Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/807

1858.] unionist, despiser of law, and other trumpery of that sort; from the other side, the no less effective ones of murderer, dumb dog, traitor to humanity, and other trumpery of that sort; and the young and sensitive student finds it difficult to keep the poise of his nature amid the cross-fire of this logic of fury and rhetoric of execration, and too often ends in joining one party from fear, or the other from the fear of being thought afraid. The probability is, that the least danger to his mental independence will proceed from any apprehension he may entertain of what are irreverently styled the “old fogies”; tor if Young America goes on at its present headlong rate, there is little doubt that the old fogy will have to descend from his eminence of place, become an object of pathos rather than terror, and be compelled to make the inquiring appeal to his brisk hunters, so often made to himself in vain, “ Am I not a man and a brother?” But with whatever association, political or moral, the thinker may connect himself, let him go in,—and not be dragged in or scared in. He certainly can do no good to himself, his country, or his race, by being the slave and echo of the heads of a clique. Besides, as most organizations are constituted on the principles of a sort of literary socialism, and each member lives and trades on a common capital of phrases, there is danger that these phrases may decline from signs into substitutes of thought, and both intellect and character evaporate in words. Thus, a man may be a Union man and a National man, or an Anti-Slavery man and a Temperance man and a Woman's-Rights’ man, and still be very little of a man. There is, indeed, no more ludicrous sight than to see Mediocrity, perched on one of these resounding adjectives, strut and bluster, and give itself braggadocio airs, and dictate to all quiet men its maxims of patriotism or morality, and all the while be but a living illustration through what grandeurs of opinion essential meanness and poverty of soul will peer and peep and be disclosed. To be a statesman or reformer requires a courage that dares defy dictation from any quarter, and a mind which has come in direct contact with the great inspiring ideas of country and humanity. All the rest is spite, and spleen, and cant, and conceit, and words.

It is plain, of course, that every man of large and living thought will naturally sympathize with those great social movements, informing and reforming, which are the glory of the age; but it must always be remembered that the grand and generous sentiments that underlie those movements demand in their fervid disciple a corresponding grandeur and generosity of soul. There is no reason why his philanthropy should be malignant because other men’s conservatism may be stupid; and the vulgar insensibility to the rights of the oppressed, and the vulgar scorn of the claims of the wretched, which men calling themselves respectable and educated may oppose to his own warmer feelings and nobler principles, should be met, not with that invective which may be as vulgar as the narrowness it denounces, nor always with that indignation which is righteous as well as wrathful, but with that awful contempt with which Magnanimity shames meanness, simply by the irony of her lofty example and the sarcasm of her terrible silence.

In these remarks, which we trust our readers have at least been kind enough to consider worthy of an effort of patience, we have attempted to connect all genuine intellectual success with manliness of character; have endeavored to show that force of individual being is its primary condition; that this force is augmented and enriched, or weakened and impoverished, according as it is or is not directed to appropriate objects; that indolence, conceit, and fear present continual checks to this going out of the mind into glad and invigorating communion with facts and laws; and that as a man is not a mere bundle of faculties, but a vital person, whose unity pervades, vivifies, and creates all the varieties of