text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/52

 mate, with Mandeville, Paine, Priestley, Price, Adam Smith, Robertson, Hume, Joseph Banks, Bishop Watson, the Bishop of St. Asaph, Lord Kames, Lord Shelburne, Lord Howe, Burke, and Chatham. Among Frenchmen he numbers on his list of admiring friends Vergennes, Lafayette, Mirabeau, Turgot, Quesnay, La Rochefoucauld, Condorcet, Lavoisier, Buffon, D'Alembert, Robespierre, and Voltaire.

It is absurd to speak of one who has been subjected to the molding of such forces as a product of the provinces. All Europe has wrought upon and metamorphosed the Yankee printer. The man whom Voltaire salutes with a fraternal kiss is a statesman, a philosopher, a friend of mankind, and a favorite son of the eighteenth century. With no softening of his patriotic fibre or loss of his Yankee tang, he has acquired all the common culture and most of the master characteristics of the Age of Enlightenment, up to the point where the French Revolution injected into it a drop of madness: its emancipation from unscrutinized tradition and authority, its regard for reason and nature, its social consciousness, its progressiveness, its tolerance, its cosmopolitanism, and its bland philanthropy.

Now this man deserves his large place in our literary history not so much by virtue of his writings, which had little immediate influence upon belles-lettres, as by virtue of his acts and ideas, which helped liberate and liberalize America. To

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/52


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/53

 describe his most important work is to recite the story of his life.

In reviewing his own career Franklin does not dwell on the fact that he who was to stand before kings had emerged from a tallow chandler's shop. To his retrospective eye there was nothing miraculous nor inexplicable in his origin. On the contrary he saw and indicated very clearly the sources of his talents and the external impulses that gave them direction. Born in Boston on January 6, 1706, he inherited from his long-lived parents, Josiah and Abiah Folger Franklin, a rugged physical and mental constitution which hardly faltered through the hard usage of eighty-four years. He recognized and profited by his father's skill in drawing and music, his "mechanical genius," his "understanding and solid judgment in prudential matters, both in private and publick affairs," his admirable custom of having at his table "as often as he could, some sensible friend or neighbour to converse with," always taking care "to start some ingenious or useful topic for discourse, which might tend to improve the minds of his children." Benjamin's formal schooling was begun when he was eight years old and abandoned when he was ten, together with the design of making him a clergyman. He significantly remarks, however, that he does not remember a time when he could not read; and the subsequent owner of the best private library in America was as a mere child an eager collector of books. For

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/53


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/54

 the two years following his removal from school he was employed in his father's business. When he expressed a firm disinclination to become a tallow chandler, his father attempted to discover his natural bent by taking him about to see various artisans at their work. Everything that Franklin touched taught him something; and everything that he learned, he used. Though his tour of the trades failed to win him to any mechanical occupation, "it has ever since been a pleasure to me," he says, "to see good workmen handle their tools; and it has been useful to me, having learnt so much by it as to be able to do little odd jobs myself in my house, . . . and to construct little machines for my experiments, while the intention of making the experiment was fresh and warm in my mind." Throughout his boyhood and youth he apparently devoured every book that he could lay hands upon. He went through his father's shelves of "polemic divinity"; read abundantly in Plutarch's Lives; acquired Bunyan's works "in separate little volumes," which he later sold to buy Burton's Historical Collections; received an impetus towards practical improvements from Defoe's Essay on Projects, and an impetus towards virtue from Mather's Essays to Do Good. Before he left Boston he had his mind opened to free speculation and equipped for logical reasoning by Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the Port Royal Art of Thinking, Xenophon's Memorabilia, and the works of Shaftesbury and Collins.

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/54


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/55

 Franklin found the right avenue for a person of his "bookish inclination" when his brother James, returning from England in 1717 with a press and letters, set up in Boston as a printer, and proceeded to the publication of the Boston Gazette, 1719, and the New England Courant, 1721. Benjamin, aged twelve, became his apprentice. It can hardly be too much emphasized that this was really an inspiring "job." It made him stand at a very early age full in the wind of local political and theological controversy. It forced him to use all his childish stock of learning and daily stimulated him to new acquisitions. It put him in touch with other persons, young and old, of bookish and literary inclination. They lent him books which kindled his poetic fancy to the pitch of composing occasional ballads in the Grub Street style, which his brother printed, and had him hawk about town. His father discountenanced these effusions, declaring that "verse-makers were generally beggars"; but coming upon his son's private experiments in prose, he applied the right incentive by pointing out where the work "fell short in elegance of expression, in method and in perspicuity." "About this time," says Franklin in a familiar paragraph, "I met with an odd volume of the Spectator." Anticipating Dr. Johnson's advice by half a century, he gave his days and nights to painstaking study and imitation of Addison till he had mastered that style—"familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious"—which several generations of Eng-

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/55


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/56

 lish essayists have sought to attain. All the world has heard how Franklin's career as a writer began with an anonymous contribution stealthily slipped under the door of his brother's printing-house at night, and in the morning approved for publication by his brother's circle of "writing friends." Professor Smyth is inclined to identify this contribution with the first of fourteen humorous papers with Latin mottoes signed "Silence Dogood," which appeared fortnightly in the New England Courant from March to October, 1722. In this year Benjamin was in charge of the Courant during his brother's imprisonment for printing matter offensive to the Assembly; and when, on repetition of the offence, the master was forbidden to publish his journal, it was continued in the name of the apprentice. In this situation James became jealous and overbearing, and Benjamin became insubordinate. When it grew evident that there was not room enough in Boston for them both, the younger brother left his indentures behind, and in 1723 made his memorable flight to Philadelphia.

Shortly after his arrival in the Quaker city, he found employment with the second printer in Philadelphia, Samuel Keimer—a curious person who kept the Mosaic law. In 1724, encouraged by the facile

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/56


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/57

 By promises of Governor Keith, he went to England in the expectation that letters of credit and recommendation from his patron would enable him to procure a printing outfit. Left in the lurch by the governor, he served for something over a year in two great London printing houses, kept free-thinking and rather loose company, and, in refutation of Wollaston's Religion of Nature upon which he happened to be engaged in the composing-room, published in 1725 his suppressed tract On Liberty and Necessity. Returning to Philadelphia in 1726, he reentered the employ of Keimer; in 1728 formed a brief partnership with Hugh Meredith, and in 1730 married and set up for himself. In 1728 he formed the famous Junto Club for reading, debating, and reforming the world—an institution which developed into a powerful organ of political influence. Shortage of money in the province prompted him to the composition of his Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of Paper Currency, 1729; a service for which his friends in the Assembly rewarded him by employing him to print the money—"a very profitable job and a great help to me." Forestalled by Keimer in a project for launching a newspaper, Franklin contributed in 1728–9 to the rival journal published by Bradford a series of sprightly "Busy-Body" papers in the vein of the periodical essayists. Keimer was forced to sell out; and Franklin acquired from him the paper known from October 2, 1729, as the Pennsylvania Gazette. To this he con-

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/57


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/58

 tributed, besides much miscellaneous matter, such pieces as the "Dialogue Between Philocles and Horatio Concerning Virtue and Pleasure," the letters of "Anthony Afterwit" and "Alice Addertongue," "A Meditation on a Quart Mug," and "A Witch Trial at Mount Holly." In 1732 he began to issue the almanacs containing the wit and wisdom of "Poor Richard," a homely popular philosopher, who is only the incarnation of common sense, and who is consequently not, as has been carelessly assumed, to be identified with his creator.

By the time he was thirty, Franklin gave promise of becoming by a gradual expansion of his useful activities the leading Pennsylvanian. In 1736 he was chosen clerk of the General Assembly, and in the following year was appointed postmaster of Philadelphia. He made both these offices useful to his printing business and to his newspaper. In compensation, he used his newspaper and his business influence to support his measures for municipal improvements, among the objects of which may be mentioned: street-sweeping, paving, a regular police force, a fire company, a hospital, and a—public library. As his business prospered, he expanded it by forming partnerships with his promising workmen, and sending them with printing-presses into other colonies. In 1741 he experimented with a monthly publication, The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle for All the British Colonies in America; this monthly, notable as the second issued

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/58


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/59

 in America, expired with the sixth number. In 1742 he invented the stove of which he published a description in 1744 as An Account of the New Invented Pennsylvanian Fire Places. In 1743 he drew up proposals for an academy which eventually became the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1744 he founded the American Philosophical Society. In 1746 he witnessed Spence's electrical experiments in Boston, bought the apparatus, and repeated the experiments in Philadelphia, where interest in the new science was further stimulated that year by a present of a Leyden jar given to the Library Company by the English experimenter, Peter Collinson. To this English friend Franklin made extended reports of his earlier electrical investigations in the form of letters, which Collinson published in London in 1751 with the title "Experiments and Observations in Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America, by Mr. Benjamin Franklin." In 1752 he showed the identity of lightning and electricity by his kite experiment, and invented the lightning rod. In 1748, being assured of a competency, he had turned over his business to his foreman, David Hall, and purposed devoting the rest of his life to philosophical enquiries. But he had inextricably involved himself in the affairs of his community, which, as soon as it found him at leisure, "laid hold" of him, as he says, for its own purposes—"every part of the civil government, and almost at the same time, imposing some duty upon me." He was made a justice

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/59


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/60

 of the peace, member of the common council, alderman, and was chosen burgess to represent the city of Philadelphia in the General Assembly. In 1753 he was appointed jointly with William Hunter to exercise the office of postmaster-general of America. In 1754, as a member of the Pennsylvania commission he laid before the colonial congress at Albany the "Plan of Union," adopted by the commissioners. In 1755 he displayed remarkable energy, ability, and public spirit in providing transportation for General Braddock's ill-fated expedition against the French; and in the following year he himself took command of a volunteer military organization for the protection of the northwest frontier. In 1757 he was sent to England to present the long-standing grievances of the Pennsylvania Assembly against the proprietary for obstructing legislation designed to throw upon them a fair share of the expense of government.

Though Franklin's political mission was not wholly successful, his residence in England from 1757 to 1762 was highly profitable to him. It developed his talent as a negotiator of public business with strangers; it enabled him to consider British colonial policies from English points of view; and it afforded him many opportunities for general self-improvement. After a fruitless effort to obtain satisfaction from the representatives of the Penn family, dismissing as impractical the hope of procuring for Pennsylvania a royal charter, he appealed

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/60


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/61

 to the Crown to exempt the Assembly from the influence of proprietary instructions and to make the proprietary estates bear a more equitable proportion of the taxes. To get the Assembly's case before the public, he collaborated with an unknown hand on An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania, published in 1759. The result was a compromise which in the circumstances he regarded as a victory. His interest in the wider questions of imperial policy he exhibited in 1760 by aspersing the advocates of a hasty and inconclusive peace with France in his stinging little skit, Of the Meanes of Disposing the Enemies to Peace, which he presented as an extract from the work of a Jesuit historian. In 1760, also, he was joint author with Richard Jackson of a notably influential argument for the retention of Canada, The Interest of Great Britain Considered with Regard to Her Colonies; to which was appended his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc. In the intervals of business, he sat for his portrait, attended the theatre, played upon the armonica, experimented with electricity and heat, made a tour of the Low Countries, visited the principal cities of England and Scotland, received honorary degrees from the universities, and enjoyed the society of Collinson, Priestley, Price, Hume, Adam Smith, Robertson, and Kames. He returned to America in the latter part of 1762. In 1763 he made a 1,600-mile tour of the northern

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/61


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/62

 provinces to inspect the post-offices. In the following year he was again in the thick of Pennsylvania politics, working with the party in the Assembly which sought to have the proprietary government of the province replaced by a royal charter. In support of this movement he published in 1764 his Cool Thoughts on the Present Situation of our Public Affairs and his Preface to the Speech of Joseph Galloway, a brilliant and blasting indictment of the proprietors, Thomas and Richard Penn.

In the fall of 1764 Franklin was sent again to England by the Assembly to petition for a royal charter and to express the Assembly's views with regard to Grenville's Stamp Act, then impending. On July 11, 1765, after the obnoxious measure had been passed by an overwhelming majority, Franklin wrote to Charles Thomson: "Depend upon it, my good neighbour, I took every step in my power to prevent the passing of the Stamp Act. . . . But the Tide was too strong against us. The nation was provoked by American Claims of Independence, and all Parties joined in resolving by this act to settle the point. We might as well have hindered the sun's setting." This letter and one or two others of about the same date express a patient submission to the inevitable. As soon, however, as Franklin was fully apprised of the fierce flame of opposition which the passage of the act had kindled in the colonies, he caught the spirit of the constituents, and threw himself sternly into the struggle for its repeal.

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/62


text:
Page:The Incas of Peru.djvu/479

Rh * Quipaypa, near Cuzco: Atahnalpa's army at, 249; schoolboys go out hawking there, 266
 * Quipu records: list of ancient kings derived from, 41; referred to by Siuyacu, 59; description, 139; uses, 139, 140, 141, 271; learnt by Inca Garcilasso, 271; used as authorities by Valera, 305
 * Quipucamayocs, recorders, 41, 106, 139, 142
 * Quiquisana, 126
 * Quirau, or cradle, 135
 * Quirirmanta, fourth station of the Ayars, 52
 * Quispicancha, 95, 270
 * Quispi Titu, son of Cusi Titu Yupanqui: befriended by Martin Ampuero, 297
 * Quisuar (Buddleia Incana), 22, 80
 * Quito conquest, 93, 95, 164, 173, 182, 198; death of Huayna Ccapac at, 95, 242; Balboa wrote at, 221 n.; Atahualpa not born at, 241 n.
 * Quitu, a dove, 82
 * Quizquiz, a Quito general, 242; in command of Atahualpa's army, 247; repulsed: took Huascar prisoner, 249, 250; met his deserts, 251

 * : his work on the church of Copacabana, 10; account of mitimaes at Juli, 314
 * Ransom, for Atahualpa, 250, 251
 * Ranti, name, 46
 * Rapids on Amazonian rivers, called puncu, 193. See Manseriche, Salto de Aguirre, Canchaguayo, Mainique
 * Raua or Rava, 49
 * Raymi, name, 44. See Festivals, Months
 * Reiss, Dr.: researches at Ancon, 227
 * Roads, 320
 * Rimac-pampa, 95
 * Rocca, 46, 56, 58
 * Rodadero, rock near the fortress of Cuzco: place for tobogganing, 266
 * Rodriguez, de Figueroa, Diego: embassy to Cusi Titu Yupanqui 285, 291; wrote an account of the mission, 291
 * Rosa, Dr. Gonzalez de la: printed the second part of the chronicle of Cieza de Leon, 4 n.; his researches respecting the work of Valera, 13; information from, respecting Tiahuanacu, 25; on the list of kings in Montesinos, 40; his edition of Carrera's grammar, 220; questions Garcilasso's integrity, 280; proved that the anonymous Jesuit was Valera, 303
 * Rosas, Dr., Cura of Chinchero: had a copy of Ollantay, 148
 * Rumihuasi pass, ix
 * Rumi-ñaui, a Quito general, 242, 266
 * Runa-huana, ravine, 180
 * Runa-simi, the general language, 137, 138. See Quichua
 * Runtu-caya, of Anta, wife of Uira-cocha Inca, 77
 * Rutuchicu, ceremony of naming boys, 135, 167

 * , Don Bautista: views on the ayllu communities, 171
 * Saavedra, Dr. Maldonado: gave the Valera manuscripts to Inca Garcilasso, 278
 * Sacrifices, 180; human, 109
 * Sacsahuaman hill: fortress on, 32, 33; Chingana cave on, 60. See Rocca
 * Sacsahuana. See Saquis-ahuana
 * Sahuaraura, Dr. Justo: claimed descent from Prince Paullu, 282 n.
 * St. Paul's, Dean of. See Milman, Dr.
 * Salcamayhua: antiquities of Peru, translated by the author, x n.; account of his work, 16; makes Urco a reigning Inca, 90 n.; temple to Uira-cocha, 97, 98; Tarapaca and Tonapa, names of Uira-cocha's servants,

title: Page:The Incas of Peru.djvu/479


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/63

 In 1766 he underwent his famous examination before the House of Commons on the attitude of the Colonies towards the collection of the new taxes. The report of this examination, which was promptly published, is one of the most interesting and impressive pieces of dramatic dialogue produced in the eighteenth century. After the repeal, Franklin received recognition at home in the shape of new duties: in 1768 he was appointed agent for Georgia; in 1769, for New Jersey; in 1770, for Massachusetts. In the summer of 1766 he visited Germany; the following summer he visited Paris; and he was in France again for a month in 1769. His pen in these years was employed mainly in correspondence and in communications to the newspapers, in which he pointedly set forth the causes which threatened a permanent breach between the mother country and the colonies. In 1773 he published in the Gentleman's Magazine two little masterpieces of irony which Swift might have been pleased to sign: An Edict by the King of Prussia and Rules by Which a Great Empire may be Reduced to a Small One. In 1774, in consequence of his activity in exposing Governor Hutchinson's proposals for the military intimidation of Massachusetts, Franklin was subjected before the Privy Council to virulent and scurrilous abuse from Attorney-General Wedderburn. This onslaught it was, accentuated by his dismissal from the office of Postmaster-General, which began to curdle in Franklin his sincere

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/63


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/64

 long-cherished hope of an ultimate reconciliation. It is an ominous coincidence that in this year of his great humiliation he sent with a letter of recommendation to his son-in-law in Philadelphia, Thomas Paine, an obscure Englishman of Whiggish temper, two years later to become the fieriest advocate of American independence. In disgrace with the Court, Franklin lingered in England to exhaust the last possibilities of amicable adjustment; petitioning the king, conferring with Burke and Chatham, and curiously arranging for secret negotiations with the go-betweens of the Ministry over the chess board of Lord Howe's sister. He sailed from England in March, 1775, half-convinced that the Ministry were bent upon provoking an open rebellion. When he arrived in Philadelphia, he heard what had happened at Lexington and Concord. On July 5, 1775, he wrote a letter to an English friend of thirty years standing, William Strahan, then a member of Parliament; it was shortened like a Roman sword and sharpened to this point:

As Franklin was sixty-nine years old in 1775, he might fairly have retreated to his library, and have left the burden of the future state to younger hands. He had hardly set foot on shore, however, before

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/64


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/65

 the Pennsylvania Assembly elected him delegate to the first Continental Congress, where his tried sagacity was enlisted in organizing the country's political, economic, and military resources for the great conflict. On July 7, 1775, the old man wrote to Priestley: "My time was never more fully employed. In the morning at six, I am at the Committee of Safety, appointed by the Assembly to put the province in a state of defence; which committee holds till near nine, when I am at the Congress, and that sits till after four in the afternoon." In the period slightly exceeding a year previous to his departure for France, he served on innumerable committees of the Congress, was made Postmaster General of the Colonies, presided over the Constitutional Convention of Pennsylvania, was sent on a mission to Canada, assisted in drafting the Declaration of Independence, and signed it.

In October, 1776, he sailed for France on a commission of the Congress to negotiate a treaty of alliance, which was concluded in February, 1778, after the surrender of Burgoyne had inspired confidence in the prospects of the American arms. In September, 1778, he was appointed plenipotentiary to the court of France. Clothed with large powers, he transacted in the next few years an almost incredible amount of difficult business for his country. He obtained from the French government the repeated loans which made possible the carrying on of a long war; he made contracts for clothing and

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/65


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/66

 ammunitions; he dissuaded or recommended to Congress foreign applicants for commissions in the colonial army; he arranged exchanges of prisoners-of-war; he equipped and to some extent directed the operations of privateers; he supplied information to many Europeans emigrating to America; he made treaties of amity and commerce with Sweden and Prussia. With all this engrossing business on his hands, he found time to achieve an immense personal popularity. He was not merely respected as a masterly diplomat; he was lionized and idolized as the great natural philosopher, the august champion of liberty, and the friend of humanity. In the press of public affairs, never losing interest in scientific matters, he served on a royal French commission to investigate Mesmerism; sent to his foreign correspondents ingenious geological and meteorological conjectures; and transmitted to the Royal Society reports on French experiments in aeronautics. He entertained with a certain lavishness at his house in Passy; and he was a frequent diner-out, adored for his wit and good humor, in the intimate coteries of Mme. Helvetius and Mme. Brillon. He set up for the amusement of himself and his friends a private press in Passy, on which he printed a number of bagatelles of an accomplished and charming levity: The Ephemera, 1778; The Morals of Chess, 1779; The Whistle, 1779; The Dialogue Between Franklin and the Gout, 1780. In 1784 he resumed work on his unfinished autobiography,

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/66


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/67

 and published Advice to such as would remove to America and Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America. In his residence in France he began seriously to feel the siege of gout, the stone, and old age. In 1781, in reply to repeated supplications for leave to go home and die, Congress had appointed him of the commission to negotiate a treaty of peace between England and the United States. This last great task was completed in 1785. In midsummer of that year he said a regretful farewell to his affectionate French friends, received the king's portrait set in four hundred diamonds, and in one of the royal litters was carried down to his point of embarkation at Havre de Grace.

Franklin arrived in Philadelphia in September, 1785, resolved to set his house in order. He was soon made aware that, like the hero in the Conquest of Granada, he had not "leisure yet to die." He was overwhelmed with congratulations; or, as he put it with characteristic modesty of phrase in a letter to his English friend Mrs. Hewson: "I had the happiness of finding my family well, and of being very kindly received by my Country folk." In the month after his arrival he was elected President of the State of Pennsylvania; and the honor was thrust upon him again in 1786 and in 1787. In a letter of November 14, 1785, he says: "I had not firmness enough to resist the unanimous desire of my country folks; and I find myself harnessed again in their service for another year. They engrossed

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/67


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/68

 the prime of my life. They have eaten my flesh, and seem resolved now to pick my bones." In 1787 he was chosen a delegate to the convention to frame the Constitution of the United States—an instrument which he deemed not perfect yet as near perfection as the joint wisdom of any numerous body of men could carry it, handicapped by "their prejudices, their passions, their local interests, and their selfish views." In 1789, as President of the Abolition Society, Franklin signed a memorial against slavery which was laid before the House of Representatives; and on March 23, 1790, less than a month before his death, he wrote for the Federal Gazette, an ironical justification of the enslaving of Christians by African Mohammedans—quite in the vein of the celebrated Edict of the King of Prussia. As the shadows thickened about him, he settled his estate, paid his compliments to his friends, and departed, on the seventeenth day of April, 1790, in his eighty-fifth year.

In the matter of religion Franklin was distinctly a product of the eighteenth century enlightenment. He took his direction in boyhood and early manhood from deistical writers like Pope, Collins, Shaftesbury, and Mandeville. At various periods of his life he drew up articles of belief, which generally included recognition of one God, the providential government of the world, the immortality of the soul, and divine justice. To profess faith in as much religion as this, he found emotionally grati-

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/68


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/69

 fying, socially expedient, and conformable to the common sense of mankind. He might have subscribed without hesitation to both the positive and negative dogmas of the religion civile formulated by Rousseau in the Contrat Social. In his later years he was in sympathetic relation with Paine, Price, and Priestley. He was, however, of a fortunately earlier generation than these English "heretics," and certain other circumstances enabled him to keep the temper of his heterodoxy sweet, while theirs grew acidulous, and to walk serenely in ways which for them were embittered by the odium theologicum. His earlier advent upon the eighteenth-century scene made possible the unfolding and comfortable settlement of his religious ideas before deism had clearly allied itself with political radicalism and edged its sword for assault upon inspired Bible and established church as powers federate with political orthodoxy in upholding the ancient régime. Among the diverse denominational bodies in Pennsylvania his perfectly genuine tolerance and his unfailing tact helped him to maintain a friendly neutrality between parties which were far from friendly. Like Lord Chesterfield, he sincerely believed in the decency and propriety of going to church; and he went himself when he could endure the preachers. He advised his daughter to go constantly, "whoever preaches." He made pecuniary contributions to all the leading denominations in Philadelphia; respectfully acknowledged

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/69


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/70

 the good features of each; and undertook to unite in his own creed the common and, as he thought, the essential features of all. Man of the world as he was, he enjoyed the warm friendship of good Quakers, good Presbyterians, Whitefield, the Bishop of St. Asaph, and his French abbes. His abstention from theological controversy was doubtless due in part to a shrewd regard for his own interest and influence as a business man and a public servant; but it was due in perhaps equal measure to his profound indifference to metaphysical questions unrelated to practical conduct. "Emancipated" in childhood and unmolested in the independence of his mind, he reached maturity without that acrimony of free thought incident to those who attain independence late and have revenges to take. He was consistently opposed to the imposition of religious tests by constitutional authority. But in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 he offered a motion in favor of holding daily prayers before the deliberations of the Assembly, for as he declared, "the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this Truth, that God governs in the Affairs of Men." With his progress in eminence and years, he seems to have been somewhat strengthened in Cicero's conviction that so puissant a personality as his own could not utterly perish, and he derived a kind of classical satisfaction from the reflection that this feeling was in concurrence with the common opinions of mankind. A few

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/70


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/71

 weeks before his death he admitted, in a remarkable letter to Ezra Stiles, a doubt as to the divinity of Jesus; but he remarked with his characteristic tranquillity that he thought it "needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble." Not elate, like Emerson, yet quite unawed, this imitator of Jesus and Socrates walked in this world and prepared for his ease in Zion.

Franklin set himself in youth to the study of "moral perfection," and the work which only great public business prevented his leaving as his literary monument was to have been a treatise on the "art of virtue." His merits, however, in both the theory and practice of the moral life have been seriously called in question. It is alleged that his standards were low and that he did not live up to them. It must be conceded on the one hand that he had a natural son who became governor of New Jersey, and on the other hand that industry and frugality, which most of us place among the minor, he placed among the major virtues. When one has referred the "errata" of his adolescence to animal spirits, "free thinking," and bad company; and when one has explained certain laxities of his maturity by alluding to the indulgent temper of the French society in which he then lived; one may as well candidly admit that St. Francis made chastity a more conspicuous jewel in his crown of virtues than did Dr. Franklin. And when one has pointed out

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/71


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/72

 that the prudential philosophy of Poor Richard's Almanac was rather a collection of popular wisdom than an original contribution; and when one has called attention to the special reasons for magnifying economic virtues in a community of impecunious colonists and pioneers; one may as well frankly acknowledge that there is nothing in the precepts of the great printer to shake a man's egotism like the shattering paradoxes of the Beatitudes nor like the Christian Morals of Sir Thomas Browne to make his heart elate. Franklin had nothing of what pietists call a "realizing sense" of sin or of the need for mystical regeneration and justification—faculties so richly present in his contemporary Jonathan Edwards. His cool calculating reason, having surveyed the fiery battleground of the Puritan conscience, reported that things are forbidden because hurtful, not hurtful because forbidden. Guided by this utilitarian principle, he simplified his religion and elaborated his morality. His system included, however, much more than maxims of thrift and prudent self-regard, and to assert that he set up wealth as the summum bonum is a sheer libel. He commended diligence in business as the means to a competency; he commended a competency as a safeguard to virtue; and he commended virtue as the prerequisite to happiness. The temple that he reared to Moral Perfection was built of thirteen stones: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, clean-

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/72


text:
Translation:Shulchan Aruch/Yoreh Deah/249

How much should one give and how should one give it? In this regard, there are sixteen sections: Section 1: The measure of giving, if one's hand is capable, is to give according to the needs of the poor. And if one's hand is not capable, they should give up to a fifth of their possessions, which is a distinguished commandment. And one-tenth is a moderate measure, less than that is considered stinginess. And this fifth is from the profits attained each year.

Note: A person should not squander more than a fifth, as they may need it for others (Ba'al Ha'Itur citing the Talmud, page Na'ara She'netpatea). However, during one's final moments, a person can give as much charity as they wish (Gaz citing Rashi, Rosh, Ramban, and Mordechai). And one should not use their own tithe for other commandments, such as candles for the synagogue or other commandments, but rather give it to the poor (Maharil, Laws of Rosh Hashanah).

Section 2: One should never withhold from themselves less than a third of a shekel per year. And if one gives less than this, they have not fulfilled the commandment of charity.

Section 3: One should give charity with a pleasant countenance, with joy and a kind heart, and sympathize with the poor in their distress, speaking comforting words to them. If one gives with an angry or unpleasant countenance, they lose the merit.

Section 4: If a poor person asks someone for help and they have nothing to give, they should not scold or raise their voice towards them. Instead, they should appease them with words and show them their good heart, that they wish to give but their hand is not capable.

Note: It is forbidden to send a poor person away empty-handed, even if one can only give them a small coin (as it is said in Psalms 41:2, "Do not turn away your face from a pauper"). (Tur, citing Rambam)

Section 5: If one can do something for others that will give them greater reward than the reward of the giver, it is praiseworthy.

Section 6: There are eight levels of charity, each surpassing the previous one. The highest level is for one who strengthens the hand of their fellow Jew, supporting them by giving them a gift, loan, partnership, or finding them work so that they do not become dependent on others and have no need to ask for charity. Regarding this, it is said, "You shall strengthen him" (Deuteronomy 15:8).

Section 7: Giving less than this to a poor person when one does not know who they are giving to, and the poor person does not know who is giving to them, is near to the level of giving to a charity box. One should not contribute to a charity box unless they know that the person in charge of it is trustworthy and will administer it properly.

Section 8: Giving less than this to a poor person when the giver knows who they are giving to, but the poor person does not know who the giver is, is similar to the practice of the sages who would discreetly place money in the garments of the poor. This is praiseworthy. However, if there are officials in charge of charity, one should act in a straightforward manner.

Section 9: Giving less than this to a poor person when the poor person knows who the giver is, but the giver does not know who the poor person is, is similar to the practice of wise sages who would secretly place money behind them and the poor would take it so as not to embarrass them.

Section 10: Giving less than this amount to a poor person without them asking for it, but the giver knows that they are in need, is praiseworthy.

Section 11: Giving less than this amount to a poor person after they have asked for it, according to what is appropriate, is praiseworthy.

Section 12: Giving less than this amount to a poor person with a pleasant countenance is praiseworthy.

Section 13: Giving less than this amount to a poor person with sorrow is permissible.

Note: In any case, a person should not boast about their charity, as if they do, it is not enough that they do not receive reward, but they may even be punished for it (Semag, brought by Ba'al Ha'Itur). Nevertheless, one who designates something for charity is permitted to write their name on it as a memorial, and it is praiseworthy to do so (Teshuvat Rashba, Siman Tafpei Alef).

Section 14: It is good to give a small coin to a poor person before every prayer, as it is said, "I will see Your face with charity" (Psalms 17:15).

Section 15: Charity collectors who have charity funds in their hands should give them to impoverished maidens, as there is no greater charity than this.

Section 16: Some say that the mitzvah of supporting a synagogue is superior to the mitzvah of charity. And the mitzvah of charity for children studying Torah or sick individuals is superior to the mitzvah of supporting a synagogue.

Note: The custom to distribute charity for the deceased during the remembrance of souls is an ancient custom and it benefits their souls (Rokach, Siman Reish Ayin Zayin).


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/73

 liness, tranquillity, chastity, and humility—the last added on the advice of a Quaker. He wrought upon the structure with the method of a monk and he recorded his progress with the regularity of a book-keeper. The presiding spirit in the edifice, which made it something more than a private oratory, was a rational and active benevolence towards his fellow mortals in every quarter of the earth. The wide-reaching friendliness in Franklin may be distinguished in two ways from the roseate humanitarian enthusiasm of the Savoyard Vicar. It was not begotten by a theory of "natural goodness" nor fostered by millennial expectations but was born of sober experience with the utility of good will in establishing satisfactory and fruitful relations among men. It found expression not in rhetorical periods but in numberless practical means and measures for ameliorating the human lot. By no mystical intuition but by the common light of reason the "prudential philosopher" discovered and acted upon the truth, that the greatest happiness that can come to a man in this world is to devote the full strength of body and mind to the service of his fellow men. Judged either by his principles or by his performance, Franklin's moral breadth and moral elevation have been absurdly underestimated.

It is perhaps in the field of politics that Franklin exhibits the most marked development of his power and his vision. A realistic inductive thinker, well versed in the rudiments of his subject long before

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/73


text:
Joaquin Miller

 * Cincinnatus Heine Miller (1837–1913), American poet and eccentric; more commonly known by the penname Joaquin Miller
 * "Joaquin Miller" (1922), an essay by Stuart Pratt Sherman

title: Joaquin Miller


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/74

 the revolutionary theorists handled it, he was not rendered by any preconception of abstract rights indocile to the lessons of his immense political experience. He formulated his conceptions in the thick of existing conditions, and always with reference to what was expedient and possible as well as to what was desirable. He served his apprenticeship in the Philadelphia Junto Club, which at its inception was little more than a village improvement society, but which threw out branches till it became a power in the province, and a considerable factor in the affairs of the colonies. In this association he learned the importance of cooperation, mastered the tactics of organization, practiced the art of getting propaganda afoot, and discovered the great secret of converting private desires into public demands. In proposing in 1754 his plan for a union of the colonies he was applying to larger units the principle of cooperative action by which he had built up what we might call today his "machine" in Pennsylvania. He had in too large measure the instincts and the ideas of a leader, and he had too much experience with the conflicting prejudices and the resultant compromises of popular assemblies, to feel any profound reverence for the "collective wisdom" of the people. "If all officers appointed by governors were always men of merit," he wrote in his Dialogue Concerning the Present State of Affairs in Pennsylvania, "it would be wrong ever to hazard a popular election." That his belief in

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/74


text:
Page:The Incas of Peru.djvu/447

Rh :Ollantay. Thou art our protector, great King, Thy noble hands disperse our grief; Thou art our faith and only hope— Thou workest by virtue's force.
 * Tupac Yupanqui. Thy wife is now in thy arms;

All sorrow now should disappear, Joy, new born, shall take its place.

 * (Acclamations from the Chiefs, and Piqui Chaqui. Music: huancars (drums), pincullus (flutes), and pututus (clarions).)

title: Page:The Incas of Peru.djvu/447


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/75

 popular representation was due as much to his sense of its political expediency as to his sense of its political justice is suggested by a passage in his letter on the imposition of direct taxes addressed to Governor Shirley, December 18, 1754: "In matters of general concern to the people, and especially where burthens are to be laid upon them, it is of use to consider, as well what they will be apt to think and say, as what they ought to think." His sojourn in England widened his horizons but not beyond the bounds of his nationality. As agent, he felt himself essentially a colonial Englishman pleading for the extension of English laws to British subjects across the sea, and playing up to the Imperial policy of crushing out the colonizing and commercial rivalry of France. The ultimate failure of his mission of reconciliation effected no sudden transformation of his political ideas; it rather overwhelmed him with disgust at the folly, the obstinacy, and the corruption rampant among English politicians of the period. He returned to the arms of his people because he had been hurled from the arms of his king, and he embraced their new principles because he was sure they could not be worse applied than his old ones. His respect for the popular will was inevitably heightened by his share in executing it in the thrilling days when he was helping his fellow countrymen to declare their independence, and was earning the superb epigraph of Turgot: Eripuit fulmen coelo sceptrumque tyrannis. His official resi-

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/75


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/76

 dence in France completely dissolved his former antagonism to that country. In the early stages of the conflict his wrath was bitter enough towards England, but long before it was over he had taken the ground of radical pacificism, reiterating his conviction that "there is no good war and no bad peace." He who had financed the Revolution had seen too much non-productive expenditure of moral and physical capital to believe in the appeal to arms. If nations required enlargement of their territories, it was a mere matter of arithmetic, he contended, to show that the cheaper way was to purchase it. "Justice," he declared, "is as strictly due between neighbor nations as between neighbor citizens, . . . and a nation that makes an unjust war is only a great gang." So far as he was able, he mitigated the afflictions of noncombatants. He proposed by international law to exempt from peril fishermen and farmers and the productive workers of the world. He ordered the privateersmen under his control to safeguard the lives and property of explorers and men of science belonging to the enemy country; and he advocated for the future the abolition of the custom of commissioning privateers. In the treaty which he negotiated with Prussia he actually obtained the incorporation of an article so restricting the "zone of war" as to make a war between Prussia and the United States under its terms virtually impossible. His diplomatic intercourse in Europe had opened his eyes to the common interests

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/76


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/77

 of all pacific peoples and to the inestimable advantages of a general amity among the nations. His ultimate political ideal included nothing short of the welfare and the commercial federation of the world. To that extent, at least, he was a believer in majority interests! It may be further said that his political development was marked by a growing mastery of the art of dealing with men and by a steady approximation of his political to his personal morality.

For the broad humanity of Franklin's political conceptions undoubtedly his interest in the extension of science was partly responsible. As a scientific investigator he had long been a "citizen of the world," and for him not the least bitter consequence of the war was that it made a break in the intellectual brotherhood of man. If he had not been obliged to supply the army of Washington with guns and ammunition, he might have been engaged in the far more congenial task of supplying the British Academy with food for philosophical discussion. He could not but resent the brutal antagonisms which had rendered intellectual coöperation with his English friends impossible, and which had frustrated his cherished hope of devoting his ripest years to philosophical researches. A natural endowment he certainly possessed which would have qualified him in happier circumstances for even more distinguished service than he actually performed in extending the frontiers of knowledge. He had,

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/77


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/78

 the powerfully developed curiosity of the explorer and the inventor, ever busily prying into the causes of things, ever speculating upon the consequences of novel combinations. His native inquisitiveness had been stimulated by a young civilization's manifold necessities, mothering manifold inventions, and had been supplemented by a certain moral and idealizing passion for improvement. The practical nature of many of his devices, his absorption in agriculture and navigation, his preoccupation with stoves and chimneys, the image of him firing the gas of ditch water or pouring oil on troubled waves, and the celebrity of the kite incident rather tend to fix an impression that he was but a tactful empiricist and a lucky dilettante of discovery. It is interesting in this connection to note that he confesses his lack of patience for verification. His prime scientific faculty, as he himself felt, was the imagination which bodies forth the shapes and relations of things unknown, which constructs the theory and the hypothesis. His mind was a teeming warren of hints and suggestions. He loved rather to start than to pursue the hare. Happily what he deemed his excessive penchant for forming hypotheses was safeguarded by his perfect readiness to hear all that could be urged against them. He wished not his view but truth to prevail—which explains the winsome cordiality of his demeanor towards other savants. His unflagging correspondence with investigators, his subscription to learned publications,

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/78


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/79

 his active membership in philosophical societies and his enterprise in founding schools and academies all betoken his prescience of the wide domain which science had to conquer and of the necessity for cooperation in the task of subduing it. Franklin was so far a Baconian that he sought to avoid unfruitful speculation and to unite contemplation and action in a stricter embrace for the generation of knowledge useful toman. But in refutation of any charge that he was a narrow-minded utilitarian and lacked the liberal views and long faith of the modern scientific spirit may be adduced his stunning retort to a query as to the usefulness of the balloons then on trial in France: "What is the use of a new born baby?"

Of Franklin's style the highest praise is to declare that it reveals the mental and moral qualities of the man himself. It is the flexible style of a writer who has learned the craft of expression by studying and imitating the virtues of many masters: the playful charm of Addison, the trenchancy of Swift, the concreteness of Defoe, the urbanity of Shaftesbury, the homely directness of Bunyan's dialogue, the unadorned vigor of Tillotson, and the epigrammatic force of Pope. His mature manner, however, is imitative of nothing but the thoroughly disciplined movement of a versatile mind which has never known a moment of languor or a moment of uncontrollable excitement. Next to his omnipresent vitality, his most notable characteristic is the clear-

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/79


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/80

 ness which results from complete preliminary vision of what is to be said, and which in a young hand demands deliberate preconsideration. To Franklin the ordering of his matter must have become eventually a light task as, with incessant passing to and fro in his experience and with the daily habit of epistolary communication, he grew as familiar with his intellectual terrains as an old field marshal with the map of Europe. For the writing of his later years is marked not merely by clearness and force but also by the sovereign ease of a man who has long understood himself and the interrelations of his ideas and has ceased to make revolutionary discoveries in any portion of his own nature. His occasional wrath does not fluster him but rather intensifies his lucidity, clarifies his logic, and brightens the ironical smile that accompanies the thrust of his wit. The "decent plainness and manly freedom" of his ordinary tone—notes which he admired in the writings of his maternal, Peter Folger—rise in parts of his official correspondence to a severity of decorum; for there is a trace of the senatorial in the man, the dignity of antique Rome. He is seldom too hurried, even in a private letter, to gratify the ear by the turning and cadence of sentence and phrase; and one feels that the harmony of his periods is the right and predestined vesture of his essential blandness and suavity of temper. His stylistic drapery, however, is never so smoothed and adjusted as to obscure the sinewy

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/80


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/81

 vigor of his thought. His manner is steadily in the service of his matter. He is adequate, not copious; for his moral "frugality and industry" prompt him to eschew surplusage and to make his texture firm. His regard for purity of diction is classical; he avoids vulgarity; he despises the jargon of scientific pedants; but like Montaigne he loves frank and masculine speech, and he likes to enrich the language of the well-bred by discreet drafts upon the burry, homely, sententious, proverbial language of the people. Like Lord Bacon and like many other grave men among his fellow countrymen, he found it dificult to avoid an opportunity for a jest even when the occasion was unpropitious; and he never sat below the Attic salt. When his fortune was made he put by the pewter spoon and earthenware bowl of his apprenticeship for silver and fine china. His biographer reminds us that he kept a well-stocked cellar at Passy and enjoyed the distinction of suffering from the gout. With affluence and years he acquired a "palate," and gave a little play to the long repressed tastes of an Epicurean whom early destiny had cast upon a rockbound coast. The literary expression of his autumnal festivity is to be found in the bagatelles. The tallow chandler's son, having entered on the cycle of his development by cultivating thrift like Defoe, completed it like Lord Chesterfield by cultivating "the graces." The Ephemera proves that this great eighteenth century rationalist had a fancy. It is no

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/81


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/82

 relative, indeed, of that romantic spirit which pipes to the whistling winds on the enchanted greens of Shakespeare. It is rather the classic sprite which summons the little rosy-winged Loves and Desires to sport among the courtiers and philosophers and the wasp-waited ladies in the delicate fête champêtre of Watteau.

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/82


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/83

Some books, like some persons, convey to us all that they will ever have to give at a single sitting. Others hold our attention profitably through two or three encounters. Of the wives we marry we ask more than that; and the books to frequent, the books to be shipwrecked with, the great books into which rich and substantial lives have been distilled and packed—the Dialogues of Plato, Montaigne's Essays, Boswell's Johnson, the Essays and Journals of Emerson—these are to be lived with and returned to and made the companions of hours and days and moods as various as those in which they were written. You cannot discover what Emerson has been to others or what he may be to you by any cursory turning of his pages. Still less can you "get him up" by studying any summary of his philosophical system. Philosophers tell us indeed that his philosophical system is hopelessly antiquated, and fancy that they have disposed of him. But Emerson himself remarked: "I need hardly say to anyone acquainted with my thoughts that I have no system." The value of his thoughts depends scarcely

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/83


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/84

 more upon the metaphysical filaments among them than the value of a string of alternating beads of gold and pearl depends upon the string. The figure has a momentary illustrative force but is very inadequate. Emerson lives, still speaks pertinently of our current affairs, and to-morrow we shall still find him commenting with equal pertinency on to-morrow's affairs. To know him is not mere knowledge. It is an experience; for he is a dynamic personality, addressing the will, the emotions, the imagination, no less than the intellect. His value escapes the merely intellectual appraiser. Analysis cannot deal properly with his pungent wit—it must be savored; nor with the impetus that he gives to the will—it must be felt; nor with the purgation and serene rapture of the mind towards which his noble discipline tends—this rapture must be attained as a state of grace by imitation of those who have attained it, by lifelong intercourse with men whose tone and habit of life is noble.

Since we are to consider him primarily as an unspent force in our own times, what it most concerns us to enquire about him is what he can do for us. If we approach him with that question, we need not tarry long over biographical details, interesting and rewarding as they may be to the student of literary history. We pretty well sum up his ex-

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/84


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/85

 ternal career when we say that he was a New Englander of Boston, where he was born in 1803, and of Concord, where he died in 1882, after a studious life of irreproachable purity, dignity, and simplicity becoming the descendant of several generations of New England gentlemen and scholars. His formal education he received at the Boston Latin School and at Harvard College, from which he was graduated in 1821, with a well-formed bias towards an intellectual life. The son of a Unitarian minister, he inherited an ethical impulse which directed him to the Harvard Divinity School in 1825–6. In 1829 he was appointed pastor of the Second Unitarian Church of Boston. He was married in the same year to Ellen Tucker, who died two years later, leaving him a sweet and unfading memory of her fragile loveliness. After he had served his parish acceptably for three years, he felt obliged to announce, in 1832, that he was no longer able to administer the sacrament of communion in the general sense of his congregation, and resigned his charge. In December of that year he visited Europe and made acquaintance with three or four men whose residence in Europe constituted for him the chief reason for going abroad: Landor in Italy, Carlyle at Craigenputtock, and Coleridge and Wordsworth in England. He returned to America in October, 1833, and in the following year settled permanently in Concord. In 1835 he married his second wife, Lidian Jackson. For three or four

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/85


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/86

 years he preached with some regularity in various pulpits, but he gradually abandoned the church for the lyceum, which invited him as far west as Wisconsin and Illinois. He made a second visit to England in 1848. For the most part, barring his winter lecturing tours and an occasional excursion to deliver a commencement address or a Phi Beta Kappa oration, he lived placidly in Concord, reading, meditating, writing, editing the short-lived transcendental Dial, looking amusedly askance upon the Brook Farm experiment, and walking and talking with his famous fellow-villagers, the Alcotts, the Hawthornes, Margaret Fuller, Ellery Channing, and Thoreau.

What ferment of radical thought went on beneath the decorous exterior of that quiet scholar's life we know with remarkable fulness and accuracy. From early boyhood Emerson kept a journal—a habit, in his case, denoting a mind disposed to make unusual exactions of the "hypocritic days." At first, he is much occupied with what he has read or proposes to read; but presently his note-book becomes a kind of storehouse for mellowing the fruits of his daily meditations, and an experimental garden for planting the seeds of new thoughts gathered on his intellectual adventures. The Journals, now published in twelve volumes, give us an invaluable commentary upon the long-familiar essays, and they enrich greatly our sense of the personality behind them. Especially they illuminate

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/86


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/87

 the turning point in Emerson's life, when he abandoned the pulpit and became a wholly free thinker and speaker. With their help, one perceives that for years before the open break, the inner emancipation had been proceeding. One observes the young thinker expanding steadily beyond the formulas of his parish, reaching out towards the life of his nation, feeling his way into the higher spirit of his times, daily becoming more eager to exchange messages and compare visions with the leaders of his generation.

It is a vulgar error of our day to think of Emerson and his friends as living in a rude and mentally poverty-stricken era. In his formative period, say from 1820 to 1832, society around the Golden Gate and at the southern end of Lake Michigan was indeed in a somewhat more primitive state than at present. But in compensation, such civilized society as the country possessed was concentrated in a much smaller geographical area. To reside in Boston or New York was not then, as now, to live on the rim but at the centre of population, within reach of the molding pressure of all the great Americans of one's time. The "moment," furthermore, was peculiarly rich in the presence of eminent men who had been shaped by the Revolution, and in the presence of men who were to become eminent in the movement which led to the Civil War. To a young man of Emerson's quality, the period of the Adamses, Jefferson, Randolph, and Jackson, the period of Web-

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/87


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/88

 ster, Clay, Calhoun, Everett, and Garrison, was not a dull period, not a dead interval, but a most stirring and exciting time between two epoch-making crises, with the thunder of a political Niagara at one's back, and the roar of wild rapids ahead. The air was full of promise and of peril and of conflicting measures for avoiding the one and fulfilling the other.

Politically-minded men—the Jacksons, the Clays, the Calhouns—brought to the problems of the hour political solutions. But the more sensitive spirits among the younger generation in New England had already experienced a certain reaction against the political faith and enthusiasms of their fathers. Already they heard the ominous creaking of democratic machinery under the manipulation of unskilful and unscrupulous hands. To them it began to appear that the next great improvement in the condition of society must depend less upon the alteration of laws and institutions than upon the intellectual and moral regeneration of men. The new movement was genuinely Puritan by its inwardness, by its earnest passion for cleansing the inside of the cup, and by its protest against external powers which thwarted or retarded the efforts of the individual soul to move forward and upward by light from within. Looking back in 1844 over the multifarious projects for "the salvation of the world" unfolded by reformers in his part of the country, Emerson remarks: "There was in all the

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/88


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/89

 practical activities of New England, for the last quarter of a century, a gradual withdrawal of tender consciences from the social organization. There is observable throughout, the contest between mechanical and spiritual methods, but with a steady tendency of the thoughtful and virtuous to a deeper belief and reliance on spiritual facts."

Those who place their reliance on spiritual facts have always been thought a little queer and rather dangerous by those who do not. Nor can it be denied that the radical protestantism of the Puritans, which Emerson inherited, has contained from the time of Wycliff an anarchical germ, a latent suspicion of church and state, a tendency towards "coming out," till one shall stand alone in utter freedom and count for one and nothing more. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the individualism which characterized the movement in New England. For Emerson above all, the very rapture of the time rose from its challenge to a perfectly independent, a perfectly fearless, scrutiny and testing of received values in every field—art, politics, morals, religion.

Emerson was preserved from the fanaticism of a secession from "the social organization" partly by his culture. A moral reformation which undertakes to investigate the bases of morals will develop and transform itself into an intellectual renascence as soon as those who are conducting it perceive that everything in heaven and earth has a bearing on their questions. Emerson discovered early that the

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/89


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/90

 first step towards thinking greatly and freely on moral matters is to consult the world's accumulated wisdom. Hasty writers speak of his "jaunty" attitude towards the past. If he is jaunty about the past, it is because he is very familiar with it. What impresses the thoughtful student of his journals is his steady effort to hold himself and his contemporaries under the searching cross-lights of human experience. He reads Plato, Cicero, Hafiz, Confucius, Buddha, Mahomet, Dante, Montaigne, Milton, Voltaire, Kant, Goethe, Napoleon, Coleridge, Carlyle, because that, he finds, is the effective way to set his own intelligence free, and because freedom, he finds, means ability to move at ease and as an equal among such minds as these.

But Emerson was also preserved from excessive individualism by a passion which, properly elevated and directed, may be a young man's guardian angel, the passion of ambition. "All young persons," he observes, "thirst for a real existence for a real object,—for something great and good which they shall do with their heart. Meanwhile they all pack gloves, or keep books, or travel, or draw indentures, or cajole old women." By habitual imaginative association with great men, he had assimilated their thoughts and virtues, and had accustomed himself to look forward with an almost Miltonic assurance to playing a part above the ordinary in the life of his country. At the age of twenty-one he is sketching a series of papers on the improvement of the

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/90


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/91

 nation. He thinks the demand for a moral education the best sign of the times, and deems the exploration of the field a task fit for a new Columbus. He queries whether it were not an "heroic adventure" for him to "insist on being a popular speaker." And with perceptible elation at the prospect he concludes: "To address a great nation risen from the dust and sitting in absolute judgment on the merits of men, ready to hear if any one offers good counsel, may rouse the ambition and exercise the judgment of a man."

There is some disposition at present to look upon Emerson's ambition as extravagant and to regard his work as a closed chapter in the intellectual life of America. It is even asserted that he never much affected the thinking of his countrymen. Says a recent writer, "What one notices about him chiefly is his lack of influence upon the main stream of American thought, such as it is. He had admirers and even worshippers, but no apprentices." But this judgment will not stand examination. Emerson was a naturalist with a fresh vision of the natural world: he had Thoreau for an apprentice, and between them they established relations with the natural world, which successive naturalists like John Burroughs and John Muir have maintained and broadened to the dimensions of a national tradition.

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/91


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/92

 Emerson was a poet with a fresh vision of the poetic field in America: he had Whitman for a disciple, and a large part of what passes with us as poetry to-day, whatever is indigenous and racy of the soil and native character and ideals, is ultimately traceable to their inspiration. Emerson is our great original force in criticism; he left the imprint of his spirit upon Lowell, who said: "There is no man living to whom, as a writer, so many of us feel and thankfully acknowledge so great an indebtedness for ennobling impulses." Whatever is finely academic, high-bred, and distinguished in our critical literature to-day has felt the influence of Emerson and Lowell. "To him," according to Lowell, "more than to all other causes together did the young martyrs of our Civil War owe the sustaining strength of thoughtful heroism that is so touching in every record of their lives." By his aid innumerable preachers and teachers have found a way to translate the message of ancient scriptures into the language of modern men. Every American who pretends to know anything whatever of the American classics has at one time or other read the Essays; and the "idealism" which was once thought to be characteristic of the American people is most readily formulated in a half dozen of his "familiar quotations," which every one knows, whether he has read a line of Emerson or not. Directly and indirectly Emerson probably did as much as any other writer in our history to establish what we mean by "a good

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/92


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/93

 American"; and that, in the long run, is the most important sort of influence that can be exerted by any writer in any country.

That his influence abroad has been considerable may be briefly suggested by the reminder that he touched deeply such various men as Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Nietzsche, and M. Maeterlinck. When Arnold visited America in 1883, he lectured on Emerson, on whom thirty years earlier he had written a sonnet of ardent admiration and homage. The lecture, the fruit of his ripest critical reflection, was not altogether satisfactory to his American audience. It impressed them as quite inadequately appreciative of their chief literary luminary. For Arnold very firmly declared that Emerson is not to be ranked with the great poets, nor with the great writers of prose, nor with the great makers of philosophical systems. These limitations of Emerson's power are commonly quoted as if detraction were the main burden of Arnold's message. As a matter of fact they are preliminary to his deliberate and remarkable declaration that in his judgment Emerson's essays are the most important work done in prose in our language during the nineteenth century. This is high praise from an exacting critic who was little given to the use of superlatives in any case, least of all in the case of American authors.

For what merit does Emerson deserve this pre-eminent place? Because, says Arnold, in a phrase full of significance, because "he is the friend and

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/93


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/94

 aider of those who would live in the spirit." Let us unfold a little the implications of this phrase and make its application more precise. Important as Emerson may have been to young Englishmen in the first half of the last century, he was still more important to youny Americans. Helpful as he may become to European minds, he will always remain peculiarly the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit amid an environment which, as is generally thought, tends powerfully to confirm on the one hand the hard and merely practical genius of the Yankee, and, on the other hand, the narrow and inflexible righteousness of the merely traditional Puritan, the Puritan who feels no longer the urgency and progressive force of hew moral life within him. To the posterity of Franklin and Edwards, Emerson is the destined and appropriate counsellor because he brings them undiminished the vital force of their great moral traditions while at the same time he emancipates them from the "dead hand," the cramping and lifeless part of their past. To children of the new world, Emerson is a particularly inspiring friend, because with deep indigenous voice he frees them from unmanly fear of their elders, lifts from their minds the overawing prestige of Europe, liberates the powers and faith of the individual man and makes him "at home" in his own time and place.

A great part of our lives, as we all recognize in what we call our educational period, is occupied

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/94


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/95

 with learning how to do and to be what others have been and have done before us. We come abreast of our predecessors by imitating them, and are grateful to the masters when they reveal to us their secrets, to the older men when they give us the benefit of their experience. But presently we discover that the world is changing around us, and that the secrets of the masters and the experience of our elders do not wholly suffice—much though they aid us—to establish us effectively in our younger world. We discover within us needs, aspirations, powers of which the generation that educated us seems unaware, or towards which it appears to be indifferent, unsympathetic, or even actively hostile. We perceive gradually or with successive shocks of surprise that many things which our fathers declared were true and satisfactory are not at all satisfactory, are by no means true, for us. Then it dawns upon us, perhaps as an exhilarating opportunity, perhaps as a grave and sobering necessity, that in a little while we ourselves shall be the elders, the responsible generation. Our salvation in the day when we take command will depend, we are constrained to believe, upon our disentanglement from the lumber of heirlooms and hereditary devices, and upon the discovery and free wise use of our own faculties. The vital part of education begins in the hour when consciousness of self-dependence breaks upon the mind. That is the hour for Emerson.

He appeals to unfolding minds because he is pro-

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/95


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/96

 foundly in sympathy with the modern spirit. By this phrase we mean primarily the disposition to accept nothing on authority, but to bring all reports to the test of experience. The modern spirit is first of all a free spirit open on all sides to the influx of truth. But freedom is not its only characteristic. The modern spirit is marked further by an active curiosity which grows by what it feeds upon, and goes ever enquiring for fresher and sounder information, not content till it has the best information to be had anywhere. But since it seeks the best, it is, by necessity, also a critical spirit, constantly sifting, discriminating, rejecting, and holding fast that which is good only till that which is better is within reach. This endless quest, when it becomes central in a life, requires labor, requires pain, requires a measure of courage; and so the modern spirit, with its other virtues, is an heroic spirit. As a reward for difficulties gallantly undertaken, the gods bestow on the modern spirit a kind of eternal youth with unfailing powers of recuperation and growth. This spirit—free, actively curious, upward-striving, critical, courageous, and self-renewing—Emerson richly possesses; and that is why he is so happily qualified to be a counsellor of youth in the period of intellectual emancipation.

There are many prophets abroad in the land to-day, offering themselves as emancipators, who have only very partially comprehended their task. By the incompleteness of their message they bring the

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/96


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/97

 modern spirit itself into disrepute. They understand and declare that the modern spirit is free and curious. They have failed to recognize that it is also critical and upward striving. When the well-born soul discards the "old clothes" of outworn custom and belief, it seeks instinctively for fresh raiment; but these Adamites would persuade it to rejoice in nakedness and seek no further. They know that man is an animal; but it escapes their notice that man is an animal constituted and destined by his nature to make pilgrimages in search for a shrine, and to worship, till he finds it, the Unknown God. Because they understand so ill the needs and cravings of man, they go about eagerly hurrying him from a predicament into a disaster. They conceive that they have properly performed the emancipative function when they have cut the young generation loose from the old moorings, and set it adrift at the mercy of wind and tide.

It is these partial liberators who produce in our young people that false and bewildering sense of illumination, so eloquently described by John Henry Newman. Says that penetrating analyst of modern libertinism: "When the mind throws off as so much prejudice what it has hitherto held, and, as if waking from a dream, begins to realize to its imagination that there is no such thing as law and the transgression of law, that sin is a phantom, and punishment a bugbear, that it is free to sin, free to enjoy the world and the flesh; and still further,

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/97


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/98

 when it does enjoy them, and reflects that it may think and hold just what it will, that 'the world is all before it where to choose,' and what system to build up as its own private persuasion; when this torrent of wilful thoughts rushes over and inundates it, who will deny that the fruit of the tree of knowledge, or what the mind takes for knowledge, has made it one of the gods, with a sense of expansion and elevation,—an intoxication in reality, still, so far as the subjective state of the mind goes, an illumination?"

The true emancipator, the man who has entered fully into the modern spirit, is always a reconstructionist. The enlargement of mind which he offers is always, to modify slightly the words of Newman, an enlargement not of tumult and intoxication but of clearer vision and fruitful peace. In our Civil War slaves set free by proclamation flung up their caps and shouted with a vague joy. But shortly afterwards, we are told, many of them returned to their old masters and sought reemployment at their former tasks. So little was their undirected freedom worth. The true liberator strikes off the old shackles but immediately he suggests new service, a fuller use of our powers. He cuts us loose from the old moorings; but then he comes aboard like a good pilot, and while we trim our sails, he takes the wheel and lays our course for a fresh voyage. His message when he leaves us is not, "Henceforth be masterless," but "Bear thou henceforth the scep-

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/98


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/99

 tre of thine own control through life and the passion of life."

Religious emancipation as conducted by Emerson makes a man not less but more religious. It frees the restless modern soul from ancient sectarian fetters, from ceremonial that has become empty, and from the litter of meaningless creeds. But straightway it reestablishes the soul in a new doctrine of "continuous revelation" and in works and conduct proper to those who have been freshly inspired. There is an element that looks like mystical experience underlying this fundamental part of Emerson's religious teaching. But since mysticism constitutes a difficulty and an obstacle to the average modern mind, let us reduce the irrational or super-rational element as far as possible. Let us explain what we can.

Emerson's belief in continuous revelation is clearly ascribable in large measure to the breadth of his spiritual culture. Throughout his life he was a student of the religions of the world. With free and open mind he compared the teachings of Plato, Confucius, Jesus, Buddha, Mahomet, seeking the spirit beneath the letter transmitted by each. This comparison did not bring him to the hasty thinker's conclusion that the Bible of Christians is an uninspired book, but rather to the conclusion that all the

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/99


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/100

 bibles are inspired books. The farther he pressed his studies in religion, in philosophy, in poetry, the more obvious it became to him that elevated thought and noble emotion are not the exclusive endowment of any special period or person, but are common to the highest representatives of all great peoples in all the great ages.

How account for that undeniable and really very inspiriting fact? Emerson explained it by what might be called the law of the conservation of spiritual energy. The mortal forms, momentarily fixed in the shape of Plato or Confucius, decay and are dispersed, yet their elemental force, as modern science teaches us, is not destroyed, but resumed and conserved in the all-encompassing energy of the universe, and is recreated for ever and ever in new shapes of men and things. In like fashion, as it appeared to Emerson, the thought and feeling of men, since thought and feeling are also forms of energy, must be resumed and conserved indestructibly in the general reservoir of moral energy, the "over-soul," from which they flow again into individuals, generations, races, with such sustaining recurrence as the vernal sap observes.

The vividness of his belief in this inflowing power may be ascribed to certain personal experiences, emotional and exalting, for which the entire discipline of his life had prepared him. From his youth up he had conversed in his reading with strongsouled men, with the saints, heroes, and sages. He

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/100


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/101

 had meditated on their counsels not occasionally but daily, persistently, for hours together, till the bounds between their minds and his disappeared, and their thoughts actually became his thoughts and their temper his temper. It is a discipline which breaks down the walls of personality and merges the individual with the over-soul. By books, he writes in his journal in 1824 at the age of twenty-one, "my memory goes back to a past immortality, and I almost realize the perfection of a spiritual intercourse which gains all the good, and lacks all the inconvenience and disgust of close society of imperfect beings. We are then likest to the image of God, for in this grateful rapidity of thought a thousand years become one day."

A mind thus stored and sensitized will respond now and then to an apparently slight stimulus with an extraordinary excitement and something in the nature of "vision" and "illumination." The young man reads in quiet solitude one of the more poetical dialogues of Plato, or he walks in flowering fields communing with his thoughts, or he lifts his head from his sick-bed at sunrise and beholds "the spotless orange light of the morning streaming up from the dark hills into the wide universe." Suddenly, to him unaccountably, there is a profound stirring of his emotional depths. A sense of sublimity fills his consciousness. His will appears to him godlike, invincible. He is elate with benign resolution. In a delighted ecstasy he feels streaming through all

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/101


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/102

 his being eternal forces,—all the wisdom and all the virtues that have ever been in the world. However we may attempt to explain, or to explain away, his sensations, he himself is incontrovertibly convinced that he has been visited and breathed upon by a power-not—himself. He has been but a passive vessel filled to the brim by an inrush of energy from the Over-soul, from the circumfluent seas of moral power.

Such inspiration, Emerson holds, is natural to man. It is probably open to everyone who will subject himself to the requisite preliminary discipline—who will live steadily with such thoughts as Emerson entertained. Record of these visitations one may find here and there in the Journals in such statements as this: "I am surrounded by messengers of God who send me credentials day by day"—statements which an intelligent reader may accept as substantially true and essentially verifiable by the method just indicated. This personal and direct relationship which he cultivated with the Over-soul had a two-fold effect. On the one hand it quite indisposed him to render allegiance to intermediate powers. Thus he declares in a poem of 1833, "Self-Reliance":

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/102


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/103

 On the other hand, this direct relationship with the source of moral power made him joyfully obedient to the impulses of what he at various times designated as the heavenly vision, the divine necessity, or the overlord of his soul. A certain levity, almost a frivolity, which he exhibits now and then in the presence of creeds, churches, pious organizations, is actually the consequence of his entire reverence in the presence of every unmistakable manifestation of spiritual life. Like his friend Carlyle, he feels that the religious edifices of the day are become uninhabitable; the religious spirit is seeking a new house. "Religion," he remarks, "does not seem to me to tend now to a cultus as heretofore, but to a heroic life. We find difficulty in conceiving any church, any liturgy, any rite that would be genuine."

This sounds like a radical utterance. It is radical with the root and branch thoroughness of Emerson's inherited Puritanism, a vital Puritanism urgent with fresh power, impatient of a corrupted tradition and a conformity that withholds one from the living truth. The tendency of the traditional religious culture he criticizes, as indifferent to æsthetic development, narrowly and incompletely moral, and averse from the wide reaches of living truth which are open to the modern mind in the domains of science. He holds that the founder of the faith in which most of his countrymen were bred was indeed a pure beam of truth whose ethical utter-

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/103


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/104

 ances cannot be overprized, yet that he exhibited a "very exclusive and partial development of the moral element. . . . A perfect man should exhibit all the traits of humanity, and should expressly recognize intellectual nature. [Italics mine.] Socrates I call a complete, universal man."

That Emerson's is the radicalism of a conservative bent upon holding fast that which is good is indicated by many other references to the character and teaching of Jesus, to whom he returns again and again with perceptions quickened and sharpened by his secular culture. "How strange," he exclaims, "that Jesus should stand at the head of history, the first character of the world without doubt, but the unlikeliest of all men, one would say, to take such a rank in the world." Approaching the subject from a quite different quarter, he says: "I think the true poetry which mankind craves is that Moral Poem of which Jesus chanted to the ages, stanzas so celestial, yet only stanzas." And finally from still another angle: "The heart of Christianity is the heart of all philosophy."

Much has been written of Emerson's philosophical indebtedness to Kant and his German followers, and to Coleridge and Carlyle and Madame de Staël, who were intermediaries between the German and the New England transcendentalists. It is not in

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/104


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/105

 my power, happily it is not much to our purpose, to enter into the details of this discussion. Briefly speaking, it may be said that the German thinkers and their interpreters by their combined influence did undoubtedly strengthen Emerson's instinctive reaction against the dry and incomplete rationalism of the eighteenth century and against the Utilitarians of the nineteenth century, who to his nostrils brought a peculiarly repugnant odor of "profit and loss." But Emerson was no systematic student of metaphysics, and most of such general impulses as he was capable of receiving from the German system-makers, he had perhaps encountered in Plato and Berkeley and the seventeenth century divines before he had much cultivated his German. He ultimately made his way through Goethe, but he never became intimately attached to him or even quite reconciled to him, finding him and his æsthetic friends deficient in "moral life."

What is still more to the point, the vital features of Emerson's philosophy are due less immediately to his reading than to that religious illumination of which we have already spoken. He arrived at the centre of his beliefs by intuition. From the mechanical conception of the universe which reduced Carlyle almost to despair, Emerson emancipated himself, or rather he perfected his emancipation, by a critical examination of his own experience. This scrutiny disclosed a real world, the world of things, moved by physical energies in accordance

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/105


text:
Andrew Carnegie

 * Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), founder of the Carnegie Steel Company and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and benefactor of numerous libraries
 * "Andrew Carnegie" (1922), an essay by Stuart Pratt Sherman

title: Andrew Carnegie


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/106

 with the laws of things. But it disclosed also an equally real world, the world of ideas, moved by moral energies in accordance with the laws, perhaps less clearly understood, of ideas. One world is associated with the other as the eye is associated with seeing; yet seeing, not the instrument of sight, is the sovereign matter. An important continuation of the Emersonian influence in our times, Professor Irving Babbitt, takes as the point of departure for his own developments these lines from Emerson's Ode to W. H. Channing:

As philosopher, Emerson conceives it his chief business to explore the "law for man," to formulate it, and to obtain recognition of it as the supreme authority in human relationships. His entire effort aims at establishing human independence and a human mastership. Man liberates himself and exchanges servitude for mastery in proportion as he obeys the "law for man" and learns to make the "law for things" serve him. In thus firmly insisting upon a radical distinction between the two parallel planes of experience, Emerson is in accord with the wisdom of the ages and at variance with the folly of the times, which tends to obliterate distinctions

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/106


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/107

 and, surrendering to a physical fatalism, to accept the law for things as also the law for man. Those who still contend for the identity of the two laws like to speak of their view as "realistic." It is a word to conjure with. Emerson's view will prevail against theirs only when it is finally established as more realistic than theirs, as more accurately and adequately descriptive of the facts of nature, the experience of men.

It is important to note that what Emerson contends for as the realistic view is the "twoness" of the universe. He does not oppose a physical monism with a spiritual monism, but with a fairly clean-cut dualism. It is a man asserting the equal realness but radical dissimilarity of things and ideas who remarks in his Journal, "Realist seems the true name for the movement party among our Scholars here. I at least endeavor to make the exchange evermore of a reality for a name." When the "solid men" of his day complain that his way of thinking neglects the fundamental facts, he replies that their way of thinking neglects the hypaethral facts, but that his way of thinking takes due cognizance of both: "Turnpike is one thing and blue sky another." "The poet complains that the solid men leave out the sky." This is the sunny mockery of one who was both a poet and a solid man. Emerson wove a net for casting in fathomless seas and brought home his catches by ways unknown to the fishermen; but this did not prevent his raising good

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/107


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/108

 apples in his Concord orchard and taking the customary road to market.

His philosophical emphasis is, however, of course upon the order of facts most likely to be ignored by the "solid men," and because of his emphasis upon this order of facts we speak of him as an idealist and as a great fountain of American idealism. What idealism meant to him is expressed in his Journal in words which Molière's cook might have understood: "We are idealists whenever we prefer an idea to a sensation. . . . The physical sciences are only well studied when they are explored for ideas. . . . The book is always dear which has made us for moments idealists. That which can dissipate this block of earth into shining ether is genius. I have no hatred to the round earth and its grey mountains. I see well enough the sandhill opposite my window. Their phenomenal being I no more dispute than I do my own. . . . Religion makes us idealists. Any strong passion does. The best, the happiest moments of life, are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its God. . . . We are all aiming to be idealists, and covet the society of those who make us so, as the sweet singer, the orator, the ideal painter."

It is commonly said that Emerson's interest in morals is his inheritance from the Puritans. In this

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/108


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/109

 connection it is interesting to find him in the Journal associating himself consciously with the loftiest Puritan of the seventeenth century, John Milton, of whom he writes: "Milton describes himself to Diodati as enamored of moral perfection. He did not love it more than I." Here indeed is a visible link in what we have grown accustomed to call the Puritan tradition. But, as a matter of fact, were Emerson and Milton more in love with moral perfection than Spenser, or was Spenser more in love with it than Dante, or Dante than Augustine, or Augustine than the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, or the Emperor than Socrates? There is a great community of minds enamored of moral perfection. It is no novel passion originating in New England or among the English Puritans. How explain the antiquity of the tradition? Dante, following Aristotle, explains it by declaring that "all things, by an intuition of their own nature, seek perfection." Emerson, then, rediscovered what Aristotle had observed: that the impulse to self-perfection is a tendency in the constitution of man.

In America, the most important predecessor of Emerson in this rediscovery was a free-thinking man of the world, entirely out of sympathy with strait-laced and stiff-necked performers of barren rites and observances. I refer to the greatest liberalizing force in eighteenth century America, Benjamin Franklin. Was he a Puritan? No one thinks of him as such; yet in truth he represents

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/109


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/110

 the normal reaction of a radical protestantism, of a living Puritanism, to an "Age of Enlightenment." By the courage of his moral realism he prepares the way for Emerson. He, too, begins his independent studies after a revolt against ecclesiastical authority, as narrow and unrealistic. The course of his emancipation is set forth in the Autobiography, where he relates his disgust at a sermon on the great text in Philippians: "Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, or of good report, if there be any virtue, or any praise, think on these things." In expounding this text the clergyman confined himself to enjoining scrupulous Sabbath observances, respect to ministers, etc., etc. "These might," says Franklin, "be all good things; but, as they were not the kind of good things that I expected from that text, I despaired of ever meeting with them from any other, was disgusted, and attended his preaching no more."

Franklin attended that preaching no more. But note what follows, apparently as the consequence of his break with the church: "It was about this time that I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wished to live without committing any fault at any time, and to conquer all that either natural inclination, custom or company might lead me into." Everyone will recall how Franklin drew up his table of thirteen moral virtues, and how he studied the means for putting them into effect. But for us the most signifi-

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/110


text:
Page:Americans (1922).djvu/111

 cant feature of this enterprise and of his proposed Art of Virtue was the realistic spirit in which they were conceived, the bold attempt to ground the virtues upon experience rather than upon authority, the assertion of the doctrine "that vicious actions are not hurtful because they are forbidden, but forbidden because they are hurtful, the nature of man alone considered."

Emerson as moralist takes up the work which Frnaklin'sFranklin's [sic] political duties prevented him from carrying out. He repeats Franklin's revolt in the name of sincerity, truth, actuality. "Whoso would be a man," he declares in "Self-Reliance," "must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness." He does not take up the virtues so methodically and exhaustively as Franklin does. That is mainly because he conceives morality to lie in a right condition and attitude of the whole self, from which particular acts will result with a kind of instinctive and inevitable rightness. "The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues," he says in "Spiritual Laws," "the better we like him." He concerns himself less with particular acts than many less exacting moralists, because he demands as the evidence of goodness that one's entire life shall be "an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine." The grand business of the moral explorer, as he understands it, is to push past conduct to the springs of conduct, to blaze a path

title: Page:Americans (1922).djvu/111