[In the following essay, Angoff offers an unflattering assessment of On the Wisdom of America.]

The United States has puzzled the Old World almost from its very beginning. The English, in particular, for a long time could make little sense out of what Tennyson called the “Gigantic daughter of the West.” The poet laureate wished her well, and so did Coleridge, who looked upon the new nation as an “august conception … Great Britain in a state of glorious magnification.” But Macaulay was filled with foreboding. He predicted that some Caesar or Napoleon would seize the government, “or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth,” with the difference that “your Huns and Vandals will have engendered within your own country by your own institutions.” Dr. Samuel Johnson, as is well known, looked upon us as “a race of convicts, [who] ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging,” and he told Boswell that he was “willing to love all mankind, except an American.” The poet W. S. Landor could only “detest the American character,” while Sidney Smith, in his celebrated article in the Edinburgh Review in 1820, asked, “In the four corners of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substance have their chemists discovered?”

Later Englishmen were less condescending than Mr. Smith. Some, indeed, were very much impressed with the land and the people, and said so in public print. Lord Bryce's American Commonwealth, with its vast understanding of and admiration for the United States, would have made Dr. Johnson frantic. And Dr. Denis Brogan's shorter and less ambitious essay, The American Character, published but six years ago, was, in some respects, even more laudatory.

The French people, from the first, were friendly toward the United States, and treated us with great seriousness and respect. Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, though it first saw print in 1835, is still probably the most penetrating analysis of the American way of life ever written by a foreigner. French writers were very sensitive to the works of American authors, and they appreciated the full stature of at least one of our poets, Edgar Allan Poe, before our own critics and our own reading public did. André Siegfried's America Comes of Age is marred somewhat by his failure to discount the shallow anti-Americanism of the noisier and temporarily more influential writers of the twenties, yet it is filled with sharp insights into our manners and with warm feeling for our entire scheme of things.

The peoples—at least, the writers—of other nations did not concern themselves very much with us until relatively recently. For decades they seemed to look upon us as little more than a semi-civilized British colony that somehow managed to shake off the mother country. The Germans and Austro-Hungarians barely gave us any notice whatever until well toward the end of the last century, and when Leon Kellner wrote his little treatise on American literature, as late as 1915, it was largely to sneer at Puritanism, or, rather, his conception of it. The Russians, the Italians, and the Japanese seldom took the trouble even to sneer.

The first World War brought the American people and those of the rest of the civilized world into more intimate contact than ever before, but the non-English and non-French speaking world was still quite ignorant about us. Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo built their predatory schemes only upon the vast misunderstanding of America, which their intellectuals fed them. Stalin is being similarly misled, as he will quickly find out on the unhappy day when, and if, he decides to do away with “the decaying American democracy.” It is truly shocking, nay, almost incredible, that the recognized leader of the democratic nations of the world in the epochal struggle with totalitarian tyranny should be so little known by so large a section of the people of the globe.

II

The Chinese, who boast the oldest and greatest civilization known to man, and many of whom have studied in our colleges and universities, seem to be as little informed about us as any other people, if one is to judge by Lin Yutang's latest book, On the Wisdom of America. A “spiritual journey through American writing,” it is about half anthology and half commentary about things American. Dr. Lin quotes extensively from some forty American authors, including Henry Adams, Clarence Day, William James, Benjamin Franklin, George Santayana, James Thurber, E. B. White, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. and Jr., Christopher Morley, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Jefferson, and David Grayson, the alter ego of Ray Stannard Baker, friend and biographer of President Wilson.

Dr. Lin is very polite to American writers, but he cannot hide his condescension to them. The Chinese, he seems to say, were, of course, far better in every field of literary composition, and, indeed, the highest compliment he can pay an American author is to compare him to a Chinese writer or philosopher. Dr. Lin considers Benjamin Franklin “that wisest of Americans (perhaps also the greatest)”—which, when one recalls the very sizeable Babbitt who resided in Franklin's soul, is perhaps the most damning praise ever accorded American culture—but when Dr. Lin wants to say something really laudatory about him he says that “Franklin talked like an American Confucius.” Dr. Lin rates Emerson and Thoreau among America's greatest sages, but he hastens to add that they “quoted liberally from Confucius and Mencius. … The Transcendentalists attended to the best of Oriental culture. An idea, like a seed carried by a sea bird across the ocean, was brought and deposited in another continent; …”

Dr. Lin's remarks upon the writers he has selected are seldom original; most often they are commonplace and sometimes they are bizarre. Emerson, of course, was a sage, but to say that his wisdom had the “ingredients of wistfulness and common sense” is to miss the very essence of his greatness. Emerson's ideas were of a most uncommon nature, penetrating and even startling in their freshness, and his whole outlook was anything but wistful. His metaphysic was hard and clear and comprehended almost all the arts and sciences. To call James Branch Cabell “another American master of irony” is to play havoc with the phrase “master of irony.” Twenty-five years ago the more brash American critics had a high opinion of Cabell's works, but there is hardly a respectable critic now writing who takes Cabell seriously. To say of Thoreau merely that he was “in a very special sense, the prophet of the individual and the defender of the individual against the state,” is to say only what every bright college senior would write on his examination paper.

Dr. Lin is at his most bizarre in his remarks on David Grayson. He quotes from his works often and at length. “Grayson is mature, if any American thinker is mature.” He has the wisdom of Emerson, but he communicates it “in a more vivid concrete manner.” There is “serenity of spirit” in Grayson, who “has achieved something that the world in general and the modern world in particular sadly lack.” Alas, the samples of Grayson's work that Dr. Lin quotes make embarrassing reading. When he didn't write biography, Grayson wrote books for young boys and for those oldsters who like to read nostalgic pulp fiction with their bifocals. One of the leading characters, obviously speaking for the author, in Great Possessions, III, for example, says: “Waal, I'll tell ye—a little peace and comfort for me and Josie in our old age, and a little something to make the children remember us when we're gone. Isn't that worth working for?”

It is perhaps not surprising that a man who likes such writings is inclined to be pretty much of an Eddie Guestian philosopher. Dr. Lin had revealed this tendency in full measure in his previous books, especially in The Importance of Living. Obviously he reveals that he hasn't changed. In a section entitled “Adam and Eve” Dr. Lin suddenly asks, “What is man, anyhow? Do we know the answer to that question better than man did a hundred years ago?” Well, in spite of all the advances in the sciences, Dr. Lin is compelled to say in reply to these questions, think what you will, “I would not bet yes and I would not bet no.” Sad to say, not one of us—not a single one of us—can live forever, yet, it seems, the inevitable end to all life is not all black. “Death,” admits Dr. Lin, “is an ugly fact, but it is fascinating.” Dr. Lin is also convinced that “it is the human being's capacity for dreaming, his unwillingness to accept the gray wall of facts as his prison, his power of pulling down the blinds on present facts and sallying forth to seek the adventure of the unknown and unrealized, that is the ticket to his redemption.” A country of dreamers can be a prosperous country. That we must never forget. But we must also never forget that “A prosperous people and a happy people are two different things.” On the strictly personal aspect of living, Dr. Lin does not hesitate to say, “There is nothing so intimate in a man's life, or in a woman's, as marriage.” Dr. Lin lets his reader in on something else he has learned in a lifetime of contemplation, to wit, that “Uncertainty is bad because it makes a man nervous.”

It seems incredible that Dr. Lin was ever considered a profound philosopher and an acute observer of our culture. He has no more to say than did the late William Lyon Phelps. Nay, he has very much less to say. Here is a man who, after living in our midst for ten years, has taken a “spiritual journey through American writing,” who heaps mountains of praise upon David Grayson, yet finds no space for Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost or Willa Cather or Josiah Royce or Stephen Crane or many others of the same stature.

Dr. Lin has been hailed as a glorious representative of the eternal qualities of Chinese culture, and his books have been read by millions of Americans. This must be regarded as but another of the many misfortunes that have lately befallen the Chinese people.