CULTURE.

The word of ambition at the present day is Culture. Whilst all the

world is in pursuit of power, and of wealth as a means of power, culture

corrects the theory of success. A man is the prisoner of his power. A

topical memory makes him an almanac; a talent for debate, a disputant;

skill to get money makes him a miser, that is, a beggar. Culture

reduces these inflammations by invoking the aid of other powers against

the dominant talent, and by appealing to the rank of powers. It watches

success. For performance, Nature has no mercy, and sacrifices the

performer to get it done; makes a dropsy or a tympany of him. If she

wants a thumb, she makes one at the cost of arms and legs, and any

excess of power in one part is usually paid for at once by some defect

in a contiguous part.

Our efficiency depends so much on our concentration, that Nature usually

in the instances where a marked man is sent into the world, overloads

him with bias, sacrificing his symmetry to his working power. It is

said, no man can write but one book; and if a man have a defect, it is

apt to leave its impression on all his performances. If she creates a

policeman like Fouche, he is made up of suspicions and of plots to

circumvent them. "The air," said Fouche, "is full of poniards." The

physician Sanctorius spent his life in a pair of scales, weighing his

food. Lord Coke valued Chaucer highly, because the Canon Yeman's Tale

illustrates the statute _Hen. V. Chap._ 4, against alchemy. I saw a man

who believed the principal mischiefs in the English state were derived

from the devotion to musical concerts. A freemason, not long since, set

out to explain to this country, that the principal cause of the success

of General Washington, was, the aid he derived from the freemasons.

But worse than the harping on one string, Nature has secured

individualism, by giving the private person a high conceit of his weight

in the system. The pest of society is egotists. There are dull and

bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. 'Tis a disease

that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper

known to physicians as _chorea_, the patient sometimes turns round, and

continues to spin slowly on one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical

varioloid of this malady? The man runs round a ring formed by his own

talent, falls into an admiration of it, and loses relation to the world.

It is a tendency in all minds. One of its annoying forms, is a craving

for sympathy. The sufferers parade their miseries, tear the lint from

their bruises, reveal their indictable crimes, that you may pity them.

They like sickness, because physical pain will extort some show of

interest from the bystanders, as we have seen children, who, finding

themselves of no account when grown people come in, will cough till they

choke, to draw attention.

This distemper is the scourge of talent,--of artists, inventors, and

philosophers. Eminent spiritualists shall have an incapacity of putting

their act or word aloof from them, and seeing it bravely for the nothing

it is. Beware of the man who says, "I am on the eve of a revelation."

It is speedily punished, inasmuch as this habit invites men to humor it,

and by treating the patient tenderly, to shut him up in a narrower

selfism, and exclude him from the great world of God's cheerful fallible

men and women. Let us rather be insulted, whilst we are insultable.

Religious literature has eminent examples, and if we run over our

private list of poets, critics, philanthropists, and philosophers, we

shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we

ought to have tapped.

This goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons, that we

must infer some strong necessity in nature which it subserves; such as

we see in the sexual attraction. The preservation of the species was a

point of such necessity, that Nature has secured it at all hazards by

immensely overloading the passion, at the risk of perpetual crime and

order. So egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by which each

individual persists to be what he is.

This individuality is not only not inconsistent with culture, but is the

basis of it. Every valuable nature is there in its own right, and the

student we speak to must have a motherwit invincible by his culture,

which uses all books, arts, facilities, and elegancies of intercourse,

but is never subdued and lost in them. He only is a well-made man who

has a good determination. And the end of culture is not to destroy

this, God forbid! but to train away all impediment and mixture, and

leave nothing but pure power. Our student must have a style and

determination, and be a master in his own specialty. But, having this,

he must put it behind him. He must have a catholicity, a power to see

with a free and disengaged look every object. Yet is this private

interest and self so overcharged, that, if a man seeks a companion who

can look at objects for their own sake, and without affection or

self-reference, he will find the fewest who will give him that

satisfaction; whilst most men are afflicted with a coldness, an

incuriosity, as soon as any object does not connect with their

self-love. Though they talk of the object before them, they are

thinking of themselves, and their vanity is laying little traps for your

admiration.

But after a man has discovered that there are limits to the interest

which his private history has for mankind, he still converses with his

family, or a few companions,--perhaps with half a dozen personalities

that are famous in his neighborhood. In Boston, the question of life is

the names of some eight or ten men. Have you seen Mr. Allston, Doctor

Channing, Mr. Adams, Mr. Webster, Mr. Greenough? Have you heard

Everett, Garrison, Father Taylor, Theodore Parker? Have you talked with

Messieurs Turbinewheel, Summitlevel, and Lacofrupees? Then you may as

well die. In New York, the question is of some other eight, or ten, or

twenty. Have you seen a few lawyers, merchants, and brokers,--two or

three scholars, two or three capitalists, two or three editors of

newspapers? New York is a sucked orange. All conversation is at an

end, when we have discharged ourselves of a dozen personalities,

domestic or imported, which make up our American existence. Nor do we

expect anybody to be other than a faint copy of these heroes.

Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company of intelligent men

together again after ten years, and if the presence of some penetrating

and calming genius could dispose them to frankness, what a confession of

insanities would come up! The "causes" to which we have sacrificed,

Tariff or Democracy, Whigism or Abolition, Temperance or Socialism,

would show like roots of bitterness and dragons of wrath: and our

talents are as mischievous as if each had been seized upon by some bird

of prey, which had whisked him away from fortune, from truth, from the

dear society of the poets, some zeal, some bias, and only when he was,

now gray and nerveless, was it relaxing its claws, and he awaking to

sober perceptions.

Culture is the suggestion from certain best thoughts, that a man has a

range of affinities, through which he can modulate the violence of any

master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor

him against himself. Culture redresses his balance, puts him among his

equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns

him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.

'Tis not a compliment but a disparagement to consult a man only on

horses, or on steam, or on theatres, or on eating, or on books, and,

whenever he appears, considerately to turn the conversation to the

bantling he is known to fondle. In the Norse heaven of our forefathers,

Thor's house had five hundred and forty floors; and man's house has five

hundred and forty floors. His excellence is facility of adaptation and

of transition through many related points, to wide contrasts and

extremes. Culture kills his exaggeration, his conceit of his village or

his city. We must leave our pets at home, when we go into the street,

and meet men on broad grounds of good meaning and good sense. No

performance is worth loss of geniality. 'Tis a cruel price we pay for

certain fancy goods called fine arts and philosophy. In the Norse

legend, Allfadir did not get a drink of Mimir's spring, (the fountain of

wisdom,) until he left his eye in pledge. And here is a pedant that

cannot unfold his wrinkles, nor conceal his wrath at interruption by the

best, if their conversation do not fit his impertinency,--here is he to

afflict us with his personalities. 'Tis incident to scholars, that each

of them fancies he is pointedly odious in his community. Draw him out of

this limbo of irritability. Cleanse with healthy blood his parchment

skin. You restore to him his eyes which he left in pledge at Mimir's

spring. If you are the victim of your doing, who cares what you do? We

can spare your opera, your gazetteer, your chemic analysis, your

history, your syllogisms. Your man of genius pays dear for his

distinction. His head runs up into a spire, and instead of a healthy

man, merry and wise, he is some mad dominie. Nature is reckless of the

individual. When she has points to carry, she carries them. To wade in

marshes and sea-margins is the destiny of certain birds, and they are so

accurately made for this, that they are imprisoned in those places.

Each animal out of its _habitat_ would starve. To the physician, each

man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ. A soldier, a

locksmith, a bank-clerk, and a dancer could not exchange functions. And

thus we are victims of adaptation.

The antidotes against this organic egotism, are, the range and variety

of attractions, as gained by acquaintance with the world, with men of

merit, with classes of society, with travel, with eminent persons, and

with the high resources of philosophy, art, and religion: books, travel,

society, solitude.

The hardiest skeptic who has seen a horse broken, a pointer trained, or,

who has visited a menagerie, or the exhibition of the Industrious Fleas,

will not deny the validity of education. "A boy," says Plato, "is the

most vicious of all wild beasts;" and, in the same spirit, the old

English poet Gascoigne says, "a boy is better unborn than untaught."

The city breeds one kind of speech and manners; the back-country a

different style; the sea, another; the army, a fourth. We know that an

army which can be confided in, may be formed by discipline; that, by

systematic discipline all men may be made heroes: Marshal Lannes said to

a French officer, "Know, Colonel, that none but a poltroon will boast

that he never was afraid." A great part of courage is the courage of

having done the thing before. And, in all human action, those faculties

will be strong which are used. Robert Owen said, "Give me a tiger, and

I will educate him." 'Tis inhuman to want faith in the power of

education, since to meliorate, is the law of nature; and men are valued

precisely as they exert onward or meliorating force. On the other hand,

poltroonery is the acknowledging an inferiority to be incurable.

Incapacity of melioration is the only mortal distemper. There are

people who can never understand a trope, or any second or expanded sense

given to your words, or any humor; but remain literalists, after hearing

the music, and poetry, and rhetoric, and wit, of seventy or eighty

years. They are past the help of surgeon or clergy. But even these can

understand pitchforks and the cry of fire! and I have noticed in some of

this class a marked dislike of earthquakes.

Let us make our education brave and preventive. Politics is an

after-work, a poor patching. We are always a little late. The evil is

done, the law is passed, and we begin the up-hill agitation for repeal

of that of which we ought to have prevented the enacting. We shall one

day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our

root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only

medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up, namely, in Education.

Our arts and tools give to him who can handle them much the same

advantage over the novice, as if you extended his life, ten, fifty, or a

hundred years. And I think it the part of good sense to provide every

fine soul with such culture, that it shall not, at thirty or forty

years, have to say, "This which I might do is made hopeless through my

want of weapons."

But it is conceded that much of our training fails of effect; that all

success is hazardous and rare; that a large part of our cost and pains

is thrown away. Nature takes the matter into her own hands, and, though

we must not omit any jot of our system, we can seldom be sure that it

has availed much, or, that as much good would not have accrued from a

different system.

Books, as containing the finest records of human wit, must always enter

into our notion of culture. The best heads that ever existed, Pericles,

Plato, Julius Caesar, Shakspeare, Goethe, Milton, were well-read,

universally educated men, and quite too wise to undervalue letters.

Their opinion has weight, because they had means of knowing the opposite

opinion. We look that a great man should be a good reader, or, in

proportion to the spontaneous power should be the assimilating power.

Good criticism is very rare, and always precious. I am always happy to

meet persons who perceive the transcendent superiority of Shakspeare

over all other writers. I like people who like Plato. Because this love

does not consist with self-conceit.

But books are good only as far as a boy is ready for them. He sometimes

gets ready very slowly. You send your child to the schoolmaster, but

'tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class,

but much of his tuition comes, on his way to school, from the

shop-windows. You like the strict rules and the long terms; and he

finds his best leading in a by-way of his own, and refuses any

companions but of his choosing. He hates the grammar and _Gradus_, and

loves guns, fishing-rods, horses, and boats. Well, the boy is right;

and you are not fit to direct his bringing up, if your theory leaves out

his gymnastic training. Archery, cricket, gun and fishing-rod, horse and

boat, are all educators, liberalizers; and so are dancing, dress, and

the street-talk; and,--provided only the boy has resources, and is of a

noble and ingenuous strain,--these will not serve him less than the

books. He learns chess, whist, dancing, and theatricals. The father

observes that another boy has learned algebra and geometry in the same

time. But the first boy has acquired much more than these poor games

along with them. He is infatuated for weeks with whist and chess; but

presently will find out, as you did, that when he rises from the game

too long played, he is vacant and forlorn, and despises himself.

Thenceforward it takes place with other things, and has its due weight

in his experience. These minor skills and accomplishments, for example,

dancing, are tickets of admission to the dress-circle of mankind, and

the being master of them enables the youth to judge intelligently of

much, on which, otherwise, he would give a pedantic squint. Landor

said, "I have suffered more from my bad dancing, than from all the

misfortunes and miseries of my life put together." Provided always the

boy is teachable, (for we are not proposing to make a statue out of

punk,) football, cricket, archery, swimming, skating, climbing, fencing,

riding, are lessons in the art of power, which it is his main business

to learn;--riding, specially, of which Lord Herbert of Cherbury said, "a

good rider on a good horse is as much above himself and others as the

world can make him." Besides, the gun, fishing-rod, boat, and horse,

constitute, among all who use them, secret freemasonries. They are as

if they belonged to one club.

There is also a negative value in these arts. Their chief use to the

youth, is, not amusement, but to be known for what they are, and not to

remain to him occasions of heart-burn. We are full of superstitions.

Each class fixes its eyes on the advantages it has not; the refined, on

rude strength; the democrat, on birth and breeding. One of the benefits

of a college education is, to show the boy its little avail. I knew a

leading man in a leading city, who, having set his heart on an education

at the university, and missed it, could never quite feel himself the

equal of his own brothers who had gone thither. His easy superiority to

multitudes of professional men could never quite countervail to him this

imaginary defect. Balls, riding, wine-parties, and billiards, pass to a

poor boy for something fine and romantic, which they are not; and a free

admission to them on an equal footing, if it were possible, only once or

twice, would be worth ten times its cost, by undeceiving him.

I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I observe that men run

away to other countries, because they are not good in their own, and run

back to their own, because they pass for nothing in the new places. For

the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have

no task to keep you at home? I have been quoted as saying captious

things about travel; but I mean to do justice. I think, there is a

restlessness in our people, which argues want of character. All

educated Americans, first or last, go to Europe;--perhaps, because it is

their mental home, as the invalid habits of this country might suggest.

An eminent teacher of girls said, "the idea of a girl's education, is,

whatever qualifies them for going to Europe." Can we never extract this

tape-worm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen? One sees very

well what their fate must be. He that does not fill a place at home,

cannot abroad. He only goes there to hide his insignificance in a

larger crowd. You do not think you will find anything there which you

have not seen at home? The stuff of all countries is just the same. Do

you suppose, there is any country where they do not scald milkpans, and

swaddle the infants, and burn the brushwood, and broil the fish? What is

true anywhere is true everywhere. And let him go where he will, he can

only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.

Of course, for some men, travel may be useful. Naturalists, discoverers,

and sailors are born. Some men are made for couriers, exchangers,

envoys, missionaries, bearers of despatches, as others are for farmers

and working-men. And if the man is of a light and social turn, and

Nature has aimed to make a legged and winged creature, framed for

locomotion, we must follow her hint, and furnish him with that breeding

which gives currency, as sedulously as with that which gives worth. But

let us not be pedantic, but allow to travel its full effect. The boy

grown up on the farm, which he has never left, is said in the country to

have had no chance, and boys and men of that condition look upon work on

a railroad, or drudgery in a city, as opportunity. Poor country boys of

Vermont and Connecticut formerly owed what knowledge they had, to their

peddling trips to the Southern States. California and the Pacific Coast

is now the university of this class, as Virginia was in old times. 'To

have some chance' is their word. And the phrase 'to know the world,' or

to travel, is synonymous with all men's ideas of advantage and

superiority. No doubt, to a man of sense, travel offers advantages. As

many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so

many times is he a man. A foreign country is a point of comparison,

wherefrom to judge his own. One use of travel, is, to recommend the

books and works of home; [we go to Europe to be Americanized;] and

another, to find men. For, as Nature has put fruits apart in latitudes,

a new fruit in every degree, so knowledge and fine moral quality she

lodges in distant men. And thus, of the six or seven teachers whom each

man wants among his contemporaries, it often happens, that one or two of

them live on the other side of the world.

Moreover, there is in every constitution a certain solstice, when the

stars stand still in our inward firmament, and when there is required

some foreign force, some diversion or alterative to prevent stagnation.

And, as a medical remedy, travel seems one of the best. Just as a man

witnessing the admirable effect of ether to lull pain, and meditating on

the contingencies of wounds, cancers, lockjaws, rejoices in Dr.

Jackson's benign discovery, so a man who looks at Paris, at Naples, or

at London, says, 'If I should be driven from my own home, here, at

least, my thoughts can be consoled by the most prodigal amusement and

occupation which the human race in ages could contrive and accumulate.'

Akin to the benefit of foreign travel, the aesthetic value of railroads

is to unite the advantages of town and country life, neither of which we

can spare. A man should live in or near a large town, because, let his

own genius be what it may, it will repel quite as much of agreeable and

valuable talent as it draws, and, in a city, the total attraction of all

the citizens is sure to conquer, first or last, every repulsion, and

drag the most improbable hermit within its walls some day in the year.

In town, he can find the swimming-school, the gymnasium, the

dancing-master, the shooting-gallery, opera, theatre, and panorama; the

chemist's shop, the museum of natural history; the gallery of fine arts;

the national orators, in their turn; foreign travellers, the libraries,

and his club. In the country, he can find solitude and reading, manly

labor, cheap living, and his old shoes; moors for game, hills for

geology, and groves for devotion. Aubrey writes, "I have heard Thomas

Hobbes say, that, in the Earl of Devon's house, in Derbyshire, there was

a good library and books enough for him, and his lordship stored the

library with what books he thought fit to be bought. But the want of

good conversation was a very great inconvenience, and, though he

conceived he could order his thinking as well as another, yet he found a

great defect. In the country, in long time, for want of good

conversation, one's understanding and invention contract a moss on them,

like an old paling in an orchard."

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the

nonsense out of a man. A great part of our education is sympathetic and

social. Boys and girls who have been brought up with well-informed and

superior people, show in their manners an inestimable grace. Fuller

says, that "William, Earl of Nassau, won a subject from the King of

Spain, every time he put off his hat." You cannot have one well-bred

man, without a whole society of such. They keep each other up to any

high point. Especially women;--it requires a great many cultivated

women,--saloons of bright, elegant, reading women, accustomed to ease

and refinement, to spectacles, pictures, sculpture, poetry, and to

elegant society, in order that you should have one Madame de Stael. The

head of a commercial house, or a leading lawyer or politician is brought

into daily contact with troops of men from all parts of the country, and

those too the driving-wheels, the business men of each section, and one

can hardly suggest for an apprehensive man a more searching culture.

Besides, we must remember the high social possibilities of a million of

men. The best bribe which London offers to-day to the imagination, is,

that, in such a vast variety of people and conditions, one can believe

there is room for persons of romantic character to exist, and that the

poet, the mystic, and the hero may hope to confront their counterparts.

I wish cities could teach their best lesson,--of quiet manners. It is

the foible especially of American youth,--pretension. The mark of the

man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech;

he takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses

plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables,

hugs his fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name, and so takes

from evil tongues their sharpest weapon. His conversation clings to the

weather and the news, yet he allows himself to be surprised into

thought, and the unlocking of his learning and philosophy. How the

imagination is piqued by anecdotes of some great man passing incognito,

as a king in gray clothes,--of Napoleon affecting a plain suit at his

glittering levee; of Burns, or Scott, or Beethoven, or Wellington, or

Goethe, or any container of transcendent power, passing for nobody; of

Epaminondas, "who never says anything, but will listen eternally;" of

Goethe, who preferred trifling subjects and common expressions in

intercourse with strangers, worse rather than better clothes, and to

appear a little more capricious than he was. There are advantages in

the old hat and box-coat. I have heard, that, throughout this country,

a certain respect is paid to good broadcloth; but dress makes a little

restraint: men will not commit themselves. But the box-coat is like

wine; it unlocks the tongue, and men say what they think. An old poet

says,

"Go far and go sparing,

For you'll find it certain,

The poorer and the baser you appear,

The more you'll look through still."[2]

[2] Beaumont and Fletcher: _The Tamer Tamed_.