Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/454

422 mind, however, which most leaders can believe of themselves, but cannot believe of the people. Hence the gross calumnies and dishonest utterances of the campaign.

German bids fair to supplement the Yankee in the round of our national character. We may even begin to guess at what that character will turn out to be—though this is little better than guess-work, thus far. America seems to have reached the front rank of nations without a defined or easily definable national character, and with but few well-defined national traits.

What is it to be an American? The Yankee has been portrayed by experts to the last degree of accuracy; but the Yankee is not the American. The American of Marryatt, of Trollope, of Dickens, was, or is, a grotesque caricature, who, if any such creature ever existed, is no longer extant. Our lasting national character is probably not yet fixed, or, as it were, set. To the making of the typical man who will one day be called the American, there must go many diverse nationalities. In describing him we must partly describe the Englishman, Frenchman, Spaniard, Prussian, Swede, and whatever may come of mingling these and others in the proportions we have here. Having typified the European, we must picture him under the influence of three centuries of American life on American soil. Then, perhaps, we shall have set forth the American of the Twentieth Century.

Lowell, who so "held the mirror up to nature" that the world saw the genuine Yankee there, afterward, in bringing that type to a second stage of historic description—the Yankee at the West—in a bold and splendid stroke, declared Abraham Lincoln to be "the first American."

But if Lincoln be the typical American of to-day, at least he will probably not be that of a century hence. As the Briton, the Dane, the Saxon, the Norman had to be kneaded together, in order to produce that compound which the "Saturday Review" and which Matthew Arnold by turns dissect, and which is called "the average Englishman," as the Pict, the Scot, the Celt had to be added to the man our fathers styled a "Britisher;" so, many races must combine in the American of the future. Our reservoir of population is constantly fed by foreign springs. Could we stop that influx from the Old World, some acute observer and analyst might tell us what, on the whole, the American man is, and what he will be; but we are always swollen with contributions from across the sea. Foreign and native are the two factors which, multiplied into each other, make up the American; which product must change, because the factors are always changing.

Both in body and spirit, the descendants of the early American settlers, and of all the ante-Revolutionary stock, bear inevitable witness to the trials and triumphs—political and individual, spiritual and material—of their ancestry. Even under the changed customs and conditions of our day, they tell in their physique, in their ideas, in their work, in their theory and conduct of public affairs and private affairs, in their aspirations, and in their daily lives, the story of two centuries of the primitive American life. Were there possible in such studies a keenness of perception kindred with that which reads from his bones the animal's habits and experiences, out of the genuine Yankee of to-day we could determine aright some doubtful thread of New England history, and out of many such, its whole warp.

Whence, for example, is that inventive or originative faculty which we attribute to him? For, since he has it above the English, from whom he derives, and the Germans who dwell by his side, we ought to be able to trace its rise and progress. Possibly it has a twofold origin. The Puritan independence in religious thought inevitably led to similar independence in political thought; and so, by honest inheritance, and gathering momentum with descent, comes down the spirit of the religious and political ventures