Page:The Democratic Heart.pdf/10
serves only as a late defense of those who were indifferent to their doctrines thirty years ago. As Remenji says of fiddles, there are but two kinds: the good and good for nothing, so we may say of preachers and teachers generally. If a man attempts to defend Jesus from the standpoint of worldly common sense, that man is easily made ridiculous. The test of the philosopher is that all he says is consequent to the ancient antagonism of the world of sense and the world of reason. And we here protest against any notion that the highest thought of the age is either coming from, or leading to, or specially entertained or fostered by, the republican party. As for the lyceum and its professors, the truth is caustic enough: they are in different esteem from what they were. Time was, the "better classes" complained that if a "nigger show" came to town it had a full house, while a "first-class lecture" was greeted by empty benches. But the democratic taste is finally approved; and there are really more brains and entertainment in an average minstrel performance than in the best lecture of the lyceum, or the mouthing of the most ineffible aesthete that ever "read."
The greater part of good literature is non-partisan and impersonal. But there is one large field of refinement to which republicans are at once entitled and welcome: the aftermath of Carlyle and Emerson, and its fern fringe of poetry, which are the delectation of the Atlantic coterie. Viewed from any healthy height it is a fen of white despair. Our nerves sink at it. A malaria arises from it—a drouthy faintness, such as might eat the air in the vicinity of the madness and shadow of hell. Too dainty and shiftless for positive science, yet not up to the speculative insight, in love with history and nature, and so loomed never to make history nor show native force,—hero-worshippers, and so loomed never to be heroes, the whole area of their conception is the compensation of Nemesis—balance—a dead sea of letters, over which every bird of passage brings the homeless brine on its wings, and the game flavor of the infinite tainting around the marrow of its bones. Compensation is not the "solvent word." There is an overbearing and an overflow. Something has "got the best of it"—something that says Go in the race,—something metalogical, unutterable perhaps, yet not so very far away from the homely heaven and hell, the loves and hates of being, and the hot and grimy proverbs of the people. It matters little that more republicans read, if by reading they attain tastes and adopt conclusions averse from our more manly and self-poised, however careless nature.
The most describing character of the republican party is excessive reverence, amounting almost to marvelousness—the beginning of fetishism, or submergence of self in another. In politics it ever overrates the established. In law it is ever overbearing the conscience of judge and jury with the constitution. In religion it sets the dead books of the past above the living spirit of the present, and, as christian, ever makes of Jesus a substitute instead of an example. In literature it ignores the romance of the present. In art it is ever buying gems regardless of their lustre, and paintings on some dealer's guaranty. One would fancy that belief in original sin might save them from the latter imposition.
And the weakness that shirks reponsibility is ever too sympathetic to be just. It pities much in others which it would bravely endure itself, forgetting those laws of growth wherof every man must learn for himself the lesson: to labor and suffer if he would be strong. Harsh words are no bad medicine for a sniveling spirit; and there is only weakness in their sympathy who need sympathy themselves. Their kindness has too much of the flavor of boiled mutton and near relations. The best way to lighten a burden is to stiffen the back that bears it. No man can be really injured by another, nor greatly helped by any but himself.—There is no ill nature, no thick blood or lax morality, in this hearty independence. We have yet to learn that democrats are slow to respond to any call of suffering from their neighbors. But organized philanthropy for far-off ends—for preventing earthquakes in the torrid zone, or furnishing tracts and hair-brushes for the new-born heathen of the Foo-foo islands,—canting charities which use ten dollars in the distribution of ten cents, are certainly not to democratic taste.
It would trouble republicans to point out in their own record so good-natured an action as that of our running Horace Greeley for president. A radical of the radicals, who had earned a better partisan