What words in any language can make this man understand that his law—which he really does profoundly understand as a law—applies to reform movements? Why, no words will do it, only example. New statements about morality, however eloquent, add nothing to our knowledge. Everything is known about the moral law, except how you yourself will act under given circumstances. You have nothing but example to contribute.
People interrogate force. They are unconvinced, and are carried, still protesting, through the air and deposited in a new place. And then, thereafter, they agree with you about the whole matter. Mere intellectual assent to your proposition is, even when you can get it, worth nothing. Your object is not to confute, but to stimulate. What you really want is that every man you meet shall drop his business and devote his entire life and energy to your cause. You will accept nothing less than this. Is it not clear that people are not moved by logic? Your conduct must ultimately square with reason and be justified by the laws of the universe and the constitution of other people’s minds; but you must value only that approval which comes from the deeper fibres in men. You need not be concerned about the bickerings of contemporary misunderstanding. Leave these for the historical society. Act first—explain afterwards. That is the way to get heard. Must you show your passport and certificate of birth and legitimacy to every editor and every lackey? They’ll find out who you are by and by. It is easier to knock a man down than to say why you do it. The act is sometimes needed, and wisdom then approves it after the event. People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this,—that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.
Such are the practical dictates of agitation. Their justification lies always with events. It may be that you must wait seven centuries for an audience, or it may be that in two years your voice will be heeded. If you are really a forerunner of better times, the times will appear and explain you. It will then turn out that your movement was the keynote of the national life. You really differed from your neighbors only in this,—that your mind had gone faster than theirs along the road all were travelling.
We are all slaves of the age; we can only see such principles as society reveals. The philosophy of other ages does us little good. We repeat the old formulas and cry up the prophets; but we see no connection between the truth we know so well in print and its counterpart in real life. The moral commonplaces, as, for instance, “Honesty is the best policy,” “A single just man can influence an entire community,” “Never compromise a principle,” are social truths. They are always true, but they are only obviously true in very virtuous communities. In a vile community the influence of a just man is potent but not visible. In a perfectly virtuous era it is clear that a cheat could not drive a fraudulent trade.
A seer is a man with such sharp eyes for cause and effect that he sees social truth, even under unfavorable conditions. And yet even the seers generally had auspicious weather,—that is to say, storms of moral passion. The whole race of Jews lived in fervent exaltation for generations, and revealed to their sharp-sighted prophets deep glimpses of social truth. Hence the Bible. “A prophet is not without honor save in his own country.” What happy precision! What sound generalization! But every township in Israel had its prophet, and the truth was a commonplace.
All the world’s moral wisdom would turn into literal truth upon the regeneration of society. It tends to become obvious in regenerative eras. In dark ages it becomes paradox. Standards are multiplied, and makeshift theories come in,—one rule for social conduct, another for business, another for politics. Expedient supplants principle. Indeed you may gauge the degradation of an age by the multiplicity of its standards. It is the same with the fine arts. To the men that made the statues and the pictures, these things were the shortest symbols of truth, and required no explanation. In the dark ages that followed they became a mystery and a paradox. But the traditions and objects survived and had to be accounted for. An age that cannot produce them requires a philosophy of æsthetics. Thus a thousand reasons are given to explain their existence, and finally it is agreed that they are something superfluous and fictitious,—conventional lies, like poetry, like loving your neighbor.
Nothing but a general increase of interest in the aspect of common things would explain to us the great masters. A revival of interest in the way the world looks is the precursor of painting: the perceptions of every one are quickening. And so we may be sure that we are upon the edge of a better era when the old moral commonplaces begin to glow like jewels and the stones to testify.
You cannot expect any one but a scientist to be startled at the movement of a glacier. But if you distribute a few micrometric instruments upon that gloomy ice-field, the American civic consciousness, and if you take observations not oftener than once in three years, you will be startled. The direction of the general movement is absolutely right. But it all moves together. Special signs of progress imply general progress, and hence comes the extraordinary and scientific interest in the awakening of this community. It is like a man lapsed into the deepest coma who is beginning to stir. Watch him, take his pulse, surround him with every apparatus of experimental physiology, and you will find the laws of health, the norm of progress.
Art and literature, and that moral atmosphere which makes a society worth moving in, lie on the other side of the great reaction, the spiritual revival which we see now faintly beginning; and it is because these things can be got at only by stimulating American character that these reform movements are of value. Here at least the circulation throbs. Political reform—that is to say, a political life in which men who are personally honest predominate, a politics run by ideas—will come in as fast as the public develops ideas, and not before. But an idea is something very different from what you who read this think it is. An idea is a thing that governs your conduct all the time. For instance, you assent to the notion of independence in politics; you understand the lost-cause theory, but you won’t vote the ticket. Why? You don’t want to get out of your class. The relations between thought and action in you are not normal. Half of your brain has never functioned, and the paralysis shows in your politics. You have no idea. It is not this sort of idea that expels rascals or makes books or music. What passes for political thought in your vocabulary is like the phantasma in the brain of the Indian priest who is buried with the corn growing above him. The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practise politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.
Imagine a tea-party of pre-Raphaelites discussing Dante; they dote on his style, his passion, his force, his quality. In walks Dante, grim, remorseless, harsh, powerful. The man represents everything they hate. He is a horror and an outrage. The whole region of literature that these men live in is not more fictitious than the region of political thought in which the effete American—I mean your banker, your college president, your writer of editorial leaders—lives. Exclude for the moment those who are financially corrupt and consider only the men of intellect, and in all that concerns politics they are as removed from real ideas as Rossetti was removed from the real Dante.