Complete Prose Works

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How largest triumph or failure in human life, in war or peace, may
depend on some little hidden centrality, hardly more than a drop of
blood, a pulse-beat, or a breath of air! It is certain that all these
weighty matters, democracy in America, Carlyleism, and the temperament
for deepest political or literary exploration, turn on a simple point
in speculative philosophy.

The most profound theme that can occupy the mind of man--the problem
on whose solution science, art, the bases and pursuits of nations, and
everything else, including intelligent human happiness, (here to-day,
1882, New York, Texas, California, the same as all times, all lands,)
subtly and finally resting, depends for competent outset and argument,
is doubtless involved in the query: What is the fusing explanation and
tie--what the relation between the (radical, democratic) Me, the human
identity of understanding, emotions, spirit, &c., on the one side,
of and with the (conservative) Not Me, the whole of the material
objective universe and laws, with what is behind them in time and
space, on the other side? Immanuel Kant, though he explain'd
or partially explain'd, as may be said, the laws of the human
understanding, left this question an open one. Schelling's answer, or
suggestion of answer, is (and very valuable and important, as far as
it goes,) that the same general and particular intelligence, passion,
even the standards of right and wrong, which exist in a conscious
and formulated state in man, exist in an unconscious state, or in
perceptible analogies, throughout the entire universe of external
Nature, in all its objects large or small, and all its movements and
processes--thus making the impalpable human mind, and concrete nature,
notwithstanding their duality and separation, convertible, and in
centrality and essence one. But G. F. Hegel's fuller statement of the
matter probably remains the last best word that has been said upon it,
up to date. Substantially adopting the scheme just epitomized, he so
carries it out and fortifies it and merges everything in it, with
certain serious gaps now for the first time fill'd, that it becomes a
coherent metaphysical system, and substantial answer (as far as there
can be any answer) to the foregoing question--a system which, while I
distinctly admit that the brain of the future may add to, revise, and
even entirely reconstruct, at any rate beams forth to-day, in its
entirety, illuminating the thought of the universe, and satisfying the
mystery thereof to the human mind, with a more consoling scientific
assurance than any yet.

According to Hegel the whole earth, (an old nucleus-thought, as in the
Vedas, and no doubt before, but never hitherto brought so absolutely
to the front, fully surcharged with modern scientism and facts, and
made the sole entrance to each and all,) with its infinite variety,
the past, the surroundings of to-day, or what may happen in the
future, the contrarieties of material with spiritual, and of natural
with artificial, are all, to the eye of the _ensemblist_, but
necessary sides and unfoldings, different steps or links, in the
endless process of Creative thought, which, amid numberless apparent
failures and contradictions, is held together by central and
never-broken unity--not contradictions or failures at all, but
radiations of one consistent and eternal purpose; the whole mass
of everything steadily, unerringly tending and flowing toward the
permanent _utile_ and _morale_, as rivers to oceans. As life is the
whole law and incessant effort of the visible universe, and death only
the other or invisible side of the same, so the _utile_, so truth, so
health are the continuous-immutable laws of the moral universe, and
vice and disease, with all their perturbations, are but transient,
even if ever so prevalent expressions.

To politics throughout, Hegel applies the like catholic standard and
faith. Not any one party, or any one form of government, is absolutely
and exclusively true. Truth consists in the just relations of objects
to each other. A majority or democracy may rule as outrageously and do
as great harm as an oligarchy or despotism--though far less likely to
do so. But the great evil is either a violation of the relations just
referr'd to, or of the moral law. The specious, the unjust, the cruel,
and what is called the unnatural, though not only permitted but in a
certain sense, (like shade to light,) inevitable in the divine scheme,
are by the whole constitution of that scheme, partial, inconsistent,
temporary, and though having ever so great an ostensible majority, are
certainly destin'd to failures, after causing great suffering.

Theology, Hegel translates into science.[16] All apparent
contradictions in the statement of the Deific nature by different
ages, nations, churches, points of view, are but fractional and
imperfect expressions of one essential unity, from which they all
proceed--crude endeavors or distorted parts, to be regarded both as
distinct and united. In short (to put it in our own form, or summing
up,) that thinker or analyzer or overlooker who by an inscrutable
combination of train'd wisdom and natural intuition most fully accepts
in perfect faith the moral unity and sanity of the creative scheme, in
history, science, and all life and time, present and future, is
both the truest cosmical devotee or religioso, and the profoundest
philosopher. While he who, by the spell of himself and his
circumstance, sees darkness and despair in the sum of the workings of
God's providence, and who, in that, denies or prevaricates, is, no
matter how much piety plays on his lips, the most radical sinner and
infidel.

I am the more assured in recounting Hegel a little freely here,[17]
not only for offsetting the Carlylean letter and spirit-cutting it
out all and several from the very roots, and below the roots--but to
counterpoise, since the late death and deserv'd apotheosis of Darwin,
the tenets of the evolutionists. Unspeakably precious as those are to
biology, and henceforth indispensable to a right aim and estimate in
study, they neither comprise or explain everything--and the last word
or whisper still remains to be breathed, after the utmost of those
claims, floating high and forever above them all, and above technical
metaphysics. While the contributions which German Kant and Fichte and
Schelling and Hegel have bequeath'd to humanity--and which English
Darwin has also in his field--are indispensable to the erudition of
America's future, I should say that in all of them, and the best of
them, when compared with the lightning flashes and flights of the old
prophets and _exaltes_, the spiritual poets and poetry of all lands,
(as in the Hebrew Bible,) there seems to be, nay certainly is,
something lacking--something cold, a failure to satisfy the deepest
emotions of the soul--a want of living glow, fondness, warmth, which
the old _exaltes_ and poets supply, and which the keenest modern
philosophers so far do not.

Upon the whole, and for our purposes, this man's name certainly
belongs on the list with the just-specified, first-class moral
physicians of our current era--and with Emerson and two or three
others--though his prescription is drastic, and perhaps destructive,
while theirs is assimilating, normal and tonic. Feudal at the core,
and mental offspring and radiation of feudalism as are his books, they
afford ever-valuable lessons and affinities to democratic America.
Nations or individuals, we surely learn deepest from unlikeness, from
a sincere opponent, from the light thrown even scornfully on dangerous
spots and liabilities. (Michel Angelo invoked heaven's special
protection against his friends and affectionate flatterers; palpable
foes he could manage for himself.) In many particulars Carlyle was
indeed, as Froude terms him, one of those far-off Hebraic utterers,
a new Micah or Habbakuk. His words at times bubble forth with abysmic
inspiration. Always precious, such men; as precious now as any time.
His rude, rasping, taunting, contradictory tones--what ones are
more wanted amid the supple, polish'd, money--worshipping,
Jesus-and-Judas-equalizing, suffrage-sovereignty echoes of current
America? He has lit up our Nineteenth century with the light of a
powerful, penetrating, and perfectly honest intellect of the first
class, turn'd on British and European politics, social life,
literature, and representative personages--thoroughly dissatisfied
with all, and mercilessly exposing the illness of all. But while he
announces the malady, and scolds and raves about it, he himself, born
and bred in the same atmosphere, is a mark'd illustration of it.

Notes:

[13] It will be difficult for the future--judging by his books,
personal dissympathies, &c.,--to account for the deep hold this author
has taken on the present age, and the way he has color'd its method
and thought. I am certainly at a loss to account for it all as
affecting myself. But there could be no view, or even partial picture,
of the middle and latter part of our Nineteenth century, that did
not markedly include Thomas Carlyle. In his case (as so many others,
literary productions, works of art, personal identities, events,)
there has been an impalpable something more effective than the
palpable. Then I find no better text, (it is always important to have
a definite, special, even oppositional, living man to start from,) for
sending out certain speculations and comparisons for home use. Let us
see what they amount to--those reactionary doctrines, fears, scornful
analyses of democracy--even from the most erudite and sincere mind of
Europe.

[14] Not the least mentionable part of the case, (a streak, it may
be, of that humor with which history and fate love to contrast their
gravity,) is that although neither of my great authorities during
their lives consider'd the United States worthy of serious mention,
all the principal works of both might not inappropriately be this day
collected and bound up under the conspicuous title: _Speculations for
the use of North America, and Democracy there with the relations
of the same to Metaphysics, including Lessons and Warnings
(encouragements too, and of the vastest,) from the Old World to the
New._

[15] I hope I shall not myself fall into the error I charge upon
him, of prescribing a specific for indispensable evils. My utmost
pretension is probably but to offset that old claim of the exclusively
curative power of first-class individual men, as leaders and rulers,
by the claims, and general movement and result, of ideas. Something
of the latter kind seems to me the distinctive theory of America,
of democracy, and of the modern--or rather, I should say, it _is_
democracy, and _is_ the modern.

[16] I am much indebted to J. Gostick's abstract.

[17] I have deliberately repeated it all, not only in offset to
Carlyle' s everlurking pessimism and world-decadence, but as
presenting the most thoroughly _American points of view_ I know. In
my opinion the above formulas of Hegel are an essential and crowning
justification of New World democracy in the creative realms of time
and space. There is that about them which only the vastness,
the multiplicity and the vitality of America would seem able to
comprehend, to give scope and illustration to, or to be fit for, or
even originate. It is strange to me that they were born in Germany, or
in the old world at all. While a Carlyle, I should say, is quite the
legitimate European product to be expected.

A COUPLE OF OLD FRIENDS--A COLERIDGE BIT

_Latter April_.--Have run down in my country haunt for a couple of
days, and am spending them by the pond. I had already discover'd my
kingfisher here (but only one--the mate not here yet.) This fine
bright morning, down by the creek, he has come out for a spree,
circling, flirting, chirping at a round rate. While I am writing these
lines he is disporting himself in scoots and rings over the wider
parts of the pond, into whose surface he dashes, once or twice making
a loud _souse_--the spray flying in the sun--beautiful! I see his
white and dark-gray plumage and peculiar shape plainly, as he has
deign'd to come very near me. The noble, graceful bird! Now he
is sitting on the limb of an old tree, high up, bending over the
water--seems to be looking at me while I memorandize. I almost fancy
he knows me. _Three days later._--My second kingfisher is here with
his (or her) mate. I saw the two together flying and whirling around.
I had heard, in the distance, what I thought was the clear rasping
staccato of the birds several times already--but I couldn't be sure
the notes came from both until I saw them together. To-day at noon
they appear'd, but apparently either on business, or for a little
limited exercise only. No wild frolic now, full of free fun and
motion, up and down for an hour. Doubtless, now they have cares,
duties, incubation responsibilities. The frolics are deferr'd till
summer-close.

I don't know as I can finish to-day's memorandum better than with
Coleridge's lines, curiously appropriate in more ways than one:

All Nature seems at work--slugs leave their lair,
The bees are stirring--birds are on the wing,
And winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring;
And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

A WEEK'S VISIT TO BOSTON

_May 1, '81._--Seems as if all the ways and means of American travel
to-day had been settled, not only with reference to speed and
directness, but for the comfort of women, children, invalids, and old
fellows like me. I went on by a through train that runs daily from
Washington to the Yankee metropolis without change. You get in a
sleeping-car soon after dark in Philadelphia, and after ruminating an
hour or two, have your bed made up if you like, draw the curtains, and
go to sleep in it--fly on through Jersey to New York--hear in
your half-slumbers a dull jolting and bumping sound or two--are
unconsciously toted from Jersey City by a midnight steamer around
the Battery and under the big bridge to the track of the New Haven
road--resume your flight eastward, and early the next morning you wake
up in Boston. All of which was my experience. I wanted to go to the
Revere house. A tall unknown gentleman, (a fellow-passenger on his way
to Newport he told me, I had just chatted a few moments before with
him,) assisted me out through the depot crowd, procured a hack, put me
in it with my traveling bag, saying smilingly and quietly, "Now I want
you to let this be _my_ ride," paid the driver, and before I could
remonstrate bow'd himself off.

The occasion of my jaunt, I suppose I had better say here, was for
a public reading of "the death of Abraham Lincoln" essay, on the
sixteenth anniversary of that tragedy; which reading duly came off,
night of April 15. Then I linger'd a week in Boston--felt pretty well
(the mood propitious, my paralysis lull'd)--went around everywhere,
and saw all that was to be seen, especially human beings. Boston's
immense material growth--commerce, finance, commission stores, the
plethora of goods, the crowded streets and sidewalks--made of course
the first surprising show. In my trip out West, last year, I thought
the wand of future prosperity, future empire, must soon surely
be wielded by St. Louis, Chicago, beautiful Denver, perhaps San
Francisco; but I see the said wand stretch'd out just as decidedly in
Boston, with just as much certainty of staying; evidences of copious
capital--indeed no centre of the New World ahead of it, (half the big
railroads in the West are built with Yankees' money, and they take
the dividends.) Old Boston with its zigzag streets and multitudinous
angles, (crush up a sheet of letter-paper in your hand, throw it down,
stamp it flat, and that is a map of old Boston)--new Boston with
its miles upon miles of large and costly houses--Beacon street,
Commonwealth avenue, and a hundred others. But the best new departures
and expansions of Boston, and of all the cities of New England, are in
another direction.

THE BOSTON OF TO-DAY

In the letters we get from Dr. Schliemann (interesting but fishy)
about his excavations there in the far-off Homeric area, I notice
cities, ruins, &c., as he digs them out of their graves, are certain
to be in layers--that is to say, upon the foundation of an old
concern, very far down indeed, is always another city or set of ruins,
and upon that another superadded--and sometimes upon that still
another--each representing either a long or rapid stage of growth and
development, different from its predecessor, but unerringly growing
out of and resting on it. In the moral, emotional, heroic, and human
growths, (the main of a race in my opinion,) something of this kind
has certainly taken place in Boston. The New England metropolis of
to-day may be described as sunny, (there is something else that makes
warmth, mastering even winds and meteorologies, though those are
not to be sneez'd at,) joyous, receptive, full of ardor, sparkle, a
certain element of yearning, magnificently tolerant, yet not to be
fool'd; fond of good eating and drinking--costly in costume as its
purse can buy; and all through its best average of houses, streets,
people, that subtle something (generally thought to be climate, but
it is not--it is something indefinable in the _race_, the turn of
its development) which effuses behind the whirl of animation, study,
business, a happy and joyous public spirit, as distinguish'd from a
sluggish and saturnine one. Makes me think of the glints we get (as in
Symonds's books) of the jolly old Greek cities. Indeed there is a
good deal of the Hellenic in B., and the people are getting handsomer
too--padded out, with freer motions, and with color in their faces.
I never saw (although this is not Greek) so many _fine-looking
gray-hair'd women_. At my lecture I caught myself pausing more
than once to look at them, plentiful everywhere through the
audience--healthy and wifely and motherly, and wonderfully charming
and beautiful--I think such as no time or land but ours could show.

MY TRIBUTE TO FOUR POETS

_April 16_.--A short but pleasant visit to Longfellow. I am not one of
the calling kind, but as the author of "Evangeline" kindly took the
trouble to come and see me three years ago in Camden, where I was ill,
I felt not only the impulse of my own pleasure on that occasion, but a
duty. He was the only particular eminence I called on in Boston, and
I shall not soon forget his lit-up face and glowing warmth and
courtesy, in the modes of what is called the old school.

And now just here I feel the impulse to interpolate something about
the mighty four who stamp this first American century with its
birthmarks of poetic literature. In a late magazine one of my
reviewers, who ought to know better, speaks of my "attitude of
contempt and scorn and intolerance" toward the leading poets--of my
"deriding" them, and preaching their "uselessness." If anybody cares
to know what I think--and have long thought and avow'd--about them,
I am entirely willing to propound. I can't imagine any better luck
befalling these States for a poetical beginning and initiation than
has come from Emerson, Longfellow, Bryant, and Whittier. Emerson, to
me, stands unmistakably at the head, but for the others I am at a loss
where to give any precedence. Each illustrious, each rounded, each
distinctive. Emerson for his sweet, vital-tasting melody, rhym'd
philosophy, and poems as amber-clear as the honey of the wild bee
he loves to sing. Longfellow for rich color, graceful forms and
incidents--all that makes life beautiful and love refined--competing
with the singers of Europe on their own ground, and, with one
exception, better and finer work than that of any of them. Bryant
pulsing the first interior verse-throbs of a mighty world--bard of the
river and the wood, ever conveying a taste of open air, with scents
as from hayfields, grapes, birch-borders--always lurkingly fond of
threnodies--beginning and ending his long career with chants of death,
with here and there through all, poems, or passages of poems, touching
the highest universal truths, enthusiasms, duties--morals as grim and
eternal, if not as stormy and fateful, as anything in Eschylus. While
in Whittier, with his special themes--(his outcropping love of heroism
and war, for all his Quakerdom, his verses at times like the measur'd
step of Cromwell's old veterans)--in Whittier lives the zeal, the
moral energy, that founded New England--the splendid rectitude and
ardor of Luther, Milton, George Fox--I must not, dare not, say the
wilfulness and narrowness--though doubtless the world needs now,
and always will need, almost above all, just such narrowness and
wilfulness.

MILLET'S PICTURES LAST ITEMS

_April 18_.--Went out three or four miles to the house of Quincy Shaw,
to see a collection of J. F. Millet's pictures. Two rapt hours. Never
before have I been so penetrated by this kind of expression. I stood
long and long before "the Sower." I believe what the picture-men
designate "the first Sower," as the artist executed a second copy, and
a third, and, some think, improved in each. But I doubt it. There
is something in this that could hardly be caught again--a sublime
murkiness and original pent fury. Besides this masterpiece, there were
many others, (I shall never forget the simple evening scene, "Watering
the Cow,") all inimitable, all perfect as pictures, works of mere art;
and then it seem'd to me, with that last impalpable ethic purpose from
the artist (most likely unconscious to himself) which I am always
looking for. To me all of them told the full story of what went before
and necessitated the great French revolution--the long precedent
crushing of the masses of a heroic people into the earth, in abject
poverty, hunger--every right denied, humanity attempted to be put back
for generations--yet Nature's force, titanic here, the stronger
and hardier for that repression--waiting terribly to break forth,
revengeful--the pressure on the dykes, and the bursting at last--the
storming of the Bastile--the execution of the king and queen--the
tempest of massacres and blood. Yet who can wonder?

Could we wish humanity different?
Could we wish the people made of wood or stone?
Or that there be no justice in destiny or time?

The true France, base of all the rest, is certainly in these pictures.
I comprehend "Field-People Reposing," "the Diggers," and "the Angelus"
in this opinion. Some folks always think of the French as a small
race, five or five and a half feet high, and ever frivolous and
smirking. Nothing of the sort. The bulk of the personnel of France,
before the revolution, was large-sized, serious, industrious as now,
and simple. The revolution and Napoleon's wars dwarf'd the standard of
human size, but it will come up again. If for nothing else, I should
dwell on my brief Boston visit for opening to me the new world of
Millet's pictures. Will America ever have such an artist out of her
own gestation, body, soul?

_Sunday, April 17._--An hour and a half, late this afternoon, in
silence and half light, in the great nave of Memorial hall, Cambridge,
the walls thickly cover'd with mural tablets, bearing the names of
students and graduates of the university who fell in the secession
war.

_April 23._--It was well I got away in fair order, for if I had staid
another week I should have been killed with kindness, and with eating
and drinking.

BIRDS--AND A CAUTION

_May 14._--Home again; down temporarily in the Jersey woods. Between
8 and 9 A.M. a full concert of birds, from different quarters, in
keeping with the fresh scent, the peace, the naturalness all around
me. I am lately noticing the russet-back, size of the robin or
a trifle less, light breast and shoulders, with irregular dark
stripes--tail long--sits hunch'd up by the hour these days, top of
a tall bush, or some tree, singing blithely. I often get near and
listen, as he seems tame; I like to watch the working of his bill and
throat, the quaint sidle of his body, and flex of his long tail. I
hear the woodpecker, and night and early morning the shuttle of the
whip-poor-will--noons, the gurgle of thrush delicious, and _meo-o-ow_
of the cat-bird. Many I cannot name; but I do not very particularly
seek information. (You must not know too much, or be too precise
or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and water-craft;
a certain free margin, and even vagueness--perhaps ignorance,
credulity--helps your enjoyment of these things, and of the sentiment
of feather'd, wooded, river, or marine Nature generally. I repeat it
--don't want to know too exactly, or the reasons why. My own notes have
been written off-hand in the latitude of middle New Jersey. Though
they describe what I saw--what appear'd to me--I dare say the expert
ornithologist, botanist or entomologist will detect more than one slip
in them.)