Chapter 19

Let me call to my aid, then, some thoughtful spirit in my audience: not a poet, of necessity, or a man of genius, but a man of large meditation, one who is accustomed to observe, and, by virtue of the warm affinities of a living heart, to draw out the meanings that are hid so often in the humblest things. Returning into the bosom of his family in some interval of care and labor, he shall come upon the very unclassic and certainly unimposing scene,--his children and a kitten playing on the floor together; and just there, possibly, shall meet him suggestions more fresh and thoughts of higher reach concerning himself and his race, than the announcement of a new-discovered planet or the revolution of an empire would incite. He surveys with a meditative feeling this beautiful scene of muscular play,--the unconscious activity, the exuberant life, the spirit of glee,--and there rises in his heart the conception that possibly he is here to see the prophecy or symbol of another and higher kind of play, which is the noblest exercise and last end of man himself. Worn by the toils of years, perceiving with a sigh that the unconscious joy of motion here displayed is spent in himself, and that now he is effectually tamed to the doom of a working creature, he may yet discover, in the lively sympathy with play that bathes his inward feeling, that his soul is playing now,--enjoying, without the motions, all it could do in them; manifold more than it could if he were down upon the floor himself, in the unconscious activity and lively frolic of childhood. Saddened he may be to note how time and work have changed his spirit and dried away the playful springs of animal life in his being; yet he will find, or ought, a joy playing internally over the face of his working nature, which is fuller and richer as it is more tranquil; which is to the other as fulfillment to prophecy, and is in fact the prophecy of a better and far more glorious fulfillment still.

Having struck in this manner the great world-problem of WORK AND PLAY, his thoughts kindle under the theme, and he pursues it. The living races are seen at a glance to be offering in their history everywhere a faithful type of his own. They show him what he himself is doing and preparing--all that he finds in the manifold experience of his own higher life. They have, all, their gambols; all, their sober cares and labors. The lambs are sporting on the green knoll; the anxious dams are bleating to recall them to their side. The citizen beaver is building his house by a laborious carpentry; the squirrel is lifting his sail to the wind on the swinging top of the tree. In the music of the morning, he hears the birds playing with their voices, and when the day is up, sees them sailing round in circles on the upper air, as skaters on a lake, folding their wings, dropping and rebounding, as if to see what sport they can make of the solemn laws that hold the upper and lower worlds together. And yet these play-children of the air he sees again descending to be carriers and drudges; fluttering and screaming anxiously about their nest, and confessing by that sign that not even wings can bear them clear of the stern doom of work. Or, passing to some quiet shade, meditating still on this careworn life, playing still internally with ideal fancies and desires unrealized, there returns upon him there, in the manifold and spontaneous mimicry of nature, a living show of all that is transpiring in his own bosom; in every flower some bee humming over his laborious chemistry and loading his body with the fruits of his toil; in the slant sunbeam, populous nations of motes quivering with animated joy, and catching, as in play, at the golden particles of the light with their tiny fingers. Work and play, in short, are the universal ordinance of God for the living races; in which they symbolize the fortune and interpret the errand of man. No creature lives that must not work and may not play.

Returning now to himself and to man, and meditating yet more deeply, as he is thus prepared to do, on work and play, and play and work, as blended in the compound of our human life; asking again what is work and what is play, what are the relations of one to the other, and which is the final end of all, he discovers in what he was observing round him a sublimity of import, a solemnity even, that is deep as the shadow of eternity.

I believe in a future age yet to be revealed, which is to be distinguished from all others as the godly or godlike age,--an age not of universal education simply, or universal philanthropy, or external freedom, or political well-being, but a day of reciprocity and free intimacy between all souls and God. Learning and religion, the scholar and the Christian, will not be divided as they have been. The universities will be filled with a profound spirit of religion, and the _bene orâsse_ will be a fountain of inspiration to all the investigations of study and the creations of genius.

I raise this expectation of the future, not because some prophet of old time has spoken of a day to come when "the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof" (for I know not that he meant to be so interpreted), but because I find a prophecy of play in our nature itself which it were a violation of all insight not to believe will sometime be fulfilled. And when it is fulfilled it will be found that Christianity has at last developed a new literary era, the era of religious love.

Hitherto the passion of love has been the central fire of the world's literature. The dramas, epics, odes, novels, and even histories, have spoken to the world's heart chiefly through this passion, and through this have been able to get their answer. For this passion is a state of play, wherein the man loses himself in the ardor of a devotion regardless of interest, fear, care, prudence, and even of life itself. Hence there gathers round the lover a tragic interest, and we hang upon his destiny as if some natural charm or spell were in it. Now this passion of love, which has hitherto been the staple of literature, is only a crude symbol in the life of nature, by which God designs to interpret, and also to foreshadow, the higher love of religion,--nature's gentle Beatrice, who puts her image in the youthful Dante, by that to attend him afterwards in the spirit-flight of song, and be his guide up through the wards of Paradise to the shining mount of God. What then are we to think, but that God will sometime bring us up out of the literature of the lower love, into that of the higher?--that as the age of passion yields to the age of reason, so the crude love of instinct will give place to the loftier, finer, more impelling love of God? And then around that nobler love, or out of it, shall arise a new body of literature, as much more gifted as the inspiration is purer and more intellectual. Beauty, truth, and worship; song, science, and duty, will all be unfolded together in this common love.

FROM 'THE AGE OF HOMESPUN'

Most of all to be remembered are those friendly circles gathered so often round the winter's fire; not the stove, but the fire, the brightly blazing, hospitable fire. In the early dusk, the home circle is drawn more closely and quietly round it; but a good neighbor and his wife drop in shortly from over the way, and the circle begins to spread. Next, a few young folk from the other end of the village, entering in brisker mood, find as many more chairs set in as wedges into the periphery to receive them also. And then a friendly sleighful of old and young that have come down from the hill to spend an hour or two, spread the circle again, moving it still farther back from the fire; and the fire blazes just as much higher and more brightly, having a new stick added for every guest. There is no restraint, certainly no affectation of style. They tell stories, they laugh, they sing. They are serious and gay by turns, or the young folks go on with some play, while the fathers and mothers are discussing some hard point of theology in the minister's last sermon, or perhaps the great danger coming to sound morals from the multiplication of turnpikes and newspapers! Meantime the good housewife brings out her choice stock of home-grown exotics, gathered from three realms--doughnuts from the pantry, hickory-nuts from the chamber, and the nicest, smoothest apples from the cellar; all which, including, I suppose I must add, the rather unpoetic beverage that gave its acid smack to the ancient hospitality, are discussed as freely, with no fear of consequences. And then, as the tall clock in the corner of the room ticks on majestically towards nine, the conversation takes, it may be, a little more serious turn, and it is suggested that a very happy evening may fitly be ended with a prayer. Whereupon the circle breaks up with a reverent, congratulative look on every face, which is itself the truest language of a social nature blessed in human fellowship.

Such, in general, was the society of the homespun age....

Passing to the church, or rather I should say, to the meeting-house--good translation, whether meant or not, of what is older and more venerable than _church_, viz., _synagogue_--here again you meet the picture of a sturdy homespun worship. Probably it stands on some hill, midway between three or four valleys, whither the tribes go up to worship, and, when the snow-drifts are deepest, go literally from strength to strength. There is no furnace or stove save the foot-stoves that are filled from the fires of the neighboring houses, and brought in partly as a rather formal compliment to the delicacy of the tender sex, and sometimes because they are really wanted. The dress of the assembly is mostly homespun, indicating only slight distinctions of quality in the worshipers. They are seated according to age,--the old king Lemuels and their queens in front, near the pulpit, and the younger Lemuels farther back, inclosed in pews, sitting back to back, impounded, all, for deep thought and spiritual digestion; only the deacons, sitting close under the pulpit by themselves, to receive, as their distinctive honor, the more perpendicular droppings of the Word. Clean round the front of the gallery is drawn a single row of choir, headed by the key-pipe in the centre. The pulpit is overhung by an august wooden canopy called a sounding-board--study general, of course, and first lesson of mystery to the eyes of the children, until what time their ears are opened to understand the spoken mysteries.

There is no affectation of seriousness in the assembly, no mannerism of worship; some would say too little of the manner of worship. They think of nothing, in fact, save what meets their intelligence and enters into them by that method. They appear like men who have a digestion for strong meat, and have no conception that trifles more delicate can be of any account to feed the system. Nothing is dull that has the matter in it, nothing long that has not exhausted the matter. If the minister speaks in his great-coat and thick gloves or mittens, if the howling blasts of winter drive in across the assembly fresh streams of ventilation that move the hair upon their heads, they are none the less content, if only he gives them good strong exercise. Under their hard and, as some would say, stolid faces, great thoughts are brewing, and these keep them warm. Free-will, fixed fate, foreknowledge absolute, trinity, redemption, special grace, eternity--give them anything high enough, and the tough muscle of their inward man will be climbing sturdily into it; and if they go away having something to think of, they have had a good day. A perceptible glow will kindle in their hard faces only when some one of the chief apostles, a Day, a Smith, or a Bellamy, has come to lead them up some higher pinnacle of thought or pile upon their sturdy minds some heavier weight of argument--fainting never under any weight, even that which, to the foreign critics of the discourses preached by them and others of their day, it seems impossible for any, the most cultivated audience in the world, to have supported. These royal men of homespun--how great a thing to them was religion!

The sons and daughters grew up, all, as you will perceive, in the closest habits of industry. The keen jocky way of whittling out a living by small bargains sharply turned, which many suppose to be an essential characteristic of the Yankee race, is yet no proper inbred distinction, but only a casual result, or incident, that pertains to the transition period between the small, stringent way of life in the previous times of home-production and the new age of trade. In these olden times, these genuine days of homespun, they supposed, in their simplicity, that thrift represented work, and looked about seldom for any more delicate and sharper way of getting on. They did not call a man's property his _fortune_, but they spoke of one or another as being _worth_ so much; conceiving that he had it laid up as the reward or fruit of his deservings. The house was a factory on the farm, the farm a grower and producer for the house. The exchanges went on briskly enough, but required neither money nor trade. No affectation of polite living, no languishing airs of delicacy and softness indoors, had begun to make the fathers and sons impatient of hard work out of doors, and set them at contriving some easier and more plausible way of living. Their very dress represented work, and they went out as men whom the wives and daughters had dressed for work; facing all weather, cold and hot, wet and dry, wrestling with the plow on the stony-sided hills, digging out the rocks by hard lifting and a good many very practical experiments in mechanics, dressing the flax, threshing the rye, dragging home, in the deep snows, the great woodpile of the year's consumption; and then when the day is ended--having no loose money to spend in taverns--taking their recreation all together in reading or singing or happy talk or silent looking in the fire, and finally in sleep--to rise again with the sun and pray over the family Bible for just such another good day as the last. And so they lived, working out, each year, a little advance of thrift, just within the line of comfort.

No mode of life was ever more expensive: it was life at the expense of labor too stringent to allow the highest culture and the most proper enjoyment. Even the dress of it was more expensive than we shall ever see again. Still it was a life of honesty and simple content and sturdy victory. Immoralities that rot down the vigor and humble the consciousness of families were as much less frequent as they had less thought of adventure; less to do with travel and trade and money, and were closer to nature and the simple life of home.

It was also a great point, in this homespun mode of life, that it imparted exactly what many speak of only with contempt--a closely girded habit of economy. Harnessed all together into the producing process, young and old, male and female, from the boy that rode the plow-horse to the grandmother knitting under her spectacles, they had no conception of squandering lightly what they all had been at work, thread by thread and grain by grain, to produce. They knew too exactly what everything cost, even small things, not to husband them carefully. Men of patrimony in the great world, therefore, noticing their small way in trade or expenditure, are ready, as we often see, to charge them with meanness--simply because they knew things only in the small; or, what is not far different, because they were too simple and rustic to have any conception of the big operations by which other men are wont to get their money without earning it, and lavish the more freely because it was not earned. Still, this knowing life only in the small, it will be found, is really anything but meanness.

THE FOUNDERS

From 'Work and Play'

There is a class of writers and critics in our country, who imagine it is quite clear that our fathers cannot have been the proper founders of our American liberties, because it is in proof that they were so intolerant and so clearly unrepublican often in their avowed sentiments. They suppose the world to be a kind of professor's chair, and expect events to transpire logically in it. They see not that casual opinions, or conventional and traditional prejudices, are one thing, and that principles and morally dynamic forces are often quite another; that the former are the connectives only of history, the latter its springs of life; and that if the former serve well enough as providential guards and moderating weights overlying the deep geologic fires and subterranean heavings of the new moral instincts below, these latter will assuredly burst up at last in strong mountains of rock, to crest the world. Unable to conceive such a truth, they cast about them accordingly to find the paternity of our American institutions in purely accidental causes. We are clear of aristocratic orders, they say, because there was no blood of which to make an aristocracy; independent of king and parliament, because we grew into independence under the natural effects of distance and the exercise of a legislative power; republican, because our constitutions were cast in the molds of British law; a wonder of growth in riches, enterprise, and population, because of the hard necessities laid upon us, and our simple modes of life.

There is yet another view of this question, that has a far higher significance. We do not understand, as it seems to me, the real greatness of our institutions when we look simply at the forms under which we hold our liberties. It consists not in these, but in the magnificent possibilities that underlie these forms as their fundamental supports and conditions. In these we have the true paternity and spring of our institutions; and these, beyond a question, are the gift of our founders.

We see this, first of all, in the fixed relation between freedom and intelligence, and the remarkable care they had of popular education. It was not their plan to raise up a body of republicans. But they believed in mind as in God. Their religion was the choice of mind. The gospel they preached must have minds to hear it; and hence the solemn care they had, even from the first day of their settlement, of the education of every child. And, as God would have it, the children whom they trained up for pillars in the church turned out also to be more than tools of power. They grew up into magistrates, leaders of the people, debaters of right and of law, statesmen, generals, and signers of declarations for liberty. Such a mass of capacity had never been seen before in so small a body of men. And this is the first condition of liberty--the Condensation of Power. For liberty is not the license of an hour; it is not the butchery of a royal house, or the passion that rages behind a barricade, or the caps that are swung or the _vivas_ shouted at the installing of a liberator. But it is the compact, impenetrable matter of much manhood, the compressed energy of good sense and public reason, having power to see before and after and measure action by counsel--this it is that walls about the strength and liberty of a people. To be free is not to fly abroad as the owls of the night when they take the freedom of the air, but it is to settle and build and be strong--a commonwealth as much better compacted in the terms of reason, as it casts off more of the restraints of force.

Their word was "Reformation"--"the completion of the Reformation"; not Luther's nor Calvin's, they expressly say; they cannot themselves imagine it. Hitherto it is unconceived by men. God must reveal it in the light that breaks forth from him. And this he will do in his own good time. It is already clear to us that, in order to any further progress in this direction, it was necessary for a new movement to begin that should loosen the joints of despotism and emancipate the mind of the world. And in order to this a new republic must be planted and have time to grow. It must be seen rising up in the strong majesty of freedom and youth, outstripping the old prescriptive world in enterprise and the race of power, covering the ocean with its commerce, spreading out in populous swarms of industry,--planting, building, educating, framing constitutions, rushing to and fro in the smoke and thunder of travel along its mighty rivers, across its inland seas, over its mountain-tops from one shore to the other, strong in order as in liberty,--a savage continent become the field of a colossal republican empire, whose name is a name of respect and a mark of desire to the longing eyes of mankind. And then, as the fire of new ideas and hopes darts electrically along the nerves of feeling in the millions of the race, it will be seen that a new Christian movement also begins with it. Call it reformation, or formation, or by whatever name, it is irresistible because it is intangible. In one view it is only destruction. The State is loosened from the Church. The Church crumbles down into fragments. Superstition is eaten away by the strong acid of liberty, and spiritual despotism flies affrighted from the broken loyalty of its metropolis. Protestantism also, divided and subdivided by its dialectic quarrels, falls into the finest, driest powder of disintegration. Be not afraid. The new order crystallizes only as the old is dissolved; and no sooner is the old unity of orders and authorities effectually dissolved than the reconstructive affinities of a new and better unity begin to appear in the solution. Repugnances melt away. Thought grows catholic. Men look for good in each other as well as evil. The crossings of opinion by travel and books, and the intermixture of races and religions, issue in freer, broader views of the Christian truth; and so the "Church of the Future," as it has been called, gravitates inwardly towards those terms of brotherhood in which it may coalesce and rest. I say not or believe that Christendom will be Puritanized or Protestantized; but what is better than either, it will be Christianized. It will settle thus into a unity, probably not of form, but of practical assent and love--a Commonwealth of the Spirit, as much stronger in its unity than the old satrapy of priestly despotism, as our republic is stronger than any other government of the world.

RELIGIOUS MUSIC

From 'Work and Play'