Indulge in whatever theories we may, whether of continuous development or of sudden creation, it is through our parents that we receive our being. It is through our ancestry, spreading ultimately back to the limits of the human race, that each of us descends from God. By them it is that the Creator creates us. Well may the great Asiatic races, the soft and contemplative Brahmins, the child-like Chinese, the pure and thoughtful Parsees, worship their unknown Maker in forms of reverential remembrance and adoration paid to their known ancestors, gathering their relics in dedicated tombs or temples, cherishing their names and examples and precepts with fond devotion, celebrating pensive and glad festivals in their honor, preparing, around their pious offerings of fruits and flowers, little seats of grass, in a circle, for the pleased guardian spirits of their recalled fathers and mothers invisibly to occupy. Let not the reckless spirit of Young America, absorbed in the chase of material gain, and irreverent of everything but sensuous good, call it all a superstition and a folly. There is truth in it, too, and a hallowing touch of the universal natural religion of humanity.
America, in her hasty and incompetent contempt for the dotage, fails to appropriate the wisdom of the Orient. More of their humility, leisure, meditation, reverence, aspiration, mystic depth of intuition, will do us as much good as more of our science, ingenuity, independence, and enterprise will do them. The American people, in their deliverance from the entrammelling conditions of the over-governed Old World, and their exciting naturalization on the virgin continent of the West, have, to some extent, erred in affixing their scorn and their respect to the wrong objects. In repudiating excessive or blind loyalty to titular superiors and false authority, they have lost too much of the proper loyalty to real superiors and just authority. They are too much inclined to be contented with respectability and the average standard, instead of aspiring to perfection by the divine standard. They show too much deference to public opinion, and are too eagerly drawn after the vulgar prizes of public pursuit,—money and social position,—to the comparative neglect of personal reflection and culture, personal honor, and detachment in a self-sustaining insight of principles. They think too subserviently of what is established, powerful, fashionable,—the very vice from which the founders of the country fled hither. They think too meanly and haltingly of the truth and good which are not yet established and fashionable, but ought to be so,—thus turning their backs on the very virtue which heaven and earth command them in especial to cultivate, namely, the virtue of an unflinching spirit of progress in obedience to whatever is right and desirable as against whatever wrongfully continues to govern. The best critics from abroad, and the wisest observers at home, agree that the most distinctive vice in the American character is described by the terms complacent rashness and assumption, crude impertinence, disrespect to age, irreverence towards parents, contempt for whatever does not belong to itself. This rampant democratic royalty in everybody has proved sadly detrimental to that spirit of modesty and docility which, however set against oppression and falsehood, is profoundly appreciative of everything sacred or useful and sits with veneration at the feet of the past to garner up its treasures with gratitude. The American who improves instead of abusing his national privileges will maintain his private convictions and not bend his knee slavishly to public opinion, but he will treat the feelings of others with tenderness, bow to all just authority, and reverently uncover his heart before everything that he sees to be really sacred.
On these points, it will be seen in the subsequent pages, the subject of the present biography, as a boldly-pronounced American citizen, was in most respects a good example. If occasionally, in some things, he practised the American vice,—self-will, unconscious bigotry intrenched in a shedding conceit,—he prevailingly exemplified the American virtue,—tolerance, frankness, generosity, a sympathetic forbearance in the presence of what was venerable and dear to others, although it was not so to him. While withholding his homage from merely conventional sanctities, he never scoffed at them; and he always instinctively worshipped those intrinsic sanctities which carry their divine credentials in their own nature. The filial and fraternal spirit in particular was very strong in him, and bore rich fruits in his life and conduct.
The conspicuous relative decay of the filial and fraternal virtues, or weakening of the family tie, among the American people, the precocious development and self-assertion of their children, wear an evil aspect, and certainly are not charming. Yet they may be inevitable phases in the evolution of the final state of society. They may distinguish a transitional stage through which all countries will have to pass, America being merely in the front. In ancient life the political and social unit was the family. The whole family was held strictly responsible for the deeds of each member of it. The drift marked by democracy is to make the individual the ultimate unit in place of the family, legally clearing each person from his consanguineous entanglements, and holding him responsible solely for his own deeds in relation to entire society. The movement towards individuality is disintegrating; but, when completed, it may, by a terminal conversion of opposites, play into a more intimate fellowship and harmony of the whole than has ever yet been realized on earth. Thus it is not impossible that the narrower and intenser domestic bonds may be giving way simply before the extruding growth of wider and grander bonds, the particular yielding merely as the universal advances. If the destiny of the future be some form of social unity, some public solidarity of sympathies and interests in which all shall mutually identify themselves with one another, then the temporary irreverences and insurgences of a democratic régime may have their providential purpose and their abundant compensation in that final harmony of co-operative freedom and obedience to which they are preparing the way out of priestly and monarchical régimes.
Either this is the truth, that the youthful insubordination and premature complacency, the rarity of generous friendships and the commonness of sinister rivalries, which mark our time and land are necessary accompaniments of the passage from individual loyalties to collective loyalties, from an antagonistic to a communistic civilization, or else our republicanism is but the repetition of a stale experiment, doomed to renewed failure. There are political horoscopists who predict the subversion of the American Republic and its replacement by a monarchy. Thickening corruption and strife between two hostile parties over a vast intermediate stratum of indifference prompt the observer to such a conclusion. But a more auspicious faith is that these ills are to be overruled for good. It is more likely that both republicanism and monarchy, in their purest forms, are to vanish in behalf of a third, as yet scarcely known, form of government, which will give the final solution to the long-vexed problem, namely, government by scientific commissions which will know no prejudice, but represent all in the spirit of justice.
The exact knowledge, co-operative power, and disciplined skill chiefly exemplified hitherto in war, or in great business enterprises conducted in the exclusive interests of their supporters against all others,—this combination, universalized and put on a basis of disinterestedness, seeking the good of an entire nation or the entire world, will furnish the true form of government now wanted. For no government of the many by the few in the spirit of will, whether that will represents the minority or the majority, can be permanent. The only everlasting or truly divine government must be one free from all will except the will of God, one which shall guide in the spirit of science by demonstrated laws of truth and right, representing the harmonized good of the whole.
In view of such a possible result, the trustful American, comparing his people with Asiatics or with Europeans, can regard without fear the apparent change of certain forms of virtue into correlative forms of vice; because he holds that this is but a transient disentwining of the moral and religious tendrils from around smaller and more selfish objects in preparation for their permanent re-entwining around greater and more disinterested ones, when private families shall dissolve into a universal family, or their separate interests be conformed to its collective interests. All humanity is the family of God, and perhaps the historic selfishness of the lesser families may crumble into individualities in order to re-combine in the universal welfare of this.
Meanwhile, it may well be maintained that the repulsive swagger of self-assertion sometimes seen here is a less evil than the degrading servility and stagnant spirit of caste often seen elsewhere. The desideratum is to construct out of the alienated races and classes of men here thrown together, jarring with their distinctions and prejudices, yet under conditions of unprecedented favorableness, a new type of character, carrying in its freed and sympathetic intelligence all the vital and spiritual traditions of humanity. There are but two methods to this end: one, the intermingling of the varieties in generative descent; the other, the personal assimilation of contrasting experiences and qualities by mutual sympathetic interpretation and assumption of them. This latter process is the very process and business of the dramatic art. The true player is the most detached, versatile, imaginative, and emotional style of man, most capable of understanding, feeling with, and reproducing all other styles, best fitted, therefore, to mediate between hostile clans and creeds and reconcile the dissonant parts of society and the race in its final cosmopolite harmony.
Consequently, among the public agencies of culture destined to educate the American people out of their defects and faults into a complete accordant manhood—if, as is fondly hoped, that happy destiny be reserved for them—the dramatic art will have an unparalleled place of honor assigned to it. The dogmatic Church, so busy in toothlessly mumbling the formulas of an extinct faith that it loses sight of the living truths of God in nature and society, will be heeded less and less as it slowly dies its double death in drivel of words and drivel of ceremonies. But the plastic Stage, clearing itself of its abuses and carelessness, and receiving a new inspiration at once religious in its sacred earnestness and artistic in its free range of recreative play, will become more and more influential as it learns to exemplify the various ideals of human nature and human life set off by their graded foils, and presents the gravest teachings disguised in the finest amusements.
In the democratic idea, every man is called on to be a priest and a king unto God. Church and State, in all their forms and disguises, have sought to monopolize those august rôles for a few; but the Theatre, in the examples of its great actors, has instinctively sought to fling their secrets open to the whole world; and, when fully enlightened by the Academy, it will clearly teach what it has thus far only obscurely hinted. It will reveal the hidden secrets of power and rank, the just arts of sway, and the iniquitous artifices of despotism. And it will assert the indefeasible claim of every man, so far as he wins personal fitness and desert, to have open before him a free passage through all the spheres and heights of social humanity. The greatest player is the one who can most perfectly represent the largest scale of characters, keeping each in its exact truth and grade, yet passing freely through them all. That, too, is the moral ground and essence of democracy, whose basis is thus the same as that of the dramatic art,—namely, a free and intelligent sympathy giving men the royal freedom of mankind by right of eminent domain. The priesthood and kingship of man are universal in kind, but endlessly varied in degree, no two men on earth nor no two angels in heaven having such a monotonous uniformity that they cannot be discriminated. Each one has an original stamp and relish of native personality. The law of infinite perfection, even in liberty itself, is perfect subordination in the infinite degrees of superiority.