Unimpregnated by human destiny

But it is the American village that most betrays the impulse of our civilization, a civilization that perpetually over-reaches itself only to be obliged to surrender again and again to nature everything it has gained. How many thousand villages, frost­ bitten, palsied, full of a morbid, bloodless death-in-life, villages that have lost, if they ever possessed, the secret of self-perpetuation, lie scattered across the continent! […] Communities that have come into being on the flood-tide of an enterprise too rapidly worked out, they all signify some lost cause of a material kind that has left humanity high and dry; like the neutral areas in an old painting where the color, incompetently mixed and of perishable quality, has evaporated with time.

[…]

Nature has been robbed and despoiled and wasted for the sake of private and temporary gains, and now, having no more easy rewards to offer, it is taking its revenge on a race that has been too impatient and self-seeking to master its inner secrets. Incapable of cooperating with nature, of lying fallow, of merging themselves as it were in the great current of life, they have accumulated no buoyant fund of instinct and experience, and each generation, a little more spiritually impoverished than the last, runs out the ever-shortening tether of self-reliance. Still pioneers, pioneers or nothing, they have lost the sap of adventure without developing beyond the stage of improvisation.

It is all so familiar, so intensely American, and yet the warm ancestral bond eludes one so! One looks out over a landscape everywhere abundant and propitious, but still in some way, after so many years of tillage, unimpregnated by human destiny, almost wholly wanting in that subtle fusion of natural and human elements which everywhere the European landscape suggests. For Europe is alive in all its members; in its loneliest and most isolated corner there is hardly a hamlet where life does not still persist, as green and warm and ruddy as the heart of an old olive tree. Some profound inertia, some imperturbable tenacity of the spirit, has prevented it from quite surrendering to nature anything, a bit of ground, a house, a road, that has once passed into the keeping of the race. And thus it is that while the conquest has been slow and laborious, invention tardy, ideas few, means inade­quate, something cumulative survives.

Van Wyck Brooks, “Enterprise,” The Seven Arts 1 (no. 1, November 1916): 57–60. Available online at Modernist Journals Project.