Complete Prose Works
[27] A: After the rest is satiated, all interest culminates in the field
of persons, and never flags there. Accordingly in this field have the
great poets and literatuses signally toil'd. They too, in all ages, all
lands, have been creators, fashioning, making types of men and women,
as Adam and Eve are made in the divine fable. Behold, shaped, bred by
orientalism, feudalism, through their long growth and culmination, and
breeding back in return--(when shall we have an equal series, typical of
democracy?)--behold, commencing in primal Asia, (apparently formulated,
in what beginning we know, in the gods of the mythologies, and coming
down thence,) a few samples out of the countless product, bequeath'd to
the moderns, bequeath'd to America as studies. For the men, Yudishtura,
Rama, Arjuna, Solomon, most of the Old and New Testament characters;
Achilles, Ulysses, Theseus, Prometheus, Hercules, Aeneas, Plutarch's
heroes; the Merlin of Celtic bards; the Cid, Arthur and his knights,
Siegfried and Hagen in the Nibelungen; Roland and Oliver; Roustam in
the Shah-Nemah; and so on to Milton's Satan, Cervantes' Don Quixote,
Shakspere's Hamlet, Richard II., Lear, Marc Antony, &c., and the modern
Faust. These, I say, are models, combined, adjusted to other standards
than America's, but of priceless value to her and hers.
Among women, the goddesses of the Egyptian, Indian and Greek
mythologies, certain Bible characters, especially the Holy Mother;
Cleopatra, Penelope; the portraits of Brunhelde and Chriemhilde in the
Nibelungen; Oriana, Una, &c.; the modern Consuelo, Walter Scott's Jeanie
and Effie Deans, &c., &c. (Yet woman portray'd or outlin'd at her best,
or as perfect human mother, does not hitherto, it seems to me, fully
appear in literature.)
[28] Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict.
Science, (twin in its fields, of Democracy in its)--Science, testing
absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the
world--a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious--surely never
again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet
remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative
literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of
the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous,
fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.
[29] It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence
of that fervid comradeship, (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the
amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going
beyond it,) that I look for the counterbalance and offset of
our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the
spiritualization thereof. Many will say it is a dream, and will not
follow my inferences: but I confidently expect a time when there will
be seen, running like a half-hid warp through all the myriad audible and
visible worldly interests of America, threads of manly friendship, fond
and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees
hitherto unknown--not only giving tone to individual character, and
making it unprecedently emotional, muscular, heroic, and refined, but
having the deepest relations to general politics. I say democracy infers
such loving comradeship, as its most inevitable twin or counterpart,
without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of
perpetuating itself.
[30] I am reminded as I write that out of this very conscience, or idea
of conscience, of intense moral right, and in its name and strain'd
construction, the worst fanaticisms, wars, persecutions, murders, &c.,
have yet, in all lands, in the past, been broach'd, and have come to
their devilish fruition. Much is to be said--but I may say here, and
in response, that side by side with the unflagging stimulation of the
elements of religion and conscience must henceforth move with
equal sway, science, absolute reason, and the general proportionate
development of the whole man. These scientific facts, deductions, are
divine too--precious counted parts of moral civilization, and, with
physical health, indispensable to it, to prevent fanaticism. For
abstract religion, I perceive, is easily led astray, ever credulous, and
is capable of devouring, remorseless, like fire and flame. Conscience,
too, isolated from all else, and from the emotional nature, may but
attain the beauty and purity of glacial, snowy ice. We want, for these
States, for the general character, a cheerful, religious fervor, endued
with the ever-present modifications of the human emotions, friendship,
benevolence, with a fair field for scientific inquiry, the right of
individual judgment, and always the cooling influences of material
Nature.
[31] The culmination and fruit of literary artistic expression, and
its final fields of pleasure for the human soul, are in metaphysics,
including the mysteries of the spiritual world, the soul itself, and the
question of the immortal continuation of our identity. In all ages, the
mind of man has brought up here--and always will. Here, at least, of
whatever race or era, we stand on common ground. Applause, too, is
unanimous, antique or modern. Those authors who work well in this
field--though their reward, instead of a handsome percentage, or
royalty, may be but simply the laurel-crown of the victors in the great
Olympic games--will be dearest to humanity, and their works, however
esthetically defective, will be treasur'd forever. The altitude of
literature and poetry has always been religion--and always will be. The
Indian Vedas, the Naçkas of Zoroaster, the Tal mud of the Jews, the Old
Testament, the Gospel of Christ and his disciples, Plato's works, the
Koran of Mohammed, the Edda of Snorro, and so on toward our own day, to
Swedenborg, and to the invaluable contributions of Leibnitz, Kant and
Hegel--these, with such poems only in which, (while singing well
of persons and events, of the passions of man, and the shows of the
material universe,) the religious tone, the consciousness of mystery,
the recognition of the future, of the unknown, of Deity over and under
all, and of the divine purpose, are never absent, but indirectly give
tone to all--exhibit literature's real heights and elevations, towering
up like the great mountains of the earth.
Standing on this ground--the last, the highest, only permanent
ground--and sternly criticising, from it, all works, either of the
literary, or any art, we have peremptorily to dismiss every pretensive
production, however fine its esthetic or intellectual points, which
violates or ignores, or even does not celebrate, the central divine
idea of All, suffusing universe, of eternal trains of purpose, in
the development, by however slow degrees, of the physical, moral, and
spiritual kosmos. I say he has studied, meditated to no profit,
whatever may be his mere erudition, who has not absorbed this simple
consciousness and faith. It is not entirely new--but it is for Democracy
to elaborate it, and look to build upon and expand from it, with
uncompromising reliance. Above the doors of teaching the inscription is
to appear, Though little or nothing can be absolutely known, perceiv'd,
except from a point of view which is evanescent, yet we know at least
one permanency, that Time and Space, in the will of God, furnish
successive chains, completions of material births and beginnings,
solve all discrepancies, fears and doubts, and eventually fulfil
happiness--and that the prophecy of those births, namely spiritual
results, throws the true arch over all teaching, all science. The local
considerations of sin, disease, deformity, ignorance, death, &c., and
their measurement by the superficial mind, and ordinary legislation and
theology, are to be met by science, boldly accepting, promulging this
faith, and planting the seeds of superber laws--of the explication of
the physical universe through the spiritual--and clearing the way for a
religion, sweet and unimpugnable alike to little child or great savan.
ORIGINS OF ATTEMPTED SECESSION
_Not the whole matter, but some side facts worth conning to-day and any
day_.
I consider the war of attempted secession, 1860-'65, not as a struggle
of two distinct and separate peoples, but a conflict (often happening,
and very fierce) between the passions and paradoxes of one and the same
identity--perhaps the only terms on which that identity could really
become fused, homogeneous and lasting. The origin and conditions out
of which it arose, are full of lessons, full of warnings yet to the
Republic--and always will be. The underlying and principal of those
origins are yet singularly ignored. The Northern States were really
just as responsible for that war, (in its precedents, foundations,
instigations,) as the South. Let me try to give my view. From the age of
21 to 40, (1840-'60,) I was interested in the political movements of the
land, not so much as a participant, but as an observer, and a regular
voter at the elections. I think I was conversant with the springs of
action, and their workings, not only in New York city and Brooklyn,
but understood them in the whole country, as I had made leisurely tours
through all the middle States, and partially through the western and
southern, and down to New Orleans, in which city I resided for some
time. (I was there at the close of the Mexican war--saw and talk'd with
General Taylor, and the other generals and officers, who were feted and
detain'd several days on their return victorious from that expedition.)
Of course many and very contradictory things, specialties, developments,
constitutional views, &c., went to make up the origin of the war--but
the most significant general fact can be best indicated and stated as
follows: For twenty-five years previous to the outbreak, the controling
"Democratic" nominating conventions of our Republic--starting from their
primaries in wards or districts, and so expanding to counties,
powerful cities, States, and to the great Presidential nominating
conventions--were getting to represent and be composed of more and more
putrid and dangerous materials. Let me give a schedule, or list, of
one of these representative conventions for a long time before, and
inclusive of, that which nominated Buchanan. (Remember they had come to
be the fountains and tissues of the American body politic, forming, as
it were, the whole blood, legislation, office-holding, &c.) One of these
conventions, from 1840 to '60, exhibited a spectacle such as could
never be seen except in our own age and in these States. The members who
composed it were, seven-eighths of them, the meanest kind of bawling and
blowing office-holders, office-seekers, pimps, malignants, conspirators,
murderers, fancy-men, custom-house clerks, contractors, kept-editors,
spaniels well-train'd to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels,
disunionists, terrorists, mail-riflers, slave-catchers, pushers of
slavery, creatures of the President, creatures of would-be Presidents,
spies, bribers, compromisers, lobbyers, sponges, ruin'd sports,
expell'd gamblers, policy-backers, monte-dealers, duellists, carriers
of conceal'd weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarr'd inside with vile
disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people's money
and harlots' money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy
combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth. And whence came they?
From back-yards and bar-rooms; from out of the custom-houses, marshals'
offices, post-offices, and gambling-hells; from the President's house,
the jail, the station-house; from unnamed by-places, where devilish
disunion was hatch'd at midnight; from political hearses, and from the
coffins inside, and from the shrouds inside of the coffins; from the