Letters and leadership Author:Van Wyck Brooks Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III YOUNG AMERICA "When first hatched they are free-swimming microscopic creatures, but in a few hours they fall to the bottom and are lost unless... more » they can adhere to a firm, clean surface while making their shells and undergoing development." —Report on the Oyster Industry. When I speak of the culture of industrialism I do not mean to imply that it has been peculiar to us. Everywhere the industrial process has devitalized men and produced a poor quality of human nature. By virtue of this process the culture of the whole Western world fell too largely, during the nineteenth century, into the hands of the prig and the aesthete, those two sick blossoms of the same sapless stalk, whose roots have been for so long unwatered by v the convictions of the race. But in Europe the great traditional culture, the culture that has ever held up the flame of the human spirit, has never been quite gutted out. The industrialism that bowled us over, because for generations our powers of resistance had been undermined by Puritanism, was no sooner well under way in Europe than human nature began to get its back up, so to speak; and a long ( line of great rebels reacted violently against its desiccating influences. Philologists like Nietzsche and Renan, digging among the roots of Greek and Semitic thought, artists like Morris and Rodin, rediscovering the beautiful and happy art of the Middle Ages, economists like Marx and Mill, revolting against the facts of their environment, kept alive the tradition of a great society and great ways of living and thus were able to assimilate for human uses the positive by-products of industrialism itself, science and democracy. They made it impossible for men to forget the degradation of society andthe poverty of their lives and built a bri...« less