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Page 22
But curtly dismissing the fallacy, that the moral and spiritual
faculties are likely to find a sound basis in a cowed and craven reason,
we come to a form of fear that practically paralyzes independent thought
more than any other, while it is incompatible with manliness and
self-respect. This fear is compounded of self-distrust and that mode
of vanity which cowers beneath the invective of men whose applause it
neither courts nor values. If you examine critically the two raging
parties of conservatism and radicalism, you will find that a goodly
number of their partisans are men who have not chosen their position,
but have been bullied into it,--men who see clearly enough that both
parties are based on principles almost equally true in themselves,
almost equally false by being detached from their mutual relations. But
then each party keeps its professors of intimidation and stainers of
character, whose business it is to deprive men of the luxury of large
thinking, and to drive all neutrals into their respective ranks. The
missiles hurled from one side are disorganizer, infidel, disunionist,
despiser of law, and other trumpery of that sort; from the other side,
the no less effective ones of murderer, dumb dog, traitor to humanity,
and other trumpery of that sort; and the young and sensitive student
finds it difficult to keep the poise of his nature amid the cross-fire
of this logic of fury and rhetoric of execration, and too often ends in
joining one party from fear, or the other from the fear of being
thought afraid. The probability is, that the least danger to his mental
independence will proceed from any apprehension he may entertain of what
are irreverently styled the "old fogies"; for if Young America goes on
at its present headlong rate, there is little doubt that the old fogy
will have to descend from his eminence of place, become an object of
pathos rather than terror, and be compelled to make the inquiring appeal
to his brisk hunters, so often made to himself in vain, "Am I not a man
and a brother?" But with whatever association, political or moral, the
thinker may connect himself, let him go in,--and not be dragged in or
scared in. He certainly can do no good to himself, his country, or his
race, by being the slave and echo of the heads of a clique. Besides,
as most organizations are constituted on the principles of a sort of
literary socialism, and each member lives and trades on a common capital
of phrases, there is danger that these phrases may decline from signs
into substitutes of thought, and both intellect and character evaporate
in words. Thus, a man may be a Union man and a National man, or an
Anti-Slavery man and a Temperance man and a Woman's-Rights' man, and
still be very little of a man. There is, indeed, no more ludicrous sight
than to see Mediocrity, perched on one of these resounding adjectives,
strut and bluster, and give itself braggadocio airs, and dictate to all
quiet men its maxims of patriotism or morality, and all the while be
but a living illustration through what grandeurs of opinion essential
meanness and poverty of soul will peer and peep and be disclosed. To be
a statesman or reformer requires a courage that dares defy dictation
from any quarter, and a mind which has come in direct contact with the
great inspiring ideas of country and humanity. All the rest is spite,
and spleen; and cant, and conceit, and words.
It is plain, of course, that every man of large and living thought will
naturally sympathize with those great social movements, informing
and reforming, which are the glory of the age; but it must always be
remembered that the grand and generous sentiments that underlie those
movements demand in their fervid disciple a corresponding grandeur and
generosity of soul. There is no reason why his philanthropy should be
malignant because other men's conservatism may be stupid; and the vulgar
insensibility to the rights of the oppressed, and the vulgar scorn of
the claims of the wretched, which men calling themselves respectable and
educated may oppose to his own warmer feelings and nobler principles,
should be met, not with that invective which may be as vulgar as the
narrowness it denounces, nor always with that indignation which is
righteous as well as wrathful, but with that awful contempt with which
Magnanimity shames meanness, simply by the irony of her lofty example
and the sarcasm of her terrible silence.
In these remarks, which we trust our readers have at least been kind
enough to consider worthy of an effort of patience, we have attempted to
connect all genuine intellectual success with manliness of character;
have endeavored to show that force of individual being is its primary
condition; that this force is augmented and enriched, or weakened and
impoverished, according as it is or is not directed to appropriate
objects; that indolence, conceit, and fear present continual checks to
this going out of the mind into glad and invigorating communion with
facts and laws; and that as a man is not a mere bundle of faculties,
but a vital person, whose unity pervades, vivifies, and creates all
the varieties of his manifestation, the same vices which enfeeble and
deprave character tend to enfeeble and deprave intellect. But perhaps we
have not sufficiently indicated a diseased state of consciousness, from
which most intellectual men have suffered, many have died, and all
should be warned,--the disease, namely, of mental disgust, the sign and
the result of mental debility. Mental disgust "sicklies o'er" all the
objects of thought, extinguishes faith in exertion, communicates a dull
wretchedness to indolence in the very process by which it makes activity
impossible, and drags into its own slough of despond, and discolors with
its own morbid reveries, the objects which it should ardently seek and
genially assimilate. It sees things neither as they are, nor as they are
glorified and transfigured by hope and health and faith; but, in the
apathy of that idling introspection which betrays a genius for misery,
it pronounces effort to be vanity, and despairingly dismisses knowledge
as delusion. "Despair," says Donne, "is the damp of hell; rejoicing is
the serenity of heaven."
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