But at the present moment the matter which America has very seriously to consider is not how near it is to its birth and beginning, but how near it may be to its end. It is only a verbal question whether the American civilization is young; it may become a very practical and urgent question whether it is dying.
When once we have cast aside, as we inevitably have after a moment's thought, the fanciful physical metaphor involved in the word "youth," what serious evidence have we that America is a fresh force and not a stale one? It has a great many people, like China;it has a great deal of money, like defeated Carthage or dying Venice.
It is full of bustle and excitability, like Athens after its ruin, and all the Greek cities in their decline. It is fond of new things;but the old are always fond of new things. Young men read chronicles, but old men read newspapers. It admires strength and good looks;it admires a big and barbaric beauty in its women, for instance;but so did Rome when the Goth was at the gates. All these are things quite compatible with fundamental tedium and decay.
There are three main shapes or symbols in which a nation can show itself essentially glad and great--by the heroic in government, by the heroic in arms, and by the heroic in art. Beyond government, which is, as it were, the very shape and body of a nation, the most significant thing about any citizen is his artistic attitude towards a holiday and his moral attitude towards a fight--that is, his way of accepting life and his way of accepting death.
Subjected to these eternal tests, America does not appear by any means as particularly fresh or untouched. She appears with all the weakness and weariness of modern England or of any other Western power.
In her politics she has broken up exactly as England has broken up, into a bewildering opportunism and insincerity. In the matter of war and the national attitude towards war, her resemblance to England is even more manifest and melancholy. It may be said with rough accuracy that there are three stages in the life of a strong people.
First, it is a small power, and fights small powers. Then it is a great power, and fights great powers. Then it is a great power, and fights small powers, but pretends that they are great powers, in order to rekindle the ashes of its ancient emotion and vanity.
After that, the next step is to become a small power itself.
England exhibited this symptom of decadence very badly in the war with the Transvaal; but America exhibited it worse in the war with Spain.
There was exhibited more sharply and absurdly than anywhere else the ironic contrast between the very careless choice of a strong line and the very careful choice of a weak enemy.
America added to all her other late Roman or Byzantine elements the element of the Caracallan triumph, the triumph over nobody.
But when we come to the last test of nationality, the test of art and letters, the case is almost terrible. The English colonies have produced no great artists; and that fact may prove that they are still full of silent possibilities and reserve force.
But America has produced great artists. And that fact most certainly proves that she is full of a fine futility and the end of all things.
Whatever the American men of genius are, they are not young gods making a young world. Is the art of Whistler a brave, barbaric art, happy and headlong? Does Mr. Henry James infect us with the spirit of a schoolboy? No; the colonies have not spoken, and they are safe.
Their silence may be the silence of the unborn. But out of America has come a sweet and startling cry, as unmistakable as the cry of a dying man.
