er
modern democratic government; the frivolity and extravagance which
represent the gasconading of the romantic temper in face of the grey
practicalities of everyday routine; the provincial boastfulness and bad
taste which have resulted from intellectual isolation; the lack, in
short, of a code, whether for thought or speech or behavior. And
nevertheless, one's instinctive Americanism replies, May it not be
better, after all, to have gone without a code for a while, to have
lacked that orderly and methodized and socialized European
intelligence, and to have had the glorious sense of bringing things to
pass in spite of it? There is just one thing that would have been fatal
to our democracy. It is the feeling expressed in La Bruyere's famous
book: "Everything has been said, everything has been written,
everything has been done." Here in America everything was to do; we
were forced to conjugate our verbs in the future tense. No doubt our
existence has been, in some respects, one of barbarism, but it has been
the barbarism of life and not of death. A rawboned baby sprawling on
the mud floor of a Kentucky log cabin is a more hopeful spectacle than
a wholly civilized funeral.

"Perhaps it is," rejoins the European critic, somewhat impatiently,
"but you are confusing the issue. We find certain grave defects in the
American mind, defects which, if you had not had what Thomas Carlyle
called 'a great deal of land for a very few people,' would long ago
have involved you in disaster. You admit the mental defects, but you
promptly shift the question to one of moral qualities, of practical
energy, of subduing your wilderness, and so forth. You have too often
absented yourself from the wedding banquet, from the European symposium
of wit and philosophy, from the polished and orderly and delightful
play and interplay of civilized mind,--and your excuse is the old one:
that you are trying your yoke of oxen and cannot come. We charge you
with intellectual sins, and you enter the plea of moral preoccupation.
If you will permit personal examples, you Americans have made ere now
your national heroes out of men whose reasoning powers remained those
of a college sophomore, who were unable to state an opponent's position
with fairness, who lacked wholly the judicial quality, who were
vainglorious and extravagant, who had, in short, the mind of an
exuberant barbarian; but you instantly forget their intellectual
defects in the presence of their