A Journeyman's Leave-taking.
"Hear me, all of you. You, and you, and you, and you! Good-bye, mistresses. I tell you freely to your faces, your bacon and greens are not to my taste. I am going to try my luck. I will march on."—Ludwig Richter, Leipsic, 1848.
As a set-off to this defect, I may mention again the absence from the German comic periodicals of the class of subjects which, at present, seems to be the sole inspiration of French art and French humor. It is evident that the Germans do not regard illicit love as the chief end of man. The reason of the superior decency of German satire is, probably, that German methods of education awaken the intelligence and store the mind with the food of thought. Indecency is the natural resource of a thoughtless mind, because the physical facts of our existence constitute a very large proportion of all the knowledge it possesses. Suppose those facts and the ideas growing directly out of them to be one hundred in number. The whole number of facts and ideas in an ignorant mind may not exceed two hundred; while in the intellect of a Goethe or a Lessing there may live and revolve twenty thousand. Convent education is probably the cause of French indecency, simply from its leaving the mind dull and the imagination active. Many Frenchmen must think bodily, or not think at all. This conjecture I hazard because I have observed in Protestant schools, professedly and distinctively religious, the same morbid tendency in the pupils that we notice in French art and drama. The French are right in not trusting their convent-bred girls out of sight. The convent-bred boys, who can not be so closely watched, show the untrustworthiness of moral principle which is not fortified by intelligent conviction. The Germans, from their better mental culture and greater variety of topics, are not reduced to the necessity of amusing themselves by "bodily wit."
CHAPTER XXI.
COMIC ART IN SPAIN.
As it is "Don Quixote" that has given most of us whatever insight into Spanish life and character we possess, we should naturally expect to find in the Spain of to-day abundant manifestations of satirical talent. But since the great age when such men as Cervantes could be formed, the intellect of Spain has suffered exhausting depletion, and the nation has in consequence long lain intellectually impotent, the natural prey of priests, dynasties, and harlots. The progress of a country depends upon the use it makes of its best men. Since Cervantes was born, in 1547, all the valuable men among the Moors and Jews, with a million of their countrymen, have been banished, carrying away with them precious arts, processes, instincts, aptitudes, and talents; to say nothing of the good that comes to a country of having upon its soil a variety of races and religions, each developing some excellencies of human nature which the others overlook or undervalue. In the same generation hundreds of the valiant men of Spain went down in the Armada, and thousands were wasted in America.
But these were not the fatal losses. These men could have been replaced, such is the bountiful fertility of nature. But, in those days, if a man was reared who possessed independence or force of mind, or had much mind of any kind, he was likely to become a Protestant; and, if he did, one of two calamitous fates awaited him, either of which made him useless to Spain: he either concealed his opinions, and thus stifled his nobler life, or else the Inquisition destroyed him. Never was such successful war waged upon the human mind as in Spain at that period, for every man who manifested any kind of mental superiority was either slain or neutralized. If he escaped the goldmines, the wars, and the Inquisition, there was still the Church to take him in and convert him into a priest.
Nor need we go as far as Spain to see the fatal damage done to communities by the absorption of promising youth into the priesthood. We have only to go to the French parts of Canada, and mark the difference between the torpid and hopeless villages there, and the vigorous, handsome towns of New England, New York, and Michigan, just over the border. The reason of this amazing contrast is that on our side of the line the natural leaders of the people found mills, factories, libraries, and schools; on the other side they enter convents and build churches; and the people, thus bereft of their natural chiefs, harness forlorn cows to crazy carts, and come down into Vermont and New Hampshire in harvest-time to get a little money to help them through the long Canadian winter. Thus, in Spain and Italy, the men who ought to serve the people, prey upon them, and the direct and chief reason why the northern nations of Europe surpass the southern is, that in the north the superior minds are turned to account, and in the south they have been entombed in the Church or paralyzed by titles of nobility.
