reat poetry will be the result. It
was almost precisely the same teaching as in Carlyle's lecture on "The
Hero as Poet."

Well, it is clear enough nowadays that both Whitman and Carlyle
underrated the value of discipline. The lack of discipline is the chief
obstacle to effective individualism. The private person must be well
trained, or he cannot do his work; and as civilization advances, it
becomes exceedingly difficult to train the individual without social
cooperation. A Paul or a Mahomet may discipline his own soul in the
Desert of Arabia; he may there learn the lessons that may later make
him a leader of men. But for the average man and indeed for most of the
exceptional men, the path to effectiveness lies through social and
professional discipline. Here is where the frontier stage of our
American life was necessarily weak. We have seen that our ancestors
gained something, no doubt, from their spirit of unconventionally and
freedom. But they also lost something through their dislike for
discipline, their indifference to criticism, their ineradicable
tendency, whether in business, in diplomacy, in art and letters and
education, to go "across lots." A certain degree of physical
orderliness was, indeed, imposed upon our ancestors by the conditions
of pioneer life. The natural prodigality and recklessness of frontier
existence was here and there sharply checked. Order is essential in a
camp, and the thin line of colonies was all camping. A certain instinct
for order underlay that resourcefulness which impresses every reader of
our history. Did the colonist need a tool? He learned to make it
himself. Isolation from the mother country was a stimulus to the
inventive imagination. Before long they were maintaining public order
in the same ingenious fashion in which they kept house. Appeals to
London took too much time. "We send a complaint this year," ran the
saying, "the next year they send to inquire, the third year the
ministry is changed." No wonder that resourcefulness bred independent
action, stimulated the Puritan taste for individualism, and led the way
to self-government.

Yet who does not know that the inherent instinct for political order
may be accompanied by mental disorderliness? Even your modern
Englishman--as the saying goes--"muddles through." The minds of our
American forefathers were not always lucid. The mysticism of the New
England Calvinists sometimes bred fanaticism. The practical and the
theoreti