The Collected Works of Theodore Parker/Volume 07/Discourse 8
VIII.
Men of a superior culture get it at the cost of the whole community, and therefore at first owe for their education. They must pay back an equivalent, or else remain debtors to mankind, debtors for ever; that is, beggars or thieves, such being the only class that are thus perpetually in debt, and a burden to the race.
It is true that every man, the rudest Prussian boor, as well as Von Humboldt, is indebted to mankind for his culture, to their past history and their existing institutions, to their daily toil. Taking the whole culture into the account, the debt bears about the same ratio to the receipt in all men. I speak not of genius, the inborn faculty which costs mankind nothing, only of the education thereof, which the man obtains. The Irishman who can only handle his spade, wear his garments, talk his wild brogue, and bid his beads, has four or five hundred generations of ancestors behind him, and is as long descended, and from as old a stock, as the accomplished patrician scholar at Oxford and Berlin. The Irishman depends on them all, and on the present generation, for his culture. But he has obtained his development with no special outlay and cost of the human race. In getting that rude culture, he has appropriated nothing to himself which is taken from another man's share. He has paid as he went along, so he owes nothing in particular for his education; and mankind has no claim on him as for value received. But the Oxford graduate has been a long time at school and college; not earning, but learning; living therefore at the cost of mankind, with an obligation and an implied promise to pay back when he comes of age and takes possession of his educated faculties. He therefore has not only the general debt which he shares with all men, but an obligation quite special and peculiar for his support while at study.
This rule is general, and applies to the class of educated men, with some apparent exceptions, and a very few real ones. Some men are born of poor but strong-bodied parents, and endowed with great abilities; they inherit nothing except their share of the general civilization of mankind, and the onward impulse which that has given. These men devote themselves to study; and having behind them an ancestry of broad-shouldered, hard-handed, stalwart, temperate men, and deep-bosomed, red-armed, and industrious mothers, they are able to do the work of two or three men at the time. Such men work while they study; they teach while they learn; they hew their own way through the wood by superior strength and skill born in their bones, with an axe themselves have chipped out from the stone, or forged of metal, or paid for with the result of their first hewings. They are specially indebted to nobody for their culture. They pay as they go, owing the academic ferryman nothing for setting them over into the elysium of the scholar.
Only few men ever make this heroic and crucial experiment. None but poor men's sons essay the trial. Nothing but poverty has whips sharp enough to sting indolent men, even of genius, to such exertion of the manly part. But even this proud race often runs into another debt: they run up long scores with the body, which must one day be paid "with aching head and squeamish heart-burnings." The credit on account of the hardy fathers is not without limit. It is soon exhausted; especially in a land where the atmosphere, the institutions, and the youth of the people all excite to premature and excessive prodigality of effort. The body takes a mortgage on the spendthrift spirit, demands certain regular periodic payments, and will one day foreclose for breach of condition, impede the spirit's action in the premises, putting a very disagreeable keeper there, and finally expel the prodigal, mortgagor. So it often happens that a man, who in his youth scorned a pecuniary debt to mankind and would receive no favour, even to buy culture with, has yet, unconsciously and against his will, contracted debts which trouble him in manhood, and impede his action oil his life; with swollen foot and wear eyes famous Griesbach pays for the austere heroism of his penurious and needy youth. The rosy bud of genius, on the poor man's tree, too often, opens into a leap, and ghastly flower. Could not Burns tell us this?
With the rare exceptions just hinted at, any man of a superior culture owes for it when obtained, Sometimes the debt is obvious: a farmer with small means and a largo family sends tho most hopeful of his sons to college. Look at the cost of tho boy's culture. His hands pro kept from work that his mind may bo free. He fares on daintier food, wears more and more costly garments. Other members of the family must feed and clothe him, earn his tuition-fees, buy his books, pay for his fuel and room-rent. For this the father rises earlier than of old, yoking the oxen a great while before day of a winter's morning, and toils till long after dark of a winter's night, enduring cold and hardship. For this the mother stints her frugal fare, her humble dress; for this the brothers must forego sleep and pastime, must toil harder, late and early both; for this the sisters must seek new modes of profitable work, must wear their old finery long stinted to spare it, is spent on this one youth. From the father to the daughters, all lay their bones to extraordinary work for him; the whole family is pinched in body, that this one youth may go brave and full. Even the family horse pays his tax to raise the education fee.
Men see the hopeful scholar, graceful and accomplished, receiving his academic honours, but they see not the hard-featured father standing unheeded in the aisle, nor the older sister in an obscure corner of the gallery, who had toiled in the factory for the favoured brother, tending his vineyard, her own not kept; who had perhaps learned the letters of Greek to hear him recite the grammar at home. Father and sister know not a word of the language in which his diploma is writ and delivered. At what cost of the family tree is this one flower produced? How many leaves, possible blossoms,—yea, possible branches—have been absorbed to create this one flower, which shall perpetuate the kind, after being beautiful and fragrant in after it is its own season? Yet, while these leaves are growing for the blossom's sake, and the life of the tree is directed thither with special and urgent emphasis, the different between branch and blossom, leaf and petal, is getting more and more. By and by the two cannot comprehend each other; the acorn has forgotten the leaf which reared it, and thinks itself of another kin. Grotius, who speaks a host of languages, talking with the learned of all countries, and of every age, has forgot his mother tongue, and speech is at end with her that bore him. The son, accomplished with many a science, many an art, ceases to understand the simple consciousness of his father and mother. They are proud of him—that he has outgrown them; he ashamed of them when they visit him amid his scholarly company. To them he is a philosopher; they only clowns in his eyes. He learns to neglect, perhaps to despise them, and forgets his obligation and his debt. Yet by their rudeness is it that he is refined. His science and literary skill are purchased by their ignorance and uncouthness of manner and of speech. Had the educational cost been equally divided, all had still continued on a level; he lived known no Latin, but the whole family might have spoken good English. For all the difference which education has made betwixt him and his kinsfolk he is a debtor.
In New England you sometimes <see extremes of social condition brought together. The blue-frocked father, well advanced, but hale as an October morning, jostles into Boston in a milk-cart, his red-cheeked grand-daughter beside him, also coming for some useful daily work, while the youngest son, cultured at the cost of that grand-daughter's sire and by that father' toil, is already a famous man; perhaps also a proud one, eloquent at the bar, or powerful in the pulpit, or mighty in the senate. The family was not rich enough to educate all the children after this costly sort; one becomes famous, the rest are neglected, obscure, and perhaps ignorant; the cultivated son has little sympathy with them. So the men that built up the cathedrals of Strasbourg and Milan slept in mean hutches of mud and straw, dirty, cold, and wet; the finished tower looks proudly down upon the lowly thatch, all heedless of the cost at which itself arose. It is plain that this man owes for his education; it is plain, whom he owes. But all men of a superior culture, though born to wealth, get their education in the same way, only there m this additional mischief to complicate the matter: the burden of self-denial is not borne by the man's own family, but by ether fathers and mothers, other brothers and sisters. They also pay the cost of his culture, bear the burden' for no special end, and have no personal or family joy in the success; they do not even know the scholar they help to train. They who hewed the topstone of society are far away when it is hoisted np with shouting. Most of the youths now-a-days trained at Harvard College are the sons of rich men, yet they also, not less, are educated at the public charge; beneficiaries not of the "Hopkins' Fund," but of the whole community. Society is not yet rich enough to afford so generous a culture to all who ask, who deserve, or who would pay for it a hundred-fold. The accomplished man who sits in his well-endowed scholar" ship at Oxford, or rejoices to be "Master of Trinity," though he have tho estate of tho Westminsters and fatherlands behind him, is still the beneficiary of the public, and owes for his schooling.
In the general way, among the industrious classes of New England, a boy earns his living after he is twelve years old. If he gets the superior education of the scholar solely by the pecuniary aid of his father or others, when he is twenty-five and enters on his profession, law, medicine, or divinity, politics, school-keeping, or trade, he has not earned his Latin grammar; has rendered no appreciable service to mankind; others have worked that he, might study, and taught that he might learn. He has not paid the first cent towards his own schooling; he is indebted for it to the whole community. The ox-driver in the fields, the pavior in the city streets, the labourer on the railroad, the lumberer in the woods, the girl in the factory, each has a claim on him. If he despises these persons, or cuts himself off from sympathy with them; if he refuses to perform his function for them after they have done their possible to fit him for it; he is not only the perpetual and us grateful debtor, but is more guilty than the poor man's son who forgets the family that sent him to college: for that family consciously and willingly made tho sacrifice, and got some satisfaction for it in the visible success of their scheme,—nay, are sometimes proud of the pride which scorns them, while with the mass of men thus slighted there is no return for theft sacrifice. They did their part, faithfully did it; their beneficiary forgets his function.
The democratic party in New England does not much favour the higher seminaries of education. There has long been a suspicion against them in the mass of the community, and among the friends of the public education of the people a serious distrust. This is the philosophy of that discontent: public money spent cm the higher seminaries is so much taken from the number schools so much taken from the colleges of all for the college of the few men educated at such cost have not adequately repaid the public for the sacrifice made on their account; men of superior education have not been eminently the friends of mankind, they do not eminently represent truth, justice, philanthropy, and piety; they do not point men to lofty human life, and go thitherward in advance of mankind; their superior education has narrowed their sympathies, instead of widening; they use their opportunities against mankind, and not in its behalf; think, write, legislate, and live not for the interest of mankind, but only for a class; instead of eminent wisdom, justice, piety, they have eminent cunning, selfishness, and want of faith. These charges are matters of allegation; judge you if they be not also matters of fact.
Now, there is a common feeling amongst men that the scholar is their debtor, and, in virtue of this, that they have a right to various services from him. No honest man asks the aid of a farmer or a blacksmith without intending to repay him in money; no assembly of mechanics would ask another to come two hundred miles and give them a month's work, or a day's Work. Yet they will ask a scholar to do so. What gratuitous services are demanded of the physician, of the ministers of the man of science and letters in general! No poor man in Boston but thinks he has a good claim on any doctor; no culprit in danger of liberty or life but will ask tho services of a lawyer, wholly without recompense, to plead his cause. The poorest and most neglected class of men look on every good clergyman as their missionary and minister and friend; the better educated and more powerful he is, the juster and greater do they fool their claim on him. A pirate in gaol may command the sendees of any Christian minister in the land. Most of the high achievements in science, letters, and art, have had no apparent pay. The pay came beforehand; in general and from God, in the greater ability, "the vision and the faculty divine," but m particular also and from men, in the opportunity afforded them by others for the use and culture thereof. Divinely and humanly they are Well paid. Men feel that they have this right to the services of the scholar, in part because they dimly know that hw superior education is purchased at the general cost. Hence, too, they are proud of the few able and accomplished men, feeling that all have ft certain properly therein, as having contributed their mite to the accumulation, by their divine nature related to the men of genius, by their human toil partners in the acquirements of the scholar. This feeling is not confined to men who intellectually can appreciate intellectual excellence. The little parish in the mountains, and the great parish in the city, are alike proud of the able-headed and accomplished scholar who ministers to them though neither the poor clowns of the village nor the wealthy clowns of the metropolis could enter into his consciousness and understand his favourite pursuits or loftiest thought. Both would think it insulting to pay such a man in full proportion to his work or their receipt. Nobody offers a salary to the House of Lords; their lordship is their pay, and they must give back, in the form of justice and sound government, an equivalent for all they take in high social rank. They must pay for their nobility by being noble lords.
How shall the scholar pay for his education? He is to give a service for the service received. Thus the miller and the farmer pay one anther each paying with service in his own kind. The scholar cannot give back bread for bread, and cloth for cloth. He must pay in the scholar’s kind, not the woodman's or the weaver’s. He is to represent the higher modes of human consciousness; his culture and opportunities of portion fit him for that. So he is not merely to go through the routine profession, as minister, doctor, lawyer, merchant, school-master, politician, or maker of almanacks, and for his own advantage; he is also to represent truth, Justice, beauty, philanthropy, and religion—the highest facts of human experience ; ho must be common, but not vulgar, and, as a star, must dwell apart from the vulgarity of the selfish and the low. He may win money without doing this, get fame and power, and thereby seem to pay mankind for their advance to him, while he rides upon their neck; but as he has not paid back the scholar's cost, and in the scholar's way, he is a debtor still, and owes for his past culture and present position.
Such is the position of the scholar everywhere, and such his consequent obligation. But in America there are some circumstances which make the position and the duty still more important. Beside the natural aristocracy of genius, talent, and educated skill, in most countries there is also a conventional and permanent nobility based on royal or patrician descent and immoveable aristocracy. Its members monopolize the high places of society, and if not strong by nature are so by position. Those men check the natural power of the class of scholars. The descendant of some famous chief of old time takes rank before the Bacons, the Shakespeares, and the Miltons of new families,—born yesterday, to-day gladdened and gladdening with the joy of their genius,—usurps their place, and for a time "shoves away the worthy bidden guest" from the honours of the public board. Here there is no such class: a man born at all is well born ; with a great nature, nobly born; the career opens to all that can run, to all men that wish to try; our aristocracy is moveable, and the scholar has scope and verge enough.
Germany has the largest class of scholars ; men of talent, sometimes of genius, of great working power, exceedingly well furnished for their work, with a knowledge of the past and the present. On the whole, they seem to have a greater power of thought than the scholars of any other land. They live in a country where intellectual worth is rated at its highest value. As England is the paradise of the patrician and the millionnaire, so is Germany for the man of thought; Goethe and Schiller and the Humboldts took precedence of the mere conventional aristocracy. The empire of money is for England; that of mind is for Germany. But there the scholar is positively hindered in his function by tho power of the government, which allows freedom of thought, and by education tends to promote it, yet not its correlative freedom of speech, and still less the consequent of that—freedom of act. Revelations of new thought are indeed looked for, and encouraged in certain forms, but the corresponding revolution of old things is forbidden. An idea must remain an idea; the government will not allow it to become a deed, an institution, an idea organized in men. The children, of the mind must be exposed to die, or, if left alive, their feet are cramped, so that they cannot go alone; useless, joyless,, and unwell, they remain in their father's house. The government seeks to establish national unity of action, by the sacrifice of individual variety of action, personal freedom: every man must be a soldier and a Christian, wearing the livery of the government on the body and in the soul, and going through the spiritual exercises of the church, as through the manual exercise of the camp. In a nation so enlightened, personal freedom cannot be wholly sacrificed, so thought is left free, but speech restricted by censorship—speech with the human mouth or the iron lips of the press, Now, as of old, is there a controversy between the temporal and the spiritual powers, about the investiture of the children of the soul.
Then, on the other side, the scholar is negatively impeded by the comparative ignorance of ;the people, by their, consequent lock of administrative power and self-help, and their distrust of themselves. There a great illumination has gone on in the upper heavens of the learned, meteors coruscating into extraordinary glory ; it has hardly dawned on the low valleys of the common people. If it shines there at all, it is but as the Northern Aurora, with a little crackling noise, lending a feeble and uncertain light, not enough to walk with, and no warmth at all; a light which disturbs the dip and alters the variation of the old historical compass, bewilders the eye, hides the stars, and yet is not bright enough to walk by without stumbling. There is a learned class, very learned and very large, with when the scholar thinks, and for whom he writes, most uncouthly, is the language only of the schools; and, if not kept in awe by the government, they are contented that a thought should remain always a thought; while in their own heart they disdain all authority but that of truth, justice, and love, they leave tho people subject to no rule but the priest, tho magistrate, and old custom, which usurp the place of reason, conscience, and the affections. There is a very enlightened pulpit, and a very dull audience. In America, it is said, for every dough-faced representative there is a dough-faced constituency; but in Germany there is not an intelligent people for each intelligent scholar. So on condition a great thought be true and revolutionary, it is hard to get it made a thing. Ideas go into a nunnery, not a family. Phidias must keep his awful Jove only in his head; there is no marble to carve it on. Eichhorn and Strauss, and Kant and Hegel, with all their pother among the learned, have kept no boor from the communion-table, nor made him discontented with the despotism of the State. They wrote for scholars, perhaps for gentlemen, for the enlightened, not for the great mass of the people, in whom they had no confidence. There is no class of hucksters of thought, who retail philosophy to the million. The million have as yet no appetite for it. So the German scholar is hindered from his function on either hand by the power of the government, or the ignorance of the people. He talks to scholars and not men; his great ideas are often as idle as shells in a lady's cabinet.
In America all is quite different. There are no royal or patrician patrons, no plebeian clients in literature, no immoveable aristocracy to withstand or even retard the new genius, talent, or skill of the scholar. There is no class organized, accredited, and confided in, to resist a new idea only the unorganised inertia of mankind retards the circulation of thought and the march of men. Our historical men do not found historical families; our famous names of to-day are all new names in the State. American aristocracy is bottomed on money which no unnatural laws make steadfast and immoveable. To exclude a scholar from the company of rich men, is not to exclude him from an audience that will welcome and appreciate.
Then the government does not Interfere to prohibit the free exercise of thought. Speaking is free, preaching free, printing free. No administration in America could put down a newspaper or suppress the discussion of an unwel come theme. The attempt would be folly and madness. There is no "tonnage and poundage" on thought. It is seldom that lawless violence usurps tho place of despotic government. Tho chief opponent of the new philosophy is the old philosophy. The old has only the advantage of a few years; the advantage of possession of the ground. It has no weapons of defence which the new has not for attack. What hinders tho growth of the new democracy of to-day?—only, the old democracy of yesterday, once green, and then mil-blown, but now going to seed. Everywhere else walled gardens have been built for it to go quietly to seed in, and men appointed, in God's name or the State's, to exterminate as a weed every new plant of democratic thought which may spring up and suck the soil or keep off the sun, so that the old may quietly occupy the ground, and undisturbed continue to decay, and contaminate the air. Here it has nothing but its own stalk to hold up its head, and is armed with only such spines as it has grown out of its own substance.
Here the only power which continually impedes the progress of mankind, and is conservative in the bad sense, is wealth, which represents life lived, not now a living, and labour accumulated, not now a doing. Thus the obstacle to free trade is not the notion that our meat must be homegrown and our coat home-spun, hut the money invested in manufactures. Slavery is sustained by no prestige of antiquity, no abstract fondness for a patriarchal institution, no special zeal for "Christianity" which the churches often tell us demands it, but solely because the Americans have invested some twelve hundred millions of dollars in the bodies and souls of their countrymen, and fear they shall lose their capital. Witney's gin for separating the cotton from its blue seed, making its culture and the labour of the slave profitable, did more to perpetuate slavery than all the "Compromises of the Constitution." The last argument in its favour is always this: "It brings money, and we would not lose out investment." Weapon a man with iron, he will stand and fight; with gold, he will shrink and run. The class of capitalists are always cowardly; here they are the only cowardly class that has much political or social influence. Here gold is the imperial metal; nothing but wealth is consecrated for life; the tonsure gets, covered up or grown over; vows of celibacy are no more binding than dicers' oaths; allegiance to the State is in transferable us a cent, and may bo alienated by going over the border; church-communion may be changed or neglected; as men will, they sign off from Church and State; only the dollar holds its own continually, and is the same under all administrations, "safe from the bar, the pulpit, and the throne." Obstinate money continues in. office spite of the prescriptive policy of Polk and Taylor; the laws may change, South Carolina move out of the nation, the Constitution be broken, the Union dissolved, still money holds its own. That is the only peculiar weapon which the old has wherewith to repel the new.
Here, too, the scholar has as much freedom as he will take; himself alone stands in his own light, nothing else between him. and the infinite majesty of Truth. He is free to think, to speak, to print his word and organize his thought. No class of men monopolize public attention or high place. He comes up to the Genius of America, and she asks: "What would you have, my little man?" "More liberty," lisps he. "Just es much as you can carry," is the answer. "Pay for it and take it, as much as you like, there it is." "But it is guarded!" "Only by gilded flies in the day-time; they look like hornets, but can only buzz, not bite with their beak, nor sting with their tail. At night it is defended by daws and beetles, noisy, but harmless. Here is marble, my son, not classic and famous as yet, but good as the Parian stone ; quarry as much as you will, enough for a nymph or a temple. Say you wisest and do your best thing: nobody will hurt you!"
Not much mere is the scholar impeded by the ignorance of the people, not at all in respect to the substance of his thought. There is no danger that he will shoot over the heads of the people by thinking too Ugh for the multitude. We have many authors below the market; scarce one above it. The people are continually looking for something better than our authors give. Kb American author has yet been too high for the comprehension of the people, and compelled to leave his writings "to posterity, after some centuries shall have passed by." If he has thought with the thinkers/ and has something to say. and can speak it in plain speech, ho is sure to be widely understood. There is no learned class to whom he may talk Latin or Sanscrit, and who will understand him if ho write as ill as Immanuel Kant; there is not a largo class to buy costly editions of ancient classics, however beautiful, or magnificent works on India, Egypt, Mexico— the class of scholars is too poor for that, the rich men have not the taste for such beauty; but there is an intelligent class of men who will hear a man if he has what is worth listening to, and says it plain. It will be understood and appreciated, and soon reduced to practice. Let him think as much in advance of men as he will, as far removed from the popular opinion as he may, if he arrives at a great truth he is sure of an audience, not an audience of fellow-scholars, us in Germany, but of fellow-men; not of the children of distinguished or rich men—rather of the young parents of such, an audience of earnest, practical people, who, if his thought be a truth, will soon make it a thing. They will appreciate the substance of his thought, though not the artistic form which clothes it.
This peculiar relation of the man of genius to the people comes from American institutions. Here the greatest man stands nearest to the people, and without a mediator speaks to them face to face. This is a new thing: in the classic nations oratory was for the people, so was the drama, and the ballad; that was all their literature. But this came to the people only in cities: the tongue travels slow and addresses only the ear, while swiftly hurries on the printed word and speaks at once to a million eyes. Thucydides and Tacitus wrote for a few; Virgil sang the labours of the shepherd in old Ascræan verse, but only to the wealthy wits of Rome. "I hate the impious crowd, and stave them off," was the scholar's maxim then. All writing was for the few. The best English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is amenable to the same criticism, except the dramatic and the religious. It is so with all the permanent literature of Europe of that time. The same must be said even of much of the religious literature of the scholars then. The writings of Taylor, of Barrow and South, of Bossuet, Massillon, and Bourdaloue, clergymen though they were, speaking with a religious aid therefore a universal aim, always pre suppose a narrow audience of men of nice culture. So they drew their figures from the schoolmen, from the Greek anthology, from heathen classics and the Christian Fathers. Their illustrations were embellishments to the scholar, but only palpable darkness to tho people. This fact of writing for a few nice judges was of great advantage to the form of the literature thus produced, but a disadvantage to the substance thereof; a misfortune to the scholar himself, for it belittled his sympathies and kept him within a narrow range. Even the religious literature of the men just named betrays a look of freedom, a thinking for the learned, and not for mankind; it has breathed the air of the cloister, not tho sky, and is tainted with academic and monastic diseases. So the best; of it is over-sentimental, timid, and does not point to hardy, manly life. Only Luther and Latimer preached to the million hearts of their contemporaries. The dramatic literature, on the other hand, was for box, pit, and gallery; hence the width of poetry in its great masters; hence many of its faults of form; and he ^e the wild and wanton luxuriance of beauty which flowers out all over the marvellous field of art where Shakespeare walked and sung. In the pulpit, excellence was painted as a priest, or monk, or nun, loving nothing but God; on the stage, as a soldier, magistrate, gentleman or simpleman, a wife and mother, loving also child and friend. Only the literature of the player and the singer of ballads was for the people.
Here all is changed, everything that is written is for the hands of the million. In three months Mr. Mocaulay has more readers in America than Thuoydides and Tacitus in twelve centuries. Literature, which was once the sacrament of the few, only a shew-bread to the people, is now the daily meat of the multitude. The best works get reprinted with great speed; the highest poetry is soon in all the newspapers. Authors know this, and write accordingly. It is only scientific works which ask for a special public. But even science, the proudest of the day, must come down from the clouds of the academy, lay off its scholastic garb, and appear before the eyes of tho multitude in common workaday clothes. To large and mainly unlearned audiences Agassiz and Walker set forth the highest teachings of physics and metaphysics, not; sparing difficult things, but putting them in plain speech. Emerson takes his majestic intuitions of truth and justice, which transcend the experience of the ages, and expounds them to the mechanics' apprentices, to the factory girls at Lowell and Chicopee, and to the merchants' Clerks at Boston. The more original the speaker, and the more profound, the bettor is he relished; the beauty of the form is not appreciated, but the original substance welcomed into new life over the bench, the loom, and even the desk of the counting-house. Of a deep man tho people ask clearness also, thinking he does not see a thing wholly till he sees it plain.
From this new relation of the scholar to the people, and the direct intimacy of his intercourse with men, then comes a new modification of his duty; he is to represent the higher facts of human consciousness to the people, and express them in the speech of the people; to think with the sago and saint, out talk with common men. It is easy to discourse with scholars, and in the old academic carriage drive through the broad gateway of the cultivated class; but here the man of genius is to take the new thought on his shoulders and climb up the stiff, steep hill, and find his way where the wild asses quench their thirst, and the untamed eagle builds his nest. Hence our American scholar must cultivate the dialectics of speech as well as thought. Power of speech without thought, a long tongue in an empty head, calls the people together once or twice, but soon its only echo is from an audience of empty pews. Thought without power of speech finds little welcome here; there are not scholars enough to keep it in countenance. This popularity of intelligence gives a great advantage to the man of letters, who is also a man. He can occupy the whole space between the extremes of mankind; can be at once philosopher in his thought and people in his speech, deliver his word without an interpreter to mediate, and, like King Mithridates in the story, talk with the fourscore nations of his camp each in his own tongue.
Further still, there are some pecularities mind, in which we differ from our English brothers. They are more inclined to the matter of fact, and appeal to history; we, to the matter of ideas, and having no national history but of a revolution, may appeal at once to human nature. So while they are more historical, fond of names and precedents, enamoured of limited facts and coy towards abstract and universal ideas, with the maxim, " Stand by the fixed," we are more metaphysical, ideal; do not think a thins; right because actual, nor impossible because it has never seen. The Americans ore more metaphysical than the English; have departed more from the old sensational philosophy, have welcomed more warmly the transcendental philosophy of Germany and France. The Declaration or Independence, and all tho State Constitutions of the North, begin with a universal and abstract idea. Even preaching is abstract and of ideas. Calvinism bears metaphysical fruit in New England.
This fact modifies still more the function of the duty of the scholar. It determines him to ideas, to facts for the ideas they cover, not so much to the past as the future, to the past only that he may guide tho present and construct the future. He is to take his run in the past to acquire the momentum of history, his stand in the present, and leap into the future.
In this manner the position and duty of the scholar in America are modified and made peculiar; and thus is the mode determined for him, in which to pay for his education in the manner most profitable to the public that has been at the cost of his training.
There is a test by which we measure the force of a horse or a steam-engine; the raising of so many pounds through so many feet in a given time. The test of the scholar's power 16 his ability to raise men. in their development.
In America there are three chief modes of acting upon the public, omitting others of small account. The first is the power which comes of National Wealth; the next, that of Political Station; the third, power of Spiritual Wealth, so to say, eminent wisdom, justice, love, piety, the power of sentiments and ideas, and f he faculty of communicating them to other men, and organizing them therein. For the sake of shortness, let each mode of power be symbolized by its instrument, and we have the power of the purse, of the office, and the pen.
The purse represents the favourite mode of power with us. This is natural in our present stage of national exist ©noo and human development; it is likely to continue for a long time. In all civilized countries which have outgrown the period when the sword was the favourite emblem, the purse represents the favourite made of power with the moss of men; but here it is so with the men of superior education. This power is not wholly personal, but extra-personal, and the man's centre of gravity lies out of himself, less or more; somewhere between the man and his last cent, the distance being greater or less as the man is less or greater than the estate. This is wielded chiefly by men of little education, except the practical culture which they have gained in the process of accumulation. Their riches they get purposely, their training by the way, and accidentally. It is a singular misfortune of the country, that while the majority of the people are better cultivated and more enlightened than any other population in the world, the greater part of the wealth of the nation is owned by men of less education and consequently of less enlightenment than the rich men of any leading nation in Europe. In England and France the wealth of this generation is chiefly inherited, and has generally fallen to men carefully trained, with minds disciplined by academic culture. Here wealth is new, and mainly in the hands of men who have scrambled for it adroitly and with vigour. They have energy, vigour, forecast, and a certain generosity, but a? a class, are narrow, vulgar, and conceited. Nine-tenths of the property of the people is owned by one- tenth of the persons; and these capitalists are men of little culture, little moral elevation. "This is an accident of our position unavoidable, perhaps transient; but it is certainly a misfortune that the great estates of the country, and the social and political power of such wealth, should be mainly in the hands of such men. The melancholy result appears in many a disastrous shape; in the tone of the pulpit, of the press, and of the national politico; much of the vulgarity of the nation is to be ascribed to this fact, that wealth belongs to men who know nothing better.
The office represents the next most popular mode of power. This also is extra-personal, the man's centre of gravity is out of himself, somewhere between him and the lowest man in the State ; the distance depending on the proportion of manhood in him and the multitude, if the office is much greater than tho man, then the officer's centre of gravity is further removed from his person. This is sought for by the ablest and best educated men in the land. But there is a largo class of educated persons who do not aspire to it from lack of ability, for in our form of government it commonly takes some saliency of character to win the high places of office and use respectably this mode of power, while it demands no great or lofty talents to accumulate the largest fortune in America. It is true the whirlwind of an election, by the pressure of votes, may now and then take a very heavy body up to a great height. Yet it does not keep him from growing giddy and ridiculous while there, and after a few years lets him fall again into complete insignificance, whence no Hercules can ever lift him up. A corrupt administration may do the same, but with the same result. This consideration keeps many educated men from the political arena; others are unwilling to endure the unsavoury atmosphere of politics, and take part in a scramble so vulgar; but still a large portion of the educated, and scholarly talent of the nation goes to that work.
The power of the pen is wholly personal. It is the appropriate instrument of the scholar, but it is least of all desired and sought for; The rich man sends his sons to trade; to make too much of inheritance yet more by fresh acquisitions of superfluity. He does not send them to literature, art, or science. You find the scholar slipping in to other modes of action, not the merchants and politicians migrating into this. He longs to act by the gravity of his money or station, not draw merely by his head. The office carries the day before the pen; the purse takes precedence of both. Educated men do not so much seek places that demand great powers, as those which bring much gold. Self-denial for money or office is common, for scholarship rare and unpopular. To act by money not mind, is the ill-concealed ambition of many a well-bred man; the desire of this colours his day-dream, which is less of wisdom and more of wealth, or of political station; rate politician, and some "tall admiral" of a politician consents to be cut down and turned into a mere sloop of trade. The representative in Congress, becomes a presi dent of on insurance office or a bank, or the agent of a cotton-mill; the judge deserts hie station on the bench, and presides over a railroad; the governor or senator wants a place in the post-office; the historian longs for a "chance in the custom house," The pen stoops to the office, that to the purse. The scholar would rather make a fortune by a balsam of wild cherry than write Hamlet or Paradise Lost for nothing; rather than help mankind by making & Paradise Regained. The well-endowed minister thinks how much mere money he might have made had ho speculated in stocks and not theology, and mourns that the Kingdom of heaven does not pay in this present, life fourfold. The professor of Greek is sorry he was not a surveyor and superintendent of a railroad, he should have so much more money; that is what he has learned from Plato and Diogenes. We estimate the skill of an artist like that of a pedler, not by the pictures he has made, but by the money. There is a mercantile way of determining literary merit, not by the author's books, but by his balance with the publisher. No church is yet called after a man who is merely rich, something in the New Testament might hinder that; but the ministers estimate their brother minister by the greatness of Ms position, not of his character; not by his piety and goodness, not even by his reason and understanding, the culture he has attained thereby, and the use he makes thereof, but by the wealth of his church and the largeness of his salary; so that ho is not thought the fortunate and great minister who has a large outgo of spiritual riches, rebukes the sins of the nation and turns many to righteousness, but he. who has a large material income, ministers, though poorly, to rich men,, and is richly paid for that function. The well-paid clergymen of a city tell the professor of theology that he must teach "such doctrines as the merchants approve," or they will not give money to the college, and he, it, and the "cause of the Lord," will all come to the ground at the same time and in kindred confusion. So blind money would put out the heavenly eyes of science, and lead her also to his own ditch. It mast not be forgotten that there use men in the midst of us, rich, respectable, and highly honoured with social rank and political power, who practically and in strict conformity with their theory, honour Judas, who made money by his treachery, far more than Jesus who laid down his life for men whose money is deemed better than manhood. It must indeed be so. Any outrage that is profitable to the controlling portion of society is sure to bo welcome to the leaders of the State, and is soon pronounced divine by the leaders of the church.
It would seem as if the pen ought to represent the favourite mode of power at a college; but even there the waters of Pactolus are thought fairer than the Castalian, Heliconian spring, or "Silca’s brook that flowed fast by the oracle of God. "The college is named after the men of wealth, not genius. How few professorships in America bear the names of men of science or letters, and not of mere rich men! Which is thought the greatest benefactor of a college, he who endows it with money or with mind? Even there it is the purse, not the pen that is the symbol of honour, and the University is "up for California," not Parnassus.
Even in politics the purse turns the scale. Let a party wrestle never so hard, it cannot throw the dollar. Money controls and commands talent, not talent money. The successful shopkeeper frowns on and browbeats the accomplished politician, who has too much justice for the wharf and the board of brokers; he notices that the rich men avert their eye, or keep their beaver down, trembles and is sad, fearing that his daughter will never find a fitting spouse. The purse buys up able men of superior education, corrupts and keeps them as its retained attorneys, in congress or the church, not as counsel but advocate, bribed to make the worse appear the better reason, and so help money to control the State and wield its power against the interest of mankind. This is perfectly well known; but no politician or minister, bribed to silence or to speech, ever loses his respectability because he is bought by respectable men,—if he get his pay. In all countries but this the office is before the purse; here the State is chiefly an accessory of the Exchange, and our politics only mercantile. This appears sometimes against our will, in symbols not meant to tell the tale. Thus in the House of Representatives in Massachusetts, a cod-fish stares the speaker in the face—not a very intellectual looking fish. When it was put there it was a symbol of the riches of the State, and be of the Commonwealth. With singular and unconscious satire it tells the legislature to have on eye "to the main chance," and, but for its fidelity to its highest instincts and its obstinate silence, might be a symbol good enough for the place.
Now, after the office and the purse have taken their votaries from the educated class, the ablest men are certainly not left behind. Three roads open before our young Hercules as he leaves college, having respectively as fingerpost, the pen, the office, and the purse. Few follow the road of letters. This need not be much complained of nay, it might be rejoiced in, if the purse and the office in their modes of power did represent the higher consciousness of mankind. But no one contends it is so.
Still there are men who devote themselves to some literary callings which have no connection with political office, and which ore not pursued for the sake of great wealth. Such men produce the greater part of the permanent literature of the country. They are eminently scholars; permanent scholars who act by their scholarcraft, not by the state-craft of the politician, or the pursecraft of the capitalist. How are these men paying their debt and performing their function? Tho answer must be found in the science and the literature of the land.
American science is something of which we may well be proud. Mr. Liebig, in Germany, has found it necessary to defend himself from the charge of following science for the loaves and fishes thereof; and he declares that he espoused chemistry not for her wealthy dower, not even for the services her possible children might render to mankind, but solely for her own sweet sake. Amongst the English race, on both sides of the ocean, science is loved rather for the fruit than the blossom; its service to the body is thought of more value than its service to tho mind. A man's respectability would be in danger, in America, if he loved any science better than the money or fame it might bring. It is characteristic of us that a scholar should write for reputation and gold. Here, as elsewhere, the unprofitable parts of science fall to the lot of poor men. When the rich man's son has the natural calling that way, public opinion would dissuade him from the study of nature. The greatest scientific attainments do not give a man so high social consideration as a political office or a successful speculation—unless it be the science which makes money. Scientific schools we call after merely rich men, not men of wealthy minds. It is true we name streets and squares, towns and counties, after Franklin, but it in because he keeps the lightning from factories, churches, and barns; tells us not "to give too much for tho whistle," and teaohes "the way to make money plenty in every man's pocket." We should not name them after Cuvier and La Place.
Not withstanding this, the scientific scholars of America, both the home-born and the adopted sons, have manfully paid for their culture, and done honour to the land. This is true of men in all departments of science, from that which searches the deeps of the sky to that which explores the shallows of the sea. Individuals, States, and the nation, have all done themselves honour by the scientists researches and discoveries that have been made. The outlay of money and of genius for things which only pay the head and not the mouth of man, is beautiful and a little surprising in such a utilitarian land as this. Time would fail me to attend to particular cases.
Look at the literature of America. Reserving the exceptional portion thereof to be examined in a moment, let us study the instantial portion of it, American literature as a whole. This may be distributed into two main divisions: First comes the permanent literature, consisting of works not designed merely for a single and transient occasion, but elaborately wrought for a general purpose. This is literature proper. Next follows the transient literature, which is brought out for a particular occasion, and designed to serve a special purpose. Let us look at each.
The permanent literature of America is poor and meagre; it does not bear the mark of manly hands, of original, creative minds. Most of it is rather milk for babes than meat for men, though much of it is neither fresh meat nor new milk, but the old dish often served up before* In respect to its form, this portion of our literature is an imitation. That is natural enough, considering the youth of the country. Every nation, like every man, even one born to genius, begins by imitation. Raphael, with servile pencil, followed his masters in his youth; but at length his artistic eye attracted now-born angels from the calm stillness of their upper heaven, and with liberal, free hand, with masterly and original touch, the painter of the newness amazed the world.
The early Christian literature is an imitation of the Hebrew or tho classic type; even after centuries had passed by, Sidonius, though a bishop of tho church, and destined to become a saint, uses the old heathen imagery, referring to Triptolomus as a model for Christian work, and talks about Triton and Galatea to the Christian Queen of the Goths. Saint Ambrose is a notorious imitator of pagan Cicero. The Christians were all anointed with Jewish, nard; and the sour grapes they ate in sacrament have set on edge their children's teeth till now. The modern nations of Europe began their literature by the driest copies of Livy and Virgil. The Germans have the most original literature of the last hundred years. But till the middle of the past century their permanent literature was chiefly in Latin and French, with as little originality as our own. The real poetic life of the nation found vent in other forms. It is natural, therefore, and according to the course of history, that we should begin in this way. The best political institutions of England are cherished here, be her best literature; and it is not surprising that we are content with this rich inheritance of artistic toil. In many things we are independent, but in much that relates to the higher works of man, we are still colonies of England. This appears rot only in the vulgar fondness for English fashions, manners, and the like, which is chiefly an affectation, but in the servile style with which we copy the great or little models of English literature. Sometimes this is done consciously, oftener without knowing it.
But the substance of our permanent literature is as faulty as its form. It does not bear marks of a new, free, vigorous mind at work, looking at things from the American point of view, and, though it put its thought in antique forms, yet thinking originally and for itself. It represents the average thought of respectable men, directed, to some particular subject, and their average morality. It represents nothing more; how could it, while the ablest men have gone off to politics or trade? It is such literature as almost anybody might get up if you would give him a little time to make the preliminary studies. 'There is little in it that is national; little individual and of the writer's own mind; it is ground out in the public literary mill. It has no noble sentiments, no great ideas; nothing which makes you burn; nothing which ' makes you much worse or much better. You may feed on this literature all your days, and whatsoever you may gain in girth, you shall not take in thought enough to add half an inch to your stature.
Out of every hundred American literary works printed since the century began, about eighty will be of this character. Compare the four most conspicuous periodicals of America with, the four great Quarterlies of England, and you see how inferior our literature is to theirs — in all things, in form and in substance too. The European has the freedom of a well-bred man — it appears in the movement of his thought, his use of words, in the easy grace of his sentences, and the general manner of his work; the American has the stiffness and limitations of a big, raw boy, in the presence of his schoolmaster. They are proud of being English, and so have a certain lofty nationality which appears in their thought and the form thereof, even in the freedom to use and invent new words. Our authors of this class seem ashamed that they are Americans, and accordingly are timid, ungraceful, and weak. They dare not be original when they could. Hence this sort of literature is dull. A man of the average mind and conscience, heart and soul, studies a particular subject a short time—for this is the land of brief processes—and writes a book thereof, or thereon; a critic of the same average makes his special study of the book, not its theme, "reviews" the work; is as ready and able to pass judgment on Bowditch's translation of La Place in. ten days after its appearance as ten years, and distributes praise and blame, not according to the author's knowledge, but the critic's ignorant caprice; and then average men read the book and the critique with no immoderate joy or unmeasured grief. They learn some new facts, no new ideas, and get no lofty impulse. The book was written without inspiration, without philosophy, and is read with small profit. Yet it is curious to observe the praise which such men receive, how soon they are raised to the House of Lords in English literature. I have known, three American Sir Walter Scotts, half a dozen Addisons, one or two Macaulays—a historian that was Hume and Gibbon both ia one, several Burases, and Miltons by the quantity, not "mute," the more is the pity, but "inglorious" enough; nay, even vain-glorious at the praise which some penny-a-liner or dollar-a-pager foolishly gave their cheap extemporary stuff. In sacred literature it is the same : in a single winter at Boston we had two American Saint Johns, in full blast for several months. Though no Felix trembles, there are now extant in the United States not less than six American Saint Pauls, in no manner of peril except the most dangerous—of idle praise.
A living, natural, and full-grown literature contains two elements. One is of mankind in general; that is human and universal. The other is of the tribe in special, and of the writer in particular. This is national and even personal: you see the idiosyncracy of the nation and the individual author in the work. The universal human substance accepts the author's form, and the public wine of mankind runs into the private bottle of the author. Thus the Hebrew literature of the Old Testament is fresh and original in substance and in form; the two elements are plain enough, the universal and the particular. The staple of the Psalms of David is human, of mankind, it is trust in God; but the twist, the die, the texture, the pattern, all that is Hebrew—of the tribe, and personal—of David, shepherd, warrior, poet, king. You see the pastoral hill-sides of Judges in his holy hymns ; nay, "Uriah's beauteous wife" now and then sidles into his sweetest psalm. The Old Testament books smell of Palestine, of its air and its soil. The Rose of Sharon has Hebrew earth about its roots. The geography of the Holy Land, its fauna and its flora both, even its wind and sky, its early and: its latter rainfall appear in the literature of historian and bard. It is so in the Iliad. You see how the sea looked from Homer's point of view, and know how he felt the west wind, cold and raw. The human element has an Ionian form and a Homeric hue. The ballads of the people in Scotland and England are national in the same way ; the staple of human fife is wrought into the Scottish form. Before the Germans had any permanent national literature of this character, their fertile mind found vent in legends, popular stories, now tho admiration, of tho learned. These had at home the German dross, but as tho stories travelled into other lands, they kept their human flesh and blood, but took a different garb, and acquired a different complexion from every country which they visited; and, like tho streams of their native Swabia, took the colour of tho soil they travelled through.
Tho permanent and instantial literature of America is not national in this sense. It has little that is American; it might as well be written by some bookwright in Leipsic or London, and then imported. The individuality of the nation is not there, except in the cheap, gaudy binding of the work. Tho nationality of America is only stamped on the lids, and vulgarly blazoned on the back.
Is the book a history?—it is written with no such freedom as you should expect of a writer, looking at the breadth of the world from the lofty stand-point of America. There is no new philosophy of history in it. You would not think it was written in a democracy that keeps the peace without armies or a national gaol. Mr. Macaulay writes the history of England as none but a North Briton could do. Astonishingly well-read, equipped with literary skill at least equal to the masterly art of Voltaire, mapping out his subject like an engineer, and adorning it like a painter, you yet see, all along, that the author is a Scotchman and a Whig. Nobody else could have written so. It is of Mr. Macaulay. But our American writer thinks about matters just as everybody else does; that is, he does not think at all, but only writes what he reads, and then, like the good-natured bear in the nursery story, " thinks he has been thinking." It is no such thing, he has been writing the common opinion of common men, to get the applause of men as common as himself.
Is the book of poetry?—the substance is chiefly old, the form old, the allusions are old. It is poetry of society, not of nature. You meet in it the same everlasting mythology, the same geography, botany, zoology, the same symbols; a new figure of speech suggested by the sight of nature, not the reading of books, you could no more find than a fresh shad in the Dead Sea. You take at random eight or ten " American poets" of this stamp, you see at once what was tho favourite author with each new bard; you often see what particular work of Shelley, or Tennyson, or Milton, or George Herbert, or, if the man has culture enough, of Goethe, or Uhland, Jean Paul, or Schiller, suggested the "American original." His inspiration comes from literature, not from the great universe of nature or of human life. You see that this writer has read Percy's Reliques, and the German Wunderhorn; but you would not know that he wrote in a republic—in a land full of new life, with great rivers and tall mountains, with maple and oak trees that turn red in the autumn; amongst a people who hold town-meetings, have free schools for everybody, read newspapers voraciously, who have lightning rods on their steeples, ride in railroads, are daguerreotyped by the sun, and who talk by lightning from Halifax to New Orleans; who listen to the whippoorwill and the bobolink, who believe in Slavery and the Declaration of Independence, in the devil and the five points of Calvinism. You would not know where our poet lived, or that he lived anywhere. Reading the Iliad, you doubt that Homer was born blind; but our bard seems to have been deaf also, and for expressing what was national in his time, might likewise have been dumb.
Is it a volume of sermons?—they might have been written at Edinburgh, Madrid, or Constantinople, as well as in New England; as well preached to the "Homo Sapiens" of Linnæus, or the man in the moon, as to the special audience that heard, or heard them not, but only paid for having the things preached. There is nothing individual about them; the author seems as impersonal as Spinoza's conception of God. The sermons are like an almanack calculated for the meridian of no place in particular, for no time in special. There is no allusion to anything American. The author never mentions a river this side of the Jordan; knows no mountain but Lebanon, Zion, and Carmel, and would think it profane to talk of the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, of Monadnock and the Androscoggin. He mentions Babylon and Jerusalem, not New York and Baltimore; you would never dream that he lived in a church without a bishop, and a State without a king, in a democratic nation that held three million slaves, with ministers chosen by the people. He is surrounded, clouded over, and hid by the traditions of the "ages of faith" behind him. He never thanks God for the dew and snow, only for "the early and the latter rain" of a classic sacred land; a temperance man, he blesses God for the wine because the great Psalmist did so thousands of years ago. He speaks of the olive and the fig-tree which he never saw, not of the apple-tree and the peach before his eyes all day long, their fruit the joy of his children's heart. If you guessed at his time and place, you would think he lived, not under General Taylor, but under King Ahab, or Jeroboam; that his audience rode on camels or in chariots, not in steam-cars; that they fought with bows and arrows against the children of Moab; that their favourite sin was the worship of some graven image, and that they made their children pass through the fire unto Moloch, not through the counting-house unto Mammon. You would not know whether the preacher was married or a bachelor, rich or poor, saint or sinner; you would probably conclude he was not much of a saint, nor even much of a sinner.
The authors of this portion of our literature seem ashamed of America. One day she will take her revenge. They are the parasites of letters, and live on what other men have made classic. They would study the Holy Land, Greece, Etruria, Egypt, Nineveh, spots made famous by great and holy men, and let the native races of America fade out, taking no pains to study the monuments which so swiftly pass away from our own continent. It is curious that most of the accounts of the Indians of North America come from men not natives here, from French and Germans; and characteristic that we should send an expedition to the Dead Sea, while wide tracts of this continent lie all untouched by the white man's foot; and, also, that while we make such generous and noble efforts to christianize and bless the red, yellow, and black heathens at the world's end, we should leave the American Indian and Negro to die in savage darkness, the South making it penal to teach a black man to write or read.
Yet, there is one portion of our permanent literature, if literature it may be called, which is wholly indigenous and original. The lives of the early martyrs and confessors are purely Christian, so are the legends of saints and other pious men: there was nothing like this in the Hebrew or heathen literature; cause and occasion were alike wanting for it. So we have one series of literary productions that could be written by none but Americans, and only hero: I mean tho Lives of Fugitive Slaves, But as these are not tho work of tho men of superior culture, they hardly help to pay tho scholar's debt. Yet all the original romance of America is in them, not in the white man's novel.
Next is the transient literature, composed chiefly of speeches, orations, state papers, political and other occasional pamphlets, business reports, articles in the journals, and other productions designed to servo some present purpose. These are commonly the work of educated men, though not of such as make literature a profession. Taking this department as a whole, it differs much from tho permanent literature; hero is freshness of thought and newness of form. If American books are mainly an imitation of old models, it would be difficult to find the prototype of some American speeches. They "would have made Quintilian stare and gasp." Take the State papers of the American government during tho administration of Mr. Polk, the speeches made in Congress at the same time, the State papers of the several States—you have a much better and more favourable idea of the vigour and originality of the American mind, than you would get from all the bound books printed in that period. The diplomatic writings of American politicians compare favourably with those of any nation in the world. In eloquence no modern nation is before us, perhaps none is our equal. Here you see the inborn strength and manly vigour of the American mind. You meet the same spirit which fells the forest, girdles the land with railroads, annexes Texas, and covets Cuba, Nicaragua, all the world. You see that the authors of this literature are workers also. Others have read of wild beasts; here are the men that have seen the wolf.
A portion of this literature represents the past, and has the vices already named. It comes from human history and not human nature; as you read it, you think of the inertia and the cowardliness of mankind ; nothing is progressive, nothing noble, generous, or just, only respectable. The past is preferred before the present; money is put before men, a vested right before a natural right. Such literature appeals in all countries. The ally of despotism, and the foe of mankind, it is yet a legitimate exponent of a large class of men. The leading journals cf America, political and commercial, or literary, are poor and feeble; our reviews of books afford matter for grave consideration. You would often suppose them written by the same hand which manufactures the advertisements of the grand caravan, or some patent medicine; or, when unfavourable, by some of the men who write defamatory articles on the eve of on election.
But a large part of this transient literature is very different in its character. Its authors have broken with the traditions of the past; they have new ideas, and plans for putting them in execution; they are full of hope; are national to the extreme, bragging and defiant. They put the majority before institutions; the rights of the majority before the privilege of a few; they represent the onward tendency and material prophecy of the nation. The new activity of the American mind here expresses its purpose and its prayer. Here is strength, hope, confidence, even audacity; all is American. But the great idea of the absolute right does not appear, all is more national than human; and in what concerns the nation, it is not justice, the point where all interests are balanced, and the welfare of each harmonizes with that of all, which is sought; but the "greatest good of the greatest number;" that is, only a privilege had at the cost of the smaller number. Here is little respect for universal humanity; little for the eternal laws of God, which override all the traditions and contrivances of men; more reverence for a statute, or constitution, which is indeed the fundamental law of the political State, but is often only an attempt to compromise between the fleeting passions of the day and the immutable morality of God.
Amid all the public documents of the nation and the several States, in the speeches and writings of favourite men, who represent and so control the public mind, for fifty years, there is little that "stirs the feelings infinite" within you; much to make us more American, not more manly. There is more head than heart; native intellect enough; culture that is competent, but little conscience, or real religion. How many newspapers, how many poli ticians in the land go at all beyond the Whig idea of protecting the property row accumulated, or tho democratic idea of insuring tho greatest material good of the greatest number? Where are we to look for the representative of justice, of tho unalienable rights of all the people and all the nations? In the triple host of article-makers, speechmakers, lay and clerical, and makers of laws, you find but few who can be trusted to stand up for the unalienable rights of men; who will nover write, speak, nor vote in the interests of a party, but always in the interest of mankind, and will represent tho justice of God in the forum of the world.
This literature, like the other, foils of the nigh end of writing and of speech; with more vigour, more freedom, more breadth of vision, and an intense nationality, the authors thereof are just as far from representing the higher consciousness of mankind, just as vulgar as the tame and well-licked writers of the permanent literature. Here are the men who have out their own way through the woods, men with more than the average intelligence, during, and strength; but with less than the average justice which is honesty in the abstract, less than the average honesty which is justice concentrated upon small particulars.
Examine both these portions of American literature, the permanent and the fleeting—you see their educated authors are no higher than the rest of men. They are the slaves of public opinion, as much as the gossip in her little village, it may not be the public opinion of a coterie of crones, but of a great party; that makes little odds, they are worshippers of the same rank, idolaters of the same wealth; the gossipping granny shows her littleness the size of life, while their deformity is magnified by the solar microscope of high office. Many a popular man exhibits his pigmy soul to the multitude of a whole continent, idly mistaking it for greatness. They are swayed by vulgar passions, seek vulgar ends, address vulgar motives, use vulgar means; they may command by their strength, they cannot refine by their beauty or instruct by their guidance, and still less inspire by any eminence of manhood which they were born to or have won. They build on the surface-sand for to-day, not on the rock of ages for ever. With so little conscience, they heed not the solemn voice of history, and respect no more the prophetic instincts of mankind.
To most men, the approbation of their fellows is one of the most desirable things. This approbation appears in the various forms of admiration, respect, esteem, confidence, veneration, and love. The great man obtains this after a time; and in its highest forms, without seeking it, simply by faithfulness to his nature. Ho gets it by rising and doing his work, in the course of nature, as easily and as irresistibly as the sun gathers to the clouds the evaporation of land and sea, and, like the sun, to shed it down in blessings on mankind. Little men seek this, consciously or not knowing it, by stooping, cringeing, flattering the pride, the passion, or the prejudice of others. So they get the approbation of men, but never of man. Sometimes this is sought for by the attainment of some accidental quality, which low-minded men hold in more honour than the genius of sage or poet, or the brave manhood of some great hero of the soul. In England, though money is power, it is patrician birth which is nobility, and valued most; and there, accordingly, birth takes precedence of all—of genius, and even of gold. Men seek the companionship or the patronage of titled lords, and social rank depends upon nobility of blood. The few bishops in the upper house do more to give conventional respectability to the clerical profession there, than all the solid intellect of Hooker, Barrow, and of South, the varied and exact learning of philosophic Cudworth, the eloquence and affluent piety of Taylor, and Butler's vast and manly mind. In America, social rank depends substantially on wealth, an accident as much as noble birth, but moveable. Here gold takes precedence of all,—of genius, and even, of noble birth.
"Though your sire
Had royal blood within him, and though you
Possess the intellect of angels too,
'Tis all in vain; the world will ne'er inquire
On such a score:—Why should it take, the pains?
'Tis easier to weigh purses, sure, than brains."
Wealth is sought, not merely as a means of power, but of nobility. When obtained, it has the power, of nobility; so poor men of superior intellect and education, powerful by nature, not by position, fear to disturb the opinion of wealthy men, to instruct their ignorance or rebuke their sin. Hence the aristocracy of wealth, illiterate and vulgar, goes unrebuked, and debases the natural aristocracy of mind and culture which bows down to it. The artist prostitutes his pencil and his skill, and takes his law of beauty from the fat clown, whose barns and pigs, and wife, he paints for daily bread. Tho preacher does the saint; and though the stench of the rum-shop infests the pulpit, and death hews down the leaders of his flock, the preacher must cry, "Peace, peace," or else be still, for rum is power! But this power of wealth has its antagonistic force—the power of numbers. Much depends on the dollar. Nine-tenths of the property is owned by one-tenth of all these men—but much also on tho votes of the million. The few are strong by money, the many by their votes. Each is worshipped by its votaries, and its approbation sought. He that can get tho men controls the money too. So while one portion of educated men bows to the rich, and consecrates their passion and their prejudice, another portion bows, equally prostrate, to the passions of the multitude of men. The many and the rich have each a public opinion of their own, and both are tyrants. Here the tyranny of public opinion is not absolutely greater than in England, Germany, or France, but is far greater in comparison with other modes of oppression. It seems inherent in a republic; it is not in a republic of noble men. But here this sirocco blows flat to the ground full many on aspiring blade. Wealth can establish banks or factories; votes can lift the meanest man into the highest political place, can dignify any passion with the name and force of human law; so it is thought by the worshippers of both, seeking the approbation of the two, that, public opinion can make truth of lies, and right even out of foulest wrong. Politicians begin to say, there is no law of God above the ephemeral laws of men.
There are few American works of literature which appeal to what is best in men; few that one could wish should go abroad and live. America has grown beyond hope in population, the free and bond, in riches, in land, in public material prosperity, but in a literature that represents the higher elements of manliness far less than wise men thought. They looked for the fresh new child; it is born with wrinkles, and dreadfully like his grandmother, only looking older and more effete. Our muse does not come down from an American Parnassus, with a new heaven in her eye, men not daring to look on the face of anointed beauty, coming to tell of noble thought, to kindle godlike feelings with her celestial spark, and stir mankind to noble deeds. She finds Parnassus steep and high, and hard to climb; the air austere and cold, the light severe, too stern for her effeminate nerves. So she has a little dwelling in the flat and close-pent town, hard by the public street; breathes its Bœotian breath; walks with the money-lenders at high change; has her account, at the bank, her pew in the most fashionable church and least austere; she gets approving nods in the street, flattery in the penny prints, sweetmeats and striding wine in the proper places. What were the inspirations of all God's truth to her? He "taunts the lofty land with little men."
There still remains the exceptional literature; some of it is only fugitive, some meant for permanent duration. Here is a new and different spirit; a respect for human nature above human history, for man above all the accidents of man, for God above all the alleged accidents of God; a veneration for the eternal laws which He only makes and man but finds; a law before all statutes, above all constitutions, and holier than all the writings of human hands. Here you find most fully the sentiments and ideas of America, not such as rule the nation now, but which, unconsciously to the people, have caused the noble deeds of our history, and now prophesy a splendid future for this young giant here. These sentiments and ideas are brought to consciousness in this literature. Here a precedent is not a limitation; a fact of history does not eclipse an idea of nature; an investment is not thought more sacred than a right. Here is more hope than memory; little deference to wealth and rank, but a constant aspiration for truth, justice, love, and piety; little fear of the public opinion of the many or the few, rather a scorn thereof, almost a defiance of it. It appears in books, in pamphlets, in journals, and in sermons, sorely scant in quantity as yet. New and fresh, it is often greatly deficient in form; rough, rude, and uncouth, it yet has in it a soul that will live. Its authors are often men of a wide and fine culture, though mainly tending to underrate tho past achievements of mankind. They have little reverence for great names. They value the Greek and Hebrew mind for no more than it is worth. With them a wrong is no more respected because well descended, and supported by all the riches, all the votes; a right, not less a right because unjustly kept out of its own. These men are American all through; so intensely national, that they do not fear to toll the nation of tho wrong it does.
The form of this literature is American. It is indigences to our soil, and could come up in no other land. It is unlike the classic literature of any other nation. It is American as the Bible is Hebrew, and tho Odyeaey is Greek. It is wild and fantastic, like all fresh original literature at first. You see in it the image of republican institutions—the free school, free state, free church; it reflects the countenance of free men* So the letters of old France, of modern England, of Italy and Spain, reflect the monarchic, oligarchic, and ecclesiastic institutions^ of those lands. Here appears the civilization of the nineteenth century, the treasures of human toil for many a thousand years. More than that, you see the result of a fresh con- tact with nature, and original intuitions of divine things. Acknowledging inspiration of old, these writers of the newness believe in it now not less, not miraculous, but normal. Here is humanity that overleaps the bounds of class and of nation> and sees a brother in the beggar, pirate, slave, one family of men variously dressed in cuticles of white or yellow, black or red. Here, too* is a new loveliness, somewhat akin to the savage beauty of our own wild woods, seen in their glorious splendour an hour before autumnal suns go down and leave a trail of glory lingering in the sky. Here, too, is a piety Somewhat needless of scriptures, liturgies, and forms and creeds; it finds its law written in nature, its glorious everlasting gospel in the soul of man; careless of circumcision and baptismal rites, it finds the world a temple, and rejoices everywhere to hold communion with the Infinite Father of us all, and keep a sacrament in daily life, conscious of immortality, and feeding continually on angels' bread.
The writers of this new literature are full of faults; yet they are often strong, though more by their direction than by native force of mind; more by their intuitions of the first good, first perfect, and first fair, than through their historical knowledge or dialectic power. Their ship sails swift, not because it is sharper built, or carries broader sails than other craft, but because it steers where the current of the ocean coincides with the current of the sky, and so is borne along by nature's wind and nature's wave. Uninvited, its ideas steal into parlour and pulpit, its kingdom coming within men and without observation. The shoemaker feels it as he toils in his narrow shop; it cheers the maiden weaving in the mill, whose wheels the Merrimac is made to turn; the young man at college bids it welcome to his ingenuous soul. So at tho breath of spring new life starts up in every plant; the sloping hills are green with corn, and sunny banks are blue and fragrant with the wealth of violets, which only slept till the enchanter came. The sentiments of this literature burn in the bosom of holy-hearted girls, of matrons, and of men. Ever and anon its great ideas are heard even in Congress, and in the speech of old and young, which comes tingling into most unwilling ears.
This literature has a work to do, and is about its work. Let the old man crow loud as he may, the young one will crow another strain; for it is written of God, that our march is continually onward, and age shall advance over age for ever and for ever.
Already America has a few fair specimens from this new field to show. Is the work history? The author writes from the stand-point of American democracy,—I mean philanthropy, the celestial democracy, not the satanic; writes with a sense of justice and in the interest of men; writes to tell a nation's purpose in its, deeds, and so reveal the universal law of God, which overrules the affairs of States as of a single man. You wonder that history was not before so writ that its facts told the nation's ideas, and its labours were lessons, and so its hard- won life became philosophy.
Is it poetry the man writes? It is not poetry like the old. The poet has seen nature with his own eyes, heard her with his own mortal, bodily ears, and felt her presence, not vicariously through Milton, Uhland, Ariosto, but personally, her heart against his heart. He sings of what he knows, sees, feels, not merely of what ho reads in others' song. Common things aro not thorefore inclean. In plain Now England life he finds his poetry, as magnets iron in the blacksmith's dust, and as tho bee finds dew-bright cups of honey in the common woods and common weeds. It is not for him to rave of Parnassus, while he knows it not, for the soul of song has a seat upon Monadnock, Wachusett, or Katahdin, quite as high. So Scottish Burns was overtaken by the muse of poetry, who met him on his own bleak hills, and showed him beauty in the daisy and the thistle, and the tiny mouse, till to his eye the hills ran o'er with loveliness, and Caledonia became a classic land.
Is it religion the author treats of? It is not worship by fear, but through absolute faith, a never-ending love; for it is not worship of a howling and imperfect God, grim, jealous, and revengeful, loving but a few, and them not well,—but of the Infinite Father of all mankind, whose universal providence will sure achieve the highest good of ail that are.
These men are few; in no land are they numerous, or were or will be. There were few Hebrew prophets, but a tribe of priests; there are but few mighty bards that hover o'er the world; but here and there a sage, looking deep and living high, who feels the heart of things, and utters oracles which pass for proverbs, psalms and prayers, and stimulate a world of men. They draw the nations, as conjoining moon and sun draw waters shore-ward from the ocean springs; and as electrifying heat they elevate the life of men. Under their influence you cannot be as before. They stimulate the sound, and intoxicate the silly; but in the heart of noble youths their idea becomes a fact, and their prayer a daily life.
Scholars of such a stamp are few and rare, not without great faults. For every one of them there will be many imitators, as for each lion a hundred lion-flies, thinking their buzz as valiant as his roar, and wondering the forest does not quake thereat, and while they feed on him fancy they suck the breasts of heaven. Such is the scholars' position in America; such their duty, and such the way in which they pay the debt they owe. Will men of superior culture not all act by scholar craft and by the pen? It were a pity if they did. If a man work nobly, the office is as worthy, and the purse as blessed in its work. The pen is power; the office is power; the purse is power; and if the purse and office be nobly held, then in a high mode the cultivated man pays for his bringing up, and honours with wide sympathies the mass of men who give him chance to ride and rule. If not; if these be meanly held, for self and not for man, then the scholar is a debtor and a traitor too.
The scholar never had so fair a chance before: here is the noblest opportunity for one that wields the pen; it is mightier than the sword, the office, or the purse. All things concede at last to beauty, justice, truth and love, and those he is to represent. He has what freedom he will pay for and take. Let him talk never so heroic, he will find fit audience, nor will it long be few. Men will rise up and welcome his quickening words as vernal grass at the first rains of spring. A great nation which cannot live by bread alone, asks for the bread of life; while the State is young, a single groat and noble man can deeply influence the nation's mind. There are great wrongs which demand redress; the present men who represent the office and the purse will not end these wrongs. They linger for the pen, with magic touch, to abolish and destroy this ancient serpent-brood. Shall it be only rude men and unlettered who confront the dragons of our time which prowl about the folds by flay and night, while the scholar, the appointed guardian of mankind, but "sports with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the tangles of Neæra's hair?" The nation asks of her scholar better things than ancient letters ever brought; asks his wonders for the. million, not the few alone. Great sentiments burn now in half-unconscious hearts, and great ideas kindle their glories round the heads of men. Unconscious electricity, truth and right, flashes out of the earth, out of the air. It is for the scholar to attract this ground-lightning and this lightning of the sky, condense it into useful thunder to destroy the wrong, then spread it forth a beauteous and a cheering light, shedding sweet influence and kindling life anew. A few great men of other times tell us what may be now.
Nothing will be done without toil—talent is only power of work, and genius greater power for higher forms of work—nothing without self-denial; nothing great and good save by putting your idea before yourself, and counting it dearer than your flesh and blood. Let it hide you, not your obesity conceal the truth God gave you to reveal. The quality of intellectual work is more than the quantity. Out of tho cloudy world Homer has drawn a spark that lasts three thousand years. "One, but a lion," should be the scholar's maxim; lot him do many things for daily need; one great thing for tho eternal beauty of his art. A single poem of Dante, a book for the bosom, lives through tho ages, surrounding its author with the glory of genius in tho night of time. One sermon on the mount, compact of truths brought down from God, all molten by such pious trust in Him, will stir men's hearts by myriads, while words dilute with other words are a shame to the speaker, and a dishonour to men who have ears to hear.
It is a great charity to give beauty to mankind; part of the scholar's function. How we honour such as create mere sensuous loveliness! Mozart carves it on the unseen air; Phidias sculptures it out from the marble stone; Raphael fixes ideal angels, maidens, matrons, men, and his triple God upon the canvas; and the lofty Angelo, with more than Amphionic skill, bids the hills rise into a temple which constrains the crowd to pray. Look, see how grateful man repays these architect of beauty with never-ending fame! Such as create a more than sensuous loveliness, the Homers, Miltons, Shakespeares, who sing of man in never-dying and creative song—see what honours we have in store for such; what honour given for what service paid! But there is a beauty higher than that of art, above philosophy and merely intellectual grace; I mean the loveliness of noble life; that is a beauty in the sight of man and God. This is a new country, the great ideas of a noble, man are easily spread abroad; soon they will appear in the life of the people, and be a blessing in our future history to ages yet unborn. A few great souls can correct the licentiousness of the American press, which is now but the type of covetousness and low ambition; correct the mean economy of the State, and amend the vulgarity of the American church, now the poor prostitute of every wealthy sin. Oh, ingenuous young maid or man, if such you are,—if not, then lot me dream you such,—seek you this beauty, complete perfection of a man, and having this, go hold the purse, the office, or the pen, as suits you best ; but out of that life, writing, voting, acting, living in all forme, you shall pay men back for your culture, and in tho scholar's noble kind, and represent tho higher facts of human thought. Will men still say, " This wrong is consecrated; it has stood for ages, and shall stand for over!" Tell them, "No. A wrong, though old as sin, is not now sacred, nor shall it stand!" Will they say, "This right can never be; that excellence is lovely, but impossible!" Show them the fact, who will not hear the speech ; the deed goes where the word fails, and life enchants where rhetoric cannot persuade.
Past ages offer their instruction, much warning, and a little guidance, many a wreck along the shore of time, a beacon here and there. Far off in the dim distance, present as possibilities, not actual as yet, future generations, with broad and wishful eyes, look at the son of genius, talent, educated skill, and seem to say, "A word for us; it will not be forgot!" Truth and Beauty, God's twin daughters, eternal both, yet ever young, wait there to offer each faithful man a budding branch,—in their hands budding, in his to blossom and mature its fruit,—wherewith he sows the field of time, gladdening the millions yet to come.