CULTURE AND THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE.
But try, I urge,--the trying shall suffice: The aim, if reached or
not, makes great the life.
BROWNING.
The mass of mankind, if we pass the whole race in review, are sunk in
gross ignorance; and even in civilized nations, where education is free,
the multitude have but a rude acquaintance with the elements of
knowledge. Their ability to read and write hardly serves intellectual
and moral ends; and such learning as they possess seems only to weaken
their power to admire and love what is best in life and thought.
If we turn to the more cultivated, whose numbers even in the most
enlightened countries are not great, we find but here and there an
individual who has anything better than a sort of mechanical cleverness.
Students, it has been said, on leaving college, quickly divide into two
classes,--those who have learned nothing, and those who have forgotten
everything. In the professions, the lawyer tends to become an advocate,
the physician an empiric, the theologian a dogmatist; and these are but
instances of a general falling away from ideals. The student of physical
science is subdued to what he works in; the man of letters loses depth
and earnestness; and the teacher, whose business it is to rouse and
illumine souls, shrivels until he becomes merely a repeater of facts and
doctrines in which there is no life, no power to exalt the imagination
or to give tone to the intellect. The teacher cannot create talent, and
his best work lies in stimulating and directing energy and impulse; but
this he seldom strives to do or to make himself capable of doing; and
hence pupils very generally leave school as men quit a prison, with a
sense of emancipation, and with a desire to forget both the place and
the kind of life there encouraged. A talent is like seed-corn,--it bears
within itself the power to break the confining walls and to spring
upward to light, if only it be sown in proper soil, where the rain and
the sunshine fall; but this is a truth which those who make education a
business are slow to accept. They repress; they overawe; they are
dictatorial; they prescribe rules and methods for minds which can gain
strength and wisdom only by following the bent given by their
endowments,--and thus the young, who are most easily discouraged in
things which concern their highest gifts, lose heart, turn away from
ideals, and abandon the pursuit of excellence. The nobler the mind, the
greater the danger of its being wrongly dealt with. We seldom find a man
whose thinking has helped to form opinion and to create literature, who,
if he care to say what he feels, will not declare that his scholastic
training was bad. Milton, Gray, Dryden, Wordsworth, Byron, Cowley,
Addison, Gibbon, Locke, Shelley, and Cowper had no love for the schools
to which they were sent; Swift and Goldsmith received no college honors;
and Pope, Thomson, Burns, and Shakespeare had little or nothing to do
with institutions of learning. A man educates himself; and the best work
teachers can do, is to inspire the love of mental exercise and a living
faith in the power of labor to develop faculty, and to open worlds of
use and delight which are infinite, and which each individual must
rediscover for himself. It is the educator's business to cherish the
aspirations of the young, to inspire them with confidence in themselves,
and to make them feel and understand that no labor can be too great or
too long, if its result be cultivation and enlightenment of mind. For
them ideals are real; their life is as yet wrapped in the bud; and to
encourage them to believe that if they are but true to themselves, the
flower and the fruit will be fair and health-bringing, is to open for
them the fountain of hope and noble endeavor.
What men have done, men can still do. Nay, shall we not rather believe
that the best is yet to be done? The peoples whom we call ancient were
but rude beginners. We are the true ancients, the inheritors of all the
wisdom and all the heroism of the past. We stand in a wider world, and
move forward with more conscious purpose along more open ways. Of the
past we see but the summits, illumined by the rays of genius and glory.
Could we look upon the plains where the multitudes lie in darkness,
wearing the triple chain of servitude, ignorance, and want, we should
understand how fair and beneficent our own age is. Enthusiasm for the
past cannot inspire the best intellectual work. The heart turns to the
past; but the mind looks to the future, and is forever untwisting the
cords which bind us to the things that pleased a childlike fancy. To
grow is to outgrow; and whatever of the past survives, survives, as the
very word implies, because it is still living and applicable here and
now. Let not the young believe that the age of the heroic and godlike is
gone. Good and the means of good are not harder to reconcile to-day than
they were a hundred or a thousand years ago, and they who have a heart
may now, as the best have done in the past, wring even from despair the
courage on which victory loves to smile. If we are weak and inferior the
fault lies in ourselves, not in the age. We are the age; and if we but
will and work, opportunities are offered us to become and to perform
whatever may crown and glorify a human soul. The time for doing best
things, like eternity, is ever present. Let but the man stand forth, and
he will find and do his work.
We are too near our own age to discern its true glory, which shall best
appear from the vantage-ground of another century; but surely we can
feel that it throbs with life, with immortal yearnings, with
ever-growing desire to give to all men higher thoughts and purer loves.
Society, the State, the Church, the individual, are striving with
conscious purpose to make life moral and intelligent. We have become
more humane than men have ever been, and accept more fully the duty and
the task of extending the domain of justice, of goodness, and of truth.
The aim of our civilization is not merely to instruct the ignorant, but
to make ignorance impossible; not merely to feed the hungry, but to do
away with famine; not merely to visit the captive, but to make captivity
the means of his regeneration. Already the chains of the slave have
been broken, and the earth has become the home of God's free children.
Disease has been tracked to its secret hiding-places, and barriers have
been built against pestilence and contagion. War has become less
frequent and less barbarous; persecution for opinion and belief has
become rare; man's inhumanity to woman, which is the deepest stain upon
the history of the race, has yielded to the influence of religion and
knowledge; and with ever-increasing force the truth is borne in upon
those who think and observe, that the fate of the rich and high-placed
cannot be separated from that of the poor and lowly. While we earnestly
strive to control and repress every kind of moral evil, we feel that
society itself is responsible for sin and crime, and that social and
political conditions and constitutions must change, until the weak and
the heavy-laden are protected from the heartlessness of the strong and
fortunate. Not only must those who labor with their hands have larger
opportunities than hitherto have ever been given them, but in the whole
social life of man there must be more justice, more love, more
tenderness, more of the spirit of Christ, than hitherto has ever been
found there.
What marvelous, intellectual work are we not doing? What admirable
expression of the highest truth do we not find in the best writers of
our age! It is not all pure gold; but whether we take a religious, a
moral, or an intellectual point of view, we may not affirm of the
literature of any age or country that it is perfect. When man clothes in
words what he thinks and loves, what he knows and believes, his work
bears the marks of his defects not less than those of his qualities.
Nay, if we turn to the Bible itself, how much do we not find there which
we either fail to comprehend or are unable to apply! Has not the mind of
Christendom been trained and illumined by the literatures of Greece and
Rome, which in moral purity, in elevation of sentiment, in breadth and
depth of thought, in the knowledge of the laws of Nature, in scientific
accuracy, in sympathy and tenderness, are altogether inferior to the
best writings of our own day? It is a mistake to suppose that this is a
material age in which the love of religion, of poetry, of art, of
excellence of whatever kind, is dead. The love of what is best has never
at any time been alive save in the hearts of the chosen few; and in such
souls it burns now with as sweet and steady a glow as when Plato spoke,
and the blessed Saviour uttered words of divine wisdom. Here and now, in
and around us, there is the heavenly presence of budding life, of
widening vision, of "new thoughts urgent as the growth of wings." Let
us turn the white forehead of hope to the fair time, and deem no labor
great by which we shall become less unfit to do the work of God and man.
"Nay, never falter; no great deed is done
By falterers who ask for certainty.
No good is certain but the steadfast mind,
The undivided will to seek the good:
'T is that compels the elements and wrings
A human music from the indifferent air.
The greatest gift the hero leaves his race
Is to have been a hero. Say we fail!
We feed the high tradition of the world
And leave our spirit in our children's breasts."
But to enter upon such a course of life with well-founded hope of
success, we must be reverent and devout. The thrill of awe is, as Goethe
says, the best thing humanity has. We must understand and feel that the
visible is but the shadow of the invisible, that the soul has its roots
in God, whose kingdom is within us. We must perceive that what we know,
believe, admire, love, and yearn for makes our real life; that we are
worth what we _are_, and not what we possess and use. We must be lovers
of perfection, as the divine Saviour bids us become,--"Be ye perfect,
even as your Father in heaven is perfect." We must be conscious of the
immortal spirit which is ourself, and walk in the company of God and of
just men made perfect, striving after light and purity and strength,
which are of the soul. We must love the inward, the true, and the
eternal rather than the outward and transitory. We must believe that in
very truth we are akin to God, that God is in us, and we in him, and
consequently that it is our first duty to follow after perfection,
completeness of life, in thought, in love, and in conduct. As it is good
to know, so is it good to be strong, to be patient, to be humble, to be
helpful; so is it good to do right, though the deed should be our only
reward.
But we are beset by all manner of temptations to turn aside from a high
and noble way of living. The line of least resistance for us is the
common highway of money-getters and place-winners; and the moment a man
gives evidence of ability, the whole world urges him to put it to
immediate use. Our public opinion identifies the good with the useful,
all else is visionary and unreal. The average man controls us not only
in politics, but in religion, in art, and in literature. To turn away
from material good in order to gain spiritual and intellectual benefit
is held to be evidence of a feeble or perverted understanding. If a man
is eloquent, let him become a lawyer, a politician, or a preacher; if he
have a talent for science, let him become a physician, a practical
chemist, or a civil engineer; if he have skill in writing, let him
become a journalist or a contributor to magazines. No one asks himself,
What shall I do to gain wisdom, strength, virtue, completeness of life;
but the universal question is, How shall I make a living, get money,
position, notoriety? In our hearts we should rather have the riches of a
Rothschild than the mind of Plato, the imagination of Shakespeare, or
the soul of Saint Theresa. We believe the best is outside of us, that
the aids to the most desirable kind of life are to be found in material
and mechanical things. We talk with pride of our numbers, our
institutions, our machines; we love the display and noise of life, are
eager to mingle in crowds, to live in great cities, and to listen to
exaggerated and declamatory speech. The soberness of wisdom, the
humility of religion, the plainness of worth, are unattractive and
unrecognized. We rush after material things, like hunters after game;
and in the excitement of the chase our pulse grows quick, and our vision
confused. We have lost the art of patient work and expectation. We are
no more capable of living in our work, of making it the means of our
growth and happiness. What we do, must be quickly done, must have
immediate results. Our success in solving the political and social
problems has spoiled us. When we hear of a man who has been prosperous
for years, whom no misfortune has sobered and softened, we expect him to
be narrow and supercilious; and in the same way, a prosperous people are
exposed to the danger of becoming self-complacent and superficial. We
exaggerate the importance of our own achievements and think that which
we have accomplished is the best; whereas the wise hold what they have
done in slight esteem, and think only of becoming themselves nobler and
wiser. Instead of boasting of our civilization, because we have
industrial and commercial prosperity, wealth and liberty, churches,
schools, and newspapers, we ought to ask ourselves whether civilization
does not imply something more and higher than this,--what kind of soul
lives and loves and thinks in this environment? Instead of trying to
persuade ourselves that we are the greatest and most enlightened people,
would it not be worth while to ask ourselves, in a dispassionate temper,
whether our best men and women are the most intellectual, the most
interesting, and the most Christian men and women to be found in the
world? Do they not lack repose, distinction, a sense for complete and
harmonious living? Must we not still look to Europe for our best
religious and philosophic thought, our best poetry, painting, music,
and architecture? "Let the passion for America," says Emerson, "cast out
the passion for Europe." This is desirable, but numbers and wealth will
not bring it about. While the best is said and done in Europe, the
better sort of Americans will look thither,--just as Europe looks to us
for corn and cotton, or mechanical appliances. We have done much, and
much that it was well to do. We have, as Matthew Arnold says, solved the
political and social problems better than any other people, though we
ourselves perceive that the solution is by no means final. The
conditions of our life are favorable to the many. It is easier for a man
to assert himself here, than it is or has ever been elsewhere. A little
sense, a little energy, is all that any one needs to make himself
independent and comfortable; and because success of this kind is so easy
it threatens to absorb our whole life. They alone seem to be living
worthily who are doing practical work, who are developing the natural
wealth of the country, starting new enterprises and inventing new
machines. The political problems which interest us are financial;
schools are maintained and fostered because they protect and strengthen
our institutions; religious beliefs are tolerated and encouraged because
they are aids to morality,--and morality means sobriety, honesty,
industry, which lead to thrift. Then there is an idea that religion is a
conservative power, useful as a bulwark against the assaults of
anti-social fanatics. Philosophy, poetry, and art are not considered
seriously, because they are not seen to bear any clear relation to our
institutions and temporal well-being. Opinion rules the wide world over;
and in the face of this strong public opinion which lays stress chiefly
upon external things,--the environment, the machinery of life,--and not
upon spiritual and intellectual qualities, it is not easy to love
knowledge and virtue for themselves, for the strength and beauty they
give to the soul, for their power to build up the being which is a man's
very self. It is rare that men have faith in what but few believe in;
they are gregarious, and need the encouragement that comes of having
aims and hopes of which the millions approve.
The predominance of the average man, of which our public opinion is the
result, puts other obstacles in the way of culture. It makes us
self-complacent, easily satisfied with what we perform. A representative
man will become a lawyer, a soldier, a merchant, a legislator, an
author, in turns, as occasion offers, and he has no doubt of his
sufficiency; because average work is all that is expected of any one. To
be able to do anything fairly well seems to us a more desirable
accomplishment than to be able to do some one thing better than anybody
else. But this is a view which only those may take who live in an
imperfectly developed society. As men become more cultivated, they more
and more want only the best; and the noblest natures feel the desire to
do their best, not with their actual power, but with the skill which
forty or fifty years of discipline and effort might give them. They are
laborious; they are patient; they persevere in one direction; they
believe that if they but continue to observe, to think, to read, to
compare, and to express in plain words what they know, their power of
seeing and of uttering will continue to grow. The charm of increasing
faculty in an infinite world sways and controls them. They never know
enough; they are never able to say well enough what they know; and so
they grow old still learning many things. They work in a spirit wholly
different from that of the common man, who if he get through with what
he has in hand is satisfied. They have an artist's sense of perfection;
and like Virgil would burn the works which if they once escape their own
hands, the world will never permit to perish.
It is hard to resist when many invite to utterance; and with us whoever
has ability is urged to put himself forward, and consequently to
dissipate in crude performances energies which if employed in
self-culture might make of him a philosopher, a poet, or a man of
science. As it is easier to act than to think, the multitude of course
will be only talkers, writers, and performers; but a great and civilized
people must have at least a few men who take rank with the profound
thinkers and finished scholars of the world. No lover of America can
help thinking it undesirable that any one should be able to say of us
with truth, what Locke has said, "The Americans are not all born with
worse understandings than the Europeans, though we see none of them have
such reaches in the arts and sciences." It is our aim to create the
highest civilization; but the highest civilization is favorable to the
highest life, which implies and requires more than the possession of
material things. Conduct is necessary, knowledge is necessary, beauty is
necessary, manners are necessary, and a civilized people must develop
life in all these directions, and as far as such a thing is possible,
harmoniously. Whoever excels in conduct, or in knowledge, or in a sense
for the beautiful, or in manners, helps to raise the standard of
living,--helps to give worth, dignity, charm, and refinement to life. It
is hard to take interest in a people who have no profound thinkers, no
great artists, no accomplished scholars, for only such men can lift a
people above the provincial spirit, and bring them into conscious
relationship with former ages and the wide world. The rule of the people
looks to something higher than opportunity for every man to have food
and a home; to something more than putting a church, a school, and a
newspaper at every man's door. Saints and heroes, philosophers and
poets, are a people's glory. They give us nobler loves, higher thoughts,
diviner aims. They show us how like a god man may become; and political
and social institutions which make saints and heroes, philosophers and
poets, impossible, can have but inferior value. And there is some
radical wrong where the noblest manhood and womanhood are not
appreciated and reverenced. Not to recognize genuine worth is the mark
of a superficial and vulgar character. The servile spirit has no
conception of the heroic nature; and they who measure life by material
standards, do not perceive the infinite which is in man and which makes
him godlike. A few only in any age or nation love the best, follow after
ideal aims; but when these few are wanting, all life becomes
common-place, and the millions pass from the cradle to the grave and
leave no lasting impression upon the world.
The practical turn of mind which finds expression in our commercial and
industrial achievements, makes itself felt also in our intellectual
activity, and those among us who have knowledge and power of utterance
are expected, almost required, to throw themselves into the breakers of
controversy, to discuss the hundred political, social, religious,
financial, sanitary, and educational problems which are ever waiting to
be solved. Let them enter the lists, let them take sides, let them
strive to see clear in an atmosphere of smoke and fog; and not to do
this is, in the estimation of the many, to be a dreamer, a dilettante, a
thinker to no purpose. But this is precisely what those who seek to
cultivate themselves, who seek to learn and communicate the best that is
known, ought not to do. They should live in a serene air, in a world of
tranquility and peace, where the soul is not troubled by contention,
where the view is not perturbed by passion. They should have leisure,
which is the original meaning of school and scholar; for the mind, like
the soul, is refreshed and strengthened by quiet meditation. Its
improvement is slow, is imperceptible often; its training is the result
of delicate methods which require patience and perseverance, faith in
ideals, and a constant looking to the all-perfect Infinite; and to throw
it into the noise and confusion of the busy excited world of practical
affairs is to stunt and warp its growth. We do not hitch a race-horse to
the plough, nor should we ask the best intellects to do the common work
of which every man is capable. They render the best service, when living
in communion with the highest and most cultivated minds of the past and
present, they learn and teach the way of looking and thinking, of
behaving and doing, which has been followed by the greatest and noblest
of the race. Political and social questions are forever changing; views
which commend themselves to-day will in a few years seem absurd;
measures which are thought to be of vital importance will grow to be
inapplicable. To talk and write about such things is well,--may help to
prevent stagnation and corruption in public life; but they exercise
altogether a higher office, who live in the presence of what is
permanently true and good and beautiful, who believe in ideal aims and
ends and prevent the masses from losing sight of what constitutes man's
real worth. They do what they alone can do, whereas the practical and
the useful may be any one's work. They may not, of course, isolate
themselves; on the contrary they must live closer than other men not
only to God and Nature, but also to the past and present history of
their country and of mankind. They study the movements of the age, but
they study them in a philosophic and not in a partisan spirit. They seek
to know, not what is popular, but what is right and good; and they often
see clearly where the view of others is uncertain and confused.
Encouragements and rewards are not necessary for them, for they are
drawn to the knowledge and love of the best by irresistible attractions,
and the more they learn and love the more beneficent and joy-giving does
their life become. Their aims and ends are in harmony with the highest
reason and the highest faith. The world they live in abides; and if they
are neglected or forgotten now, they can wait, for truth and goodness
and beauty can never lose their power or their charm.
"The worthiest poets have remained uncrowned
Till death has bleached their foreheads to the bone."