Walking one day toward the Village, as we used to call it in the good
old days when almost every dweller in the town had been born in it, I
was enjoying that delicious sense of disenthralment from the actual
which the deepening twilight brings with it, giving as it does a sort of
obscure novelty to things familiar. The coolness, the hush, broken only
by the distant bleat of some belated goat, querulous to be disburthened
of her milky load, the few faint stars, more guessed as yet than seen,
the sense that the coming dark would so soon fold me in the secure
privacy of its disguise,--all things combined in a result as near
absolute peace as can be hoped for by a man who knows that there is a
writ out against him in the hands of the printer’s devil. For the
moment, I was enjoying the blessed privilege of thinking without being
called on to stand and deliver what I thought to the small public who
are good enough to take any interest therein. I love old ways, and the
path I was walking felt kindly to the feet it had known for almost fifty
years. How many fleeting impressions it had shared with me! How many
times I had lingered to study the shadows of the leaves mezzotinted upon
the turf that edged it by the moon, of the bare boughs etched with a
touch beyond Rembrandt by the same unconscious artist on the smooth page
of snow! If I turned round, through dusky tree-gaps came the first
twinkle of evening lamps in the dear old homestead. On Corey’s hill I
could see these tiny pharoses of love and home and sweet domestic
thoughts flash out one by one across the blackening salt-meadow between.
How much has not kerosene added to the cheerfulness of our evening
landscape! A pair of night-herons flapped heavily over me toward the
hidden river. The war was ended. I might walk townward without that
aching dread of bulletins that had darkened the July sunshine and twice
made the scarlet leaves of October seem stained with blood. I remembered
with a pang, half-proud, half-painful, how, so many years ago, I had
walked over the same path and felt round my finger the soft pressure of
a little hand that was one day to harden with faithful grip of sabre. On
how many paths, leading to how many homes where proud Memory does all
she can to fill up the fireside gaps with shining shapes, must not men
be walking in just such pensive mood as I? Ah, young heroes, safe in
immortal youth as those of Homer, you at least carried your ideal hence
untarnished! It is locked for you beyond moth or rust in the
treasure-chamber of Death.
Is not a country, I thought, that has had such as they in it, that could
give such as they a brave joy in dying for it, worth something, then?
And as I felt more and more the soothing magic of evening’s cool palm
upon my temples, as my fancy came home from its revery, and my senses,
with reawakened curiosity, ran to the front windows again from the
viewless closet of abstraction, and felt a strange charm in finding the
old tree and shabby fence still there under the travesty of falling
night, nay, were conscious of an unsuspected newness in familiar stars
and the fading outlines of hills my earliest horizon, I was conscious of
an immortal soul, and could not but rejoice in the unwaning goodliness
of the world into which I had been born without any merit of my own. I
thought of dear Henry Vaughan’s rainbow, “Still young and fine!” I
remembered people who had to go over to the Alps to learn what the
divine silence of snow was, who must run to Italy before they were
conscious of the miracle wrought every day under their very noses by the
sunset, who must call upon the Berkshire hills to teach them what a
painter autumn was, while close at hand the Fresh Pond meadows made all
oriels cheap with hues that showed as if a sunset-cloud had been wrecked
among their maples. One might be worse off than even in America, I
thought. There are some things so elastic that even the heavy roller of
democracy cannot flatten them altogether down. The mind can weave itself
warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts and dwell a hermit anywhere. A
country without traditions, without ennobling associations, a scramble
of parvenus, with a horrible consciousness of shoddy running through
politics, manners, art, literature, nay, religion itself? I confess, it
did not seem so to me there in that illimitable quiet, that serene
self-possession of nature, where Collins might have brooded his “Ode to
Evening,” or where those verses on Solitude in Dodsley’s Collection,
that Hawthorne liked so much, might have been composed. Traditions?
Granting that we had none, all that is worth having in them is the
common property of the soul,--an estate in gavelkind for all the sons of
Adam,--and, moreover, if a man cannot stand on his two feet (the prime
quality of whoever has left any tradition behind him), were it not
better for him to be honest about it at once, and go down on all fours?
And for associations, if one have not the wit to make them for himself
out of his native earth, no ready-made ones of other men will avail him
much. Lexington is none the worse to me for not being in Greece, nor
Gettysburg that its name is not Marathon. “Blessed old fields,” I was
just exclaiming to myself, like one of Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroes, “dear
acres, innocently secure from history, which these eyes first beheld,
may you be also those to which they shall at last slowly darken!” when I
was interrupted by a voice which asked me in German whether I was the
Herr Professor, Doctor, So-and-so? The “Doctor” was by brevet or
vaticination, to make the grade easier to my pocket.
One feels so intimately assured that he is made up, in part, of shreds
and leavings of the past, in part of the interpolations of other people,
that an honest man would be slow in saying _yes_ to such a question. But
“my name is So-and-so” is a safe answer, and I gave it. While I had been
romancing with myself, the street-lamps had been lighted, and it was
under one of these detectives that have robbed the Old Road of its
privilege of sanctuary after nightfall that I was ambushed by my foe.
The inexorable villain had taken my description, it appears, that I
might have the less chance to escape him. Dr. Holmes tells us that we
change our substance, not every seven years, as was once believed, but
with every breath we draw. Why had I not the wit to avail myself of the
subterfuge, and, like Peter, to renounce my identity, especially, as in
certain moods of mind, I have often more than doubted of it myself? When
a man is, as it were, his own front-door, and is thus knocked at, why
may he not assume the right of that sacred wood to make every house a
castle, by denying himself to all visitations? I was truly not at home
when the question was put to me, but had to recall myself from all
out-of-doors, and to piece my self-consciousness hastily together as
well as I could before I answered it.
I knew perfectly well what was coming. It is seldom that debtors or good
Samaritans waylay people under gas-lamps in order to force money upon
them, so far as I have seen or heard. I was also aware, from
considerable experience, that every foreigner is persuaded that, by
doing this country the favor of coming to it, he has laid every native
thereof under an obligation, pecuniary or other, as the case may be,
whose discharge he is entitled-to on demand duly made in person or by
letter. Too much learning (of this kind) had made me mad in the
provincial sense of the word. I had begun life with the theory of giving
something to every beggar that came along, though sure of never finding
a native-born countryman among them. In a small way, I was resolved to
emulate Hatem Tai’s tent, with its three hundred and sixty-five
entrances, one for every day in the year,--I know not whether he was
astronomer enough to add another for leap-years. The beggars were a kind
of German-silver aristocracy; not real plate, to be sure, but better
than nothing. Where everybody was overworked, they supplied the
comfortable equipoise of absolute leisure, so æsthetically needful.
Besides, I was but too conscious of a vagrant fibre in myself, which too
often thrilled me in my solitary walks with the temptation to wander on
into infinite space, and by a single spasm of resolution to emancipate
myself from the drudgery of prosaic serfdom to respectability and the
regular course of things. This prompting has been at times my familiar
demon, and I could not but feel a kind of respectful sympathy for men
who had dared what I had only sketched out to myself as a splendid
possibility. For seven years I helped maintain one heroic man on an
imaginary journey to Portland,--as fine an example as I have ever known
of hopeless loyalty to an ideal. I assisted another so long in a
fruitless attempt to reach Mecklenburg-Schwerin, that at last we grinned
in each other’s faces when we met, like a couple of augurs. He was
possessed by this harmless mania as some are by the North Pole, and I
shall never forget his look of regretful compassion (as for one who was
sacrificing his higher life to the fleshpots of Egypt) when I at last
advised him somewhat strenuously to go to the D----, whither the road
was so much travelled that he could not miss it. General Banks, in his
noble zeal for the honor of his country, would confer on the Secretary
of State the power of imprisoning, in case of war, all these seekers of
the unattainable, thus by a stroke of the pen annihilating the single
poetic element in our humdrum life. Alas! not everybody has the genius
to be a Bobbin-Boy, or doubtless all these also would have chosen that
more prosperous line of life! But moralists, sociologists, political
economists, and taxes have slowly convinced me that my beggarly
sympathies were a sin against society. Especially was the Buckle
doctrine of averages (so flattering to our free-will) persuasive with
me; for as there must be in every year a certain number who would bestow
an alms on these abridged editions of the Wandering Jew, the withdrawal
of my quota could make no possible difference, since some destined proxy
must always step forward to fill my gap. Just so many misdirected
letters every year and no more! Would it were as easy to reckon up the
number of men on whose backs fate has written the wrong address, so that
they arrive by mistake in Congress and other places where they do not
belong! May not these wanderers of whom I speak have been sent into the
world without any proper address at all? Where is our Dead-Letter Office
for such? And if wiser social arrangements should furnish us with
something of the sort, fancy (horrible thought!) how many a workingman’s
friend (a kind of industry in which the labor is light and the wages
heavy) would be sent thither because not called for in the office where
he at present lies!
But I am leaving my new acquaintance too long under the lamp-post. The
same Gano which had betrayed me to him revealed to me a well-set young
man of about half my own age, as well dressed, so far as I could see, as
I was, and with every natural qualification for getting his own
livelihood as good, if not better, than my own. He had been reduced to
the painful necessity of calling upon me by a series of crosses
beginning with the Baden Revolution (for which, I own, he seemed rather
young,--but perhaps he referred to a kind of revolution practised every
season at Baden-Baden), continued by repeated failures in business, for
amounts which must convince me of his entire respectability, and ending
with our Civil War. During the latter, he had served with distinction as
a soldier, taking a main part in every important battle, with a rapid
list of which he favored me and no doubt would have admitted that,
impartial as Jonathan Wild’s great ancestor, he had been on both sides,
had I baited him with a few hints of conservative opinions on a subject
so distressing to a gentleman wishing to profit by one’s sympathy and
unhappily doubtful as to which way it might lean. For all these reasons,
and, as he seemed to imply, for his merit in consenting to be born in
Germany, he considered himself my natural creditor to the extent of five
dollars, which he would handsomely consent to accept in greenbacks,
though he preferred specie. The offer was certainly a generous one, and
the claim presented with an assurance that carried conviction. But,
unhappily, I had been led to remark a curious natural phenomenon. If I
was ever weak enough to give anything to a petitioner of whatever
nationality, it always rained decayed compatriots of his for a month
after. _Post hoc ergo propter hoc_ may not be always safe logic, but
here I seemed to perceive a natural connection of cause and effect. Now,
a few days before I had been so tickled with a paper (professedly
written by a benevolent American clergyman) certifying that the bearer,
a hard-working German, had long “sofered with rheumatic paints in his
limps,” that, after copying the passage into my note-book, I thought it
but fair to pay a trifling _honorarium_ to the author. I had pulled the
string of the shower-bath! It had been running shipwrecked sailors for
some time, but forthwith it began to pour Teutons, redolent of
_lager-bier_. I could not help associating the apparition of my new
friend with this series of otherwise unaccountable phenomena. I
accordingly made up my mind to deny the debt, and modestly did so,
pleading a native bias towards impecuniosity to the full as strong as
his own. He took a high tone with me at once, such as an honest man
would naturally take with a confessed repudiator. He even brought down
his proud stomach so far as to join himself to me for the rest of my
townward walk, that he might give me his views of the American people,
and thus inclusively of myself.
I know not whether it is because I am pigeon-livered and lack gall, or
whether it is from an overmastering sense of drollery, but I am apt to
submit to such bastings with a patience which afterwards surprises me,
being not without my share of warmth in the blood. Perhaps it is because
I so often meet with young persons who know vastly more than I do, and
especially with so many foreigners whose knowledge of this country is
superior to my own. However it may be, I listened for some time with
tolerable composure as my self-appointed lecturer gave me in detail his
opinions of my country and its people. America, he informed me, was
without arts, science, literature, culture, or any native hope of
supplying them. We were a people wholly given to money-getting, and who,
having got it, knew no other use for it than to hold it fast. I am fain
to confess that I felt a sensible itching of the biceps, and that my
fingers closed with such a grip as he had just informed me was one of
the effects of our unhappy climate. But happening just then to be where
I could avoid temptation by dodging down a by-street, I hastily left him
to finish his diatribe to the lamp-post, which could stand it better
than I. That young man will never know how near he came to being
assaulted by a respectable gentleman of middle age, at the corner of
Church Street. I have never felt quite satisfied that I did all my duty
by him in not knocking him down. But perhaps he might have knocked _me_
down, and then?
The capacity of indignation makes an essential part of the outfit of
every honest man, but I am inclined to doubt whether he is a wise one
who allows himself to act upon its first hints. It should be rather, I
suspect, a _latent_ heat in the blood, which makes itself felt in
character, a steady reserve for the brain, warming the ovum of thought
to life, rather than cooking it by a too hasty enthusiasm in reaching
the boiling-point. As my pulse gradually fell back to its normal beat, I
reflected that I had been uncomfortably near making a fool of myself,--a
handy salve of euphuism for our vanity, though it does not always make a
just allowance to Nature for her share in the business. What possible
claim had my Teutonic friend to rob me of my composure? I am not, I
think, specially thin-skinned as to other people’s opinions of myself,
having, as I conceive, later and fuller intelligence on that point than
anybody else can give me. Life is continually weighing us in very
sensitive scales, and telling every one of us precisely what his real
weight is to the last grain of dust. Whoever at fifty does not rate
himself quite as low as most of his acquaintance would be likely to put
him, must be either a fool or a great man, and I humbly disclaim being
either. But if I was not smarting in person from any scattering shot of
my late companion’s commination, why should I grow hot at any
implication of my country therein? Surely _her_ shoulders are broad
enough, if yours or mine are not, to bear up under a considerable
avalanche of this kind. It is the bit of truth in every slander, the
hint of likeness in every caricature, that makes us smart. “Art thou
_there_, old Truepenny?” How did your blade know its way so well to that
one loose rivet in our armor? I wondered whether Americans were
over-sensitive in this respect, whether they were more touchy than other
folks. On the whole, I thought we were not. Plutarch, who at least had
studied philosophy, if he had not mastered it, could not stomach
something Herodotus had said of Bœotia, and devoted an essay to showing
up the delightful old traveller’s malice and ill-breeding. French
editors leave out of Montaigne’s “Travels” some remarks of his about
France, for reasons best known to themselves. Pachydermatous
Deutschland, covered with trophies from every field of letters, still
winces under that question which Père Bouhours put two centuries ago,
_Si un Allemand peut être bel-esprit_? John Bull grew apoplectic with
angry amazement at the audacious persiflage of Pückler-Muskau. To be
sure, he was a prince,--but that was not all of it, for a chance phrase
of gentle Hawthorne sent a spasm through all the journals of England.
Then this tenderness is not peculiar to _us_? Console yourself, dear man
and brother, whatever you may be sure of, be sure at least of this, that
you are dreadfully like other people. Human nature has a much greater
genius for sameness than for originality, or the world would be at a sad
pass shortly. The surprising thing is that men have such a taste for
this somewhat musty flavor, that an Englishman, for example, should
feel himself defrauded, nay, even outraged, when he comes over here and
finds a people speaking what he admits to be something like English, and
yet so very different from (or, as he would say, to) those he left at
home. Nothing, I am sure, equals _my_ thankfulness when I meet an
Englishman who is _not_ like every other, or, I may add, an American of
the same odd turn.
Certainly it is no shame to a man that he should be as nice about his
country as about his sweetheart, and who ever heard even the friendliest
appreciation of that unexpressive she that did not seem to fall
infinitely short? Yet it would hardly be wise to hold every one an enemy
who could not see her with our own enchanted eyes. It seems to be the
common opinion of foreigners that Americans are _too_ tender upon this
point. Perhaps we are; and if so, there must be a reason for it. Have we
had fair play? Could the eyes of what is called Good Society (though it
is so seldom true either to the adjective or noun) look upon a nation of
democrats with any chance of receiving an undistorted image? Were not
those, moreover, who found in the old order of things an earthly
paradise, paying them quarterly dividends for the wisdom of their
ancestors, with the punctuality of the seasons, unconsciously bribed to
misunderstand if not to misrepresent us? Whether at war or at peace,
there we were, a standing menace to all earthly paradises of that kind,
fatal underminers of the very credit on which the dividends were based,
all the more hateful and terrible that our destructive agency was so
insidious, working invisible in the elements, as it seemed, active while
they slept, and coming upon them in the darkness like an armed man.
_Could_ Laius have the proper feelings of a father towards Œdipus,
announced as his destined destroyer by infallible oracles, and felt to
be such by every conscious fibre of his soul? For more than a century
the Dutch were the laughing-stock of polite Europe. They were
butter-firkins, swillers of beer and schnaps, and their _vrouws_ from
whom Holbein painted the all-but loveliest of Madonnas, Rembrandt the
graceful girl who sits immortal on his knee in Dresden, and Rubens his
abounding goddesses, were the synonymes of clumsy vulgarity. Even so
late as Irving the ships of the greatest navigators in the world were
represented as sailing equally well stern-foremost. That the
aristocratic Venetians should have
“Riveted with gigantic piles
Thorough the centre their new-catchëd miles,”
was heroic. But the far more marvellous achievement of the Dutch in the
same kind was ludicrous even to republican Marvell. Meanwhile, during
that very century of scorn, they were the best artists, sailors,
merchants, bankers, printers, scholars, jurisconsults, and statesmen in
Europe, and the genius of Motley has revealed them to us, earning a
right to themselves by the most heroic struggle in human annals. But,
alas! they were not merely simple burghers who had fairly made
themselves High Mightinesses, and could treat on equal terms with
anointed kings, but their commonwealth carried in its bosom the germs of
democracy. They even unmuzzled, at least after dark, that dreadful
mastiff, the Press, whose scent is, or ought to be, so keen for wolves
in sheep’s clothing and for certain other animals in lions’ skins. They
made fun of Sacred Majesty, and, what was worse, managed uncommonly well
without it. In an age when periwigs made so large a part of the natural
dignity of man, people with such a turn of mind were dangerous. How
could they seem other than vulgar and hateful?
In the natural course of things we succeeded to this unenviable position
of general butt. The Dutch had thriven under it pretty well, and there
was hope that we could at least contrive to worry along. And we
certainly did in a very redoubtable fashion. Perhaps we deserved some of
the sarcasm more than our Dutch predecessors in office. We had nothing
to boast of in arts or letters, and were given to bragging overmuch of
our merely material prosperity, due quite as much to the virtue of our
continent as to our own. There was some truth in Carlyle’s sneer, after
all. Till we had succeeded in some higher way than this, we had only the
success of physical growth. Our greatness, like that of enormous Russia,
was greatness on the map,--barbarian mass only; but had we gone down,
like that other Atlantis, in some vast cataclysm, we should have covered
but a pin’s point on the chart of memory, compared with those ideal
spaces occupied by tiny Attica and cramped England. At the same time,
our critics somewhat too easily forgot that material must make ready the
foundation for ideal triumphs, that the arts have no chance in poor
countries. But it must be allowed that democracy stood for a great deal
in our shortcoming. The Edinburgh Review never would have thought of
asking, “Who reads a Russian book?” and England was satisfied with iron
from Sweden without being impertinently inquisitive after her painters
and statuaries. Was it that they expected too much from the mere miracle
of Freedom? Is it not the highest art of a Republic to make men of flesh
and blood, and not the marble ideals of such? It may be fairly doubted
whether we have produced this higher type of man yet. Perhaps it is the
collective, not the individual, humanity that is to have a chance of
nobler development among us. We shall see. We have a vast amount of
imported ignorance, and, still worse, of native ready-made knowledge,
to digest before even the preliminaries of such a consummation can be
arranged. We have got to learn that statesmanship is the most
complicated of all arts, and to come back to the apprenticeship-system
too hastily abandoned. At present, we trust a man with making
constitutions on less proof of competence than we should demand before
we gave him our shoe to patch. We have nearly reached the limit of the
reaction from the old notion, which paid too much regard to birth and
station as qualifications for office, and have touched the extreme point
in the opposite direction, putting the highest of human functions up at
auction to be bid for by any creature capable of going upright on two
legs. In some places, we have arrived at a point at which civil society
is no longer possible, and already another reaction has begun, not
backwards to the old system, but towards fitness either from natural
aptitude or special training. But will it always be safe to let evils
work their own cure by becoming unendurable? Every one of them leaves
its taint in the constitution of the body-politic, each in itself,
perhaps, trifling, yet all together powerful for evil.
But whatever we might do or leave undone, we were not genteel, and it
was uncomfortable to be continually reminded that, though we should
boast that we were the Great West till we were black in the face, it did
not bring us an inch nearer to the world’s West-End. That sacred
enclosure of respectability was tabooed to us. The Holy Alliance did not
inscribe us on its visiting-list. The Old World of wigs and orders and
liveries would shop with us, but we must ring at the area-bell, and not
venture to awaken the more august clamors of the knocker. Our manners,
it must be granted, had none of those graces that stamp the caste of
Vere de Vere, in whatever museum of British antiquities they may be
hidden. In short, we were vulgar.
This was one of those horribly vague accusations, the victim of which
has no defence. An umbrella is of no avail against a Scotch mist. It
envelops you, it penetrates at every pore, it wets you through without
seeming to wet you at all. Vulgarity is an eighth deadly sin, added to
the list in these latter days, and worse than all the others put
together, since it perils your salvation in _this_ world,--far the more
important of the two in the minds of most men. It profits nothing to
draw nice distinctions between essential and conventional, for the
convention in this case _is_ the essence, and you may break every
command of the decalogue with perfect good-breeding, nay, if you are
adroit, without losing caste. We, indeed, had it not to lose, for we had
never gained it. “_How_ am I vulgar?” asks the culprit, shudderingly.
“Because thou art not like unto Us,” answers Lucifer, Son of the
Morning, and there is no more to be said. The god of this world may be a
fallen angel, but he has us _there_! We were as clean,--so far as my
observation goes, I think we were cleaner, morally and physically, than
the English, and therefore, of course, than everybody else. But we did
not pronounce the diphthong _ou_ as they did, and we said _eether_ and
not _eyther_, following therein the fashion of our ancestors, who
unhappily could bring over no English better than Shakespeare’s; and we
did not stammer as they had learned to do from the courtiers, who in
this way flattered the Hanoverian king, a foreigner among the people he
had come to reign over. Worse than all, we might have the noblest ideas
and the finest sentiments in the world, but we vented them through that
organ by which men are led rather than leaders, though some
physiologists would persuade us that Nature furnishes her captains with
a fine handle to their faces that Opportunity may get a good purchase on
them for dragging them to the front.
This state of things was so painful that excellent people were not
wanting who gave their whole genius to reproducing here the original
Bull, whether by gaiters, the cut of their whiskers, by a factitious
brutality in their tone, or by an accent that was forever tripping and
falling flat over the tangled roots of our common tongue. Martyrs to a
false ideal, it never occurred to them that nothing is more hateful to
gods and men than a second-rate Englishman, and for the very reason that
this planet never produced a more splendid creature than the first-rate
one, witness Shakespeare and the Indian Mutiny. Witness that truly
sublime self-abnegation of those prisoners lately among the bandits of
Greece, where average men gave an example of quiet fortitude for which
all the stoicism of antiquity can show no match. If we could contrive to
be not too unobtrusively our simple selves, we should be the most
delightful of human beings, and the most original; whereas, when the
plating of Anglicism rubs off, as it always will in points that come to
much wear, we are liable to very unpleasing conjectures about the
quality of the metal underneath. Perhaps one reason why the average
Briton spreads himself here with such an easy air of superiority may be
owing to the fact that he meets with so many bad imitations as to
conclude himself the only real thing in a wilderness of shams. He
fancies himself moving through an endless Bloomsbury, where his mere
apparition confers honor as an avatar of the court-end of the universe.
Not a Bull of them all but is persuaded he bears Europa upon his back.
This is the sort of fellow whose patronage is so divertingly
insufferable. Thank Heaven he is not the only specimen of
cater-cousinship from the dear old Mother Island that is shown to us!
Among genuine things, I know nothing more genuine than the better men
whose limbs were made in England. So manlytender, so brave, so true, so
warranted to wear, they make us proud to feel that blood is thicker than
water.
But it is not merely the Englishman; every European candidly admits in
himself some right of primogeniture in respect to us, and pats this
shaggy continent on the back with a lively sense of generous unbending.
The German who plays the bass-viol has a well-founded contempt, which he
is not always nice in concealing, for a country so few of whose children
ever take that noble instrument between their knees. His cousin, the
Ph.D. from Göttingen, cannot help despising a people who do not grow
loud and red over Aryans and Turanians, and are indifferent about their
descent from either. The Frenchman feels an easy mastery in speaking his
mother tongue, and attributes it to some native superiority of parts
that lifts him high above us barbarians of the West. The Italian _prima
donna_ sweeps a courtesy of careless pity to the over-facile pit which
unsexes her with the _bravo!_ innocently meant to show a familiarity
with foreign usage. But all without exception make no secret of
regarding us as the goose bound to deliver them a golden egg in return
for _their_ cackle. Such men as Agassiz, Guyot, and Goldwin Smith come
with gifts in their hands; but since it is commonly European failures
who bring hither their remarkable gifts and acquirements, this view of
the case is sometimes just the least bit in the world provoking. To
think what a delicious seclusion of contempt we enjoyed till California
and our own ostentatious _parvenus_, flinging gold away in Europe that
might have endowed libraries at home, gave us the ill repute of riches!
What a shabby downfall from the Arcadia which the French officers of our
Revolutionary War fancied they saw here through Rousseau-tinted
spectacles! Something of Arcadia there really was, something of the Old
Age; and that divine provincialism were cheaply repurchased could we
have it back again in exchange for the tawdry upholstery that has taken
its place.
For some reason or other, the European has rarely been able to see
America except in caricature. Would the first Review of the world have
printed the _niaiseries_ of Mr. Maurice Sand as a picture of society in
any civilized country? Mr. Sand, to be sure, has inherited nothing of
his famous mother’s literary outfit, except the pseudonyme. But since
the conductors of the _Revue_ could not have published his story because
it was clever, they must have thought it valuable for its truth. As true
as the last-century Englishman’s picture of Jean Crapaud! We do not ask
to be sprinkled with rosewater, but may perhaps fairly protest against
being drenched with the rinsings of an unclean imagination. The next
time the _Revue_ allows such ill-bred persons to throw their slops out
of its first-floor windows, let it honestly preface the discharge with a
_gare de l’eau!_ that we may run from under in season. And Mr. Duvergier
d’Hauranne, who knows how to be entertaining! I know _le Français est
plutôt indiscret que confiant_, and the pen slides too easily when
indiscretions will fetch so much a page; but should we not have been
_tant-soit-peu_ more cautious had we been writing about people on the
other side of the Channel? But then it is a fact in the natural history
of the American long familiar to Europeans, that he abhors privacy,
knows not the meaning of reserve, lives in hotels because of their
greater publicity, and is never so pleased as when his domestic affairs
(if he may be said to have any) are paraded in the newspapers. Barnum,
it is well known, represents perfectly the average national sentiment in
this respect. However it be, we are not treated like other people, or
perhaps I should say like people who are ever likely to be met with in
society.
Is it in the climate? Either I have a false notion of European manners,
or else the atmosphere affects them strangely when exported hither.
Perhaps they suffer from the sea-voyage like some of the more delicate
wines. During our Civil War an English gentleman of the highest
description was kind enough to call upon me, mainly, as it seemed, to
inform me how entirely he sympathized with the Confederates, and how
sure he felt that we could never subdue them,--“they were the
_gentlemen_ of the country, you know.” Another, the first greetings
hardly over, asked me how I accounted for the universal meagreness of my
countrymen. To a thinner man than I, or from a stouter man than he, the
question _might_ have been offensive. The Marquis of Hartington[3] wore
a secession badge at a public ball in New York. In a civilized country
he might have been roughly handled; but here, where the _biensèances_
are not so well understood, of course nobody minded it. A French
traveller told me he had been a good deal in the British colonies, and
had been astonished to see how soon the people became Americanized. He
added, with delightful _bonhomie_, and as if he were sure it would charm
me, that “they even began to talk through their noses, just like you!” I
was naturally ravished with this testimony to the assimilating power of
democracy, and could only reply that I hoped they would never adopt our
democratic patent-method of seeming to settle one’s honest debts, for
they would find it paying through the nose in the long-run. I am a man
of the New World, and do not know precisely the present fashion of
May-Fair, but I have a kind of feeling that if an American (_mutato
nomine, de te_ is always frightfully possible) were to do this kind of
thing under a European roof, it would induce some disagreeable
reflections as to the ethical results of democracy. I read the other day
in print the remark of a British tourist who had eaten large quantities
of our salt, such as it is (I grant it has not the European savor), that
the Americans were hospitable, no doubt, but that it was partly because
they longed for foreign visitors to relieve the tedium of their
dead-level existence, and partly from ostentation. What shall we do?
Shall we close our doors? Not I, for one, if I should so have forfeited
the friendship of L. S., most lovable of men. He somehow seems to find
us human, at least, and so did Clough, whose poetry will one of these
days, perhaps, be found to have been the best utterance in verse of this
generation. And T. H. the mere grasp of whose manly hand carries with it
the pledge of frankness and friendship, of an abiding simplicity of
nature as affecting as it is rare!
The fine old Tory aversion of former times was not hard to bear. There
was something even refreshing in it, as in a northeaster to a hardy
temperament. When a British parson, travelling in Newfoundland while the
slash of our separation was still raw, after prophesying a glorious
future for an island that continued to dry its fish under the ægis of
Saint George, glances disdainfully over his spectacles in parting at the
U. S. A., and forebodes for them a “speedy relapse into barbarism,” now
that they have madly cut themselves off from the humanizing influences
of Britain, I smile with barbarian self-conceit. But this kind of thing
became by degrees an unpleasant anachronism. For meanwhile the young
giant was growing, was beginning indeed to feel tight in his clothes,
was obliged to let in a gore here and there in Texas, in California, in
New Mexico, in Alaska, and had the scissors and needle and thread ready
for Canada when the time came. His shadow loomed like a Brocken-spectre
over against Europe,--the shadow of what they were coming to, that was
the unpleasant part of it. Even in such misty image as they had of him,
it was painfully evident that his clothes were not of any cut hitherto
fashionable, nor conceivable by a Bond Street tailor,--and this in an
age, too, when everything depends upon clothes, when, if we do not keep
up appearances, the seeming-solid frame of this universe, nay, your very
God, would slump into himself, like a mockery king of snow, being
nothing, after all, but a prevailing mode. From this moment the young
giant assumed the respectable aspect of a phenomenon, to be got rid of
if possible, but at any rate as legitimate a subject of human study as
the glacial period or the silurian what-d’ye-call-ems. If the man of the
primeval drift-heaps is so absorbingly interesting, why not the man of
the drift that is just beginning, of the drift into whose irresistible
current we are just being sucked whether we will or no? If I were in
their place, I confess I should not be frightened. Man has survived so
much, and contrived to be comfortable on this planet after surviving so
much! I am something of a protestant in matters of government also, and
am willing to get rid of vestments and ceremonies and to come down to
bare benches, if only faith in God take the place of a general agreement
to profess confidence in ritual and sham. Every mortal man of us holds
stock in the only public debt that is absolutely sure of payment, and
that is the debt of the Maker of this Universe to the Universe he has
made. I have no notion of selling out my stock in a panic.
It was something to have advanced even to the dignity of a phenomenon,
and yet I do not know that the relation of the individual American to
the individual European was bettered by it; and that, after all, must
adjust itself comfortably before there can be a right understanding
between the two. We had been a desert, we became a museum. People came
hither for scientific and not social ends. The very cockney could not
complete his education without taking a vacant stare at us in passing.
But the sociologists (I think they call themselves so) were the hardest
to bear. There was no escape. I have even known a professor of this
fearful science to come disguised in petticoats. We were cross-examined
as a chemist cross-examines a new substance. Human? yes, all the
elements are present, though abnormally combined. Civilized? Hm! that
needs a stricter assay. No entomologist could take a more friendly
interest in a strange bug. After a few such experiences, I, for one,
have felt as if I were merely one of those horrid things preserved in
spirits (and very bad spirits, too) in a cabinet. I was not the
fellow-being of these explorers: I was a curiosity; I was a _specimen_.
Hath not an American organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions
even as a European hath? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle
us, do we not laugh? I will not keep on with Shylock to his next
question but one.
Till after our Civil War it never seemed to enter the head of any
foreigner, especially of any Englishman, that an American had what could
be called a country, except as a place to eat, sleep, and trade in. Then
it seemed to strike them suddenly. “By Jove, you know, fellahs don’t
fight like that for a shop-till!” No, I rather think not. To Americans
America is something more than a promise and an expectation. It has a
past and traditions of its own. A descent from men who sacrificed
everything and came hither, not to better their fortunes, but to plant
their idea in virgin soil, should be a good pedigree. There was never
colony save this that went forth, not to seek gold, but God. Is it not
as well to have sprung from such as these as from some burly beggar who
came over with Wilhelmus Conquestor, unless, indeed, a line grow better
as it runs farther away from stalwart ancestors? And for history, it is
dry enough, no doubt, in the books, but, for all that, is of a kind that
tells in the blood. I have admitted that Carlyle’s sneer had a show of
truth in it. But what does he himself, like a true Scot, admire in the
Hohenzollerns? First of all, that they were _canny_, a thrifty,
forehanded race. Next, that they made a good fight from generation to
generation with the chaos around them. That is precisely the battle
which the English race on this continent has been carrying doughtily on
for two centuries and a half. Doughtily and silently, for you cannot
hear in Europe “that crash, the death-song of the perfect tree,” that
has been going on here from sturdy father to sturdy son, and making this
continent habitable for the weaker Old World breed that has swarmed to
it during the last half-century. If ever men did a good stroke of work
on this planet, it was the forefathers of those whom you are wondering
whether it would not be prudent to acknowledge as far-off cousins. Alas,
man of genius, to whom we owe so much, could you see nothing more than
the burning of a foul chimney in that clash of Michael and Satan which
flamed up under your very eyes?
Before our war we were to Europe but a huge mob of adventurers and
shop-keepers. Leigh Hunt expressed it well enough when he said that he
could never think of America without seeing a gigantic counter stretched
all along the seaboard. Feudalism had by degrees made commerce, the
great civilizer, contemptible. But a tradesman with sword on thigh and
very prompt of stroke was not only redoubtable, he had become
respectable also. Few people, I suspect, alluded twice to a needle in
Sir John Hawkwood’s presence, after that doughty fighter had exchanged
it for a more dangerous tool of the same metal. Democracy had been
hitherto only a ludicrous effort to reverse the laws of nature by
thrusting Cleon into the place of Pericles. But a democracy that could
fight for an abstraction, whose members held life and goods cheap
compared with that larger life which we call country, was not merely
unheard-of, but portentous. It was the nightmare of the Old World taking
upon itself flesh and blood, turning out to be substance and not dream.
Since the Norman crusader clanged down upon the throne of the
_porphyro-geniti_, carefully-draped appearances had never received such
a shock, had never been so rudely called on to produce their titles to
the empire of the world. Authority has had its periods not unlike those
of geology, and at last comes Man claiming kingship in right of his mere
manhood. The world of the Saurians might be in some respects more
picturesque, but the march of events is inexorable, and it is bygone.
The young giant had certainly got out of long-clothes. He had become the
_enfant terrible_ of the human household. It was not and will not be
easy for the world (especially for our British cousins) to look upon us
as grown up. The youngest of nations, its people must also be young and
to be treated accordingly, was the syllogism,--as if libraries did not
make all nations equally old in all those respects, at least, where age
is an advantage and not a defect. Youth, no doubt, has its good
qualities, as people feel who are losing it, but boyishness is another
thing. We had been somewhat boyish as a nation, a little loud, a little
pushing, a little braggart. But might it not partly have been because we
felt that we had certain claims to respect that were not admitted? The
war which established our position as a vigorous nationality has also
sobered us. A nation, like a man, cannot look death in the eye for four
years, without some strange reflections, without arriving at some
clearer consciousness of the stuff it is made of, without some great
moral change. Such a change, or the beginning of it, no observant person
can fail to see here. Our thought and our politics, our bearing as a
people, are assuming a manlier tone. We have been compelled to see what
was weak in democracy as well as what was strong. We have begun
obscurely to recognize that things do not go of themselves, and that
popular government is not in itself a panacea, is no better than any
other form except as the virtue and wisdom of the people make it so, and
that when men undertake to do their own kingship, they enter upon the
dangers and responsibilities as well as the privileges of the function.
Above all, it looks as if we were on the way to be persuaded that no
government can be carried on by declamation. It is noticeable also that
facility of communication has made the best English and French thought
far more directly operative here than ever before. Without being
Europeanized, our discussion of important questions in statesmanship,
political economy, in æsthetics, is taking a broader scope and a higher
tone. It had certainly been provincial, one might almost say local, to a
very unpleasant extent. Perhaps our experience in soldiership has taught
us to value training more than we have been popularly wont. We may
possibly come to the conclusion, one of these days, that self-made men
may not be always equally skilful in the manufacture of wisdom, may not
be divinely commissioned to fabricate the higher qualities of opinion on
all possible topics of human interest.
So long as we continue to be the most common-schooled and the least
cultivated people in the world, I suppose we must consent to endure this
condescending manner of foreigners toward us. The more friendly they
mean to be the more ludicrously prominent it becomes. They can never
appreciate the immense amount of silent work that has been done here,
making this continent slowly fit for the abode of man, and which will
demonstrate itself, let us hope, in the character of the people.
Outsiders can only be expected to judge a nation by the amount it has
contributed to the civilization of the world; the amount, that is, that
can be seen and handled. A great place in history can only be achieved
by competitive examinations, nay, by a long course of them. How much new
thought have we contributed to the common stock? Till that question can
be triumphantly answered, or needs no answer, we must continue to be
simply interesting as an experiment, to be studied as a problem, and not
respected as an attained result or an accomplished solution. Perhaps, as
I have hinted, their patronizing manner toward us is the fair result of
their failing to see here anything more than a poor imitation, a
plaster-cast of Europe. And are they not partly right? If the tone of
the uncultivated American has too often the arrogance of the barbarian,
is not that of the cultivated as often vulgarly apologetic? In the
America they meet with is there the simplicity, the manliness, the
absence of sham, the sincere human nature, the sensitiveness to duty and
implied obligation, that in any way distinguishes us from what our
orators call “the effete civilization of the Old World”? Is there a
politician among us daring enough (except a Dana here and there) to risk
his future on the chance of our keeping our word with the exactness of
superstitious communities like England? Is it certain that we shall be
ashamed of a bankruptcy of honor, if we can only keep the letter of our
bond? I hope we shall be able to answer all these questions with a frank
yes. At any rate, we would advise our visitors that we are not merely
curious creatures, but belong to the family of man, and that, as
individuals, we are not to be always subjected to the competitive
examination above mentioned, even if we acknowledged their competence as
an examining board. Above all, we beg them to remember that America is
not to us, as to them, a mere object of external interest to be
discussed and analyzed, but in us, part of our very marrow. Let them not
suppose that we conceive of ourselves as exiles from the graces and
amenities of an older date than we, though very much at home in a state
of things not yet all it might be or should be, but which we mean to
make so, and which we find both wholesome and pleasant for men (though
perhaps not for _dilettanti_) to live in. “The full tide of human
existence” may be felt here as keenly as Johnson felt it at Charing
Cross, and in a larger sense. I know one person who is singular enough
to think Cambridge the very best spot on the habitable globe. “Doubtless
God _could_ have made a better, but doubtless he never did.”
It will take England a great while to get over her airs of patronage
toward us, or even passably to conceal them. She cannot help confounding
the people with the country, and regarding us as lusty juveniles. She
has a conviction that whatever good there is in us is wholly English,
when the truth is that we are worth nothing except so far as we have
disinfected ourselves of Anglicism. She is especially condescending just
now, and lavishes sugar-plums on us as if we had not outgrown them. I am
no believer in sudden conversions, especially in sudden conversions to a
favorable opinion of people who have just proved you to be mistaken in
judgment and therefore unwise in policy. I never blamed her for not
wishing well to democracy,--how should she?--but Alabamas are not
wishes. Let her not be too hasty in believing Mr. Reverdy Johnson’s
pleasant words. Though there is no thoughtful man in America who would
not consider a war with England the greatest of calamities, yet the
feeling towards her here is very far from cordial, whatever our Minister
may say in the effusion that comes after ample dining. Mr. Adams, with
his famous “My Lord, this means war,” perfectly represented his country.
Justly or not, we have a feeling that we have been wronged, not merely
insulted. The only sure way of bringing about a healthy relation between
the two countries is for Englishmen to clear their minds of the notion
that we are always to be treated as a kind of inferior and deported
Englishman whose nature they perfectly understand, and whose back they
accordingly stroke the wrong way of the fur with amazing perseverance.
Let them learn to treat us naturally on our merits as human beings, as
they would a German or a Frenchman, and not as if we were a kind of
counterfeit Briton whose crime appeared in every shade of difference,
and before long there would come that right feeling which we naturally
call a good understanding. The common blood, and still more the common
language, are fatal instruments of misapprehension. Let them give up
_trying_ to understand us, still more thinking that they do, and acting
in various absurd ways as the necessary consequence, for they will never
arrive at that devoutly-to-be-wished consummation, till they learn to
look at us as we are and not as they suppose us to be. Dear old
long-estranged mother-in-law, it is a great many years since we parted.
Since 1660, when you married again, you have been a step-mother to us.
Put on your spectacles, dear madam. Yes, we _have_ grown, and changed
likewise. You would not let us darken your doors, if you could help it.
We know that perfectly well. But pray, when we look to be treated as
men, don’t shake that rattle in our faces, nor talk baby to us any
longer.
“Do, child, go to it grandam, child;
Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will
Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig!”