men have a voice in the government; that we choose our own rulers
and make our own laws; that no man has a hereditary right to rule,
and that men are selected for the service of the people, in the
construction and the execution of the laws, because of their
fitness for office. Outside of this view, the American system of
government has no beauty and no foundation in truth and justice.
If we undertake to argue with a monarchist, we never bring forward
any other. It has in it the essential element of poetry, because
it does justice to the nature and character of man, and describes
a perfect political society. The poetical view of the American
system of government, is, then, the highest view. It covers the
sovereignty of the citizen, and the wisdom of the popular voice.
Around this idea the poets have woven their noblest songs; but
again we ask what are the facts? The people are led by the nose by
politicians; and not one officer of the government in one hundred
is chosen to his place because of his fitness for it. The people
do not nominate those who shall rule them, or those who shall make
laws for them. Those whom the politicians do not nominate for
office, nominate themselves. The political machinery of America
practically takes the choice of rulers and officers out of the
hands of the people, and puts it into the hands of a set of
self-appointed leaders, whose patriotism is partisanship, and whose
principal aim is to serve themselves and their friends, and use
the people for accomplishing their purposes. No greater fiction
was ever conceived than the pleasant one that the people of
America govern America. The people of America, except in certain
political revolutions, have always been governed by a company of
self-appointed and irresponsible men, whose principal work was to
grind axes for themselves. The poetry of American politics is then
the severest standard by which to judge the reality of American
politics.
Religious freedom is another poetical idea in which the American
glories. It is essentially a poetical thought that every man is
free to worship God according to the dictates of his own
conscience--that there is no Church to domineer over the State,
and no State to domineer over the Church, that the Bible is free,
and that each individual soul is responsible only to its Maker.
This great and beautiful liberty stirs us when we think of it as
music would stir us, breathed from heaven itself. It is grand,
God-begotten, belonging in the eternal system of things, full of
inspiration. This religious freedom we claim as Americans. Some of
us enjoy it; but the number is not large. The freedom of the sect
is not greatly circumscribed, but the freedom of the individual is
hardly greater in America than it is in those countries where an
established church lays its finger upon every man. I would as
soon be the slave of the Pope or the Archbishop as the slave of a
sect. I would as readily put my neck under the yoke of a national
church as under the yoke of a sect. It does not mend the matter
that the multitude are willing slaves, and it certainly mars the
matter that the sects themselves do what they can, in too many
instances, to circumscribe each the other's liberty. Sects are
religiously and socially proscribed by sects. Take any town in
America that contains half a dozen churches, representing the same
number of religious denominations, and it will be found that, with
one, and that probably the dominant sect, it will be all that a
man's reputation and position are worth to belong to another sect.
Perfect religious freedom in America there undoubtedly is; but it
is the possession of only here and there an individual. Prevalent
uncharitableness and bigotry are incompatible with the existence
of religious liberty anywhere.
It is thus that the poetic instinct grasps at truth and beauty,
and fitness and harmony, wherever it sees it, and it is thus that
it furnishes us (subordinate only to special, divine revelation)
with the most delicate tests of human institutions, customs, and
actions. Litmus-paper does not more faithfully detect the presence
of an acid than the poetic instinct detects the false and foul in
all that makes up human life. All that is grand and good, all
that is heroic and unselfish, all that is pure and true, all that
is firm and strong, all that is beautiful and harmonious, is
essentially poetical, and the opposite of all these is at once
rejected by the unsophisticated poetic instinct.
Verily the poets of the world are the prophets of humanity! They
forever reach after and foresee the ultimate good. They are
evermore building the paradise that is to be, painting the
millennium that is to come, restoring the lost image of God in the
human soul. When the world shall reach the poet's ideal, it will
arrive at perfection; and much good will it do the world to
measure itself by this ideal, and struggle to lift the real to its
lofty level.
LESSON XXIII.
THE FOOD OF LIFE.
"To the soul time doth perfection give,
And adds fresh lustre to her beauty still;
And makes her in eternal youth to live
Like her which nectar to the Gods doth fill.
The more she lives, the more she feeds on truth;
The more she feeds, the strength doth more increase;
And what is strength, but an effect in youth
Which, if time nurse, how can it ever cease?"
SIR J. DAVIES.
A horse can live, and do a good deal of dull work, on hay; but
spirit and speed require grain. There is no self-supplied,
perennial fountain within the animal that enables him to expend
more in the way of muscular power than he receives in the way of
muscular stimulus and nourishment. Food, in its quality and
amount, up to the limit of healthful digestion, is set over
against, and exactly measures, under ordinary circumstances, the
quality and amount of labor of which a horse is capable. So, a
cow can live on straw and corn-stalks; but it would not be
reasonable to suppose that she would give any considerable amount
of milk upon so slender a diet. We do not expect rich milk, in
large quantities, to be yielded by a cow that is not bountifully
fed with the most nutricious food. The same fact attaches to land.
We cannot get out of land more than there is in it; and having
once exhausted it, we are obliged to put into it, in fertilizers,
all we wish to take from it in the form of vegetable growths.
Wherever there is an outgo, there must be an equal income, or
exhaustion will be the inevitable consequence.
The principle which these familiar facts so forcibly illustrate is a
very important one, in its connection with human life. We cannot get
any more out of human life than we put into it. All civilization is
an illustration of what can be accomplished by feeding the human
mind. All barbaric and savage life is an illustration of mental and
moral starvation. The differences among mankind are the results of
differences in the nourishment upon which their minds are fed.
Eunice Williams, who was taken captive by the savages of Canada a
hundred and fifty years ago, was the daughter of a most godly
minister, of the old Puritan stamp; but a very few years of savage
feeding made her a savage. Her mind was cut off from all other
varieties of nourishment, and could only tend to savage issues. She
kept a knowledge of her history, and many years after her capture
revisited her home, accompanied by her tawny husband; but no
persuasions could call her from her savage life and companionship.
The conversion of men from heathenism to Christianity and Christian
civilization is accomplished by introducing new food into their
moral and mental diet. "A change of pastures makes fat calves," we
are told; and any one who has noticed the effect upon an active mind
of its translation from one variety of social and moral influences
to another, will recognize the truth of the proverb.
If a man will call up his acquaintances, one by one, and mentally
measure the results of their lives, he will be astonished to see how
small those results are. He will also see that they are, under
ordinary circumstances, in the exact proportion to the amount, and
in correspondence with the variety, of the food they take in. It is
astonishing to see how little it takes to keep some people, and how
very little such people become on their diet. A man who shuts
himself away from all social life, and lays by his reading, and
declines all food that addresses itself to his sensational and
emotional nature, and refuses that bread of life which comes down
from heaven, and feeds himself only with relation to the
accomplishment of some petty work, will become as thin and scrawny,
mentally and morally, as the body of a half-starved Hottentot. It is
the one curse of rural life that it does not have a sufficiency and
a sufficient variety of food. The same scenes, the same faces, the
same limited range of books, the same dull friends, exhausted long
ago--no new nourishment for powers cloyed with their never-varying
food--these are what make rural life, as it is usually lived,
unattractive and most unfruitful. The fruits--the issues--of this
life cannot be greater than the food it gets, and the food is very
scanty. It is not necessary that it should be so, and sometimes it
is not so; but the rule of common rural life is insufficiency of
mental food, and consequent poverty of manifestation.
The utilitarian habits of New England, originating in necessity, and
far outliving the circumstances in which they had their birth, have
tended more than any other cause to make New England character
unlovable. The saving of half-pence to add to one's store, and the
denial to one's self and children of that which will delight the
famished senses, and stir the thin emotions, and enlarge the range
of experience, is the direct way of arriving at meanness of life.
There are those who will not allow their families to cultivate
flowers, because flowers are not useful, and they involve a waste of
time and land. They will not have an instrument of music in their
houses, because music is not useful, and it involves an expenditure
of money, and the throwing away of a great deal of time. They will
not buy pictures, because pictures are not useful, and because they
cost money; so that many a rich man's parlor is as bare of ornament
as a tomb would be. They will not attend a lecture, because, though
it might furnish them with mental food for a month, it would not
bring their shillings back to them. They will not attend a concert,
because a concert is not useful. They will not hire a minister who
possesses fine gifts--gifts that would enrich them mentally,
morally, and socially--because they cannot afford it. So they take
up with ministerial dry nursing, and one another's dry experiences,
as spiritual food, in order to save a few more dollars.
There are a few of the severer virtues that will live upon a diet of
this kind. Endurance, industry, a negative purity, thrift,
integrity--these can live, and do live, after a sort, on a plain and
scanty diet, and these, as we know, abound in New England. But
generosity, hospitality, charity, liberality--all those qualities
that enrich the character, and all those virtues that enlarge it and
give it fulness and beauty and attractiveness, are always wanting
among the class that sacrifices every thing for use. More cannot be
got out of any life than is put into it. Modern chemistry analyzes
soils, and ascertains exactly what they need to make them produce
bountifully of any kind of grains and fruits. Wheat cannot be grown
on land that does not contain the constituents of wheat; and if it
be desirable to grow wheat, those constituents must be added to the
soil. If any mental soil does not produce those vital manifestations
and results which characterize a large, rich, and attractive life,
then the constituents of that life must be introduced as nutriment.
One of the common experiences in the world of authorship is the
writing of a single successful book, and the failure of all that
follow it from the same pen. The explanation is, that the first book
is the result of a life of feeding, and those that follow it come
from an exhausted mind. There are many writers who, as soon as they
begin to write, stop feeding, and in a very short time write
themselves out. The temptation of the writer is to seclusion. His
labors in a measure unfit him for social life, and for mingling in
the every-day affairs of men. He is apt to become warped in his
sentiments, and morbid in his feelings, and to grow small and weak
as his works increase. The greatest possible blessing to an author
is compulsory contact with the world--every-day necessity to meet
and mingle with men and women--social responsibilities and business
cares, and the consequent necessity of keeping up with the events
and the literature of his time. An author in this position not only
keeps a healthy mind, but he takes in food every day which his
individuality assimilates to itself, and utters as the expression of
its life. I have no belief that Shakspeare would ever have given us
his immortal plays, but for the necessities which brought him so
much into contact with men. Outside of his authorship, he lived an
active, practical life--trod the boards of a theatre, managed men,
looked after his money, rubbed against society in multiplied ways--
and kept himself strong, healthy, and abundantly fed with that food
which was necessary to him.
Shakspeare had genius, it is true, but genius without food is quite
as helpless as a barren acre. All great geniuses are immense
feeders. All true and healthy geniuses fasten for food upon every
thing and every body. Their antennas are always out for the
apprehension of ideas, and their mouths always open for their
reception. Walter Scott was engaged in the active duties of the
legal profession when writing his novels, and there was not a legend
of Scotland, nor a bit of history or gossip, nor an old story-teller
that lived within fifty miles of him, that he did not lay under
tribute for mental food. It is declared, to the everlasting disgrace
of Goethe, that he practiced upon the affections of women, even to
old age, that he might gather food for poetry. Byron traversed
Europe in search of adventure, and rummaged the scenes of legend and
story for food for his voracious senses and sensibilities. His
Childe Harold is nothing but the record of his tireless foraging.
All men who have produced much have fed bountifully.
The writers are few in whom we do not notice something painfully
wanting. We do not always understand what it is, but we know that,
while we may accord to them good sense, and even genius, they fail
to satisfy us. There is some good thing which they lack--something
unbalanced and partial and one-sided about them. We presume that
this is often the result of a constitutional defect, but in most
instances it is attributable to insufficient nourishment in some
department of their nature. "All but," is the appropriate epitaph
for the tombstone of many an author; and if we look carefully into
his history we shall find an answer to the question: "All but what?"
We shall find, perhaps, that he is a recluse, that his social nature
is not fed at all, and that be is, of course, unsympathetic. This is
a very frequent cause of dissatisfaction with an author, as it
always gives a morbid tinge to his writings. Dickens is eminently a
social man, and eminently healthy and sympathetic. Possibly an
author may starve his senses and become purely reflective, yielding
up his points of contact with the outside world, and shutting the
channels by which the qualities of things find their way to his
mind. Not unfrequently a man's domestic affections may be starved,
or ill fed, and if so, the fact is sure to be betrayed in his
writings. And if a writer's religious nature be starved, it
invariably vitiates all his characteristic works. No man who shuts
out God and heaven from his life can write without betraying the
poverty of his diet. If an author would write satisfactorily,
touching all kinds of human nature and all sides of human nature, he
must feed every department of his own nature, for he has nothing to
give that he does not receive.
As in animal, so in mental life, there are gormandizing and
gluttony, tending always to paralysis of voluntary effort. The
devouring of facts, as they are found both in nature and in books,
indulgence in social pleasures immoderately and constantly, pietism
that feeds exclusively upon the things of religion, the feasting of
the imagination upon the creations of fiction--all these are
debilitating; and a blessed thing to the world is it that they unfit
the mind for writing at all, as the overfeeding of the body unfits
its organs for labor. Plethoric minds do not trouble the world with
books, or with conversation, or with preaching. Activity simply
demands food enough, and in sufficient variety, to feed its powers
while operative, from day to day. This is the reason why immensely
learned men have rarely done much for the world. Many of them have
won reputations, like remarkably fat steers, for breadth of back and
depth of brisket, but they are never known to move more than their
own enormous bulks. Beyond a certain point of mental feeding, over
and above the necessities of labor, the mind gets sleepy and clumsy.
I have alluded to authors, particularly, because, unlike the world
in general, they give form and record to their life. The masses of
men live as authors live, but their lives are not put down in books,
so that the public may read and measure them. We will suppose that
two men are fed upon the same diet. Each shall have sufficient food
for his religious, social, esthetic, domestic, sensational, and
emotional natures, yet only one of them shall embody in books the
life which he draws from these varieties of nourishment. The other
lives essentially the same life, but it fails of record. It may be
as rich, and characteristic, in every particular, as that of the
author, but it fails of artistic form because, perhaps, he lacks the
peculiar mental gift required for its construction. So the real life
of the author and the life of his reader may be the same, the one
having advantage over the other in no particular, and the fact that
one is embodied in artistic forms conferring upon it no essential
excellence. What I have said about authors, therefore, applies to
all mankind, engaged in whatever calling or profession. If any
portion of any man's nature be not well fed, he will betray the fact
in his life. Poverty of food in any particular will surely bring
poverty of manifestation in that department of life which is
deprived of its natural nourishment.
A familiar illustration of the failure of a life to secure its
appropriate food, will be found in men and women who live unmarried.
An old bachelor will sooner or later betray the fact that his finer
affections are starved. It is next to impossible for him to hide
from the world the wrong to which he is subjecting himself. His
character will invariably show that it is warped and weak and lame,
and his life will be barren of all those manifestations which flow
from domestic affections abundantly fed. Here and there, one like
Washington Irving will nourish a love transplanted to Heaven, and
bring around him the sweet faces and delicate natures of women, to
minister to a thirsting heart, and preserve, as he did, his
geniality and tenderness to the last; but such as he are
comparatively few. An old bachelor, voluntarily single, always
betrays a nature badly fed in one of its important departments. So,
too, those who marry, but who are not blest with children, betray
the lack of food. Many of these hunger through life for children to
feed their affections, and take on peculiarities that betray the
fact that something is wrong with them. Some adopt children in order
to supply a want which seems imperative, and others take pets of
different kinds to their bosoms, ranging through the scale from
birds to bull-dogs. It is a familiar trick of starved faculties and
affections to take on a morbid appetite, and feed themselves on the
strangest of supplies.
So, if a man would live a full and generous life, he must supply it
with a full and generous diet. So far as his ability will go, he
should make his home the embodiment of his best taste. There should
be abundant meaning in its architecture. There should be pictures
upon its walls, and books upon its shelves and tables. All the
domestic and social affections should be abundantly fed there. His
table should be a gathering place for friends. Music should minister
to him. He should bring himself into contact with the great and wise
and good, who have embalmed their lives in the varied forms of art.
The facts that live in the earth under his feet, the beauty that
spreads itself around him, and all those truths which appeal to his
religious nature, are food which should minister to his life. An
irreligious man--no matter what his genius may be--is always a
starveling. An unsocial man can by no possibility lead a true life.
A man's nature should be thrown wide open at every point, to drink
in the nourishment that comes from the healthy sources of supply;
and thus only may his life become abundantly rich and beautiful. I
repeat the proposition that I started with: we cannot get more out
of human life than we put into it.
There is another aspect of this subject that I have barely space to
allude to. The illustration with which this article opens, touching
the effects of hay and grain respectively upon the life of the
horse, suggests that the food with which our bodies are nourished
may have an important bearing upon our mental and moral life. Of
this I have no doubt. Coarse food, made of material but feebly
vitalized, makes coarse men and women. Muscular tissues not formed
from choice material, brains built of poor stuff, nervous fibres to
which the finest and most delicate food has not ministered, are not
the instruments of the highest grade of mental life. The
dispensation of sawdust is passed away. It is pretty well understood
that the most complicated, the noblest, and the finest creature in
the world requires the best food the world can produce; and that he
requires it in great variety. If a man leads simply an animal life--
eating, working, and sleeping--let him feed as animals do; but if he
lives a life above animals, as a social and religious being, then
let him take food that gives pleasure to his palate, and pluck and
power to all the instruments of his mind. Hay may answer very well
for a mind that moves at the rate of only three miles an hour; but a
mile was never yet made "inside of 2:40" without grain.
LESSON XXIV.
HALF-FINISHED WORK.
"Ah God! well, art is long!
And life is short and fleeting.
What headaches have I felt and what heart-beating,
When critical desire was strong.
How hard it is the ways and means to master
By which one gains each fountain head!
And ere one yet has half the journey sped
The poor fool dies--O sad disaster!"
BROOKS' TRANSLATION OF FAUST.
Mankind are "nothing, if not critical;" and nothing would seem to
be criticism with them but fault-finding. It is astonishing to see
what a number of architects there are in the world--how many people
there are who feel competent to give an opinion upon buildings in
course of erection on the public streets. If a dwelling is going up,
there is not a day of its progress in which its builder or architect
is not convicted of being a fool, by any number of wise people who
judge him on the evidence of a half-finished structure. When the
dwelling is completed, it usually "looks better than they ever
supposed it could;" but they learn nothing from this, though the
proverb that "only fools criticize half-finished work" is a good
deal older than they are. Every man who builds is obliged to take
this running fire of fault-finding. Passing a new church recently,
in the company of an architect, I asked him what he thought of the
building. "I can tell better when the staging is down," was his
reply. He knew enough not to criticize half-finished work, while
probably a hundred men, knowing nothing of architecture whatever,
had, during that very day, freely given their opinion of the
building in the most unqualified way.