I should demand a
programme of culture, drawn out, not for a single class alone, or for
the parlors or lecture-rooms, but with an eye to practical life,
the west, the working-men, the facts of farms and jack-planes and
engineers, and of the broad range of the women also of the middle and
working strata, and with reference to the perfect equality of women,
and of a grand and powerful motherhood. I should demand of this
programme or theory a scope generous enough to include the widest
human area. It must have for its spinal meaning the formation of a
typical personality of character, eligible to the uses of the high
average of men--and _not_ restricted by conditions ineligible to
the masses. The best culture will always be that of the manly
and courageous instincts, and loving perceptions, and of
self-respect--aiming to form, over this continent, an idiocrasy of
universalism, which, true child of America, will bring joy to its
mother, returning to her in her own spirit, recruiting myriads of
offspring, able, natural, perceptive, tolerant, devout believers in
her, America, and with some definite instinct why and for what she has
arisen, most vast, most formidable of historic births, and is, now and
here, with wonderful step, journeying through Time.
The problem, as it seems to me, presented to the New World, is,
under permanent law and order, and after preserving cohesion,
(ensemble-individuality,) at all hazards, to vitalize man's free play
of special Personalism, recognizing in it something that calls ever
more to be consider'd, fed, and adopted as the substratum for the best
that belongs to us, (government indeed is for it,) including the new
esthetics of our future.
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