of it are to
be sought in the habits of mind of the American people. They are, as I
have shown, besotted by moral concepts, a moral engrossment, a delusion
of moral infallibility. In their view of the arts they are still unable
to shake off the naive suspicion of the Fathers.[77] A work of the
imagination can justify itself, in their sight, only if it show a moral
purpose, and that purpose must be obvious and unmistakable. Even in
their slow progress toward a revolt against the ancestral Philistinism,
they cling to this ethical bemusement: a new gallery of pictures is
welcomed as "improving," to hear Beethoven "makes one better." Any
questioning of the moral ideas that prevail--the principal business, it
must be plain, of the novelist, the serious dramatist, the professed
inquirer into human motives and acts--is received with the utmost
hostility. To attempt such an enterprise is to disturb the peace--and
the disturber of the peace, in the national view, quickly passes over
into the downright criminal.

These symptoms, it seems to me, are only partly racial, despite the
persistent survival of that third-rate English strain which shows itself
so ingenuously in the colonial spirit, the sense of inferiority, the
frank craving for praise from home. The race, in truth, grows mongrel,
and the protest against that mongrelism only serves to drive in the
fact. But a mongrel race is necessarily a race still in the stage of
reaching out for culture; it has not yet formulated defensible
standards; it must needs rest heavily upon the superstitions that go
with inferiority. The Reformation brought Scotland among the civilized
nations, but it took Scotland a century and a half to live down the
Reformation.[78] Dogmatism, conformity, Philistinism, the fear of
rebels, the crusading spirit; these are the marks of an upstart people,
uncertain of their rank in the world and even of their direction.[79] A
cultured European, reading a typical American critical journal, must
needs conceive the United States, says H. G. Wells, as "a vain,
garrulous and prosperous female of uncertain age and still more
uncertain temper, with unfounded pretensions to intellectuality and an
ideal of refinement of the most negative description ... the Aunt Errant
of Christendom."[80] There is always that blushful shyness, that
timorous uncertainty, broken by sudden rages, sudden enunciations of
impeccable doctrine, sudden runnings amuck. Formalism is the hall-mar