Take his clubs and his routs away from Thackeray, his hunting away from White-Melville, his peasantry away from Scott, his street life away from Dickens, and where would their books be? Vigorous and picturesque individuality must precede good fiction. The great American novel, except as the outcome of a vigorous social life, is the dream of an idiot. You must have an age of ebullition, where the spontaneous life about the novelist forces itself into his books, before you can have good fiction. Architecture depends so plainly upon social life, that we have only to look at our country houses from Colonial times down, to read the hearts of the inmates. And so with the other fine arts and decorations, they are mere languages.
It is thought that our modern life is more complex than that of the eighteenth century, because the machinery by which it is carried on is expanded. Transportation, newspapers, corporations, oceans of books and magazines, foreign cables, have changed the forms by which power is transmitted. But the manifestations of humanity in government, in social life, and in the arts proceed upon the same principles as ever. Everything depends as completely on personal intercourse as it did in Athens. The real struggle comes between two men across a table, my force against your force. The devices which political philosophy has always approved, are those which protect the spirit of the individual, and enable it to grow strong. The struggles for English liberty have been struggles over taxation. The rights of the sovereign to seize a man’s property, or imprison his body without form of law, were abolished. This comparative financial independence of the English subject has been valued as the basis of spiritual independence. It has no other claim to be thought important. Yet while we have been praising our bills of rights and bulwarks of liberty, commerce in the United States has been bringing power after power, battalion after battalion, to bear upon the integrity of spirit of the individual man. Here is a situation which no legislation can meet. Civil liberty has been submerged in the boss system. But this is a mere symptom. It is valuable only because it brings strikingly into view the intellectual bondage it denotes. It is valuable only because it gives us a fighting ground, an educational arena in which the fight for intellectual liberty may be begun.
It is unnecessary to go over the steps of the argument backward, and to show how our citizen movements are a mere sign that the individual is becoming more unselfish. How, partly through the settling of commerce into more stable conditions, partly through revulsion in the heart of man against so much wickedness, a reign of better things is coming. The Christian Endeavorers, the University Settlements, the innumerable leagues and propaganda which bring no dogmas, but which stand for faith—speak for multitudes, affect every one. Their influence can already be traced into business, into social life, and out again into every department of our existence. The revolution is going forward on a great scale, and the demonstration is about to be worked out throughout the continent as if it were a blackboard.
The man who has subscribed $1,000 to the reform campaign, the man who has worked for the cause, and the man who has voted the ticket, have met. This personal meeting, this social focus, exists and is indestructible. These people who have been kept apart by the old political conditions, by the boss system, and the capitalist; these men whom every element of selfishness and corruption fought with the instinct of self-preservation to keep separate, have come together. The downfall of the old social system, and the redistribution of every force in the community, is inevitable. In the first place, every individual in the community has talked about the movement with an intensity proportionate to his power of good. Our form of government throws the moral idea with terrible force, as a practical issue, into the life of each man. “Thou art the man.” The extreme simplicity of our social fabric makes it impossible for any one to get behind his institution, his class, his prejudice. There is no one who cannot be shown up. We are as defenceless before virtue as we were before selfishness. Our politics can be worked as effectively by one passion as by the other—but we are only just beginning to find this out.
Free speech and the grouping, classing, and mingling of men according to intellect, and not according to income, have begun already. They are not more the outcome than they are the cause of these citizens’ movements. They are the same elemental thing. The love of truth is the same passion as the veneration for the individual. It is impossible to really want reform and to remain socially exclusive or socially deferential. And so, a social life is beginning to emerge in New York, based on the noblest and the most natural passion that can stir in the heart of man The results in the field of practical politics, will be that “society”—at least such of our drawing-rooms and dinner tables as any one, whether foreigner or native, knows or cares anything about—will resume the political importance which such places have always held in civilized times, and of which nothing but extraordinary and transient conditions have deprived them. Let any one who doubts this, compare the club talk and dinner table talk of to-day, with the talk of ten years ago. It would be childish to guess the positive results on the arts, theatres, novels, verse which will follow; but you can no more keep the spirit of freedom out of these things than you can keep it out of personal manners. These are changing daily. The decorums and codes of behavior, the old self-consciousness and self-distrust are dropping off. Steadily the flood of life advances, inspiring all things.
EDUCATION: FROEBEL