That in it which is disinterested, chosen, rare, he ignores, despite the munificence with which he scatters his individual fortune to found schools of art, form popular taste, build splendid museums, patronize huge expositions, and deck his cities with monuments and his streets with bronze and marble. And if one had to characterize his taste, in a word, it would be that which in itself involves the negation of great art; strained brutality of effect, insensibility to soft tones or an exquisite style, the cult of bigness, and that sensationalism which excludes all noble serenity as incompatible with the hurry of his hectic life.

The ideal of beauty does not appeal to the descendants of the austere Puritan, nor even a passionate worship of the truth; they care little for any thinking that has no immediate practical object — it seems to them idle and fruitless; even to science they bring no selfless interest for discovery, nor do they seem capable of loving its truths only because they are true; investigation is merely the necessary antecedent of practical application. Their praiseworthy efforts to extend the benefits of popular education are inspired with the noble motive of communicating the rudiments of knowledge to the masses; but it does not appear that they also concern themselves overmuch with that higher education which shall rise above the general mediocrity. And so the outcome is that of all their struggle with ignorance the only gain has been a sort of universal semiculture and a profound indifference to the higher. ... As fast as the general ignorance decreases, so, in the air of that giant democracy, decreases the higher learning and vanishes genius itself. This is why the story of their intellectual activity is of a retrogression in brilliance and originality. For while at the era of their Independence and Constitution many famous names illustrate their history in thought as well as in action, a half-century later de Tocqueville could say of them, the Gods are disappearing.

And, when he wrote his master work, there still radiated from Boston, the Puritan home, the city of learning and tradition, a glorious pleiad which holds in the intellectual story of our century a universal fame. Who since has picked up the heritage of Emerson, Channing, Poe? The levelling by the middle classes tends ever, pressing with its desolating task, to plane down what little remains of intelligentsia : the flowers are mown by the machine when the weeds remain.

Long since their books have ceased to soar on wings beyond the common vision. To-day the most actual example of what Americans like best in literature must be sought in the gray pages of magazines or periodicals which seldom remind one that that mode of publication was employed in the immortal “Federalist.”

In the domain of moral sentiment, the mechanical impulse for the utilitarian has, indeed, encountered a certain balance” wheel in a strong religious tradition; but one may not conclude that even this has given to the direction of conduct a real, disinterested principle.... American religiosity, derived from the English and exaggerated, is merely an auxiliary force for the penal law, and would disappear on the day it was found possible without it to give to utilitarian morality that religious sanction which Mill desired for it. The very culmination of that morality is only that of Franklin; a philosophy of conduct which has for its goal a commonplace sagacity, a prudent usefulness, in whose bosom will never rise the emotions of holiness or heroism; and which, fit only to give to one’s conscience in the common affairs of life a certain moral support — like the apple-tree cane with which Franklin ever walked — is but a fragile staff with which to surmount great heights. And yet his was its supreme height: it is in the valleys where one must seek for its actuality. Even if the moral critique were not to descend below the probity and moderation of Franklin’s standard, its necessary termination, as de Tocqueville wisely said of a society educated narrowly with similar notions of duty, would surely not be in that superb and noble decadence which gives us to measure a Satanic beauty of tragedy in the downfall of empires, but rather a kind of pallid materialism, drab culture, and finally the sleep of an enervation without brilliancy in the silent decay of all the mainsprings of the moral life. In that society whose precept tends to put outside of what is obligatory the higher manifestations of abnegations and of virtue, practical considerations will always make the limits of obligation recede indefinitely. And the school of material prosperity, always a rude teacher of republican austerity, has carried even further that simplicity of the conception of a rational conduct which now obsesses the mind. To Franklin’s code have succeeded others franker still in their expression of the national wisdom. A book by one Swett Marden was recently1 published in Boston, “Pushing to the Front,” which announced, apparently with much popular approval, as a new moral law, that success is the final end of life; this book was praised even in church circles, and compared to the “Imitation” of à Kempis!...

1 1894. The book seems to have had less effect than Rodo feared.

And public life does not escape the consequences of the growth of this germ of disorganization in society generally. Any casual observer of their political customs will tell you how the obsession of material interest tends steadily to enervate and eradicate the sentiment of law or right; the civic virtue of a Hamilton is as an old and rusty sword, every day the more forgotten, lost in the cobwebs of tradition; venality, beginning at the polls, spreads through the working of all their institutions; the government by a mediocrity renders vain that emulation which exalts the character and the intelligence, and imposes itself even on the imagination as an unavoidable future. A democracy not subject to a superior instruction, not trained in liberal schools to the understanding of true human excellence, tends always to that abominable brutality of the majority which despises the greater moral benefits of liberty and annuls in public opinion all respect for the dignity of the individual. And to-day a new and formidable power arises to accentuate this absolutism of numbers: the political influence of a plutocracy represented only by the agents of the trusts, monopolies of production, and lords of the economic life, one of the most noteworthy and significant features of the United States of to-day. Their advent has caused almost everybody to recall to mind the coming of that proud and over-rich class which at the end of the Roman Republic preceded the tyranny of the Caesars and the ruin of liberty. And the exclusive preoccupation with material aggrandizement, the deity of such a civilization, has its logical result on the State as on the individual, putting the struggle-for-life principle also at the head of national policy, and making its representative the supreme personification of the national energy— the postulant of Emerson, the ruling personage of Taine.

To the impulse which drives the spiritual life toward that deorientation of the ideal to the selfishly useful corresponds physically that other principle which in the astounding increase of that people impels both the multitude and the initiative ever in the direction of that boundless West which in the times of their first independence was all mystery, veiled behind the forests of the Mississippi. In fact that improvised West — which grows so formidable to the older Atlantic States and already claims hegemony in the near future—is where the most faithful representation of American life is to be found at this moment of its evolution. It is there where the definite results, the logical and natural fruits of the spirit that has guided the great democracy from its origin, are brought into relief for the observer so that he can picture to himself the aspect of its immediate future. To the Virginian, the Yankee, has succeeded the master of the yesterday empty prairies, of whom Michel Chevalier predicted, half a century since, “The last shall one day be the first.” Utilitarianism, empty of all ideal content, a certain cosmopolitan levity of spirit, and the levelling of a falsely conceived democracy, will in him reach their ultimate victory. Every noble element of that civilization, all which binds it to the generous traditions and lofty origin of its historic dignity — the arrival of the men of the Mayflower, the memory of the Patricians of Virginia and the warriors of New England, the spirit of the people and lawmakers of the Emancipation — will remain only in the older States, where a Boston or a Philadelphia still maintain “the palladium of the Washingtonian tradition.” Chicago will arise to reign. And its overweening superiority over the original States of the Atlantic shore is based on its belief that they are reactionary, too European, too subject to tradition. History confers no claims on any, where popular election confers the purple.

As fast as the utilitarian genius of that nation takes on a more defined character, franker, narrower yet, with the intoxication of material prosperity, so increases the impatience of its sons to spread it abroad by propaganda, and think it predestined for all humanity.