II
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Foerster, Norman
And we have Anderson’s summary indictment of industrialism:
“Modern men and women who live in industrial cities are like mice that have come out of the fields to live in houses that do not belong to them. They live within the dark walls of the houses where only a dim light penetrates, and so many have come that they grow thin and haggard with the constant toil of getting food and warmth.”
Thus those who have sought an American paradise of nature, a physical paradise, have reported finding only despair. In essentials this hope is identical with the primitivistic and industrial hope which Europe found inadequate over a century ago. Wordsworth, the high priest of naturalism, confessed he had “too blindly reposed” his trust, and he had the wisdom to seek the support of the classical and the Christian traditions. And Ruskin and Carlyle exposed the criminal fallacies involved in setting material gain above the sanctity of the individual personality. But when this outworn, exploded philosophy, based upon primitivism, faith in natural goodness, absolute liberty, laissez faire, and reliance upon nature and material things, was transplanted to the vast material resources of a frontier land, it was given a new, hysterical lease of life. Now, a century and a quarter later, a disenchanted America agrees with the English naturalist who testified of his infinite “dejection” and his conviction that man
“may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.”