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 compa.s.s, bewilders the eye, hides the stars, and yet is not bright enough to walk by without stumbling. There is a learned cla.s.s, very learned and very large, with whom the scholar thinks, and for whom he writes, most uncouthly, in 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 the people subject to no rule but the priest, the 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 const.i.tuency, 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 ma.s.s of the people, in whom they had no confidence. There is no cla.s.s of hucksters of thought, who retail philosophy to the million. The million have as yet no appet.i.te 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 sh.e.l.ls in a lady"s cabinet.
In America all is quite different. There are no royal or patrician patrons, no plebeian clients in literature, no immovable aristocracy to withstand or even r.e.t.a.r.d the new genius, talent, or skill of the scholar. There is no cla.s.s organized, accredited and confided in, to resist a new idea; only the unorganized inertia of mankind r.e.t.a.r.ds 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 immovable. 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 unwelcome theme. The attempt would be folly and madness. There is no "tonnage and poundage" on thought. It is seldom that lawless violence usurps the place of despotic government. The 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 the growth of the new democracy of to-day?--only the old democracy of yesterday, once green, and then full 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 G.o.d"s name or the States", 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 labor acc.u.mulated, not now a-doing. Thus the obstacle to free trade is not the notion that our meat must be home-grown and our coat home-spun, but the money invested in manufactures. Slavery is sustained by no prestige of antiquity, no abstract fondness for a patriarchal inst.i.tution, 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. Whitney"s gin for separating the cotton from its blue seed, making its culture and the labor of the slave profitable, did more to perpetuate slavery than all the "Compromises of the Const.i.tution." The last argument in its favor is always this: It brings money, and we would not lose our investment. Weapon a man with iron he will stand and fight; with gold, he will shrink and run. The cla.s.s of capitalists are always cowardly; here they are the only cowardly cla.s.s 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 as transferable as a cent, and may be 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 proscriptive policy of Polk and Taylor; the laws may change, South Carolina move out of the nation, the Const.i.tution 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 cla.s.s 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 as 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 daytime; 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 cla.s.sic and famous as yet, but good as the Parian stone; quarry as much as you will, enough for a nymph or a temple. Say your wisest and do your best thing; n.o.body will hurt you!"
Not much more 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 high for the mult.i.tude. We have many authors below the market; scarce one above it. The people are continually looking for something better than our authors give. No 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 pa.s.sed by." If he has thought with the thinkers and has something to say, and can speak it in plain speech, he is sure to be widely understood. There is no learned cla.s.s to whom he may talk Latin or Sanscrit, and who will understand him if he write as ill as Immanuel Kant; there is not a large cla.s.s to buy costly editions of ancient cla.s.sics, however beautiful, or magnificent works on India, Egypt, Mexico--the cla.s.s of scholars is too poor for that, the rich men have not the taste for such beauty--but there is an intelligent cla.s.s 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, as 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 inst.i.tutions. 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 cla.s.sic 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 labors of the shepherd in old Ascraean 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, Ma.s.sillon and Bourdaloue, clergymen though they were, speaking with a religious and therefore a universal aim, always presuppose a narrow audience of men of nice culture. So they drew their figures from the schoolmen, from the Greek anthology, from heathen cla.s.sics and the Christian Fathers. Their ill.u.s.trations were embellishments to the scholar, but only palpable darkness to the 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 lack of freedom, a thinking for the learned and not for mankind; it has breathed the air of the cloister, not the 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 hence the wild and wanton luxuriance of beauty which flowers out all over the marvellous field of art where Shakspeare walked and sung. In the pulpit, excellence was painted as a priest, or monk, or nun, loving nothing but G.o.d; on the stage, as a soldier, magistrate, a 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, every thing that is written is for the hands of the million. In three months Mr. Macaulay has more readers in America than Thucydides 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 mult.i.tude. 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 the mult.i.tude in common work-day clothes. To large and mainly unlearned audiences Aga.s.siz 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 better 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 the 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, there 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 sage and saint, but 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 cla.s.s; 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 a.s.ses 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 s.p.a.ce 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 peculiarities of the American 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 thing right because actual, nor impossible because it has never been. The Americans are 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 of Independence and all the State Const.i.tutions 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 the 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 is 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 the 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 favorite mode of power with us. This is natural in our present stage of national existence 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 favorite emblem, the Purse represents the favorite mode of power with the ma.s.s 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 acc.u.mulation. 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 vigor. They have energy, vigor, forecast, and a certain generosity, but as a cla.s.s, 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 politics; 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 mult.i.tude, if the office is much greater than the 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 large cla.s.s 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 acc.u.mulate 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 unsavory 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 colors his day-dream, which is less of wisdom and more of wealth, or of political station; so a first-rate clergyman desires to be razed to a second-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 president of an insurance office or a bank, or the agent of a cotton mill; the judge deserts his 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 a Paradise Regained. The well-endowed minister thinks how much more money he might have made had he 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 peddler, 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 his 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 he 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 must not be forgotten that there are men in the midst of us, rich, respectable and highly honored with social rank and political power, who practically and in strict conformity with their theory, honor 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 be welcome to the leaders of the State, and is soon p.r.o.nounced divine by the leaders of the church.
It would seem as if the Pen ought to represent the favorite mode of power at a college; but even there the waters of Pactolus are thought fairer than the Castalian, Heliconian spring, or "Siloa"s brook that flowed fast by the oracle of G.o.d." 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 honor, and the University is "up for California," not Parna.s.sus.
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 Ma.s.sachusetts, a codfish 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 so of the Commonwealth.
With singular and unconscious satire it tells the legislature to have an 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 cla.s.s, the ablest men are certainly not left behind. Three roads open before our young Hercules as he leaves college, having respectively as finger-post, 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 are 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 scholar-craft, not by the state-craft of the politician, or the purse-craft of the capitalist. How are these men paying their debt and performing their function? The 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 the 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 is because he keeps the lightning from factories, churches, and barns; tells us not "to give too much for the whistle," and teaches "the way to make money plenty in every man"s pocket." We should not name them after Cuvier and La Place.
Notwithstanding this, the scientific scholars of America, both the home-born and the adopted sons, have manfully paid for their culture, and done honor 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 honor by the scientific 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 new-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 the cla.s.sic type: even after centuries had pa.s.sed by, Sidonius, though a bishop of the church, and destined to become a saint, uses the old heathen imagery, referring to Triptolemus 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 inst.i.tutions of England are cherished here, so 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 not 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 n.o.ble 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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 in one; several Burnses, and Miltons by the quant.i.ty, 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 G.o.d; 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 Judea in his holy hymns; nay, "Uriah"s beauteous wife"
now and then sidles in to 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 rain, all 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 life 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 the admiration of the learned. These had at home the German dress, but as the 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 the streams of their native Swabia, took the color of the soil they travelled through.
The 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 book-wright in Leipsic or London, and then imported. The individuality of the nation is not there, except in the cheap, gaudy binding of the work. The 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 jail. 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. n.o.body 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 the favorite author with each new bard; you often see what particular work of Sh.e.l.ley, 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 "h.o.m.o Sapiens" of Linnaeus, 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 G.o.d. The sermons are like an almanac calculated for the meridian of no place in particular, for no time in special. There is no allusion to any thing 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 G.o.d for the dew and snow, only for "the early and the latter rain" of a cla.s.sic sacred land; a temperance man, he blesses G.o.d 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 favorite sin was the worship of some graven image, and that they made their children pa.s.s 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 cla.s.sic. 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 pa.s.s 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 n.o.ble 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 here: I mean the Lives of Fugitive Slaves. But as these are not the work of the men of superior culture, they hardly help to pay the 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 serve 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 the permanent literature; here 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 the 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 favorable idea of the vigor 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 favorably 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 vigor 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 n.o.ble, 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 appears in all countries. The ally of despotism, and the foe of mankind, it is yet a legitimate exponent of a large cla.s.s of men. The leading journals of 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts of the grand caravan, or some patent medicine; or when unfavorable, by some of the men who write defamatory articles on the eve of an 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 inst.i.tutions; 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 G.o.d which override all the traditions and contrivances of men; more reverence for a statute, or const.i.tution, which is indeed the fundamental law of the political State, but is often only an attempt to compromise between the fleeting pa.s.sions of the day and the Immutable Morality of G.o.d. Amid all the public doc.u.ments of the nation and the several States, in the speeches and writings of favorite 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 politicians in the land go at all beyond the whig idea of protecting the property now acc.u.mulated, or the democratic idea of ensuring the greatest material good of the greatest number? Where are we to look for the representative of justice, of the unalienable rights of all the people and all the nations? In the triple host of article-makers, speech-makers, 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 never write, speak, nor vote in the interests of a party, but always in the interest of mankind, and will represent the justice of G.o.d in the forum of the world.
This literature, like the other, fails of the high end of writing and of speech: with more vigor, 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 cut their own way through the woods, men with more than the average intelligence, daring 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.