Charles Pollen, that excellent and worthy German who came to this
country while still a young man and who lived in the midst of the social
and intellectual life of Boston, felt the want of intellectual freedom
in the people about him. If one were obliged to describe the America of
to-day in a single sentence, one could hardly do it better than by a
sentence from a letter of Follen to Harriet Martineau written in 1837,
after the appearance of one of her books: "You have pointed out the two
most striking national characteristics, 'Deficiency of individual moral
independence and extraordinary mutual respect and kindness.'"
Much of what Emerson wrote about the United States in 1850 is true of
the United States to-day. It would be hard to find a civilized people
who are more timid, more cowed in spirit, more illiberal, than we. It is
easy to-day for the educated man who has read Bryce and Tocqueville to
account for the mediocrity of American literature. The merit of Emerson
was that he felt the atmospheric pressure without knowing its reason.
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