s so
precocious, it has been trained by the genteel tradition to be so wise
for its years, that some indications of a truly native philosophy and
poetry are already to be found. I might mention the humorists, of whom
you here in California have had your share. The humorists, however,
only half escape the genteel tradition; their humour would lose its
savour if they had wholly escaped it. They point to what contradicts
it in the facts; but not in order to abandon the genteel tradition,
for they have nothing solid to put in its place. When they point out
how ill many facts fit into it, they do not clearly conceive that this
militates against the standard, but think it a funny perversity in the
facts. Of course, did they earnestly respect the genteel tradition,
such an incongruity would seem to them sad, rather than ludicrous.
Perhaps the prevalence of humour in America, in and out of season, may
be taken as one more evidence that the genteel tradition is present
pervasively, but everywhere weak. Similarly in Italy, during the
Renaissance, the Catholic tradition could not be banished from the
intellect, since there was nothing articulate to take its place; yet
its hold on the heart was singularly relaxed. The consequence was that
humorists could regale themselves with the foibles of monks and of
cardinals, with the credulity of fools, and the bogus miracles of the
saints; not intending to deny the theory of the church, but caring for
it so little at heart that they could find it infinitely amusing that
it should be contradicted in men's lives and that no harm should come
of it. So when Mark Twain says, "I was born of poor but dishonest
parents," the humour depends on the parody of the genteel Anglo-Saxon
convention that it is disreputable to be poor; but to hint at the
hollowness of it would not be amusing if it did not remain at bottom
one's habitual conviction.

The one American writer who has left the genteel tradition entirely
behind is perhaps Walt Whitman. For this reason educated Americans
find him rather an unpalatable person, who they sincerely protest
ought not to be taken for a representative of their culture; and he
certainly should not, because their culture is so genteel and
traditional. But the foreigner may sometimes think otherwise, since he
is looking for what may have arisen in America to express, not the
polite and conventional American mind, but the spirit and the
inarticulate principles that animate