The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 12, October, 1858

Accordingly, in our American Man must be found, first, social largeness and susceptibility,—whatsoever, in the breadth of a flexile and sympathetic nature, may contribute to the keeping of the Golden Rule. But the broadest good-feeling will not alone suffice. The great pledge of peace, fellowship, and profitable co-working among such a population as we anticipate must be sought in the deeper unity of moral principle. For Right is one, and is every man's interest. Right is better than Charity; for Right meets, or even anticipates, normal wants, while Charity only mends failures. Nothing, therefore, that we could discover in the New Man would be such a security for his future, nothing so fit him for his place, as a tendency to simple and universal principles of action. In the absence of this, he will infallibly be compelled one day to enter Providence's court of chancery, and come forth bankrupt. But let him be, even by promise, a seer of those primary truths in which the interests of all are comprehended and made identical, and the virtue of his vision will become the assurance of his welfare. Doubtless, sad men will say that our own eyes are clouded with some glittering dust of optimism, when we declare that this Man for the Continent is the very one whose advent we celebrate. This might, indeed, seem a fatuitously dulcet song to sing just now, when a din of defection and recreancy is loud through all the land,—now, when we have immediately in view, and on the largest scale, an open patronage of infamous wrong-doing, so brazen-fronted and blush-proof that only the spectacle itself makes its credibility;—the prior possibility of it we should one and all hasten, for the honor of human nature, to deny. Yet in the midst of all this are visible the victorious influences that mould the imported Teuton to the spiritual form which his appointed tasks imply. These we now hasten to indicate.

And first, every breath of American air helps to make him the American Man. The atmosphere of America was early noted as a wonder-worker. Ten years subsequent to the landing at Plymouth, the Rev. Francis Higginson, an acute observer, wrote to the mother country,—"A sup of New England air is better than a whole flagon of old English ale." Jean Paul says that the roots of humankind are the lungs, and that, being rooted in air,—we are properly children of the aether. Truly, children of the aether,—and so, children of fire. For the oxygen, upon which the lungs chiefly feed, is the fiery principle in Nature,—all that we denominate fire and flame being but the manifestation of its action. We are severe upon fire-eaters, Southern and other; yet here are we, cool Northerns, quaffing this very principle and essence of fire in large lung-draughts every moment, each of us carrying a perpetual furnace in his bosom. Now it is doubtless true that we inhale more oxygen, or at least inhale it less drenched with damp, than the people of Europe, and are, therefore, more emphatically children of fire than they. Be this, or be some other, the true theory of the fact, the fact itself unquestionably is, that our climate produces the highest nervous intensity. As there are conditions of atmosphere in which the magnetic telegraph works well, and others in which it works ill, so some conditions stimulate, while others repress nervous action. The air of England seems favorable to richness and abundance of blood; there the life-vessels sit deep, and bring opulent cargoes to the flesh-shores; and the rotund figure, the ruddy solid cheek, and the leisurely complacent movement, all show how well supported and stored with vital resources the Englishman is. But to the American's lip the great foster-mother has proffered a more pungent and rousing draught,—not an old Saxon sleeping-cup for the night, but a waking-cup for the bright morning and busy day. It is forenoon with him. He is up and dressed, and at work by the job. Bring an Englishman here, and nothing short of Egyptian modes of preservation will keep him an Englishman long. Soon he cannot digest so much food, cannot dispose of so much stimulant; his step becomes quicker, his eye keener, his voice rises a note on the scale, and grows a trifle sharper. In fine, the effects observed in our autumn foliage may be traced in the people themselves, a heightening of colors; and while this accounts for much that is prurient and bizarre, it infolds also the best promise of America.

The effect of this upon American physiology and physiognomy is already quite visible. Of course we must guard against hasty generalizations, since the interfusing of various elements in our Western States is producing new types of manhood. But the respective physiques of Old and New England can easily be compared, and the difference strikes every eye. The American is lean, he has a paler complexion, a sharper face, a slighter build than his ancestors brought from the Old World. Mr. Emerson is reported as saying (though the precise words escape us) that the Englishman speaks from his chest, the American more from the mouth or throat,—that is, the one associates his voice more with the stomach and viscera, the other with the head; and, indeed, the pectoral quality of the prevailing tones catches the ear immediately upon setting foot on British soil. Every man instinctively apprehends where he is strongest, and will tend to associate voice and movement with the centre of his strengths. The American, since in him the nervous force predominates, instinctively lifts his voice into connection with the great household of that force, which is the brain; for an equally good reason the Englishman speaks from the visceral and sanguineous centres. The American (we are still dwelling chiefly on the New England type) is also apt to throw the head forward in walking,—thereby indicating, first, his chief reliance upon the forces which that part harbors, and, secondly, his impulse to progress; so that our national motto, "Go ahead," may have a twofold significance, as if it were in some sort the antipodes of going a-foot, and suggested not only the direction of movement, but also the active agent therein!

Mr. Robert Knox, of England, somewhat known as an ethnological lecturer and author,—a thinker in a sort, though of the "slam-bang" school, of far more force than faculty, and of a singular avidity for ugly news,—dogmatically proclaims that all Americans are undergoing a physical degeneration, involving, as he thinks, an equal lapse of mental power, proceeding with swift fated steps, and sure ere long to land them in sheer impotence and imbecility; and he appeals to the common loss of adipose tissue and avoirdupois as proof. This author belongs to a class of well-meaning gentlemen, so unfortunately constituted that the distractions of their time induce in them an acetous fermentation (as milk sometimes sours during thunder); and from acid becoming acrid, they at length fall fairly in love with the Erinnyes, and henceforth dote upon destruction and ugliness as happier lovers do upon cosmical health and beauty. Concluding that the universe is a shabby affair, they like to make it out shabbier still,—and so, seldom brighten up till they have an ill thing to say. They are not persons toward whom it is easy to feel amiable. Dogmatism is ever unlovely, though it be in behalf of the sweetest hopes; but chronic doubt and disbelief erected into a dogmatism are intolerable. Yet Mr. Knox's misinterpretations of the facts are taking root in many minds that do not share his fierce hypochondria and hunger for bitter herbs. That the American has lost somewhat in animal resources is incontestable; but Mr. Knox's ever-implied premise, "The animal is the man," from which his Jeremiad derives its plaint, is but a provincial paper-currency, of very local estimation, and can never, like gold and silver, pass by weight in the world's marts of thought. The physical constitution of the New Man is comparatively delicate and fragile; but as a china vase is not necessarily less sound than a stone jug or iron kettle, so delicacy and fragility in man are no proof of disease. The ominous prognosis of this doctor, therefore, seems no occasion for despair, perhaps not even for alarm. But to perceive what different harping can be performed on this string, hear Carus:—"Leanness, as such," says the master, "is the symbol of a certain lightness, activity, rapidity, and mental power." Thus the adipose impoverishment, which to the yellow-eyed Englishman seems utter bankruptcy, is at once recognized by a superior man as denoting an augmentation, rather than diminution, of proper human wealth.

But while the typical American organization is of this admitted delicacy and lightness, it is still capable, under high and powerful impulse of extraordinary feats of endurance. This has of late been admirably illustrated. Not long since, there returned to our shores a hero who—as Dante was believed by the people of Italy to have entered the Inferno of Fire—had actually descended into the opposite Inferno of Frost, and done unprecedented battle with the demons of that realm. Dr. Kane was slight, delicately framed, lean, with sharp, clear-cut features, of quivering mobility and fineness of texture, having the aspect rather of an artist than an explorer,—not at all the personage to whom most judges would assign great power of endurance. And as one follows him through those thrice Herculean toils,—sees him not only bearing cheerfully the great burden of his own cares and ills, but lifting up, as it were, from his companions, and assuming upon his own shoulders, the awful oppression of the polar night, as Atlas of old was fabled to support the heavens,—not even one's admiration at such force of soul can wholly exclude wonder at such fortitude of body. Whence, we ask, this power of endurance? We can trace it to no ordinary physical resource. It comes from no ordinary physical resource. It is pure brain-power. It streams down upon the body, in rivers of invigoration, from the cerebral hemispheres. A conversational philosopher, discoursing to a circle of intelligent New England mechanics, said,—"It is commonly supposed that the earth supports man. Not so; man upholds the earth!" "How!" exclaimed a wide-eyed auditor; "upholds the earth? How do you make that out?" "How?" answered the philosopher, with superb innocence,—"don't you see that it sticks to his heels?" When the question is asked, How the slight frame of this Arctic hero could support such tests, the answer must be analogous,—It clung to his brain. The usual order of support is reversed; and here is that truer Mercury, in whom the winged head, possessing as function what its prototype only exhibited as ornament and symbol, really soars in its own might, bearing the pendent feet.

Dr. Kane was one of the purest examples of the American organization; and as he issued victorious from that region where "the ground burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire," the Man of the New World was represented, and in him came forth with proven strength. The same significance would not attach to all feats of endurance, even where equally representative. Here are Hercules and Orpheus in one,—the organization of a poet, and the physical stamina of a gladiator.

Now this peculiar organization offers the physical inducement for two great tendencies,—one relating to the perception of truth, the other to the feeling of social claims,—while these tendencies are supported on the spiritual side by the great disciplines of our position; and the genius which these foreshow is precisely that which ought to be the genius of the New Man.

This organization is that of the seer, the poet, the spiritualist, of all such as have an eye for the deeper essences and first principles of things. Concede intellectual power, or the spiritual element, then add this temperament, and there follows a certain subtile, penetrative, radical quality of thought, a characteristic percipience of principles. And principles are not only seen, but felt; they thrill the nerve as well as greet the eye; and the man consequently becomes highly amenable to his own belief. The primary question respecting men is this,—How far are they affected by the original axiomatic truths? Truths are like the winds. Near the earth's surface winds blow in variable directions, and the weathercock becomes the type of fickleness. So there is a class of little truths, dependent upon ever-variable relations, with which it is the function of cunning, shrewdness, tact, to deal, and numbers of men seldom or never lift their heads above this weathercock region. Yet the upper air, alike of the spiritual and the physical atmosphere, has its perpetual currents, unvarying as the revolution of the globe or the sailing of constellations; and these fail not to represent themselves by eternal tradewinds upon the surface of our planet and of our life. Now the grand inquiry about any man is,—Does he belong to the great current, or to the lesser ones? He appertains to the great in proportion to his access to principles. Or we may illustrate by another analogy a distinction, of importance so emphatic. The Arctic voyagers find two descriptions of ice. The field-ice spreads over vast spaces, and moves with immense power; but goes with the wind and the surface-flow. The bergs, on the contrary, sit deep, are bedded in the mighty under-currents; and when the field-ice was crashing down with tide and storm, Dr. Kane found these heroes holding their steady inevitable way in the teeth of both. Thus may one discover men who are very massive, very powerful, engrossing such enormous spaces that there hardly seems room in the world for anybody else; but they are Field-ice Men; they represent with gigantic force the impulse of the hour. But there is another class, making, perhaps, little show upon the surface, or making it by altitude alone, who represent the grand circulations of law, the orbital courses of truth. It is a question of depth, of penetration. And depth, be it observed, secures unity; diversity, contrariety, contention are of the surface. Numbers need not concern us, whether one hundred, or one hundred millions, provided all are imbedded in the central, commanding truths of the human consciousness. And if the Man of the New World be characteristically one who will attach himself to the eternal master-tides, that fact alone fits him for his place.

Of course no sane man would intimate that organization alone can bring about such results. The Arabian horse will hardly manufacture a Saladin for his back. But let the Saladin be given, and this marvel of nerve and muscle will multiply his presence,—will, as it were, give two selves. So, if the Teutonic man who comes to our shores were innately empty or mean, this nervous intensity would only ripen his meanness, or make his inanity obstreperous. But in so far as he has real depth of nature, this radical organization will aid him, quickening by its heat what is deepest within him; and when he turns his face toward principles, this flying brain-steed will swiftly bring him to his goal. Nay, it is best that even meanness should ripen. The slaveholder of South Carolina must avouch a false principle to cover his false practice,—must affirm that slavery is a Divine institution. It is well. A Quaker, hearing a fellow blaspheme, said,—"That is right, friend; get such bad stuff out of thee!" A lie is dangerous, till it is told,—like scarlatina, before it is brought to the surface: when either breaks out, it is more than half conquered. The only falsehoods of appalling efficacy for evil are those which circulate subtly in the vital unconsciousness of powerful but obscure or undemonstrative natures,—deadly from the intimacy which also makes them secret and secure, and silently perverting to their own purposes the normal vigors of the system. A Mephistopheles is not dangerous; he is too clear-headed; he knows his own deserts: some muddiness is required to harbor self-deceptions, in order that badness may reach real working power. To all perversion iron limits are, indeed, set; but obscure falsehood works in the largest spaces and with the longest tether.—Thus the expressive intensity which appertains to this organization is serviceable every way, even in what might, at first blush, seem wholly evil effects.

While thus the brain-hand of the American is formed for grasping principles, for apprehending the simple, subtile, universal truths which slip through coarser and more sluggish fingers, there is also an influence on the moral and intellectual faculties, coming in to accept and use these cerebral ones. We are more in conversation with the heart and pure spiritual fact of humanity than any other people of equal power and culture. We necessarily deal more with each other on a bond and basis of common persuasion, of open unenacted truth, than others. This matter is of moment enough to justify somewhat formal elucidation.

Nations, like individual men, birds, and many quadrupeds and fishes, are house-builders. They wall and roof themselves in with symbols, creeds, codes, customs, etiquettes, and the like; they stigmatize by the terms heresy, high-treason, and names of milder import, any attempt to quit this edifice; and send such offenders into purgatory, penitentiary, coventry, as the case may be. Some nations omit to insert either door or window; they make penal even the desire to look out of doors, even the assertion that a sky exists other than the roof of their building, or that there is any other than a very unblessed out-of-doors beyond its walls. Such are countries where free speech is forbidden, where free thought is racked and thumb-screwed, and where not only a man's overt actions, but his very hopes, his faith, his prayers, are prescribed. Here man is put into his own institutions, as into a box; and a very bad box it proves. Now these blank walls not only encompass society as a mass, but also run between individuals, cutting off bosom from bosom, and rendering impossible that streaming of heart-fires, that mounting flame from meeting brands, out of whose wondrous baptism come the consecrate deeds of mankind. Go to China, and to any living soul you obtain no access, or next to none,—such disastrous roods of etiquette are interposed between. It is as if one very cordially shook hands with you by means of a pair of tongs or a ten-foot pole. Indeed, it is hardly a man that you meet; it is a piece of automatic ceremony. Nor is it in China alone that men may be found who can hardly be accredited with proper personality. As one dying may distribute his property in legacies to various institutions and organizations,—so much, for example, to the Tract Society, so much to the Colonization Society, and the like,—in the same manner do many make wills at the outset of life for the disposal of their own personal powers, and do nothing afterward but execute this testament,—executing themselves in another sense at the same time. They parcel out themselves, their judgment, their conscience, and whatsoever pertains to their spiritual being, among the customs, traditions, institutions, etiquettes of their time, and renounce all claim to a free existence. After such a piece of spiritual felo-de-se, the man is nothing but one wheel in a machine, or even but one cog upon a wheel. Thenceforth he merely hangs together;—simple cohesion is the utmost approximation to action which can be truly attributed to him.

And as nothing is so ridiculous, so, few things are so mischievous, as the sincere insincerity, the estrangement from fact, of those who have thus parted with themselves. It is worse, if anything can be worse, than hypocrisy itself. The hypocrite sees two things,—the fact and the fiction, the gold and its counterfeit; he has virtue enough to know that he is a hypocrite. But the post-mortem man, the walking legacy, does not recognize the existence of eternal Fact; it has never occurred to his mind that anything could be more serious than "spiritual taking-on" and make-belief. An innocent old gentleman, being at a play where the heroine is represented as destroyed in attempting to cross a broken bridge, rose, upon seeing her approach it, and in tones of the deepest concern offered his opinion that said bridge was unsafe! The post-mortem man reverses this harmless blunder, and makes it anything but harmless by the change; as that one took theatricals to be earnest fact, so this conceives virtue itself to consist in posturing; he thinks gold a clever imitation of brass, and the azure of the sky to be a kind of celestial cosmetic; in fine, formalities are the realest things he knows. It is said, that, in the later days of Rome, the augurs and inspectors of entrails could not look each other in the face during their ceremonies, for fear of bursting into a laugh. But still worse off than these pitiful peddlers of fraud is he who feigns without knowing that he feigns,—feigns unfeignedly, and calls God to witness that he is faithful in the performance of his part. This is ape's earnest, and is, perhaps, the largest piece of waste that ever takes place upon this earth. Ape's earnest,—it is a pit that swallows whole nations, whole ages; and the extent to which it may be carried is wellnigh incredible, even with the fact before our eyes. A Chinese gentleman spends an hour in imploring a relative to dine with him,—utterly refusing, so urgent is his desire of company, to accept No for an answer,—and then flies into a rage because the cousin commits the faux pas of yielding to his importunity, and agreeing to dine. Louis Napoleon perpetrates the king-joke of the century by solemnly presenting the Russian Czar with a copy of Thomas à Kempis's "Imitation of Christ,"—a book whose great inculcation is to renounce the world!

Now no sooner do men lose hold upon fact than they inevitably begin to wither. They resemble a tree drawn with all its roots from the earth; the juices already imbibed may sustain it awhile, but with every passing day will sustain it less. If Louis Napoleon is so removed from conversation with reality as not to perceive the colossal satire implied in his gift, it will soon require more vigor than he possesses to keep astride the Gallic steed. That Chinese etiquette explains the condition of the Chinese nation. Indeed, it is easy to give a recipe for mummying men alive. Take one into keeping, prescribe everything, thoughts, actions, manners, so that he never shall find either permission or opportunity to ask his own intellect, What is true? nor his own heart, What is right? nor to consider within himself what is intrinsically good and worthy of a man; and if he does not rebel, you will make him as good a mummy as Egyptian catacombs can boast.

The capital art of life is to renew and augment your power by its expenditure. It was intimated some eighteen centuries since that the highest are obtained only by loss of the same; and the transmutation of loss into gain is the essence and perfection of all spiritual economies. Now of this art of arts he is already master who steadily draws upon his own spiritual resources. The soul is an extraordinary well; the way to replenish is to draw from it. It is more miraculous than the widow's cruse;—that simply continued unexhausted,—never less, indeed, but also never more; while from this the more you take, the more remains in it. Were it, therefore, desired to arrange with forethought a scheme of life that should afford the highest invigoration, in such scheme there should be the minimum of prescription, and nothing be so sedulously avoided as the superseding of inward and active principles by outward and passive rules;—that is, life would be made as much moral and spontaneous, as little political and mechanical, as possible.

And this does not ill describe our own case. No civilized nation is so little imprisoned in precedents and traditions. Our national maxim is, "The world is too much governed." In the degree of this release we are, of course, thrown back upon underlying principles and universal persuasions,—since these of necessity become, in the absence of more artificial ties, the chief bond of such peace and coöperation as obtain. Leave two men to deal with each other, not merely as subjects or citizens, but as men, and they must recur to that which is at once native and common to both, to the universal elements in their consciousness, that is, to principles; and thus the most ordinary mutual dealing becomes, in some degree, a spiritual discipline. Harness these men in precedents, and whip them through the same action with penalties, and they will gain only such discipline as the ox obtains in the furrow and the horse between the thills. Statutes serve men, but lame them. They render morality mechanical. Men learn to say not, "It is right," but, "It is enacted." And the difference is immense. "Right" sends one to his own soul, and requires him to produce the living law out of that; "Enacted" sends him to the Revised Statutes, or the Reports, and there it ends. The latter gives a bit of information; the former a step in development. Laws are necessary; but laws which are not necessary are more and worse than unnecessary;—they pilfer power from the soul; they intercept the absolute uses of life; they incarcerate men, and make Caspar Hausers of them. Now in America not only is there already much emancipation from those outside regulations which supersede moral and private judgment, but the tendency toward a fresh life daily gains impetus. That repeal of the Missouri Compromise, however blamable, has several happy features, and prominent among these must be reckoned the illustration it affords of a growing disposition to say, "No putting To-day into Yesterday's coffin; let the Present live and be its own lord."