As regards the first, calculate deliberately how long you have been riding or walking, and at what pace, since you left your party; subtract for stoppages and well-recollected zigzags; allow a mile and a half per hour as the pace when you have been loitering on foot, and three and a half when you have been walking fast. Occasional running makes an almost inappreciable difference. A man is always much nearer the lost path than he is inclined to fear.
As regards the second, if you recollect the third, and also know the course of the path within eight points of the compass, (or one-fourth of the whole horizon,) it is a great gain; or even if you know your direction within twelve points, or one-third of the whole horizon, that knowledge is worth something. Don't hurry, if you get bewildered. Stop and think. Then arrange matters, and you are safe. When Napoleon was once caught in a fog, while riding with his staff across a shallow arm of the Gulf of Suez, he thought, as usual. His way was utterly lost, and going forward he found himself in deeper water. So he ordered his staff to ride from him in radiating lines in all directions, and such of them as should find shallow water to shout out. If Napoleon had been alone on that occasion, he would have set his five wits to the task of finding the right way, and he would have found it.
Finally, cheerfulness in large doses is the best medicine one can take along in his out-door tramps. We once had the good-luck to hear old Christopher North try his lungs in the open air in Scotland. Such laughter and such hill-shaking merry-heartedness we may never listen to again among the Lochs, but the lesson of the hour (how it rained that black night!) is stamped for life upon our remembrance. "Clap your back against the cliff," he shouted, "and never mind the deluge!" Rest, glorious Christopher, under the turf you trod with such a gallant bearing! Few mortals knew how to rough it like you!
* * * * *
SELF-POSSESSION vs. PREPOSSESSION.
Timoleon, a man prosperous in all his undertakings, was wont to ascribe his successes to good-luck; but that he did not mean to give credit to any blind Goddess of Fortune is evident from his having built an altar to a certain divine something which he called Automatia, signifying Spontaneousness, or a happy promptitude in following the dictates of his own genius. The Liberator of Sicily, to be sure, did not live in an age of newspapers, and was not liable at every turn to have his elbow jogged by Public Opinion; but it is plain that his notion of a man fit to lead was, that he should be one who never waited to seize Opportunity from behind, and who knew that events become the masters of him who is slow to make them his servants.
Thus far nothing has been more remarkable in the history of our civil war than that its signal opportunities have failed to produce on either side any leader who has proved himself to be gifted with this happy faculty. Even our statesmen seem not to have felt the kindling inspiration of a great occasion. The country is going through a trial more crucial, if possible, than that of the Revolution; but no state-paper has thus far appeared, comparable in anything but quantity to the documents of our heroic period. Even Mr. Seward seems to have laid aside his splendid art of generalization, or to have found out the danger of those specious boomerangs of eloquence, which, launched from the platform with the most graceful curves of rhetoric, come back not seldom to deal an untimely blow to him who sets them flying. The people begin to show signs of impatience that the curtain should be so slow to rise and show them the great actor in our national tragedy. They are so used to having a gigantic bubble of notoriety blown for them in a week by the newspapers, though it burst in a day or two, leaving but a drop of muddy suds behind it, that they have almost learned to think the making of a great character as simple a matter as that of a great reputation. Bewildered as they have been with a mob of statesmen, generals, orators, poets, and what not, all of them the foremost of this or any other age, they seem to expect a truly great man on equally easy terms with these cheap miracles of the press,—grown as rapidly, to be forgotten as soon, as the prize cauliflower of a county show. We have improvised an army; we have conjured a navy out of nothing so rapidly that pines the jay screamed in last summer may be even now listening for the hum of the hostile shot from Sumter; why not give another rub at our Aladdin's lamp and improvise a genius and a hero?
This is, perhaps, very natural, but it is nevertheless unreasonable. Heroes and geniuses are never to be had ready-made, nor was a tolerable specimen of either ever produced at six months' notice. Dearly do nations pay for such secular births; still more dearly for their training. They are commonly rather the slow result than the conscious cause of revolutions in thought or polity. It is no imputation on democratic forms of government, it is the unexampled prosperity of nearly half a century that is in fault, if a sudden and unforewarned danger finds us without a leader, whether civil or military, whom the people are willing to trust implicitly, and who can in some sense control events by the prestige of a great name. Carlyle and others have for years been laying to the charge of representative and parliamentary government the same evils whose germ certain British critics, as ignorant of our national character as of our geography, are so kindly ready to find in our democracy. Mr. Stuart Mill, in his essay on "Liberty," has convinced us that even the tyranny of Public Opinion is not, as we had hastily supposed, a peculiarly American institution, but is to the full as stringent and as fertile of commonplace in intellect and character under a limited as under a universal system of suffrage.
The truth is, that it is not in our institutions, but in our history, that we are to look for the causes of much that is superficially distasteful and sometimes unpleasantly disappointing in our national habits,—we would not too hastily say in our national character. Our most incorrigible blackguards, and the class of voters who are at the mercy of venal politicians, have had their training, such as it is, under forms of government and amid a social order very unlike ours. Disgust at the general dirtiness and corruption of our politics, we are told, keeps all our leading men out of public life. This appears to us, we confess, a rather shallow misconception. Our politics are no dirtier or more corrupt than those of our neighbors. The famous Quam parvâ sapientiâ regitur mundus was not said in scorn by the minister of a republic, but in sober sadness by one whose dealings had been lifelong with the courts and statesmen of princes. The real disgust lies in the selfish passions that are called into play by the strife of party and the small ambitions of public men, and not in any mere coarseness in the expression of them. We are not an elegant people: rather less so, on the whole, even in the aristocratic South than in the democratic North. In this past year of our Lord eighteen hundred sixty-one, we have no doubt, and we shudder to think of it, that by far the larger proportion of our fellow-citizens shovelled their green-peas into their mouths with uncanonical knife-blades, just as Sir Philip Sidney did in a darker age, when yet the "Times" and the silver fork were not. Nay, let us make a clean breast of all these horrors at once, it is probably true that myriads of fair salmon were contaminated with the brutal touch of steel in scenes of unhallowed family-festival. The only mitigating circumstance is that such luxuries are within the reach of ten Americans where one European sees them any nearer than through the windows of the victualler. No, we must yield the point. We are not an elegant people, least of all in our politics; but we do not believe it is this which keeps our first-rate men out of political life, or that it is the result of our democratic system.
It has been our good-fortune hitherto that our annals have been of that happy kind which write themselves on the face of a continent and in the general well-being of a people, rather than in those more striking and commonly more disastrous events which attract the historian. We have been busy, thriving, and consequently, except to some few thoughtful people like De Tocqueville, profoundly uninteresting. We have been housekeeping; and why does the novelist always make his bow to the hero and heroine at the church-door, unless because he knows, that, if they are well off, nothing more is to be made of them? Prosperity is the forcing-house of mediocrity; and if we have ceased to produce great men, it is because we have not, since we became a nation, been forced to pay the terrible price at which alone they can be bought. Great men are excellent things for a nation to have had; but a normal condition that should give a constant succession of them would be the most wretched possible for the mass of mankind. We have had and still have honest and capable men in public life, brave and able officers in our army and navy; but there has been nothing either in our civil or military history for many years to develop any latent qualities of greatness that may have been in them. It is only first-rate events that call for and mould first-rate characters. If there has been less stimulus for the more showy and striking kinds of ambition, if the rewards of a public career have been less brilliant than in other countries, yet we have shown, (and this is a legitimate result of democracy,) perhaps beyond the measure of other nations, that plebeian genius for the useful which has been chiefly demanded by our circumstances, and which does more than war or state-craft to increase the well-being and therefore the true glory of nations. Few great soldiers or great ministers have done so much for their country as Whitney's cotton-gin and McCormick's reaper have done for ours. We do not believe that our country has degenerated under democracy, but our position as a people has been such as to turn our energy, capacity, and accomplishment into prosaic channels. Physicians call certain remedies, to be administered only in desperate cases, heroic, and Providence reserves heroes for similar crises in the body politic. They are not sent but in times of agony and peril. If we have lacked the thing, it is because we have lacked the occasion for it. And even where truly splendid qualities have been displayed, as by our sailors in the War of 1812, and by our soldiers in Mexico, they have been either on so small a scale as to means, or on a scene so remote from European interests, that they have failed of anything like cosmopolitan appreciation. Our great actors have been confined to what, so far as Europe is concerned, has been a provincial theatre; and an obscure stage is often as fatal to fame as the want of a poet.