Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
in cheap and pretentious county-seats, parasites on the producing
hinterland over whose politics and credit and morals Main Street
tradesmen have set up a strict custodianship--futile and complacent and
drab, mere echoes of the greater cities that lie on the horizon and to
which the sons of Main Street turn for light and guidance.
It is these greater cities that constitute the true capitals of our
red-blooded Americans who proclaim themselves “the greatest race in
the world”--fruitful centers from which radiates the philosophy of
pep, punch, and progress for the upbuilding and enlightenment of the
world. Of these centers the hustling and mighty Zenith is the wonder
and admiration of all right-minded citizens; it is the brightest and
bloomiest sunflower of the great American garden. And in Zenith dwells
George F. Babbitt, realtor, Sinclair Lewis’s full-length portrait of
a hero sprung from the loins of America, the completest embodiment of
the triumphant American genius that is conquering the earth. Babbitt as
an upstanding he-member of the great herd is a marvel, the apotheosis
of the regnant middle class, the finished product of our snappy
civilization. Other lands, no doubt, have produced men accounted great.
Plato and Saul of Tarsus, St. Francis and Leonardo, Pascal and Galileo
and Hegel, were no doubt esteemed in their own times and by their own
cities; but Zenith does not go in for out-of-date merchandise; it is
up-to-the-minute and it specialized in George F. Babbitts. And so when
the Reverend Elmer Gantry rises to influence in Gopher Prairie, he is
called to Zenith as its spiritual counselor, and becomes the custodian
of the Zenith moralities, the apostle of Zenith Bunk, the devotee
of the Zenith Mumbo Jumbo. And through Zenith passes also Martin
Arrowsmith the rebel, the perverse outlandish scientist who refuses
to worship Mumbo Jumbo, on his solitary way to discover reality in a
world of Zenith chicanery. Babbitt, Gantry, Arrowsmith--these are the
figures that Sinclair Lewis comes upon in his exploration of the land
of the free and the home of the brave. A somewhat curious showing at
the best.
So slashing an attack upon our common creed and practice has naturally
aroused vigorous protest. Human nature does not like to have its idols
assailed; even the devotees of Mumbo Jumbo will defend their god
against the heretics; and Sinclair Lewis has become the target for
many a shaft. The critics have pressed home their counter attack with
ardor. They insist that he is suffering from an aggravated case of
astigmatism, and that in consequence he does not see eye to eye with
those of normal vision. The world is out of focus to him--askew in all
its structural lines; and this distorted vision prompts those jaundiced
opinions and malicious judgments in regard to the ideals cherished by
our best citizens. He has deliberately cultivated a spleen that makes
him dislike his neighbors because they are comfortable and contented.
Diogenes railing at mankind gained a vast reputation, but it is a nice
question if Diogenes was a useful citizen. What did he do to further
the well-being of his community? How much time and money did he give
to charity and the upbuilding of his city? For all his talking Mr.
Lewis does not seem to know what the good life is. He rails at Babbitt
for not being Plato, but does he understand the A B C of service? To
take a homely figure: the family cow, standing knee-deep in June and
chewing the cud of contentment, would excite his Diogenic scorn. As a
fault-finder and knocker, Brindle is not the equal of Diogenes; but
to criticize her mentality and manners, forgetful of the fact that
from the contented chewing of a plentiful cud will come a plentiful
supply of milk and cream and butter to sweeten the bread of life, is
a somewhat sorry business. In her modest, democratic sphere she is
devoted to service, and if there is a nobler function, Rotary humbly
confesses it had not discovered it. One must not, of course, press too
far the analogy between Brindle and Babbitt; the figure is useful only
to suggest that even in the lowliest spheres Mr. Lewis completely fails
to understand the fine ethical values that underlie and animate the
common American life at which he rails. How, then, shall he understand
them in the higher? Comfort and service are excellent things in
themselves, and if they can be merged in everyday experience, surely
the good life is in the way of achievement.
The point is of vast importance, for it is here that Diogenes Lewis,
his critics assert, has totally misread the meaning and faith of
America. Here in this prosperous land the union between comfort and
service--or to put it in more dignified phrase, the synthesis of
Hellenism and Hebraism--has been achieved in practice. A rich and
abundant life, motivated by a fine sense of ethical responsibility
and disciplined by a democratic public school, is, in sober fact, the
distinguishing characteristic of America that sets our country apart
from all other lands in western civilization. Call it a Babbitt warren
if you will, nevertheless where else has the industrial revolution been
brought so completely and happily under dominion to the democratic
ideal, or been so ennobled by ethical values? Here it has scattered
its wealth amongst the plain people with a bountiful hand, until the
poorest family enjoys its nickel-plated plumbing, its flivver, its
telephone, its radio, its movies, its funnies, and all the thousand
aids to comfort and intelligence which a few generations ago were
denied kings--the result of all which is a standard of living that our
forefathers would have envied. Our Hellenism is, happily, not Greek.
That, as every schoolboy in America knows, was established in slavery;
whereas our modern Hellenism is established in democracy and ennobled
by a sensitive social conscience. Here the master serves. The richest
and greatest amongst us--our Judge Garys and Andrew Mellons--are
servants of the nameless public, and dedicate their creative genius to
the common democratic prosperity. Our Hellenism, in short, is engrafted
on a sturdy Hebraic root and flowers in righteousness--in charity, in
education, in free clinics and hospitals, in scientific foundations, in
great public libraries, in all the vast gifts that wealth freely offers
to the cause of social amelioration. The Puritan strain is fortunately
still the American strain, and we owe much to those excellent
origins that Mr. Lewis scoffs at without understanding. Comfort and
service--Hellenism and Hebraism: if this is not the good life, where
shall one find it? In Bolshevik Russia? After all Diogenes Lewis is
no more important--or useful--than the gad-fly that Brindle brushes
from her glossy sides as she chews her cud. What gad-fly ever produced
butter?
If Sinclair Lewis is unimpressed by such arguments it is because he
is quite disillusioned with the current ideal of material progress.
His dreams do not find their satisfaction in good roads and cheap
gasoline. He would seem to be an incorrigible idealist who has been
bred up on the vigorous Utopianisms of the late nineteenth century.
In the golden days before the deluge he had gone blithely to school to
all the current idealisms that flourished in the land--to Jeffersonian
democracy and to Marxian socialism; and in the well-stocked
pharmacopoeias of hopeful young liberals he professed to discover
specifics for all our social ills. But the war destroyed his faith
in nostrums and removed his Utopia to a dim and foggy future. He has
not yet traveled so far in disillusion as Mr. Cabell, who has seen
fit to dwarf man to the compass of a flea on the epidermis of earth;
nor has he achieved the irony--or the technique--of Clarence Darrow,
who suggests casually: “Of course I know that Confucius was as great
a philosopher as Billy Sunday, and that as a thinker Buddha was the
equal of Billy Bryan. But still all orthodox people know that Confucius
and Buddha were spurious and the Billy brothers genuine.” He has not
even achieved the smug satisfaction of the psychologists who impose
their preposterous intelligence tests on simple folk and triumphantly
discover morons in respectable neighbors. Some lingering faith in our
poor human nature he still clings to. In the great American mass that
human nature is certainly foolish and unlovely enough. It is too often
blown up with flatulence, corroded with lust, on familiar terms with
chicanery and lying; it openly delights in hocus-pocus and discovers
its miracle-workers in its Comstocks and Aimee Semple McPhersons. But
for all its pitiful flabbiness human nature is not wholly bad, nor is
man so helpless a creature of circumstance as the cynics would have us
believe. There are other and greater gods than Mumbo Jumbo worshiped
in America, worthier things than hocus-pocus; and in rare moments even
Babbitt dimly perceives that the feet of his idol are clay. There are
Martin Arrowsmiths as well as Elmer Gantrys, and human nature, if it
will, can pull itself out of the trap. Bad social machinery makes
bad men. Put the banker in the scullery instead of the drawing-room;
exalt the test-tube and deflate the cash register; rid society of the
dictatorship of the middle class; and the artist and the scientist
will erect in America a civilization that may become what civilization
was in earlier days, a thing to be respected. For all his modernity
and the disillusion learned from Pullman-car philosophers, Sinclair
Lewis is still an echo of Jean Jacques and the golden hopes of the
Enlightenment--thin and far off, no doubt, but still an authentic echo.
Whether we like Mr. Lewis’s technique or not, whether we agree with
his indictment of middle-class ideals or dissent from it, his writings
are suggestive documents symptomatic of a dissatisfied generation
given over to disillusion. The optimistic dreams of middle-class
capitalism are not so golden as they seemed to us before the war; and
these pudgy novels are slashing attacks on a world that in mouthing
empty shibboleths is only whistling to keep up its courage. The faith
of America is dead. These brisk pages are filled with the doings
of automata--not living men but the simulacra of men, done with
astonishing verisimilitude, speaking an amazingly realistic language,
professing a surprising lifelikeness; yet nevertheless only shells from
which the life has departed, without faith or hope or creative energy,
not even aware that they are dead.
It is this consciousness of sketching in a morgue that differentiates
Mr. Lewis from the earlier satirists of middle-class America, who in
the hopeful years before the war were busily engaged in rebuilding the
American temple. The preceding generation--earnest souls like Robert
Herrick and Jack London and Upton Sinclair--were as well aware of the
shortcomings of our industrial order as Sinclair Lewis, and hated them
as vigorously. From the days of Emerson and George Ripley, of Carlyle
and Ruskin, capitalistic society had been persistently subjected to
sharp and devastating analysis; its drabness and regimentation, its
sterility and emptiness and joylessness, had been pointed out by
many pens. The Victorians long ago discovered that no generous or
humane civilization was to be expected from the hands of Plugson of
Undershot--that the banker conceiving of human felicity in terms of
eight per cent. is a mean and shabby fellow in comparison with St.
Francis or Michelangelo. Long before Sherwood Anderson, William Morris
had observed that the workman no longer sings in the factory as in
other days he sang over his tool, and concluded that the creation of
beauty is more important for human happiness than figuring profits from
mass production.
But those earlier analysts were dealing with causes of which they