And I have seen Orestes and Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and
Oedipus. Do you suppose I have not met Tarquin and Virginia and
Lucretia and Shylock--to come down to nearer times--and seen Lear
and studied Macbeth in the flesh? I knew Juliet once, and behind
locked doors I have talked with Romeo. They are all here in any
American commonwealth at the close of our century: the great
tragedies are numbered--the oldest are the newest. So that
sometimes I fix my eyes only on the old. I see merely the planet
with its middle green belt of pasture and its poles of snow and
ice; and wandering over that green belt for a little while man the
pasturing animal--with the mystery of his ever being there and the
mystery of his dust--with nothing ever added to him, nothing ever
lost out of him--his only power being but the power to vary the
uses of his powers.
"Then there is the other side, the side of the new. I like to
think of the marvels that the pasturing animal has accomplished in
our own country. He has had new thoughts, he has done things never
seen elsewhere or before. But after all the question remains, what
is our characteristic mettle? What is the mettle of the American?
He has had new ideas; but has he developed a new virtue or carried
any old virtue forward to characteristic development? Has he added
to the civilizations of Europe the spectacle of a single virtue
transcendently exercised? We are not braver than other brave
people, we are not more polite, we are not more honest or more
truthful or more sincere or kind.
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