You are a great nature, a great writer, and a man of piercing intellect: he is a jack or a dunce that denies it. But of you, more than of most men at all your equals in intellectual resource, it may be said that yours is not a spherical or universal, but a special and linear intelligence,—of great human depth and richness, but special nevertheless. Of a particular order of truths you are an incomparable champion; but always you are the champion and on the field, always your genius has its visor down, and glares through a loop-hole with straitened intentness of vision. A particular sort of errors and falsities you can track with the scent of a blood-hound, and with a speed and bottom not surpassed, if equalled; but the Destinies have put the nose of your genius to the ground, and sent it off for good and all upon a particular trail. You sound, indeed, before your encounter, such a thrilling war-note as turns the cripple's crutch to an imaginary lance; you open on your quarry with such a cry as kindles a huntsman's heart beneath the bosoms of nursing mothers. No living writer possesses the like fascination. Yet, in truth, we should all have tired of your narrow stringency long ago, did there not run in the veins of your genius so rich and ruddy a human blood. The profoundness of your interest in man, and the masterly way in which you grasp character, give to your thought an inner quality of centrality and wholeness, despite the dogmatic partiality of its shaping at your hands. And so your enticement continues, intensely partial though it be.
Continues,—but with growing protest, and growing ground for it. For, to speak the truth, by your kind permission, without reserve, you are beginning to suffer from yourself. You are threatening to perish of too much Thomas Carlyle, I venture to caution you against that tremendous individual. He is subduing your genius to his own special humors; he is alloying your mental activity, to a fearful degree, with dogmatic prepossession; he is making you an intellectual routinier, causing thereby an infiltration of that impurity of which all routine at last dies. For years we that love you most have seen that you were ceasing more and more to hold open, fresh relations with truth,—that you were straitening and hardening into the linear, rigid eagerness of the mere propagandist. You have, if I may so speak, been turning all your front-head into back-head, giving to your cerebral powers the characters of preappointed, automatic action, which are proper to the cerebellum. It cannot be denied that you have thus acquired a remarkable, machine-like simplicity, force, and constancy of mental action,—your brain-wheels spinning away with such a steam-engine whirr as one cannot but admire; but, on the other hand, as was inevitable, you have become astonishingly insensitive to all truths, save those with which you are established in organic connection; nor could the products of Manchester mills be bargained for beforehand with more certainty than the results of your intellectual activity. You can be silent,—I venture to assert so much; but if you speak at all, we know perfectly well what description of fabric must come from your loom.
It does not, therefore, surprise us, does not clash with our sense of your native greatness, that for our particular Iliad you prove a very nutshell Homer indeed. For I must not disguise it from you that this is exactly the case. It was Homerus in nuce first; and the pitiful purport of the epic results less from any smallness in the action celebrated than from that important law, not, perhaps, wholly new to your own observation, which forbids a pint-measure to contain more than a pint, though you dip it full from the ocean itself.
You are great, but not towards us Americans. Towards us you are little and insignificant and superfluous. Your eyes, though of wondrous efficacy in their way, blink in our atmosphere like those of an owl in broad sunlight; and if you come flying here, it is the privilege of the smallest birds—of which you are quite at liberty to esteem me one—to pester you back into your medieval twilight.
Shall I try to tell you why you can have no right to judge us and our affairs? By your leave, then, and briefly.
There is a spiritual nature of man, which is ever and everywhere the same; and, through the necessary presence of this in every human being, there is a common sense and a common conscience, which make each man one with all others. Here in America we are seeking to give the force of political sovereignty to this common and unitive nature,—assuming that all political problems are at last questions of simple justice, courage, good sense, and fellow-feeling, which any sound heart and healthy intelligence may appreciate.
On the other hand, there is the truth of spiritual Rank or Degree,—that one man may be immensely superior in human quality to another. This is the truth that is most powerfully present to your mind, and you would constitute government strictly, if not solely, in the light of it. To this you are impelled by the peculiar quality of your genius, which is so purely biographical, so inevitably drawn to special personalities, that you can hardly conceive of history otherwise than as a record of personal influence.
We assume, then, as a basis, common sense; you, uncommon sense. We assume Unity or Identity; you assume Difference, and seek to reconstitute unity only through mastership on the one hand and reverent obedience on the other. We do not deny Difference; we recognize the truth of spiritual Degree; we merely elect the common element as the material out of which to constitute, and the force by which to operate, the State.
Now my judgment is, that either the truth of a common Manhood or the truth of spiritual Rank may be made primary in a State, and that with admirable results, provided it be duly allied and tempered with its opposite. For these opposites I hold to be correlative and polaric, each required by the other. But chasm is worse than indistinction; and he that breaks the circle of human fellowship is more mischievous than he who blurs the hues of gradation.
I affirm, then, that America has a grand spiritual fact at the base of her political system. But you are the prophet of an opposite order of truths. And you are so intensely the partisan of your pole, that you have not a moment's patience with anything else, above all with an opposite partiality. And wanting sympathy and patience with it, you equally want apprehension of its meaning.