Part 34
“‘I know no country in which there is so little true independence of opinion and freedom of discussion as in America’ (vol. i., p. 259).”
“I am far from thinking it late. I don’t despond at all whilst I hear the verdicts of European juries against us—Renan says this; Arnold says that. That does not touch us.
“’Tis doubtful whether London, whether Paris can answer the questions which now rise in the human mind. But the humanity of all nations is now in the American Union. Europe, England is historical still. Our politics, our social frame are almost ideal. We have got suppled into a state of melioration. When I see the emigrants landing at New York, I say, There they go—to school.
“In estimating nations, potentiality must be considered as well as power; not what to-day’s actual performance is, but what promise is in the mind which a crisis will bring out.”
“The war has established a chronic hope, for a chronic despair. It is not a question whether we shall be a nation, or only a multitude of people. No, that has been conspicuously decided already; but whether we shall be the new nation, guide and lawgiver of all nations, as having clearly chosen and firmly held the simplest and best rule of political society.
“Culture, be sure, is in some sort the very enemy of nationality and makes us citizens of the world; and yet it is essential that it should have the flavor of the soil in which it grew, and combine this with universal sympathies. Thus in this country are new traits and distinctions not known to former history. Colonies of an old country, but in new and commanding conditions. Colonies of a small and crowded island, but planted on a continent and therefore working it in small settlements, where each man must count for ten, and is put to his mettle to come up to the need....
“Pray leave these English to form their opinions. ’Tis a matter of absolute insignificance what those opinions are. They will fast enough run to change and retract them on their knees when they know who you are....
“I turn with pleasure to the good omen in the distinguished reception given in London to Mr. Beecher. It was already prepared by the advocacy of Cobden, Bright and Forster, Mill, Newman, Cairnes and Hughes, and by the intelligent Americans already sent to England by our Government to communicate with intelligent men in the English Government and out of it. But Mr. Beecher owed his welcome to himself. He fought his way to his reward. It is one of the memorable exhibitions of the force of eloquence,—his evening at Exeter Hall. The consciousness of power shown in his broad good sense, in his jocular humor and entire presence of mind, the surrender of the English audience on recognizing the true master. He steers the Behemoth, sits astride him, strokes his fur, tickles his ear, and rides where he will. And I like the well-timed compliment there paid to our fellow citizen when the stormy audience reminds him to tell England that Wendell Phillips is the first orator of the world. One orator had a right to speak of the other,—Byron’s thunderstorm, where
“‘Jura answers from his misty shroud Back to the joyous Alps who call to him aloud.’
“The young men in America to-day take little thought of what men in England are thinking or doing. That is the point which decides the welfare of a people,—_which way does it look?_ If to any other people, it is not well with them. If occupied in its own affairs, and thoughts, and men, with a heat which excludes almost the notice of any other people,—as the Jews, as the Greeks, as the Persians, as the Romans, the Arabians, the French, the English, at their best times have done,—they are sublime; and we know that in this abstraction they are executing excellent work. Amidst the calamities that war has brought on our Country, this one benefit has accrued,—that our eyes are withdrawn from England, withdrawn from France, and look homeward. We have come to feel that
“‘By ourselves our safety must be bought;’
to know the vast resources of the continent; the good will that is in the people; their conviction of the great moral advantages of freedom, social equality, education and religious culture, and their determination to hold these fast, and by these hold fast the Country, and penetrate every square inch of it with this American civilization....
“Americans—not girded by the iron belt of condition, not taught by society and institutions to magnify trifles, not victims of technical logic, but docile to the logic of events; not, like English, worshippers of fate; with no hereditary upper house, but with legal, popular assemblies, which constitute a perpetual insurrection, and by making it perpetual save us from revolutions.”
FOOTNOTES
[A] Mr. Emerson believed the “not” had been accidentally omitted, and it can hardly be questioned that he was right in his supposition.
[B] Vol. ii., pp. 424-433.
[C] _The Genius and Character of Emerson; Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy_, edited by F. B. Sanborn. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1885.
[D] _Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson_, vol. i., pp. 260, 261.
[E] _Epistle of Paul to Philemon_, i. 16, 17.
[F] See the report of this speech in Redpath’s _Life of Captain John Brown_. Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860.
[G] “Review of Holmes’s Life of Emerson,” _North American Review_, February, 1885.
[H] _Richard Henry Dana; a Biography._ By Charles Francis Adams. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1890. In chapter viii. of this book is a very remarkable account of John Brown and his family at their home at North Elba in 1849, when Mr. Dana and a friend, lost in the Adirondac woods, chanced to come out upon the Brown clearing and were kindly received and aided.
[I] While waiting for the services to begin, Mr. Sears wrote some verses. The following lines, which Mrs. Emerson saw him write, were a prophecy literally fulfilled within three years by the Union armies singing the John Brown song:—
“But not a pit six feet by two Can hold a man like thee; John Brown shall tramp the shaking earth From Blue Ridge to the sea.”
[J] In the very interesting work _The Influence of Emerson_, published in Boston in 1903, by the American Unitarian Association.
[K] See note 3 to page 63 of the “Historical Discourse.”
[L] “Emerson’s Relation to Society,” in _The Genius and Character of Emerson_, Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy, edited by F. B. Sanborn. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1885.