I

TOWARDS AN AMERICAN TYPE

When I was in college, I used to poke around in the library a good deal looking for books which would take me out of the shallow water of college life into the deep channel of experience, into the serious life of the world. And naturally enough the works of Tolstoy came into my hands. Now one knows what a typical Tolstoy novel is. The hero is a young man of rank and wealth and social position. He is at the outset a gay pleasure-loving fellow who enters heartily into the occupations and recreations and dissipations of his class. But somewhere midway in his career, while he is returning from a dance or from a fox-hunt, or perhaps while he is stationed at some lonely army post in the mountains, at midnight under the wintry stars, a great coolness and stillness invade his mind; and in the midst of the stillness he hears a voice which seems to come out of the depths of his own heart, crying: "Young man, what are you about in the universe?"-And then, for the first time in his life, he begins to think. His thinking troubles him. He begins to be worried about the reason and justification for his own existence. He begins to question the use of his wealth and his

strength and his talent. His world begins to come tumbling about his ears. He plunges into philosophy; and he comes up gasping; and he asks himself whether life is worth living, and, if so, for what purpose.

Under the influence of Tolstoy and such writers, I used while still in college to go about among my class-mates and puzzle them somewhat and amuse them a good deal by asking them whether life was worth living. The question had never occurred to them. When I presented it, they mostly replied that they took it for granted that it was. And there they dropped the matter. They didn't care to discuss it. Well, I myself have long since dropped that question, too. I take it for granted that life is worth living, because practically every one acts upon the assumption that it is. But the settlement of that question gave birth to another question which I have been putting to my friends and acquaintances ever since. It, too, is a kind of Tolstoyan question. That is to say, it probes inquisitively into the foundation and underpinning of our daily conduct. It is this: "Assuming that life is worth living, what are its durable -satisfactions ?"

I think that is a useful question and quite in line with our modern ideas of efficiency. Before you can make any sort of intelligent working plan for your life, you must answer it. If you don't face it and answer it, you soon discover that you are not living economically. You find that you are wasting your

energies on objects which make no adequate returns. You find that a bare twenty-five per cent of your activities are yielding you durable satisfactions, while seventy-five per cent of them are yielding only fatigue and regret. Or you find that you are mainly occupied with things which divert and amuse you today, but don't last. Tomorrow they are gone; there is nothing there; you aren't accumulating anything. You aren't growing richer with the years, as you feel that you ought to grow, but are as poor as ever. But if you know clearly what the durable satisfactions of your life are, you know how to revise your business and your pleasure. You know what to keep and what to cut away. You have something definite to aim at. Your activities take a common direction. You feel all your powers, like a well-trained team, pulling together towards a known destination, pulling you home, home to the object of your heart's inmost desire. And so I think that, for both young people and old people, one of the most profitable questions is this: "What are the durable satisfactions of life?"

I used not to get much response to that question either. People used not to be very curious about it. They took it for granted that life has some durable satisfactions; but they hadn't considered the subject; and they thought me rather queer to pry into anything so intimate and so unexplored. Since the late war, however, there has been a great change in that respect. Nowadays, everyone is asking my question. The great war and its consequences have

introduced into thousands of minds hitherto untroubled by such thoughts profound doubts regarding the tendencies and the quality and the satisfactions of our modern civilization-pointed questions regarding the amount of happiness that modern civilization pays to the private life. Skepticism, cynicism, and satire are the prevailing moods of contemporary enquiry. Here in America, since the war, our current literature has been filled with a kind of Tolstoyan unrest of which the most obvious symptom is a series of derisive pictures of objects to which we used formerly to "point with pride"; derisive pictures of our politicians; derisive pictures of the church; derisive pictures of the universities; derisive pictures of our great bulwark, the middle class; derisive pictures of the American business man; derisive pictures of the average American man and the average American—

woman.

I firmly believe that this satirical and soulsearching mood through which the country is passing at present is tremendously good for it, is going to be a step towards its "salvation"; but its effects, like those of certain powerful medicines, are rather distressing while they last. Not long ago I spent several hours talking with three interesting men of wide experience and great energy of mind-an editor, a politician, and a man connected with one of our great educational foundations. They were all avowedly out hunting, hunting from New York to San Francisco. There were brains and money

and power behind them; and they were hunting for adequate objects on which to expend them. They had not been very successful, nor much cheered by their contact with our fellow countrymen. They came back from their explorations of the democracy with such an account of the political and social and moral corruption and disintegration rampant in our great cities and in our small country towns, that I myself returned to the relative peace and order and sobriety of my own university community full of a kind of private and selfish thanksgiving that I lived there and not somewhere else. I came back full of a very genuine gratitude that my community consisted mainly of several thousand young men and women united in an inspiring enterprise, united in the quest of wisdom, and truth, and beauty. It seemed to me, for the moment, that, comparatively speaking, a university community had an interesting and adequate object for living.

"In the outside world," I said to myself, "there seem to be, if one may trust the reports, scattered individuals of energy and virtue and upward purpose; but the general force of society is against them; the general pull of society is down, not up. They can maintain their energy and virtue only by constantly resisting the social pressure towards slackness and vice and inefficiency. But here in the university community," I said, "the conditions are reversed. As individuals, many of us, perhaps most of us, have our weak moods and our slack and inefficient moods and our downward tendencies; but