Nation: LINCOLN AND MODERN AMERICA

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Jefferson, Locke's thought became something quite different. The New World brought about a new dispensation. Puritanism, despite the memories of stocks and stonings it left behind, sanctified self-reliance and selfdiscipline. In the colonies Christianity and the Enlightenment came together without strife. As Father John Courtney Murray has put it, the framers of the American Bill of Rights, unlike the men of the French Enlightenment, acted with due regard for Christian history. They "were individualists, but not to the point of ignoring the social nature of man."

It was Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting the U.S. in the 1830s, who first reported the "novel expression," individualism. This must not be confused with mere selfishness, he explained, but was "a mature and calm feeling" of withdrawal from the community. He thought it was a dangerous tendency but also believed that America's political institutions would keep it in check. Amid this early American balance of man and society developed a new breed of individual.

A Litany. To call someone an individual involves many personal and historic judgments as well as an endless play of paradoxes. In the litany of the saints of individuality, men have placed all the holy rebels and unholy dissenters, the blessed visionaries and diabolic prophets, the leaders and pioneers, the artists and discoverers, and all the mere eccentrics who enlarged (and sometimes narrowed) the human spirit. There are the true dissenters, in whom a sense of injustice, like Karl Marx's boils, is almost a physical affliction: Spartacus and Tom Paine, Abelard and John Brown, Saint-Just and Sam Houston, Cromwell and Bernard Shaw. There are also those who are pushed to their rebellion almost against their will, like Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, who recanted several times but then, cursing his right hand for signing the recantations, deliberately put the hand into the flames; or Luther, gradually moving from reform to open spiritual insurrection. There are those who flee into rebellion as if it were a second country, like Lenin or Garibaldi or T. E. Lawrence, or find in it a devout clique of followers, like Freud or Sartre. And there are those who carry rebellion to insanity, like Sade and Hitler.

There are those who neither rebel nor assert egos but are consumed by a vision, like Buddha, Pascal, St. Joan, Mary Baker Eddy. There are the converts who see a sudden or a slow light for which they surrender their past, like St. Paul or Mary Magdalene or Cardinal Newman. There are those who are willing to defy the class or service to which they belong, like Savonarola or Franklin D. Roosevelt or Billy Mitchell, and those who fulfill their individuality in the sometimes more difficult discipline of submission.

There are the numberless artists who lived to express their visions, or merely to earn applause, or both: Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Raphael and Mozart, who aimed to please; El Greco, Goya, Picasso, Beethoven, Proust and Yeats, who mostly aimed to please themselves. And there are those who found in art a refuge from reality, either through true talent, like the runaway Gauguin, or through some talent mixed with posing, like Byron, Hemingway and Dali, or no talent at all, like the hundreds of pseudo artists who succeed on borrowed ideas and hand-me-down rebellion. There are the great artistic eccentrics who