Page:The Democratic Heart.pdf/11

recognition than any of his compeers, it occurred to him that after years of service he too might ask for office. He was laughed at as a crank, a "galvanized squash." The democracy resented this ingratitude to a good man, and tried hard to console him.

It were but in the way of common compensation that self-reliance should occasionally jostle its neighbors,—that liberty should be occasionally loud,—that he who is a law unto himself should at times indulge himself in disregard of others,—and that strong natures not delicately bred should sometimes offend a cosmopolitan refinement. Much that is sweet in the kernel is prickly about the shell. This is the grin of the fates,—the quirk in the creative force wherefrom monkeys, and mules, and Fenians proceed. It was for this the great sculptor, carving the statue of Jupiter, outlined a babian head on the arm of his throne; it was for this the slave stood behind the victor in his triumph and whispered in his ear "thou art mortal.' But blood and breeding being equal, it is difficult to find the radical surpassing the conservative sentiment in results of courtesy and taste; while in the trust of power the latter has ever shown itself eminently judicial, fair and safe.

To a class of religionists whose conceptions are rapidly fading out—(for all growth is in our direction—in the secularization of thought) democracy is a child of the devil,—wrong and glorying in wrong,—even overdoing its convictions to gird at the more humble and self-sacrificing. Let us not be misunderstood. We do not wish to paint it in radical colors,—to say it is wholly good and only mistaken as evil. The terms good and evil have a historical In so far as well as a scientific import. as the utmost liberty of human thought and action responds to the impulse which rebellious to assumed is historically supremacy as such, democracy is of that historical evil; at the same time, in so far as the good historically resents aggression on itself, democracy is of the good also; for its essence is self-respect and self-defense, in this the chief of all insoluble problems. Evil is not solely evil, nor is good wholly good. The heart of every brave and true man sympathizes with Lucifer in his discontent at everlasting subservience—his resentment of the long monotony of Heaven's imperial peace. In our hearts it is written that it shall be written "there was war in heaven." Could the soul have bowed down forever to an untested absolute? Were the gods so good in ruling? Lo! where they reclined on asphodel; prudence, solicitude, observance, to them were not; no congenital sympathy with doubt and darkness ruffled the languor of their patrician repose; and the odor of finite prayer and frailty forever rising around the scentless ermine of the purple-born, the unaccountable, troubled them not. It is in the first poetry of every people that there was One who would not endure it, but rose against it.

That evil which is brutal and cruel and low, no man condones; but that self-assertion which demands liberty, and opposes centralization and idolatry, with the front of Ajax we foster and defend. And they who would oppose us have a hard and dreary argument before them.

If conservatism is slow, it is so because it feels its weight. If it moves reluctantly, it is content where it is. It is skeptical of pretensions because it has faith in past experience and success,—not from dread or dislike of change, but contempt for the lean and hungry vanity and greed which are the motives of so much innovation. It does not affect great brilliancy and eclat, for character despises too much outside, and poises on itself. It does not covet an intellectuality disproportioned to the staying stuff of human nature. Better than all poems is that from which poetry is made. Expression is the craze of immaturity. Then is speech most beautiful when it tells how golden silence is, in the presence of the nameless mystery which we are.