ABSTRACT

The most ignorant man may feel the full strength and heartiness of the American idea, and so may the most accomplished scholar. Americanism includes the faith that national self-government is not a chimera, but that, with whatever inconsistencies and drawbacks. Happily, there are few among our cultivated men in whom this oxygen of American life is wholly wanting. The American's more perilous gift is a certain power of assimilation, through which he acquires something from every man he meets, but runs the risk of parting with something in return. To analyze combinations of character that only our national life produces, to portray dramatic situations that belong to a clearer social atmosphere,—this is the higher Americanism. The first among American scholars was nominated year after year, only to be rejected, before the academic societies of his own neighborhood. The American writer in whom the artistic instinct was strongest came of unmixed Puritan stock.