Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/339

of industrial pioneering, in the hour when the life of business had become obligatory upon every American man! How, easy it is to understand why it was so generally used as a guidebook by Americans travelling in Europe! Pretending only to ridicule the sentimental pretensions of the author's own pseudo-cultivated fellow-countrymen, it ridiculed in fact everything of which the author's totally uncultivated fellow-countrymen were ignorant, everything for which they wished just such an excuse to be ignorant where knowledge would have contributed to an individual development incompatible with success in business, a knowledge that would have involved an expenditure in thought and feeling altogether too costly for the mind that was fixed upon the main chance. It attacked not only the illegitimate pretensions of the human spirit but the legitimate pretensions also. It expressly made the American business man as good as Titian and a little better: it made him feel that art and history and all the great, elevated, admirable, painful discoveries of humankind were things not worth wasting one's emotions over. Oh, the Holy Land, yes! But the popular Biblical culture of the nineteenth century was notoriously, as Matthew Arnold pointed out, the handmaid of commercial philistinism; and besides, ancient Palestine was hardly a rival, in civilization, of modern America. "I find your people—your best people, I suppose they are—very nice, very intelligent, very pleasant—talk only about Europe," says a travelling Englishman in one of Howells's novels. "They talk about London and about Paris, and about Rome; there seems to be quite a passion for Italy; but they don't seem interested in their own country. I can't make it out." It was true, true at least of the colonial society of New England; and no doubt Mark Twain's dash of cold water had its salutary effect. The defiant Americanism of The Innocents Abroad marked, almost as definitely as Whitman's Leaves of Grass, the opening of the national consciousness of which every one hopes such great things in the future. But, unlike Leaves of Grass, having served to open it, it served also to postpone its fruition. Its whole tendency ran precisely counter to Whitman's, in sterilizing, that is to say, instead of promoting the creative impulses in the individual. It buttressed the feeble confidence of our busy race in a commercial civilization so little capable of commanding the true spiritual allegiance of men that they could not help anxiously enquiring every travelling foreigner's opinion of it. Here we have the measure