Complete Prose Works
superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete
failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral,
literary, and esthetic results. In vain do we march with unprecedented
strides to empire so colossal, outvying the antique, beyond Alexander's,
beyond the proudest sway of Rome. In vain have we annex'd Texas,
California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for Cuba. It
is as if we were somehow being endow'd with a vast and more and more
thoroughly-appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.
Let me illustrate further, as I write, with current observations,
localities, &c. The subject is important, and will bear repetition.
After an absence, I am now again (September, 1870) in New York city and
Brooklyn, on a few weeks' vacation. The splendor, picturesqueness,
and oceanic amplitude and rush of these great cities, the unsurpass'd
situation, rivers and bay, sparkling sea-tides, costly and lofty new
buildings, façades of marble and iron, of original grandeur and elegance
of design, with the masses of gay color, the preponderance of white
and blue, the flags flying, the endless ships, the tumultuous streets,
Broadway, the heavy, low, musical roar, hardly ever intermitted, even
at night; the jobbers' houses, the rich shops, the wharves, the great
Central Park, and the Brooklyn Park of hills, (as I wander among
them this beautiful fall weather, musing, watching, absorbing)--the
assemblages of the citizens in their groups, conversations, trades,
evening amusements, or along the by-quarters--these, I say, and the like
of these, completely satisfy my senses of power, fulness, motion, &c.,
and give me, through such senses and appetites, and through my esthetic
conscience, a continued exaltation and absolute fulfilment. Always and
more and more, as I cross the East and North rivers, the ferries, or
with the pilots in their pilot-houses, or pass an hour in Wall street,
or the gold exchange, I realize, (if we must admit such partialisms,)
that not Nature alone is great in her fields of freedom and the open
air, in her storms, the shows of night and day, the mountains, forests,
seas--but in the artificial, the work of man too is equally great--in
this profusion of teeming humanity--in these ingenuities, streets,
goods, houses, ships--these hurrying, feverish, electric crowds of men,
their complicated business genius, (not least among the geniuses,) and
all this mighty, many-threaded wealth and industry concentrated here.
But sternly discarding, shutting our eyes to the glow and grandeur of
the general superficial effect, coming down to what is of the only real
importance, Personalities, and examining minutely, we question, we ask,
Are there, indeed, _men_ here worthy the name? Are there athletes? Are
there perfect women, to match the generous material luxuriance? Is there
a pervading atmosphere of beautiful manners? Are there crops of fine
youths, and majestic old persons? Are there arts worthy freedom and a
rich people? Is there a great moral and religious civilization--the
only justification of a great material one? Confess that to severe eyes,
using the moral microscope upon humanity, a sort of dry and flat Sahara
appears, these cities, crowded with petty grotesques, malformations,
phantoms, playing meaningless antics.
Confess that everywhere, in shop, street, church, theatre, bar-room,
official chair, are pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning,
infidelity--everywhere the youth puny, impudent, foppish, prematurely
ripe--everywhere an abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male,
female, painted, padded, dyed, chignon'd, muddy complexions, bad blood,
the capacity for good motherhood deceasing or deceas'd, shallow
notions of beauty, with a range of manners, or rather lack of manners,
(considering the advantages enjoy'd,) probably the meanest to be seen in
the world.[22]
Of all this, and these lamentable conditions, to breathe into them
the breath recuperative of sane and heroic life, I say a new founded
literature, not merely to copy and reflect existing surfaces, or pander
to what is called taste--not only to amuse, pass away time, celebrate
the beautiful, the refined, the past, or exhibit technical, rhythmic,
or grammatical dexterity--but a literature underlying life, religious,
consistent with science, handling the elements and forces with competent
power, teaching and training men--and, as perhaps the most precious
of its results, achieving the entire redemption of woman out of these
incredible holds and webs of silliness, millinery, and every kind of
dyspeptic depletion--and thus insuring to the States a strong and sweet
Female Race, a race of perfect Mothers--is what is needed.
And now, in the full conception of these facts and points, and all that
they infer, pro and con--with yet unshaken faith in the elements of the
American masses, the composites, of both sexes, and even consider'd as
individuals--and ever recognizing in them the broadest bases of the
best literary and esthetic appreciation--I proceed with my speculations,
Vistas.
First, let us see what we can make out of a brief, general, sentimental
consideration of political democracy, and whence it has arisen, with
regard to some of its current features, as an aggregate, and as the
basic structure of our future literature and authorship. We shall, it is
true, quickly and continually find the origin-idea of the singleness of
man, individualism, asserting itself, and cropping forth, even from the
opposite ideas. But the mass, or lump character, for imperative reasons,
is to be ever carefully weigh'd, borne in mind, and provided for. Only
from it, and from its proper regulation and potency, comes the other,
comes the chance of individualism. The two are contradictory, but our
task is to reconcile them.[23]
The political history of the past may be summ'd up as having grown out
of what underlies the words, order, safety, caste, and especially out of
the need of some prompt deciding authority, and of cohesion at all cost.
Leaping time, we come to the period within the memory of people
now living, when, as from some lair where they had slumber'd long,
accumulating wrath, sprang up and are yet active, (1790, and on eyen to
the present, 1870,) those noisy eructations, destructive iconoclasms, a
fierce sense of wrongs, amid which moves the form, well known in modern
history, in the old world, stain'd with much blood, and mark'd by savage
reactionary clamors and demands. These bear, mostly, as on one inclosing
point of need.
For after the rest is said--after the many time-honor'd and really true
things for subordination, experience, rights of property, &c., have
been listen'd to and acquiesced in--after the valuable and well-settled
statement of our duties and relations in society is thoroughly conn'd
over and exhausted--it remains to bring forward and modify everything
else with the idea of that Something a man is, (last precious
consolation of the drudging poor,) standing apart from all else, divine
in his own right, and a woman in hers, sole and untouchable by any
canons of authority, or any rule derived from precedent, state-safety,
the acts of legislatures, or even from what is called religion, modesty,
or art. The radiation of this truth is the key of the most significant
doings of our immediately preceding three centuries, and has been the
political genesis and life of America. Advancing visibly, it still more
advances invisibly. Underneath the fluctuations of the expressions of
society, as well as the movements of the politics of the leading nations
of the world, we see steadily pressing ahead and strengthening itself,
even in the midst of immense tendencies toward aggregation, this image
of completeness in separatism, of individual personal dignity, of a
single person, either male or female, characterized in the main, not
from extrinsic acquirements or position, but in the pride of himself or
herself alone; and, as an eventual conclusion and summing up, (or else
the entire scheme of things is aimless, a cheat, a crash,) the simple
idea that the last, best dependence is to be upon humanity itself, and
its own inherent, normal, fullgrown qualities, without any superstitious
support whatever. This idea of perfect individualism it is indeed that
deepest tinges and gives character to the idea of the aggregate. For it
is mainly or altogether to serve independent separatism that we favor a
strong generalization, consolidation. As it is to give the best vitality
and freedom to the rights of the States, (every bit as important as the
right of nationality, the union,) that we insist on the identity of the
Union at all hazards.
The purpose of democracy--supplanting old belief in the necessary
absoluteness of establish'd dynastic rulership, temporal,
ecclesiastical, and scholastic, as furnishing the only security against
chaos, crime, and ignorance--is, through many transmigrations, and amid
endless ridicules, arguments, and ostensible failures, to illustrate,
at all hazards, this doctrine or theory that man, properly train'd in
sanest, highest freedom, may and must become a law, and series of laws,
unto himself, surrounding and providing for, not only his own personal
control, but all his relations to other individuals, and to the State;
and that, while other theories, as in the past histories of nations,
have proved wise enough, and indispensable perhaps for their conditions,
_this,_ as matters now stand in our civilized world, is the only scheme
worth working from, as warranting results like those of Nature's laws,
reliable, when once establish'd, to carry on themselves.
The argument of the matter is extensive, and, we admit, by no means all
on one side. What we shall offer will be far, far from sufficient. But
while leaving unsaid much that should properly even prepare the way
for the treatment of this many-sided question of political liberty,
equality, or republicanism--leaving the whole history and consideration
of the feudal plan and its products, embodying humanity, its politics
and civilization, through the retrospect of past time, (which plan
and products, indeed, make up all of the past, and a large part of the
present)--leaving unanswer'd, at least by any specific and local answer,
many a well-wrought argument and instance, and many a conscientious
declamatory cry and warning--as, very lately, from an eminent and
venerable person abroad[24]--things, problems, full of doubt, dread,
suspense, (not new to me, but old occupiers of many an anxious hour in
city's din, or night's silence,) we still may give a page or so, whose
drift is opportune. Time alone can finally answer these things. But as
a substitute in passing, let us, even if fragmentarily, throw forth a
short direct or indirect suggestion of the premises of that other plan,
in the new spirit, under the new forms, started here in our America.
As to the political section of Democracy, which introduces and breaks
ground for further and vaster sections, few probably are the minds, even
in these republican States, that fully comprehend the aptness of that
phrase, "THE GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE,"
which we inherit from the lips of Abraham Lincoln; a formula whose
verbal shape is homely wit, but whose scope includes both the totality
and all minutiae of the lesson.
The People! Like our huge earth itself, which, to ordinary scansion,
is full of vulgar contradictions and offence, man, viewed in the lump,
displeases, and is a constant puzzle and affront to the merely educated
classes. The rare, cosmical, artist-mind, lit with the Infinite, alone
confronts his manifold and oceanic qualities--but taste, intelligence
and culture, (so-called,) have been against the masses, and remain so.