# Americans (Sherman)

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Americans
By Stuart P. Sherman Author of "Matthew Arnold," "On Contemporary Literature," etc.
New York Charles Scribner's Sons 1922
To R. M. S.
If this book fulfils in any degree the intention of its author, its tendency will be to encourage readers to keep open the channels of their national traditions and to scrutinize contemporary literature in the light of their national past. I am aware of the current feeling that no national past will bear scrutiny. At the present time, there appears to be no "popular" nation anywhere in the world, and the feelings with which many people regard any encouragement of "nationalistic sentiment," either at home or abroad, are as curiously mixed as those which the ancients entertained towards the daughter of Tyndareus, that beautiful and dangerous woman whose fame has outlasted all their empires.
The old bard Stesichorus, we are told, for reviling Helen was stricken blind; but he afterwards "unsaid all the evil he had sung of her," and accepted a legendary account according to which Helen was never actually in Troy but only her phantasm, while she herself, miraculously transported to Egypt, there awaited the return of her lord. Euripides based his Helen upon this story.
Virgil's treatment of the character exhibits the same sense of a perilous impiety in any attempt to ​molest her. During the sack of Troy, while Aeneas was wandering desperately among the flaming relics of his city, he espied the seductive cause of all that woe, cowering on the threshold of a temple, a silent, terror-stricken fugitive. To the beauty that had launched a thousand ships his anguish made him blind. The smoke of a world in ruins smarted in his eyes. Hot wrath possessed him. Though he knew there was no glory to be had from slaying a woman, it seemed to him "very stuff of the conscience" to end that hateful life. He clutched his sword. In the instant, his divine mother appeared to him, stayed his hand, and assured him that the real cause of the war was not Helen but the inclementia divum, the merciless will of the gods.
Many intellectuals look malignly upon nationalism as the baleful Helen of our recent international disaster. Through the smoke of the conflict they thought they heard an angel with vials of wrath crying: "There shall be no more flags!" As an act of the higher piety, holding nothing sacred which is less than Humanity, they dedicated themselves to the destruction in themselves and in others of all those complex beliefs and emotions which the waving flag of one's land stirs in the heart of the ordinary man. The war multiplied the number of refined young liberals, American, English, Jewish, French, Italian, who in the confidences of the midnight hour, aflame with the "higher piety," ​conscientiously spit upon what they would call the time-dishonored notion that, in certain circumstances, it is sweet and beautiful to die for one's country. In order to become men, in the higher sense of the word, our disillusioned youth imagine they must slay the thing they loved—they must cease to be Americans.
It was about the year 1917 that I began to meditate rather frequently upon the relation between civilization and the existence of separate nationalities, national traditions, national sentiments, and the national literatures through which the life of vanished generations survives as a living power among the powers of the present day. That sense for Humanity above all nations, which was quickened by certain appeals of the war, it seemed to me that every intelligent man must applaud, and must desire to strengthen. Sentiments which interfered with the growth of this sense, I thought, should be suppressed, and sacrifices which must be made for the extension of it should be courageously offered. An inflamed and egotistical nationalism appeared to me, as to so many others, the prime cause of the world's catastrophe.
And yet if even for a moment it occurred to me that true citizenship in "the country of all intelligent beings" might necessitate the sacrifice of one's essential Americanism and the use of the knife at ​the root of all fond sentiments related to it, in that instant there came to me, as if in a vision, our "divine mother," the spirit of America as the clear-eyed among our poets and statesmen have seen her, assuring me that the higher piety demands no such immolation. That which we have loved in our country, she declared, that which we have honored in her, that which reveals her to our hearts as proudly beautiful is in no way dangerous to Humanity. On the contrary, the more deeply we loved the true constituent elements of her loveliness, the more clearly we understood her inmost purposes and set ourselves to further them, the more perfectly we should find ourselves in accord with the "friends of mankind" in all nations.
Shall we shun music because we know that barbaric music arouses the cave-man in us and sets the pulses throbbing, the feet dancing, to the "blood-lust song"—forgetting that music of another sort, seizing upon these same impressionable quivering senses of ours, may masteringly attune us to the most harmonious impulses of our nature? Because we fear the tom-toms shall we smash the cathedral organ? All things which have great power are greatly dangerous till they are controlled to right ends; but they are not more dangerous than weak things put in a place where strength is required. At the present moment the isolated individuals and scattered bands of pale-​browed intellectuals striving to realize at once "the federation of the world" by the renunciation of their nationalities—these are weak things where great strength is required.
The most powerful instruments yet existing in the world for the destruction of international order are the nations; yet they are still the most powerful instruments for creating it. The most powerful agents for the corruption of the world's civilization are corrupt national civilizations; yet they are still the most powerful redemptive agents. Power is the good which the world craves. We cannot afford to waste it or to turn away from it. The friends of Humanity will make less progress by attempting to destroy the national spirit than by criticizing it and purifying it, and by seizing upon and fostering those elements in it which are truly humane. With this program in mind no wise student of the national past will be an indiscriminating upholder of traditions. While seeking to conserve their vital energy, he will steadily subject their direction to a critical scrutiny in the best light of his own time.
The studies in this book, though originally published separately as occasion offered, all had their origin in a fresh interest in American life and letters, which has strengthened side by side with a strengthening interest in the cause of those young men to whom the war brought a new vision of the ​old Humanitas. Some years ago, while preparing a book on Matthew Arnold, I found in his letters a passage which I read with pleasure and envy. It was written when he was putting together the first volume of his Essays in Criticism: "I think the moment is, on the whole, favorable for the Essays; and in going through them I am struck with the admirable riches of human nature that are brought to light in the group of persons whom they treat, and the sort of unity that as a book to stimulate the better humanity in us the volume has." The "admirable riches of human nature" are, I am sure, also present in my group of Americans, and something I hope of this unity, may also be found here.
For permission to reprint these revised essays acknowledgments are due as follows: to the New York Times Book Review for the Mr. Mencken and the New Spirit in Letters; to the Bookman for Tradition; to G. P. Putnam's Sons for the essay on Franklin from The Cambridge History of American Literature; to Harcourt, Brace, and Co. for the essay on Emerson from my edition of Essays and Poems of Emerson; to Charles Scribner's Sons for the Hawthorne and the Walt Whitman from my editions of The Scarlet Letter and Leaves of Grass in the Modern Student's Library; to G. P. Putnam's Sons for the biographical essay on Joaquin Miller from a forth​coming collective edition of Miller's poems; to the newly erected Step Ladder for the Note on Carl Sandburg; to The New York Nation for the essays on Carnegie, Roosevelt, and the Adamses; and to the Weekly Review for An Imaginary Conversation With Mr. P. E. More.
S. P. S.
Contents
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1926, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 97 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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