Thus far the opening of the conversational game is evidently a cautious play for safety, so well understood that it is assumed no offence could possibly be taken. What, however, so many of the early American tourists complained of in New England and elsewhere, was the merciless catechising that followed,—questions as to one’s age, married state, one’s relatives, every imaginable detail of a personal sort by which the stranger’s mind, history, circumstances and opinions were ruthlessly explored so long as he continued to submit. The American jaw possesses an idiosyncratic restlessness, which has been the foundation and prime cause of the rise of the Beeman, Adams, Wrigley and other gum fortunes, but I am inclined to trace the source of the second type of American questioning less to the extreme irritability of the maxillary muscles than to a psychological vacuity. The trick of questioning, instead of conversing, which developed among the dwellers in the towns, villages and frontier fringes of colonial America and which so disturbed the horde of French tourists who came to look us over following the Seven Years’ and Revolutionary Wars, and the English who came from 1820 to 1850, was merely the rude effort of a primitive, predatory and half-starved brain to grab at food. The spider simply sucked the blood out of any insect that got caught in his web. The community mental life of any village or provincial[Pg 225] town for most folk in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was hardly stimulating but, as compared with those in Europe, that of the American towns, villages and lonely clearings became a good deal like what the landscape must have looked like after the last great thaw of the Ice Age revealed it under the melted glacier. As I have pointed out elsewhere, a struggle for life under primitive, even savage conditions does not preclude the growth of an artistic and intellectual life, as the arts and mythologies of any primitive people from the African negroes to the Pacific Islanders testify. What saps the white man and empties his mind of all cultural elements when he struggles to subdue a wilderness is the effort to maintain a civilized standard, as far as possible, of material comfort under wilderness opposition. Something has to be jettisoned from his cargo or he sinks. He always naturally elects to throw culture overboard until such time as, the storm weathered, he thinks he may salvage it again. Hard as the life has been in the old lands from which our first immigrants came, English in New England, German in Pennsylvania, there had been many means of self-expression and leisure, and a social consciousness that made such self-expression natural. For example, among other things they brought with them their arts and crafts. They carved the end beams of their houses, painted designs on the overhang, designed, carved and painted their furniture. Little by little all this was dropped. The struggle proved too hard.