It would be difficult to find a clearer expression of the old doctrine of individualism than is uttered by Carlyle in his London lecture on "The Hero as Man of Letters." Listen to the grim child of Calvinism as he fires his "Annandale grapeshot" into that sophisticated London audience: "Men speak too much about the world.... The world\'s being saved will not save us; nor the world\'s being lost destroy us. We should look to ourselves.... For the saving of the world I will trust confidently to the Maker of the world; and look a little to my own saving, which I am more competent to!"

Carlyle was never more soundly Puritanic, never more perfectly within the lines of the moral traditions of his race than in these injunctions to let the world go and to care for the individual soul.[Pg 210]

We are familiar with the doctrine on this side of the Atlantic. Here is a single phrase from Emerson\'s Journal of September, 1833, written on his voyage home from that memorable visit to Europe where he first made Carlyle\'s acquaintance. "Back again to myself," wrote Emerson, as the five-hundred-ton sailing ship beat her way westward for a long month across the stormy North Atlantic:—"Back again to myself.—A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is made a law unto himself. All real good or evil that can befall him must be from himself.... The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself."

In the following August he is writing:—

    "Societies, parties, are only incipient stages, tadpole states of men, as caterpillars are social, but the butterfly not. The true and finished man is ever alone."

On March 23, 1835:—

    "Alone is wisdom. Alone is happiness. Society nowadays makes us low-spirited, hopeless. Alone is Heaven."

And once more:—

[Pg 211]

    "If ?schylus is that man he is taken for, he has not yet done his office when he has educated the learned of Europe for a thousand years. He is now to approve himself a master of delight to me. If he cannot do that, all his fame shall avail him nothing. I were a fool not to sacrifice a thousand ?schyluses to my intellectual integrity."

These quotations have to do with the personal life. Let me next illustrate the individualism of the eighteen-thirties by the attitude of two famous individualists toward the prosaic question of paying taxes to the State. Carlyle told Emerson that he should pay taxes to the House of Hanover just as long as the House of Hanover had the physical force to collect them,—and not a day longer.

Henry Thoreau was even more recalcitrant. Let me quote him:—

    "I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere[Pg 212] flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand on the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman[Pg 213] with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it."

Here is Thoreau\'s attitude toward the problems of the inner life. The three quotations are from his Walden:—

"Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation."

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience,[Pg 214] and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

"It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind."

All of these quotations from Emerson and Thoreau are but various modes of saying "Let the world go." Everybody knows that in later crises of American history, both Thoreau and Emerson forgot their old preaching of individualism, or at least merged it in the larger doctrine of identification of the individual with the acts and emotions of the community. And nevertheless as men of letters they habitually laid stress upon the rights and duties of the private person. Upon a hundred brilliant pages they preached the gospel that society is in conspiracy against the individual manhood of every one of its members.

They had a right to this doctrine. They came by it honestly through long lines of ancestral heritage. The republicanism of the seventeenth century in the American forests, as well as upon[Pg 215] the floor of the English House of Commons, had asserted that private persons had the right to make and unmake kings. The republican theorists of the eighteenth century had insisted that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were the birthright of each individual. This doctrine was related, of course, to the doctrine of equality. If republicanism teaches that "I am as good as others," democracy is forever hinting "Others are as good as I." Democracy has been steadily extending the notion of rights and duties. The first instinct, perhaps, is to ask what is right, just, lawful, for me? Next, what is right, just, lawful for my crowd? That is to say, my family, my clan, my race, my country. The third instinct bids one ask what is right and just and lawful, not merely for me, and for men like me, but for everybody. And when we get that third question properly answered, we can afford to close school-house and church and court-room, for this world\'s work will have ended.

We have already glanced at various phases of colonial individualism. We have had a glimpse of Cotton Mather prostrate upon the dusty floor of his study, agonizing now for[Pg 216] himself and now for the countries of Europe; we have watched Jonathan Edwards in his solitary ecstasies in the Northampton and the Stockbridge woods; we have seen Franklin preaching his gospel of personal thrift and of getting on in the world. Down to the very verge of the Revolution the American pioneer spirit was forever urging the individual to fight for his own hand. Each boy on the old farms had his own chores to do; each head of a family had to plan for himself. The most tragic failure of the individual in those days was the poverty or illness which compelled him to "go on the town." To be one of the town poor indicated that the individualistic battle had been fought and lost. No one ever dreamed, apparently, that a time for old-age pensions and honorable retiring funds was coming. The feeling against any form of community assistance was like the bitter hatred of the workhouse among English laborers of the eighteen-forties.

The stress upon purely personal qualities gave picturesqueness, color, and vigor to the early life of the United States. Take the persons whom Parkman describes in his Oregon Trail. They have the perfect clearness of outline[Pg 217] of the portraits by Walter Scott and the great Romantic school of novelists who loved to paint pictures of interesting individual men. There is the same stress upon individualistic portraiture in Irving\'s Astoria; in the humorous journals of early travellers in the Southern States. It is the secret of the curiosity with which we observe the gamblers and miners and stage-drivers described by Bret Harte. In the rural communities of to-day, in the older portions of the country, and in the remoter settlements of the West and Southwest, the individual man has a sort of picturesque, and, as it were, artistic value, which the life of cities does not allow. The gospel of self-reliance and of solitude is not preached more effectively by the philosophers of Concord than it is by the backwoodsmen, the spies, and the sailors of Fenimore Cooper. Individualism as a doctrine of perfection for the private person and individualism as a literary creed have thus gone hand in hand. "Produce great persons, the rest follows," cried Walt Whitman. He was thinking at the moment about American society and politics. But he believed that the same law held good in poetry. Once get your great man and[Pg 218] let him abandon himself to poetry and the great poetry will be the result. It was almost precisely the same teaching as in Carlyle\'s lecture on "The Hero as Poet."

Well, it is clear enough nowadays that both Whitman and Carlyle underrated the value of discipline. The lack of discipline is the chief obstacle to effective individualism. The private person must be well trained, or he cannot do his work; and as civilization advances, it becomes exceedingly difficult to train the individual without social co?peration. A Paul or a Mahomet may discipline his own soul in the Desert of Arabia; he may there learn the lessons that may later make him a leader of men. But for the average man and indeed for most of the exceptional men, the path to effectiveness lies through social and professional discipline. Here is where the frontier stage of our American life was necessarily weak. We have seen that our ancestors gained something, no doubt, from their spirit of unconventionally and freedom. But they also lost something through their dislike for discipline, their indifference to criticism, their ineradicable tendency, whether in business, in diplomacy, in art and[Pg 219] letters and education, to go "across lots." A certain degree of physical orderliness was, indeed, imposed upon our ancestors by the conditions of pioneer life. The natural prodigality and recklessness of frontier existence was here and there sharply checked. Order is essential in a camp, and the thin line of colonies was all camping. A certain instinct for order underlay that resourcefulness which impresses every reader of our history. Did the colonist need a tool? He learned to make it himself. Isolation from the mother country was a stimulus to the inventive imagination. Before long they were maintaining public order in the same ingenious fashion in which they kept house. Appeals to London took too much time. "We send a complaint this year," ran the saying, "the next year they send to inquire, the third year the ministry is changed." No wonder that resourcefulness bred independent action, stimulated the Puritan taste for individualism, and led the way to self-government.

Yet who does not know that the inherent instinct for political order may be accompanied by mental disorderliness? Even your modern Englishman—as the saying goes—"muddles[Pg 220] through." The minds of our American forefathers were not always lucid. The mysticism of the New England Calvinists sometimes bred fanaticism. The practical and the theoretical were queerly blended. The essential unorderliness of the American mind is admirably illustrated by that "Father of all the Yankees," Benjamin Franklin. No student of Franklin\'s life fails to be impressed by its happy casualness, its cheerful flavor of the rogue-romance. Gil Blas himself never drifted into and out of an adventure with a more offhand and imperturbable adroitness. Franklin went through life with the joyous inventiveness of the amateur. He had the amateur\'s enthusiasm, coupled with a clairvoyant penetration into technical problems such as few amateurs have possessed. With all of his wonderful patience towards other men, Franklin had in the realm of scientific experiment something of the typical impatience of the mere dabbler. He was inclined to lose interest in the special problem before it was worked out. His large, tolerant intelligence was often as unorderly as his papers and accounts. He was a wonderful colonial Jack-of-all-trades; with a range of suggestion, a resourcefulness,[Pg 221] a knack of assimilation, a cosmopolitan many-sidedness, which has left us perpetually his debtors. Under different surroundings, and disciplined by a more severe and orderly training, Franklin might easily have developed the very highest order of professional scientific achievement. His natural talent for organization of men and institutions, his "early projecting public spirit," his sense of the lack of formal educational advantages in the colonies, made him the founder of the Philadelphia Academy, the successful agitator for public libraries. Academicism, even in the narrow sense, owes much to this LL.D. of St. Andrews, D.C.L. of Oxford, and intimate associate of French academicians. But one smiles a little, after all, to see the bland printer in this academic company: he deserves his place there, indeed, but he is something more and other than his associates. He is the type of youthful, inexhaustible colonial America; reckless of precedent, self-taught, splendidly alive; worth, to his day and generation, a dozen born academicians; and yet suggesting by his very imperfections, that the Americans of a later day, working under different conditions, are bound to develop a sort of professional[Pg 222] skill, of steady, concentrated, ordered intellectual activity, for which Franklin possessed the potential capacity rather than the opportunity and the desire.

Yet there were latent lines of order, hints and prophecies of a coming fellowship, running deep and straight beneath the confused surface of the preoccupied colonial consciousness. In another generation we see the rude Western democracy asserting itself in the valley of the Mississippi. This breed of pioneers, like their fathers on the Atlantic coast line, could turn their hands to anything, because they must. "The average man," says Mr. Herbert Croly, "without any special bent or qualifications, was in the pioneer states the useful man. In that country it was sheer waste to spend much energy upon tasks which demanded skill, prolonged experience, high technical standards, or exclusive devotion.... No special equipment was required. The farmer was obliged to be all kinds of a rough mechanic. The business man was merchant, manufacturer, and storekeeper. Almost everybody was something of a politician. The number of parts which a man of energy played in his time was astonishingly[Pg 223] large. Andrew Jackson was successively a lawyer, judge, planter, merchant, general, politician, and statesman; and he played most of these parts with conspicuous success. In such a society a man who persisted in one job, and who applied the most rigorous and exacting standards to his work, was out of place and really inefficient. His finished product did not serve its temporary purpose much better than did the current careless and hasty product, and his higher standards and peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism on the easy methods of his neighbors. He interfered with the rough good-fellowship which naturally arises among a group of men who submit good naturedly and uncritically to current standards. It is no wonder, consequently, that the pioneer Democracy viewed with distrust and aversion the man with a special vocation and high standards of achievement."

The truth of this comment is apparent to everybody. It explains the still lingering popular suspicion of the "academic" type of man. But we are likely to forget that back of all that easy versatility and reckless variety of effort there was some sound and patient and constructive[Pg 224] thinking. Lincoln used to describe himself humorously, slightingly, as a "mast-fed" lawyer, one who had picked up in the woods the scattered acorns of legal lore. It was a true enough description, but after all, there were very few college-bred lawyers in the Eighth Illinois Circuit or anywhere else who could hold their own, even in a purely professional struggle, with that long-armed logician from the backwoods.

There was once a "mast-fed" novelist in this country, who scandalously slighted his academic opportunities, went to sea, went into the navy, went to farming, and then went into novel-writing to amuse himself. He cared nothing and knew nothing about conscious literary art; his style is diffuse, his syntax the despair of school-teachers, and many of his characters are bores. But once let him strike the trail of a story, and he follows it like his own Hawkeye; put him on salt water or in the wilderness, and he knows rope and paddle, axe and rifle, sea and forest and sky; and he knows his road home to the right ending of a story by an instinct as sure as an Indian\'s. Professional novelists like Balzac, professional critics[Pg 225] like Sainte-Beuve, stand amazed at Fenimore Cooper\'s skill and power. The true engineering and architectural lines are there. They were not painfully plotted beforehand, like George Eliot\'s. Cooper took, like Scott, "the easiest path across country," just as a bee-hunter seems to take the easiest path through the woods. But the bee-hunter, for all his apparent laziness, never loses sight of the air-drawn line, marked by the homing bee; and your Last of the Mohicans will be instinctively, inevitably right, while your Daniel Deronda will be industriously wrong.

Cooper literally builded better than he knew. Obstinately unacademic in his temper and training, he has won the suffrages of the most fastidious and academic judges of excellence in his profession. The secret is, I suppose, that the lawlessness, the amateurishness, the indifference to standards were on the surface,—apparent to everybody,—the soundness and rightness of his practice were unconscious.

Franklin and Lincoln and Cooper, therefore, may be taken as striking examples of individuals trained in the old happy-go-lucky way, and yet with marked capacities for socialization,[Pg 226] for fellowship. They succeeded, even by the vulgar tests of success, in spite of their lack of discipline. But for most men the chief obstacle to effective labor even as individuals is the lack of thoroughgoing training.

It is scarcely necessary to add that there are vast obstacles in the way of individualism as a working theory of society. Carlyle\'s theory of "Hero Worship" has fewer adherents than for half a century. It is picturesque,—that conception of a great, sincere man and of a world reverencing him and begging to be led by him. But the difficulty is that contemporary democracy does not say to the Hero, as Carlyle thought it must say, "Govern me! I am mad and miserable, and cannot govern myself!"

Democracy says to the Hero, "Thank you very much, but this is our affair. Join us, if you like. We shall be glad of your company. But we are not looking for governors. We propose to govern ourselves."

Even from the point of view of literature and art,—fields of activity where the individual performer has often been felt to be quite independent of his audience,—it is quite evident nowadays that the old theory of individualism[Pg 227] breaks down. Even your lyric poet, who more than any other artist stands or sings alone, falls easily into mere lyric eccentricity if he is not bound to his fellows by wholesome and normal ties. In fact, this lyric eccentricity, weakness, wistfulness, is one of the notable defects of American poetry. We have always been lacking in the more objective forms of literary art, like epic and drama. Poe, and the imitators of Poe, have been regarded too often by our people as the normal type of poet. One must not forget the silent solitary ecstasies that have gone into the making of enduring lyric verse, but our literature proves abundantly how soon sweetness may turn to an Emily Dickinson strain of morbidness; how fatally the lovely becomes transformed into the queer. The history of the American short story furnishes many similar examples. The artistic intensity of a Hawthorne, his ethical and moral preoccupations, are all a part of the creed of individualistic art. But both Hawthorne and Poe would have written,—one dare not say better stories, but at least greater and broader and more human stories,—if they had not been forced to walk so constantly in[Pg 228] solitary pathways. That fellowship in artistic creation which has characterized some of the greatest periods of art production was something wholly absent from the experience of these gifted and lonely men. Even Emerson and Thoreau wrote "whim" over their portals more often than any artist has the privilege to write it. Emerson never had any thorough training, either in philosophy, theology, or history. He admits it upon a dozen smiling pages. Perhaps it adds to his purely personal charm, just as Montaigne\'s confession of his intellectual and moral weaknesses heightens our fondness for the Prince of Essayists. But the deeper fact is that not only Emerson and Thoreau, Poe and Hawthorne, but practically every American writer and artist from the beginning has been forced to do his work without the sustaining and heartening touch of national fellowship and pride. Emerson himself felt the chilling poverty in the intellectual and emotional life of the country. He betrays it in this striking passage from his Journal, about the sculptor Greenough:—

    "What interest has Greenough to make a good statue? Who cares whether it is good?[Pg 229] A few prosperous gentlemen and ladies; but the Universal Yankee Nation roaring in the capitol to approve or condemn would make his eye and hand and heart go to a new tune."

Those words were written in 1836, bu............