Retrospect of Western Travel, Volume 2 (of 2)

by Harriet Martineau

Originals who are so in common circumstances, through their own force of soul, ruling events as well as being guided by them, yield something far better than amusement to the observer. Some of these, out of almost every class, I saw in America, from the divine and statesman down to the slave. I saw a very old lady whom I consider to be one, not on account of her extraordinary amiability and sympathy with all ages (which cause her to be called grandmamma by all who know her), but because this temper of mind is the result of something higher than an easy disposition and prosperous circumstances. It is the accomplishment of a long-settled purpose. When Grandmamma J. was eight years old, she was in company with an old lady who was jealous, exacting, and peevish. On returning home, the child ran to her mother and said, "If I am ever an old lady, I will be a good-tempered old lady." This was not said and forgotten, like many childish resolutions formed under the smart of elderly people's faults. It was a real purpose. She knew that, in order not to be cross when old, it is necessary to be meek, patient, and cheerful when young. She was so; and the consequence is, that Grandmamma J.'s popularity is unbounded. She is cherished by the whole community to whom she is known. The children want to have her at their dances, and the youths and maidens are always happiest where she is. She looks as if no shadow of care had been cast over her bright spirit for many a long year, and as if she might yet have many sunny years to come. She is preacher, prophet, and dispenser of amiability, all in one.

The venerable Noah Worcester is an original. I am thankful to have seen this aged apostle, for so he should be considered, having had a mission, and honourably discharged it. He is the founder of Peace Societies in America. Noah Worcester was a minister of the Gospel, of orthodox opinions. By the time he was surrounded by a family of young children, he had changed his opinions, and found himself a Unitarian. He avowed the change, resigned his parish, and went forth with his family, without a farthing in the world, or any prospect of being able to obtain a subsistence. He wrote diligently, but on subjects which were next his heart, and on which he would have written in like manner if he had been the wealthiest of American citizens. He set up the "Christian Disciple," a publication which has done honour to its supporters both under its original title and its present one of "The Christian Examiner." He devoted his powers to the promotion of Peace principles and the establishment of Peace Societies. Whatever may be thought of the practical effects, in a narrow view, of such societies, they seem to have well answered a prodigious purpose in turning men's contemplations full on the subject of true and false honour, and in inducing a multitude of glorious experiments of living strictly according to a principle which happens to be troublesome in its application. The number of peacemen, practisers of nonresistance, out of the Quaker body, is considerable in America, and their great living apostle is Noah Worcester. The leaders of the abolition movement are for the most part peacemen; an inestimable circumstance, as it takes out the sting from the worst of the slanders of their enemies, and gives increased effect to their moral warfare. Human nature cannot withstand the grandeur of the spectacle of men who have all the moral power on their side, and who abide unresistingly all that the physical power of the other side can inflict The boldest spirits tremble, hearts the most hardened in prejudice melt, when once they come into full view of this warfare; and the victory rests with the men of peace, who all love the name of Noah Worcester. Nearly twenty years ago he was encompassed with distresses for a time. Indeed, his life has been one of great poverty till lately. He is not one of the men made to be rich, or to spend his thoughts on whether he was happy or not. He was sent into the world for a very different purpose, with which and with its attendant enjoyments poverty could but little interfere. But in the midst of his deep poverty came sickness. His two daughters were at once prostrated by fever, and a severe struggle it was before they got through. Two friends of mine nursed them; and in the discharge of their task learned lessons of faith which they will be for ever thankful for, and of those graces which accompany the faith of the heart, cheerfulness of spirits, and quietude and simplicity of manner. My friends were not, at the beginning, fully aware of the condition of the household. They were invited to table at the early dinner hour. On the table stood a single brown loaf and a pitcher of water. Grace was said, and they were invited to partake with the utmost ease and cheerfulness, and not a word passed in reference to the restriction of the fare. This was what God had been pleased to provide, and it was thankfully accepted and hospitably shared. The father went from the one sick room to the other, willing to receive what tidings might await him, but tender to his daughters, as they have since been to him. On one evening when all looked threatening, he asked the friendly nurse whether the voice of prayer would be injurious to his sick children; finding that they desired to hear him, he set open the doors of their chambers, kneeled in the passage between, and prayed, so calmly, so thankfully, that the effect was to compose the spirits of the invalids. One now lives with him and cherishes him. She has changed her religious opinions and become orthodox, but she has not changed towards him. They are as blessed in their relation as ever.

Noah Worcester was seventy-six when I saw him in the autumn of 1835. He was very tall, dressed in a gray gown, and with long white hair descending to his shoulders. His eye is clear and bright, his manner serious but cheerful. His evening meal was on the table, and he invited us to partake with the same grace with which he offered his harder fare to the guests of former years. He lives at Brighton, a short distance from Boston, where his daughter manages the postoffice, by which their humble wants are supplied. He had lately published, and he now presented me with his "Last Thoughts" on some religious subjects which had long engaged his meditations. I hope his serene old age may yet be prolonged, gladsome to himself and eloquent to the world.

There is a remarkable man in the United States, without knowing whom it is not too much to say that the United States cannot be fully known. I mean by this, not only that he has powers and worth which constitute him an element in the estimate to be formed of his country, but that his intellect and his character are the opposite of those which the influences of his country and his time are supposed almost necessarily to form. I speak of the author of the oration which I have already mentioned as being delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society last August, Mr. Emerson. He is yet in the prime of life. Great things are expected from him, and great things, it seems, he cannot but do, if he have life and health to prosecute his course. He is a thinker and a scholar. He has modestly and silently withdrawn himself from the perturbations and conflicts of the crowd of men, without declining any of the business of life, or repressing any of his human sympathies. He is a thinker without being solitary, abstracted, and unfitted for the time. He is a scholar without being narrow, bookish, and prone to occupy himself only with other men's thoughts. He is remarkable for the steadiness and fortitude with which he makes those objects which are frequently considered the highest in their own department subordinate to something higher still, whose connexion with their department he has clearly discovered. There are not a few men, I hope, in America, who decline the pursuit of wealth; not a few who refrain from ambition; and some few who devote themselves to thought and study from a pure love of an intellectual life. But the case before us is a higher one than this. The intellectual life is nourished from a love of the diviner life of which it is an element. Consequently, the thinker is ever present to the duty, and the scholar to the active business of the hour; and his home is the scene of his greatest acts. He is ready at every call to action. He lectures to the factory people at Lowell when they ask it. He preaches when the opportunity is presented. He is known at every house along the road he travels to and from home, by the words he has dropped and the deeds he has done. The little boy who carries wood for his household has been enlightened by him; and his most transient guests owe to him their experience of what the highest grace of domestic manners may be. He neglects no political duty, and is unmindful of nothing in the march of events which can affect the virtue and peace of men. While he is far above fretting himself because of evil-doers, he has ever ready his verdict for the right, and his right hand for its champions. While apart from the passions of all controversies, he is ever present with their principles, declaring himself and taking his stand, while appearing to be incapable of contempt of persons, however uncompromising may be his indignation against whatever is dishonest and harsh. Earnest as is the tone of his mind, and placidly strenuous as is his life, an exquisite spirit of humour pervades his intercourse. A quiet gayety breathes out of his conversation; and his observation, as keen as it is benevolent, furnishes him with perpetual material for the exercise of his humour. In such a man it is difficult to point out any one characteristic; but if, out of such a harmony, one leading quality is to be distinguished, it is in him modest independence. A more entire and modest independence I am not aware of having ever witnessed, though in America I saw two or three approaches to it. It is an independence equally of thought, of speech, of demeanour, of occupation, and of objects in life; yet without a trace of contempt in its temper, or of encroachment in its action. I could give anecdotes; but I have been his guest, and I restrain myself. I have spoken of him in his relation to society, and have said only what may be and is known to common observers.

Such a course of life could not have been entered upon but through discipline. It has been a discipline of calamity as well as of toil. As for the prospect, it is to all appearance very bright. Few persons are apparently placed so favourably for working out such purposes in life. The condition seems hard to find fault with; and as to the spirit which is to work upon it—though I differ from some of the views of the thinker, and do not sympathize with all of those tastes of the scholar which I am capable of entering into—I own that I see no defect, and anticipate nothing short of triumph in the struggle of life.

Something may be learned of this thinker and his aims from a few passages of his address; though this is the last purpose, I doubt not, that he dreamed of his work being used for. He describes the nature of the occasion. "Our holyday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters among a people too busy to give to letters any more." His topic is the American scholar, and he describes the influences which contribute to form or modify him: the influence of Nature, the mind of the past, and action in life. He concludes with a consideration of the duty of the scholar.

"There goes in the world a notion that the scholar should be a recluse, a valetudinarian, as unfit for any handiwork or public labour as a penknife for an axe. The so-called 'practical men' sneer at speculative men as if, because they speculate or see, they could do nothing. I have heard it said that the clergy—who are always, more universally than any other class, the scholars of their day—are addressed as women; that the rough spontaneous conversation of men they do not hear, but only a mincing and diluted speech. They are often virtually disfranchised; and, indeed, there are advocates for their celibacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen into truth. While the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice; but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know as I have lived."

... "The mind now thinks, now acts, and each fit reproduces the other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended, and books are a weariness, he has always the resource to live. Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.

"The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to live as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to impart his truths? He can still fall back on this elemental force of living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act. Let the grandeur of justice shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of affection cheer his lowly roof. Those 'far from fame' who dwell and act with him will feel the force of his constitution in the doings and passages of the day better than it can be measured by any public and designed display. Time shall teach him that the scholar loses no hour which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the sacred germe of his instinct screened from influence. What is lost in seemliness is gained in strength. Not out of those on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Bersirkirs come at last Alfred and Shakspeare. I hear, therefore, with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labour to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labour is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not, for the sake of wider activity, sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action."

... "They (the duties of the scholar) are such as become man thinking. They may all be comprised in self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amid appearances. He plies the slow, unhonoured, and unpaid task of observation. Flamstead and Herschel, in their glazed observatory, may catalogue the stars with the praise of all men, and, the results being splendid and useful, honour is sure. But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such; watching days and months, sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old records; must relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long period of his preparation he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in his speech, often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept, how often! poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty, and loss of time which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature. He is one who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye. He is the world's heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart in all emergencies, in all solemn hours has uttered as its commentary on the world of actions, these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men and events of to-day, this he shall hear and promulgate. These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He, and he only, knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honourable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation; patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time, happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly."