Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864

Works of art are dry subjects of description, and that too just in the proportion of their exquisiteness to behold. Things made for the eye must be presented to the eye. Works of a coarse and comic nature can, indeed, be described so as to produce their effect. Here, for instance, is a railroad-station man. Such in Bavaria, dressed in their quaint little red coats, must stand with the hand to the hat as if in token of profound respect for the train while it passes. This one, when lathered and half shaved, was suddenly called by the train, and in this predicament he stands while it passes. The best new work in the exhibition was one in water colors by Professor Schwind, of Munich, setting forth the popular German myth of the seven ravens. It sold to a prince for seven thousand florins. I know better than to attempt a description. The 'Raising of Jairus' Daughter,' a picture sent on by the king of Prussia, gave the best impression I have ever had of life once departed, and now suddenly beginning again to quiver on the lip and gleam in the eye; or as Willis has it:

'And suddenly a flushShot o'er her forehead and along her lips,And through her cheek the rallied color ran;And the still outline of her graceful formStirred in the linen vesture;'

thus changing the sadness of the family assembled round the couch into a lustre sympathetic with that of her own reopened eyes.

These specimens have been given to show that such subjects are incapable of description. The exhibition continued from June to October, and the collection was so extensive that a shorter period would have been scarcely sufficient for the study of works exhibited. During this time the characteristic enthusiasm and jealousies of the artists were variously exemplified. The delightful hours spent in walking through these halls will be among my latest remembrances.

This whole festive period culminated with the closing days of September. The city had been unusually full all summer, but as its great birthday festival approached, the crowds thickened, until its capacity for lodging room had been transcended. All parts of Germany were represented, nor did delegates from the rest of the civilized world fail.

The question naturally arises, whether New York, Boston, or Philadelphia has a history which would appear well in such a drama! Although our history extends back over little more than one fourth of the period occupied by that of Munich, it might afford this material. The annals of public events would be found preserved with great fulness and distinctness—the archives of city and state councils and of the churches would supply the needed facts—but who could furnish the fashions, tools, and implements of each successive age from that of the Pilgrim fathers to that of the great rebellion? Who would perform the labor of research necessary to ascertain what they were? Where is the American court, supported at an expense of several millions per annum, to preserve all these in collections, or to get them up for court theatres? Who would pay for making all these for a procession of twenty thousand persons, with all the necessary horses and carriages? And surely, if we could not feel the confidence that everything was historical, all our interest in the display would be gone. I am apprehensive that we shall be obliged to leave such exhibitions to those countries which have hereditary heads, and, making a virtue of necessity, console ourselves with the thought that we have something better.

THE DANISH SAILOR

Far by the Baltic shore,Where storied ElsinoreRears its dark walls, invincible to time;Where yet Horatio walks,And with Marcellus talks,And Hamlet dreams soliloquy sublime;Though forms of Old Romance,Mail-clad, with shield and lance,Are laid in 'fair Ophelia's' watery tomb,Still, passion rules her hour,Love, Hate, Revenge, have power,And hearts, in Elsinore, know joy and gloom.Grouped round a massy gunBlack sleeping in the sun,The belted gunners list to many a taleTold by grim Jarl, the tar,Old Danish dog of war,Of his young days in battle and in gale.The medal at his breast,The single-sleeved blue vest,His thin, white hair, tossed by the Norway breeze,His knotted, horny hand,And wrinkled face, dark tanned,Tell of the times when Nelson sailed the seas.Steam-winged, upon the tidesA gallant vessel glides,Two royal flags float blended at her fore,Gay convoyed by a fleet,Whose answering guns repeatThe joyous 'God speeds' thundered from the shore.'Look, comrades! there she goes,Old Denmark's Royal Rose,Plucked but to wither on a foreign strand;Can Copenhagen's damesForget their country's shames—Her sons, unblushing, clasp a British hand?'Since that dark day of shameWhich blends with Nelson's fame,When the prince of all the land led us on,I little thought to seeOur noblest bend the kneeTo any English queen, or her son.'What the fate of battle gaveTo our victor on the wave,Was as nothing to the bitter, conscious sting,That our haughty island foeStruck a sudden, traitor blow,In the blessed peace of God and the king.'Ay, you were not yet bornOn that cursed April morn,When they sprang like red wolves on their prey,And our princeliest and bestBy our humblest lay at rest,In the heart's blood of Denmark, on that day.'And now, their lady queen,O'er our martyrs' graves between,Stoops to cull our cherished bud for her heir,And the servile, fickle crowdShout their shameless joy aloud,All but one old crippled tar—who was there!'Till the memory shall failOf that treach'rous, bloody tale,Or the grief, and the rage, and the wrong,Shall enforce atonement due,On some Danish Waterloo,To be chanted by our countrymen in song,'I will keep my love and truthFor the Denmark of my youth,Nor clasp hands with her enemies alive;Ay, I'd train this very gunOn that British prince and son,Who comes here, in his arrogance, to wive.'When I gave my good right arm,And my blood was spouting warmO'er my dying brother's face, as we lay,I played a better part,I bore a prouder heart,Than the proudest in that pageant bears to-day.'—There floats the Royal Bride,On that unreturning tide;—By the blood of all the sea-kings of yore,'Twere better for her fame,That Denmark sunk her shameWhere the maelstrom might drown it in his roar!'There was silence for a space,As they gazed upon his face,Dark with grief, and with passion overwrought;When out spoke a foreign tongue,That gunner-group among:'Neow old Jarl ses the thing he hed'nt ought.'This idee of keeping madHalf a cent'ry, is too bad;'Tis onchristian, and poor policy beside;For they say that the young manHas the 'brass to buy the pan,'And her folks are putty sure that he'll provide.'The old seaman's scornful eyeGlanced mute, but stern reply,And the Yankee vowed and swore to me, the bard,That old Jarl, that very night,By the northern moon's cold light,Talked with Hamlet's father's ghost in the back yard.

AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

There are two opposite standpoints from which American civilization will be regarded both by the present and future generations; opposite both in respect to the views they give of American society and the judgment to be formed thereon: so opposing, in fact, that they must ever give rise to conflicting opinions, which can only be reconciled in individual instances by the actual occurrence of great events, and never when dealing with generalities. These two far distant points of view are the foreign and the native. We are, more perhaps than any other nation in existence, a peculiar people. Our institutions are new and in most respects original, and cannot be judged by the experience of other nations. Our manner of life and modes of thought—all our ideas of individual and national progress, are sui generis, and our experience, both social and political, as based upon those ideas, has been similar to that of no other race which history records. Hence to the foreign historian or philosopher our inner life is a sealed book; he can neither understand the hidden springs of action which govern all the movements of our body politic, nor appreciate the motives or the aspirations of the American mind: in a word, he can never be imbued with the spirit of our intellectual and moral life, which alone can give the key-note to prophecy, the pitch and tone to true and impartial history. And he who, reasoning from the few à priori truths of human nature, or from those characteristics which the American mind possesses in common with that of the Old World, shall pretend to treat of our systems and our intellectual life, or to map out our future destiny, will be as much at fault as the historian of a thousand years ago who should attempt to portray the events of this our day and generation. The historian of American civilization must not only be among us, but of us—one who is able not only to identify his material interests with those of the great American people, but also to partake of our moral habitudes, to be actuated by the same feelings, desires, aspirations, and be governed by the same motives. By such an one alone, who is able to understand our moral life in all its phases and bearings, can a clear and truthful view be taken of the great events which are continually agitating our society, and their bearings upon our present and future civilization be correctly estimated.

It is precisely from lack of this sympathy and of appreciation of the difficulties under which we have labored, that America has suffered in the opinion of the world. For the foreign view, looking upon us not as a new people, but as the offshoot of an old and cultivated race, has conceded to us little more than a certain mechanical ingenuity in fitting together the parts of an edifice built upon a foundation already laid for us away back in the ages—a carrying out of plans already perfected for us, and requiring little of originality for their development; forgetting that oftentimes the laying of the foundation is the easiest part of the work, while the erection and embellishment of the superstructure has taxed the efforts of the loftiest genius. In so far as regards the development of the national mind, the strengthening of the originating and energetic faculties, and the capability of profound and well directed thought arising therefrom, we are, as a race, deeply indebted to our progenitors of the Old World, and we have reaped therefrom a great advantage over other nationalities in their inception. But aside from these benefits, the cultivation of the race before the settlement of our country has been rather a hamper upon our progress. For here was to be inaugurated a new civilization, upon a different basis from and entirely incompatible with that of the Old World; here was to be established an idea antagonistic to those of the preexisting world, and evolving a new and more progressive social life, which needed not only a new sphere and new material, but also entire freedom from the restraints of the old-time civilization. And it is harder to unlearn an old lesson than to learn a new. The institutions and modes of thought of the Old World are to the last degree unfavorable to the progress of such a nationality as ours. Their tendency being toward the aggrandizement of the few and the centralization of power, renders them wholly incompatible with that freedom of thought and action, that opening up of large fields of exertion as well as of the road to distinction and eminence, with all their incentives to effort, which are the very life of a majestic republic stretching over a large portion of the earth's surface, embracing such mixed nationalities, and founded upon principles of progress both in its physical and mental relations which have rendered it in very truth a new experiment among the nations. We had first to forget the divine right of kings, and the invidious distinctions of class, with all their deep-seated and time-honored prejudices, and to start forward in a different and hitherto despised path toward which the iron hand of our necessity pointed, and in which all men should be considered equal in their rights, and the position of each should depend, not upon the distance to which he could trace a proud genealogy, but upon the energy with which he should grapple with the stern realities of life, the honesty and uprightness with which he should tread its path, and the use he should make of the blessings which God and his own exertions bestowed upon him. We had to learn the great but simple lesson that

'The rank is but the guinea's stamp,The man's the man for a' that;'

and in so doing, to accept, for a time, the position of the Pariahs of Christendom, through the imputation of degrading all things high and noble to the rank of the low and vulgar, of casting the pearls of a lofty and ennobled class before the swinish multitude, of throwing open the doors of the treasury, that creatures of low, plebeian blood might grasp the crown jewels which had for ages been kept sacred to the patrician few; in a word, we had to take upon ourselves all the odium of a despised democracy—a moral agrarianism which should make common property of all blessings and privileges, and mingle together all things, pure and impure, in one common hotch-potch of corruption and degradation. Greater heresy than all this was not then known, and the philosopher of to-day has little conception of the sacrifice required of those who would at that time accept such a position.

Another and not less important lesson which our ancestors had to learn was, that national prosperity which depends upon the learning and refinement or energy of a certain privileged class, can never be otherwise than ephemeral; that the common people—the low plebeians, whom they had been taught to consider of the least importance in the state, are in reality the strength of the land; and that in the amelioration of their condition, in the education and mental training of the masses, while at the same time placing before them the highest incentives to individual exertion, lies the only sure basis of an enduring prosperity—that the only healthful national growth is that which is made up of the individual strivings of the great mass rather than the self-interested movements of the few; and as a consequence of this truth, that the privileged minority is really the least important of the two classes in any community. In the infancy of government, when a rude and unlettered people are little able to take care of themselves, the establishment of class distinctions is undoubtedly conducive to progress, as it tends to unite the people, thereby counteracting the thousand petty jealousies and strifes and bickerings which invariably beset an infant people, and to organize and systematize all progressive effort. It is, in fact, a putting of the people to school under such wholesome restraints as shall compel them forward while guarding them against those evil influences which militate against their prosperity. But in the course of events the time comes when these restraints are no longer necessary, but rather become hampers upon the wheels of progress; and when that period arrives, all these invidious distinctions should, in a well-regulated state, gradually disappear and give place to that freedom which is essential to individual advancement as the basis of national power. Trained as our ancestors had been to consider these distinctions divinely appointed, it was no easy task for them to abrogate so aged and apparently sacred a system, and nothing but the material evidence before their eyes in the experience of their own society, convincing them that such a course was an actual necessity of their future well-being, could have induced them so to depart from the teachings of their progenitors. Nor was it less difficult to determine how far these safeguards of the olden time might safely be dispensed with, or where or how deeply the knife should be applied which, in the fallibility of human judgment, might possibly cut away some main root of their social organization. Here was required the exercise of the profoundest wisdom and the most careful discretion—wisdom unassisted by any experience in the past history of the world other than that of the utter failure of all past experiments in any way similar to their own. To us of to-day, viewed in the light of intervening experience and of the increased knowledge of human affairs, this may seem a little thing; but to them it was not so, for the path was new and untried, and they were surrounded by the thickest of darkness. Thus it will be seen that in the founding of our system there were great difficulties, which only the loftiest aims and the utmost firmness and determination in the cause of the good and the true, with the liveliest sense of the necessities and the yearnings of human nature, and the true end of all human existence, could have overcome,—difficulties which, with all the cultivation of their past, rendered their task not less arduous than that of the founders of any community recorded in history even among the rudest and most savage of peoples. And for all their energy and perseverance the world has not yet given them the credit which is their due, although the yearly developing results of their labors are gradually restoring them to their proper position in the appreciation of humanity. And the time will come when their memory will be cherished all over the earth as that of the greatest benefactors of the human kind. As the Alpine glacier year after year heaves out to its surface the bodies of those who many decades ago were buried beneath the everlasting snows, so time in its revolutions heaves up to the view of the world, one by one, the great facts of the buried past, to be carefully laid away in the graveyard of memory, with a towering monument above them to mark to all succeeding ages the spot where they have wrought in the interest of humanity.

Another evil effect of this same foreign view is to lead the world to expect of us, the descendants of an old and polished civilization, more than is warranted by the facts of our history or even by the capabilities of human nature in its present stage. And this, too, arises from a false estimate of the difficulties which have beset us on every side, and from the paucity of the world's experience, and consequent knowledge, of such experiments as our own. The march of human advancement has but just begun in this its new path; and it is but little wonder that, excited by our past successes, and stimulated to an inordinate degree as their ideas of progress have become through the new truths which our efforts have brought to light, the friends of human freedom all over the world should expect from us more astonishing developments, more rapid progress, than is compatible with the frailties and fallibilities of our humanity. Hence in the light of this morbid view our greatest successes are looked upon as somewhat below the standard which our advantages demand.

With the foreign view we, as a nation, have nothing to do. We must be content to act entirely independently of the opinions of the outside world, being only careful steadfastly to pursue the path of right, leaving to future ages to vindicate our ideas and our motives. So only can we possess that true national independence which is the foundation of all national dignity and worth, and the source of all progress. We must free ourselves from all the hampering influences of old-time dogmas and worn-out theories of social life, content to submit to the aspersions of Old-World malice, confident that time will prove the correctness of our policy. So only can we throw wide open the doors of investigation, and give free scope to those truths which will not fail to follow the earnest strivings of a great people for the purest right and the highest good.

In estimating any civilization at its true value, the law of God is obviously the highest standard. Yet in these days of divided opinion and extended scepticism, when scarcely any two hold exactly the same religious views, and when all manner of beliefs are professedly founded on Holy Writ, such a comparison would only result in as many different estimates as there are reflecting minds, and the investigation would be in no degree advanced. Even the moral sense of our own community is so divided upon the distinctions of abstract right, that the application of such a standard to our civilization would only open endless fields of useless because interested and bigoted discussions.

There are two other and more feasible methods of conducting such an investigation; the first of which is that of comparing our own civilization with that of Europe; marking the differences, and judging of them according to our knowledge of human nature and the light of past experience and analogy. Yet such a course presents the serious objection of preventing an impartial judgment through the strong temptation to self-laudation, which is in itself the blinding of reason as well as the counteraction of all aspirations for a still higher good.

The third and last method is that which takes cognizance of the most obvious and deeply felt evils connected with our own system, and reasoning from universally conceded principles of abstract right, and from the highest moral standard of our own society, to study how they may best be remedied and errors most successfully combated. From such a course of investigation truth cannot fail to be evolved, and the moral appreciation of the thinker to be heightened. For such a method presents less danger of partiality from local prejudices, religious bias, or national antipathy. And such is the method which we shall endeavor to pursue.

Judging from mankind's sense of right, of justice, and of that moral nobility which each individual's spiritual worthiness seems to demand, a pure democracy is the highest and most perfect form of government. But such a system presupposes a perfect humanity as its basis, a humanity which no portion of the earth has yet attained or is likely to attain for many ages to come. Hence the vices as well as the weaknesses of human nature render certain restraints necessary, which are more or less severe according as the nation is advanced in moral excellence and intellectual cultivation, and which must gradually disappear as the race progresses, giving place to others newer and more appropriate to the changing times and conditions of men. Under this view that progress in the science of government is alone healthy which keeps exact pace with the moral progress of the nation, and tends toward a pure democracy in exactly the degree in which the people become fitted to appreciate, to rationally enjoy, and faithfully guard the blessings of perfect liberty. Too rapid progress leads to political anarchy by stimulating, to a degree unsustained by their acquirements and natural ability, the aspirations of the ambitious and the reckless, thereby begetting and nationalizing a spirit of lawlessness which grasps continually at unmerited honors, and strives to make all other and higher considerations bend to that of individual advancement and personal vanity. The truth of this position is seen in the utter failure of all attempted democratic systems in the past, which may be traced to this too eager haste in the march of human freedom, ending invariably in the blackest of despotism, as well as from the fact in our own history that every era of unusual political corruption and reckless strife for position and power, has followed close upon the moral abrogation of some one of those safeguards which the wisdom of our fathers threw around our political system.

On the other hand, advancement which does not keep pace with the expansion of thought, the intellectual development, and consequent capacity of the people for self-government, not only offers no encouragement to effort, but actually discourages all striving, and blunts the appetites of the searchers for truth. It fossilizes the people, retards the march of intellect by its reactionary force, and rolls backward the wheels of all progress, till the nation becomes a community of dull, contented plodders, fixed in the ruts of a bygone age, suffering all its energy and life to rust away, day by day, in inaction. Such we find to be the case with those nations of the Old World which are still ruled by the effete systems of a feudal age. The governmental policy and the intellectual status of the masses mutually react upon each other, effectually neutralizing all progress, whether moral or physical.

For these reasons that nicely graduated mean between political recklessness and national old fogyism, which alone guarantees an enduring progress, is the object of search to all disinterested political reformers. For only by following such a golden mean, in which political reform shall keep even pace with intellectual and moral advancement, can physical and mental progress be made mutually to sustain each other in the onward march. Yet this mean is extremely difficult to find, for though we be guided by all the experience of the past, and earnestly and sincerely endeavor to profit by the failures as well as the successes of those who have gone before us, the paths of experiment are so infinite and the combinations of method so boundless, that the wisest may easily be led astray. Hence the failures of the republics of the past, however pure the motives and lofty the aims of their founders, may be attributed to a leaning to one side or the other of this strait and narrow way, which lies so closely concealed amid the myriad ramifications of the paths of method. The slightest divergence, if it be not corrected, like the infinitesimal divergence of two straight lines, goes on increasing to all time, till that which was at first imperceptible, becomes at last a boundless ocean of intervening space, which no human effort can bridge.