Complete Prose Works
produce,) haunts of heroes long dead, saints, poets, divinities, with
deepest associations 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 pass'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--accumulations! 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
institutes 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, appetites, under which nearly every man of us, (often
the greatest brawler for freedom,) is enslav'd. Can we attain such
enfranchisement--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-CLASSES--AMERICA'S LITERATURE
For certain purposes, literary productions through all the recorded ages
may be roughly divided into two classes. 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 class, 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 class, 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
God 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 associations, 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
association, (and the world cannot get along without it,) the true
nobility 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 shores 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 assassin 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 damn 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 pass,
When a trifle small as this,
Moving and bartering nigger 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 masses--progress!--bah!
Words that tickle and sound;
But claiming to rule o'er "practical men"
Is very different ground.
Beyond all such we know a term
Charming to ears and eyes,
With it we'll stab young Freedom,
And do it in disguise;
Speak soft, ye wily dough-faces--
That term is "compromise."
And what if children, growing up,
In future seasons read
The thing we do? and heart and tongue
Accurse us for the deed?
The future cannot touch us;
The present gain we heed.
Then, all together, dough-faces!
Let's stop the exciting clatter,
And pacify slave-breeding wrath
By yielding all the matter;
For otherwise, as sure as guns,
The Union it will shatter.
Besides, to tell the honest truth
(For us an innovation,)
Keeping in with the slave power
Is our personal salvation;
We've very little to expect
From t' other part of the nation.
Besides it's plain at Washington
Who likeliest wins the race,
What earthly chance has "free soil"
For any good fat place?
While many a daw has feather'd his nest,
By his creamy and meek dough-face.
Take heart, then, sweet companions,
Be steady, Scripture Dick!
Webster, Cooper, Walker,
To your allegiance stick!
With Brooks, and Briggs and Phoenix,
Stand up through thin and thick!
We do not ask a bold brave front;
We never try that game;
'Twould bring the storm upon our heads,
A huge mad storm of shame;
Evade it, brothers--"compromise"
Will answer just the same.
PAUMANOK.
DEATH IN THE SCHOOL-ROOM (_A Fact_)
Ting-a-ling-ling-ling! went the little bell on the teacher's desk of a
village-school one morning, when the studies of the earlier part of the
day were about half completed. It was well understood that this was a
command for silence and attention; and when these had been obtained, the
master spoke. He was a low thick-set man, and his name was Lugare.
"Boys," said he, "I have had a complaint enter'd, that last night some
of you were stealing fruit from Mr. Nichols's garden. I rather think I
know the thief. Tim Barker, step up here, sir."