comparative ignorance of the people, by their consequent lack of
administrative power and self-help, and their distrust of themselves.
There a great illumination has gone on in the upper heavens of the
learned, meteors coruscating into extraordinary glory; it has hardly
dawned on the low valleys of the common people. If it shines there at
all, it is but as the Northern Aurora with a little crackling noise,
lending a feeble and uncertain light, not enough to walk with, and no
warmth at all; a light which disturbs the dip and alters the variation
of the old historical compass, bewilders the eye, hides the stars, and
yet is not bright enough to walk by without stumbling. There is a
learned class, very learned and very large, with whom the scholar
thinks, and for whom he writes, most uncouthly, in the language only of
the schools, and, if not kept in awe by the government, they are
contented that a thought should remain always a thought; while in their
own heart they disdain all authority but that of truth, justice, and
love, they leave the people subject to no rule but the priest, the
magistrate, and old custom, which usurp the place of reason, conscience,
and the affections. There is a very enlightened pulpit, and a very dull
audience. In America, it is said, for every dough-faced representative
there is a dough-faced constituency, but in Germany there is not an
intelligent people for each intelligent scholar. So on condition a great
thought be true and revolutionary, it is hard to get it made a thing.
Ideas go into a nunnery, not a family. Phidias must keep his awful Jove
only in his head; there is no marble to carve it on. Eichhorn and
Strauss, and Kant and Hegel, with all their pother among the learned,
have kept no boor from the communion-table, nor made him discontented
with the despotism of the State. They wrote for scholars, perhaps for
gentlemen, for the enlightened, not for the great mass of the people, in
whom they had no confidence. There is no class of hucksters of thought,
who retail philosophy to the million. The million have as yet no
appetite for it. So the German scholar is hindered from his function on
either hand by the power of the government, or the ignorance of the
people. He talks to scholars and not men; his great ideas are often as
idle as shells in a lady's cabinet.
In America all is quite different. There are no royal or patrician
patrons, no plebeian clients in literature, no immovable aristocracy to
withstand or even retard the new genius, talent, or skill of the
scholar. There is no class organized, accredited and confided in, to
resist a new idea; only the unorganized inertia of mankind retards the
circulation of thought and the march of men. Our historical men do not
found historical families; our famous names of to-day are all new names
in the State. American aristocracy is bottomed on money which no
unnatural laws make steadfast and immovable. To exclude a scholar from
the company of rich men, is not to exclude him from an audience that
will welcome and appreciate.
Then the government does not interfere to prohibit the free exercise of
thought. Speaking is free, preaching free, printing free. No
administration in America could put down a newspaper or suppress the
discussion of an unwelcome theme. The attempt would be folly and
madness. There is no "tonnage and poundage" on thought. It is seldom
that lawless violence usurps the place of despotic government. The chief
opponent of the new philosophy is the old philosophy. The old has only
the advantage of a few years; the advantage of possession of the ground.
It has no weapons of defence which the new has not for attack. What
hinders the growth of the new democracy of to-day?--only the old
democracy of yesterday, once green, and then full blown, but now going
to seed. Everywhere else walled gardens have been built for it to go
quietly to seed in, and men appointed, in God's name or the States', to
exterminate as a weed every new plant of democratic thought which may
spring up and suck the soil or keep off the sun, so that the old may
quietly occupy the ground, and undisturbed continue to decay and
contaminate the air. Here it has nothing but its own stalk to hold up
its head, and is armed with only such spines as it has grown out of its
own substance.
Here the only power which continually impedes the progress of mankind,
and is conservative in the bad sense, is Wealth, which represents life
lived, not now a-living, and labor accumulated, not now a-doing. Thus
the obstacle to free trade is not the notion that our meat must be
home-grown and our coat home-spun, but the money invested in
manufactures. Slavery is sustained by no prestige of antiquity, no
abstract fondness for a patriarchal institution, no special zeal for
"Christianity" which the churches often tell us demands it, but solely
because the Americans have invested some twelve hundred millions of
dollars in the bodies and souls of their countrymen, and fear they shall
lose their capital. Whitney's gin for separating the cotton from its
blue seed, making its culture and the labor of the slave profitable, did
more to perpetuate slavery than all the "Compromises of the
Constitution." The last argument in its favor is always this: It brings
money, and we would not lose our investment. Weapon a man with iron he
will stand and fight; with gold, he will shrink and run. The class of
capitalists are always cowardly; here they are the only cowardly class
that has much political or social influence. Here gold is the imperial
metal; nothing but wealth is consecrated for life: the tonsure gets
covered up or grown over; vows of celibacy are no more binding than
dicers' oaths; allegiance to the State is as transferable as a cent, and
may be alienated by going over the border; church-communion may be
changed or neglected; as men will, they sign off from Church and State;
only the dollar holds its own continually, and is the same under all
administrations, "safe from the bar, the pulpit and the throne."
Obstinate money continues in office spite of the proscriptive policy of
Polk and Taylor; the laws may change, South Carolina move out of the
nation, the Constitution be broken, the Union dissolved, still money
holds its own. That is the only peculiar weapon which the old has
wherewith to repel the new.
Here, too, the scholar has as much freedom as he will take; himself
alone stands in his own light, nothing else between him and the infinite
majesty of Truth. He is free to think, to speak, to print his word and
organize his thought. No class of men monopolize public attention or
high place. He comes up to the Genius of America, and she asks: "What
would you have, my little man?" "More liberty," lisps he. "Just as much
as you can carry," is the answer. "Pay for it and take it, as much as
you like, there it is." "But it is guarded!" "Only by gilded flies in
the daytime; they look like hornets, but can only buzz, not bite with
their beak, nor sting with their tail. At night it is defended by daws
and beetles, noisy but harmless. Here is marble, my son, not classic and
famous as yet, but good as the Parian stone; quarry as much as you will,
enough for a nymph or a temple. Say your wisest and do your best thing;
nobody will hurt you!"
Not much more is the scholar impeded by the ignorance of the people, not
at all in respect to the substance of his thought. There is no danger
that he will shoot over the heads of the people by thinking too high for
the multitude. We have many authors below the market; scarce one above
it. The people are continually looking for something better than our
authors give. No American author has yet been too high for the
comprehension of the people, and compelled to leave his writings "to
posterity after some centuries shall have passed by." If he has thought
with the thinkers and has something to say, and can speak it in plain
speech, he is sure to be widely understood. There is no learned class to
whom he may talk Latin or Sanscrit, and who will understand him if he
write as ill as Immanuel Kant; there is not a large class to buy costly
editions of ancient classics, however beautiful, or magnificent works on
India, Egypt, Mexico--the class of scholars is too poor for that, the
rich men have not the taste for such beauty--but there is an intelligent
class of men who will hear a man if he has what is worth listening to
and says it plain. It will be understood and appreciated, and soon
reduced to practice. Let him think as much in advance of men as he will,
as far removed from the popular opinion as he may, if he arrives at a
great truth he is sure of an audience, not an audience of
fellow-scholars, as in Germany, but of fellow-men; not of the children
of distinguished or rich men--rather of the young parents of such, an
audience of earnest, practical people, who, if his thought be a truth,
will soon make it a thing. They will appreciate the substance of his
thought, though not the artistic form which clothes it.
This peculiar relation of the man of genius to the people comes from
American institutions. Here the greatest man stands nearest to the
people, and without a mediator speaks to them face to face. This is a
new thing: in the classic nations oratory was for the people, so was the
drama, and the ballad; that was all their literature. But this came to
the people only in cities: the tongue travels slow and addresses only
the ear, while swiftly hurries on the printed word and speaks at once to
a million eyes. Thucydides and Tacitus wrote for a few; Virgil sang the
labors of the shepherd in old Ascraean verse, but only to the wealthy
wits of Rome. "I hate the impious crowd and stave them off," was the
scholar's maxim then. All writing was for the few. The best English
literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is
amenable to the same criticism, except the dramatic and the religious.
It is so with all the permanent literature of Europe of that time. The
same must be said even of much of the religious literature of the
scholars then. The writings of Taylor, of Barrow, and South, of Bossuet,
Massillon and Bourdaloue, clergymen though they were, speaking with a
religious and therefore a universal aim, always presuppose a narrow
audience of men of nice culture. So they drew their figures from the
schoolmen, from the Greek anthology, from heathen classics and the
Christian Fathers. Their illustrations were embellishments to the
scholar, but only palpable darkness to the people. This fact of writing
for a few nice judges was of great advantage to the form of the
literature thus produced, but a disadvantage to the substance thereof, a
misfortune to the scholar himself, for it belittled his sympathies and
kept him within a narrow range. Even the religious literature of the men
just named betrays a lack of freedom, a thinking for the learned and not
for mankind; it has breathed the air of the cloister, not the sky, and
is tainted with academic and monastic diseases. So the best of it is
over-sentimental, timid, and does not point to hardy, manly life. Only
Luther and Latimer preached to the million hearts of their
contemporaries. The dramatic literature, on the other hand, was for box,
pit and gallery; hence the width of poetry in its great masters; hence
many of its faults of form; and hence the wild and wanton luxuriance of
beauty which flowers out all over the marvellous field of art where
Shakspeare walked and sung. In the pulpit, excellence was painted as a
priest, or monk, or nun, loving nothing but God; on the stage, as a
soldier, magistrate, a gentleman or simpleman, a wife and mother, loving
also child and friend. Only the literature of the player and the singer
of ballads was for the people.
Here all is changed, every thing that is written is for the hands of the
million. In three months Mr. Macaulay has more readers in America than
Thucydides and Tacitus in twelve centuries. Literature, which was once
the sacrament of the few, only a shew-bread to the people, is now the
daily meat of the multitude. The best works get reprinted with great
speed; the highest poetry is soon in all the newspapers. Authors know
this, and write accordingly. It is only scientific works which ask for a
special public. But even science, the proudest of the day, must come
down from the clouds of the academy, lay off its scholastic garb, and
appear before the eyes of the multitude in common work-day clothes. To
large and mainly unlearned audiences Agassiz and Walker set forth the
highest teachings of physics and metaphysics, not sparing difficult
things, but putting them in plain speech. Emerson takes his majestic
intuitions of truth and justice, which transcend the experience of the
ages, and expounds them to the mechanics' apprentices, to the factory
girls at Lowell and Chicopee, and to the merchants' clerks at Boston.
The more original the speaker, and the more profound, the better is he
relished; the beauty of the form is not appreciated, but the original
substance welcomed into new life over the bench, the loom, and even the
desk of the counting-house. Of a deep man the people ask clearness also,
thinking he does not see a thing wholly till he sees it plain.
From this new relation of the scholar to the people, and the direct
intimacy of his intercourse with men, there comes a new modification of
his duty: he is to represent the higher facts of human consciousness to
the people, and express them in the speech of the people; to think with
the sage and saint, but talk with common men. It is easy to discourse
with scholars, and in the old academic carriage drive through the broad
gateway of the cultivated class; but here the man of genius is to take
the new thought on his shoulders and climb up the stiff, steep hill, and
find his way where the wild asses quench their thirst, and the untamed
eagle builds his nest. Hence our American scholar must cultivate the
dialectics of speech as well as thought. Power of speech without
thought, a long tongue in an empty head, calls the people together once
or twice, but soon its only echo is from an audience of empty pews.
Thought without power of speech finds little welcome here; there are not
scholars enough to keep it in countenance. This popularity of
intelligence gives a great advantage to the man of letters, who is also
a man. He can occupy the whole space between the extremes of mankind;
can be at once philosopher in his thought and people in his speech,
deliver his word without an interpreter to mediate, and, like King
Mithridates in the story, talk with the fourscore nations of his camp
each in his own tongue.
Further still, there are some peculiarities of the American mind, in
which we differ from our English brothers. They are more inclined to the
matter of fact, and appeal to history; we, to the matter of ideas, and
having no national history but of a revolution, may appeal at once to
human nature. So while they are more historical, fond of names and
precedents, enamoured of limited facts and coy towards abstract and
universal ideas, with the maxim, "Stand by the fixed," we are more
metaphysical, ideal, do not think a thing right because actual, nor
impossible because it has never been. The Americans are more
metaphysical than the English; have departed more from the old
sensational philosophy, have welcomed more warmly the transcendental
philosophy of Germany and France. The Declaration of Independence and
all the State Constitutions of the North begin with a universal and
abstract idea. Even preaching is abstract and of ideas. Calvinism bears
metaphysical fruit in New England.
This fact modifies still more the function of the duty of the scholar.
It determines him to ideas, to facts for the ideas they cover, not so
much to the past as the future, to the past only that he may guide the
present and construct the future. He is to take his run in the past to
acquire the momentum of history, his stand in the present and leap into
the future.
In this manner the position and duty of the scholar in America are
modified and made peculiar; and thus is the mode determined for him, in
which to pay for his education in the manner most profitable to the
public that has been at the cost of his training.
There is a test by which we measure the force of a horse or a
steam-engine: the raising of so many pounds through so many feet in a
given time. The test of the scholar's power is his ability to raise men
in their development.
In America there are three chief modes of acting upon the public,
omitting others of small account. The first is the power which comes of
National Wealth; the next, that of Political Station; the third, power
of Spiritual Wealth, so to say, eminent wisdom, justice, love, piety,
the power of sentiments and ideas, and the faculty of communicating them
to other men, and organizing them therein. For the sake of shortness,
let each mode of power be symbolized by its instrument, and we have the
power of the Purse, of the Office, and the Pen.
The Purse represents the favorite mode of power with us. This is natural
in our present stage of national existence and human development; it is
likely to continue for a long time. In all civilized countries which
have outgrown the period when the sword was the favorite emblem, the
Purse represents the favorite mode of power with the mass of men; but
here it is so with the men of superior education. This power is not
wholly personal, but extra-personal, and the man's centre of gravity
lies out of himself, less or more; somewhere between the man and his
last cent, the distance being greater or less as the man is less or
greater than the estate. This is wielded chiefly by men of little
education, except the practical culture which they have gained in the
process of accumulation. Their riches they get purposely, their training
by the way and accidentally. It is a singular misfortune of the country,
that, while the majority of the people are better cultivated and more
enlightened than any other population in the world, the greater part of
the wealth of the nation is owned by men of less education and
consequently of less enlightenment than the rich men of any leading
nation in Europe. In England and France the wealth of this generation is
chiefly inherited, and has generally fallen to men carefully trained,
with minds disciplined by academic culture. Here wealth is new, and
mainly in the hands of men who have scrambled for it adroitly and with
vigor. They have energy, vigor, forecast, and a certain generosity, but
as a class, are narrow, vulgar, and conceited. Nine tenths of the
property of the people is owned by one tenth of the persons, and these
capitalists are men of little culture, little moral elevation. This is
an accident of our position unavoidable, perhaps transient; but it is
certainly a misfortune that the great estates of the country, and the
social and political power of such wealth, should be mainly in the hands
of such men. The melancholy result appears in many a disastrous shape:
in the tone of the pulpit, of the press, and of the national politics;
much of the vulgarity of the nation is to be ascribed to this fact, that
wealth belongs to men who know nothing better.
The Office represents the next most popular mode of power. This also is
extra-personal, the man's centre of gravity is out of himself, somewhere
between him and the lowest man in the State; the distance depending on
the proportion of manhood in him and the multitude, if the office is
much greater than the man, then the officer's centre of gravity is
further removed from his person. This is sought for by the ablest and
best educated men in the land. But there is a large class of educated
persons who do not aspire to it from lack of ability, for in our form of
government it commonly takes some saliency of character to win the high
places of office and use respectably this mode of power, while it
demands no great or lofty talents to accumulate the largest fortune in
America. It is true the whirlwind of an election, by the pressure of
votes, may, now and then, take a very heavy body up to a great height.
Yet it does not keep him from growing giddy and ridiculous while there,
and after a few years lets him fall again into complete insignificance,
whence no Hercules can ever lift him up. A corrupt administration may do
the same, but with the same result. This consideration keeps many
educated men from the political arena; others are unwilling to endure
the unsavory atmosphere of politics, and take part in a scramble so
vulgar; but still a large portion of the educated and scholarly talent
of the nation goes to that work.
The power of the Pen is wholly personal. It is the appropriate
instrument of the scholar, but it is least of all desired and sought
for. The rich man sends his sons to trade, to make too much of
inheritance yet more by fresh acquisitions of superfluity. He does not
send them to literature, art or science. You find the scholar slipping
in to other modes of action, not the merchants and politicians migrating
into this. He longs to act by the gravity of his money or station, not
draw merely by his head. The Office carries the day before the Pen; the
Purse takes precedence of both. Educated men do not so much seek places
that demand great powers, as those which bring much gold. Self-denial
for money or office is common, for scholarship rare and unpopular. To
act by money, not mind, is the ill-concealed ambition of many a
well-bred man; the desire of this colors his day-dream, which is less
of wisdom and more of wealth, or of political station; so a first-rate
clergyman desires to be razed to a second-rate politician, and some
"tall admiral" of a politician consents to be cut down and turned into a
mere sloop of trade. The representative in Congress becomes a president
of an insurance office or a bank, or the agent of a cotton mill; the
judge deserts his station on the bench and presides over a railroad; the
governor or senator wants a place in the post-office; the historian
longs for a "chance in the custom-house." The Pen stoops to the Office,
that to the Purse. The scholar would rather make a fortune by a balsam
of wild cherry than write Hamlet or Paradise Lost for nothing; rather
than help mankind by making a Paradise Regained. The well-endowed
minister thinks how much more money he might have made had he speculated
in stocks and not theology, and mourns that the kingdom of heaven does
not pay in this present life fourfold. The professor of Greek is sorry
he was not a surveyor and superintendent of a railroad, he should have
so much more money; that is what he has learned from Plato and Diogenes.
We estimate the skill of an artist like that of a peddler, not by the
pictures he has made, but by the money. There is a mercantile way of
determining literary merit not by the author's books, but by his balance
with the publisher. No church is yet called after a man who is merely
rich, something in the New Testament might hinder that; but the
ministers estimate their brother minister by the greatness of his
position, not of his character; not by his piety and goodness, not even
by his reason and understanding, the culture he has attained thereby,
and the use he makes thereof, but by the wealth of his church and the
largeness of his salary; so that he is not thought the fortunate and
great minister who has a large outgo of spiritual riches, rebukes the
sins of the nation and turns many to righteousness, but he who has a
large material income, ministers, though poorly, to rich men, and is
richly paid for that function. The well-paid clergymen of a city tell
the professor of theology that he must teach "such doctrines as the
merchants approve," or they will not give money to the college, and he,
it, and "the cause of the Lord" will all come to the ground at the same
time and in kindred confusion. So blind Money would put out the heavenly
eyes of Science, and lead her also to his own ditch. It must not be
forgotten that there are men in the midst of us, rich, respectable and
highly honored with social rank and political power, who practically and
in strict conformity with their theory, honor Judas, who made money by
his treachery, far more than Jesus who laid down his life for men, whose
money is deemed better than manhood. It must indeed be so. Any outrage
that is profitable to the controlling portion of society is sure to be
welcome to the leaders of the State, and is soon pronounced divine by
the leaders of the church.
It would seem as if the Pen ought to represent the favorite mode of
power at a college; but even there the waters of Pactolus are thought
fairer than the Castalian, Heliconian spring, or "Siloa's brook that
flowed fast by the oracle of God." The college is named after the men of
wealth, not genius. How few professorships in America bear the names of
men of science or letters, and not of mere rich men! Which is thought
the greatest benefactor of a college, he who endows it with money or
with mind? Even there it is the Purse, not the Pen that is the symbol of
honor, and the University is "up for California," not Parnassus.