or any of those
social forms and intellectual standards which so many Americans vaguely
believed to be exclusively European. It should have been a protest
against a sterile and demoralizing Americanism--the Americanism of
national irresponsibility and indiscriminate individualism. The bondage
from which Americans needed, and still need, emancipation is not from
Europe, but from the evasions, the incoherence, the impatience, and the
easy-going conformity of their own intellectual and moral traditions. We
do not have to cross the Atlantic in order to hunt for the enemies of
American national independence and fulfillment. They sit at our
political fireside and toast their feet on its coals. They poison
American patriotic feeling until it becomes, not a leaven, but a kind of
national gelatine. They enshrine this American democratic ideal in a
temple of canting words which serves merely as a cover for a religion of
personal profit. American moral and intellectual emancipation can be
achieved only by a victory over the ideas, the conditions, and the
standards which make Americanism tantamount to collective
irresponsibility and to the moral and intellectual subordination of the
individual to a commonplace popular average.

The heretics of the Middle Period were not cowardly, but they were
intellectually irresponsible, undisciplined, and inexperienced. Sharing,
as they did, most of the deeper illusions of their time, they did not
vindicate their own individual intellectual independence, and they
contributed little or nothing to American national intellectual
independence. With the exception of a few of the men of letters who had
inherited a formative local tradition, their own personal careers were
examples not of gradual individual fulfillment, but at best of
repetition and at worst of degeneracy. Like the most brilliant
contemporary Whig politicians, such as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster,
their intellectual individuality was gradually cheapened by the manner
in which it was expressed; and it is this fact which makes the case of
Lincoln, both as a politician and a thinker, so unique and so
extraordinary. The one public man of this period who did impose upon
himself a patient and a severe intellectual and moral discipline, who
really did seek the excellent use of his own proper tools, is the man
who preeminently attained national intellectual and moral stature. The
difference in social value between Lincoln and, say, William L