A Little Journey in the World | Page 2

their time into portions, and leave no hour

unprovided for. This is conscientiousness in women, and not
restlessness. There is a day for music, a day for painting, a day for the
display of tea-gowns, a day for Dante, a day for the Greek drama, a day
for the Dumb Animals' Aid Society, a day for the Society for the
Propagation of Indians, and so on. When the year is over, the amount
that has been accomplished by this incessant activity can hardly be
estimated. Individually it may not be much. But consider where
Chaucer would be but for the work of the Chaucer clubs, and what an
effect upon the universal progress of things is produced by the associate
concentration upon the poet of so many minds.
A cynic says that clubs and circles are for the accumulation of
superficial information and unloading it on others, without much
individual absorption in anybody. This, like all cynicism, contains only
a half-truth, and simply means that the general diffusion of
half-digested information does not raise the general level of intelligence,
which can only be raised to any purpose by thorough self-culture, by
assimilation, digestion, meditation. The busy bee is a favorite simile
with us, and we are apt to overlook the fact that the least important part
of his example is buzzing around. If the hive simply got together and
buzzed, or even brought unrefined treacle from some cyclopaedia, let
us say, of treacle, there would be no honey added to the general store.
It occurred to some one in this talk at last to deny that there was this
tiresome monotony in American life. And this put a new face on the
discussion. Why should there be, with every race under the heavens
represented here, and each one struggling to assert itself, and no
homogeneity as yet established even between the people of the oldest
States? The theory is that democracy levels, and that the anxious
pursuit of a common object, money, tends to uniformity, and that
facility of communication spreads all over the land the same fashion in
dress; and repeats everywhere the same style of house, and that the
public schools give all the children in the United States the same
superficial smartness. And there is a more serious notion, that in a
society without classes there is a sort of tyranny of public opinion
which crushes out the play of individual peculiarities, without which
human intercourse is uninteresting. It is true that a democracy is

intolerant of variations from the general level, and that a new society
allows less latitude in eccentricities to its members than an old society.
But with all these allowances, it is also admitted that the difficulty the
American novelist has is in hitting upon what is universally accepted as
characteristic of American life, so various are the types in regions
widely separated from each other, such different points of view are had
even in conventionalities, and conscience operates so variously on
moral problems in one community and another. It is as impossible for
one section to impose upon another its rules of taste and propriety in
conduct--and taste is often as strong to determine conduct as principle
--as it is to make its literature acceptable to the other. If in the land of
the sun and the jasmine and the alligator and the fig, the literature of
New England seems passionless and timid in face of the ruling
emotions of life, ought we not to thank Heaven for the diversity of
temperament as well as of climate which will in the long-run save us
from that sameness into which we are supposed to be drifting?
When I think of this vast country with any attention to local
developments I am more impressed with the unlikenesses than with the
resemblances. And besides this, if one had the ability to draw to the life
a single individual in the most homogeneous community, the product
would be sufficiently startling. We cannot flatter ourselves, therefore,
that under equal laws and opportunities we have rubbed out the
saliencies of human nature. At a distance the mass of the Russian
people seem as monotonous as their steppes and their commune
villages, but the Russian novelists find characters in this mass perfectly
individualized, and, indeed, give us the impression that all Russians are
irregular polygons. Perhaps if our novelists looked at individuals as
intently, they might give the world the impression that social life here
is as unpleasant as it appears in the novels to be in Russia.
This is partly the substance of what was said one winter evening before
the wood fire in the library of a house in Brandon, one of the lesser
New England cities. Like hundreds of residences of its kind, it stood in
the suburbs,