The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

The features of the American scene which most struck the analyst then are those which most strike the immigrant now, whether they be minor details, like the magnificent boots and teeth, the heavy consumption of candy, "the vagueness of separation between apartments, between hall and room, be­tween one room and another, between the one you are in and the one you are not in," or major matters like the promiscuous gregariousness, the lack, even among the rich, of constituted privacy, the absence of forms for vice no less than for virtue, the "spoiling" of women and their responsibility for the whole of culture, above all the elimination from the scene of the squire and the parson.² It takes the immigrant a litde time to discover just why the United States seems so different from any of the countries he resentfully or nostalgically remembers, but the cru­cial difference is, I think, just this last elimination of "the pervasive Patron" and "the old ecclesiastical arrogance for

² The immigrant would like to add one element, the excesses of the climate, which is either much too hot or much too cold or much too wet or much too dry or even, in the case of the California coast, much too mild, a sort of meteorological Back Bay. And then—oh dear!—the insects,

and the snakes, and the poison

hry . . . The truth is, Nature never intended human beings to live here, and her hostility, which confined the Indian to a nomad life and forbids the white man to relax his vigilance and will for one instant, must be an important factor in determining the American character.

which, oh! a thousand times, the small substitutes, the mere multiplication of the signs of theological enterprise, in the tra­dition and on the scale of commercial and industrial enterprise, have no attenuation worth mentioning."

What in fact is missing, what has been consciously rejected, with all that such a rejection implies, is the romanitas upon which Europe was founded and which she has not ceased at­tempting to preserve. This is a point which, at the risk of becoming tedious, must be enlarged upon, since the issue be­tween America and Europe is no longer a choice between social leveling and social distinctions. The leveling is a universal and inexorable fact. Nothing can prevent the liquidation of the European nations or any other nation in the great continents, Asia, Africa, America, the liquidation of the "individual" (m the eighteenth-century liberal meaning of the word) in the collective proletariat, the liquidation of Christendom in the neutral world. From that there is no refuge anywhere. But one's final judgment of Europe and America depends, it seems to me, upon whether one thinks that America Cor America as a symbol) is right to reject romanitas or that Europe is right in trying to find new forms of it suited to the "democratized" so­cieties of our age.

The fundamental presupposition of romanitas, secular or sa­cred, is that virtue is prior to liberty, i.e., what matters most is that people should think and act rightly; of course it is prefer­able that they should do so consciously of their own free will, but if they cannot or will not, they must be made to, the majority by the spiritual pressure of education and tradition, the minority by physical coercion, for liberty to act wrongly is not liberty but license. The antagonistic presupposition, which is not peculiar to America and would probably not be accepted by many Americans, but for which this country has come, symbolically, to stand, is that liberty is prior to virtue, i.e., liberty cannot be distinguished from license, for freedom of choice is neither good nor bad but the human prerequisite without which virtue and vice have no meaning. Virtue is, of course, preferable to vice, but to choose vice is preferable to having virtue chosen for one.