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It should have been a protest against a sterile and demoralizing Americanism the Americanism of national irresponsibility and indiscriminate individualism. The bondage from which Americans needed, and still need, emancipation is not from Europe, but from the evasions, the incoherence, the impatience, and the easy-going conformity of their own intellectual and moral traditions.
The former has ended in the dedication of a continent to Individualism there, under republican forms, before the close of the present century, one hundred million people, with no more restraint than their common security requires, will be pursuing an unfettered career.
Most men have no land, so that one man may own a county. And they call this Individualism! In considering any proposed change, whether imminent or distant, in practice or in day-dream, it is not fair to take as your standard of reference the most highly-favoured individuals under existing conditions. Nor is it fair to take the most unfortunate only. You should look at the average.
We pedantic city people, on the contrary, in the outer construction of our houses, in their joiner-like, barrack architecture with the monotonous rows of windows, have all this time remained prisoners of the Pigtail; but in the gaudy, whimsical decoration of our rooms, on the other hand, we have reached the Rococo once more, and only very recently have we begun to improve by going back to the powerful individualism of the Renaissance as, for instance, in many of the new streets in Munich.
In his moral aspects, he united egoism and altruism, pride and charity, individualism and democracy, fierce patriotism and the cosmopolitan spirit; in his literary aspects he united mysticism and realism, the poet and prophet, the local and the universal; in his religious aspects he united faith and agnosticism, the glorification of the body and all objective things, with an unshakable trust in the reality of the invisible world.
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 coöperation.
He considers, as do all reformers, the prevalent inequalities of economic and political power to be violations of that principle. He also believes in the truth of American political individualism, and in the adequacy, except in certain minor respects, of our systems of inherited institutions. How, then, did these inequalities come about?
There is no extreme of radicalism or conservatism, of individualism or socialism, of Republicanism or Democracy, which does not rest its argument on this one consummate principle. In this respect, the good American finds himself in a situation similar to that with which he was confronted before the Civil War.
Vincenzo Galilei, father of Galileo Galilei, opened the way. He was the active champion of monody, in which a principal melody was intoned or sung to the accompaniment of subordinate harmonies, believing that in music designed to arouse personal feeling individualism should predominate.
When we view the shortcomings of the present individualism, its waste of energy, its fretful overwork, its cruel inequality and the bitter lot that it brings to the uncounted millions of the submerged, we are inclined to cry out against it, and to listen with a ready ear to the easy promises of the idealist.
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