In addition to establish'd sciences, we suggest
a science as it were of healthy average personalism, on
original-universal grounds, the object of which should be to raise up
and supply through the States a copious race of superb American men
and women, cheerful, religious, ahead of any yet known.
America has yet morally and artistically originated nothing. She seems
singularly unaware that the models of persons, books, manners, &c.,
appropriate for former conditions and for European lands, are but
exiles and exotics here. No current of her life, as shown on the
surfaces of what is authoritatively called her society, accepts or
runs into social or esthetic democracy; but all the currents set
squarely against it. Never, in the Old World, was thoroughly
upholster'd exterior appearance and show, mental and other, built
entirely on the idea of caste, and on the sufficiency of mere outside
acquisition--never were glibness, verbal intellect, more the test, the
emulation--more loftily elevated as head and sample--than they are on
the surface of our republican States this day. The writers of a time
hint the mottoes of its gods. The word of the modern, say these
voices, is the word Culture.
We find ourselves abruptly in close quarters with the enemy. This word
Culture, or what it has come to represent, involves, by contrast, our
whole theme, and has been, indeed, the spur, urging us to engagement.
Certain questions arise. As now taught, accepted and carried out, are
not the processes of culture rapidly creating a class of supercilious
infidels, who believe in nothing? Shall a man lose himself in
countless masses of adjustments, and be so shaped with reference to
this, that, and the other, that the simply good and healthy and brave
parts of him are reduced and clipp'd away, like the bordering of box
in a garden? You can cultivate corn and roses and orchards--but who
shall cultivate the mountain peaks, the ocean, and the tumbling
gorgeousness of the clouds? Lastly--is the readily-given reply that
culture only seeks to help, systematize, and put in attitude, the
elements of fertility and power, a conclusive reply?
I do not so much object to the name, or word, but I should certainly
insist, for the purposes of these States, on a radical change of
category, in the distribution of precedence.
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