Winds Of Doctrine eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 215 pages of information about Winds Of Doctrine.

Winds Of Doctrine eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 215 pages of information about Winds Of Doctrine.
perversity in the facts.  Of course, did they earnestly respect the genteel tradition, such an incongruity would seem to them sad, rather than ludicrous.  Perhaps the prevalence of humour in America, in and out of season, may be taken as one more evidence that the genteel tradition is present pervasively, but everywhere weak.  Similarly in Italy, during the Renaissance, the Catholic tradition could not be banished from the intellect, since there was nothing articulate to take its place; yet its hold on the heart was singularly relaxed.  The consequence was that humorists could regale themselves with the foibles of monks and of cardinals, with the credulity of fools, and the bogus miracles of the saints; not intending to deny the theory of the church, but caring for it so little at heart that they could find it infinitely amusing that it should be contradicted in men’s lives and that no harm should come of it.  So when Mark Twain says, “I was born of poor but dishonest parents,” the humour depends on the parody of the genteel Anglo-Saxon convention that it is disreputable to be poor; but to hint at the hollowness of it would not be amusing if it did not remain at bottom one’s habitual conviction.

The one American writer who has left the genteel tradition entirely behind is perhaps Walt Whitman.  For this reason educated Americans find him rather an unpalatable person, who they sincerely protest ought not to be taken for a representative of their culture; and he certainly should not, because their culture is so genteel and traditional.  But the foreigner may sometimes think otherwise, since he is looking for what may have arisen in America to express, not the polite and conventional American mind, but the spirit and the inarticulate principles that animate the community, on which its own genteel mentality seems to sit rather lightly.  When the foreigner opens the pages of Walt Whitman, he thinks that he has come at last upon something representative and original.  In Walt Whitman democracy is carried into psychology and morals.  The various sights, moods, and emotions are given each one vote; they are declared to be all free and equal, and the innumerable commonplace moments of life are suffered to speak like the others.  Those moments formerly reputed great are not excluded, but they are made to march in the ranks with their companions—­plain foot-soldiers and servants of the hour.  Nor does the refusal to discriminate stop there; we must carry our principle further down, to the animals, to inanimate nature, to the cosmos as a whole.  Whitman became a pantheist; but his pantheism, unlike that of the Stoics and of Spinoza, was unintellectual, lazy, and self-indulgent; for he simply felt jovially that everything real was good enough, and that he was good enough himself.  In him Bohemia rebelled against the genteel tradition; but the reconstruction that alone can justify revolution did not ensue.  His attitude, in principle, was utterly disintegrating; his poetic

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Winds Of Doctrine from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.