The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 55, May, 1862

One man is engrossed over an apple-parer; another snatches the needle from the weary fingers of the seamstress, and offers her in return the sewing-machine. That man yonder has turned himself into an armory, and he brings out the deadliest instrument he can produce, something perhaps that can shoot you at sight, even though you be a speck in the horizon. His next-door neighbor is an iron workshop, and is forging an armor of proof for a vessel of war, from which the mightiest balls shall bound as lightly as the arrows from an old-time breastplate. There is another searching for that new motive power which shall keep pace with the telegraph, and hurl the bodies of men through space as fast as their thoughts are hurled; there is another seeking that electro-magnetic battery which shall speak instantly and distinctly to the ends of the earth. The mind of that astronomer is a telescope, through whose increasing field new worlds float daily by; the mind of that geologist is a divining-rod, forever bending toward the waters of chaos, and pointing out new places where a shaft can be sunk into periods of almost infinite antiquity; the mind of that chemist is a subtile crucible, in which aboriginal secrets lie disclosed, and within whose depths the true philosopher's stone will be found; the mind of that mathematician is a maze of ethereal stair-ways, rising higher and higher toward the heaven of truth.

The ambition is everywhere,—in every breast; the power is everywhere,—in every brain. The giant and the pigmy are alike active in seeking out and finding out many inventions. And in this very universality of effort and result we discover another guaranty of the great future. The river of Progress multiplies its tributaries the farther it flows, and even now, unknown ages from its mouth, we already see that magnificent widening of its channel, in which, like the Amazon, it long anticipates the sea.

Man, the great achiever! the marvellous magician! Look at him! A head hardly six feet above the ground out of which he was taken. His "dome of thought and palace of the soul" scarce twenty-two inches in circumference; and within it, a little, gray, oval mass of "convoluted albumen and fibre, of some four pounds' weight," and there sits the intelligence which has worked all these wonders! An intelligence, say, six thousand years old next century. How many thousand years more will it think, and think, and wave the wand, and raise new spirits out of Nature, open her sealed-up mysteries, scale the stars, and uncover a universe at home? How long will it be before this inherent power, laid in it at the beginning by the Almighty, shall be exhausted, and reach its limit? Yes, how long? We cannot begin to know. We cannot imagine where the stopping-place could be. Perhaps there is none.

To take up the nautical figure which has furnished our title,—we are in the midst of an infinite sea, sailing on to a destination we know not of, but of which the vague and splendid fancies we have formed hang before our prow like illusions in the sky. We are meeting on every hand great opportunities which must not be lost, new achievements which must be wrought, and strange adventures which must be undertaken: every day wondering more to what our commission shall bring us at last, full of magnificent hopes and a growing faith,—the inscrutable bundle of orders not nearly exhausted: whole continents of knowledge yet to be discovered and explored; the gates of yet distant sciences to be sought and unlocked; the fortresses of yet undreamed necessities to be taken; Arcadias of beauty to be visited and their treasures garnered by the imagination; an intricate course to be followed amid all future nations and governments, and their winding histories, as if threading the devious channels of endless archipelagoes; the spoils of all ages to be gathered, and treaties of commerce with all generations to be made, before the mysterious voyage is done.

And now, before we leave this fascinating theme, or suffer another dream, let us stop where we are, in order to see where we are. Let us take our bearings. What says our chart? What do we find in the horizon of the present, which may give us the wherewithal to hope, to doubt, or to fear?

The era in which we live presents some remarkable characteristics, which have been brought into it by this immense material success. It is preeminently an age of reality: an age in which a host of unrealities—queer and strange old notions—have been destroyed forever. Never were the vaulted spaces in this grand old temple of a world swept so clean of cobwebs before. The mind has not gone forth working outside wonders, without effecting equal inside changes. In achieving abroad, it has been ennobling at home. At no time was it so free from superstition as now, and from the absurdities which have for centuries beset and filled it. What numberless delusions, what ghosts, what mysteries, what fables, what curious ideas, have disappeared before the besom of the day! The old author long ago foretasted this, who wrote,—"The divine arts of printing and gunpowder have frightened away Robin Goodfellow, and all the fairies." It is told of Kepler, that he believed the planets were borne through the skies in the arms of angels; but science shortly took a wider sweep, killed off the angels, and showed that the wandering luminaries had been accustomed from infancy to take care of themselves. And so has the firmament of all knowledge been cleared of its vapors and fictions, and been revealed in its solid and shining facts.

Here, then, lies the great distinction of the time: the accumulation of Truth, and the growing appetite for the true and the real. The year whirls round like the toothed cylinder in a threshing-machine, blowing out the chaff in clouds, but quietly dropping the rich kernels within our reach. And it will always be so. Men will sow their notions and reap harvests, but the inexorable age will winnow out the truth, and scatter to the winds whatsoever is error.

Now we see how that impalpable something has been produced which we call the "Spirit of the Age,"—that peculiar atmosphere in which we live, which fills the lungs of the human spirit, and gives vitality and character to all that men at present think and say and feel and do. It is this identical spirit of courageous inquiry, honest reality, and intense activity, wrought up into a kind of universal inspiration, moving with the same disposition, the same taste, the same thought, persons whole regions apart and unknown to each other. We are frequently surprised by coincidences which prove this novel, yet common afflatus. Two astronomers, with the ocean between them, calculate at the same moment, in the same direction, and simultaneously light upon the same new orb. Two inventors, falling in with the same necessity, think of the same contrivance, and meet for the first time in a newspaper war, or a duel of pamphlets, for the credit of its authorship. A dozen widely scattered philosophers as quickly hit upon the self-same idea as if they were in council together. A more rational development of some old doctrine in divinity springs up in a hundred places at once, as if a theological epidemic were abroad, or a synod of all the churches were in session. It has also another peculiarity. The thought which may occur at first to but one mind seems to have an affinity to all minds; and if it be a free and generous thought, it is instantly caught, intuitively comprehended, and received with acclamations all over the world. Such a spirit as this is rapidly bringing all sections and classes of mankind into sympathy with one another, and producing a supreme caste in human nature, which, as it increases in numbers, will mould the character and control the destinies of the race.

So far we speak of the upper air of the day. But there is no denying the prevalence of a lower and baser spirit. We are uncomfortably aware that there is another extreme to the freaks of the imagination. There are superstitions of the reason and of realism,—the grotesque fancies, mysticisms, and vagaries which prevail, and the diseased gusto for something ultra and outlandish which affects many raw and undisciplined minds. Yet even these are, in their way, indications of the pervading disposition,—the unhealthy exhalations to be expected from hitherto stagnant regions, stirred up by the active and regenerating thought of the time. There is promise even in them, and they serve to distinguish the more that purer and higher spirit of honesty and reality, which clarifies the intellect, and invigorates the faculties that apprehend and grasp the noble and the true.

We glory in this triumph of the reason over the imagination, and in this predominance of the real over the ideal. We prefer that common sense should lead the van, and that mere fancy, like the tinselled conjurer behind his hollow table and hollow apparatus, should be taken for what it is, and that its tricks and surprises should cease to bamboozle, however much they may amuse mankind. Nothing, in the course of Providence, conveys so much encouragement as this recent and growing development of reality in thought and pursuit. In its presence the future of the world looks substantial and sure. We dream of an immense change in the tone of the human spirit, and in the character of the civilization which shall in time embower the earth.

But, as it has always been, the greater the good, the nearer the evil; Satan is next-door neighbor to the saint; Eden had a lurking-hole for the serpent. Just here the voyaging is most dangerous; just here we drop the plummet and strike upon a shoal; we lift up our eyes, and discover a lee-shore.

The mind that is not profound enough to perceive and believe even what it cannot comprehend,—that is the shoal. Unless the reason will permit the sounding-lead to fall illimitably down into a submarine world of mystery, too deep for the diver, and yet a true and living world,—unless there is admitted to be a fathomless gulf, called faith, underlying the surface-sea of demonstration, the race will surely ground in time, and go to pieces. There is the peril of this all-prevailing love of the real. It may become such an infatuation that nothing will appear actual which is not visible or demonstrable, which the hand cannot handle or the intellect weigh and measure. Even to this extreme may the reason run. Its vulnerable point is pride. It is easily encouraged by success, easily incited to conceit, readily inclined to overestimate its power. It has a Chinese weakness for throwing up a wall on its involuntary boundary-line, and for despising and defying all that is beyond its jurisdiction. The reason may be the greatest or the meanest faculty in the soul. It may be the most wise or the most foolish of active things. It may be so profound as to acknowledge a whole infinitude of truth which it cannot comprehend, or it may be so superficial as to suspect everything it is asked to believe, and refuse to trust a fact out of its sight. There is the danger of the day. There is the lee-shore upon which the tendencies of the age are blowing our bark: a gross and destructive materialism, which is the horrid and treacherous development of a shallow realism.

In the midst of this splendid era there is a fast-increasing class who are disposed to make the earth the absolute All,—to deny any outlet from it,—to deny any capacity in man for another sphere,—to deny any attribute in God which interests Him in man,—to shut out, therefore, all faith, all that is mysterious, all that is spiritual, all that is immortal, all that is Divine.

  "There live, alas! of heaven-directed mien,  Of cultured soul, and sapient eye serene,  Who hail thee Man!—the pilgrim of a day,  Spouse of the worm, and brother of the clay,  Frail as the leaf in autumn's yellow bower,  Dust in the wind, or dew upon the flower,  A friendless slave, a child without a sire.         * * * * *  Are these the pompous tidings ye proclaim,  Lights of the world, and demigods of Fame?  Is this your triumph, this your proud applause,  Children of Truth, and champions of her cause?  For this hath Science searched on weary wing,  By shore and sea, each mute and living thing?  Launched with Iberia's pilot from the steep,  To worlds unknown, and isles beyond the deep?  Or round the cope her living chariot driven,  And wheeled in triumph through the signs of heaven?  O star-eyed Science, hast thou wandered there,  To waft us home the message of despair?"

Is shipwreck, after all, to be the end of the mysterious voyage? Yes, unless there is something else beside materialism in the world. Unless there is another spirit blowing off that dreadful shore, unless the chart opens a farther sea, unless the needle points to the same distant star, unless there are other orders, yet sealed and secret, there is no further destiny for the race, no further development for the soul. The intellect, however grand, is not the whole of man. Material progress, however magnificent, is not the guaranty, not even the cardinal element, of civilization. And civilization, in the highest possible meaning of that most expressive word, is that great and final and all-embosoming harbor toward which all these achievements and changes dimly, but directly, point. Upon that we have fixed our eyes, but we cannot imagine how it can be attained by intellectual and material force alone.

In order to indicate this more vividly, let us suppose that there is no other condition necessary to the glory of human nature and the world,—let us suppose that no other provision has been made, and that the age is to go on developing only in this one direction,—what a dreary grandeur would soon surround us! As icebergs floating in an Arctic sea are splendid, so would be these ponderous and glistering works. As the gilded and crimsoned cliffs of snow beautify the Polar day, so would these achievements beautify the present day. But expect no life, no joy, no soul, amid such ice-bound circumstances as these. The tropical heart must congeal and die; its luxuriant fruits can never spring up. The earth must lie sepulchred under its own magnificence; and the divinest feelings of the spirit, floating upward in the instinct of a higher life, but benumbed by the frigid air, and rebuked by the leaden sky, must fall back like clouds of frozen vapor upon the soul: and "so shall its thoughts perish."

It would be a gloomy picture to paint, if one could for a moment imagine that intellectual power and material success were all that enter into the development of the race. For if there is no other capacity, and no other field in which at least an equal commission to achieve is given, and for which equal arrangements have been made by the Providence that orders all, then the soul must soon be smothered, society dismembered, and human nature ruined.

But this very fact, which we purposely put in these strong colors, proves that there must be another and greater element, another and higher faculty, another and wider department, likewise under express and secret conditions of success. It shall come to pass, as the development goes on, that this other will become the foremost and all-important, —the relation between them will be reversed,—this must increase, that decrease,—the Material, although the first in time, the first in the world's interest, and the first in the world's effort, will be found to be only an ordained forerunner, preparing the way for Something Else, the latchet of whose shoes it is not worthy to unloose.

There is that in man—also wrapt up and sealed within his inscrutable brain—which provides for his inner as well as outer life; which insures his highest development; which shall protect, cherish, warm, and fertilize his nature now, and perpetuate and exalt his soul forever. It is a commission which begins, but does not end, in time. It is a commission which makes him the agent and builder of an immense moral work on the earth. Under its instructions he shall add improvement to improvement in that social fabric which is already his shelter and habitation. He has found it of brick,—he shall leave it of marble. He shall seek out every contrivance, and perfect every plan, and exhaust every scheme, which will bring a greater prosperity and a nobler happiness to mankind. He shall quarry out each human spirit, and carve it into the beauty and symmetry of a living stone that shall be worthy to take its place in the rising structure. This is the work which is given him to do. He must develop those conditions of virtue, and peace, and faith, and truth, and love, by which the race shall be lifted nearer its Creator, and the individual ascend into a more conscious neighborhood and stronger affinity to the world which shall receive him at last. All this must that other department be, and this other capacity achieve or there is a fatal disproportion in the progress of man.

The beauty of this as a dream perhaps all men will admit; but they question its possibility. "It is the old Utopia," they say, "the impracticable enterprise that has always baffled the world." Some will doubt whether the Spiritual has an existence at all. Others will doubt, if it does exist, whether man can accomplish anything in it. It is invisible, impalpable, unknown. It cannot be substantial, it cannot be real,—at least to man as at present constituted. Its elements and conditions cannot be controlled by his spirit. That spirit cannot control itself,—how much less go forth and work solid wonders in that phantom realm! There can be no success in this that will be coequal with the other; nor a coequal grandeur. There is no such thing as keeping pace with it. The heart cannot grow better, society cannot be built higher, mankind cannot become happier, God will not draw nearer, the hidden truth of all that universe will never be more ascertained than it is,—can never be accumulated and stored away among other human acquisitions. It is utterly, gloomily impracticable. In this respect we shall forever remain as we are, and where we are. So they think.

And now we venture to contradict it all, and to assert that there is, there must be, just such a corresponding field, and just such a corresponding progress, or else (we say it reverently) God's ways are not equal. So great is our faith. Like Columbus, therefore, we dream of the golden Indies, and of that "unknown residue" which must yet be found, and be taken possession of by mankind.

We look far out to where the horizon dips its vapory veil into the sea, and beyond which lies that other hemisphere, and ask,—Is there no world there to be a counterpoise to the world that is here? Has the Creator made no provision for the equilibrium of the soul? Is all that infinite area a shoreless waste, over which the fleets of speculation may sail forever, and discover nothing? Or is there not, rather, a broad and solid continent of spiritual truth, eternally rooted in that ocean,—prepared, from the beginning, for the occupation of man, when the fulness of time shall have come,—ordained to take its place in the historic evolution of the race, and to give the last and definite shape to its wondrous destinies?

Is there, or is there not, another region of truth, of enterprise, of progress,—to finish, to balance, to consummate the world?

Such is the Problem.

* * * * *

MY GARDEN

I can speak of it calmly now; but there have been moments when the lightest mention of those words would sway my soul to its profoundest depths.

I am a woman. I nip this fact in the bud of my narrative, because I like to do as I would be done by, when I can just as well as not. It rasps a person of my temperament exceedingly to be deceived. When any one tells a story, we wish to know at the outset whether the story-teller is a man or a woman. The two sexes awaken two entirely distinct sets of feelings, and you would no more use the one for the other than you would put on your tiny teacups at breakfast, or lay the carving-knife by the butter-plate. Consequently it is very exasperating to sit, open-eyed and expectant, watching the removal of the successive swathings which hide from you the dusky glories of an old-time princess, and, when the unrolling is over, to find it is nothing, after all, but a great lubberly boy. Equally trying is it to feel your interest clustering round a narrator's manhood, all your individuality merging in his, till, of a sudden, by the merest chance, you catch the swell of crinoline, and there you are. Away with such clumsiness! Let us have everybody christened before we begin.

I do, therefore, with Spartan firmness depose and say that I am a woman. I am aware that I place myself at signal disadvantage by the avowal. I fly in the face of hereditary prejudice. I am thrust at once beyond the pale of masculine sympathy. Men will neither credit my success nor lament my failure, because they will consider me poaching on their manor. If I chronicle a big beet, they will bring forward one twice as large. If I mourn a deceased squash, they will mutter, "Woman's farming!" Shunning Scylla, I shall perforce fall into Charybdis. (Vide Classical Dictionary. I have lent mine, but I know one was a rock and the other a whirlpool, though I cannot state, with any definiteness, which was which.) I may be as humble and deprecating as I choose, but it will not avail me. A very agony of self-abasement will be no armor against the poisoned shafts which assumed superiority will hurl against me. Yet I press the arrow to my bleeding heart, and calmly reiterate, I am a woman.

The full magnanimity of which reiteration can be perceived only when I inform you that I could easily deceive you, if I chose. There is about my serious style a vigor of thought, a comprehensiveness of view, a closeness of logic, and a terseness of diction commonly supposed to pertain only to the stronger sex. Not wanting in a certain fanciful sprightliness which is the peculiar grace of woman, it possesses also, in large measure, that concentrativeness which is deemed the peculiar strength of man. Where an ordinary woman will leave the beaten track, wandering in a thousand little by ways of her own,—flowery and beautiful, it is true, and leading her airy feet to "sunny spots of greenery" and the gleam of golden apples, but keeping her not less surely from the goal,—I march straight on, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left, beguiled into no side-issues, discussing no collateral question, but with keen eye and strong hand aiming right at the heart of my theme. Judge thus of the stern severity of my virtue. There is no heroism in denying ourselves the pleasures which we cannot compass. It is not self-sacrifice, but self-cherishing, that turns the dyspeptic alderman away from turtle-soup and the pâté de foie gras to mush and milk. The hungry newsboy, regaling his nostrils with the scents that come up from a subterranean kitchen, does not always know whether or not he is honest, till the cook turns away for a moment, and a steaming joint is within reach of his yearning fingers. It is no credit to a weak-minded woman not to be strong-minded and write poetry. She couldn't, if she tried; but to feed on locusts and wild honey that the soul may be in better condition to fight the truth's battles,—to go with empty stomach for a clear conscience's sake,—to sacrifice intellectual tastes to womanly duties, when the two conflict,—

  "That's the true pathos and sublime,  Of human life."

You will, therefore, no longer withhold your appreciative admiration, when, in full possession of what theologians call the power of contrary choice, I make the unmistakable assertion that I am a woman.

Of the circumstances that led me to inchoate a garden it is not necessary now to speak. Enough that the first and most important step had been taken, the land was bought,—a few acres, with a smart little house peeking up, a crazy little barn tumbling down, and a dozen or so fruit-trees that might do either as opportunity offered, and I set out on my triumphal march from the city of my birth to the estate of my adoption. Triumphal indeed! My pathway was strewed with roses. Feathery asparagus and the crispness of tender lettuce waved dewy greetings from every railroad-side; green peas crested the racing waves of Long Island Sound, and unnumbered carrots of gold sprang up in the wake of the ploughing steamer; till I was wellnigh drunk with the new wine of my own purple vintage. But I was not ungenerous. In the height of my innocent exultation, I remembered the dwellers in cities who do all their gardening at stalls, and in my heart I determined, when the season should be fully blown, to invite as many as my house could hold to share with me the delight of plucking strawberries from their stems and drinking in foaming health from the balmy-breathed cows. Moreover, in the exuberance of my joy, I determined to go still farther, and despatch to those doomed ones who cannot purchase even a furlough from burning pavements baskets of fragrance and sweetness. I pleased myself with pretty conceits. To one who toils early and late in an official Sahara, that the home atmosphere may always be redolent of perfume, I would send a bunch of long-stemmed white and crimson rose-buds, in the midst of which he should find a dainty note whispering, "Dear Fritz: Drink this pure glass of my overflowing June to the health of weans and wife, not forgetting your unforgetful friend." To a pale-browed, sad-eyed woman, who flits from velvet carpets and broidered flounces to the bedside of an invalid mother, whom her slender fingers and unslender and most godlike devotion can scarcely keep this side the pearly gates, I would heap a basket of summer-hued peaches smiling up from cool, green leaves into their straitened home, and, with eyes, perchance, tear-dimmed, she should read, "My good Maria: The peaches are to go to your lips, the bloom to your cheeks, and the gardener to your heart." Ah me! How much grace and gladness may bud and blossom in one little garden! Only three acres of land, but what a crop of sunny surprises, unexpected tendernesses, grateful joys, hopes, loves, and restful memories!—what wells of happiness, what sparkles of mirth, what sweeps of summer in the heart, what glimpses of the Upper Country!