character. Its authors have broken with the traditions of the past; they
have new ideas, and plans for putting them in execution; they are full
of hope; are national to the extreme, bragging and defiant. They put the
majority before institutions; the rights of the majority before the
privilege of a few; they represent the onward tendency and material
prophecy of the nation. The new activity of the American mind here
expresses its purpose and its prayer. Here is strength, hope,
confidence, even audacity; all is American. But the great idea of the
Absolute Right does not appear, all is more national than human; and in
what concerns the nation, it is not justice, the point where all
interests are balanced, and the welfare of each harmonizes with that of
all, which is sought; but the "greatest good of the greatest number;"
that is, only a privilege had at the cost of the smaller number. Here is
little respect for universal humanity; little for the Eternal Laws of
God which override all the traditions and contrivances of men; more
reverence for a statute, or constitution, which is indeed the
fundamental law of the political State, but is often only an attempt to
compromise between the fleeting passions of the day and the Immutable
Morality of God. Amid all the public documents of the nation and the
several States, in the speeches and writings of favorite men, who
represent and so control the public mind, for fifty years, there is
little that "stirs the feelings infinite" within you; much to make us
more American, not more manly. There is more head than heart; native
intellect enough; culture that is competent, but little conscience, or
real religion. How many newspapers, how many politicians in the land go
at all beyond the whig idea of protecting the property now accumulated,
or the democratic idea of ensuring the greatest material good of the
greatest number? Where are we to look for the representative of justice,
of the unalienable rights of all the people and all the nations? In the
triple host of article-makers, speech-makers, lay and clerical, and
makers of laws, you find but few who can be trusted to stand up for the
unalienable rights of men; who will never write, speak, nor vote in the
interests of a party, but always in the interest of mankind, and will
represent the justice of God in the forum of the world.
This literature, like the other, fails of the high end of writing and of
speech: with more vigor, more freedom, more breadth of vision, and an
intense nationality, the authors thereof are just as far from
representing the higher consciousness of mankind, just as vulgar as the
tame and well-licked writers of the permanent literature. Here are the
men who have cut their own way through the woods, men with more than the
average intelligence, daring and strength, but with less than the
average justice which is honesty in the abstract, less than the average
honesty which is justice concentrated upon small particulars.
Examine both these portions of American literature, the permanent and
the fleeting--you see their educated authors are no higher than the rest
of men. They are the slaves of public opinion, as much as the gossip in
her little village. It may not be the public opinion of a coterie of
crones, but of a great party; that makes little odds, they are
worshippers of the same rank, idolaters of the same wealth; the
gossiping granny shows her littleness the size of life, while their
deformity is magnified by the solar microscope of high office. Many a
popular man exhibits his pigmy soul to the multitude of a whole
continent, idly mistaking it for greatness. They are swayed by vulgar
passions, seek vulgar ends, address vulgar motives, use vulgar means;
they may command by their strength, they cannot refine by their beauty
or instruct by their guidance, and still less inspire by any eminence of
manhood which they were born to or have won. They build on the
surface-sand for to-day, not on the rock of ages forever. With so little
conscience, they heed not the solemn voice of history, and respect no
more the prophetic instincts of mankind.
To most men the approbation of their fellows, is one of the most
desirable things. This approbation appears in the various forms of
admiration, respect, esteem, confidence, veneration and love. The great
man obtains this after a time, and in its highest forms, without seeking
it, simply by faithfulness to his nature. He gets it, by rising and
doing his work, in the course of nature, as easily and as irresistibly
as the sun gathers to the clouds the evaporation of land and sea, and
like the sun to shed it down in blessings on mankind. Little men seek
this, consciously or not knowing it, by stooping, cringing, flattering
the pride, the passion, or the prejudice of others. So they get the
approbation of men, but never of Man. Sometimes this is sought for by
the attainment of some accidental quality, which low-minded men hold in
more honor than the genius of sage or poet, or the brave manhood of some
great hero of the soul. In England though money is power, it is
patrician birth which is nobility, and valued most; and there,
accordingly, birth takes precedence of all, of genius and even of gold.
Men seek the companionship or the patronage of titled lords, and social
rank depends upon nobility of blood. The few bishops in the upper house
do more to give conventional respectability to the clerical profession
there, than all the solid intellect of Hooker, Barrow, and of South, the
varied and exact learning of philosophic Cudworth, the eloquence and
affluent piety of Taylor, and Butler's vast and manly mind. In America
social rank depends substantially on wealth, an accident as much as
noble birth, but movable. Here gold takes precedence of all,--of genius,
and even of noble birth.
"Though your sire
Had royal blood within him, and though you
Possess the intellect of angels too,
'Tis all in vain;--the world will ne'er inquire
On such a score:--Why should it take the pains?
'Tis easier to weigh purses, sure, than brains."
Wealth is sought, not merely as a means of power but of nobility. When
obtained, it has the power of nobility: so poor men of superior
intellect and education, powerful by nature, not by position, fear to
disturb the opinion of wealthy men, to instruct their ignorance or
rebuke their sin. Hence the aristocracy of wealth, illiterate and
vulgar, goes unrebuked, and debases the natural aristocracy of mind and
culture which bows down to it. The artist prostitutes his pencil and his
skill, and takes his law of beauty from the fat clown, whose barns and
pigs and wife he paints for daily bread. The preacher does the same; and
though the stench of the rum-shop infests the pulpit, and death hews
down the leaders of his flock, the preacher must cry "Peace, peace," or
else be still, for rum is power! But this power of wealth has its
antagonistic force--the power of numbers. Much depends on the dollar.
Nine tenths of the property is owned by one tenth of all these men--but
much also on the votes of the million. The few are strong by money, the
many by their votes. Each is worshipped by its votaries, and its
approbation sought. He that can get the men controls the money too. So
while one portion of educated men bows to the rich, and consecrates
their passion and their prejudice, another portion bows, equally
prostrate, to the passions of the multitude of men. The many and the
rich have each a public opinion of their own, and both are tyrants. Here
the tyranny of public opinion is not absolutely greater than in England,
Germany or France, but is far greater in comparison with other modes of
oppression. It seems inherent in a republic; it is not in a republic of
noble men. But here this sirocco blows flat to the ground full many an
aspiring blade. Wealth can establish banks, or factories; votes can lift
the meanest man into the highest political place, can dignify any
passion with the name and force of human law; so it is thought by the
worshippers of both, seeking the approbation of the two, that public
opinion can make truth of lies, and right even out of foulest wrong.
Politicians begin to say, There is no law of God above the ephemeral
laws of men.
There are few American works of literature which appeal to what is best
in men; few that one could wish should go abroad and live. America has
grown beyond hope in population, the free and bond, in riches, in land,
in public material prosperity, but in a literature that represents the
higher elements of manliness far less than wise men thought. They looked
for the fresh new child; it is born with wrinkles and dreadfully like
his grandmother, only looking older and more effete. Our muse does not
come down from an American Parnassus, with a new heaven in her eye, men
not daring to look on the face of anointed beauty, coming to tell of
noble thought, to kindle godlike feelings with her celestial spark, and
stir mankind to noble deeds. She finds Parnassus steep and high and hard
to climb; the air austere and cold, the light severe, too stern for her
effeminate nerves. So she has a little dwelling in the flat and
close-pent town, hard by the public street; breathes its Boeotian
breath; walks with the money-lenders at high change; has her account at
the bank, her pew in the most fashionable church and least austere; she
gets approving nods in the street, flattery in the penny-prints,
sweetmeats and sparkling wine in the proper places. What were the
inspirations of all God's truth to her? He "taunts the lofty land with
little men."
* * * * *
There still remains the Exceptional Literature; some of it is only
fugitive, some meant for permanent duration. Here is a new and different
spirit: a respect for human nature above human history, for man above
all the accidents of man, for God above all the alleged accidents of
God; a veneration for the eternal laws which He only makes and man but
finds; a law before all statutes, above all constitutions, and holier
than all the writings of human hands. Here you find most fully the
sentiments and ideas of America, not such as rule the nation now, but
which, unconsciously to the people, have caused the noble deeds of our
history, and now prophesy a splendid future for this young giant here.
These sentiments and ideas are brought to consciousness in this
literature. Here a precedent is not a limitation; a fact of history does
not eclipse an idea of nature; an investment is not thought more sacred
than a right. Here is more hope than memory; little deference to wealth
and rank, but a constant aspiration for truth, justice, love and piety;
little fear of the public opinion of the many or the few, rather a scorn
thereof, almost a defiance of it. It appears in books, in pamphlets, in
journals, and in sermons, sorely scant in quantity as yet. New and
fresh, it is often greatly deficient in form; rough, rude and uncouth,
it yet has in it a soul that will live. Its authors are often men of a
wide and fine culture, though mainly tending to underrate the past
achievements of mankind. They have little reverence for great names.
They value the Greek and Hebrew mind for no more than it is worth. With
them a wrong is no more respected because well descended, and supported
by all the riches, all the votes; a right, not less a right because
unjustly kept out of its own. These men are American all through; so
intensely national, that they do not fear to tell the nation of the
wrong it does.
The form of this literature is American. It is indigenous to our soil,
and could come up in no other land. It is unlike the classic literature
of any other nation. It is American as the Bible is Hebrew, and the
Odyssey is Greek. It is wild and fantastic, like all fresh original
literature at first. You see in it the image of republican
institutions--the free school, free state, free church; it reflects the
countenance of free men. So the letters of old France, of modern
England, of Italy and Spain reflect the monarchic, oligarchic, and
ecclesiastic institutions of those lands. Here appears the civilization
of the nineteenth century, the treasures of human toil for many a
thousand years. More than that, you see the result of a fresh contact
with nature, and original intuitions of divine things. Acknowledging
inspiration of old, these writers of the newness believe in it now not
less, not miraculous, but normal. Here is humanity that overleaps the
bounds of class and of nation, and sees a brother in the beggar, pirate,
slave, one family of men variously dressed in cuticles of white or
yellow, black or red. Here, too, is a new loveliness, somewhat akin to
the savage beauty of our own wild woods, seen in their glorious splendor
an hour before autumnal suns go down and leave a trail of glory
lingering in the sky. Here, too, is a piety somewhat heedless of
scriptures, liturgies, and forms, and creeds; it finds its law written
in nature, its glorious everlasting Gospel in the soul of man; careless
of circumcision and baptismal rites, it finds the world a temple, and
rejoices everywhere to hold communion with the Infinite Father of us
all, and keep a sacrament in daily life, conscious of immortality, and
feeding continually on angel's bread.
The writers of this new literature are full of faults; yet they are
often strong, though more by their direction than by native force of
mind; more, by their intuitions of the first good, first perfect and
first fair, than through their historical knowledge or dialectic power.
Their ship sails swift, not because it is sharper built, or carries
broader sails than other craft, but because it steers where the current
of the ocean coincides with the current of the sky, and so is borne
along by nature's wind and nature's wave. Uninvited, its ideas steal
into parlor and pulpit, its kingdom coming within men and without
observation. The shoemaker feels it as he toils in his narrow shop; it
cheers the maiden weaving in the mill, whose wheels the Merrimac is made
to turn; the young man at college bids it welcome to his ingenuous soul.
So at the breath of spring new life starts up in every plant; the
sloping hills are green with corn, and sunny banks are blue and fragrant
with the wealth of violets, which only slept till the enchanter came.
The sentiments of this literature burn in the bosom of holy-hearted
girls, of matrons and of men. Ever and anon its great ideas are heard
even in Congress, and in the speech of old and young, which comes
tingling into most unwilling ears.
This literature has a work to do, and is about its work. Let the old man
crow loud as he may, the young one will crow another strain, for it is
written of God, that our march is continually onward, and age shall
advance over age forever and forever.
Already America has a few fair specimens from this new field to show. Is
the work History? The author writes from the stand-point of American
democracy; I mean philanthropy, the celestial democracy, not the
satanic; writes with a sense of justice and in the interest of men;
writes to tell a nation's purpose in its deeds, and so reveal the
universal law of God, which overrules the affairs of States as of a
single man. You wonder that history was not before so writ that its
facts told the nation's ideas, and its labors were lessons, and so its
hard-won life became philosophy.
Is it poetry the man writes? It is not poetry like the old. The poet has
seen nature with his own eyes, heard her with his own mortal, bodily
ears, and felt her presence, not vicariously through Milton, Uhland,
Ariosto, but personally, her heart against his heart. He sings of what
he knows, sees, feels, not merely of what he reads in others' song.
Common things are not therefore unclean. In plain New England life he
finds his poetry, as magnets iron in the blacksmith's dust, and as the
bee finds dew-bright cups of honey in the common woods and common weeds.
It is not for him to rave of Parnassus, while he knows it not, for the
Soul of Song has a seat upon Monadnock, Wachusett, or Katahdin, quite as
high. So Scottish Burns was overtaken by the muse of poetry, who met him
on his own bleak hills, and showed him beauty in the daisy and the
thistle, and the tiny mouse, till to his eye the hills ran o'er with
loveliness, and Caledonia became a classic land.
Is it religion the author treats of? It is not worship by fear, but
through absolute faith, a never-ending love; for it is not worship of a
howling and imperfect God, grim, jealous and revengeful, loving but a
few, and them not well, but of the Infinite Father of all mankind,
whose universal providence will sure achieve the highest good of all
that are.
These men are few; in no land are they numerous, or were or will be.
There were few Hebrew Prophets, but a tribe of priests; there are but
few mighty bards that hover o'er the world; but here and there a sage,
looking deep and living high, who feels the heart of things, and utters
oracles which pass for proverbs, psalms and prayers, and stimulate a
world of men. They draw the nations, as conjoining moon and sun draw
waters shore-ward from the ocean-springs; and as electrifying heat they
elevate the life of men. Under their influence you cannot be as before.
They stimulate the sound, and intoxicate the silly, but in the heart of
noble youths their idea becomes a fact, and their prayer a daily life.
Scholars of such a stamp are few and rare, not without great faults. For
every one of them there will be many imitators, as for each lion a
hundred lion-flies, thinking their buzz as valiant as his roar, and
wondering the forest does not quake thereat, and while they feed on him
fancy they suck the breasts of heaven.
* * * * *
Such is the Scholars' position in America: such their duty, and such the
way in which they pay the debt they owe. Will men of superior culture
not all act by scholar-craft and by the Pen? It were a pity if they
did. If a man work nobly, the Office is as worthy, and the Purse as
blessed in its work. The Pen is power; the Office is power; the Purse is
power; and if the purse and office be nobly held, then in a high mode
the cultivated man pays for his bringing up, and honors with wide
sympathies the mass of men who give him chance to ride and rule. If not;
if these be meanly held, for self and not for man, then the scholar is a
debtor and a traitor too.
The scholar never had so fair a chance before; here is the noblest
opportunity for one that wields the Pen; it is mightier than the Sword,
the Office, or the Purse. All things concede at last to Beauty, Justice,
Truth and Love, and these he is to represent. He has what freedom he
will pay for and take. Let him talk never so heroic, he will find fit
audience, nor will it long be few. Men will rise up and welcome his
quickening words as vernal grass at the first rains of spring. A great
nation which cannot live by bread alone, asks for the bread of life;
while the State is young, a single great and noble man can deeply
influence the nation's mind. There are great wrongs which demand
redress; the present men who represent the Office and the Purse will not
end these wrongs. They linger for the Pen, with magic touch to abolish
and destroy this ancient serpent-brood. Shall it be only rude men and
unlettered who confront the dragons of our time which prowl about the
folds by day and night, while the scholar, the appointed guardian of
mankind, but "sports with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the tangles of
Neaera's hair?" The nation asks of her scholar better things than ancient
letters ever brought; asks his wonders for the million, not the few
alone. Great sentiments burn now in half-unconscious hearts, and great
ideas kindle their glories round the heads of men. Unconscious
electricity, Truth and Right, flashes out of the earth, out of the air.
It is for the scholar to attract this ground-lightning and this
lightning of the sky, condense it into useful thunder to destroy the
wrong, then spread it forth a beauteous and a cheering light, shedding
sweet influence and kindling life anew. A few great men of other times
tell us what may be now.
Nothing will be done without toil--talent is only power of work, and
genius greater power for higher forms of work--nothing without
self-denial; nothing great and good save by putting your idea before
yourself, and counting it dearer than your flesh and blood. Let it hide
you, not your obesity conceal the truth God gave you to reveal. The
quality of intellectual work is more than the quantity. Out of the
cloudy world Homer has drawn a spark that lasts three thousand years.
"One, but a lion," should be the scholar's maxim; let him do many things
for daily need; one great thing for the eternal beauty of his art. A
single poem of Dante, a book for the bosom, lives through the ages,
surrounding its author with the glory of genius in the night of time.
One Sermon on the Mount, compact of truths brought down from God, all
molten by such pious trust in Him, will stir men's hearts by myriads,
while words dilute with other words are a shame to the speaker, and a
dishonor to men who have ears to hear.
It is a great charity to give beauty to mankind; part of the scholar's
function. How we honor such as create mere sensuous loveliness! Mozart
carves it on the unseen air; Phidias sculptures it out from the marble
stone; Raphael fixes ideal angels, maidens, matrons, men, and his triple
God upon the canvas, and the lofty Angelo, with more than Amphionic
skill, bids the hills rise into a temple which constrains the crowd to
pray. Look, see how grateful man repays these architects of beauty with
never-ending fame! Such as create a more than sensuous loveliness, the
Homers, Miltons, Shakspeares, who sing of man in never-dying and
creative song--see what honors we have in store for such; what honor
given for what service paid! But there is a beauty higher than that of
art, above philosophy and merely intellectual grace: I mean the
loveliness of noble life; that is a beauty in the sight of man and God.
This is a new country, the great ideas of a noble man are easily spread
abroad; soon they will appear in the life of the people, and be a
blessing in our future history to ages yet unborn. A few great souls can
correct the licentiousness of the American press, which is now but the
type of covetousness and low ambition; correct the mean economy of the
State, and amend the vulgarity of the American church, now the poor
prostitute of every wealthy sin.
Oh ingenuous young maid or man, if such you are,--if not, then let me
dream you such; seek you this beauty, complete perfection of a man, and
having this, go hold the Purse, the Office, or the Pen, as suits you
best; but out of that life, writing, voting, acting, living in all
forms, you shall pay men back for your culture, and in the scholar's
noble kind, and represent the higher facts of human thought. Will men
still say, "This Wrong is consecrated; it has stood for ages and shall
stand for ever!" Tell them, "No. A wrong, though old as Sin, is not now
sacred, nor shall it stand!" Will they say, "This Right can never be;
that excellence is lovely but impossible!" Show them the fact, who will
not hear the speech; the deed goes where the word fails, and life
enchants where rhetoric cannot persuade.
Past ages offer their instruction, much warning and a little guidance,
many a wreck along the shore of time, a beacon here and there. Far off
in the dim distance, present as possibilities, not actual as yet, future
generations, with broad and wishful eyes, look at the son of genius,
talent, educated skill, and seem to say, "A word for us; it will not be
forgot!" Truth and Beauty, God's twin daughters, eternal both, yet ever
young, wait there to offer each faithful man a budding branch, in their
hands budding, in his to blossom and mature its fruit, wherewith he sows
the field of time, gladdening the millions yet to come.
END OF VOL. III.
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