Complete Prose Works Part 32

Though Nature maintains, and must prevail, there will always be plenty of people, and good people, who cannot, or think they cannot, see anything in that last, wisest, most envelop'd of proverbs, "Friendship rules the World." Modern society, in its largest vein, is essentially intellectual, infidelistic--secretly admires, and depends most on, pure compulsion or science, its rule and sovereignty--is, in short, in "cultivated" quarters, deeply Napoleonic.

"Friendship," said Bonaparte, in one of his lightning-flashes of candid garrulity, "Friendship is but a name. I love no one--not even my brothers; Joseph perhaps a little. Still, if I do love him, it is from habit, because he is the eldest of us. Duroc? Ay, him, if any one, I love in a sort--but why? He suits me; he is cool, undemonstrative, unfeeling--has no weak affections--never embraces any one--never weeps."

I am not sure but the same a.n.a.logy is to be applied, in cases, often seen, where, with an extra development and acuteness of the intellectual faculties, there is a mark'd absence of the spiritual, affectional, and sometimes, though more rarely, the highest esthetic and moral elements of cognition.

LACKS AND WANTS YET

Of most foreign countries, small or large, from the remotest times known, down to our own, each has contributed after its kind, directly or indirectly, at least one great undying song, to help vitalize and increase the valor, wisdom, and elegance of humanity, from the points of view attain'd by it up to date. The stupendous epics of India, the holy Bible itself, the Homeric canticles, the Nibelungen, the Cid Campeador, the Inferno, Shakspere's dramas of the pa.s.sions and of the feudal lords, Burns's songs, Goethe's in Germany, Tennyson's poems in England, Victor Hugo's in France, and many more, are the widely various yet integral signs or land-marks, (in certain respects the highest set up by the human mind and soul, beyond science, invention, political amelioration, &c.,) narrating in subtlest, best ways, the long, long routes of history, and giving ident.i.ty to the stages arrived at by aggregate humanity, and the conclusions a.s.sumed in its progressive and varied civilizations.... Where is America's art-rendering, in any thing like the spirit worthy of herself and the modern, to these characteristic immortal monuments? So far, our Democratic society, (estimating its various strata, in the ma.s.s, as one,) possesses nothing--nor have we contributed any characteristic music, the finest tie of nationality--to make up for that glowing, blood-throbbing, religious, social, emotional, artistic, indefinable, indescribably beautiful charm and hold which fused the separate parts of the old feudal societies together, in their wonderful interpenetration, in Europe and Asia, of love, belief, and loyalty, running one way like a living weft--and picturesque responsibility, duty, and blessedness, running like a warp the other way. (In the Southern States, under slavery, much of the same.)...

In coincidence, and as things now exist in the States, what is more terrible, more alarming, than the total want of any such fusion and mutuality of love, belief, and rapport of interest, between the comparatively few successful rich, and the great ma.s.ses of the unsuccessful, the poor? As a mixed political and social question, is not this full of dark significance? Is it not worth considering as a problem and puzzle in our democracy--an indispensable want to be supplied?

RULERS STRICTLY OUT OF THE Ma.s.sES

In the talk (which I welcome) about the need of men of training, thoroughly school'd and experienced men, for statesmen, I would present the following as an offset. It was written by me twenty years ago--and has been curiously verified since:

I say no body of men are fit to make Presidents, Judges, and Generals, unless they themselves supply the best specimens of the same; and that supplying one or two such specimens illuminates the whole body for a thousand years. I expect to see the day when the like of the present personnel of the governments, Federal, State, munic.i.p.al, military, and naval, will be look'd upon with derision, and when qualified mechanics and young men will reach Congress and other official stations, sent in their working costumes, fresh from their benches and tools, and returning to them again with dignity. The young fellows must prepare to do credit to this destiny, for the stuff is in them. Nothing gives place, recollect, and never ought to give place, except to its clean superiors. There is more rude and undevelopt bravery, friendship, conscientiousness, clear-sightedness, and practical genius for any scope of action, even the broadest and highest, now among the American mechanics and young men, than in all the official persons in these States, legislative, executive, judicial, military, and naval, and more than among all the literary persons. I would be much pleas'd to see some heroic, shrewd, fully-inform'd, healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American blacksmith or boatman come down from the West across the Alleghanies, and walk into the Presidency, dress'd in a clean suit of working attire, and with the tan all over his face, breast, and arms; I would certainly vote for that sort of man, possessing the due requirements, before any other candidate.

(The facts of rank-and-file workingmen, mechanics, Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, Garfield, brought forward from the ma.s.ses and placed in the Presidency, and swaying its mighty powers with firm hand--really with more sway than any king in history, and with better capacity in using that sway--can we not see that these facts have bearings far, far beyond their political or party ones?)

MONUMENTS--THE PAST AND PRESENT

If you go to Europe, (to say nothing of Asia, more ancient and ma.s.sive still,) you cannot stir without meeting venerable mementos--cathedrals, ruins of temples, castles, monuments of the great, statues and paintings, (far, far beyond anything America can ever expect to produce,) haunts of heroes long dead, saints, poets, divinities, with deepest a.s.sociations of ages. But here in the New World, while _those_ we can never emulate, we have _more_ than those to build, and far more greatly to build. (I am not sure but the day for conventional monuments, statues, memorials, &c., has pa.s.s'd away--and that they are henceforth superfluous and vulgar.) An enlarg'd general superior humanity, (partly indeed resulting from those,) we are to build. European, Asiatic greatness are in the past. Vaster and subtler, America, combining, justifying the past, yet works for a grander future, in living democratic forms. (Here too are indicated the paths for our national bards.) Other times, other lands, have had their missions--Art, War, Ecclesiasticism, Literature, Discovery, Trade, Architecture, &c., &c.--but that grand future is the enclosing purport of the United States.

LITTLE OR NOTHING NEW, AFTER ALL

How small were the best thoughts, poems, conclusions, except for a certain invariable resemblance and uniform standard in the final thoughts, theology, poems, &c., of all nations, all civilizations, all centuries and times. Those precious legacies--acc.u.mulations! They come to us from the far-off--from all eras, and all lands--from Egypt, and India, and Greece, and Rome--and along through the middle and later ages, in the grand monarchies of Europe--born under far different inst.i.tutes and conditions from ours--but out of the insight and inspiration of the same old humanity--the same old heart and brain--the same old countenance yearningly, pensively, looking forth. What we have to do to-day is to receive them cheerfully, and to give them ensemble, and a modern American and democratic physiognomy.

A LINCOLN REMINISCENCE

As is well known, story-telling was often with President Lincoln a weapon which he employ'd with great skill. Very often he could not give a point-blank reply or comment--and these indirections, (sometimes funny, but not always so,) were probably the best responses possible. In the gloomiest period of the war, he had a call from a large delegation of bank presidents. In the talk after business was settled, one of the big Dons asked Mr. Lincoln if his confidence in the permanency of the Union was not beginning to be shaken--whereupon the homely President told a little story: "When I was a young man in Illinois," said he, "I boarded for a time with a deacon of the Presbyterian church. One night I was roused from my sleep by a rap at the door, and I heard the deacon's voice exclaiming, 'Arise, Abraham! the day of judgment has come!' I sprang from my bed and rushed to the window, and saw the stars falling in great showers; but looking back of them in the heavens I saw the grand old constellations, with which I was so well acquainted, fixed and true in their places. Gentlemen, the world did not come to an end then, nor will the Union now."

FREEDOM

It is not only true that most people entirely misunderstand Freedom, but I sometimes think I have not yet met one person who rightly understands it. The whole Universe is absolute Law. Freedom only opens entire activity and license _under the law_. To the degraded or undevelopt--and even to too many others--the thought of freedom is a thought of escaping from law--which, of course, is impossible. More precious than all worldly riches is Freedom--freedom from the painful constipation and poor narrowness of ecclesiasticism--freedom in manners, habiliments, furniture, from the silliness and tyranny of local fashions--entire freedom from party rings and mere conventions in Politics--and better than all, a general freedom of One's-Self from the tyrannic domination of vices, habits, appet.i.tes, under which nearly every man of us, (often the greatest brawler for freedom,) is enslav'd. Can we attain such enfranchis.e.m.e.nt--the true Democracy, and the height of it? While we are from birth to death the subjects of irresistible law, enclosing every movement and minute, we yet escape, by a paradox, into true free will.

Strange as it may seem, we only attain to freedom by a knowledge of, and implicit obedience to, Law. Great--unspeakably great--is the Will! the free Soul of man! At its greatest, understanding and obeying the laws, it can then, and then only, maintain true liberty. For there is to the highest, that law as absolute as any--more absolute than any--the Law of Liberty. The shallow, as intimated, consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws, namely, the fusion and combination of the conscious will, or partial individual law, with those universal, eternal, unconscious ones, which run through all Time, pervade history, prove immortality, give moral purpose to the entire objective world, and the last dignity to human life.

BOOK-CLa.s.sES--AMERICA'S LITERATURE

For certain purposes, literary productions through all the recorded ages may be roughly divided into two cla.s.ses. The first consisting of only a score or two, perhaps less, of typical, primal, representative works, different from any before, and embodying in themselves their own main laws and reasons for being. Then the second cla.s.s, books and writings innumerable, incessant--to be briefly described as radiations or offshoots, or more or less imitations of the first. The works of the first cla.s.s, as said, have their own laws, and may indeed be described as making those laws, and amenable only to them. The sharp warning of Margaret Fuller, unquell'd for thirty years, yet sounds in the air: "It does not follow that because the United States print and read more books, magazines, and newspapers than all the rest of the world, that they really have, therefore, a literature."

OUR REAL CULMINATION

The final culmination of this vast and varied Republic will be the production and perennial establishment of millions of comfortable city homesteads and moderate-sized farms, healthy and independent, single separate ownership, fee simple, life in them complete but cheap, within reach of all. Exceptional wealth, splendor, countless manufactures, excess of exports, immense capital and capitalists, the five-dollar-a-day hotels well fill'd, artificial improvements, even books, colleges, and the suffrage--all, in many respects, in themselves, (hard as it is to say so, and sharp as a surgeon's lance,) form, more or less, a sort of anti-democratic disease and monstrosity, except as they contribute by curious indirections to that culmination--seem to me mainly of value, or worth consideration, only with reference to it.

There is a subtle something in the common earth, crops, cattle, air, trees, &c., and in having to do at first hand with them, that forms the only purifying and perennial element for individuals and for society.

I must confess I want to see the agricultural occupation of America at first hand permanently broaden'd. Its gains are the only ones on which G.o.d seems to smile. What others--what business, profit, wealth, without a taint? What fortune else--what dollar--does not stand for, and come from, more or less imposition, lying, unnaturalness?

AN AMERICAN PROBLEM

One of the problems presented in America these times is, how to combine one's duty and policy as a member of a.s.sociations, societies, brotherhoods or what not, and one's obligations to the State and Nation, with essential freedom as an individual personality, without which freedom a man cannot grow or expand, or be full, modern, heroic, democratic, American. With all the necessities and benefits of a.s.sociation, (and the world cannot get along without it,) the true n.o.bility and satisfaction of a man consist in his thinking and acting for himself. The problem, I say, is to combine the two, so as not to ignore either.

THE LAST COLLECTIVE COMPACTION

I like well our polyglot construction-stamp, and the retention thereof, in the broad, the tolerating, the many-sided, the collective. All nations here--a home for every race on earth. British, German, Scandinavian, Spanish, French, Italian--papers published, plays acted, speeches made, in all languages--on our sh.o.r.es the crowning resultant of those distillations, decantations, compactions of humanity, that have been going on, on trial, over the earth so long.

APPENDIX

PIECES IN EARLY YOUTH

1834-'42

DOUGH-FACE SONG --Like dough; soft; yielding to pressure; pale----_Webster's Dictionary_.

We are all docile dough-faces, They knead us with the fist, They, the dashing southern lords, We labor as they list; For them we speak--or hold our tongues, For them we turn and twist.

We join them in their howl against Free soil and "abolition,"

That firebrand--that a.s.sa.s.sin knife-- Which risk our land's condition, And leave no peace of life to any Dough-faced politician.

To put down "agitation," now, We think the most judicious; To d.a.m.n all "northern fanatics,"

Those "traitors" black and vicious; The "reg'lar party usages"

For us, and no "new issues."

Things have come to a pretty pa.s.s, When a trifle small as this, Moving and bartering n.i.g.g.e.r slaves, Can open an abyss, With jaws a-gape for "the two great parties;"

A pretty thought, I wis!

Principle--freedom!--fiddlesticks!

We know not where they're found.

Rights of the ma.s.ses--progress!--bah!

Words that tickle and sound; But claiming to rule o'er "practical men"

Is very different ground.