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Page 18
"My lungs draw braver air, my breast dilates
With ampler manhood, and I face both worlds."
Dickens, with all his boisterous humor and democratic sympathies, could
not interpret Jefferson Brick and Lafayette Kettle and the other
expansive patriots whom he met on his travels. Their virtues were as a
sealed book to him. Their boastful familiarity was simply odious.
To understand Lowell's exhilaration one must enter into the spirit of
American history. It has been the history of what has been done by
strong men who owed nothing to the refinements of civilization. The
interesting events have taken place not at the centre, but on the
circumference of the country. The centrifugal force has always been the
strongest. There has been no capital to which ambitious youths went up
to seek their fortune. In each generation they have gone to the frontier
where opportunities awaited them. There they encountered, on the rough
edges of society, rough-and-ready men in whom they recognized their
natural superiors. These men, rude of speech and of manner, were
resourceful, bold, far-seeing. They were conscious of their power. They
were laying the foundations of cities and of states and they knew it.
They were as boastful as Homeric heroes, and for the same reason. There
was in them a rude virility that found expression in word as well as in
deed.
Davy Crockett, coon-hunter, Indian fighter, and Congressman, was a great
man in his day. It does not detract from his worth that he was well
aware of the fact. There was no false modesty about this backwoods
Charlemagne. He wrote of himself, "If General Jackson, Black Hawk, and
me were to travel through the United States we would bring out, no
matter what kind of weather, more people to see us than any other three
people now living among the fifteen millions now inhabiting the United
States. And what would it be for? As I am one of the persons mentioned I
would not press the question further. What I am driving at is this. When
a man rises from a low degree to a place he ain't used to, such a man
starts the curiosity of the world to know how he got along."
Davy Crockett understood the temper of his fellow citizens. A man who
rises by his own exertions from a low position to "a place he ain't used
to" is not only an object of curiosity, but he elicits enthusiastic
admiration. Any awkwardness which he exhibits in the position which he
has achieved is overlooked. We are anxious to know how he got along.
Every country has its self-made men, but usually they are made to feel
very uncomfortable. They are accounted intruders in circles reserved for
the choicer few. But in America they are assured of a sympathetic
audience when they tell of the way they have risen in the world. There
is no need for them to apologize for any lack of early advantages, for
they are living in a self-made country. We are in the habit of giving
the place of honor to the beginner rather than to the continuer. For the
finisher the time is not ripe.
II
The most vivid impressions of Americans have always been anticipatory.
They have felt themselves borne along by a resistless current, and that
current has, on the whole, been flowing in the right direction. They
have never been confronted with ruins that tell that the land they
inhabit has seen better days. Yesterday is vague; To-day may be
uncertain; To-morrow is alluring; and the Day after to-morrow is
altogether glorious. George Herbert pictured religion as standing on
tiptoe waiting to pass to the American strand. Not only religion but
every other good thing has assumed that attitude of expectant curiosity.
Even Cotton Mather could not avoid a tone of pious boastfulness when he
narrated the doings of New England. Everything was remarkable. New
England had the most remarkable providences, the most remarkable painful
preachers, the most remarkable heresies, the most remarkable witches.
Even the local devils were in his judgment more enterprising than those
of the old country. They had to be in order to be a match for the New
England saints.
The staid Judge Sewall, after a study of the prophecies, was of the
opinion that America was the only country in which they could be
adequately fulfilled. Here was a field large enough for those future
battles between good and evil which enthralled the Puritan imagination.
To be sure, it would be said, there isn't much just now to attract the
historian whose mind dwells exclusively on the past. But to one who dips
into the future it is thrilling. Here is the battlefield of Armageddon.
Some day we shall see "the spirits of devils working miracles, which go
forth unto the kings of the earth, and of the whole world, to gather
them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty." Just _when_ that
might take place might be uncertain but _where_ it would take place was
to them more obvious.
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