WHY WORSHIP EUROPE?

We never can be sure what it was that gave us a bad cold, and for some reason we invariably speculate about that as if it made a difference. So it is with getting to be an old person when we have always felt young. I suppose we do grow old, but we do not know it until suddenly the fact comes upon us. The curtain drops behind us, all those years when we were young pass into memory, and we see the whole of life from a soberer, wiser, different point of view. Our very self-consciousness gets a stoop in the shoulders, and though we may go on for a time with a square-shouldered air we are not the same.

About this time that change took place in me. I shall never know whether it was the death of my husband, ill-health, or that six months spent in Europe, but some vivacity of the spirit was gone when I came home. Life had been bent somewhere within. I felt the weariness of wisdom, such as one gets from the world. And I never had it until this time--a curious depression about the mortal fate of man. I was so outrageously tamed that I lost the habit of making dogmatic statements, which had always been a refreshing insolence of the mind with me, as bearing arms must be with a soldier of fortune. It seemed to me that I had been demoted and suddenly civilized.

Whatever may have been the cause I do not know, but in my opinion it was Europe, that aged me. It is an old book of history, illustrated with the scenes and architecture of former, younger, more spirited races of men. The countries I saw could never have been produced by the people who are now living in them, with the possible exception of England. I do not like Britishers, but involuntary respect compels me to hand it to Englishmen wherever I see them. They have the weakest chins in the Old World and the strongest wills still to survive and achieve.

I cannot understand Americans who worship the life, culture, and mental attitude of these failing civilizations. But they do. Nothing, not even the Great War and our experiences then with their rapacity and their resentment of our qualities can cure us of this obsession. If the League of Nations had been called the League of Arts, nothing could have kept us out of it. We spend more every year staring at their scenery, buying their pictures, statues, tapestries, and the very stones of their ancient castles than would be required to open every door in the world to our commerce, our inventions, our morals, and our institutions, all of which are more vigorous and vastly superior to anything along the same lines in Europe.

But we seem determined to degrade our own powers to achieve better things by this idealism of old things abroad. We note disparagingly the imitative characteristics of the negro race in their relation to the white races, which has in fact delayed the development of their peculiar genius in many ways; but we show the same tendencies toward European culture with less excuse. I suppose we buy their old things because we feel the lack of the tone of time in our civilization and collect this stuff to produce that effect.

As a matter of fact, there is no virtue in the tone of time. Virtue comes alone from our own achievements. We cannot mellow what we are by what we hang on our walls. This is cheating, in my opinion, such as we do when we chase our ancestors back until we derive a coat of arms from some old swashbuckling knight of the fourteenth century. Very few of them would be acceptable now in decent society. It seems to me safer and more respectable not to admit descending from any further back than our original pioneer American blacksmith ancestors. This is good stock, cleaned and charged with the noblest virtues by the courage with which they endured hardships and built a great civilization. Benjamin Franklin’s sister made soap and sold it to her patrons in Philadelphia for a livelihood. It seems to me a more honorable record to hand down to posterity than that of a seventeenth lady whose only distinction was that she had a title inherited, not earned, and that she sat to a great artist for her portrait.

Europe is childish, overbearing, grasping, like an old man. We ought to contribute liberally to its support on that account, as we do to aged parents; but we ought not to ape the senility of old age. We do now limit the quota of immigrants from these countries, but it seems to me even more important to limit the number of American tourists who go abroad to the aged and mature. The youth of this country should be kept at home until their characters and ideals have been firmly established. I was forty years old before I went over there, confirmed and certified in my convictions as an American citizen, but it was a long time before I recovered my own spirit and wiped the shadows of a weaker world from my mind. Even now I cannot be sure. It seems to me that I detect a foreign substance at times in my thoughts, not so firm or sound as real living makes thinking. And I have known a great many people who never do repent of Europe after they have indulged in it. They get an air of aloofness and superiority. They are sick and disgusted with our honest sins. They have acquired a decadent taste for vice as if vice were one of the arts of Europe, as indeed it is. Now it does seem to me that if we must be wicked we ought to be normally and healthily wicked and call our sins by their right names. It is a sign of degeneracy to be so virtuously sensitive and proud of your vices as so many men and women of older nations have grown to be.