Part 23

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 the 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 unwed, 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 lack 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 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 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 immovable 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 unorganized 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 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 God'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 accumulated, 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 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. 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 Constitution." 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 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 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 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 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 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 your wisest and do your best thing; nobody 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 multitude. 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 passed 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 class 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 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, 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 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 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, Massillon 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 classics and the Christian Fathers. Their illustrations 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 God; 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 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 the multitude in common work-day 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 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 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 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 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 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 mass 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 vigor. They have energy, vigor, forecast, and a certain generosity, but as 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 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 multitude, 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 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 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.