or Napoleon's way of commanding. Consider a Frenchman's way of driving in a nail, or an Italian's way of eating macaroni. Consider the air with which an American rings a door-bell and then stands nonchalantly on the door-step, waiting for the door to be opened. There is a whole-hearted and headlong manner of life which betrays itself in all these activities, and which makes us see and feel that the thing in hand is important.

There are certain flowers from whose root a long filament goes out, a hairy process which is called a biotic root. This biotic root is an insignificant, superfluous-looking string, and often is accidentally destroyed while the flowers are being transplanted; but when this superfluous-looking root is cut the plant dies. Now the quality which the expatriated American loses is somehow due to the loss of his biotic root; but to say just what the thing is or does, whether in horticulture or in a spiritual sense, is beyond our power.

VI

THE POOR INDIAN

THE terrible thing about Nature is that she operates but never explains. Nature lets a man die for lack of oxygen, but she never says to him: "What you need, my dear fellow, is oxygen." The scientist and his laboratory are required to find the labels for the poisons of the world. We see certain evil symptoms, certain weaknesses and faintnesses of nature, deficiencies of energy and dead spots; but we can never be sure that we have properly accounted for them. If there is any truth in my diagnosis of the heart and brain troubles which attack Americans residing in Europe, then we must look a long way back for the causes. We must go back to Columbus' time, and perceive that the rush of Europeans to America and their segregation for a few centuries on a new soil made them peculiarly sensitive to certain home microbes, certain drawing-room diseases of Europe, from which their frontier life had been peculiarly free. When the Americans return to Europe the pleasures of the intellect become to them a danger,

because they roll themselves in those pleasures as a cat rolls in valerian. The cult of cultivation, which is merely a becoming sort of fashionable cough to thousands of Europeans, runs straight into scarlet fever and typhoid with the American visitors. The pose of refinement, the dread of crudity, the love of bibelots, become, as it were, mortal sins to the long-lost American.

We must note one very interesting fact: the American who is in Europe selling steam-boilers or distributing Belgian relief, or even on some business connected with art or literature, does not show signs of this fussy sickness. He does his business and goes home. It is the man who stays in Europe in search of sensation that catches the disease.

The disease in all its forms is Nature's punishment for the vice of seeking sensation. The dilettantes of ancient Rome, who suffered from it, were people who wanted to draw a little more pleasure out of life than health would permit. "We are all of us too clever!" says Montaigne; “and in order to grow wise we must become dull." Now Americans have not enough reserve power to indulge in any cleverness at all, with impunity. They exhibit the rarest variety

of the disease of cleverness which has ever been known, because they have lived in the wilderness till they have lost the power to take sophistication lightly. Sophistication is poison to them; they die of it, as red Indians die of whiskey.

Our only road to strength in America lies through the building up of the arts and sciences in America, and in an increase in the general complexity of our social and intellectual life. Your intelligent American will stand more chance of becoming a significant intelligence if he babbles in the purlieus of Hoboken than if he hobnobs with the Sorbonne. He will then be able to retain his own point of view on entering Europe, and will not drop it in the antechamber of the first European house he enters. When he goes to Europe he will go as the business man does, bringing his own thoughts, his own wares, his own aims and habits with him and feeling no false shame as to his crudity. He will not be so impressed with the importance of small things, whether they be visiting-cards or the tittletattle of the intellectual classes, as he is at present. He will, in fact, have a self-respecting and natural relation, instead of a

simian and nervous relation, towards the things of the mind in the Old World.

After all, the typical American manufacturer who comes abroad with his foolish wife and daughters and is held up to ridicule in the novels of the Anglo- and FrancoAmerican literatures (this school of fiction seems to have only one theme) is a step nearer to true cultivation than the rest of the characters in the books, -a step nearer than the authors who write them; for this manufacturer is a part of a continent and of a tradition, a part of an unconscious force. The other personages are dried leaves.

MAR 29 1922