Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/536

528 sagacity has been well hit by Lowell in his description of the typical American scholar,—

That is, the New Man has two things that seldom make each other's acquaintance,—Sight and Insight. Accordingly, our subtilest thinker, whom the scholarly Mr. Vaughan classes with the mystics and accuses of going beyond the legitimate range even of mystics, has written such an estimate of the most practical nation in the world as has never been written of that or any other before. The American knows what is about him, has tact, sagacity, conversance with surfaces and circumstances, is the shrewdest guesser in the world; and seeing him on this side alone, one might say,—This is the man of to-day, a quick worker, good to sail ships, bore mountains, buy and sell, but belonging to the surface, knowing only that. The medal turns, and lo! here is this 'cute Yankee a thinker, a mystic, fellow of the antique, Oriental in his subtilest contemplations, a rider of the sunbeam, dwelling upon Truth's sweetness with such pure devotion and delight that vigorous Mr. Kingsley must shriek, "Windrush!" "Intellectual Epicurism!" and disturb himself in a somewhat diverting manner. Pollok declaimed against the attempt to lay hold of the earth with one hand and heaven with the other. But that is the peculiar feat for which the American is born,—to bring together seeing and doing, principle and practice, eternity and to-day. The American is given, they say, to extremes. True, but to both extremes; he belongs to the two antipodes. To the one he appertains by intellectual emancipation and penetrative power; to the other by his pungent element of sympathy with persons. Speaking of the older Northern States, and of the people as a whole, we affirm that their inhabitants are more speculative and more practical, the scholars know more of immediate common interests and speak more the dialect of the people, while the mechanics know more of speculative truth and understand better the necessary vocabulary of thought, than any other people.

Lyell says, that the New World is really the Old World—that there, preëminently, the antique geological formations are found, and nearer the surface than elsewhere. Thus the physical peculiarity of our continent is, that here an elaborate and highly finished surface is immediately superimposed upon the oldest rock, rock wrought in fire and kneaded with earthquake knuckles. We discover in this a symbol of the American Man. He likewise brings into near association the most ancient and the most modern. By insight he dwells in the old thoughts, the eternal truths, the meditations that rapt away the early seers into trance and dream; but he brings these into sharp contact with life, associates them with the newest work, the toil and interests of this year and day.

We shall find space to mention but one peril which besets the New Man. It is danger of physical exhaustion. Dr. Kane, the hero of two Arctic nights, came forth to the day only to die. That which makes the preëminence of our organization makes also its peril. Denmark is said to be impoverished by the disproportion of the learned to the industrial class; production is insufficient, and too much of a good thing cripples the country. The nervous system is a learned class in the body; it contributes dignity and superior uses, but makes no corn grow in the physiological fields. A brain of great animation and power is a perilous freight for the stanchest body; in a weak and shattered body it is like gold in a spent swimmer's pocket,—the richer it would make him on dry land, the less chance it gives him of arriving there. That this danger is not imaginary too many are able to testify—Few scenes in Rabelais are more exquisitely ludicrous than that in which he pictures the monk Panurge in a storm at sea. The oily ecclesiastic is terrified as only a combination of hypocrite and coward can be; and, in the ex-