which accord well enough with what we see and hear. There is an
American disease, a paralysis of the active faculties, which falls
on young men of this country as soon as they have finished their
college education, which strips them of all manly aims and bereaves
them of animal spirits; so that the noblest youths are in a few years
converted into pale Caryatides to uphold the temple of conventions.
They are in the state of the young Persians, when “that mighty Yezdam
prophet” addressed them and said, “Behold the signs of evil days are
come; there is now no longer any right course of action, nor any
self-devotion left among the Iranis.” As soon as they have arrived
at this term, there are no employments to satisfy them, they are
educated above the work of their times and country, and disdain it.
Many of the more acute minds pass into a lofty criticism of these
things, which only embitters their sensibility to the evil and widens
the feeling of hostility between them and the citizens at large. From
this cause, companies of the best-educated young men in the Atlantic
states every week take their departure for Europe; for no business
that they have in that country, but simply because they shall so
be hid from the reproachful eyes of their countrymen and agreeably
entertained for one or two years, with some lurking hope, no doubt,
that something may turn up to give them a decided direction. It is
easy to see that this is only a postponement of their proper work,
with the additional disadvantage of a two years’ vacation. Add that
this class is rapidly increasing by the infatuation of the active
class, who, whilst they regard these young Athenians with suspicion
and dislike, educate their own children in the same courses, and use
all possible endeavors to secure to them the same result.
Certainly we are not insensible to this calamity, as described
by the observers or witnessed by ourselves. It is not quite
new and peculiar; though we should not know where to find in
literature any record of so much unbalanced intellectuality, such
undeniable apprehension without talent, so much power without equal
applicability, as our young men pretend to. Yet in Theodore Mundt’s
account of Frederic Hölderlin’s “Hyperion,” we were not a little
struck with the following Jeremiad of the despair of Germany, whose
tone is still so familiar that we were somewhat mortified to find
that it was written in 1799. “Then came I to the Germans. I cannot
conceive of a people more disjoined than the Germans. Mechanics you
shall see, but no man. Is it not like some battle-field, where hands
and arms and all members lie scattered about, whilst the life-blood
runs away into the sand? Let every man mind his own, you say, and I
say the same. Only let him mind it with all his heart, and not with
this cold study, literally, hypocritically, to appear that which he
passes for,—but in good earnest, and in all love, let him be that
which he is; then there is a soul in his deed. And is he driven into
a circumstance where the spirit must not live? Let him thrust it from
him with scorn, and learn to dig and plough. There is nothing holy
which is not desecrated, which is not degraded to a mean end among
this people. It is heart-rending to see your poet, your artist, and
all who still revere genius, who love and foster the Beautiful. The
Good! They live in the world as strangers in their own house; they
are like the patient Ulysses whilst he sat in the guise of a beggar
at his own door, whilst shameless rioters shouted in the hall and
asked, Who brought the ragamuffin here? Full of love, talent and
hope, spring up the darlings of the muse among the Germans; some
seven years later, and they flit about like ghosts, cold and silent;
they are like a soil which an enemy has sown with poison, that it
will not bear a blade of grass. On earth all is imperfect! is the
old proverb of the German. Aye, but if one should say to these
God-forsaken, that with them all is imperfect only because they leave
nothing pure which they do not pollute, nothing holy which they do
not defile with their fumbling hands; that with them nothing prospers
because the godlike nature which is the root of all prosperity they
do not revere; that with them, truly, life is shallow and anxious and
full of discord, because they despise genius, which brings power and
nobleness into manly action, cheerfulness into endurance, and love
and brotherhood into towns and houses. Where a people honors genius
in its artists, there breathes like an atmosphere a universal soul,
to which the shy sensibility opens, which melts self-conceit,—all
hearts become pious and great, and it adds fire to heroes. The home
of all men is with such a people, and there will the stranger gladly
abide. But where the divine nature and the artist is crushed, the
sweetness of life is gone, and every other planet is better than the
earth. Men deteriorate, folly increases, and a gross mind with it;
drunkenness comes with a disaster; with the wantonness of the tongue
and with the anxiety for a livelihood the blessing of every year
becomes a curse, and all the gods depart.”
The steep antagonism between the money-getting and the academic
class must be freely admitted, and perhaps is the more violent,
that whilst our work is imposed by the soil and the sea, our culture
is the tradition of Europe. But we cannot share the desperation of
our contemporaries; least of all should we think a preternatural
enlargement of the intellect a calamity. A new perception, the
smallest new activity given to the perceptive power, is a victory won
to the living universe from Chaos and old Night, and cheaply bought
by any amounts of hard fare and false social position. The balance
of mind and body will redress itself fast enough. Superficialness is
the real distemper. In all the cases we have ever seen where people
were supposed to suffer from too much wit, or, as men said, from a
blade too sharp for the scabbard, it turned out that they had not wit
enough. It may easily happen that we are grown very idle, and must
go to work, and that the times must be worse before they are better.
It is very certain that speculation is no succedaneum for life. What
we would know, we must do. As if any taste or imagination could take
the place of fidelity! The old Duty is the old God. And we may come
to this by the rudest teaching. A friend of ours went five years
ago to Illinois to buy a farm for his son. Though there were crowds
of emigrants in the roads, the country was open on both sides, and
long intervals between hamlets and houses. Now after five years he
had just been to visit the young farmer and see how he prospered,
and reports that a miracle had been wrought. From Massachusetts to
Illinois the land is fenced in and builded over, almost like New
England itself, and the proofs of thrifty cultivation abound;—a
result not so much owing to the natural increase of population, as to
the hard times, which, driving men out of cities and trade, forced
them to take off their coats and go to work on the land; which has
rewarded them not only with wheat but with habits of labor. Perhaps
the adversities of our commerce have not yet been pushed to the
wholesomest degree of severity. Apathies and total want of work, and
reflection on the imaginative character of American life, etc., etc.,
are like seasickness, and never will obtain any sympathy if there is
a wood-pile in the yard, or an unweeded patch in the garden; not to
mention the graver absurdity of a youth of noble aims who can find no
field for his energies, whilst the colossal wrongs of the Indian, of
the Negro, of the emigrant, remain unmitigated, and the religious,
civil and judicial forms of the country are confessedly effete and
offensive. We must refer our clients back to themselves, believing
that every man knows in his heart the cure for the disease he so
ostentatiously bewails.
As far as our correspondents have entangled their private griefs
with the cause of American Literature, we counsel them to disengage
themselves as fast as possible. In Cambridge orations and elsewhere
there is much inquiry for that great absentee American Literature.
What can have become of it? The least said is best. A literature
is no man’s private concern, but a secular and generic result, and
is the affair of a power which works by a prodigality of life and
force very dismaying to behold,—every trait of beauty purchased by
hecatombs of private tragedy. The pruning in the wild gardens of
nature is never forborne. Many of the best must die of consumption,
many of despair, and many be stupid and insane, before the one great
and fortunate life which they each predicted can shoot up into a
thrifty and beneficent existence.
VIII.
THE TRAGIC.[12]
He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the
house of Pain. As the salt sea covers more than two thirds of the
surface of the globe, so sorrow encroaches in man on felicity. The
conversation of men is a mixture of regrets and apprehensions. I do
not know but the prevalent hue of things to the eye of leisure is
melancholy. In the dark hours, our existence seems to be a defensive
war, a struggle against the encroaching All, which threatens
surely to engulf us soon, and is impatient of our short reprieve.
How slender the possession that yet remains to us; how faint the
animation! how the spirit seems already to contract its domain,
retiring within narrower walls by the loss of memory, leaving its
planted fields to erasure and annihilation. Already our own thoughts
and words have an alien sound. There is a simultaneous diminution of
memory and hope. Projects that once we laughed and leapt to execute,
find us now sleepy and preparing to lie down in the snow. And in
the serene hours we have no courage to spare. We cannot afford to
let go any advantages. The riches of body or of mind which we do
not need to-day, are the reserved fund against the calamity that
may arrive to-morrow. It is usually agreed that some nations have
a more sombre temperament, and one would say that history gave no
record of any society in which despondency came so readily to heart
as we see it and feel it in ours. Melancholy cleaves to the English
mind in both hemispheres as closely as to the strings of an Æolian
harp. Men and women at thirty years, and even earlier, have lost all
spring and vivacity, and if they fail in their first enterprises they
throw up the game. But whether we and those who are next to us are
more or less vulnerable, no theory of life can have any right which
leaves out of account the values of vice, pain, disease, poverty,
insecurity, disunion, fear and death.
What are the conspicuous tragic elements in human nature? The
bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual
source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny; the belief that the
order of nature and events is controlled by a law not adapted to
man, nor man to that, but which holds on its way to the end, serving
him if his wishes chance to lie in the same course, crushing him if
his wishes lie contrary to it, and heedless whether it serves or
crushes him. This is the terrible meaning that lies at the foundation
of the old Greek tragedy, and makes the Œdipus and Antigone and
Orestes objects of such hopeless commiseration. They must perish,
and there is no over-god to stop or to mollify this hideous enginery
that grinds or thunders, and snatches them up into its terrific
system. The same idea makes the paralyzing terror with which the
East Indian mythology haunts the imagination. The same thought is
the predestination of the Turk. And universally, in uneducated and
unreflecting persons on whom too the religious sentiment exerts
little force, we discover traits of the same superstition: “If you
balk water you will be drowned the next time;” “if you count ten
stars you will fall down dead;” “if you spill the salt;” “if your
fork sticks upright in the floor;” “if you say the Lord’s prayer
backwards,”—and so on, a several penalty, nowise grounded in the
nature of the thing, but on an arbitrary will. But this terror of
contravening an unascertained and unascertainable will, cannot
coexist with reflection: it disappears with civilization, and can
no more be reproduced than the fear of ghosts after childhood.
It is discriminated from the doctrine of Philosophical Necessity
herein: that the last is an Optimism, and therefore the suffering
individual finds his good consulted in the good of all, of which he
is a part. But in destiny, it is not the good of the whole or the
_best will_ that is enacted, but only _one particular will_. Destiny
properly is not a will at all, but an immense whim; and this the only
ground of terror and despair in the rational mind, and of tragedy
in literature. Hence the antique tragedy, which was founded on this
faith, can never be reproduced.
After reason and faith have introduced a better public and private
tradition, the tragic element is somewhat circumscribed. There must
always remain, however, the hindrance of our private satisfaction by
the laws of the world. The law which establishes nature and the human
race, continually thwarts the will of ignorant individuals, and this
in the particulars of disease, want, insecurity and disunion.
But the essence of tragedy does not seem to me to lie in any list of
particular evils. After we have enumerated famine, fever, inaptitude,
mutilation, rack, madness and loss of friends, we have not yet
included the proper tragic element, which is Terror, and which does
not respect definite evils but indefinite; an ominous spirit which
haunts the afternoon and the night, idleness and solitude.
A low, haggard sprite sits by our side, “casting the fashion of
uncertain evils”—a sinister presentiment, a power of the imagination
to dislocate things orderly and cheerful and show them in startling
array. Hark! what sounds on the night wind, the cry of Murder in that
friendly house; see these marks of stamping feet, of hidden riot.
The whisper overheard, the detected glance, the glare of malignity,
ungrounded fears, suspicions, half-knowledge and mistakes, darken the
brow and chill the heart of men. And accordingly it is natures not
clear, not of quick and steady perceptions, but imperfect characters
from which somewhat is hidden that all others see, who suffer most
from these causes. In those persons who move the profoundest pity,
tragedy seems to consist in temperament, not in events. There are
people who have an appetite for grief, pleasure is not strong enough
and they crave pain, mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on
poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can soothe their
ragged and dishevelled desolation. They mis-hear and mis-behold, they
suspect and dread. They handle every nettle and ivy in the hedge, and
tread on every snake in the meadow.
“Come bad chance,
And we add to it our strength,
And we teach it art and length,
Itself o’er us to advance.”
Frankly, then, it is necessary to say that all sorrow dwells in a low
region. It is superficial; for the most part fantastic, or in the
appearance and not in things. Tragedy is in the eye of the observer,
and not in the heart of the sufferer. It looks like an insupportable
load under which earth moans aloud. But analyze it; it is not I,
it is not you, it is always another person who is tormented. If a
man says, Lo! I suffer—it is apparent that he suffers not, for grief
is dumb. It is so distributed as not to destroy. That which would
rend you falls on tougher textures. That which seems intolerable
reproach or bereavement, does not take from the accused or bereaved
man or woman appetite or sleep. Some men are above grief, and some
below it. Few are capable of love. In phlegmatic natures calamity
is unaffecting, in shallow natures it is rhetorical. Tragedy must
be somewhat which I can respect. A querulous habit is not tragedy.
A panic such as frequently in ancient or savage nations put a troop
or an army to flight without an enemy; a fear of ghosts; a terror
of freezing to death that seizes a man in a winter midnight on the
moors; a fright at uncertain sounds heard by a family at night in the
cellar or on the stairs,—are terrors that make the knees knock and
the teeth clatter, but are no tragedy, any more than seasickness,
which may also destroy life. It is full of illusion. As it comes,
it has its support. The most exposed classes, soldiers, sailors,
paupers, are nowise destitute of animal spirits. The spirit is true
to itself, and finds its own support in any condition, learns to live
in what is called calamity as easily as in what is called felicity;
as the frailest glass-bell will support a weight of a thousand pounds
of water at the bottom of a river or sea, if filled with the same.
A man should not commit his tranquillity to things, but should
keep as much as possible the reins in his own hands, rarely giving
way to extreme emotion of joy or grief. It is observed that the
earliest works of the art of sculpture are countenances of sublime
tranquillity. The Egyptian sphinxes, which sit to-day as they sat
when the Greek came and saw them and departed, and when the Roman
came and saw them and departed, and as they will still sit when the
Turk, the Frenchman and the Englishman, who visit them now, shall
have passed by,—“with their stony eyes fixed on the East and on
the Nile,” have countenances expressive of complacency and repose,
an expression of health, deserving their longevity, and verifying
the primeval sentence of history on the permanency of that people,
“Their strength is to sit still.” To this architectural stability
of the human form, the Greek genius added an ideal beauty, without
disturbing the seals of serenity; permitting no violence of mirth,
or wrath, or suffering. This was true to human nature. For, in life,
actions are few, opinions even few, prayers few; loves, hatreds, or
any emissions of the soul. All that life demands of us through the
greater part of the day, is an equilibrium, a readiness, open eyes
and ears, and free hands. Society asks this, and truth, and love, and
the genius of our life. There is a fire in some men which demands an
outlet in some rude action; they betray their impatience of quiet by
an irregular Catalinarian gait; by irregular, faltering, disturbed
speech, too emphatic for the occasion. They treat trifles with a
tragic air. This is not beautiful. Could they not lay a rod or two
of stone wall, and work off this superabundant irritability? When
two strangers meet in the highway, what each demands of the other
is that the aspect should show a firm mind, ready for any event of
good or ill, prepared alike to give death or to give life, as the
emergency of the next moment may require. We must walk as guests
in nature; not impassioned, but cool and disengaged. A man should
try Time, and his face should wear the expression of a just judge,
who has nowise made up his opinion, who fears nothing, and even
hopes nothing, but who puts nature and fortune on their merits: he
will hear the case out, and then decide. For all melancholy, as all
passion, belongs to the exterior life. Whilst a man is not grounded
in the divine life by his proper roots, he clings by some tendrils of
affection to society—mayhap to what is best and greatest in it, and
in calm times it will not appear that he is adrift and not moored;
but let any shock take place in society, any revolution of custom, of
law, of opinion, and at once his type of permanence is shaken. The
disorder of his neighbors appears to him universal disorder; chaos is
come again. But in truth he was already a driving wreck, before the
wind arose which only revealed to him his vagabond state. If a man
is centred, men and events appear to him a fair image or reflection
of that which he knoweth beforehand in himself. If any perversity or
profligacy break out in society, he will join with others to avert
the mischief, but it will not arouse resentment or fear, because he
discerns its impassable limits. He sees already in the ebullition of
sin the simultaneous redress.
Particular reliefs also, fit themselves to human calamities; for the
world will be in equilibrium, and hates all manner of exaggeration.
Time, the consoler, Time, the rich carrier of all changes, dries the
freshest tears by obtruding new figures, new costumes, new roads, on
our eye, new voices on our ear. As the west wind lifts up again the
heads of the wheat which were bent down and lodged in the storm, and
combs out the matted and dishevelled grass as it lay in night-locks
on the ground, so we let in time as a drying wind into the seed-field
of thoughts which are dark and wet and low bent. Time restores
to them temper and elasticity. How fast we forget the blow that
threatened to cripple us. Nature will not sit still; the faculties
will do somewhat; new hopes spring, new affections twine and the
broken is whole again.
Time consoles, but Temperament resists the impression of pain.
Nature proportions her defence to the assault. Our human being is
wonderfully plastic; if it cannot win this satisfaction here, it
makes itself amends by running out there and winning that. It is
like a stream of water, which is dammed up on one bank, overruns
the other, and flows equally at its own convenience over sand, or
mud, or marble. Most suffering is only apparent. We fancy it is
torture; the patient has his own compensations. A tender American
girl doubts of Divine Providence whilst she reads the horrors of
“the middle passage;” and they are bad enough at the mildest; but to
such as she these crucifixions do not come: they come to the obtuse
and barbarous, to whom they are not horrid, but only a little worse
than the old sufferings. They exchange a cannibal war for the stench
of the hold. They have gratifications which would be none to the
civilized girl. The market-man never damned the lady because she had
not paid her bill, but the stout Irishwoman has to take that once
a month. She however never feels weakness in her back because of
the slave-trade. This self-adapting strength is especially seen in
disease. “It is my duty,” said Sir Charles Bell, “to visit certain
wards of the hospital where there is no patient admitted but with
that complaint which most fills the imagination with the idea of
insupportable pain and certain death. Yet these wards are not the
least remarkable for the composure and cheerfulness of their inmates.
The individual who suffers has a mysterious counterbalance to that
condition, which, to us who look upon her, appears to be attended
with no alleviating circumstance.” Analogous supplies are made to
those individuals whose character leads them to vast exertions of
body and mind. Napoleon said to one of his friends at St. Helena,
“Nature seems to have calculated that I should have great reverses to
endure, for she has given me a temperament like a block of marble.
Thunder cannot move it; the shaft merely glides along. The great
events of my life have slipped over me without making any demand on
my moral or physical nature.”
The intellect is a consoler, which delights in detaching or putting
an interval between a man and his fortune, and so converts the
sufferer into a spectator and his pain into poetry. It yields the
joys of conversation, of letters and of science. Hence also the
torments of life become tuneful tragedy, solemn and soft with music,
and garnished with rich dark pictures. But higher still than the
activities of art, the intellect in its purity and the moral sense in
its purity are not distinguished from each other, and both ravish us
into a region whereinto these passionate clouds of sorrow cannot rise.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] _The Dial_, vol. i. p. 137.
[6] _The Dial_, vol. ii. p. 262.
[7] _The Dial_, vol. iii. p. 77.
[8] _The Dial_, vol. iii. p. 123.
[9] _The Dial_, vol. iii. p. 511.
[10] _The Dial_, vol. iv. p. 96.
[11] _The Dial_, vol. iv. p. 262.
[12] From the course on “Human Life,” read in Boston, 1839-40.
Published in _The Dial_, vol. iv. p. 515.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within
the text and consultation of external sources.
Some hyphens in words have been silently removed, some added,
when a predominant preference was found in the original book.
Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text,
and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.
Pg. 100: ‘χόσμος’ replaced by ‘Κόσμος’.
Pg. 211: ‘ageeably entertained’ replaced by ‘agreeably entertained’.