The Dawn of the Golden Day

...Mumford's book...

...At best, it would be a phase, not a solution—a pleasant pause, but not the end of the journey of man...

...Brooks takes any part in blowing blasts of those brazen (or dulcet) bugles of blurbing which today keep the puppets of publicity dancing to the tunes arranged by publishers' claques...

...Santayana nor Mr...

...Mumford says about Mr...

...Mumford's work "is the best book about America, if not the best American book, that I have ever read...

...So, as Protestantism passed more and more away from the central energy of Christian ideas, and more and more broke up and separated into increasingly individualistic cults, and then was displaced by the cult of individualism itself...

...What Mr...

...so I do, with one reservation ; but because I believe that the point at which something should be said that is not praise, but a deep regret, and because the reservation to be made is, it seems to me, of fundamental importance, I propose to add a few words to the chorus of high and merited praise given to The Golden Day...

...a philosophy which shall be as completely oriented toward Life as the dominant thought since Descartes has been directed toward the Machine...

...but they have a far wider and deeper application...

...because all the people and opinions which I deal with and try to understand, are foreign and heretical and transitory from the point of view of the great tradition to which I belong...

...and it is to these types that he attributes all that has been unsatisfactory, even baneful, in American culture and life...

...There are authors who can be judged by the quality rather than by the quantity or the popularity of their work, and Mr...

...Mumford's definition of the guiding principle of the mediaeval Christian ethos is just and well expressed: Over the daily life lay a whole tissue of meanings, derived from the Christian belief in eternity: the notion that existence was not a biological activity, but a period of moral probation...

...The Church did not die at any of the dates inscribed more or less eloquently on tombstones above empty graves, by so many of the writers of its obituaries...

...Santayana's pardon for tinkering with his lucid prose) : What you (Mr...

...the idea that life was significant only on condition that it was prolonged, in beatitude or despair, into the next world...

...Mumford has the right to be judged by the effect of his book as a book, as a whole thing, rather than by a precis, no matter how apparently accurate, of its main ideas...

...Mumford's views about Mr...

...and another book dealing with the American experiment in civilization through a more particular examination of America's architecture...

...the second is an equally strong and durable interest in the material, the social, the actual conditions of human life seen in relation to human ideals...

...Mumford is far more precise in his analysis than in his synthesis...

...At the end of his book, Mr...

...Men who look forward to an endless life will certainly not take the same view of earthly life as men who care only for this world and its life...

...Brooks thinks that Mr...

...In this sense, America might save, not only its own soul, but that of Europe—the distracted mother from whom she fled into the wilderness...

...He can separate and describe the principal factors of his problem admirably (except for the one great factor which, I repeat, he misses entirely) particularly in criticizing the deficiencies and the faults of American life...

...He says that Mr...

...But to return from Mr...

...Brooks has been one of the leaders of this critical movement, one, indeed, of its creators...

...of their poets and artists...

...It helps, as all such work will help, to clear the air, and to clear the ground, for the action of that which is not heretical, but true...

...The Golden Day: A Study in American Experience and Culture, by Lewis Mumford...

...Mumford's views of Mr...

...2.50...

...what, rather, he does not even see, is the fact, plain as sunlight, that there was no such complete disappearance of Catholic Christianity as he assumes to be the case...

...So far as this book is concerned, Mr...

...In this effort Mr...

...the Church set its mark on America long before the distracted refugees from a chaotic Europe arrived upon the scene...

...So I do, up to a certain point...

...Both men still believe in addressing themselves to the intelligence of their readers...

...In a score of passages Mr...

...When, and only when we apply it, will society find its equilibrium again...

...What that "something" is remains, however, more than a little vague...

...but he only does so in relation to what Mr...

...Your appreciation seems absolutely just, as directed upon that semi-public personage...

...What Mr...

...it has the atmosphere of an individual's personality...

...Gardner's Boston, is true of him, not of me...

...the Church's norm of culture and of life remains, after all experiments have failed...

...Santayana, thus (I crave Mr...

...it has the mood induced by all good writing—a mood akin to that produced by music, a mood in which something intuitively transcendental seems to mingle with the pleasure or the interest aroused in us by the mathematics of music—and Mr...

...Particularly insistent is his opinion, over and over repeated, that the breakdown of European culture, the dissolution of all the spiritual, moral, philosophical principles that had molded and directed that culture, was complete* and final, and that it was from a chaos that the dissociated and inharmonious elements which explored, settled, and civilized America—or, at any rate, the United States—proceeded...

...the third quality is the focusing of the two other qualities upon the study of American life: its achievements, its failures, its errors, its hopes and prospects...

...Brooks...

...Mum-ford's is something like the chief value of such cruder work as Mr...

...New York: Boni and Live-right...

...Mumford's views of American life and culture can only be made clear by turning to Mr...

...Two such opinions, uttered by two such authorities, almost dispense us from further examination of The Golden Day...

...nobody has a juster title to be regarded as one of the judges of its results...

...Mumford, no force left to oppose the inevitable disaster which menaced mankind, save as he indicates in his last chapter —the revolt of man against the new notions of mere materialism in science and government, art and culture generally, and the creation by man himself, "of a new world...

...for instance, of my pose as a superior and lackadaisical person...

...In a word, the chief value of a book like Mr...

...namely, it clearly exhibits the failure of things heretical and transitory...

...The book I have read follows a book dealing with the story of Utopias—the curious history of man's many dreams of a world made perfect for human life...

...Santayana, he is even more emphatic than Mr...

...Mumford's general views as well as to his particular view of Mr...

...it is partial and incomplete, but it serves its purpose fairly well...

...Mumford's book is "the culmination of the whole critical movement in this country during the last ten years—the most brilliant book the movement has produced thus far and the one that bests sums vfp its leading ideas...

...my own roots are Catholic and Spanish, and though they remain underground, perhaps, they are the life of everything...

...I simply advise my own readers to read it, and thereby profit...

...Perhaps that is the best vision a prophet may be able to achieve...

...but the main roots of European, and therefore, of American life, are Catholic, and though they remain underground, perhaps, they are the life of everything . . . and all the people and opinions and conditions which you deal with and try to understand are heretical and transitory from the point of view of the great tradition and greater life of Catholicism...

...Nevertheless, even were I competent for the task, I cannot write a book about Mr...

...but I never felt myself to be identical with that being, and now much less than ever...

...We know that Mr...

...H. L. Mencken's...

...Santayana's criticism applies not merely to Mr...

...The Protestant, the inventor, the politician, the explorer, the restless delocalized man—all these types appeared in Europe before they rallied together to form the composite America," he goes on to say...

...Mumford's vision of the future to his picture of the past and of the present, let us sketch his thesis a little more fully...

...Mumford) say about the roots of distracted, materialistic America being at best in the uprooted soil of a distracted, dissociated Europe—the post-Reformation Europe—is true in part...

...and gradually the dream that held them all together started to dissolve...

...While it is one of the greatest merits of Mr...

...Hence, also, the strenuous, persistent efforts of their better, nobler representatives...

...Mum-ford's book that it talks to the mind, that it is intellectual without being pedantic or limited too strictly to intellectual values, at the same time it is a work of art...

...The first quality is a powerful, persistent interest in ideals, even in vague dreams of ideals, of human perfectibility here and now—dreams of the earthly paradise...

...Mumford which I have quoted above, has, indeed, anticipated the point I have in mind, the reservation I propose to make...

...I quote from Mr...

...Lewis Mumford, I feel no hesitancy in saying that he is one of the few American authors who really matter...

...And so does Mr...

...It is, of course, an outside view...

...Mumford's, I would still be certain that he was a very important figure...

...And if I am correct in my interpretation of the hints, I, for one, would be obliged to comment that "the best," as imagined by Mr...

...And also, as the qualities in these types that were responsible for things unsatisfactory or evil (socially and culturally speaking) were cured or modified, that "something of value was created" to take the place of "something of value" that "disappeared with the colonization of America...

...Then, one by one, they began to crack...

...The beliefs and symbols of the Christian Church had guided men, and partly modified their activities for, roughly, a thousand years...

...Mumford reiterates his belief in the total loss of the culture which once had unified and vivified European life and culture: In the thirteenth century, the European heritage of mediaeval culture was still intact...

...One does not need to have read these two books (though doubtless they are well worth reading) to know that they manifest three qualities that are strikingly combined in the third book,* now under consideration...

...A lesser critic, knowing how well he may rely upon the verdict of two such sound judges of literature, might be tempted simply to write: "I concur —for what my own opinion may be worth, I agree that Mr...

...What you say about my roots being at best in Mrs...

...Now, Mr...

...Mumford lays down and establishes the thesis that it is from Europe's unsettlement that the settlement of America sprang...

...not transitory, but permanent—Catholicism...

...Mumford: In the very complimentary notice, in quality and quantity, which you take of me in your book, I feel that you are thinking of me—quite naturally—as just a Harvard professor, author of a book called The Life of Reason...

...When two such men as George Santayana and Van Wyck Brooks praise a writer in terms vibrant with enthusiasm as well as illuminated with judgment, we may be assured that we shall not waste our time in paying some attention to his work...

...If a man tells you that he hopes for the best, only a very disgruntled pessimist would be inclined to growl at him...

...Even had I not read anything of Mr...

...Mumford's book, in order to find out just what these views are...

...Mumford, is not nearly good enough...

...Santayana, but much more fundamentally to Mr...

...Santayana, in the letter which contained the very remarkable tribute to Mr...

...of the higher but undirected instincts, or desires, of their own selves, to resolve the lack of harmony of their lives and culture, and to achieve a new, and nobler, synthesis—to find a greater culture than any of the past...

...Santayana...

...Mumford celebrates the beauty and the high value of this "something" in a vein of prophetic exultation—the exultation of hope, at least, if not precisely of realization...

...Then, perhaps, we shall know the Golden Day...

...When the process ceased, the united order of Christendom had become an array of independent and sovereign states, and the Church itself had divided up into a host of repellent sects...

...Mumford would leave such a question unanswered, save for a hint or two...

...It would not be good enough because it would not be true enough, even if we were ever to have it...

...By the end of the seventeenth it had become only a heap of fragments...

...As for Mr...

...Santayana wrote about himself might be paraphrased so as to apply to Mr...

...and as industrialism married materialism and begot prole-tarianism, there was, according to Mr...

...I think, then, it may be said that first of all, and justly, Mr...

...Its dawn is already visible...

...but the landscape of the future, or even a map of it, he shows only as a rosy blur of humanistic optimism...

...Mumford recognizes the greatness of America...

...The dissociation, the displacement, and, finally, the disintegration of European culture became most apparent in the new world: but the process itself began in Europe, and the interests that eventually dominated the American scene all had their origin in the old world," says Mr...

...in these pages I can only do my best to give a brief outline of what those main ideas seem to be, and how they seem to miss the main idea of all...

...The manner in which Mr...

...and also of vaguely idealistic humanism...

...A score of such passages might be quoted...

...Mumford's book is what they say it is...

...All the same, even an optimist might, without being open to a charge of cruelty, or lack of sympathy, ask him to tell us what it is he deems to be the best...

...Mumford, of course, ignores...

...Mumford is such a one...

...both have worked with ardent and lucid patience to keep the lamp of reason alight in the troubled atmosphere of American letters...

...one by one they ceased to be real or interesting...

...the notion of an intermediate hierarchy of human beings (the priesthood) that connected the lowest sinner with the august Ruler of Heaven...

...of Protestantism, materialistic science, industrialism...

...Santa-yana's letter to Mr...

...Santayana, as a corrective to Mr...

...Hence, all the ugly, mean, sordid conditions which mar American life or culture were produced because of the inherent lack of an organic set of principles, or ideas, on the part of the Protestant, pioneering, political, materialistic, profiteering settlers and colonists and their descendants...

...Neither Mr...

...Mumford's views are so painstakingly expressed, they are so amply, and so beautifully, illustrated by his studies of the European foundation and background of American life, of the psychology of the American pioneer, of the arrival and the results of the industrial revolution, of Puritanism, of Emerson, Melville, Twain, and other writers, that it is very difficult to epitomize them justly...