FREE TRADE, FASHION AND CENTRALIZATION.
Liberty and political economy beget and encourage free trade, as well
between different localities and different nations, as between
individuals of the same towns, neighborhoods or nations. The nations
possessed of most skill and capital, and commercial enterprise, and
cunning, gradually absorb the wealth of those nations who possess less
of those qualities. The effect of international free trade, aided by the
facilities of the credit system, of the mail, and speedy steam
communication, is to centralize wealth in a few large cities, such as
New York, Paris and London; and of social free trade to aggregate wealth
in a few hands in those cities. Theoretically, the disparities of
shrewdness, of skill and business capacity, between nations and
individuals, would, in the commercial and trading war of the wits, rob
the weak and simple, and enrich the strong and cunning. The facts of
history, and of the increasing inequalities of social, individual and
national wealth, under the system of free trade, stimulated by political
economy, correspond with the theory. Every month brings forth its
millionaire, and every day its thousands of new paupers. New York and
London grow richer rapidly on the fruits of a trade that robs the less
commercial and skillful people who traffic with them.
But the worst effect of free trade is, that it begets centres of
opinion, thought and fashions, robs men of their nationality, and
impairs their patriotism by teaching them to ape foreign manners, affect
foreign dress and opinions, and despise what is domestic. Paris, as the
centre of thought and fashion, wields as much power, and makes almost as
much money as London, by being the centre of trade and capital. An
American or Englishman will give five prices for an article because it
is made in Paris. Thus the want of true self-respect in America and
England, makes labor produce more in Paris than elsewhere. A Virginian
thinks it a disgrace to be dressed in home-spun, because home-spun is
unfashionable. The Frenchman prides himself on being a Frenchman; all
other people affect the cosmopolitan.
The tendency of all this is to transfer all wealth to London, New York
and Paris, and reduce the civilization of Christendom to a miserable
copy of French civilization, itself an indifferent copy of Roman
civilization, which was an imitation, but a falling off from that of
Greece.
We pay millions monthly for French silks, French wines, French brandy,
and French trinkets, although we can and do make as comfortable articles
for dress, and as good liquors, at home. But we despise ourselves, and
admire the French, and give four hours of American labor for one of
French labor, just to be in the fashion. And what is our fashion? To
treat whatever is American with contempt. People who thus act are in a
fair way to deserve and meet with from others, that contempt which they
feel for themselves. The little States of Greece each had its dialect,
and cultivated it, and took pride in it. Now, dialects are vulgar and
provincial. We shall have no men like the Greeks, till the manners,
dress, and dialect of gentlemen, betray, like the wines of Europe, the
very neighborhood whence they come. So thought Mr. Calhoun, and talked
South Carolina dialect in the Senate. But for all that, it was the best
English of the day. Its smack of provincialism gave it a higher flavor.
We of the South teach political economy, because it is taught in Europe.
Yet political economy, and all other systems of moral science, which we
derive from Europe, are tainted with abolition, and at war with our
institutions. We must build up centres of trade, of thought and fashion
at home. We must become national, nay, provincial, and cease to be
imitative cosmopolitans. We must, especially, have good colleges and
universities, where young men may learn to admire their homes, not to
despise them.
The South feels the truth of all this, and after a while will begin to
understand it. She has been for years earnestly and actively engaged in
_promoting_ the exclusive and protective policy, and preaching free
trade, non-interference of government and 'let alone.' But she does not
let alone. She builds roads and canals, encourages education, endows
schools and colleges, improves river navigation, excludes, or taxes
heavily foreign show-men, foreign pedlars, sellers of clocks, &c.; tries
to build up by legislation Southern commerce, and by State legislation
to multiply and encourage industrial pursuits. Protection by the State
Government is her established policy--and that is the only expedient or
constitutional protection. It is time for her to avow her change of
policy and opinion, and to throw Adam Smith, Say, Ricardo & Co., in the
fire.
We want American customs, habits, manners, dress, manufactures, modes of
thought, modes of expression, and language. We should encourage national
and even State peculiarities; for there are peculiarities and
differences in the wants and situations of all people, that require
provincial and national, not cosmopolitan, institutions and productions.
Take language, for instance. It is a thing of natural growth and
development, and adapts itself naturally to the changes of time and
circumstance. It is never ungrammatical as spoken by children, but
always expressive, practical and natural. Nature is always grammatical,
and language, the child of nature, would continue so, but for the
grammarians, who, with their Procrustean rules, disturb its proportions,
destroy its variety and adaptation, and retard its growth. They are to
language what dentists are to teeth: they more often injure it than
improve it.
Grammar, lexicography, and rhetoric, applied to language, destroy its
growth, variety and adaptability--stereotype it, make it at once
essentially a dead language, and unfit for future use; for new
localities, and changes of time and circumstances, beget new ideas, and
require new words and new combinations of words. Centralization and
cosmopolitanism have precisely the same effect. They would furnish a
common language from the centre, which is only fully expressive and
comprehensive at that centre. Walking and talking are equally natural,
and talking masters and walking masters equally useless. Neither can
foresee and provide for the thousands of new circumstances which make
change of language, or varieties of movement necessary. Nature is never
at a loss, and is the only reliable dancing master and grammar teacher.
She is always graceful and appropriate, and always ready to adapt
herself to changes of time, situation and circumstances.
Paris is becoming the universal model and grammar of Christendom;
nothing is right unless it be a la Parisienne. Now, in truth, nothing
can be right, natural, appropriate, or in good taste, outside of Paris,
that is Parisienne. When will our monkey imitative world cease to
sacrifice millions of money, cease to show its want of good sense and
propriety, and cease to render itself ridiculous by aping, what, in the
nature of things, is unsuitable, inappropriate, and unnatural? Fashion,
aided by free trade and centralization, is subjecting us to the dominion
of Parisian thought; and commerce, by means of the same agencies, makes
us tributaries to London. Trade and fashion conquer faster than arms.
After the Romans had conquered Greece, Athens became the school and
centre of thought for the civilized world. Men had but one set of ideas,
but one set of models to imitate, in the whole range of the fine arts.
Inventiveness and originality ceased, and genius was subdued. The rule
of Horace, "_Nullius addictus in verba magistri jurare_," was versed,
and men ceased to think for themselves, but looked to the common
fountain of thought at Athens; where the teachers of mankind borrowed
all their ideas from the past. Improvement and progress ceased, and
imitation, chaining the present to the car of the past, soon induced
rapid retrogression. Thus, we think centralization of thought occasioned
the decline of civilization. Northern invaders introduced new ideas,
broke up centralization, arrested imitation, and begot originality and
inventiveness. Thus a start was given to a new and Christian
civilization. Now, a centralization occasioned by commerce and fashion,
threatens the overthrow of our civilization, as arms and conquest
overthrew the ancient.
The ill effect of centralization of thought, whether its centre be the
past, or some locality of the present, is apparent in the arts and
literature of the Latin nations of Europe. France, Spain and Italy,
though possessed of more genius, have displayed less originality than
England and Germany. French art is a mere re-hash of Roman art, and very
inferior to its original. The natural growth, changes and adaptation of
language, are admirably described by Horace in his _De Arte Poetica_. He
makes a great blunder in advising the forming and compounding words from
the Greek, however; for the very want that occasions new words, shows
that they cannot be supplied from the past. In the passage we are about
to quote, he seems to have seen and deplored the advent of that age of
rule and criticism that was to stereotype language, thought, art itself,
prevent progress, and inaugurate decline. From Horace's day, criticism
ruled, language and art were stereotyped, and the world declined:
"Dixeris egregie, notum si callida verbum,
Reddiderit junctura novum: si forte necesse est
Indiciis monstrare recentibus abdita rerum,
Fingere cinctutis non exaudita Cethegis
Continget; dabiturque licentia sumpta pudenter;
Et nova fictaque nuper habebunt verba fidem, si
Graeco fonte cadant, parce detorta. Quid autem
Caecilio, Plantoque dabit Romanus, ademptum
Virgilio, Varioque? ego cur acquirere pauca
Si possum, invideor; cum lingua Catonis et Enni
Sermonem patrium ditaverit, et nova rerum
Nomina protulerit? Licuit, semperque licebit
Signatum praesente nota procudere nomen.
Ut silvae foliis pronos mutantur in annos,
Prima cadunt; ita verborum vetus interit aetas,
Et juvenum ritu florent modo nata, vigentque."
Italy, of the middle ages, imbibed more of the Christian and chivalric
element, threw off for a while imitation and subserviency to the past,
and shone forth with brilliant originality in all the works of art. But
she, like France, has relapsed into imitation of the antique, and falls
far below either Roman or mediaeval art. With the age of Cervantes,
Spanish genius expired. His happy ridicule expelled the absurdities of
Knight Errantry, but unfortunately expelled, at the same time, the new
elements of thought which Christianity and Chivalry had introduced into
modern literature. They were its only progressive elements, in the
Latin nations of Europe, who in all else were mere Romans.
Fenelon's Telemaque is a servile imitation of Virgil's AEneid, and that
is an equally servile imitation of Homer. Each copy falls below the
original.
Nothing shows so strongly the want of originality and want of
independence of taste and thought among these Latin nations, as their
contempt for Shakspeare. He violates all the rules of Greek and Roman
art, and erects a higher art of his own; but Frenchmen, Italians, and
Spaniards, have no tastes and no ideas differing from, or in advance of,
the ancients, and can neither understand nor appreciate the genius of
Shakspeare. In Germany, he is almost as much read and admired as in
England.
Imitation, grammar and slavery suit the masses. Liberty and Laissez
faire, the men of genius, and the men born to command. Genius, in her
most erratic flights, represents a higher Grammar than Dr. Blair or
Lindlay Murray--the grammar of progressive nature. To secure true
progress, we must unfetter genius, and chain down mediocrity. Liberty
for the few--Slavery, in every form, for the mass!
The rules of art destroy art. Homer never could have produced the Iliad,
had he learned grammar and rhetoric and criticism. 'Tis well for the
world, he lived before Longinus. Euripides, Sophocles, and
Aristophanes, and the Greek Masters in Sculpture and Painting, knew
nothing of the rules of art and canons of criticism. Without the modern
helps to art, Grecian art so far excelled ours, that it is a popular
theory that they possessed an Ideal that has been lost. Early in the
days of the Roman Empire, the rhetoricians, by attempting to teach
eloquence by rule, so corrupted it, that the Emperors found it necessary
to banish them from Rome.
We are no doubt indebted to the ignorance of the ancients for the
invention of Gothic architecture. No one taught to reverence Greek
architecture, would have violated its rules by imitating the Gothic.
When about the time of the Reformation, the study of the ancients was
revived, each Gothic spire stopped half way in its course towards
heaven. Mediaeval art expired:--and now the world has no art, but basely
copies the past.
Had Shakspeare been as learned as Ben Jonson, he would have written no
better than Ben Jonson. The lofty genius of Milton would have created a
glorious English epic, had he not travelled too much abroad, and dwelt
too much with the past. The Paradise Lost is a splendid piece of Mosaic,
made up of bits of Greek and Roman mythology, Hebrew theology, Christian
morality, Mediaeval romance, set in the purest Anglo-Saxon, twisted into
Latin collocation. 'Tis the song of the mocking-bird.
What, then? Shall we not in boyhood sojourn and linger at Athens and at
Rome, nor in manhood travel into France and Italy?
_Est modus in rebus._ Study the past, but be careful not to copy it, and
never travel abroad until age has matured your love and respect for your
native land.