easier to acquiesce and to submit. The sense of personal responsibility
lessens. What is the use of battling for one's own opinions when one
can already see that the multitude is on the other side? The greater
your democratic faith in the ultimate rightness of the multitude, the
less perhaps your individual power of will. The easier is it for you to
believe that everything is coming out right, whether you put your
shoulder to the wheel or not.

The problem of overcoming these evils is nothing less than the problem
of spiritualizing democracy. There are some of our hero-worshipping
people who think that that vast result can still be accomplished by
harking back to some such programme as the "great man" theory of
Carlyle. Another theory of spiritualizing democracy, no less familiar
to the student of nineteen-century literature, is what is called "the
divine average" doctrine of Walt Whitman. The average man is to be
taught the glory of his walk and trade. Round every head there is to be
an aureole. "A common wave of thought and joy, lifting mankind again,"
is to make us forget the old distinction between the individual and the
social group. We are all to be the sons of the morning.

We must not pause to analyze or to illustrate these two theories.
Carlyle's theory seems to me to be outworn, and Whitman's theory is
premature. But it is clear that they both admit that the mass of men
are as yet incompletely spiritualized, not yet raised to their full
stature. Unquestionably, our American life is, in European eyes at
least, monotonously uniform. It is touched with self-complacency. It
is too intent upon material progress. It confuses bigness with
greatness. It is unrestful. It is marked by intellectual impatience.
Our authors are eager to write life rather than literature. But they
are so eager that they overlook the need of literary discipline. They
do not learn to write literature and therefore most of them are
incapable of interpreting life. They escape, perhaps, from "the musty
grip of the past," but in so doing they refuse to learn the inexorable
lessons of the past. Hence the fact that our books lack power, that
they are not commensurate with the living forces of the country. The
unconscious, moral, and spiritual life of the nation is not back of
them, making "eye and hand and heart go to a new tune."

If we could have that, we should ask no more, for we believe in the
nation. I heard a doctor say, the other day, t