"This brown-fisted rough, this shirt-sleeved Cid,
This backwoods Charlemagne of Empires new.
Who meeting Cæsar's self would slap his back,
Call him 'Old Horse' and challenge to a drink."
Mr. Lowell bore no resemblance to this brown-fisted rough. He would not have slapped Cæsar on the back, and he would have resented being himself greeted in such an unconventional fashion. Nevertheless he was an American and was able to understand that a man might be capable of such improprieties and at the same time be a pillar of the State. It tickled his fancy to think of a fellow citizen meeting the imperial Roman on terms of hearty equality.
"My lungs draw braver air, my breast dilates
With ampler manhood, and I face both worlds."
Dickens, with all his boisterous humor and democratic sympathies, could not interpret Jefferson Brick and Lafayette Kettle and the other expansive patriots whom he met on his travels. Their virtues were as a sealed book to him. Their boastful familiarity was simply odious.
To understand Lowell's exhilaration one must enter into the spirit of American history. It has been the history of what has been done by strong men who owed nothing to the refinements of civilization. The interesting events have taken place not at the centre, but on the circumference of the country. The centrifugal force has always been the strongest. There has been no capital to which ambitious youths went up to seek their fortune. In each generation they have gone to the frontier where opportunities awaited them. There they encountered, on the rough edges of society, rough-and-ready men in whom they recognized their natural superiors. These men, rude of speech and of manner, were resourceful, bold, far-seeing. They were conscious of their power. They were laying the foundations of cities and of states and they knew it. They were as boastful as Homeric heroes, and for the same reason. There was in them a rude virility that found expression in word as well as in deed.
Davy Crockett, coon-hunter, Indian fighter, and Congressman, was a great man in his day. It does not detract from his worth that he was well aware of the fact. There was no false modesty about this backwoods Charlemagne. He wrote of himself, "If General Jackson, Black Hawk, and me were to travel through the United States we would bring out, no matter what kind of weather, more people to see us than any other three people now living among the fifteen millions now inhabiting the United States. And what would it be for? As I am one of the persons mentioned I would not press the question further. What I am driving at is this. When a man rises from a low degree to a place he ain't used to, such a man starts the curiosity of the world to know how he got along."
Davy Crockett understood the temper of his fellow citizens. A man who rises by his own exertions from a low position to "a place he ain't used to" is not only an object of curiosity, but he elicits enthusiastic admiration. Any awkwardness which he exhibits in the position which he has achieved is overlooked. We are anxious to know how he got along.
Every country has its self-made men, but usually they are made to feel very uncomfortable. They are accounted intruders in circles reserved for the choicer few. But in America they are assured of a sympathetic audience when they tell of the way they have risen in the world. There is no need for them to apologize for any lack of early advantages, for they are living in a self-made country. We are in the habit of giving the place of honor to the beginner rather than to the continuer. For the finisher the time is not ripe.
II
The most vivid impressions of Americans have always been anticipatory. They have felt themselves borne along by a resistless current, and that current has, on the whole, been flowing in the right direction. They have never been confronted with ruins that tell that the land they inhabit has seen better days. Yesterday is vague; To-day may be uncertain; To-morrow is alluring; and the Day after to-morrow is altogether glorious. George Herbert pictured religion as standing on tiptoe waiting to pass to the American strand. Not only religion but every other good thing has assumed that attitude of expectant curiosity.