Now no sooner do men lose hold upon fact than they inevitably begin to wither. They resemble a tree drawn with all its roots from the earth; the juices already imbibed may sustain it awhile, but with every passing day will sustain it less. If Louis Napoleon is so removed from conversation with reality as not to perceive the colossal satire implied in his gift, it will soon require more vigor than he possesses to keep astride the Gallic steed. That Chinese etiquette explains the condition of the Chinese nation. Indeed, it is easy to give a recipe for mummying men alive. Take one into keeping, prescribe everything, thoughts, actions, manners, so that he never shall find either permission or opportunity to ask his own intellect, What is true? nor his own heart, What is right? nor to consider within himself what is intrinsically good and worthy of a man; and if he does not rebel, you will make him as good a mummy as Egyptian catacombs can boast.
The capital art of life is to renew and augment your power by its expenditure. It was intimated some eighteen centuries since that the highest are obtained only by loss of the same; and the transmutation of loss into gain is the essence and perfection of all spiritual economies. Now of this art of arts he is already master who steadily draws upon his own spiritual resources. The soul is an extraordinary well; the way to replenish is to draw from it. It is more miraculous than the widow's cruse;that simply continued unexhausted,never less, indeed, but also never more; while from this the more you take, the more remains in it. Were it, therefore, desired to arrange with forethought a scheme of life that should afford the highest invigoration, in such scheme there should be the minimum of prescription, and nothing be so sedulously avoided as the superseding of inward and active principles by outward and passive rules;that is, life would be made as much moral and spontaneous, as little political and mechanical, as possible.
And this does not ill describe our own case. No civilized nation is so little imprisoned in precedents and traditions. Our national maxim is, "The world is too much governed." In the degree of this release we are, of course, thrown back upon underlying principles and universal persuasions,since these of necessity become, in the absence of more artificial ties, the chief bond of such peace and coöperation as obtain. Leave two men to deal with each other, not merely as subjects or citizens, but as men, and they must recur to that which is at once native and common to both, to the universal elements in their consciousness, that is, to principles; and thus the most ordinary mutual dealing becomes, in some degree, a spiritual discipline. Harness these men in precedents, and whip them through the same action with penalties, and they will gain only such discipline as the ox obtains in the furrow and the horse between the thills. Statutes serve men, but lame them. They render morality mechanical. Men learn to say not, "It is right," but, "It is enacted." And the difference is immense. "Right" sends one to his own soul, and requires him to produce the living law out of that; "Enacted" sends him to the Revised Statutes, or the Reports, and there it ends. The latter gives a bit of information; the former a step in development. Laws are necessary; but laws which are not necessary are more and worse than unnecessary;they pilfer power from the soul; they intercept the absolute uses of life; they incarcerate men, and make Caspar Hausers of them. Now in America not only is there already much emancipation from those outside regulations which supersede moral and private judgment, but the tendency toward a fresh life daily gains impetus. That repeal of the Missouri Compromise, however blamable, has several happy features, and prominent among these must be reckoned the illustration it affords of a growing disposition to say, "No putting To-day into Yesterday's coffin; let the Present live and be its own lord."
We need be at no loss to discover the effects of the combined influences here stated. The ordinary phrases of our country-people denote an alert judgment,as, "I reckon," "I calculate," "I guess." The inventiveness which characterizes Americans, the multiplicity of patents, comes from the tendency to go behind the actual, to test possibilities, to bring everything to the standard of thought. Emerson dissolves England in the alembic of his brain, and makes a thought of that. Our politics are yearly becoming more and more questions of principle, questions of right and wrong. There is almost infinite promise and significance in this gradual victory of the moral over the political, of life over mechanism. Mr. Benton complains of the "speculative philanthropy" of New England, because it suggests questions upon which he could not meet his constituents, and interferes with his domestic arrangements. It is much as if one should pray God to abolish the sun because his own eyes are sore!
* * * * *We now pass to the second great tendency which, as is here affirmed, organization and moral discipline are unitedly tending to establish on this shore. An inevitable consequence of the nervous intensity and susceptibility characteristic of Americans is an access of personal magnetism, or influence; we keenly feel each other, have social impressibility. The nervous is the public element in the body, the mediating and communicating power. It is the agent of every sense,of sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell,and of the power of speech. It is the vehicle of all fellow-feeling, of all social sympathy. It introduces man to man, and makes strangers acquainted. And a most unceremonious master of these ceremonies it is;running indiscriminately across ranks; introducing beggar and baron; forcing the haughtiest master, spite of his theories, to feel that the slave is a man and a fellow; compelling the prince to acknowledge the peasant,not with a shake of the hand, perhaps, but, it may be, with knee-shakings and heart-shakings. A terrible leveller and democrat is this master element in the human frame; yet king and kaiser must entertain him in courts and on thrones. Now the high development of this in the American Man renders him communicative, gives him a quick interest in men; he cannot let them pass without giving and taking. Hence the much-blamed inquisitiveness,"What is your name? Where do you live? Where are you going? What is your business? Do you eat baked beans on Sunday?" Mrs. Trollope is horrified; it is a bore; but one likes the man the better for it. He is interested in you;that is the simple secret of all. King Carlyle calls us "eighteen millions of bores." To be sure; is that so bad? The primitive English element was pirate; let the primitive American be bore. The fathers of the Britain that is took men by the throat; let the fathers of the America that is to be take them by thebutton;that is amelioration enough for one thousand years! In truth, this intense personal interest which characterizes the American, though often awkwardly manifested and troublesome, is an admirable feature in his constitution, and few traits should awaken our pride or expectation more. It is this keen fellow-feeling that fits him for the broadest and most beneficent public interest. This makes him a philanthropist. And his philanthropy is peculiar. It is not merely of the neighborhood sort, such as sends a Thanksgiving turkey to poor Robert and a hat that does not fit well to poor Peter. For here the predilection for principles and generalizations comes in, and leads him to translate his fellow-feeling into social axioms. Thus it occurs that the American is that man who is grappling most earnestly and intelligently with the problem of man's relation to man. In every village is some knot of active minds that brood over questions of this kind. The monarch newspaper of America is deeply tinged with the same hue; nor could one with a contrary complexion attain its position. This great current of human interest floats our politics; it feeds the springs of enthusiasm, coming forth in doctrines of non-resistance, of government by love, and the like; and our literature contains essays upon love and friendship which, in our judgment, are not equalled in the literature of the world.
Nor is a moral discipline wanting to second this tendency. A terrible social anomaly has been forced upon us,has had time to intertwine itself with trade, with creeds, with partisan prejudice and patriotic pride, and, having become next to unconquerable, now shows that it can keep no terms and must kill or be killed. And through this the question of man's duties to man, on the broadest scale, is incessantly kept in agitation. It is like a lurid handwriting across the sky,"Learn what man should be and do to his fellow." And the companion sentence is this,"Thy justice to the strangers shall be the best security to thine own household."
* * * * *By the co-working of these two grand tendencies we obtain at once the largest speculative breadth and the closest practical and personal interest. What sweeter promise could any one ask than that of this rare and admirable combination? Thought and action have been more than sufficiently separated. The philosopher has discoursed to a few, and in the dialect of the few, in Academic shades; sanctity has hidden itself away, lost in the joy of its secret contemplations; the great world has rolled by, unhearing, unheeding,like London roaring with cataract thunder around St. Paul's, while within the choral service is performed to an audience of one. Thinking and doing have hardly recognized each other. Now we are not of those vague, enthusiastic persons who fancy that all truths are for all ears,that the highest spiritual fact can be communicated, where there is no spiritual apprehension to lay hold upon it. He that hath ears, let him hear. Nor would we attempt to confuse the functions of sayer and doer. But let there be a sympathy and understanding between them, that, when achieved, will mark an epoch in the world's history. Nowhere, at least in modern times, have thought and action approached so nearly and intimately as in America; nowhere is speculative intellect so colored with the hues of practical interest without limiting its own flight; nowhere are labor and executive power so receptive of pure intellectual suggestion. The union of what is deepest and most recondite in thought with clear-sighted sagacity has been well hit by Lowell in his description of the typical American scholar,
"Sits in a mystery calm and intense,
And looks round about him with sharp common-sense."
That is, the New Man has two things that seldom make each other's acquaintance,Sight and Insight. Accordingly, our subtilest thinker, whom the scholarly Mr. Vaughan classes with the mystics and accuses of going beyond the legitimate range even of mystics, has written such an estimate of the most practical nation in the world as has never been written of that or any other before. The American knows what is about him, has tact, sagacity, conversance with surfaces and circumstances, is the shrewdest guesser in the world; and seeing him on this side alone, one might say,This is the man of to-day, a quick worker, good to sail ships, bore mountains, buy and sell, but belonging to the surface, knowing only that. The medal turns, and lo! here is this 'cute Yankee a thinker, a mystic, fellow of the antique, Oriental in his subtilest contemplations, a rider of the sunbeam, dwelling upon Truth's sweetness with such pure devotion and delight that vigorous Mr. Kingsley must shriek, "Windrush!" "Intellectual Epicurism!" and disturb himself in a somewhat diverting manner. Pollok declaimed against the attempt to lay hold of the earth with one hand and heaven with the other. But that is the peculiar feat for which the American is born,to bring together seeing and doing, principle and practice, eternity and to-day. The American is given, they say, to extremes. True, but to both extremes; he belongs to the two antipodes. To the one he appertains by intellectual emancipation and penetrative power; to the other by his pungent element of sympathy with persons. Speaking of the older Northern States, and of the people as a whole, we affirm that their inhabitants are more speculative and more practical, the scholars know more of immediate common interests and speak more the dialect of the people, while the mechanics know more of speculative truth and understand better the necessary vocabulary of thought, than any other people.
Lyell says, that the New World is really the Old World,that there, preëminently, the antique geological formations are found, and nearer the surface than elsewhere. Thus the physical peculiarity of our continent is, that here an elaborate and highly finished surface is immediately superimposed upon the oldest rock, rock wrought in fire and kneaded with earthquake knuckles. We discover in this a symbol of the American Man. He likewise brings into near association the most ancient and the most modern. By insight he dwells in the old thoughts, the eternal truths, the meditations that rapt away the early seers into trance and dream; but he brings these into sharp contact with life, associates them with the newest work, the toil and interests of this year and day.
We shall find space to mention but one peril which besets the New Man. It is danger of physical exhaustion. Dr. Kane, the hero of two Arctic nights, came forth to the day only to die. That which makes the preëminence of our organization makes also its peril. Denmark is said to be impoverished by the disproportion of the learned to the industrial class; production is insufficient, and too much of a good thing cripples the country. The nervous system is a learned class in the body; it contributes dignity and superior uses, but makes no corn grow in the physiological fields. A brain of great animation and power is a perilous freight for the stanchest body; in a weak and shattered body it is like gold in a spent swimmer's pocket,the richer it would make him on dry land, the less chance it gives him of arriving there. That this danger is not imaginary too many are able to testify.Few scenes in Rabelais are more exquisitely ludicrous than that in which he pictures the monk Panurge in a storm at sea. The oily ecclesiastic is terrified as only a combination of hypocrite and coward can be; and, in the extremity of his craven distress, he fancies that any situation on shore, no matter how despicable, would be paradise. So at length he whines, "Oh that I were on dry land, and somebody kicking me!" In a similar mannersimilar, save that farce deepens to tragedymany a man in America of opulent mental outfit, but with only a poor wreck of a body to bear the precious cargo, must often have been tempted to cry, "Oh that I had a sound digestion, and were some part of a dunce!" In truth, we are a nation of health-hunters, betraying the want by the search. It were to be wished that an accurate computation could be made how much money has been paid in the United States, within a score of years, for patent medicines. It would buy up a kingdom of respectable dimensions. So eager is this health-hunger, that it bites at bare hooks. The "advertising man" of Arnold's Globules offers his services as nostrum-puffer-general, and appeals to past success as proof of his abilities in this line. But Arnold's Globules will sell no whit the worse. Is the amiable Mr. Knox right, after all? Doubtless, we answer, the American organization is more easily disordered than the English,just as a railway-train running at forty miles an hour is more liable to accident than one proceeding at twenty. Besides, Americans have not learned to live as these new circumstances require. The New Man is a clipper-ship, that can run out of sight of land while one of the old bluff-bowed, round-ribbed craft is creeping out of port; but, from the very nature of his superiorities, he is apt to be shorter-lived, and more likely to spring a leak in the strain of a storm. He demands nicer navigation. It will not do for him to beat over sand-bars. Yet dinner-pilotage in this country is reckless and unscientific to a degree. The land is full of wrecks hopelessly snagged upon indigestible diet. As yet, it is difficult to obtain a hearing for precaution. Men answer you out of their past experience,much like a headstrong personage who was about to attempt crossing a river in a boat sure to sink. "You will drown, if you go in that thing," said a bystander. "Never was drowned yet," was the prompt retort; and pushing off, he soon lost the opportunity to repeat that boast! But this resistance is constantly becoming less. Meantime, numbers of foreseeing men are waking up, or are already awakened, to the importance of recreation and physical culture,members of the clerical profession, to the credit of the craft be it said, taking the lead. Messrs. Beecher, Bellows, and Hale plead the cause of amusements; the author of "Saints and their Bodies" celebrates the uses and urges the need of athletic sports; gymnasia are becoming matters of course in the cities and larger towns; "The New York Tribune" attends to the matter of cookery; and it is safe to predict that the habits of the people will undergo in time the necessary changes. That health is possible to Americans ought not to be questioned. Of despair we will not listen to a word. In crossing the ocean, in the backwoods-experience which everywhere precedes cultivation, in the excitement which has followed the obliteration of social monopolies and the throwing open of the wealth of a continent to free competition, the old traditional precautions have been lost, the old household wisdoms, the old economies of health; and these we have now to reproduce for ourselves. It will be done. And when this is done, though ancient English brawn will not reappear, there will be health, and its great blessing of cheerful spirits. The special means by which this shall be accomplished we leave to the care of the gentlemen abovenamed, and their compeersmerely putting in one word for gentle exercise, and two words for the cherishing of mental health, the expulsion of morbid excitements, assume what guise they may. We should take extreme care not to admit decay at the summit. A healthy soul is a better prophylactic than belladonna. Refusing to despond respecting American health, we cheerfully trust that the genius of the New Man will find all required physical support, and due length of time for demonstrating its quality.