ALFIERI AND CELLINI.[10]
THESE two publications have come to hand during the last month—a cheering gleam upon the winter of our discontent, as we saw the flood of bad translations of worse books which swelled upon the country.
We love our country well. The many false deeds and low thoughts; the devotion to interest; the forgetfulness of principle; the indifference to high and noble sentiment, which have, in so many ways, darkened her history for some years back, have not made us despair of her yet fulfilling the great destiny whose promise rose, like a star, only some half a century ago upon the hopes of the world.
Should that star be forsaken by its angel, and those hopes set finally in clouds of shame, the church which we had built out of the ruins of the ancient time must fall to the ground. This church seemed a model of divine art. It contained a labyrinth which, when threaded by aid of the clew of Faith, presented, re-viewed from its centre, the most admirable harmony and depth of meaning in its design, and comprised in its decorations all the symbols of permanent interest of which the mind of man has made use for the benefit of man. Such was to be our church, a church not made with hands, catholic, universal, all whose stones should be living stones, its officials the cherubim of Love and Knowledge, its worship wiser and purer action than has before been known to men. To such a church men do indeed constitute the state, and men indeed we hoped from the American church and state, men so truly human that they could not live while those made in their own likeness were bound down to the condition of brutes.
Should such hopes be baffled, should such a church fall in the building, such a state find no realization except to the eye of the poet, God would still be in the world, and surely guide each bird, that can be patient, on the wing to its home at last. But expectations so noble, which find so broad a basis in the past, which link it so harmoniously with the future, cannot lightly be abandoned. The same Power leads by a pillar of cloud as by a pillar of fire—the Power that deemed even Moses worthy only of a distant view of the Promised Land.
And to those who cherish such expectations rational education, considered in various ways and bearings, must be the one great topic of interest; an enterprise in which the humblest service is precious and honorable to any who can inspire its soul. Our thoughts anticipate with eager foresight the race that may grow up from this amalgamation of all races of the world which our situation induces. It was the pride and greatness of ancient nations to keep their blood unmixed; but it must be ours to be willing to mingle, to accept in a generous spirit what each clime and race has to offer us.
It is, indeed, the case that much diseased substance is offered to form this new body; and if there be not in ourselves a nucleus, a heart of force and purity to assimilate these strange and various materials into a very high form of organic life, they must needs induce one distorted, corrupt, and degraded beyond the example of other times and places. There will be no medium about it. Our grand scene of action demands grandeur and purity; lacking these, one must suffer from so base failure in proportion to the success that should have been.
It would be the worthiest occupation of mind to ascertain the conditions propitious for this meeting of the nations in their new home, and to provide preventions for obvious dangers that attend it. It would be occupation for which the broadest and deepest knowledge of human nature in its mental, moral, and bodily relations, the noblest freedom from prejudice, with the finest discrimination as to differences and relations, directed and enlightened by a prophetic sense as to what Man is designed by God to become, would all be needed to fit the thinker. Yet some portion of these qualities, or of some of these qualities, if accompanied by earnestness and aspiration, may enable any one to offer useful suggestions. The mass of ignorance and selfishness is such, that no grain of leaven must be despised.
And as the men of all countries come hither to find a home, and become parts of a new life, so do the books of all countries gravitate towards this new centre. Copious infusions from all quarters mingle daily with the new thought which is to grow into American mind, and develop American literature.
As every ship brings us foreign teachers, a knowledge of living contemporary tongues must in the course of fifty years become the commonest attainment. There exists no doubt in the minds of those who can judge, that the German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese tongues might, by familiar instruction and an intelligent method, be taught with perfect ease during the years of childhood, so that the child would have as distinct a sense of their several natures, and nearly as much expertness in their use, as in his own. The higher uses of such knowledge can, of course, be expected only in a more advanced state of the faculties; but it is pity that the acquaintance with the medium of thought should be deferred to a period when the mind is sufficiently grown to bend its chief attention on the thoughts themselves. Much of the most precious part of short human lives is now wasted from an ignorance of what might easily be done for children, and without taking from them the time they need for common life, play, and bodily growth, more than at present.