I admire them, fire, for their formidable power of desire; I bow before that ‘‘school of will and work ” — which Philarete Chasles tells us they have inherited from their forbears.

In the beginning was Action. With these famous words of Faust the future historian of the great Republic may begin; the Genesis, not yet concluded, of their national existence. Their genius may be defined as the universe of the Dynamists: force in movement. Above all, it has the capacity, the enthusiasm, the fortunate vocation, for doing things; volition is the chisel which has shapen this people from hard rock. Their characteristic points are manifestations of the will-power, originality, and audacity. Their history is above all a very paroxysm of virile activity. Their typical figure should be entitled, not Superman, but He who wants. And if anything saves them collectively from vulgarity, it is that extraordinary verve of energy which they always show and which lends a certain epic character to even the struggles of self-interest and the material life. So Bourget could say, of the speculators of Minneapolis and Chicago that they are of the mould of gladiators, that their fighting power of attack or of defence is as of Napoleon’s soldiers of the Guard. Yet that supreme energy with which the North American seems to cast, as if by hypnotizing, a spell and suggestion over the Fates, is found only in just those things which are presented to us as exceptional, divergent, in their civilization. No one will say that Edgar Poe was not an anomalous individual, rebellious to the influences around him: his chosen spirit represented a particle inassimilable by the national soul, which vainly struggled to express itself to others as from an infinite solitude; yet the fundamental note — Baudelaire has pointed it out — in the character of Poe’s heroes is still the inner shrine, the unconquerable resistance of the will. When he imagined Ligeia, most mysterious and adorable of his creatures, he symbolized in the inextinguishable light of her eyes the hymn of the triumph of man’s will over death.

If now by a sincere recognition of what is great and brilliant in the genius of that mighty country I have acquired the right to complete the picture by meting even- handed justice, one question, full of interest, still presents itself: Does that society realize, or at least tend to realize, the ideal of such rational conduct as satisfies, to the heart’s desire, the intellectual and moral dignity of our civilization? Is it there that we shall find the most approximate image of our perfect State? That feverish unrest which seems to centuple in its bosom the movement, the intensity of life—has it an end that is worth while and a motive sufficient for its justification?

Herbert Spencer, when with a noble sincerity he framed his parting address to the democracy of America at a New York banquet, marked as the chief feature of North American life that same overflowing unrest which shows itself both in the infinite passion for work and in vainglory in all forms of material expansion. Later he said that so exclusive a preoccupation with those activities which make for immediate utility revealed a notion of life, tolerable indeed in a young country as a provisional stage of civilization, but which already needed rectifying as it tended to make “useful” labor the end and object of all living; whereas in no case can it mean more than the accumulation of those things which are only the necessary elements to a full and harmonious development of our being. And he added that it behooved them now to teach their people the gospel of rest or recreation; and we, identifying diese words with the otium of the ancients, will include in this gospel to be taught those restless toilers any ideal concern, any disinterested employment of one’s time, any object of meditation or study divorced from all relation to immediate utilitarian interest.

North American life, indeed, describes that vicious circle which Pascal remarked in the ceaseless seeking for well-being when it has no object outside of oneself. Its prosperity is as immense as its incapability of satisfying even a mediocre view of human destiny. Titanic in its enormous concentration of human will-power, in its unprecedented triumph in all spheres of material aggrandizement, its civilization yet produces as a whole a singular impression of insufficiency, of emptiness. And if man’s spirit demands, with all the reason that thirty centuries of growth under classic and under Christian influence have conferred upon it, what are in this new world the dirigent principles,—the ideal substratum, the ulterior end of all this concernment with the positive interests that so informs that mighty multitude, — he will only be met, as a definite formula, by that same exclusive interest in material triumphs. Orphaned of the profound tradition that attended his birth, the North American has not yet replaced the inspiring ideality of his past with any high unselfish conception of the future. He lives for the immediate reality of the present, and for this subordinates all his activities in the egoism of material well-being, albeit both individual and collective. Of all his aggregation of the elements of wealth and power, one might say, what Bourget said of the intelligence of his character the Marquis Norbert, “a mountain of wood to which they have not yet known how to set fire.” The vital spark is lacking to throw up that flame of the ideal, restless, life-giving, from that mountain of dead wood. Not even the selfishness of patriotism, for want of higher impulses, nor the pride of race, both of which transfigured and exalted in ancient days even the prosaic hardness of the life of Rome, can light a glimmer of ideality or beauty in a people where a cosmopolite confusion and the atomism of a badly understood democracy impede the formation of a veritable national conscience.

One might think that the positivist genius of England has suffered a sea- change in crossing the Atlantic so as to fill its sons there with a spirit deprived of those elements of ideality which tempered it at home, and thus really reducing it to the crudeness which only the exaggeration of passion or satire has ascribed to its English form. For the English spirit, under its rough utilitarian exterior, its mercantile cynicism, its Puritanic severity, always concealed a rare poetic genius and a deep respect for the finer sensibility, which caused Taine to hold that at the bottom of the Teutonic nature, which is the base of the English race, must exist, however modified by the pressure of conquest or the habit of trade, an extraordinary exaltation of the emotional qualities. But the American spirit has not inherited this ancestral poetic instinct, which gushes like a clear fountain from the British rock when it is a Moses of high art who touches it. The English people possess in their institution of aristocracy (however unequal and out of date it may appear in the political aspect) a lofty and solid bulwark to oppose to the shopkeeping spirit and the encroachment of a prosaic world; so solid and lofty that Taine could say that since Grecian times history has presented no example of a society more fit to breed noble men and a noble spirit. But in the ambient of America’s democracy there are no heights so lofty as to escape the climbing of the flood of vulgarity, and it spreads and extends itself freely as over a level plain.

Sensibility, intelligence,' manners — each is marked in that enormous people by a radical unaptness for selection; and this, with the mechanical ordering of their material activities, makes a chaos of all that pertains to the realm of the ideal. It were easy to follow this unaptness from its most obvious manifestations to the more intimate and essential ones. Prodigal of riches — for meanness is not his fault — the North American has learned only to acquire by them the satisfaction of his vanity and material luxury, but not the chosen note of good taste. In such a surrounding true art can only exist as the rebellion of an individual. Emerson, Poe, are as estrays of a fauna expelled from their true habitat by some geological catastrophe. In “Outre Mer” Bourget speaks of the solemn tone in which the North American utters the word Art, when he, a self-made man, has achieved riches which he now desires to crown with all the human refinements; but he never has felt the divine frenzy of poem or picture; he would buy but to add to his collection a new toy, to satisfy at once his vanity and his acquisitive instinct.