talkers, the device of ascribing their own sentence to an imaginary
person, in order to give it weight,--as Cicero, Cowley, Swift, Landor,
and Carlyle have done. And Cardinal de Retz, at a critical moment in the
Parliament of Paris, described himself in an extemporary Latin sentence,
which he pretended to quote from a classic author, and which told
admirably well. It is a curious reflex effect of this enhancement of our
thought by citing it from another, that many men can write better under
a mask than for themselves,--as Chatterton in archaic ballad, Le Sage in
Spanish costume, Macpherson as "Ossian,"--and, I doubt not, many a young
barrister in chambers in London, who forges good thunder for the
"Times," but never works as well under his own name. This is a sort of
dramatizing talent; as it is not rare to find great powers of
recitation, without the least original eloquence,--or people who copy
drawings with admirable skill, but are incapable of any design.
In hours of high mental activity we sometimes do the book too much
honor, reading out of it better things than the author wrote,--reading,
as we say, between the lines. You have had the like experience in
conversation: the wit was in what you heard, not in what the speakers
said. Our best thought came from others. We heard in their words a
deeper sense than the speakers put into them, and could express
ourselves in other people's phrases to finer purpose than they knew. In
Moore's Diary, Mr. Hallam is reported as mentioning at dinner one of his
friends who had said, "I don't know how it is, a thing that falls flat
from me seems quite an excellent joke when given at second-hand by
Sheridan. I never like my own _bon-mots_ until he adopts them." Dumont
was exalted by being used by Mirabeau, by Bentham, and by Sir Philip
Francis, who, again, was less than his own "Junius"; and James Hogg
(except in his poems "Kilmeny" and "The Witch of Fife") is but a
third-rate author, owing his fame to his effigy colossalized through the
lens of John Wilson,--who, again, writes better under the domino of
"Christopher North" than in his proper clothes. The bold theory of Delia
Bacon, that Shakspeare's plays were written by a society of wits,--by
Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord Bacon, and others around the Earl of
Southampton,--had plainly for her the charm of the superior meaning they
would acquire when read under this light; this idea of the authorship
controlling our appreciation of the works themselves. We once knew a man
overjoyed at the notice of his pamphlet in a leading newspaper. What
range he gave his imagination! Who could have written it? Was it not
Colonel Carbine, or Senator Tonitrus, or, at the least, Professor
Maximilian? Yes, he could detect in the style that fine Roman hand. How
it seemed the very voice of the refined and discerning public, inviting
merit at last to consent to fame, and come up and take place in the
reserved and authentic chairs! He carried the journal with haste to the
sympathizing Cousin Matilda, who is so proud of all we do. But what
dismay, when the good Matilda, pleased with his pleasure, confessed she
had written the criticism, and carried it with her own hands to the
post-office! "Mr. Wordsworth," said Charles Lamb, "allow me to introduce
to you my only admirer."
Swedenborg threw a formidable theory into the world, that every soul
existed in a society of souls, from which all its thoughts passed into
it, as the blood of the mother circulates in her unborn child; and he
noticed that, when in his bed,--alternately sleeping and
waking,--sleeping, he was surrounded by persons disputing and offering
opinions on the one side and on the other side of a proposition; waking,
the like suggestions occurred for and against the proposition as his own
thoughts; sleeping again, he saw and heard the speakers as before: and
this as often as he slept or waked. And if we expand the image, does it
not look as if we men were thinking and talking out of an enormous
antiquity, as if we stood, not in a coterie of prompters that filled a
sitting-room, but in a circle of intelligences that reached through all
thinkers, poets, inventors, and wits, men and women, English, German,
Celt, Aryan, Ninevite, Copt,--back to the first geometer, bard, mason,
carpenter, planter, shepherd,--back to the first negro, who, with more
health or better perception, gave a shriller sound or name for the thing
he saw and dealt with? Our benefactors are as many as the children who
invented speech, word by word. Language is a city, to the building of
which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be
credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the
coral reef which is the basis of the continent.
Πάντα ῥεῖ: all things are in flux. It is inevitable that you
are indebted to the past. You are fed and formed by it. The old forest
is decomposed for the composition of the new forest. The old animals
have given their bodies to the earth to furnish through chemistry the
forming race, and every individual is only a momentary fixation of what
was yesterday another's, is to-day his, and will belong to a third
to-morrow. So it is in thought. Our knowledge is the amassed thought and
experience of innumerable minds: our language, our science, our
religion, our opinions, our fancies we inherited. Our country, customs,
laws, our ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair,--all these we
never made; we found them ready-made; we but quote them. Goethe frankly
said, "What would remain to me if this art of appropriation were
derogatory to genius? Every one of my writings has been furnished to me
by a thousand different persons, a thousand things: wise and foolish
have brought me, without suspecting it, the offering of their thoughts,
faculties, and experience. My work is an aggregation of beings taken
from the whole of nature; it bears the name of Goethe."
But there remains the indefeasible persistency of the individual to be
himself. One leaf, one blade of grass, one meridian, does not resemble
another. Every mind is different; and the more it is unfolded, the more
pronounced is that difference. He must draw the elements into him for
food, and, if they be granite and silex, will prefer them cooked by sun
and rain, by time and art, to his hand. But, however received, these
elements pass into the substance of his constitution, will be
assimilated, and tend always to form, not a partisan, but a possessor of
truth. To all that can be said of the preponderance of the Past, the
single word Genius is a sufficient reply. The divine resides in the new.
The divine never quotes, but is, and creates. The profound apprehension
of the Present is Genius, which makes the Past forgotten. Genius
believes its faintest presentiment against the testimony of all history;
for it knows that facts are not ultimates, but that a state of mind is
the ancestor of everything. And what is Originality? It is being, being
one's self, and reporting accurately what we see and are. Genius is, in
the first instance, sensibility, the capacity of receiving just
impressions from the external world, and the power of co-ordinating
these after the laws of thought. It implies Will, or original force, for
their right distribution and expression. If to this the sentiment of
piety be added, if the thinker feels that the thought most strictly his
own is not his own, and recognizes the perpetual suggestion of the
Supreme Intellect, the oldest thoughts become new and fertile whilst he
speaks them.
Originals never lose their value. There is always in them a style and
weight of speech, which the immanence of the oracle bestowed, and which
cannot be counterfeited. Hence the permanence of the high poets. Plato,
Cicero, and Plutarch cite the poets in the manner in which Scripture is
quoted in our churches. A phrase or a single word is adduced, with
honoring emphasis, from Pindar, Hesiod, or Euripides, as precluding all
argument, because thus had they said: importing that the bard spoke not
his own, but the words of some god. True poets have always ascended to
this lofty platform, and met this expectation. Shakspeare, Milton,
Wordsworth, were very conscious of their responsibilities. When a man
thinks happily, he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses. All
spontaneous thought is irrespective of all else. Pindar uses this
haughty defiance, as if it were impossible to find his sources: "There
are many swift darts within my quiver, which have a voice for those with
understanding; but to the crowd they need interpreters. He is gifted
with genius who knoweth much by natural talent."
Our pleasure in seeing each mind take the subject to which it has a
proper right is seen in mere fitness in time. He that comes second must
needs quote him that comes first. The earliest describers of savage
life, as Captain Cook's account of the Society Islands, or Alexander
Henry's travels among our Indian tribes, have a charm of truth and just
point of view. Landsmen and sailors freshly come from the most civilized
countries, and with no false expectation, no sentimentality yet about
wild life, healthily receive and report what they saw,--seeing what they
must, and using no choice; and no man suspects the superior merit of the
description, until Chateaubriand, or Moore, or Campbell, or Byron, or
the artists arrive, and mix so much art with their picture that the
incomparable advantage of the first narrative appears. For the same
reason we dislike that the poet should choose an antique or far-fetched
subject for his muse, as if he avowed want of insight. The great deal
always with the nearest. Only as braveries of too prodigal power can we
pardon it, when the life of genius is so redundant that out of petulance
it flings its fire into some old mummy, and, lo! it walks and blushes
again here in the street.
We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme
claim. The Past is for us; but the sole terms on which it can become
ours are its subordination to the Present. Only an inventor knows how to
borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. We must not tamper
with the organic motion of the soul. 'Tis certain that thought has its
own proper motion, and the hints which flash from it, the words
overheard at unawares by the free mind, are trustworthy and fertile,
when obeyed, and not perverted to low and selfish account. This vast
memory is only raw material. The divine gift is ever the instant life,
which receives and uses and creates, and can well bury the old in the
omnipotency with which Nature decomposes all her harvest for
recomposition.
PROGRESS OF CULTURE.
PROGRESS OF CULTURE.
ADDRESS READ BEFORE THE Φ Β Κ SOCIETY AT CAMBRIDGE,
JULY 18, 1867.
WE meet to-day under happy omens to our ancient society, to the
commonwealth of letters, to the country, and to mankind. No good citizen
but shares the wonderful prosperity of the Federal Union. The heart
still beats with the public pulse of joy, that the country has withstood
the rude trial which threatened its existence, and thrills with the vast
augmentation of strength which it draws from this proof. The storm which
has been resisted is a crown of honor and a pledge of strength to the
ship. We may be well contented with our fair inheritance. Was ever such
coincidence of advantages in time and place as in America to-day?--the
fusion of races and religions; the hungry cry for men which goes up from
the wide continent; the answering facility of immigration, permitting
every wanderer to choose his climate and government. Men come hither by
nations. Science surpasses the old miracles of mythology, to fly with
them over the sea, and to send their messages under it. They come from
crowded, antiquated kingdoms to the easy sharing of our simple forms.
Land without price is offered to the settler, cheap education to his
children. The temper of our people delights in this whirl of life. Who
would live in the stone age, or the bronze, or the iron, or the
lacustrine? Who does not prefer the age of steel, of gold, of coal,
petroleum, cotton, steam, electricity, and the spectroscope?
"Prisca juvent alios, ego me nunc denique natum Gratulor."
All this activity has added to the value of life, and to the scope of
the intellect. I will not say that American institutions have given a
new enlargement to our idea of a finished man, but they have added
important features to the sketch.
Observe the marked ethical quality of the innovations urged or adopted.
The new claim of woman to a political status is itself an honorable
testimony to the civilization which has given her a civil status new in
history. Now that, by the increased humanity of law she controls her
property, she inevitably takes the next step to her share in power. The
war gave us the abolition of slavery, the success of the Sanitary
Commission and of the Freedmen's Bureau. Add to these the new scope of
social science; the abolition of capital punishment and of imprisonment
for debt; the improvement of prisons; the efforts for the suppression of
intemperance; the search for just rules affecting labor; the
co-operative societies; the insurance of life and limb; the free-trade
league; the improved alms-houses; the enlarged scale of charities to
relieve local famine, or burned towns, or the suffering Greeks; the
incipient series of international congresses,--all, one may say, in a
high degree revolutionary,--teaching nations the taking of government
into their own hands, and superseding kings.
The spirit is new. A silent revolution has impelled, step by step, all
this activity. A great many full-blown conceits have burst. The coxcomb
goes to the wall. To his astonishment he has found that this country and
this age belong to the most liberal persuasion; that the day of ruling
by scorn and sneers is past; that good sense is now in power, and _that_
resting on a vast constituency of intelligent labor, and, better yet, on
perceptions less and less dim of laws the most sublime. Men are now to
be astonished by seeing acts of good-nature, common civility, and
Christian charity proposed by statesmen, and executed by justices of the
peace,--by policemen and the constable. The fop is unable to cut the
patriot in the street; nay, he lies at his mercy in the ballot of the
club.
Mark, too, the large resources of a statesman, of a socialist, of a
scholar, in this age. When classes are exasperated against each other,
the peace of the world is always kept by striking a new note. Instantly
the units part, and form in a new order, and those who were opposed are
now side by side. In this country the prodigious mass of work that must
be done has either made new divisions of labor or created new
professions. Consider, at this time, what variety of issues, of
enterprises public and private, what genius of science, what of
administration, what of practical skill, what masters, each in his
several province, the railroad, the telegraph, the mines, the inland and
marine explorations, the novel and powerful philanthropies, as well as
agriculture, the foreign trade and the home trade (whose circuits in
this country are as spacious as the foreign), manufactures, the very
inventions, all on a national scale too, have evoked!--all implying the
appearance of gifted men, the rapid addition to our society of a class
of true nobles, by which the self-respect of each town and State is
enriched.
Take as a type the boundless freedom here in Massachusetts. People have
in all countries been burned and stoned for saying things which are
commonplaces at all our breakfast-tables. Every one who was in Italy
twenty-five years ago will remember the caution with which his host or
guest, in any house looked around him, if a political topic were
broached. Here the tongue is free, and the hand; and the freedom of
action goes to the brink, if not over the brink, of license.
A controlling influence of the times has been the wide and successful
study of Natural Science. Steffens said, "The religious opinions of men
rest on their views of nature." Great strides have been made within the
present century. Geology, astronomy, chemistry, optics, have yielded
grand results. The correlation of forces and the polarization of light
have carried us to sublime generalizations,--have affected an
imaginative race like poetic inspirations. We have been taught to tread
familiarly on giddy heights of thought, and to wont ourselves to daring
conjectures. The narrow sectarian cannot read astronomy with impunity.
The creeds of his church shrivel like dried leaves at the door of the
observatory, and a new and healthful air regenerates the human mind, and
imparts a sympathetic enlargement to its inventions and method. That
cosmical west-wind which, meteorologists tell us, constitutes, by the
revolution of the globe, the upper current, is alone broad enough to
carry to every city and suburb--to the farmer's house, the miner's
shanty, and the fisher's boat--the inspirations of this new hope of
mankind. Now, if any one say we have had enough of these boastful
recitals, then I say, Happy is the land wherein benefits like these have
grown trite and commonplace.
We confess that in America everything looks new and recent. Our towns
are still rude,--the make-shifts of emigrants,--and the whole
architecture tent-like, when compared with the monumental solidity of
mediæval and primeval remains in Europe and Asia. But geology has
effaced these distinctions. Geology, a science of forty or fifty
summers, has had the effect to throw an air of novelty and mushroom
speed over entire history. The oldest empires,--what we called venerable
antiquity,--now that we have true measures of duration, show like
creations of yesterday. 'Tis yet quite too early to draw sound
conclusions. The old six thousand years of chronology become a kitchen
clock,--no more a measure of time than an hour-glass or an
egg-glass,--since the duration of geologic periods has come into view.
Geology itself is only chemistry with the element of time added; and the
rocks of Nahant or the dikes of the White Hills disclose that the world
is a crystal, and the soil of the valleys and plains a continual
decomposition and recomposition. Nothing is old but the mind.
But I find not only this equality between new and old countries, as seen
by the eye of science, but also a certain equivalence of the ages of
history; and as the child is in his playthings working incessantly at
problems of natural philosophy,--working as hard and as successfully as
Newton,--so it were ignorance not to see that each nation and period has
done its full part to make up the result of existing civility. We are
all agreed that we have not on the instant better men to show than
Plutarch's heroes. The world is always equal to itself. We cannot yet
afford to drop Homer, nor Æschylus, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor
Archimedes. Later, each European nation, after the breaking up of the
Roman Empire, had its romantic era, and the productions of that era in
each rose to about the same height. Take for an example in literature
the _Romance of Arthur_, in Britain, or in the opposite province of
Brittany; the _Chansons de Roland_, in France; the Chronicle of the Cid,
in Spain; the _Niebelungen Lied_, in Germany; the Norse Sagas, in
Scandinavia; and, I may add, the Arabian Nights, on the African coast.
But if these works still survive and multiply, what shall we say of
names more distant, or hidden through their very superiority to their
coevals,--names of men who have left remains that certify a height of
genius in their several directions not since surpassed, and which men in
proportion to their wisdom still cherish,--as Zoroaster, Confucius, and
the grand scriptures, only recently known to Western nations, of the
Indian Vedas, the Institutes of Menu, the Puranas, the poems of the
Mahabarat and the Ramayana?
In modern Europe, the Middle Ages were called the Dark Ages. Who dares
to call them so now? They are seen to be the feet on which we walk, the
eyes with which we see. 'Tis one of our triumphs to have reinstated
them. Their Dante and Alfred and Wickliffe and Abelard and Bacon; their
Magna Charta, decimal numbers, mariner's compass, gunpowder, glass,
paper, and clocks; chemistry, algebra, astronomy; their Gothic
architecture, their painting,--are the delight and tuition of ours. Six
hundred years ago Roger Bacon explained the precession of the equinoxes,
and the necessity of reform in the calendar; looking over how many
horizons as far as into Liverpool and New York, he announced that
machines can be constructed to drive ships more rapidly than a whole
galley of rowers could do, nor would they need anything but a pilot to
steer; carriages, to move with incredible speed, without aid of animals;
and machines to fly into the air like birds. Even the races that we
still call savage or semi-savage, and which preserve their arts from
immemorial traditions, vindicate their faculty by the skill with which
they make their yam-cloths, pipes, bows, boats, and carved war-clubs.
The war-proa of the Malays in the Japanese waters struck Commodore Perry
by its close resemblance to the yacht "America."
As we find thus a certain equivalence in the ages, there is also an
equipollence of individual genius to the nation which it represents. It
is a curious fact, that a certain enormity of culture makes a man
invisible to his contemporaries. 'Tis always hard to go beyond your
public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not
easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it, you
will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But, from time to time, in
history, men are born a whole age too soon. The founders of nations, the
wise men and inventors, who shine afterwards as their gods, were
probably martyrs in their own time. All the transcendent writers and
artists of the world,--'tis doubtful who they were,--they are lifted so
fast into mythology,--Homer, Menu, Viasa, Dædalus, Hermes, Zoroaster,
even Swedenborg and Shakspeare. The early names are too typical,--Homer,
or _blind man_; Menu, or _man_; Viasa, _compiler_; Dædalus, _cunning_;
Hermes, _interpreter_; and so on. Probably, the men were so great, so
self-fed, that the recognition of them by others was not necessary to
them. And every one has heard the remark (too often, I fear, politely
made), that the philosopher was above his audience. I think I have seen
two or three great men who, for that reason, were of no account among
scholars.
But Jove is in his reserves. The truth, the hope of any time, must
always be sought in the minorities. Michel Angelo was the conscience of
Italy. We grow free with his name, and find it ornamental now; but in
his own days, his friends were few; and you would need to hunt him in a
conventicle with the Methodists of the era, namely, Savonarola, Vittoria
Colonna, Contarini, Pole, Occhino,--superior souls, the religious of
that day, drawn to each other, and under some cloud with the rest of the
world,--reformers, the radicals of the hour, banded against the
corruptions of Rome, and as lonely and as hated as Dante before them.