not Whitman violate all rules of form; and does not Henry James see the half-tones? And still such variations from the usual are due to exceptional circumstances, and every formula can apply only in a general way.

Still, in these general traits, one can see the workings of great forces. This enthusiastic self-confidence and youthful optimism in literature are only another expression of American initiative, which has developed so powerfully in the fight with nature during the colonial and pioneer days, and which has made the industrial power of America. And, as Barrett Wendell has shown, not a little of this enthusiastic and spontaneous character is inherited from the old English stock of three hundred years ago. In England itself, the industrial development changed the people; the subjects of Queen Victoria were very little like those of Queen Elizabeth; the spontaneity of Shakespeare’s time no longer suits the smug and insular John Bull. But that same English stock found in America conditions that were well calculated to arouse its spontaneity and enthusiasm.

Then, on the other hand, the clear, composed, and formal maturity which distinguish the literary work of the new nation is traceable principally to the excellent influence of English literature. The ancient culture of England spared this nation a period of immaturity. Then, too, there has been the intellectual domination of the New England States, whose Puritan spirit has given to literature its ethical quality, and at the same time contributed a certain quiet superiority to the common turmoil. Throughout the century, and even to-day, almost all of the best literature originates with those who are consciously reacting against the vulgar taste. Just because the number of sellers and readers of books is so much greater than in Europe, the unliterary circles of readers who, as everywhere, enjoy the broadly vulgar, must by their numbers excite the disgust of the real friend of literature; and this conscious duty of opposition, which becomes a sort of mission, sharpens the artistic consciousness, fortifies the feeling of form, and struggles against all that is immature.

Undoubtedly these external conditions are as responsible for many of the failings of American literature as for its excellences; most of all for the lack of shading and twilight tones, of all that is dreamy, pessimistic, sentimental, and “decadent.” This is a lack in the American life which in other important connections is doubtless a great advantage. There are no old castles, no crumbling ruins, no picturesque customs, no church mysticism, nor wonderful symbols; there are no striking contrasts between social groups, no romantic vagabondage, and none of the fascinating pomp of monarchy. Everywhere is solid and healthy contentment, thrifty and well clothed, on broad streets, and under a bright sun. It is no accident that true poets have not described their own surroundings, but have taken their material so far as it has been American, as did Hawthorne, from the colonial times which were already a part of the romantic past, or out of the Indian legends, or later from the remote adventurous life of the West, or from the negro life in far Southern plantations; the daily life surrounding the poet was not yet suitable for poetry. And by being so cruelly clear and without atmosphere as not to invite poetic treatment, it has left the whole literature somewhat glaringly sharp, sane, and homely.

Fiction stands in the centre of the characteristic literary productions; but also literature in the broader sense, including everything which interprets human destinies, as history and philosophy, or even more broadly including all the written products of the nation, everything reflects the essential traits of the literary temperament. In fact, the practical literature, especially the newspaper, reveals the American physiognomy most clearly. In better circles in America, it is proper to deplore the newspaper as a literary product, and to look on it as a necessary evil; and doubtless most newspapers serve up a great deal that is trivial and vulgar, and treat it in a trivial and vulgar way. But no one is forced, except by his own love for the sensational, to choose his daily reading out of this majority. Everybody knows that there is a minority of earnest and admirable papers at his disposal. Apart from newspaper politics and apart from the admirable industrial organization of the newspaper—both of which we have previously spoken of—the newspapers of the country are a literary product whose high merit is too often underestimated. The American newspapers, and of these not merely the largest, are an intellectual product of well-maintained uniformity of standard.

To be sure, the style is often light, the logic unsound, the information superficial; but, taken as a whole, the newspaper has unity and character. Thousands of loose-jointed intellects crowd into journalism every year—more than in any other country; but American journalism, like the nation as a whole, has an amazing power of assimilation. Just as thousands of Russians and Italians land every year in the rags of their wretchedness, and in a few years become earnest American citizens, so many land on the shores of American journalism who were not intended to be the teachers or entertainers of humanity, and who nevertheless in a few years are quite assimilated. The American newspapers, from Boston to San Francisco, are alike in style and thought; and it must be said, in spite of all prejudices, that the American newspaper is certainly literature. The American knows no difference between unpolitical chatter written with a literary ambition and unliterary comment written with a political ambition. In one sense the whole newspaper is political, while at the same time it is nothing but feuilleton, from the editorials, of which every large newspaper has three or four each day, to the small paragraphs, notes, and announcements with which the editorial page generally closes. From the Washington letter to the sporting gossip, everything tries in a way to have artistic merit, and everything bears the stamp of American literature. Nothing is pedantic. There is often a great lack of information and of perspective—perhaps, even, of conscientiousness in the examination of complaints—but everything is fresh, optimistic, clear and forcible, and always humorous between the lines.

In the weekly papers, America achieves still more. The light, fresh, and direct American style there finds its most congenial field. The same is true of the monthly papers in a somewhat more ambitious and permanent way. The leading social and political monthlies, like the venerable North American Review, which errs merely in laying too much emphasis on the names of its well-known contributors, and others are quite up to the best English reviews. The more purely literary Atlantic Monthly, which was founded in 1857 by a small circle of Boston friends, Lowell, Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Whittier, and Motley, and which has always attracted the best talent of the country, is most nearly comparable to the Revue des Deux Mondes. Every monthly paper specially cultivates that literary form for which America has shown the most pronounced talent—the essay. The magazine essay entirely takes the place of the German brochure, a form which is almost unknown in America. The brochure, depending as it does wholly on its own merits to attract the attention of the public, must be in some way sensational to make up for its diminutive size; while an essay which is brought before the reader on the responsibility of a magazine needs no such motive power. It is one among many, and takes its due place, being only one of the items of interest that make up the magazine.

While in German literary circles the problems of the day are mostly argued in brochures, and the essay is a miniature book really written for the easy instruction of a public which would not read long books, the American essay is half-way between. It is living and satirical like the German brochure, but conservative and instructive like the German “Abhandlung.” Only when a number of essays on related topics come from the same pen are they put together and published as a separate book. We have already mentioned that America is oversupplied with such volumes of essays, which have almost all the same history—they were first lectures, then magazine articles, and now they are revised and published in book form. Their value is, of course, very diverse; but in general, they are interesting and important, often epoch-making, and the form is admirable. A distinguished treatment, pointed humour, a rich and clear diction, uncommonly happy metaphors, and a careful polish are united so as to make one forget the undeniable haste with which the material is gathered and the superficiality of the conclusions arrived at. So it happens that the essayists who appear in book form are much more appreciated by the reading public than their German colleagues, and that every year sees several hundred such volumes put on the market. The motto, “fresh and mature,” is nowhere more appropriate.

But the American remains an American, even in the apparently international realm of science. It is a matter of course for an historian to write in the personal style. Parkman, Motley, Prescott, and Fiske are very different types of historians; and nevertheless, they have in common the same way of approaching the subject and of giving to it form and life. But even in so purely a scientific work as William James’s two-volume “Principles of Psychology,” one finds such forcible and convincing turns of thought, so personal a form given to abstract facts, and such freshness together with such ripe mastery, as could come only from an American.

Oratory may be accounted an off-shoot of actual literature. A nation of politicians must reserve an honourable place for the orator, and for many years thousands of factors in public life have contributed to develop oratory, to encourage the slightest talent for speaking, and to reward able speakers well. Every great movement in American history has been initiated by eloquent speakers. Before the Revolution, Adams and Otis, Quincy and Henry, precipitated the Revolution by their burning words. And no one can discuss the great movement leading up to the Civil War without considering the oratory of Choate, Clay, Calhoun, Hayne, Garrison, and Sumner; of Wendell Phillips, the great popular leader, and Edward Everett, the great academician, and of Daniel Webster, the greatest statesman of them all.

In the present times of peace, the orator is less important than the essayist, and most of the party speeches to-day have not even a modest place in literature. But if one follows a Presidential campaign, listens to the leading lawyers of the courts, or follows the parliamentary debates of university students, one knows that the rhetorical talent of the American has not died since those days of quickening, and would spring up again strong and vigorous if any great subject, greater than were silver coinage or the Philippine policy, should excite again the nation. Keenness of understanding, admirable sense of form in the single sentence as in the structure of the whole, startling comparisons, telling ridicule, careful management of the climax, and the tone of conviction seem to be everybody’s gift. Here and there the phrase is hollow and thought is sacrificed to sound, but the general tendency goes toward brevity and simplicity. A most delightful variation of oratory is found in table eloquence; the true American after-dinner speech is a finished work of art. Often, of course, there are ordinary speeches which simply go from one story to another, quite content merely to relate them well. In the best speeches the pointed anecdote is not lacking either, but it merely decorates the introduction; the speaker then approaches his real subject half playfully and half in earnest, very sympathetically, and seeming always to let his thoughts choose words for themselves. The speeches at the Capitol are sometimes better than those in the Reichstag; but those at American banquets are not only better than the speeches at Festessen and Kommersen, but they are also qualitatively different—true literary works of art, for which the American is especially fitted by the freshness, humour, enthusiasm, and sense of symmetry which are naturally his.

Whoever looks about among journalists, essayists, historians, and orators will return more than once to the subject of belles-lettres; and this is truer in America than elsewhere. As we have already seen, pure literature is strongly biased toward the practical; it is glad to serve great ideas, whether moral or social. Poetry itself is sometimes an essay or sermon. We need not think here of romances which merely sermonize, and are therefore artistically second-rate, such as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” or of such literary rubbish as Bellamy’s “Utopia”; even true poets like Whittier must, in the history of emancipation, be classed with the political writers. And although the problem novel in the three-volume English form is not favoured in America because of its poor literary form, the short satirical and clean-cut society novel, which may break away at any moment into the essay or journalistic manner, has become all the more popular. Further, this being the time of America’s industrial struggle, society has not become so intellectually aristocratic that being a poet is a life profession. The leading novelists have had to be active in almost all fields of literature; they have frequently begun as journalists, and have generally been essayists, editors, or professors at the same time.

The eighteenth century was unfruitful for the New World, in lyric as in epic literature. The literary history discovers many names, but they are of men who created nothing original, and who cannot be compared with the great English geniuses. America was internally as well as externally dependent on England; and if one compares the utter intellectual unfruitfulness of Canada to-day with the feverish activity of her southern neighbour, one will inevitably ask whether political colonies can ever create literature. When freedom was first obtained by the colonies, a condition of new equilibrium was reached after a couple of decades of uncertainty and unrest, and then American literature woke up. Even then it was not free, and did not care to be free, from English precedents; and yet there were original personalities which came to the front. Washington Irving was, as Thackeray said, the first ambassador which the New World of literature sent to the Old. English influences are unmistakable in the tales of Irving, although he was a strong and original writer. His “Sketch-Book,” published in 1819, has remained the most popular of his books, and the poetic muse has never been hunted away from the shores of the Hudson where Rip Van Winkle passed his long slumbers.

The American novel had still not appeared. The romances of Brown, laid in Pennsylvania, were highly inartistic in spite of their forcible presentation. Then James Fenimore Cooper discovered the untouched treasures of the infinite wilderness. His “Spy” appeared in 1821, and he was at once hailed as the American Scott. In the next year appeared “The Pioneers,” the first of his Leather-stocking Tales of wild Indian life. And after Cooper’s thirty-two romances there followed many tales by lesser writers. Miss Sedgwick was the first woman to attain literary popularity, and her romances were the first which depicted the life of New England. At the same time a New England youth began to write verses which, by their serene beauty, were incomparably above all earlier lyric attempts of his native land. Bryant’s first volume of poems appeared in 1821, and therewith America had a literature, and England’s sarcastic question, “Who ever reads an American book?” was not asked again.

The movement quickly grew to its first culmination. A brilliant period commenced in the thirties, when Hawthorne, Holmes, Emerson, Longfellow, Thoreau, Curtis, and Margaret Fuller, all of New England, became the luminaries of the literary New World. And like the prelude to a great epoch rings the song of the one incomparable Edgar Allan Poe, who did not fight for ideas like a moral New Englander, but sang simply in the love of song. Poe’s melancholy, demoniacal, and melodious poetry was a marvellous fountain in the country of hard and sober work. And Poe was the first whose fantasy transformed the short story into a thing of the highest poetical form. In New England no one was so profoundly a poet as Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of “The Scarlet Letter.” His “Marble Faun,” of which the scene is laid in Italy, may show him in his fullest maturity, but his greatest strength lay in the romances of Massachusetts, which in their emotional impressiveness and artistic finish are as beautiful as an autumn day in New England. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the rhapsodical philosopher, wrote poems teeming over with thought, and yet true poems, while Whittier was the inspired bard of freedom; and besides these there was the trio of friends, Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes. Harvard professors they were, and men of distinguished ability, whose literary culture made them the proper educators of the nation. Thomas Wentworth Higginson is the only one of this circle now living, remaining over, as it were, from that golden age. He fought at first to free the slaves, and then he became the stout defender of the emancipation of women, and is to-day, as then, the master of the reflective essay. His life is full of “cheerful yesterdays”; his fame is sure of “confident tomorrows.”

Longfellow is, to the German, mainly the sensitive transposer of German poetry; his sketch-book, “Hyperion,” opened up the German world of myth, and brought the German romance across the ocean. His ballads and his delightful idyll of “Evangeline” clothed New England life, as it were, in German sentiment; and even his Indian edda, “Hiawatha,” sounds as if from a German troubadour wandering through the Indian country. Longfellow became the favourite poet of the American home, and American youth still makes its pilgrimage to the house in Cambridge where he once lived. Lowell was perhaps more gifted than Longfellow, and certainly he was the more many-sided. His art ranged from the profoundest pathos by which American patriotism was aroused in those days of danger, to the broadest and most whimsical humour freely expressed in dialect verses; and he also wrote the most finished idyllic poetry and keenly satirical and critical essays. It is common to exalt his humorous verses, “The Biglow Papers,” to the highest place of typical literary productions of America; nevertheless, his essential quality was fine and academic. Real American humour undoubtedly finds its truer expression in Holmes. Holmes was also a lyric poet, but his greatest work was the set of books by the “Autocrat.” His “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” has that serious smile which makes world literature. It was the first of a long series, and at the writing he was a professor of anatomy, sixty-four years old.

Then there were many lesser lights around these great ones. At the middle of the century Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” of which ten thousand copies were sold every day for many months. And romance literature in general began to increase. At the same time appeared the beautiful songs of Bayard Taylor, whose later translation of Faust has never been surpassed, and the scarcely less admirable lyrics of Stedman and Stoddard. So it happened that at the time when the Civil War broke out, America, although deficient in every sort of productive science except history, had a brilliant literature. Science needed, first of all, solid academic institutions, which could only be built patiently, stone on stone—a work which has been witnessed by the last three decades of the century. Poetry, however, needed only the inner voice which speaks to the susceptible heart, and the encouragement of the people. For science there has been a steady, quiet growth, parallel with the growth of the institutions; for letters there have been changing fortunes, times of prosperity and times of stagnation. When the powder and smoke of the Civil War had blown away the happy days of literature were over; it began to languish, and only at the present day is it commencing to thrive once more.

This does not mean that there has been no talent for three decades, or that the general interest in literature has flagged. Ambitious writers of romance like Howells, James, Crawford, and Cable; novelists like Aldrich, Bret Harte, and Hale, Mary Wilkins, and Sarah Orne Jewett; poets like Lanier and Whitman, and humourists like Stockton and Mark Twain, have done much excellent work, and work that is partly great, and have shown the way to large provinces of literary endeavour. Nevertheless, compared with the great achievements which had gone before, theirs is rather a time of intermission. And yet many persons are quite prepared to say that Howells is the greatest of all American authors, and his realistic analyses among the very best modern romances. And Howells himself pays the same tribute to Mark Twain’s later and maturer writings.

But there is one poet about whom only the future can really decide; this is Walt Whitman. His “Leaves of Grass,” with their apparently formless verse, were greatly praised by some; by others felt to be barbarous and tasteless. There has been a dispute similar to that over Zarathustra of Nietzsche. And even as regards content, Whitman may be compared with Nietzsche, the radical democrat with the extreme aristocrat, for the exaggerated democratic exaltation of the ego leads finally to a point in which every single man is an absolute dictator in his own world, and therefore comes to feel himself unique, and proudly demands the right of the Uebermensch. “When they fight, I keep silent, go bathing, or sit marvelling at myself,” says this prophet of democracy. “In order to learn, I sat at the feet of great masters. Oh, that these great masters might return once more to learn of me.” The similarity between American and German intellects could readily be traced further, and was, perhaps, not wholly unfitted to reveal a certain broad literary perspective. As we have compared Whitman and Nietzsche, so we might compare Bryant with Platen, Poe with Heine, Hawthorne with Freytag, Lowell with Uhland, Whittier with Rückert, Holmes with Keller, Howells with Fontane, Crawford with Heyse, and so on, and we should compare thus contemporaries of rather equal rank. But such a parallelism, of course, could not be drawn too far, since it would be easy to show in any such pair important traits to belie the comparison.

In the positively bewildering literature of to-day, the novel and the short story strongly predominate. The Americans have always shown a special aptitude and fondness for the short story. Poe was the true master of that form, and the grace with which Aldrich has told the story of Marjorie Daw, and Davis of Van Bibber, the energy with which Hale has cogently depicted the Man Without a Country, or Bret Harte the American pioneer, and the intimacy with which Miss Wilkins and Miss Jewett have perpetuated the quieter aspects of human existence, show a true instinct for art. A profound appreciation, fresh vigour, and fine feeling for form, graceful humour and all the good qualities of American literature, combine to make the short story a perfect thing. It is not the German Novelle, but is, rather, comparable to the French conte. The short stories are not all of the single type; some are masculine and others feminine in manner. The finely cut story, which is short because the charm of the incidents would vanish if narrated in greater detail, is of the feminine type. And, of the masculine, is the story told in cold, sharp relief, which is short because it is energetic and impatient of any protracted waits. In both cases, everything unessential is left out. Perhaps the American is nowhere more himself than here; and short stories are produced in great numbers and are specially fostered by the monthly magazines.

Of humourists there are fewer to-day than formerly. Neither the refined humour of Irving, Lowell, and Holmes, nor the broader humour of Bret Harte and Mark Twain, finds many representatives of real literary importance. There are several, it is true, who are delighted with Dooley’s contemporary comment in the Irish dialect, but there is a much truer wit in the delicately satirical society novels of Henry James, and to a less degree in those of Grant, Herrick, Bates, and a hundred others, or in the romances of common life, such as Westcott’s “David Harum.”

The historical romance has flourished greatly. At first the fantasy went to far regions, and the traditional old figures of romance were tricked out in the gayest foreign costumes. The most popular of all has been Wallace’s “Ben Hur.” The Americans have long since followed the road which German writers have taken from Ebers to Dahn and Wildenbruch, and have revived their own national past. To be sure, the tremendous editions of these books are due rather to the desire for information than the love of poetry. The public likes to learn its national history while being entertained, since the national consciousness has developed so noticeably in the last decade and the social life of America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has doubtless become thus living and real for millions of Americans. Æsthetic motives predominate, nevertheless, and although books like Churchill’s “The Crisis,” Bacheller’s “D’ri and I,” Miss Johnston’s “Audrey,” Ford’s “Janice Meredith,” and others similar are merely books of the day, and will be replaced by others on the next Christmas-trees, nevertheless they are works of considerable artistic merit. They are forcibly constructed, dramatic, full of invention and delightful diction. It is undeniable that the general level of the American romance is to-day not inferior to that of Germany.

Historical romance aims, first of all, to awaken the national consciousness. So, for instance, the romances of the versatile physician, Weir Mitchell, are first of all histories of the Revolutionary period of the whole nation, and, secondarily, histories of early Pennsylvania. But the story which depends on local colour flourishes too. Here shows itself strongly that trait which is distinguishable in American writing through the whole century, from Irving, Cooper, and Bryant to the present day—the love of nature. Almost every part of the country has found some writer to celebrate its landscape and customs, not merely the curious inhabitants of the prairie and gold-fields, but the outwardly unromantic characters of the New England village and the Tennessee mountains, of the Southern plantations and the Western States. And new stories of this sort appear every day. Especially the new West figures prominently in literature; and the tireless ambition on which the city of Chicago is founded is often depicted with much talent. The novels of Fuller, Norris, and others are all extraordinarily forceful descriptions of Western life and civilization. The South of to-day, which shows symptoms of awaking to new life, is described more from the Northern than from the Southern point of view. It is surprising that the mental life of the American negro has attracted so little attention, since the short stories of Chestnut point to unexplored treasures.

The longer efforts are always in prose, and since the time of Evangeline epic verse has found almost no representative. Verse is almost wholly lyrical. The history of American lyric is contained in the large and admirable collections of Stedman, Onderdonk, and others; and it is the history of, perhaps, the most complete achievement of American literature. One who knows the American only in the usual caricature, and does not know what an idealist the Yankee is, would be surprised to learn that the lyric poem has become his favourite field. The romantic novel, which appeals to the masses, may have, perhaps, a commercial motive, while the book of verse is an entirely disinterested production. The lyric, in its fresh, intense, and finished way, reveals the inner being of American literature, and surprisingly much lyric verse is being written to-day. Even political newspapers, like the Boston Transcript, publish every day some lyric poem; and although here as everywhere many volumes of indifferent verse see the light of day, still the feeling for form is so general that one finds very seldom anything wholly bad and very often bits of deep significance and beauty. Here, too, the best-known things are not the most admirable. We hear too much of Markham’s “The Man With the Hoe,” and too little of Santayana’s sonnets or of Josephine Preston Peabody. Here, too, local colour is happily in evidence—as, for instance, in the well-known verses of Riley. The Western poet goes a different road from the Eastern. The South has never again sent a messenger so full of melodies as Sidney Lanier.

There is a strong lyric tendency also in the dramatic compositions of the day. The true drama has always been more neglected than any other branch of art, and if it is true that the Americans have preserved the temperament and point of view of Elizabethan England, it is high time for some American Shakespeare to step forth. Until now, extremely few plays of real literary worth have been written between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. Dramatists there have been always, and the stage is now more than ever supplied by native talent; but literature is too little considered here. The rural dramas having the local colour of Virginia and New England are generally better than the society pieces: and the very popular dramatizations of novels are stirring, but utterly cheap. On the other hand, the American has often applied the lyric gift in dramatic verse, and in dramas of philosophic significance such as Santayana’s admirable “Lucifer” or Moody’s “Masque of Judgment.” The stunted growth of American dramatic writing is closely connected with the history of the American stage, a subject which may lead us from literature to the sister arts.

Chapter Nineteen: Art

The history of the theatre leads us once more back to Puritan New England. Every one knows that the Puritan regarded the theatre as the very temple of vice, and the former association of the theatre and the bar-room—a tradition that came from England—naturally failed to make public opinion more favourable. In the year 1750 theatrical productions were entirely forbidden in Boston. One theatre was built in 1794, and a few others later, but the public feeling against demoralizing influences of the stage so grew that one theatre after another was turned from its profane uses and made over into a lecture hall or something of the sort. In 1839 it was publicly declared that Boston should never again have a theatre. Nevertheless by 1870, it had five theatres, and to-day it has fifteen. Other cities have always been more liberal toward the theatre, and in the city of New York, since 1733, ninety-five theatres have been built, of which more than thirty are still standing to-day and in active operation. Thus the Puritan spirit seems long since to have disappeared, and the backwardness of the drama seems not to be connected with the religious past of the country. But this is not the case.

Let us survey the situation. There is certainly no lack of theatres, for almost every town has its “opera house,” and the large cities have really too many. Nor is there any lack of histrionic talent; for, although the great Shakespearian actor, Edwin Booth, has no worthy successor, we have still actors who are greatly applauded and loved—Mansfield, Sothern, Jefferson, Drew, and Gillette; Maude Adams, Mrs. Fiske, Blanche Bates, Henrietta Crosman, Julia Arthur, Julia Marlowe, Ada Rehan, Nance O’Neill, and many others who are certainly sincere artists; and the most brilliant actors of Europe, Irving and Tree, Dusé, Bernhardt, Sorma, and Campbell come almost every year to play in this country. The American’s natural versatility gives him a great advantage for the theatrical career; and so it is no accident that amateur theatricals are nowhere else so popular, especially among student men and women. The equipments of the stage, moreover, leave very little to be desired, and the settings sometimes surpass anything which can be seen in Europe; one often sees marvellous effects and most convincing illusions. And these, with the American good humour, verve, and self-assurance, and the beauty of American women, bring many a graceful comedy and light opera to a really artistic performance. The great public, too, is quite content, and fills the theatres to overflowing. It seems almost unjust to criticise unfavourably the country’s theatres.

But the general public is not the only nor even the most important factor; the discriminating public is not satisfied. Artistic productions of the more serious sort are drowned out by a great tide of worthless entertainments; and however amusing or diverting the comedies, farces, rural pieces, operettas, melodramas, and dramatized novels may be, they are thoroughly unworthy of a people that is so ceaselessly striving for cultivation and self-perfection. Such pieces should not have the assurance to invade the territory of true art. And, although the lack of good plays is less noticeable, if one looks at the announcements of what is to be given in New York on any single evening, it is tremendously borne home on one by the bad practice of repeating the plays night after night for many weeks, so that a person who wants to see real art has soon seen every production which is worth while. In this respect New York is distinctly behind Paris, Berlin, or Vienna, although about on a level with London; and in the other large cities of America the situation is rather worse. Everywhere the stage caters to the vulgar taste, and for one Hamlet there are ten Geishas.

It cannot be otherwise, since the theatre is entirely a business matter with the managers. Sometimes there is an artist like the late Daly, who is ready to conduct a theatre from the truly artistic point of view, and who offers admirable performances; but this is an expensive luxury, and there are few who will afford it. It is a question of making money, and therefore of offering humorous or sentimental pieces which fill the theatre. There is another fact of which the European hardly knows; it is cheaper to engage a company to play a single piece for a whole year with mechanical regularity than to hire actors to give the study necessary to a diversified repertoire. After many repetitions, even mediocre actors can attain a certain skill, while in repertoire only good actors are found at all satisfactory, and the average will not be tolerated by the pampered public. Then, too, the accessories are much cheaper for a single piece.

Now, in a town of moderate size, one piece cannot be repeated many nights, so that the companies have to travel about. The best companies stay not less than a week, and if the town is large enough, they stay from four to six weeks. These companies are known by the name of the piece which they are presenting, or by the name of the leading actor, the “star.” The theatre in itself is a mere tenantless shell. In early fall the whole list of companies which are to people its stage through the next thirty weeks is arranged. In this way, it is true that the small city is able to see the best actors and the newest pieces. Yet one sees how sterile this principle is by considering some of the extreme cases. Jefferson has played his Rip Van Winkle and almost nothing else for thirty years; and the young people of Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston would be very unhappy if he were not to come in this rôle for a couple of weeks every winter. And he has thus become several times a millionaire.

But the business spirit has not stopped with this. The hundreds of companies compete with one another, so that very naturally a theatrical trust has been formed. The syndicate of Klaw, Erlanger & Frohman was organized in 1896 with thirty-seven leading theatres in large cities, all pledged to present none but companies belonging to the syndicate, while, in return, the syndicate agreed to keep the theatres busy every week in the season. The favourite actors and the favourite companies were secured, and the independent actors who resisted the tyranny found that in most of the large cities only second-rate theatres were open to them. One after another had to give in, and now the great trust under the command of Frohman has virtually the whole theatrical business of the country in its hands. The trust operates shrewdly and squarely; it knows its public, offers variety, follows the fashions, gives the great mimes their favourite rôles, pays them and the theatre owners well, relieves the actors from the struggle for promotion, and vastly amuses the public. It is impossible to resist this situation, which is so adverse to art.

All are agreed that there is only one way to better matters. Permanent companies must be organized, in the large cities at first, to play in repertoire. And these must be subsidized, so as not to be dependent for their support on the taste of the general public. Then and then only will the dramatic art be able to thrive, or the theatre become an educational institution, and so slowly cultivate a better demand, which in the end will come to make even the most eclectic theatre self-supporting. So it has always been on the European Continent; princes and municipalities have rivalled with one another to raise the level of dramatic art above what it would have to be if financially dependent solely on the box-office. In the United States there is certainly no lack of means or good will to encourage such an educational institution. Untold millions go to libraries, museums, and universities, and we may well ask why the slightest attempt has not been made to provide, by gift or from the public treasury, for a temple to the drama.

It is just here that the old Puritan prejudice is still felt to-day. The theatre is no longer under the ban of the law, but no step can be taken toward a subvention of the theatre. Most taxpayers in America would look with disfavour on any project to support a theatre from public funds. Why a theatre more than a hotel or restaurant? The theatre remains a place of frivolous amusement, and for that reason no millionaires have so far endowed a theatre. Men like Carnegie know too well that the general mass of people would blame them if they were to give their millions to the theatre, as long as a single town was still wishing for its library or its college.

The history of music in America has shown what can be attained by endowment—how the public demand can be educated so that even the very best art will finally be self-supporting. The development of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which is still the best musical organization in the country, is thoroughly typical. It was realized that symphony concerts, like the best given in Germany, would not be self-supporting, in view of the deficient musical education of the country. In 1880 Boston had two symphony orchestras, but both were of little account. They were composed of over-busied musicians, who could not spare the time needed for study and rehearsals. Then one of the most liberal and appreciative men of the country, Henry Lee Higginson, came forward and engaged the best musicians whom he could find, to give all their time and energy to an orchestra; and he himself guaranteed the expenses. During the first few years he paid out a fortune annually, but year by year the sum grew less, and to-day Boston so thoroughly enjoys its twenty-four symphony concerts, which are not surpassed by those of any European orchestra, that the large music-hall is too small to hold those who wish to attend. This example has been imitated, and now New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities have excellent and permanent orchestras.

Likewise various cities, but especially New York, enjoy a few weeks of German, French, and Italian opera which is equal to the best opera in Europe, by a company that brings together the best singers of Europe and America. In the case of opera the love of music has prevailed over the prejudice against the theatre. Extraordinarily high subscriptions for the boxes, and a reduced rental of the Metropolitan Opera House, which was erected by patrons of art, have given brilliant support to the undertaking. Without going into questions of principle, an impartial friend of music must admit that even the performances of Parsifal were artistically not inferior to those of Bayreuth, and the audience was quite as much in sympathy with the great masterpiece as are the assemblages of tourists at Bayreuth. The artistic education proceeding from these larger centres is felt through the entire country, and there is a growing desire for less ambitious but permanent opera companies.

The symphony and the opera are not the only evidences of the serious love of music in America. Every large city has its conservatory and its surplus of trained music teachers, and almost every city has societies which give oratorios, and innumerable singing clubs, chamber concerts, and regular musical festivals. Even the concerts by other soloists than that fashionable favourite of American ladies, Paderewski, are well attended. And these are not new movements; opera was given in New York as early as 1750, and the English opera of the eighteenth century was followed in 1825 by Italian opera. Also Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New Orleans early developed a love for music.

Boston has been the great centre for oratorio. The Händel and Haydn Society dates from 1810, and in 1820 a great many concerts were given all through the East, even in small towns. And the influence of the musical Germans was strongly felt by the middle of the century. The Germania Orchestra of Boston was founded in 1848, and now all the Western cities where German influences are strong, such as Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis, are centres of music, with many male choruses and much private cultivation of music in the home.

The churches, moreover, are a considerable support to music. The Puritan spirit disliked secular music no less than the theatre; but the popular hymns were always associated with the service of God, and so the love for music grew and its cultivation spread. Progress was made from the simplest melodies to fugue arrangements; organs and stringed instruments were introduced; the youth was educated in music, and finally in the last century church worship was made more attractive by having the best music obtainable. And thus, through the whole country, chorus and solo singing and instrumental skill have been everywhere favoured by the popular religious instinct.

So much for the performance of music. Musical composition has not reached nearly such a high point. It is sufficient to look over the programmes of recent years. Wagner leads among operatic composers, then follow Verdi, Gounod, and Mozart; Beethoven is the sovereign of the concert-hall, and The Messiah and The Creation are the most popular oratorios. Sometimes a suspicion has been expressed that American composers must have been systematically suppressed by the leading German conductors like Damrosch, Seidl, Gericke, Thomas, and Paur. But this is not remotely true. The American public is much more to be blamed; for, although so patriotic in every other matter, it looks on every native musical composition with distrust, and will hardly accept even the American singer or player until he has first won his laurels in Europe.

Still, there has been some composition in America. There were religious composers in the eighteenth century, and when everything English was put away at the time of the Revolution, the colonists replaced the psalm-tunes which they had brought over with original airs. Billings and his school were especially popular, although there was an early reaction against what he was pleased to call fugues. The nineteenth century brought forth little more than band-master music, with no sign of inspiration in real orchestral or operatic music. Only lately there have stepped into the field such eminent composers as MacDowell, Paine, Chadwick, Strong, Beech, Buck, Parker, and Foot. Paine’s opera of “Azara,” Chadwick’s overtures, and MacDowell’s interesting compositions show how American music will develop.

More popular was a modest branch of musical composition, the song in the style of folk-songs. America has no actual folk-songs. The average European imagines “Yankee Doodle” to be the real American song, anonymous and dreadful as it is, and in diplomatic circles the antiquated and bombastic “Hail Columbia” is conceived to be the official hymn of America. The Americans themselves recognize neither of these airs. The “Star Spangled Banner” is the only song which can be called national; it was written in 1814 to an old and probably English melody. The Civil War left certain other songs which stir the breast of every patriotic American.

On the other hand, folk-songs have developed in only one part of the country—on the Southern plantations—and with a very local colouring. The negro slaves sang these songs first, although it is unlikely that they are really African songs. They seem to be Irish and Scotch ballads, which the negroes heard on the Mississippi steamboats. Baptist and Methodist psalm-tunes and French melodies were also caught up by the musical negroes and modified to their peculiar melody and rhythm. A remarkable sadness pervades all these Southern airs.

Many song composers have imitated this most unique musical product of the country. In the middle of the century Stephen Foster rose to rapid popularity with his “Old Folks at Home,” which became the popular song, rivalled only by “Home Sweet Home,” which was taken from the text of an American opera, but of which the melody is said to have originated in Sicily. There are to-day all sorts of composers, some in the sentimental style and others in the light opera vein, whose street tunes are instantly sung, whistled and played on hurdy-gurdies from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and, worst of all, stridently rendered by the graphophones, with megaphone attachments, on verandahs in summer. There are composers of church hymns, of marches à la Sousa, and writers of piano pieces by the wholesale. All serious musicians agree that the American, unlike the Englishman, is decidedly musically inclined, but he is the incontestable master of only a very modest musical art—he can whistle as nobody else.

Unlike American music, American paintings are no longer strange to Europe. In the art division of the last Paris Exposition Americans took their share of the honours, and they are highly appreciated at most of the Berlin and Munich picture shows. Sargent and Whistler are the best known. Sargent, as the painter of elegant ladies, prosperous men, and interesting children, has undoubtedly the surest and most refined gift with his brush of any son of the New World. When, a few years ago, a large exhibition of his works was brought together in Boston, one felt on standing before that gathering of ultra-polite and almost living humanity, that in him the elegant world has found its most brilliant, though perhaps not its most flattering, transcriber. Whistler is doubtless the greater, the real sovereign. This most nervous of all artists has reproduced his human victims with positively uncanny perspicacity. Like Henry James, the novelist, he fathoms each human riddle, and expresses it intangibly, mysteriously. Everything is mood and suggestion, the dull and heavy is volatilized, the whole is a sceptical rendering in rich twilight tones.

America is proud of both artists, and still one may doubt whether the art of the New World would be justly represented if it sent across the ocean only these two pampered and somewhat whimsical artists. Firstly, in spite of much brilliant other work, they are both best known as portraitists, while it becomes plainer every day that landscape painting is the most typical American means of expression. The profound feeling for nature, which pervades American poetry and reflects the national life and struggle therewith, brings the American to study landscape. Many persons think even that if American artists were to send ever so many easel pictures across the ocean, the artistic public of Europe would still have no adequate judgment of American painting, because the best talent is busied with the larger pieces intended for wall decoration. The great number of monumental buildings, with their large wall surfaces and the desire for ambitious creations, attract the American to-day to wall-painting. And they try to strengthen the national character of this tendency by a democratic argument. The easel picture, it is said, is a luxury designed for the house of the wealthy and is, therefore, decadent, while the art of a nation which is working out a democracy must pertain to the people; and therefore just as early art adorned the temples and churches, this art must adorn the walls of public buildings, libraries, judicial chambers, legislatures, theatres, railway stations and city halls. And the more this comes to be the case, the less correct it is to judge the pinctile efforts of the time by the framed pictures that come into the exhibitions. Moreover, many of the more successful painters do not take the trouble to send any of their works across the ocean.

Sargent and Whistler also—and this is more important—speak a language which is not American, while the country has now developed its own grammar of painting, and the most representative artists are seldom seen in Europe. In painting, as in so many other branches, the United States has developed from the provincial to the cosmopolitan and from the cosmopolitan to the national, and is just now taking this last step. It is very characteristic that the untutored provincial has grown into the national only by passing through a cosmopolitan stage. The faltering powers of the beginner do not achieve a self-conscious expression of national individuality until they have first industriously and systematically imitated foreign methods, and so attained a complete mastery of the medium of expression.

At first the country, whose poor population was not able to pay much attention to pictures, turned entirely to England. West and Copley are the only pre-Revolutionary Americans whose pictures possess any value. The portraits of their predecessors—as, for instance, those in Memorial Hall at Harvard—are stiff, hard, and expressionless. Then came Gilbert Stuart at the end of the eighteenth century, whose portraits of George and Martha Washington are famous, and who showed himself an artistic genius and quite the equal of the great English portraitists. John Trumbull, an officer in the Revolutionary Army, who lived at the same time, was still more important for the national history by his war pictures, the best of which were considerably above contemporary productions. The historical wall-paintings which he made in 1817, for the Capitol at Washington, are in his later and inferior manner. They seem to-day, like everything which was done in the early part of the century to decorate the Capitol, hackneyed and tiresome. And if one goes from the Capitol to the Congressional Library, which shows the condition of art at the end of the nineteenth century, one feels how far the public taste of Trumbull’s time was from appreciating true art. Portraiture was the only art which attained tolerable excellence, where, besides Stuart, there were Peale, Wright, and Savage. Then came the day of the “American Titian,” Allston, whose Biblical pictures were greatly praised for their brilliant colouring.

Hitherto artists had gone to England to study or, indeed, sometimes to Italy. In the second third of the century they went to Düsseldorf; they painted American landscapes, American popular life, and historical pictures of American heroes, all in German fashion. They delighted in genre studies in the Düsseldorf manner, and painted the Hudson River all bathed in German moonlight. While the popular school was still painting the world in blackish brown, the artistic secession began at about the time of the Civil War. Then artists began to go to Paris and Munich, and American painting developed more freely. It was a time of earnest, profound, and independent study such as had so far never been. The artist learned to draw, learned to see values, and, in the end, to be natural. The number of artists now began to increase, and to-day Americans produce thousands of pictures each year, and one who sees the European exhibitions in summer and the American in winter does not feel that the latter are on a much lower level.

Since Allston’s time the leaders in landscape have been Cole, Bierstadt, Kensett, and Gifford; in genre, Leslie, Woodville, and particularly Mount; in historical painting, Lentze and White; and in portraiture, Inman and Elliott. The first who preached the new doctrine of individuality and colour was Hunt, and in the early seventies the new school just graduated from Paris and Munich was bravely at work. There are many well-known names in the last thirty years, and it is a matter rather of individual choice what pictures one prefers of all the large number. Yet no one would omit George Inness from the list, since he has seen American landscapes more individually than any one else. Besides his pictures every one knows the marines of Winslow Homer, the street scenes of Childe Hassam, the heads of Eaton, the autumn forests of Enneking, the apple trees in spring-time of Appleton Brown, the delicate landscapes of Weir and Tryon, the wall pictures of Abbey, Cox, and Low, Gaugengigl’s little figure paintings, Vedder’s ambitious symbolism, the brilliant portraits of Cecilia Beaux and Chase, the women’s heads of Tarbell, the ideal figures of Abbot Thayer, and the works of a hundred other American artists, not to mention those who are really more familiar in London, Paris, and Munich than in America itself.

Besides the oil pictures, there are excellent water-colours, pastelles, and etchings; and, perhaps most characteristic of all, there is the stained glass of La Farge, Lathrop, the late Mrs. Whitman, Goodhue, and others. The workers in pen-and-ink are highly accomplished, of whom the best known is Gibson, whose American women are not only artistic, but have been socially influential on American ideals and manners. His sketches for Life have been themselves models for real life. Nor should we forget Pennell, the master of atmosphere in pen-and-ink.

Sculpture has developed more slowly. It presupposes a higher understanding of art than does painting; and, besides that, the prudishness of the Puritan has affected it adversely. When John Brazee, the first American amateur sculptor, in the early part of the nineteenth century, asked advice of the president of the New York Academy of Arts, he was told that he would better wait a hundred years before practicing sculpture in America. The speech admirably showed the general lack of interest in plastic art. But the impetuous pressure toward self-perfection existing in the nation shortened the century into decades; people began to journey through Italy. The pioneers of sculpture were Greenough, Powers, Crawford, and Palmer, and their statues are still valued for their historical interest. The theatrical genre groups of John Rogers became very popular; and Randolph Rogers, who created the Columbus bronze doors of the Capitol, was really an artist. Then came Storey, Ball, Rinehart, Hosmer, Mead, and many others with works of greater maturity. Squares and public buildings were filled with monuments and busts which, to be sure, were generally more interesting politically than artistically, and which to-day wait patiently for a charitable earthquake. And yet they show how the taste for plastic art has slowly worked upward.

More recent movements, which are connected with the names of Ward, Warner, Partridge, French, MacMonnies, and St. Gaudens, have already left many beautiful examples of sculpture. Cities are jealously watchful now that only real works of art shall be erected, and that monuments which are to be seen by millions of people shall be really characteristic examples of good art. More than anything else, sculpture has at length come into a closer sympathy with architecture than perhaps it has in any other country. The admirable sculptural decorations of the Chicago World’s Fair, the effective Dewey Triumphal Arch and the permanent plastic decorations of the Congressional Library, the more restrained and distinguished decorations of the Court of Appeals in New York City, and of many similar buildings show clearly that American sculpture has ended its period of immaturity. Such a work as St. Gaudens’s Shaw Memorial in Boston is among the most beautiful examples of modern sculpture; and it is thoroughly American, not only because the negro regiment marches behind the mounted colonel, but because the American subject is handled in the American spirit. These men are depicted with striking vigour, and the young hero riding to his death is conceived with Puritan sobriety. Vigorous and mature is the American, in plastic art as well as in poetry.

The development of architecture has been a very different one. A people must be housed, and cannot stay out of doors until it has learned what is beautiful in architecture. People could wait for poetry, music, and painting while they were busy in keeping off the Indians and felling the forests; but they had to have houses at once. And since at that time they had no independent interests in art, they imitated forms with which they had been familiar, and everywhere perpetuated the architectural ideas of their mother country. But the builder is at a disadvantage beside the painter, the singer, and the poet, in that when he imitates he cannot even do that as he will, but is bound down by climate, by social requirements, and especially by his building material. And when he is placed in new surroundings, he is forced to strike out for himself.

Although the American colonist remained under the influence of English architecture, his environment forced him in the first place to build his house of wood instead of stone as in England, and in wood he could not so easily copy the pattern. It had to be a new variation of the older art. And so architecture, although it more slavishly followed the mother country than any other art, was the earliest to strike out in some respects on an independent course. It borrowed its forms, but originated their applications; and while it slowly adopted new ideas of style and became gradually free of European styles, it became free even earlier in their technical application, owing to the new American conditions. More than any other feature of her civilization, American architecture reveals the entire history of the people from the days when the Puritans lived in little wooden villages to the present era of the sky-scraper of the large cities; and in this growth more than in that of any other art the whole country participates, and specially the West, with its tremendous energy, which is awkward with the violin-bow and the crayon but is well versed in piling stone on stone.

In colonial days, English renaissance architecture was imitated in wood, a material which necessitated slender columns and called for finer detail and more graceful lines than were possible in stone. One sees to-day, especially in the New England States, many such buildings quite unaltered; and the better of these in Salem, Cambridge, and Newport are, in spite of their lightness, substantial and distinguished as no European would think possible in so ordinary a material as wood. Large, beautiful halls, with broad, open staircases and broad balusters, greet the visitor; large fireplaces, with handsomely carved chimney-pieces, high wainscotings on the walls and beautiful beams across the ceilings. The more modest houses show the same thing on a smaller scale. There was this one style through the whole town, and its rules were regarded as canonical. In certain parts of the country there were inconspicuous traces of Spanish, French, and Dutch influence, which survive to-day in many places, especially in the South, and contribute to the picturesqueness of the architectural whole.

After the Revolutionary period, people wished to break with English traditions, and the immigration from many different countries brought a great variety of architectural stimulation. A time of general imitation had arrived, for in architecture also the country was to grow from the provincial to the national through a cosmopolitan stage. At the end of the eighteenth century, architecture was chiefly influenced by the classic Greek. Farmhouses masqueraded as big temples, and the thoughtless application of this form became so monotonous that it was not continued very long in private houses. Then the Capitol at Washington was begun by Latrobe and finished by the more competent Bulfinch, and it became the model for almost all state capitols of the Union. Bulfinch himself designed the famous State House of Massachusetts, but it was the Puritan spirit of Boston which selected the austere Greek temple to typify the public spirit. The entire century, in spite of many variations, stood under this influence, and until recently nobody has ventured to put up a civil structure in a freer, more picturesque style.

Many of these single state capitols built during the century, such as the old one at Albany, are admirable; while the post-offices, custom-houses, and other buildings dedicated to federal uses have been put up until recently cheaply and without thought. Lately, however, the architect has been given freer play. Meanwhile taste had wandered from the classic era to the Middle Ages, and the English Gothic had come to be popular. The romantic took the place of the classic, and the buildings were made picturesque. The effect of this was most happy on church edifices, and about the middle of the century Richard Upjohn, “the father of American architecture,” built a number of famous churches in the Gothic style.

But in secular edifices this spirit went wholly to architectural lawlessness. People were too little trained to preserve a discipline of style along with the freedom of the picturesque. And even more unfortunate than the lack of training of the architect, who committed improprieties because uncertain in his judgment, there was the tastelessness of the parvenu patron, and this particularly in the West. Then came the time of unrest and vulgar splurge, when in a single residential street palaces from all parts of the world were cheaply copied, and just as in Europe forgotten styles were superficially reproduced. The Queen Anne style became fashionable; and then native colonial and Dutch motives were revived.

This period is now long past. The last twenty-five years in the East and the last ten years in the West have seen this tasteless, hap-hazard, and ignorant experimenting with different styles give place to building which is thoughtful, independent, and generally beautiful; though, of course, much that is ugly has continued to be built. Architecture itself has developed a careful school, and the public has been trained by the architects. Of course, many regrettable buildings survive from former periods, so that the general impression to-day is often very confused; but the newer streets in the residential, as well as the business, portions of cities and towns display the fitting homes and office buildings of a wealthy, independent, and art-loving people. In comparison with Europe, a negative feature may be remarked; namely, the notable absence of rococo tendencies. It is sometimes found in interior decorations, but never on exteriors.

The positive features which especially strike the European are the prevalence of Romanesque and of the sky-scrapers. The round arch of the Romans comes more immediately from southern France; but since its introduction to America, notably by the architectural genius Richardson, the round arch has become far more popular than in Europe, and has given rise to a characteristic American style, which is represented to-day in hundreds of substantial buildings all over the country. There is something heavy, rigid, and at the same time energetic, in these great arches resting on short massive columns, in the great, pointed, round towers, in the heavy balconies and the low arcades. The primitive force of America has found its artistic expression here, and the ease with which the new style has adapted itself to castle-like residences, banks, museums, and business houses, and the quickness with which it has been adopted, in the old streets of Boston as in the newer ones of Chicago and Minneapolis, all show clearly that it is a really living style, and not merely an architectural whim.

The Romanesque style grew from an artistic idea, while the sky-scraper has developed through economic exigencies. New York is an island, wherefore the stage of her great business life cannot be extended, and every inch has had to be most advantageously employed. It was necessary to build higher than commercial structures have ever been carried in Europe. At first these buildings were twenty stories high, but now they are even thirty. To rest such colossal structures on stone walls would have necessitated making the walls of the lower stories so thick as to take up all the most desirable room, and stone was therefore replaced by steel. The entire structure is simply a steel framework, lightly cased in stone. Herewith arose quite new architectural problems. The subdivision of the twenty-story façade was a much simpler problem than the disposal of the interior space, where perhaps twenty elevators have to be speeding up and down, and ten thousand men going in and out each day. The problem has been admirably solved. The absolute adaptation of the building to its requirements, and its execution in the most appropriate material—namely, steel and marble—the shaping of the rooms to the required ends, and the carrying out of every detail in a thoroughly artistic spirit make a visit to the best office buildings of New York an æsthetic delight. And since very many of these are now built side of one another, they give the sky-line of the city a strength and significance which strike every one who is mature enough to find beauty in that to which he is not accustomed. When the problem had once been solved, it was natural for other industrial cities to imitate New York, and the sky-scraper is now planted all over the West.

American architecture of to-day is happily situated, because the population is rapidly growing, is extraordinarily wealthy, and seriously fond of art. An architect who has to be economical, must make beauty secondary to utility. In the western part of the country, considerable economy is often exercised and mostly in the very worst way. The pretentious appearance of the building is preserved, but the construction is made cheap; the exterior is made of stucco instead of stone, and the interior finish is not carved, but pressed. This may not, after all, be so much for the sake of economy, as by reason of a deficient æsthetic sense. People who would not think of preferring a chromo-lithograph to an oil-painting do not as yet feel a similar distinction between architectural materials. For the most part, however, the buildings now erected are rich and substantial. The large public and semi-public buildings, court-houses and universities, state capitols and city halls, libraries and museums are generally brilliant examples of architecture. The same is true of the buildings for industrial corporation, offices, banks, hotels, life-insurance companies, stock-exchanges, counting-houses, railway stations, theatres and clubs, all of which, by their restrained beauty, inspire confidence and attract the eye. These are companies with such large capital that they never think of exercising economy on their buildings. The architect can do quite as he likes. New York has a dozen large hotels, each one of which is, perhaps, more splendid in marble and other stones than any hotel in Europe; and while Chicago, Boston, and other cities have fewer such hotels, they have equally handsome ones.

The fabulously rapid and still relatively late growth of handsome public buildings in the last decade is interesting from still another point of view. It reveals a trait in the American public mind which we have repeatedly contrasted with the thought of Europe. American ambitions have grown out of the desire for self-perfection. The American’s own person must be scrupulously, neatly, and carefully dressed, his own house must be beautiful; and only when the whole nation, as it were, has satisfied the needs of the individual can æsthetic feeling go out to the community as a whole—from the individual persons to the city, from the private house to the public building. It has been exactly the opposite on the European Continent. The ideal individual was later than the ideal community. Splendid public buildings were first put up in Europe, while people resided in ugly and uninviting houses.

There was a period in which the American did not mind stepping from his daily bath, and going from his sumptuous home immaculately attired to a railway station or court-house which was screamingly hideous and reeking with dirt. And similarly there was a time in which the Germans and the French moved in and out of the wonderful architectural monuments of their past in dirty clothing, and perhaps without having bathed for many days. In Germany the public building has influenced the individual, and eventually worked toward beautifying his house. In America the individual and the private house have only very slowly spread their æsthetic ideals through the public buildings. The final results in both countries must be the same. There is exactly the same contrast in the ethical field; whereas in Germany and France public morals have spread into private life, in America individual morals have spread into public life. As soon as the transition has commenced it proceeds rapidly.

In Germany few private houses are now built without a bathroom, and in America few public buildings without consideration for what is beautiful. The great change in railway stations indicates the rapidity of the movement. Even ten years ago there were huge car-sheds in the cities, and little huts in country districts, which so completely lacked any pretensions to beauty that æsthetic criticism was simply out of place. Now, on the contrary, most of the large cities have palatial stations, of which some are among the most beautiful in the world, and many railway companies have built attractive little stations all along their lines. As soon as such a state of things has come about, a reciprocal influence takes place between the individual and the communal desire for perfection, and the æsthetic level of the nation rises daily. So, too, the different arts stimulate one another. The architect plans his work from year to year more with the painter and sculptor in mind, so that the erection of new buildings and the growth and wealth of the people benefit not merely architecture, but the other arts as well.

Still other factors are doing their part to elevate the artistic life of the United States. And here particularly works the improved organization of the artistic professions. In former times, the true artist had to prefer Europe to his native home, because in his home he found no congenial spirits; this is now wholly changed. There is still the complaint that the American cities are even now no Kunststädte; and, compared with Munich or with Paris, this is still true. But New York is no more and no less a Kunststädte than is Berlin. In all the large cities of America the connoisseurs and patrons of art have organized themselves in clubs, and the national organizations of architects, painters, and sculptors, have become influential factors in public life; and the large art schools with well-known teachers and the studios of private masters have become great centres for artistic endeavour. A general historical study of architecture has even been introduced in universities, and already the erection of a national academy of art is so actively discussed that it will probably be very soon realized. Certainly every American artist will continue to visit Europe, as every German artist visits Italy; but all the conditions are now ripe in America for developing native talent on native soil.

The artistic education of the public is not less important nor far behind the professional education of the artist. We have discussed the general appreciation of architecture, and the same public education is quietly going on in the art museums. Of course, the public art galleries of America are necessarily far behind those of Europe, since the art treasures of the world were for the most part distributed when America began to collect. And yet it is surprising what treasures have been secured, and in some branches of modern painting and industrial art the American collections are not to be surpassed. Thus the Japanese collection of pottery in Boston has nowhere its equal, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York leads the world in several respects. Modern German art is unfortunately ill represented, but modern French admirably. Here is a large field open for a proper German ambition; German art needs to be recognized much more throughout the country. It must show that American distrust is absolutely unjustified, that it has made greater artistic advances than any other nation, and that German pictures are quite worthy of a large place in the collections.

There are many extraordinary private collections which were gathered during the cosmopolitan period that the nation has gone through. Just as foreign architecture was imitated, so the treasures of foreign countries in art and decoration were secured at any price; and owing to the great wealth, the most valuable things were bought, often without intelligent appreciation, but never without a stimulating effect. One is often surprised to find famous European paintings in private houses, often in remote Western cities; and the fact that for many years Americans have been the best patrons of art in the markets of the world, could not have been without its results. At the height of this collecting period American art itself probably suffered: a moderately good French picture was preferred to a better American picture; but all these treasures have indirectly benefited native art, and still do benefit it, so much that the better artists of the country are much opposed to the absurd protective tariff that is laid on foreign works of art. The Italian palace of Mrs. Gardner in Boston contains the most superb private collection; but just here one sees that the cosmopolitan period of collection and imitation is, after all, merely an episode in the history of American art. An Italian palace has no organic place in New England, although the artistic merits of the Gardner collection are perhaps nowhere surpassed.

The temporary exhibitions which are just now much in fashion have, perhaps, more influence than the permanent museums. Every large city has its annual exhibitions, and in the artistic centres, one special collection comes after another. And the strongest general stimulation has emanated from the great expositions. When the nation visited Philadelphia in 1876, the American artistic sense was just waking up, and the impetus there started was of decisive significance. It is said that the taste for colour in household decoration and fittings, for handsome carpets and draperies, came into the country at that time. When Chicago built its Court of Honour in 1893, which was more beautiful than what Paris could do seven years later, the country became for the first time aware that American art could stand on its own feet, and this æsthetic self-consciousness has stimulated endeavour through the entire nation. In Chicago, for the first time, the connection between architecture and sculpture came properly to be appreciated; and, more than all else, the art of the whole world was then brought into the American West, and that which previously had been familiar only to the artistic section between Boston and Washington was offered to the masses in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Missouri. Chicago has remained since that time one of the centres of American architecture, and the æsthetic level of the entire West was raised, although it is still below that of the Eastern States. And once more, after a very short pause, St. Louis is ambitious enough to try the bold experiment which New York and Boston, like Berlin and Munich, have always avoided. The World’s Fair at St. Louis will surely give new impetus to American art, and especially to the artistic endeavour of the Western States.

If a feeling for art is really to pervade the people, the influence must not begin when persons are old enough to visit a world’s fair, but rather in childhood. The instruction in drawing, or rather in art, since drawing is only one of the branches, must undertake the æsthetic education of the youth in school. It cannot be denied that America has more need of such æsthetic training of children than Germany. The Anglo-Saxon love of sport leads the youth almost solely to the bodily games which stimulate the fancy much less than the German games of children, and other influences are also lacking to direct the children’s emotional life in the road of æsthetic pleasure. On the other hand, it must be admitted that the problem has been well solved in America. The American art training in school, say on the Prang system, which more than 20,000 teachers are using in class instruction, is a true development of the natural sense of beauty. The child learns to observe, learns technique, learns the value of lines and colours, and learns, more than all, to create beauty. In place of merely copying he divides and fills a given space harmoniously, and so little by little goes on to make small works of art. Generations which have enjoyed such influences must look on their environment with new eyes, and even in the poorest surroundings instinctively transform what they have, in the interests of beauty.

Corresponding to these popular stimulations of the sense of beauty is the wish to decorate the surroundings of daily life, most of all the interior; even in more modest circles to make them bright, pleasing, and livable, whereas they have too long been bare and meaningless. The arts and crafts have taken great steps forward, have gotten the services of true artists, and accomplished wonderful results. The glittering glasses of Tiffany and many other things from his world-famous studios are unsurpassed. There are also the wonderfully attractive silver objects of Gorham, the clay vases of the Rockwood Pottery, objects in cut-glass and pearl, furniture in Old English and Colonial designs, and much else of a similar nature. And for the artistic sense it is more significant and important that at last even the cheap fabrics manufactured for the large masses reveal more and more an appreciation of beauty. Even the cheap furniture and ornaments have to-day considerable character; and no less characteristic is the general demand, which is much greater than that of Europe, for Oriental rugs. The extravagant display of flowers in the large cities, the splendid parks and park-ways such as surround Boston, the beautification of landscapes which Charles Eliot has so admirably effected, and in social life the increasing fondness for coloured and æsthetic symbols, such as the gay academic costumes, the beautiful typography and book-bindings, and a thousand other things of the same sort, indicate a fresh, vigorous, and intense appreciation of beauty.

While such a sense for visible beauty has been developed by the wealth and the artistic instruction of the country, one special condition more has affected not only the fine arts but also poetry and literature. This is the development of the national feeling, which more than anything else has stimulated literary and artistic life. The American feels that he has entered the exclusive circle of world powers, and must like the best of them realize and express his own nature. He is conscious of a mission, and the national feeling is unified much less by a common past than by a common ideal for the future. His national feeling is not sentimental, but aggressive; the American knows that his goal is to become typically American. All this gives him the courage to be individual, to have his own points of view, and since he has now studied history and mastered technique, this means no longer to be odd and freakish, but to be truly original and creative. He is now for the first time thoroughly aware what a wealth of artistic problems is offered by his own continent, by his history, by his surroundings, and by his social conditions. And just as American science has been most successful in developing the history, geography, geology, zoölogy, and anthropology of the American Continent, so now his new art and literature are looking about for American material.

His hopes are high; he sees indications of a new art approaching which will excite the admiration of the world. He feels that the great writer is not far off who will express the New World in the great American novel. Who shall say that these hopes may not be realized to-morrow? For it is certain that he enjoys an unusual combination of favourable conditions for developing a world force. Here are a people thoroughly educated in the appreciation of literature and art—a people in the hey-day of success, with their national feeling growing, and having, by reason of their economic prosperity, the amplest means for encouraging art; a people who find in their own country untold treasures of artistic and literary problems, and who in the structure of their government and customs favour talent wherever it is found; a people who have learned much in cosmopolitan studies and to-day have mastered every technique, who have absorbed the temperament and ambitions of the most diverse races and yet developed their own consistent, national consciousness, in which indomitable will, fertile invention, Puritan morals, and irrepressible humour form a combination that has never before been known. The times seem ripe for something great.

Chapter Twenty: Religion

The individualistic conception of life and the religious conceptions of the world favour each other. The more that an individual’s religious temperament sees this earthly life merely as a preparation for the heavenly, the more he puts all his efforts into the development of his individual personality. General concepts, civilizations, and political powers cannot, as such, enter the gates of heaven; and the perfection of the individual soul is the only thing which makes for eternal salvation. On the other hand, the more deeply individualism and the desire for self-perfection have taken hold on a person, so much the deeper is his conviction that the short shrift before death is not the whole meaning of human existence, and that his craving for personal development hints at an existence beyond this world. Through such individualism, it is true, religion is in a sense narrowed; the idea of immortality is unduly emphasized. Yet the whole life of an individualistic nation is necessarily religious. The entire American people are in fact profoundly religious, and have been from the day when the Pilgrim Fathers landed, down to the present moment.

On the other hand, individualism cannot decide whether we ought to look on God with fear or with joy, to conceive Him as revengeful or benevolent, to think human nature sinful or good. The two most independent American thinkers of the eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin, represent here the two extremes. The men who have made American history and culture took in early times the point of view of Edwards, but take to-day rather that of Franklin.

Can it be said that America is really religious to-day? From first impressions, a European may judge the opposite; first and most of all, he observes that the government does not concern itself with the church. Article VI of the Constitution expressly forbids the filling of any office or any political position of honour in the United States being made dependent on religion, and the first amendment adds that Congress may never pass a law aiming to establish any official religion or to hinder religious freedom. This provision of the Constitution is closely followed in the Constitutions of the several states. The government has nothing to do with the church; that is, the church lacks the powerful support of the state which it receives in all monarchical countries; and in fact the state interprets this neutrality prescribed by the Constitution so rigorously that, for example, statistics of religious adherence for the last great census were obtained from the church organizations, because the state has not the right to inquire into the religious faith of citizens. Ecclesiastics pass no state examinations to show their fitness to preach; millions of people belong to no church organization; the lower masses are not reached by any church, and the public schools have no religious instruction. It might thus appear as if the whole country were as indifferent to religion as European humourists have declared it to be, in saying that the Almighty Dollar is the American’s only god.

On looking more closely, one finds very soon that the opposite is the case. Although it is true that the state is not concerned with religion, yet this provision of the Constitution in no wise signifies any wish to encourage religious indifference. The states which united to form the Federation were profoundly religious; both Protestants and Catholics had come to the New World to find religious freedom, had made great renunciations to live in their faith untroubled by the persecutions of the Old World, and every sect of Europe had adherents on this side of the ocean. Not a few of the states were, in their general temperament, actually theocratic. Not only in Puritan New England had the church all the power in her hands, but in the colony of Virginia, the seat of the English High-Churchmen, it was originally the law that one who remained twice away from church was flogged, and on the third time punished with death. When America broke away from England, almost every state had its special and pronounced religious complexion. The majority of the population in the separate colonies had generally forced their religion on the whole community, and religious interests were everywhere in the foreground.

Although, finally, Jefferson’s proposition constitutionally to separate church and state was accepted, this move is not to be interpreted as indifference, but rather as a wish to avoid religious conflicts. In view of such pronounced differences as those between Puritans, Quakers, High-Churchmen, Catholics, etc., the establishment of any church as a state institution would have required a subordination of the other sects which would have been felt as suppression. The separation of the church from the state simply meant freedom for every sect. Then, too, not all the separate states followed the federal precedent; the New England States especially favoured, by their taxation laws, the Calvinistic faith until the beginning of the nineteenth century; and Massachusetts was the last to introduce complete religious neutrality, as lately as 1833. In the Southern States, the relations between church and state were more easily severed; and in the Middle States, even during colonial times, there was general religious freedom.

Whether or not the separation was rapid or slow, or whether it took place under the passive submission, or through the active efforts of the clergy, the churches everywhere soon became the warmest supporter of this new condition of things. All the clergy found that in this way the interests of religion were best preserved. The state does nothing to-day for the churches except by way of laws in single states against blasphemy and the disturbance of religious worship, and by the recognition, but not the requirement, of church marriage. There are also remnants of the connection in the recognized duty of the President to appoint the annual day of Thanksgiving, and in cases of signal danger to appoint days of fasting and prayer, and one more remnant in the fact that the legislatures are opened by daily prayer. Otherwise, the state and church move in separate dimensions of space, as it were, and there is no attempt to change this condition.

It was, therefore, no case of an orthodox minority being forced to content itself with an unchurchly state; but neither party nor sect nor state had the slightest wish to see church and state united. The appreciation of this mutual independence is so great that public opinion turns at once against any church which tries to exert a political influence, whether by supporting a certain political body in local elections or by trying to obtain public moneys for its educational institutions and hospitals. When, for instance, the principal anti-Catholic organization, the so-called American Protective Association, became regrettably wide-spread, it got its strength, not from any Protestant ecclesiastical opposition, but only from the political antipathy against that church which seemed the most inclined to introduce such un-American side influences in party politics. Every one felt that a great American principle was there at stake.

Thus the legal status of the churches is that of a large private corporation, and nobody is required to connect himself with any church. Special ecclesiastical legislation is, therefore, superfluous; every church may organize, appoint officers, and regulate its property matters and disciplinary questions as it likes, and any disputed points are settled by civil law, as in the case of all corporations. Just as with business companies, a certain sort of collective responsibility is required; but the competition between churches, as between industrial corporations, is unhampered, and the relation of the individual to his church is that of ordinary contract. One hundred and forty-eight different sects appeal to-day for public favour. To the European this sounds at first like secularization, like a lowering of the church to the level of a stock company—like profanation. And still no Catholic bishop nor Orthodox minister would wish it different. Now how does this come about?

In the first place individualism has even here victoriously carried through its desire for self-determination. Nobody is bound to belong to any congregation, and one who belongs is therefore willing to submit himself to its organization, to subscribe to its by-laws, and to support its expenditures. Nobody pays public taxes for any church, nor is under ecclesiastical authority which he does not freely recognize. The church is, therefore, essentially relieved of any suspicion of interfering with individual freedom. The individual himself is for the same reason not only free to adopt or to reject religion, but also to express his personal views in any form or creed whatsoever. Only where the church exercises no authority on thought or conscience can it be supported by the spirit of self-determination. Thus, the Mennonite Church has already developed twelve sects, the Baptist thirteen, the Methodist seventeen, and all of these are equally countenanced. At the same time the reproach can never be made that the church owes its success to the assistance of the state: what it does is by its own might; and so its success is thoroughly intrinsic and genuine, its zeal is quickened, and its whole activities kept apart from the world of political strife and directed toward ideals.

The church which is not supported by any written laws of the state is not, for that reason, dependent alone on the religious ideals of its adherents, but also on the unwritten law of the social community. The less the authority of the state, the more the society as a whole realizes its duties; and while society remains indifferent as long as religion is enforced by external means, it becomes energetic as soon as it feels itself responsible for the general religious situation. The church has had no greater fortune than in having religion made independent of the state and made the affair of society at large. Here an obligation could be developed, which is perhaps more firm and energetic than that of the state, but which is nevertheless not felt as an interference, firstly, because the political individual is untouched, and secondly, because the allegiance to a certain social class is not predetermined, but becomes the goal and the honourable achievement of the individual. Of course, even the social obligation would not have developed had there not been a deep religious consciousness living in the people; but such individual piety has been able to take much deeper root in a soil socially so favourable. A religiously inclined population, which has made churchliness a social and not a political obligation, affords the American church the most favourable condition for its success that could be imagined.

One may see even from the grouping of sects, how much the church is supported by society. If anywhere democracy seems natural, it should be in the eyes of God; and yet, if Americans show anywhere social demarcations, it is in the province of religion. This is true, not only of different churches where the expense of membership is so unequal that in large cities rich and poor are farther apart on Sundays than on week-days, but it is true of the sects themselves. Methodists and Episcopalians or Baptists and Unitarians form in general utterly different social groups, and one of these sects is socially predominant in one section of the country, another in another. But just because religious differences are so closely related to the differences existing in the social world, the relations between the sects are thoroughly friendly. Each has its natural sphere.

It is certain that the large number of sects are helpful in this direction, since they make the distinction between related faiths extremely small, sometimes even unintelligible to all except the theological epicure; and, indeed, they often rest on purely local or ancestral distinctions. Thus the German Reformed and the Dutch Reformed churches are called two sects, and even the African Methodist Episcopalians and the Coloured Methodist Episcopalians wish to be distinguished from each other as from the other negro sects. Where large parties oppose each other, a war for principles can break out; but where the religions merge into one another through many small gradations, the consciousness of difference is less likely to be joined to any feeling of opposition. The real opponent of churches is the common enemy, the atheist, although the more straitlaced congregations are not quite sure that the Unitarians, who are most nearly comparable to members of the German Protestantenverein, are not best classed with the atheists. And, lastly, envy and jealousy do not belong to the American optimistic temperament, which does not grudge another his success. Thus everything works together to make the churches get on peacefully with one another. The religion of the country stretches from one end to the other, like a brilliant and many-hued rainbow.

The commingling of church and society is shown everywhere. The church is popular, religious worship is observed in the home, the minister is esteemed, divine worship is well attended, the work of the church is generously supported, and the cause of religion is favoured by the social community. These outlines may now be filled in by a few details. The American grows up with a knowledge of the Bible. The church, Sabbath-school, and the home influences work together; a true piety rules in every farm-house, and whosoever supposes this to be in anywise hypocrisy has no notion of the actual conditions. In many city homes of artisans the occupants do not know the Bible and do not wish to know it; but they are in nowise hypocritical, and in the country at large religion is so firmly rooted that people are much more likely to make sham pretences of general enlightenment than of religious belief. Thus, it is mostly a matter of course that festivals, banquets, and other meetings which in Germany would not call for any religious demonstration whatsoever, are opened and closed by prayer. Religious discussions are carried on with animation in every class of society, and one who travels about through the country finds that business and religion are the two great topics of conversation, while after them come politics. It is only among individuals who are so religiously disposed, that such vagaries of the supernatural consciousness, as spiritualism, healing by prayer, etc., could excite so much interest. But also normal religious questions interest an incomparably large circle of people; nine hundred ecclesiastical newspapers and magazines are regularly published and circulated by the millions.

We have said, furthermore, that divine service is well attended, and that clergymen are highly esteemed. In the non-political life, especially in the East, the great preachers are among the most influential people of the day. The most brilliant ecclesiastic of recent decades was, by common consent, Phillips Brooks, by whose speech and personality every one was attracted and ennobled; and it has often been said that at his death, a few years ago, the country mourned as never before since the death of Lincoln. No one equal to him has appeared since, but there are many ministers whose ethical influence must be accounted among the great factors of public life; and this is true, not only of the Protestant ministers, but also of several Catholic ecclesiastics.

The same is true in the more modest communities. The influence of the preacher is more profound in small communities of America than it is in Germany. But it is weakened at once if the representative of the church descends to politics. He is welcomed as an appropriate fellow-worker only in questions that border both on politics and on morals—as, for instance, the temperance question. The high position of the clergy is interestingly shown from the fact that the profession is very often recruited from the best classes of society. Owing to the American effort to obliterate social differentiation as much as possible, it is difficult to make sure of the facts of the situation; but it seems pretty certain that the men who study for the ministry, especially in the Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Congregational, and Unitarian churches, are better born than the men who become school teachers and physicians.

The preacher steps into the pulpit and faces his hearers in a way which is typically American. Of course, it is impossible to reduce the ministerial bearing in the 194,000 churches of the country to a single formula; but one thing may always be noted, by the European, in contrast to what he has seen at home—the obvious reference of the sermon to the worldly interests of the congregation. Its outer form already shows this; the similes and metaphors are borrowed from ordinary and even vulgar life, the applications are often trivial, but forcible and striking, and even anecdotes are introduced and given in colloquial form. More than that, the topic itself is chosen so as to concern personally nearly every one sitting in the pews; the latest vexation or disappointment, the cherished hope, or the duty lying nearest to the individual forms the starting-point of the sermon, and the words of the Bible are brought home to the needs of the hearers like an expected guest. The preacher does not try to lure the soul away from daily life, but he tries to bring something higher into that life and there to make it living; and if he is the right sort of a preacher, this never works as a cheapening of what is divine, but as an exaltation of what is human.

Doubtless it is just on this account that the church is so popular and the services so well attended. To be sure, frequently the minister is a sensational pulpit elocutionist, who exploits the latest scandal or the newest question of the day in order to interest the public and attract the curious to church. Often the worldly quality of the sermon tends to another form of depreciation. The sermon becomes a lecture in general culture, a scientific dissertation, or an educational exercise. Of course, the abandonment of the strictly religious form of sermon brings many temptations to all except the best preachers; yet, in general, the American sermon is unusually powerful.

The popularity of the church does not depend only on the applicability of the sermon, but in part on social factors which are not nearly so strong in any part of Europe. If the congregation desires to bring the general public to church, it will gain its end most surely by offering attractions of a religiously indifferent nature. These attractions may indirectly assist the moral work of the church, although their immediate motive is to stimulate church-going. The man who goes to church merely in order to hear the excellent music has necessarily to listen to the sermon; and one who joins the church for the sake of its secular advantages is at least in that way detained from the frivolous enjoyments of irreligious circles. Thus, the church has gradually become a social centre with functions which are as unknown in Germany as the “parlours” which belong to every church in America. The means of social attraction must naturally be adapted to the character of the congregation; the picnics which are popular in the small towns, with their raffles and social games, their lemonade and cake, would not be appropriate to the wealthy churches on Fifth Avenue. In the large cities, æsthetic attractions must be substituted—splendid windows, soft carpets, fine music, elegant costumes, and fashionable bazars for charity’s sake.

But the social enjoyment consists not solely in what goes on within the walls of the church, but specially in the small cities and rural districts the church is the mediator of almost all social intercourse. A person who moves to a new part of the town or to an entirely new village, allies himself to some congregation if he is of the middle classes, in order to form social connections; and this is the more natural since, in the religious as in the social life of America, the women are the most active part of the family. Even the Young Men’s Christian Associations and similar social organizations under church auspices play an important rôle utterly unlike anything in Europe. In Germany such organizations are popularly accounted flabby, and their very name has a stale flavour. In America they are the centres of social activity, even in large cities, and have an extraordinary influence on the hundreds of thousands of members who meet together in the splendid club buildings, and who are as much interested in sport and education as in religion.

How fully the church dominates social life may be seen in the prevalent custom of church weddings. The state does not make a civil wedding obligatory. As soon as the local civil board has officially licensed the married couple, the wedding may legally be performed either by a civil officer or by a minister; yet it is a matter of course with the great majority of the population that the rings shall be exchanged before the altar. An avowed atheist is not received in any social circles above that of the ordinary saloon, and while a politician need not fear that his particular religion will prevent his being supported by the members of other churches, he has no prospects for election to any office if he should be found an actual materialist. When Ingersoll, who was the great confessed atheist of the country, travelled from city to city for many years preaching somewhat grotesquely and with the looseness of a political agitator, the arguments of David Friedrich Strauss, in return for an admission price, he found everywhere large audiences for his striking oratory, but very few believers among all the curious listeners.

The man who is convinced that this mechanical interaction of material forces is the whole reality of the world, and who therefore in his soul recognizes no connection between his will and a moral or spiritual power—in short, the man who does not believe something, no matter whether he has learned it from the church or from philosophy—is regarded by the typical American as a curious sort of person and of an inferior type; the American does not quite understand what such a man means by his life. By picturing to one’s self the history of America as the history of a people descended from those who have been religiously persecuted, and who have made a home for such as are persecuted, ever since the days when the “Mayflower” landed with the Puritans down to these days when the Jews are flocking over the ocean from Russia and the Armenians from Turkey, and by picturing how this people have had to open up and master the country by hard fighting and hard work, and how they were therefore constrained to a rigid sense of duty, a serious conception of life, and an existence almost devoid of pleasure, and how now all historical and social traditions and all educational influences strengthen the belief in God and the striving for the soul’s salvation—one sees that it cannot be otherwise, and that the moral certainty of the nation cannot be shaken by so-called arguments.

It is true, of course, that one hears on all sides complaints against the increasing ungodliness; and it is not to be denied that the proletariat of the large cities is for the most part outside of the church. The population which owns no church allegiance is estimated at five millions, but among these there is a relatively large fraction of indifferent persons, who are too lazy to go to church; a free-thinking animosity to religion is uncommon. The American who feels that his church no longer corresponds to his own belief has an ample opportunity to choose among all the many sects one which is just adapted to himself. He will leave his own church in order to join some other straightway; but even if he leaves church attendance in future to his wife and daughters, or if he with his whole family leaves the congregation, this generally means that he can serve God without a minister. Real irreligion does not fit his character; and any doubt which science may perhaps occasion in him ends, not by shaking his religion, but by making it more liberal. This process of increasing freedom from dogma and of intellectualization of the church goes on steadily in the upper classes of society. The development of the Unitarian Church out of Orthodox Calvinism has been most influential on the intellectual life of the nation, but its fundamental religious tone has not been lessened thereby.

To be churchly means not only to comply with the ordinances of the church, but to contribute to the funds of the church and to give one’s labour. And since the state does not impose any taxes in the interests of the church, material support is wholly dependent on the good will of the community. In fact, lay activity is everywhere helpful. Of this the Sunday-schools are typical, which are visited by eight million children, and supported everywhere by the willing labour of unpaid teachers. The known property belonging to churches is estimated at seven hundred million dollars, and the rental of seats brings them handsome incomes. More than this, all church property is exempt from taxation.

Nevertheless, so many ecclesiastical needs remain unsatisfied that a great deal of money has to be raised by mite-boxes, official subscriptions, and bequests, in order for the churches to meet their expenses; and they seldom beg in vain. Members of the congregations carry on their shoulders the missions among the irreligious population in large cities and the heathen of foreign lands, the expense of church buildings, and of schools and hospitals belonging to the sect, and the salaries of ministers. The theological faculties are likewise church institutions, whether they are formally connected with universities or not. There are to-day 154 such seminaries, and this number has for some time remained almost unchanged. In 1870 there were only 80, but there were 142 in 1880, and 145 in 1890. It appears from the statistics that, of the present 154, only 21 have more than a hundred students, while twelve have less than ten students. The total number of students was 8,009, and of teachers 994. The property of these theological seminaries amounts to thirty-four million dollars, and more than a million was given them during the last year.

The pedagogical function of the church is not limited to the Sunday-school for children and the seminaries for ministers; but in these two branches it has a monopoly, while in all other fields, from the elementary school to the university, it competes with secular institutions, or more exactly, it complements their work. We have already shown how important a rôle private initiative plays in the educational life of the United States, and it is only natural that such private institutions should be welcomed by a part of the public when they bear the sanction of one or another religious faith. There are grammar schools, high schools, colleges, and universities of the most diverse sects to meet this need; and their relation to religion itself is equally diverse, and ranges from a very close to a very loose one. Boston College, for instance, is an excellent Catholic institution consisting of a high school and college under the instruction of Jesuits, in which the education is at every moment strongly sectarian. The university of Chicago, on the other hand, is nominally a Baptist institution: yet nobody asks whether a professor who is to be appointed is a Baptist; no student is conscious of its Baptist character, and no lectures give any indication thereof. Its Baptist quality is limited to the statute that the president of the university and two-thirds of the board of overseers must be Baptists, as was the founder of the institution.

While among the larger universities, Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Cornell, and all state universities, are officially independent of any sect, Yale is, for instance, said to be Congregational, although neither teachers nor students trouble themselves with the question. The smaller colleges have a much more truly sectarian character; and there is no doubt that this is approved by large circles, especially in the Middle and Western States. The sectarian colleges outnumber the non-sectarian; and, to take a random example, we may note that in the state of Michigan the State University at Ann Arbor is independent of sect, while Adrian College is Methodist, Albion College Episcopalian, Alma College Presbyterian, Detroit College Catholic, Hilledale College Baptist, Hope College Reformed, and Olivet College is Congregational. This inclination, especially noticeable in country districts, to a religious education however so slightly coloured, shows how deeply religion pervades the whole people.

To follow the separate religions and their diverse religious offshoots cannot be our purpose; we must be content with a few superficial outlines. There is no really new religious thought to record; an American religion has, so far, not appeared. The history of the church in the New World has only to report how European religions have grown under new conditions. The apparently new associations are only unimportant variations. Some enthusiasts have appeared from time to time to preach a new religion with original distortions of the moral or social sense, but they have expressed no moral yearning of the time, and have remained without any deep influence. This rests in good part on the conservative nature of Americans. They snatch enthusiastically at the newest improvements and the most modern reform, but it must be a reform and not a revolution. The historical continuity must be preserved. The Mormons, the Spiritualists, and the adherents of Christian Science might, with some propriety, be called pure American sects; but although all three of these excite much public curiosity, they have no importance among those religions which are making the civilization of the present moment.

The religions of the United States which have the most communicants are the Methodist, Baptist, and Roman Catholic. The religions, however, which have had the most important influence on culture are the Congregational, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Unitarian. Besides these, there are the Lutheran, the Reformed, and the Jewish churches; all the other denominations are small and uninfluential. The churches which we have named can be more or less distinguished by their locality, although they are represented in almost every state. The Congregationalists and Unitarians are specially numerous in the New England States, the Episcopalians and Presbyterians in New York and Pennsylvania, while the Methodists are specially strong in the South, the Baptists in the Middle West, and the Catholics all through the East. Such special demarcation rests firstly on the relation of the churches to different races which have settled in different places; the Episcopalians and Congregationalists are mainly English, the Presbyterians are Scotch, the Catholics are Irish and South German, the Lutherans are North German and Scandinavian, the Reformed Church is German and Dutch, and Methodism has spread widely among the negroes.

In close connection herewith are the social distinctions. The Methodist, Baptist, and Catholic religions are specially religions of the masses; the others are more exclusive. It is especially those religions of the lower classes which yield to every tendency toward breaking up into sects; only Catholicism maintains a firm unity in the New as in the Old World.

The old Calvinistic faith which was brought over by the Puritans to the New England colonies still lives in the Congregational Church. This church has played a greater political part than any other from the colonial days, when no one could vote who was not a communicant, down to the time when it took an active stand against slavery. Its expansion was limited by an agreement with the Presbyterian Church; only since this was given up, has it entered all the states of the Union. And yet to-day there are in Massachusetts almost 700 Congregational church buildings, and 400 in the small State of Connecticut; but only 300 in the State of New York, 100 in Pennsylvania, a few in the West, and still fewer in the South.

As in the case of all churches, the proportion of the population belonging to this church can only be approximately given. Since the official census may ask no questions concerning religion, we have to rely on the figures of the church itself, which regularly refer to the actual members in the congregations. Now in these Evangelical, Catholic, and Jewish congregations, the conditions for membership are so unlike that the figures are not directly comparable; and even among the Evangelical churches, it is clearly false to find the total number of souls allied to that church, as this is usually found, by multiplying the number of communicants by some average figure, like 3.5. In view of the social and ethnical differences between these churches, the percentage of children, for instance, is very different. It may be said then, although with caution, that the Congregational population embraces about two million souls; but their importance in the shaping of American civilization has greatly exceeded their numerical representation. The spirit of this church has lent ethical seriousness and a vigorous sense of duty to the whole nation. It has founded the first schools, and is responsible for the independence of the country.

It is even more necessary to weigh the votes and not to count them, when we speak of the optimistic daughter church of austere Calvinism, the Unitarian. Probably not more than one quarter of a million persons belong to the Unitarian Church; but the influence of these people on literature and life, science and philosophy, has been incomparable. The church has existed officially since 1815, although the new faith began to spread much earlier within the Calvinistic Church itself. There is nothing theologically new here, since the main teachings, that the Trinity is only a dogma, that God is One, and that Christ was an exemplary man but not God, go back, of course, to the fourth century. These are the Arian ideas, which have also been held in Europe in times past. The significance of the American Trinitarian controversy does not lie in the province of theology. In a sense, the Unitarian Church has no binding belief, but aims only to be an influence of ever-increasing faith in God, which welcomes investigation, advance, and difference of individual thought, within the unity of a moral and ideal view of the universe.

Thus it has been an entirely natural development, for example, for the theological faculty of Harvard University to go over from the Congregational to the Unitarian faith as early as the second decade of the last century, and in recent times to become non-sectarian and broadly Christian, filling its professional chairs with theologians of the most diverse denominations. The significance for civilization does not lie in the Unitarian view of God, but in its anti-Calvinistic conception of man. This church says that man is not naturally sinful, but, being the image of God, is naturally good, and that the salvation of his soul is not determined by a predestination of divine grace, but by his own right-willing. Channing was the Unitarian leader, and the thinkers and writers in the middle of the century followed in his footsteps. Their work was a source of moral optimism. This confession has necessarily remained small by reason of its radical theology, which too little satisfies the imagination of the profoundly pious; but the Unitarian ideas have come everywhere into the worship of aristocratic churches.

The Episcopalian faith, which is English Protestantism, came to the shores of the New World even earlier than the faith of Calvin. The English faith was organized in Virginia as early as 1607, and for a long time no other faith was even tolerated; and in the middle colonies the English High Church spread rapidly under the influence of many missionaries from England. The secession of the colonies from the mother country was destined to bring a check, but soon after the war the Episcopalian Church of America organized itself independently, and grew steadily through the East. It has to-day seventy-five bishops. It is governed by a council which meets every three years in two divisions—an upper, which consists of bishops, and a lower, composed of delegates sent from the various dioceses. The diocese elects its own bishop. Their creed is, to all intents and purposes, identical with that of the Church of England, and some two million souls are affiliated with this church.

Also the Presbyterian Church of the New World goes back to the seventeenth century; it was first definitely organized in the beginning of the eighteenth, under Scotch and Irish influences. It stands on a Calvinistic foundation, but the church government is the distinguishing feature; at its head are the elders, the Presbyters. Twelve different sects have grown out of this church—as, for instance, the Cumberland Presbyterians, who broke away in a popular religious movement in 1810; other sects had started already on European soil—as, for instance, the Presbyterian Church of Wales, which is perpetuated in America. The Presbyterian population amounts to about four million souls.

The Methodist and Baptist congregations are much larger. Methodism comes from that great movement, at the University of Oxford in 1729, of John and Charles Wesley, whose Sacred Club, with its Biblical bigotry, was, on account of its methodical precision, ridiculed as the Methodist Club; and the nickname was accepted and held to. It was a question of bringing the English church closer to the heart, of profoundly moving every individual and instilling a deeper piety in the people. In order to preach the word of God, it needed neither professional theologians nor church buildings; laymen were to be the preachers, and the canopy of heaven their church. The movement began to spread in America in 1766, and while in England it remained for a longer time nominally within the established church, American Methodism took very early a different course from Episcopalianism.

The peculiar organization of the congregation is a prominent feature. Candidates for membership are accepted after a six months’ probation, popular prayer-meetings are held at any chosen spot, the lay preachers are permitted to deliver religious talks without giving up their secular occupations, and no pastor may remain longer than five years over any congregation. These and other provisions are rather in the nature of concessions to the religious needs of ordinary people; the special items of faith differ slightly from those of the mother church, and are of comparatively little significance. The number of communicants has grown rapidly, especially among the negroes of the South, owing to the large camp-meetings, where many persons sing and pray together, and work themselves up to a more or less hysterical point of excitement under the open sky. As is usual among less cultivated classes, the tendency to form sects has been very great; small groups are continually breaking away, because they cannot believe in this or that feature of the main church. Seventeen principal groups may be distinguished, and some of these only by the colour of the communicants. The Methodist Episcopalians are by far the most numerous, and all the Methodist churches together must embrace more than sixteen million people.

The twelve or thirteen sects of Baptists are in some cases widely different in the matter of faith, although the main body of regular Baptists are Calvinistic, and the church is organized like the Calvinistic Congregational Church. Each congregation governs itself, and the one point which all have in common is that they renounce infant baptism; he only may be baptized who is formally able to acknowledge Christ, and he must be baptized not by sprinkling, but by immersion. This cult originated in Switzerland at the time of the Reformation, and gradually gained adherents all through Europe, but it first became widely spread in America, where it embraces about twelve million people. Just as Methodism is a sort of popular form of the Episcopalian Church, the Baptist faith is a popularization of the Congregational Church. The main division of the regular Baptists is made between the Northern and Southern churches, a division which originated in the middle of the century, owing to the diversity of opinion about slavery; and the third main group of Baptists is made up of negroes.

The first Lutherans to come to the New World were Dutchmen, who landed on Manhattan Island in 1623. But the Dutch authorities there suppressed all churches except the Reformed Church, and it was not until New York came into the hands of the English that the Lutheran Church got its freedom. Lutherans from the Palatinate settled in Pennsylvania in 1710, and in the middle of the eighteenth century began their definite organization into synods under the influence of their pastor, Mühlenberg. The church grew in consequence of German, and later of Scandinavian, immigration. Most of its communicants still speak German, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Icelandic, and those who speak English are mostly of German descent. All together they make a population of four million persons, of whom one-fifth live in Pennsylvania. The Lutherans have formed sixteen sects.

There is another small Protestant sect, which likewise originated in Germany; this is the sect of Mennonites. As is well known, they combine the Baptist refusal of infant baptism with the principle of non-resistance. They came from Germany to Pennsylvania at the end of the seventeenth century in order to escape persecution, and were there known as the German Friends. Their little band has the honour of having registered, in 1688, the first protest against American slavery. Their numbers have since been augmented from Holland, Switzerland, Germany, and Russia, and to-day the largest part of the Mennonites is said to be in America—in spite of which they number hardly more than 150,000 persons.

In many respects the Quakers may be compared with the Mennonites. The Quaker Church was founded in the middle of the seventeenth century by an Englishman, John Fox, and spread to America as early as 1656, where it now numbers, perhaps, 400,000 persons, living chiefly in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The Quakers lay great emphasis on silence, and even in their meetings they observe long pauses, in which each member communes with the Holy Spirit. The sins for which a Quaker may be excommunicated from his church are the denial of the divinity of Christ or of the divine origin of the Bible, enlistment in the army, encouragement of war, trading in alcohol, drunkenness, blasphemy, making wagers, participation in lotteries, giving an oath in court, and requiring an oath. They dress in black or grey, and are known for their mild, gentle, and yielding characters.

The Roman Catholic Church in America is little different from the Church in Europe. It has grown rapidly in the nineteenth century, owing to the tremendous numbers of Irish, South German, Polish, Hungarian, Italian, and Spanish immigrants. Catholic missionaries, it is true, were the first Christian ministers in the New World. They accompanied the Spanish expeditions, and their first bishop landed in 1528. Maryland was the chief English colony of Catholics, while most of the other colonies were very intolerant of the Romish Church. In 1700 New York, which has to-day a half million Catholics, is said to have had only seven Catholic families; and even in 1800 the Catholic population of the whole United States was estimated at less than 150,000. In 1840 they had increased tenfold, and number to-day probably ten millions, with sixteen archbishops and a cardinal. The Catholic centres, in the order of the size of congregations, are, New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Paul, New Orleans, Baltimore, Cleveland, Buffalo, Newark, Providence, Pittsburg, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee.

The Jews, who are said to have first come from Brazil in 1654, have likewise increased rapidly in recent years, owing to the extraordinary immigration from the East of Europe. They must number to-day about a million people, and if the latest estimates are correct, nearly one-half of these have not gone farther than New York City, which would therefore have a larger Jewish population than any other city in the world. The larger part of these people are Russian Jews, who live together in great poverty and are very little Americanized. The division made by the census into Orthodox and Reformed Jews does not represent two sects, but merely a manner of grouping, since the congregations present a very gradual transition from rigid Asiatic orthodoxy to a reform so complete as to be hardly Jewish at all, and in which the rabbis are merely lecturers on “ethical culture.”

Many other churches might be mentioned, such as the widely spread sect of Disciples of Christ, which originated in America, or the Moravians, Dunkards, and others which have come from Europe. But it will be enough here to speak of only a few specially typical sects that have been manufactured in America. The profane expression is in place, since they are all artificially devised organizations, whose founders have often been thought dishonest; such are the Adventists, the Mormons, the Spiritualists, and the Christian Scientists. The Adventists were gathered in by William Miller, of Massachusetts, who in the year 1831 calculated from figures which he found in the Bible that Christ would appear again on earth in the year 1843. This prophecy caused a great many small congregations to spring up, and when the momentous year came and brought disillusionment, and even after a second similar disappointment at a later year, these congregations did not break up, but contented themselves with the less risky prediction that Christ would make His appearance soon. There are Adventists in all the states, and especially in Michigan. They have broken up into smaller sects, of which a few are always making new computations for the coming of Christ. In all, they amount to about two hundred thousand people.

More famous, or perhaps more notorious, are the Mormons. Their first prophet, Joseph Smith, began in 1823, when he was eighteen years of age, to have dreams in which he was intrusted with a religious mission. Four years later, with the help of certain persons of his dreams, he “discovered” the Book of Mormon—a set of metal tablets on which the history of America was written in “reformed Egyptian” characters. The first American colony had been organized, according to the Book of Mormon, by a race of people which had helped to build the Tower of Babel, and which in 600 B.C. had settled in South America. The American Indians, the book says, descend from this race; and Christ also, it says, was for a time in America. Finally, an angel came who appointed Smith and a friend of his as priests, and they then began the regular formation of a church. Miracles were rumoured; missionaries were sent out and congregations formed in several states, even before polygamy was ordained. In 1843 Smith received the inspired message which proclaimed the new ordinance of “heavenly marriage.” In the following year Smith was murdered, and his successor, Brigham Young, when hostile demonstrations became frequent, led the group of believers on a bold expedition into what was at that time the almost impassable West—to Utah, on the Great Salt Lake.

The settlement grew, and under its rigorously theocratic government made remarkable economic progress. A large garden was planted in the wilderness, and Salt Lake City is to-day a large, modern town on the railroad line to California, and the Mormons compose only half its population. But they alone and under terrific difficulties carried civilization across the prairies, and as a token of their industry the largest church in America stands there, the Mormon Temple, which they built by forty years of labour, exactly according to the plans which Young saw in a vision. While people are readily admitted to the curious hall of prayer, no strangers are allowed to enter the Temple. Polygamy was introduced, undoubtedly, from no immoral motives, but from the religious belief that an unmarried woman will not go to heaven. Economic motives may have helped the matter along, since the priests permitted new marriages only when the contracting parties had sufficient means to support several families, and so used the satisfaction of polygamous instincts as a reward for unusual economic industry.

The stern morality of the American people has always looked on the Mormon tribe as a thorn in the flesh, and yet it was difficult for a long time for the federal government to suppress the abuse. Serious opposition began in the early eighties with the passing of special laws; thousands of Mormons were put in prison, and millions of dollars were paid in fines. The Mormons fought with every legal means, but were repudiated by the Supreme Court, and finally gave in. In the year 1890 their president, Woodruff, published an ordinance forbidding new polygamous marriages. This has not prevented the Mormons from holding polygamy sacred, and they have abandoned it only on compulsion. The marriages which were solemnized before 1890 are still in force. Such polygamous families do not impress a stranger unfavourably, since, in spite of its complexity, their family life appears to be a happy one. From Utah the sect has spread to Idaho and other Western States, and embraces now perhaps half a million people.

There have been some other curious religious congregations with unusual marriage ordinances. For instance, the Oneida Community has had an apparently most immoral form of cohabitation. It is here a question not so much of religion as of a communistic and economic experiment. Such experiments are, for the most part, short-lived and flourish secretly. Celibacy is practised by fifteen communities of Shakers, who live in a communistic way. They broke away from the Quakers at the end of the eighteenth century, and have unique religious ideas. God, and, therefore, every human soul, is thought to be a double principle, both male and female. The male principle was revealed in Christ, the female in an English woman, Anne Lee, a Quakeress whose visions during imprisonment occasioned the formation of this sect.

The Shakers were so called because they are “shaken” by religious fervour; and the lower classes of the American populace are uncommonly predisposed to this ecstatic and hysterical religious excitement. General revivals, great camp-meetings, and hysterical and tumultuous meetings of prayer, with theatrical conversions and divine illuminations, have always played a prominent role in America. Thus at the end of the fifties, after a time of declining piety, a wave of religious conversion swept over the country, having all the appearance of a nervous epidemic. The doings of the rapidly growing Salvation Army also often have a somewhat neurotic character.

It is difficult to say why this is so. As in every form of hysteria, suggestion is, of course, an important factor; but the manifestations are so marked that there must be some special disposition thereto. It almost seems as if a lack of other stimulants produced a pathological demand for religious excitement. Certainly in those portions of the country which are most affected, the life of the great masses, at least until recently, has been colourless and dull. There has been no stimulation of the fancy, such as is afforded by the Catholic Church, or in former days was provided by the romantic events of monarchical history. People have lacked the stimulation of amusements, festivals, the theatre and music; daily life has been hard, morality rigorous, and alcohol was thought sinful. Where religion has been the single intellectual stimulus, it has become an intoxicant for the pining soul: and persons drank until they obtained a sort of hysterical relief from deadly reality.

The seeds of mysticism easily take root on such a soil, and it is no accident that the chief mystical movements of our times have gone on in America, the country which so many suppose to be the theatre of purely material interests. Here we find, first of all, the Spiritualistic movement which began in 1848, when mysterious knockings were heard by the Fox family in a village of New York State. The sounds were interpreted as messages from dead friends, and as soon as these spirits commenced their material manifestations it was only a short step for them to appear in person. The leading card of Spiritualism is its supposed proof of life after death, and all its other features are secondary.

On the other hand, it is natural for a teaching which depends on such mysterious phenomena to turn its interest to other supposably unexplained phenomena, and therewith to become a general rallying-ground for mysticism. Although the Spiritualistic Church has about fifty thousand members, these are by no means all of the actual Spiritualists in America. Indeed, if Spiritualism were to be taken in a broader sense, including a belief in telepathic influences, mysterious communications, etc., the number of believers would mount into the millions, with some adherents in the most highly educated circles. Even in enlightened Boston a Spiritualistic church stands in the best section of the town. Its services have been grievously exposed from time to time, but the deceptions have been quickly forgotten, and this successful “religious” enterprise is once more given credence. A short time ago, in Philadelphia, the spirit of Darwin was constrained to write a pious final contribution to his works for the benefit of a well-paying audience, on a typewriter which stood in the middle of the room, and which, of course, could be easily operated electrically from some other room.

To be sure, it would be unfair to say that all spiritualism is based on deception, although the lively wish to see dead relatives, or receive communications from them, puts a high premium on the pious fraud. Indeed, it would be over-hasty to say that all the spiritualistic conceptions go against the laws of nature; for, since the philosophy of Spiritualism has conceived of an ether organism which pervades the molecular body and survives death, it has fairly cleverly met the demands of casual explanation. And it may well be thought probable that in the world of mental influences there is much remaining to be found out, just as a hundred years ago there were hypnotism and Röntgen rays; so that the zeal of very many people to assist in the solving of these mysteries is, perhaps, easily understood.

But just where these most serious motives prevail and all idea of conscious deception is excluded, one sees the profound affiliation of intellectual interests with the mystical tendency. Even the Society for Psychical Research, which aims to investigate mysterious phenomena in a thoroughly scientific way, has, after all, mostly held the interest of men who are more inclined to mysticism than to science. Mrs. Piper, of Arlington, may be called the most important spiritualistic medium, and Hodgson her most interesting prophet. The whole movement is, after all, religious. Spiritualism has a near neighbour in Theosophy, which is specially strong in California. The great literary charm of Hindu philosophy makes this form of mysticism more attractive to minds that are repelled by its vulgar forms. Hindu mysticism has, undoubtedly, a future in America.

There is a still larger circle of people who believe in Christian Science, the discovery of Mary Baker G. Eddy. When Mrs. Eddy suffered a severe illness at Lynn in 1867, she was seized by the idea that all illness might be only an illusion or hallucination of the soul, since God alone is real, and in Him there can be naught but good. It was therefore necessary only to realize this deceptive unreality, in order to relieve the soul of its error and so to regain health. She herself became well and proceeded to read her principle of mental healing into the Bible, and so to develop a metaphysical system. She commenced her work of healing without medicine, and in 1875 published her book, “Science and Health, With a Key to the Holy Scriptures.” The book is a medium-sized work, has a system not unskilfully constructed, although unskilfully expressed, and one who is familiar with the history of philosophy will find in it not one original thought. In spite of this, the book must be called one of the most successful of modern times. It is a rather expensive book, but has been bought by the hundreds of thousands. Congregations have formed all over the country, and built some magnificent churches; and, finally, the infectious bacillus of this social malady has been wafted across the ocean. The great feature of this new sect is its practice of healing; there are to-day some thirty institutions giving instruction in the art of metaphysical healing, and the public supports thousands of spiritual healers.

The movement is benefited by the general mistrust of academic medicine which pervades the lower classes of America, as may be seen from the ridiculous popularity of patent medicines. The cult is also undoubtedly helped by actual and often surprising cures. The healing power of faith is no new discovery; the effects of auto-suggestion are always important in nervous disorders, and there are indeed few pathological conditions in which nervous disorders do not play a part. Mrs. Eddy’s disciples, in their consultation offices, do with the help of the inner consistency of their metaphysical system, which the logic of the average patient cannot break down, what Catholicism does at Lourdes by stimulating the imagination. The main support of Christian Science is, after all, the general mystical and religious disposition. Where religion plays such a mighty rôle in the popular mind, religious vagaries and perversions must be the order of the day; but even the perversions show how thoroughly the whole American people is pervaded by the religious spirit.

Not only would it be unfair to estimate the religion of America by its perversions, but even if the religious life of the country were amply described in the many forms of its conservative congregations and confessions, the most important thing would be still unmentioned: the spirit of moral self-perfection common to all the religions of the country. To be sure, it is not to be supposed that all the morality in this nation is of religious origin. One sees clearly that this is not the case if one looks at American social ethics, which are independent of religious ethics, and if one notices how often motives from the two spheres unite in bringing about certain actions. The Americans would have developed a marked morality if they had not been brought up in church; but the church has co-operated, specially when the nation was young and when far-reaching impulses were being developed. And while the forms of faith have changed, the moral ideas have remained much the same.

Benjamin Wadsworth was president of Harvard College in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and no greater religious contrast could be found than that between him and his present successor in office; between the orthodox Calvinist who said that it is by God’s unmerited grace that we are not all burning in the flames of hell, as our sins so richly deserve, and the liberal Unitarian of to-day. And yet President Eliot could rightly say that, even after these two hundred years, he gladly subscribes to all the moral tenets of his early predecessor. Wadsworth exhorted parents to teach their sons to live soberly, virtuously, and in the fear of God; to keep them from idleness, pride, envy, and malice; to teach them simple, kindly, and courteous behaviour; to see that they learn to be useful in the world, and so marry and carry on their daily business as to avoid temptation and to grow in grace and in the fear of God.

Benjamin Franklin’s catalogue of virtues which he desired to realize in himself, was: temperance, silence, order, simplicity, industry, honesty, justice, self-restraint, purity, peacefulness, continence, and modesty. In this he was not thinking of the church, but his worldly morals came to much the same thing as the Puritan’s ethics. The goal is everywhere moral self-perfection—to learn, first of all, to govern one’s natural desires, not for the sake of the effect on others, but for the effect on one’s self. To put it extremely, the religious admonition might have read: Give, not that your neighbour may have more, but that you may have less; not in order to give your neighbour pleasure, but to discipline yourself in overcoming greed. The social morality developed the opposite motives; and even to-day the joining of both tendencies may be followed everywhere, and especially in many philanthropic deeds. The two extremes go together: social enthusiasm for being helpful, and the fundamentally religious instinct to give alms.

Within the circle of ecclesiastical influences, moral concern for the self is everywhere in great evidence—the desire to be sober, temperate, industrious, modest, and God-fearing. It has been said that these centuries of self-mastery are the cause of America’s final triumph. Too many other factors are there left out of account, but undoubtedly the theocratic discipline which held back all immoderation and indulgence, and often intolerantly extinguished the lower instincts, has profoundly influenced national life. And to this all churches have contributed alike. It seems as if the Calvinistic God of severity had been complemented by a God of love; but practically all churches have worked as if it was necessary, first of all, to improve radically evil men, to convert evildoers, and to uproot natural instincts. The American church is to-day what it has always been, whether in or outside of Calvinism, a church militant, strong in its battle against unrighteous desires. To be churchly means to be in the battle-camp of a party; in the camp itself they make merry, but every one is armed against the enemy.

The final result in the great masses of people is an uncommonly high degree of personal purity as compared with the masses of Europe. Here one is not to think of the slums of large cities nor of the masses of still un-Americanized immigrants from Southern Europe, nor of those people who are under the influence of temporary abnormal conditions, such as the adventurers who flock together wherever gold and silver are discovered. One must look at the people in the fields and the work-shops, in the country and the small city, or at the average citizen of the large city, and one will get from these bustling millions an impression of moral earnestness, simplicity, and purity. These people are poor in imagination and vulgar; and yet one feels that, in the humble home where the average man has probably grown up, the family Bible lay on the table. It is not accidental that the zealous Puritans of Colonial times believed not only that man is preserved from hellfire by the special grace of God, but also that the colonists were a chosen people and favoured by God with a remarkably large proportion who enjoyed His grace. They saw a moral rigour everywhere around them, and could not suppose that such Puritan living was the path to everlasting torment. Since then life has become endlessly complicated, the pressure of circumstances has increased, temptations are a thousandfold more numerous, and consequently the general level of morality has shifted. Much is to-day called harmless which was then called sinful; but to-day, as then, the number of those who live above the general level of moral requirements is astonishingly large.

As everywhere in the world, so in America; temptation and distress fill the prisons with unfortunate and mistaken human beings. But this fact belongs in a wholly different social connection. We are thinking here of the life of those who are not amenable to law; for intemperance, envy, incontinence, coarseness, servility, brutality, lack of character and kindness, and vulgarity are, in themselves, not punishable. If we speak of those who are thus within the law, we find that life in America is purer, simpler, and more moral than in Europe. And the average American who lives for some time on the Continent of Europe comes home dismayed at the exaggerated and specious politeness of Europe and rejoiced at the greater humanity of the Americans. The incontinence of France, the intemperance of Germany, the business dishonesty of Southern Europe, are favourite examples in America of European lack of virtue; and aside from all local differences, the Americans believe that they find everywhere in Europe the symptoms of moral decadence and laxity, and on finding the same things in large American cities, they put the blame on Europe.

At first sight it looks as if one who lives in a glass house were throwing stones. The foreigner, on hearing of American Sabbath observance, piety, temperance, continence, benevolence, and honesty, is at once inclined to call up the other side of the situation: he has seen cases of hypocrisy, he knows how many divorces and bank robberies there are; he has heard about benevolence from purely selfish motives, and about corruption.

All this is true, and, nevertheless, false. On examining the situation more closely, the foreigner will see that however many sins there are, the life of the people is intrinsically pure and moral and devout. It is true that there are many divorces, and that these are made extremely easy in some states; but infidelity is seldom the motive. The cause lies in the democratic spirit of self-determination, which wants to loosen bonds that individuals no longer freely recognize. It might be said that this is a higher individual morality which ends marriage when it has lost its inner sanctity. The American divorce does not indicate any lack of marriage fidelity; married life is, throughout the nation, distinctly purer than it is in Europe, and this is still more true of the life of young men. To be sure, it is easy to get material for piquant booklets, as “From Darkest America,” and there is very much vice in Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco. The American is no saint, and a large city is a large city the world over. But undoubtedly the sexual tension is incomparably less in American life than in European, as may be seen by comparing the life of American students with that of German students of the same age. This is not due to deficient romantic feeling, for there is nowhere more flirting going on than in America; but a genuine respect of womanhood, without regard to social class, lends purity to the life of the men.

It is true that American temperance does not prevent some men from drinking too much, and the regular prohibition laws of many of the states have not succeeded in suppressing a desire for physiological stimulation; and it may be even affirmed that the legal interdiction of the sale of alcohol in states or communities, unless an overwhelming majority of the population believes in abstinence, has done more harm than good. But it is clear that the fight against alcohol which has been carried on for a hundred years, and notably by the church, has done an infinite amount of good. The whole nation is strongly set against tippling, and only the dregs of society gather in the saloons. And much more has been done by moral than by legislative influence to suppress the unhappy licentious and criminal consequences of drink among the lower classes; and among higher classes the deadening intellectual influence of sitting in beer-houses and so wasting strength, time, and moral vigour, is almost unknown. In good society one does not drink in the presence of ladies except at dinner, and the total abstainer becomes thereby no more conspicuous than the man in Germany who will not smoke; and those who drink at table are content with very little. Evening table gatherings, such as the German Kommerse, are accounted incorrect, and drunkenness is dishonourable. These ideas are making their way among the lower classes; railway companies and other corporations have not the least difficulty in employing only temperance men. The temperance movement, in spite of its mistakes and exaggerations, and aside from its great benefit to the health of the social organism, represents a splendid advance in moral self-control. A nation which accounts as immoral all indulgence in alcohol that interferes with self-control has made thereby a tremendous ethical advance.

It would be still easier to expose the caricatures which are published relative to Sabbath observance. One may say it is hypocritical for the law to forbid theatrical performances on Sunday for which the scenes are changed and the curtain dropped, but to allow several New York theatres to perform the cheapest vaudeville without curtain and without a change of scenes. But the fact is merely that the heavy immigration from Europe has brought about conditions in the metropolis which do not accord with the ideas of the rural majority in the state. In Boston no one would think of evading such a law, because the theatres would remain empty; where the attempt has been made to keep large exhibitions open on Sunday, it has been unsuccessful.

The American people still cling to a quiet Sabbath observance, and the day of rest and meditation is a national institution. No law and no scruples forbid the railway companies to run more trains on Sunday than on other days, as they do in Germany; but instead of this there are fewer railway trains, and these are poorly patronized. People do not travel on Sunday, even if they no longer visit the grave-yard, which was the Puritan idea of a permissible Sunday stroll. Concessions are more and more made to Sunday amusements, it is true; golf is played on Sunday in many places, and in contrast to England the Sunday newspapers have become so voluminous that if one read their fifty or sixty pages through, one would not have time to go to church. But in the main the entire American-born population, without constraint and therefore without hypocrisy, observes Sunday as a day of self-abnegation; and even many men who are not abstainers during the week drink no wine on Sunday.

The masses of the people are to a high degree truthful and honourable. It has been well said that the American has no talent for lying, and mistrust of a man’s word strikes the Yankee as specifically European. From the street urchin to the minister of state, frankness is the predominant trait; and all institutions are arranged for a thorough-going and often exaggerated confidence. We have shown before that in the means of conveyance, such as street cars, the honesty of the public is not watched, that in the country the farm-house door is hardly locked, and that the most important mercantile agreements are concluded by a word of mouth or nod of the head. There are scoundrels who abuse all this, who swindle the street-car companies and circulate false checks; but the present customs could never have arisen if the general public had not justified this blind confidence. It is true that many a bank cashier robs the treasury; but it is much more characteristic to see a newspaper boy, when one gives him five cents by mistake, run after one in order to return the right amount. It is true that many an Irish politician has entered politics in order to steal from the public funds, but it is a more characteristic fact that everywhere letters too large to go in the letter-box are laid on top of it in the confidence that they will not be stolen. A school-boy who lies to the teacher often has, in Europe, the sympathy of the whole class, but not in America; children despise a lie, and in this sense the true American remains a child through life.

As the American education makes for honesty, so it does for self-sacrifice, which is the finest result of the Puritan idea of self-perfection. The ascetic sacrifice for the mere sake of sacrifice goes against the American love of activity, although if the many New England popular tales are really taken from life, even this way of pleasing God is not uncommon in the North-Eastern States. But all classes of the population are willing to make sacrifices for an end, however abstract and impersonal. The spirit of sacrifice is not genuine when it parades itself before the public; it works in secret. But anybody who watches what goes on quietly, who notes the life of the teacher, the minister, and the physician in all country districts, who sees how parents sometimes suffer in order to give their children a better education than they themselves had, will be surprised at the infinite and patient sacrifices which are daily made by hard-working people. The spirit of quiet forbearance, so little noticeable on the surface, is clear to every one who looks somewhat deeply into American life.

Thus the more dangerous forms of missionary activity have always attracted Americans; and nowhere else has the nurse’s profession, which requires so much patience, attracted so many women. All the world knows the sacrificing spirit which was shown during the war against slavery, and there is no less of that spirit in times of peace. Every day one observes the readiness of men to risk their own lives in order to save those of others; and one is surprised to see that the public understands this as a matter of course. The more modest and naturally more frequent form of self-sacrifice consists in giving of one’s own possessions, whether a small sum to the contribution-box of the Salvation Army, or a present of millions to benevolent institutions. It is true that private benefactions are open to interpretation; sometimes they are made for the sake of social recognition, more often they are merely superficial, inconsiderate, or ill-timed, and therefore they are often detrimental to the community. But after all allowances, the volume of contributions to all benevolent purposes is simply astonishing; and here, too, the historical development shows that of all motives the religious has been the strongest.

Yet in all these movements the religious motive, the soul’s salvation, has been only one among other influences that are rather social. American philanthropy is perhaps more often religiously coloured than it is in Germany; but the more benefaction comes to be in the hands of organizations with a trained administration, the more the social and economic factors appear. In the same way, Sunday observance and temperance have come to be social problems which are almost distinct from ecclesiastical considerations; and if the American is honest, upright, and pure, he himself scarcely knows to-day whether he is so as a Christian or as a gentleman. Questions of morality point everywhere from religious to social considerations.

PART FOUR SOCIAL LIFE