The American in Europe, if a thinking mind, can only become more
American. In some respects it is a great pleasure to be here. Although
we have an independent political existence, our position toward Europe
as to literature and the arts is still that of a colony, and one feels
the same joy here that is experienced by the colonist in returning to
the parent home. What was but picture to us becomes reality; remote
allusions and derivations trouble no more; we see the pattern of the
stuff, and understand the whole tapestry. There is a gradual clearing
up on many points, and many baseless notions and crude fancies are
dropped. Even the post-haste passage of the business American through
the great cities, escorted by cheating couriers and ignorant _valets
de place_, unable to hold intercourse with the natives of the country,
and passing all his leisure hours with his countrymen, who know no
more than himself, clears his mind of some mistakes,--lifts some mists
from his horizon.
There are three species: First, the servile American,--a being utterly
shallow, thoughtless, worthless. He comes abroad to spend his money
and indulge his tastes. His object in Europe is to have fashionable
clothes, good foreign cookery, to know some titled persons, and
furnish himself with coffee-house gossip, by retailing which among
those less traveled and as uninformed as himself he can win importance
at home. I look with unspeakable contempt on this class,--a class
which has all the thoughtlessness and partiality of the exclusive
classes in Europe, without any of their refinement, or the chivalric
feeling which still sparkles among them here and there. However,
though these willing serfs in a free age do some little hurt, and
cause some annoyance at present, they cannot continue long; our
country is fated to a grand independent existence, and as its laws
develop, these parasites of a bygone period must wither and drop away.
Then there is the conceited American, instinctively bristling and
proud of--he knows not what. He does not see, not he! that the history
of humanity, for many centuries, is likely to have produced results it
requires some training, some devotion, to appreciate and profit by.
With his great clumsy hands, only fitted to work on a steam-engine, he
seizes the old Cremona violin, makes it shriek with anguish in his
grasp, and then declares he thought it was all humbug before he came,
and now he knows it; that there is not really any music in these old
things; that the frogs in one of our swamps make much finer, for they
are young and alive. To him the etiquettes of courts and camps, the
ritual of the Church, seem simply silly,--and no wonder, profoundly
ignorant as he is of their origin and meaning. Just so the legends
which are the subjects of pictures, the profound myths which are
represented in the antique marbles, amaze and revolt him; as, indeed,
such things need to be judged of by another standard than that of the
Connecticut Blue Laws. He criticizes severely pictures, feeling quite
sure that his natural senses are better means of judgment than the
rules of connoisseurs,--not feeling that to see such objects mental
vision as well as fleshly eyes are needed, and that something is aimed
at in art beyond the imitation of the commonest forms of nature. This
is Jonathan in the sprawling state, the booby truant, not yet aspiring
enough to be a good schoolboy. Yet in his folly there is a meaning;
add thought and culture to his independence, and he will be a man of
might: he is not a creature without hope, like the thick-skinned dandy
of the class first specified.
The artists form a class by themselves. Yet among them, though seeking
special aims by special means, may also be found the lineaments of
these two classes, as well as of the third, of which I am now to
speak.
This is that of the thinking American,--a man who, recognizing the
immense advantage of being born to a new world and on a virgin soil,
yet does not wish one seed from the past to be lost. He is anxious to
gather and carry back with him every plant that will bear a new
climate and new culture. Some will dwindle; others will attain a bloom
and stature unknown before. He wishes to gather them clean, free from
noxious insects, and to give them a fair trial in his new world. And
that he may know the conditions under which he may best place them in
that new world, he does not neglect to study their history in this.
The history of our planet in some moments seems so painfully mean and
little,--such terrible bafflings and failures to compensate some
brilliant successes; such a crushing of the mass of men beneath the
feet of a few, and these too often the least worthy; such a small drop
of honey to each cup of gall, and in many cases so mingled that it is
never one moment in life purely tasted; above all, so little achieved
for humanity as a whole, such tides of war and pestilence intervening
to blot out the traces of each triumph,--that no wonder if the
strongest soul sometimes pauses aghast; no wonder if the many
indolently console themselves with gross joys and frivolous prizes.
Yes! those men _are_ worthy of admiration, who can carry this cross
faithfully through fifty years; it is a great while for all the
agonies that beset a lover of good, a lover of men; it makes a soul
worthy of a speedier ascent, a more productive ministry in the next
sphere. Blessed are they who ever keep that portion of pure, generous
love with which they began life! How blessed those who have deepened
the fountains, and have enough to spare for the thirst of others! Some
such there are; and feeling that, with all the excuses for failure,
still only the sight of those who triumph gives a meaning to life or
makes its pangs endurable, we must arise and follow.