Literary values, and other papers

by John Burroughs

We are always wondering who are going to take the place of the great poets, the great preachers, the great statesmen and orators who are passing away. We see the new men, but they are not the worthy successors of these. The great ones are all old or dead. The new ones we know not; they cannot be to us what the others were; they cannot be the star actors in the drama in which we have played a part, and therefore we fancy they are of little account.

Are there any genuine old men any more? Why, the old men, the real ones, are all dead long ago; we knew them in our youth; they were always old, old from the foundations of the world. These old men of to-day are mere imitations; we can remember when they were not old,—it is all put on. The grandfathers and the grandmothers whom we knew—think of any present-day grandparents being anything more than mere counterfeits of them!

Hence, also, the new generation always go astray according to the old, and run after strange gods. “And also all that generation were gathered unto their fathers; and there arose another generation after them, which knew not the Lord, nor yet the works which He had done for Israel.”

How ready we are to believe in the past as against the present; to believe that wonders happened then that do not happen now! Miracles happened then, but not now. The Divine One came upon earth then, but he comes no more! Our whole religion is of the past. How hard to believe in a present revelation, or to believe in the advantages and opportunities of the present hour!

From the standpoint of each of us the sunrise and the sunset seem like universal facts; it must be evening or morning throughout the world, we think, instead of just here on our meridian. In the same way we are prone to look upon youth and age as commensurate with human existence; the world was young when we were young, and it grows old as we grow old; youth and age we think are not subjective experiences, but objective realities.

How can these youths here by our side feel as we have felt, see what we have seen, have the same joys and sorrows, the same friends, the same experiences, see the world clad in the same hues, feel the same ties of home, of father and mother, of school and comrades, when all the world is so changed,—when these things and persons that were so much to us are forever past? What is there left? How can life bring to them what it brought to us? But it will. The same story is told over and over to each succeeding generation, and each finds it new and true for them alone. As we find our past in others, so our youths will find their past in us, and find it unique and peculiar.

The lives of men are like the sparks that shoot upward; the same in the first ages as in the last, each blazing its brief moment as it leaps forth, some attaining a greater brilliancy or a higher flight than others, but all ending at last in the same black obscurity. Or they are like the waves that break upon the shore; one generation following swift upon the course of another, repeating the same evolutions, and crumbling and vanishing in the same way.

Probably no man ever lost his father or his mother or his bosom friend without feeling that no one else could ever have had just such an experience. Carlyle, in writing to Emerson shortly after each had lost his mother, said, “You too have lost your good old mother, who stayed with you like mine, clear to the last; alas, alas, it is the oldest Law of Nature; and it comes on every one of us with a strange originality, as if it had never happened before!”

Speaking of these two rare men, each so attractive to the other, how unlike they were in their attitude toward the past,—the one with that yearning, wistful, backward glance, bearing the burden of an Old World sorrow and remorse, long generations of baffled, repressed, struggling humanity coming to full consciousness in him; the other serene, hopeful, optimistic, with the spell of the New World upon him, turning cheerfully and confidently to the future! Emerson describes himself as an endless seeker with no past at his back. He seemed to have no regrets, no wistful retrospections. His mood is affirmative and expectant. The power of the past was not upon him, but it had laid its hand heavily upon his British brother, so heavily that at times it almost overpowered him. Carlyle’s dominant note is distinctively that of retrospection. He yearns for the old days. The dead call to him from their graves. In the present he sees little, from the future he expects less; all is in the past. How he magnifies it, how he re-creates it and reads his own heroic temper into it! The twelfth century is more to him than the nineteenth.

It is true that the present time is more or less prosy, vulgar, commonplace to most men; not till we have lived it and colored it with our own experiences does it begin to draw us. This seems to have been preëminently the case with Carlyle; he was morbidly sensitive to the crude and prosy present, and almost preternaturally alive to the glamour of the past. What men had done, what they had touched with their hands, what they had colored with their lives, that was sacred to him.