The American Mind: The E. T. Earl Lectures by Bliss Perry

 

There is but one lumberman in camp who can play the fiddle, though the whole camp can dance.

A little change of pace, this book of printed lectures was published in 1912. Within, Mr. Perry, attempts to proffer a theme for what makes American literature unique to itself and not necessarily reflective of the European world that so many of the nation’s earliest authors came from or were deeply influenced by.

Rather than looking to the Old World, Mr. Perry’s theme is that the continual pushing of physical frontiers shaped the American cultural mind—even if one were not a frontiersman himself, the early American mind lived with a great awareness that there were territories to be explored, “places beyond” civilization,

This awareness of an unbounded world and mixing with a humanity who was willing to chance it, shaped a culture, dyed a society in a way that already settled regions back in Europe could not even imagine.

His theme seems to be a literary version of Frederick Jackson Turner’s historical offering The Significance of the Frontier in American History.

While not strictly an examination of Western literature as a genre unto itself, I was continually struck that his theme of what made early American literature distinct from the Old-World literature of the time seems to carry on into present day Western genre writing.

The themes of pluck, self-reliance, perseverance, no need of obeisance to mere opinion.

Themes that are lost in much present-day literature be it Western, literary, or most genres overall.

A few extracts from Mr. Perry’s work.

"'T is best to remain aloof from people, and like their good parts, without being eternally troubled with the dull process of their everyday lives.... All I can say is that standing at Charing Cross, and looking East, West, North and South, I can see nothing but dullness."—John Keats

·        Here, Mr. Perry remarks upon the Old-World attitude. A crowded civilization lapses into either taking one another for granted or, well, a bit of annoyance. [Social media anyone?]

·        Mr. Keats’ observation may be true [may] but it also fails to take into account that He is also part of that civilized press, and He too may in fact be viewed as engaging in the dull process of everyday living.

"Men speak too much about the world.... The world's being saved will not save us; nor the world's being lost destroy us. We should look to ourselves.... For the saving of the world, I will trust confidently to the Maker of the world; and look a little to my own saving, which I am more competent to!"—Thomas Carlyle

·        Another Englishman with a bit of a grouse, but the grousing points the way to what was burgeoning on the American Continent, an increasing number of folks who “didn’t follow fashion” and set out to forge themselves in this new world rather than decry how the world was in arrears.

·        The New World man was seen to Face the World, not lament it.

"If Æschylus is that man he is taken for, he has not yet done his office when he has educated the learned of Europe for a thousand years. He is now to approve himself a master of delight to me. If he cannot do that, all his fame shall avail him nothing. I were a fool not to sacrifice a thousand Æschyluses to my intellectual integrity."—Ralph Waldo Emerson

·        Mr. Perry offers this from Emerson’s journals. This foretaste of his “Self-Reliance” essay.

·        We are not to be impressed by classics, or the past, or tradition, or what “Good society” dictates simply because “That is simply how it is done.”

·        We are meant to be the test of all for ourselves.

·        We are not to read Shakespeare because he has been pronounced Good.

·        We are to read Shakespeare because we enjoy him.

·        If we do not, he is nothing to me, or to you.

·        On the opposite side of that coin, if we find no charm in Shakespeare or Aeschylus we do not attempt to dissuade others from reading him by dint of our mighty opinion, that would be just as dogmatic as the Powers That be declaring Shakespeare divine.

·        We are the measure for ourselves.

·        We are too busy tasting, reading, engaging in the living experiment of life for ourselves to dictate to others.

·        We push and explore frontiers.

·        We do not set boundaries for others.

“The lack of discipline is the chief obstacle to effective individualism.”

·        Here Mr. Perry rounds into his overall theme.

·        The rugged individuals of the Frontier weren’t “Individuals” because they wore the T-shirt, sported the bumper-sticker, posted the correct meme or social media profile, they were because they Bucked up and Went and Did it.

·        Individualism without the Discipline and the Act, is simply the cant of the child who says, “When I grow up, I’m gonna be…”

“I think it was [James Russell] Lowell who once said, in combatting the old aristocratic notion of white man supremacy, that no gentleman is willing to accept privileges that are inaccessible to other men.”

·        This comes after passages reflecting on how clustered civilization seems to “sort” humans, foster class distinction, foment prejudice.

·        The European continent had its ancestral lines [royal and feudal.]

·        The New World attempted to duplicate that with “Good Families” from “Good areas.”

·        It seems the Frontiers were the true melting pots. It is here we find, not necessarily harmony, but white men, black men, Native Americans, different social classes all more likely to mix, work along side one another, marry, fight together, rejoice together and live together than we see in the cosmopolitan regions where ideas are discussed but not lived.

·        In a natural world that can cut men and women down to size in a lighting stroke, Dems and Maga would be less important than, “John’s a good man to hunt with” “Carol Ann, is potting a stew tonight.”

·        Civilization without the daily fight for survival allows for free time to “think” and sort others into needless categories.

·        Put people together in a survival situation as we see in modern post-disaster scenarios and abstract differences fade away and realities intrude revealing, “Hey, this guy is all right!”

“I heard a doctor say, the other day, that a man's chief lesson was to pull his brain down into his spinal cord; that is to say, to make his activities not so much the result of conscious thought and volition, as of unconscious, reflex action; to stop thinking and willing, and simply do what one has to do.”

·        And that…That is the theme of life.

·        Life Large or small.

·        Stop thinking.

·        Start Doing.

·        In the beginning, we all have to think about how to ride that bike, finger that chord, pop that jab.

·        But, we keep at it and keep at it, and then there you go.

·        It becomes a natural act.

·        The jab becomes easy, the chord is a snap, the kind unjudgy act is buttery smooth and automatic.