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MY STUDY WINDOWS.
BY
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, A. M.,
OLEATE
PROFESSOR OF BELLES-LETTRES IN HARVARD COLLEGE.
BOSTON:
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY.
New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street.
Che Vivergide Press, Cambridge,
1889.
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< /BY‘ JAMES ‘RUSSELL LOWELL,
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TWENTY-EIGHTH EDITION.
PREFATORY NOTE.
—
Y former volume of Essays has been so kindly
received that I am emboldened to make an-
other and more miscellaneous collection. The papers
here gathered have been written at intervals during the
last fifteen years, and I knew no way so effectual to rid
my mind of them and make ready for a new departure,
as this of shutting them between two covers where
they can haunt me, at least, no more. I should have
preferred a simpler title, but publishers nowadays are
inexorable on this point, and I was too much occupied
for happiness of choice. That which I have desperately
snatched is meant to imply both the books within and
the world without, and perhaps may pass muster in the
case of one who has always found his most fruitful
study in the open air.
TO
PROFESSOR F. J. CHILD.
My pear Camp, —
You were good enough to like my Essay on Chaucer
(about whom you know so much more than I), and I shall
accordingly so far presume upon our long friendship as to
inscribe the volume containing it with your name.
Always heartily yours,
J. R. LOWELL.
CAMBRIDGE, Christmas, 1870.
CONTENTS.
My GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE . s : : . : 1
A Goop Worp ror WINTER . - : . 24
On A CrrRTAIN ConDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS | _ 4 Bert!
A Great Pusiic CHARACTER . : - . ‘< 83
\LCARLYLE 2 F ; s A ; ‘ ; Oks
ABRAHAM LINCOLN . : : ‘ ; : . 150
Tae Lire AND Letters or James Gates Percivan . 178
THOREAU . i : ‘ P : ; R é 193
Swinpurne’s TRAGEDIES ; y ‘ . n pee A?
{ CHAUCER . : 7 : P - ‘ 2 : 1 la
Liprary oF Outp AvuTHORS . y e . ; . 290
“EMERSON, THE LecTuRER .« : . : : ; 375 |
Pore ° e e e e a e e e e 385 F
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE.
NE of the most delightful books in my father’s
library was White’s Natural History of Selborne.
For me it has rather gained in charm with years. I used
to read it without knowing the secret of the pleasure I
found in it, but as I grow older I begin to detect some of
the simple expedients of this natural magic. Open the
book where you will, it takes you out of doors. In our
broiling July weather one can walk out with this genially
garrulous Fellow of Oriel and find refreshment instead of
fatigue. You have no trouble in keeping abreast of him
as he ambles along on his hobby-horse, now pointing to a
pretty view, now stopping to watch the motions of a bird
or an insect, or to bag a specimen for the Honourable
Daines Barrington or Mr. Pennant. In simplicity of:
taste and natural refinement he reminds one of Walton ;
in tenderness toward what he would have called the brute
creation, of Cowper. I do not know whether his descrip-
tions of scenery are good or not, but they have made me
familiar with his neighborhood. Since I first read him,
I have walked over some of his favorite haunts, but I
still see them through his eyes rather than by any recol-
lection of actual and personal vision. The book has also
the delightfulness of absolute leisure. Mr. White seems
never to have had any harder work to do than to study
the habits of his feathered fellow-townsfolk, or to watch
the ripening of his peaches on the wall. His volumes are
the journal of Adam in Paradise,
i A
2 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE.
* Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.”
It is positive rest only to look into that garden of his.
It is vastly better than to
* See great Diocletian walk
In the Salonian garden’s noble shade,”
for thither ambassadors intrude to bring with them the
noises of Rome, while here the world has no entrance.
No rumor of the revolt of the American Colonies seems
to have reached him. “ The natural term of an hog’s
life’? has more interest for him than that of an empire.
Burgoyne may surrender and welcome ; of what conse-
quence is that compared with the fact that we can explain
the odd tumbling of rooks in the air by their turning over
“‘ to scratch themselves with one claw”? All the couriers
in Europe spurring rowel-deep make no stir in Mr.
White's little Chartreuse ; but the arrival of the house-
martin a day earlier or later than last year is a piece of
news worth sending express to all his correspondents.
Another secret charm of this book is its inadvertent
humor, so much the more delicious because unsuspected
by the author. How pleasant is his innocent vanity in
adding to the list of the British, and still more of the
Selbornian, fauna! I believe he would gladly have con-
sented to be eaten by a tiger or a crocodile, if by that
means the occasional presence within the parish limits of
either of these anthropophagous brutes could have been
established. He brags of no fine society, but is plainly a
little elated by “having considerable acquaintance with
a tame brown owl.” Most of us have known our share
of owls, but few can boast of intimacy with a feathered
one. The great events of Mr. White’s life, too, have that
disproportionate importance which is always humorous.
To think of his hands having actually been thought
worthy (as neither Willoughby’s nor Ray’s were) to hold
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 3
a stilted plover, the Charadrius himantopus, with no back
toe, and therefore “liable, in speculation, to perpetual
vacillations”! I wonder, by the way, if metaphysicians
have no hind toes. In 1770 he makes the acquaintance
in Sussex of “an old family tortoise,” which had then
been domesticated for thirty years. It is clear that he
fell in love with it at first sight. We have no means of
tracing the growth of his passion; but in 1780 we find
him eloping with its object in a post-chaise. The rattle
and hurry of the journey so perfectly roused it that, when
I turned it out in a border, it walked twice down to the
bottom of my garden.” It reads like a Court Journal :
“Yesterday morning H. R. H. the Princess Alice took an
airing of half an hour on the terrace of Windsor Castle.”
This tortoise might have been a member of the Royal
Society, if he could have condescended to so ignoble an
ambition. It had but just been discovered that a surface
inclined at a certain angle with the plane of the horizon
took more of the sun’s rays. The tortoise had always
known this (though he unostentatiously made no parade
of it), and used accordingly to tilt himself up against the
garden-wall in the autumn. He seems to have been more
of a philosopher than even Mr. White himself, caring for
nothing but to get under a cabbage-leaf when it rained,
or the sun was too hot, and to bury himself alive before
frost, —a four-footed Diogenes, who carried his tub on
his back.
There are moods in which this kind of history is infi-
nitely refreshing. These creatures whom we affect to
look down upon as the drudges of instinct are members
of a commonwealth whose constitution rests on immov-
able bases. Never any need of reconstruction there !
They never dream of settling it by vote that eight hours
are equal to ten, or that one creature is as clever as an-
other and no more. Zhey do not use their poor wits in
4. MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE.
regulating God’s clocks, nor think they cannot go astray
so long as they carry their guide-board about with them,
—a delusion we often practise upon ourselves with our
high and mighty reason, that admirable finger-post which
points every way and alwaysright. It is good for us now
and then to converse with a world like Mr. White’s, where
Man is the least important of animals. But one who,
like me, has always lived in the country and always on
the same spot, is drawn to his book by other occult sym-
pathies. Do we not share his indignation at that stupid
Martin who had graduated his thermometer no lower
than 4° above zero of Fahrenheit, so that in the coldest
weather ever known the mercury basely absconded into
the bulb, and left us to see the victory slip through our
fingers just as they were closing upon it? No man, I
suspect, ever lived long in the country without being
bitten by these meteorological ambitions. He hkes to
be hotter and colder, to have been more deeply snowed
up, to have more trees and larger blown down than his
neighbors. With us descendants of the Puritans espe-
cially, these weather-competitions supply the abnegated
excitement of the race-course. Men learn to value ther-
mometers of the true imaginative temperament, capable
of prodigious elations and corresponding dejections. The
other day (5th July) I marked 98° in the shade, my high-
water mark, higher by one degree than I had ever seen
it before. I happened to meet a neighbor ; as we mopped
- our brows at each other, he told me that he had just
cleared 100°, and I went home a beaten man. I had not
felt the heat before, save as a beautiful exaggeration of
sunshine ; but now it oppressed me with the prosaic vul-
garity of an oven. What had been poetic intensity be-
came all at once rhetorical hyperbole. I might suspect
his thermometer (as indeed I did, for we Harvard men
are apt to think ill of any graduation but our own) ; but
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 5
it was a poor consolation. The fact remained that his
herald Mercury, standing a-tiptoe, could look down on
mine. I seem to glimpse something of this familiar
weakness in Mr. White. He, too, has shared in these
mercurial triumphs and defeats. Nor do I doubt that
he had a true country-gentleman’s interest in the weather-
cock ; that his first question on coming down of a morn-
ing was, like Barabas’s,
“ Into what quarter peers my halcyon’s bill?”
It is an imnocent and healthful employment of the
mind, distracting one from too continual study of him-
self, and leading him to dwell rather upon the indiges-
tions of the elements than his own. “Did the wind
back round, or go about with the sun?” is a rational,
question that bears not remotely on the making of hay
and the prosperity of crops. I have little doubt that
the regulated observation of the vane in many different
places, and the interchange of results by telegraph, would
put the weather, as it were, in our power, by betraying
its ambushes before it is ready to give the assault. At
first sight, nothing seems more drolly trivial than_ the
lives of those whose single achievement is to record the
wind and the temperature three times a day. Yet such
men are doubtless sent into the world for this special
end, and perhaps there is no kind of accurate observa-
tion, whatever its object, that has not its final use and
value for some one or other. It is even to be hoped
that the speculations of our newspaper editors and their
myriad correspondents upon the signs of the political at-
mosphere may also fill their appointed place in a well-reg-
ulated universe, if it be only that of supplying so many
more jack-o’-lanterns to the future historian. Nay, the
observations on finance of an M. C. whose sole knowledge
of the subject has been derived from a lifelong success in
getting a living out of the public without paying any
6 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE.
equivaient therefor, will perhaps be of interest hereafter
to some explorer of our cloaca maxima, whenever it is
cleansed.
For many years I have been in the habit of noting
down some of the leading events of my embowered soli-
tude, such as the coming of certain birds and the like, —
a kind of mémoires pour servir, after the fashion of White,
rather than properly digested natural history. I thought
it not impossible that a few simple stories of my winged
acquaintances might be found entertaining by persons
of kindred taste.
There is a common notion that animals are better
meteorologists than men, and I have little doubt that in
immediate weather-wisdom they have the advantage of
our sophisticated senses (though I suspect a sailor or
shepherd would be their match), but I have seen nothing
that leads me to believe their minds capable of erecting
the horoscope of a whole season, and letting us know be-
foréhand whether the winter will be severe or the sum-
mer rainless. I more than suspect that the clerk of the
weather himself does not always know very long in ad-
vance whether he is to draw an order for hot or cold,
dry or moist, and the musquash is scarce likely to. be
wiser. I have noted but two days’ difference in the
coming of the song-sparrow between a very early and a
very backward spring. This very year I saw the linnets
at work thatching, just before a snow-storm which
covered the ground several inches deep for a number of
days. They struck work and left us for a while, no
doubt in search of food. Birds frequently perish from
sudden changes in our whimsical spring weather of
which they had no foreboding. More than thirty years
ago, a cherry-tree, then in full bloom, near my window,
was covered with humming-birds benumbed by a fall of
mingled rain and snow, which probably killed many of
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. i¢
them. It should seem that their coming was dated by
the height of the sun, which betrays them into unthrifty
matrimony ;
“ So nature pricketh hem in their corages ;
but their going is another matter. The chimney-swal-
lows leave us early, for example, apparently so soon as
their latest fledglings are firm enough of wing to at-
tempt the long rowing-match that is before them. On
the other hand, the wild-geese probably do not leave the
North till they are frozen out, for I have heard their
bugles sounding southward so late as the middle of
December. What may be called local migrations are
doubtless dictated by the chances of food. I have once
been visited by large flights of cross-bills ; and whenever
the snow lies long and deep on the ground, a flock of
cedar-birds comes in midwinter to eat the berries on my
hawthorns. I have never been quite able to fathom the
local, or rather geographical partialities of birds. Never
before this summer (1870) have the king-birds, hand-
somest of flycatchers, built in my orchard ; though I
always know where to find them within half a mile.
The rose-breasted grosbeak has been a familiar bird in
Brookline (three miles away), yet I never saw one here
till last July, when I found a female busy among my
raspberries and surprisingly bold. I hope she was pros-
pecting with a view to settlement in our garden. She
seemed, on the whole, to think well of my fruit, and I
would gladly plant another bed if it would help to win
over so delightful a neighbor.
The return of the robin is commonly announced by
the newspapers, like that of eminent or notorious people
to a watering-place, as the first authentic notification of
spring. And such his appearance in the orchard and
garden undoubtedly is. But, in spite of his name of
migratory thrush, he stays with us all winter, and 1
8 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE.
have seen him when the thermometer marked 15 de-
grees below zero of Fahrenheit, armed impregnably with-
in, like Emerson’s Titmouse, and as cheerfulas he. The
robin has a bad reputation among people who do not
value themselves less for being fond of cherries. There is,
T admit, a spice of vulgarity in him, and his song is rather
of the Bloomfield sort, too largely ballasted with prose.
His ethics are of the Poor Richard school, and the main
chance which calls forth all his energy is altogether of
the belly. He never has those fine intervals of lunacy
into which his cousins, the catbird and the mavis, are
apt to fall. But for a’ that and twice as muckle ’s a’
that, I would not exchange him for all the cherries that
ever came out of Asia Minor. With whatever faults, he
has not wholly forfeited that superiority which belongs
to the children of nature. He has a finer taste in fruit
than could be distilled from many successive committees
of the Horticultural Society, and he eats with a relishing
gulp not inferior to Dr. Johnson’s. He feels and freely
exercises his right of eminent domain. His is the earli-
est mess of green peas; his all the mulberries I had
fancied mine. But if he get also the lion’s share of the
raspberries, he is a great planter, and sows those wild ones
in the woods, that solace the pedestrian and give a mo-
mentary calm even to the jaded victims of the White
Hills. He keeps a strict eye over one’s fruit, and knows
to a shade of purple when your grapes have cooked long
enough in the sun. During the severe drought a few
years ago, the robins wholly vanished from my garden.
I neither saw nor heard one for three weeks. Mean--
while a small foreign grape-vine, rather shy of bearing,
seemed to find the dusty air congenial, and, dreaming
perhaps of its sweet Argos across the sea, decked itself
with a score or so of fair bunches. I watched them
from day to day till they should have secreted sugar
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 9
enough from the sunbeams, and at last made up my
mind that I would celebrate my vintage the next morn-
ing. But the robins too had somehow kept note of
them. They must have sent out spies, as did the Jews
into the promised land, before I was stirring. When I
went with my basket, at least a dozen of these winged
vintagers bustled out from among the leaves, and alight-
ing on the nearest trees interchanged some shrill re-
marks about me of aderogatory nature. They had fairly
sacked the vine. Not Wellington’s veterans made
cleaner work of a Spanish town; not Federals or Con-
federates were ever more impartial in the confiscation of
neutral chickens. I was keeping my grapes a secret to
surprise the fair Fidele with, but the robins made them
a profounder secret to her than I had meant. The tat-
tered remnant of a single bunch was all my harvest-
home. How paltry it looked at the bottom of my
basket, —as if a humming-bird had laid her egg in an
eagle’s nest! I could not help laughing ; and the robins
seemed to join heartily in the merriment. There was a
native grape-vine close by, blue with its less refined
abundance, but my cunning thieves preferred the foreign
flavor. Could I tax them with want of taste ?
The robins are not good solo singers, but their chorus,
as, like primitive fire-worshippers, they hail the return
of light and warmth to the world, is unrivalled. There
are a hundred singing like one. They are noisy enough
then, and sing, as poets should, with no afterthought.
But when they come after cherries to the tree near my
window, they muffle their voices, and their faint pep,
pip, pop! sounds far away at the bottom of the gar-
den, where they know I shall not suspect them of rob-
bing the great black-walnut of its bitter-rinded store.*
* The screech-owl, whose cry, despite his ill name, is one of the
sweetest sounds in nature, softens his voice in the same way with the
most beguiling mockery of distance.
10 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE.
They are feathered Pecksniffs, to be sure, but then how
brightly their breasts, that look rather shabby in the
sunlight, shine in a rainy day against the dark green of
the fringe-tree! After they have pinched and shaken
all the life out of an earthworm, as Italian cooks pound
all the spirit out of a steak, and then gulped him, they
stand up in honest self-confidence, expand their red
waistcoats with the virtuous air of a lobby member, and
outface you with an eye that calmly challenges inquiry.
“Do J look like a bird that knows the flavor of raw
vermin? JI throw myself upon a jury of my peers.
Ask any robin if he ever ate anything less ascetic than
the frugal berry of the juniper, and he will answer that
his vow forbids him.” Can such an open bosom cover
such depravity? Alas, yes! I have no doubt his breast
was redder at that very moment with the blood of my
raspberries. On the whole, he isa doubtful friend in the
garden. He makes his dessert of all kinds of berries,
and is not averse from early pears. But when we re-
member how omnivorous he is, eating his own weight in
an incredibly short time, and that Nature seems exhaust-
less in her invention of new insects hostile to vegetation,
perhaps we may reckon that he does more good than
harm. For my own part, I would rather have his cheer-
fulness and kind neighborhood than many berries.
For his cousin, the catbird, I have a still warmer re-
gard. Always a good singer, he sometimes nearly equals
the brown thrush, and has the merit of keeping up his
music later in the evening than any bird of my familiar
acquaintance. Ever since I can remember, a pair of
them have built in a gigantic syringa, near our front
door, and I have known the male to sing almost unin-
terruptedly during the evenings of early summer till
twilight duskened into dark. They differ greatly in
vocal talent, but all have a delightful way of crooning
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. i i
over, and, as it were, rehearsing their song in an under-
tone, which makes their nearness always unobtrusive.
Though there is the most trustworthy witness to the
imitative propensity of this bird, I have only once,
during an intimacy of more than forty years, heard him
indulge it. In that case, the imitation was by no means
so close as to deceive, but a free reproduction of the
notes of some other birds, especially of the oriole, as a
kind of variation in his own song. The catbird is as
shy as the robin is vulgarly familiar. Only when his
nest or his fledglings are approached does he become
noisy and almost aggressive. JI have known him to
station his young in a thick cornel-bush on the edge of
the raspberry-bed, after the fruit began to ripen, and
feed them there for a week or more. In such cases he
shows none of that conscious guilt which makes the
‘robin contemptible. On the contrary, he will maintain
his post in the thicket, and sharply scold the intruder
who ventures to steal Azs berries. After all, his claim is
only for tithes, while the robin will bag your entire crop
if he get a chance.
Dr. Watts’s statement that “ birds in their little nests
agree,” like too many others intended to form the infant
mind, is very far from being true. On the contrary, the
most peaceful relation of the different species to each
other is that of armed neutrality. They are very jealous
of neighbors. U.S. A., and fore-
bodes for them a “speedy relapse into barbarism,” now
that they have madly cut themselves off from the
humanizing influences of Britain, I smile with barbarian
self-conceit. But this kind of thing became by degrees
an unpleasant anachronism. For meanwhile the young
giant was growing, was beginning indeed to feel tight in
4
74 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS.
‘ed to let in ® gore here and there
in ‘Texas, in California, in New Mexico, 12 Alaska, and
had the scissors and needle and thread ready for Can-
ada when eye time Cae is shadow Joomed hike
Brocken-spectre over against Europe, __the shadow of
shat tney Wo? coming +0, that was the unpleasant part 7
ge as they had of him, it (
was painfully evident that his clothes wer? not of any
cut hitherto gashionable; nor conceivable by 2 Bond
Street tailor, __and this sn an age, 00 when everything
depends upon clothes, when, if we do wot Keep UP ME
pearances, the geeming- solid frame of this universe, nay; |
your very Goa, would slump into himself, like @ mockery
king of snow, being nothing, after all, put a prevailing
wede: From this moment the youns giant assumed the
dona.) 1 SHE man of the primeval drift-heaps 38 8° ab-
sorbingly snteresting, why not the man of the drift that
ig just beginning, of the drift into whose srresistible cur’
J were in their place, 1 confess { should not be fright-
ened. Man has survived 8° pouch, and contrived to be
comfortable om this planet after surviving 6° much !
holds stock m the only public debt that is absolutely
sure of payment, and that 1s the debt of the Maker of
notion of gclling out MY stock im & panic.
ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 75
of a phenomenon, and yet I do not know that the rela-
tion of the individual American to the individual Euro-
pean was bettered by it ; and that, after all, must adjust
itself comfortably before there can be a right under-
standing between the two. We had been a desert, we
became a museum. People came hither for scientific
and not social ends. The very cockney could not com-
plete his education without taking a vacant stare at us
in passing. But the sociologists (I think they call them-
selves so) were the hardest to bear. There was no es-
cape. I have even known a professor of this fearful
science to come disguised in petticoats. We were cross-
examined as a chemist cross-examines a new substance.
Human ? yes, all the elements are present, though ab-
normally combined. Civilized? Hm! that needs a
stricter assay. No entomologist could take a more
friendly interest in a strange bug. After a few such ex-
periences, I, for one, have felt as if I were merely one of
those horrid things preserved in spirits (and very bad
spirits, too) in a cabinet. - I was not the fellow-being of
these explorers: I was a curiosity; I was a specimen.
Hath not an American organs, dimensions, senses, affec-
tions, passions even as a European hath? If you prick
us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh ?
I will not keep on with Shylock to his next question but
one.
Till after our Civil War it never seemed to enter the
head of any foreigner, especially of any Englishman, that
an American had what could be called a country, except
as a place to eat, sleep, and trade in. Then it seemed to
strike them suddenly. “By Jove, you know, fellahs
don’t fight like that for a shop-till!” No, I rather think
not. To Americans America is something more than a
promise and an expectation. It has a past and tradi-
tions of its own. A descent from men who sacrificed
76 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS.
everything and came hither, not to better their fortunes,
but to plant their idea in virgin soil, should be a good
pedigree. There was never colony save this that went
forth, not to seek gold, but God. Is it not as well to
have sprung from such as these as from some burly
beggar who came over with Wilhelmus Conquestor, un-
less, indeed, a line grow better as it runs farther away
from stalwart ancestors? And for history, it is dry
enough, no doubt, in the books, but, for all that, is of a
kind that tells in the blood. I have admitted that Car-
lyle’s sneer had a show of truth in it. But what does
he himself, like a true Scot, admire in the Hohenzol-
lerns? First of all, that they were canny, a thrifty,
forehanded race. Next, that they made a good fight
from generation to generation with the chaos around
them. That is precisely the battle which the English
race on this continent has been carrying doughtily on for
two centuries and a half. Doughtily and silently, for
you cannot hear in Europe “that crash, the death-song
of the perfect tree,” that has been going on here from
sturdy father to sturdy son, and making this continent
habitable for the weaker Old World breed that has
swarmed to it during the last half-century. If ever men
did a good stroke of work on this planet, it was the fore-
fathers of those whom you are wondering whether it
would not be prudent to acknowledge as far-off cousins.
Alas, man of genius, to whom we owe so much, could
you see nothing more than the burning of a foul chim-
ney in that clash of Michael and Satan which flamed up
under your very eyes ?
Before our war we were to Europe but a huge mob of
adventurers and shop-keepers. Leigh Hunt expressed it
well enough when he said that he could never think of
America without seeing a gigantic counter stretched all
along the seaboard. Feudalism had by degrees made
ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 77
commerce, the great civilizer, contemptible. But a
tradesman with sword on thigh and very prompt of
stroke was not only redoubtable, he had become respect:
able also. Few people, I suspect, alluded twice to a
needle in Sir John Hawkwood’s presence, after that
doughty fighter had exchanged it for a more dangerous
tool of the same metal. Democracy had been hitherto
only a ludicrous effort to reverse the laws of nature by
thrusting Cleon into the place of Pericles. But a democ-
racy that could fight for an abstraction, whose members
held life and goods cheap compared with that larger life
which we call country, was not merely unheard-of, but
portentous. It was the nightmare of the Old World
taking upon itself flesh and blood, turning out to be
substance and not dream. Since the Norman crusader
clanged down upon the throne of the porphyro-geniti,
carefully-draped appearances had never received such a
shock, had never been so rudely called:on to produce
their titles to the empire of the world. Authority has
had its periods not unlike those of geology, and at last
comes Man claiming kingship in right of his mere man-
hood. The world of the Saurians might be in some
respects more picturesque, but the march of events is
inexorable, and it is bygone.
The young giant had certainly got out of long-clothes.
He had become the enfant terrible of the human house-
hold. It was not and will not be easy for the world
(especially for our British cousins) to look upon us as
grown up. The youngest of nations, its people must also
be young and to be treated accordingly, was the syl-
logism, —as if libraries did not make all nations equally
old in all those respects, at least, where age is an ad-
vantage and not a defect. Youth, no doubt, has its good
qualities, as people feel who are losing it, but boyishness
is another thing. We had been somewhat boyish as a
78 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS.
nation, a little loud, a little pushing, a little braggart.
But might it not partly have been because we felt that
we had certain claims to respect that were not admitted?
The war which established our position as a vigorous
nationality has also sobered us. A nation, like a man,
cannot look death in the eye for four years, without some
strange reflections, without arriving at some clearer con-
sciousness of the stuff it is made of, without some great
moral change. Such a change, or the beginning of it,
no observant person can fail to see here. Our thought
and our politics, our bearing as a people, are assuming a
manlier tone. We have been compelled to see what was
weak in democracy as well as what was strong. We
have begun obscurely to recognize that things do not go
itself a panacea, is no better than any other form except
as the virtue and wisdom of the people make it so, and
that when men undertake to do their own kingship, they
enter upon the dangers and responsibilities as well as
the privileges of the function. Above all, it looks as if
we were on the way to be persuaded that no government
can be carried on by declamation. It is noticeable also
that facility of communication has made the best Eng-
lish and French thought far more directly operative
here than ever before. Without being Europeanized,
our discussion of important questions in statesmanship,
political economy, in esthetics, is taking a broader scope
and a higher tone. It had certainly been provincial,
one might almost say local, to a very unpleasant extent.
Perhaps our experience in soldiership has taught us to
value training more than we have been popularly wont.
We may possibly come to the conclusion, one of these
days, that selfmade men may not be always equally
skilful in the manufacture of wisdom, may not be
divinely commissioned to fabricate the higher qualities
of opinion on all possible topics of human interest.
ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 79
So long as we continue to be the most common-
stuvoled and the least cultivated people in the world, I
suppose we must consent to endure this condescending
manner of foreigners toward us. The more friendly
they mean to be the more ludicrously prominent it be-
comes. ‘They can never appreciate the immense amount
of silent work that has been done here, making this |
continent slowly fit for the abode of man, and which
will demonstrate itself, let us hope, in the character of
the people. Outsiders can only be expected to judge a
nation by the amount it has contributed to the civiliza-
tion of the world ; the amount, that is, that can be seen
and handled.