one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as lie has done this, that line will be quoted east and west. Then there are great ways of borrow ing. Genius borrows nobly. When Shakspeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: " Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life." And we must thank Karl Ottfried Miiller for the just remark, " Poesy, drawing within its circle all that is glorious and inspiring, gave itself but little concern as to where its ilowers originally grew." So Voltaire usually imitated, but with such superiority that Dubuc said: " He is like the false Amphitryon; although the stranger, it is always he who has the air of being master of the house." Wordsworth, as soon as he heard a good thing, caught it up, meditated upon it, and very soon re produced it in his conversation and writing. If De Quincey said, " That is what I told you," he replied, "No: that is mine, — mine, and not yours." On the whole, we like the valor of it. 'T is on Mar- montel's principle, " I pounce on what is mine, wherever I find it "; and on Bacon's broader rule, " I take all knowledge to be my province." It be trays the consciousness that truth is the property of no individual, but is the treasure of all men. And inasmuch as any writer has ascended to a just view of man's condition, he has adopted this tone. In so far as the receiver's aim is 011 life, and not QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 171 on literature, will be his indifference to the source. The nobler the truth or sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship. It never troubles the simple seeker from whom he derived such or such a sentiment. Whoever expresses to us a just thought makes ridiculous the pains of the critic who should tell him where such a word had been said before. " It is no more according to Plato than according to me." * Truth is always present: it only needs to lift the iron lids of the mind's eye to read its ora cles. But the moment there is the purpose of dis play, the fraud is exposed. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others, as it is to in vent. Always some steep transition, some sudden alteration of 'temperature, of point or of view, betrays the foreign interpolation.
There is,.besides, a new charm in such intellec tual works as, passing through long time, have had a multitude of authors and improvers. "We admire that poetry which no man wrote, — no poet less than the genius of humanity itself, — which is to be read in a mythology, in the effect of a fixed or national style of pictures, of sculptures, or drama, or cities, or sciences, on us. Such a poem also is language. Every word in the language has once been used happily. The ear, caught by that feli city, retains it, and it is used again and again, as if the charm belonged to the word, and not to the life of thought which so enforced it. These profane 172 QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY.
uses, of course, kill it, and it is avoided. But a quick wit can at any time reinforce it, and it comes into vogue again. Then people quote so differ ently: one finding only what is gaudy and popu lar; another, the heart of the author, the report of his select and happiest hour: and the reader some times giving more to the citation than he owes to it. Most of the classical citations you shall hear or read in the current journals or speeches were not drawn from the originals, but from previous quotations in English books; and you can easily pronounce, from the use and relevancy of the sen tence, whether it had not done duty many times before, — whether your jewel was got from the mine or from an auctioneer. We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, and find a new and fervent sense; as a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering. As the journals say, " the italics are ours." The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The pro- foundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it. The passages of Shakspeare that we most prize were never quoted until within this century; and Milton's prose, and Burke, even, have their best fame within it. Every one, too, remembers his friends by their favorite poetry or other reading.
QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 173 Observe, also, that a writer appears to more ad vantage in the pages of another book than in his own. In his own, he waits as a candidate for your approbation; in another's, he is a lawgiver.
Then another's thoughts have a certain advan tage with us simply because they are another's. There is an illusion in a new phrase. A man hears a fine sentence out of Swedenborg, and wonders at the wisdom, and is very merry at heart that he has now got so fine a thing. Translate it out of the new words into his own usual phrase, and he will wonder again at his own simplicity, such tricks do fine words play with us.'
T is curious what new interest an old author acquires by official canonization in Tiraboschi, or Dr. Johnson, or Von Hammer-Purgstall, or Hallam, or other historian of literature. Their registration of his book, or citation of a passage, carries the senti mental value of a college diploma. Hallam, though never profound-, is a fair mind, able to appreciate poetry, unless it becomes deep, being always blind and deaf to imaginative and analogy-loving souls, like the Platonists, like G-iordano Bruno, like Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan; and Hallam cites a sentence from Bacon or Sidney, and distinguishes a lyric of Edwards or Vaux, and straightway it commends itself to us as if it had received the Isthmian crown.
It is a familiar expedient of brilliant writers, and 174 QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY.
not less of witty talkers, the device of ascribing their own sentence to an imaginary person, in order to give it weight, — as Cicero, Cowley, Swift, Lan- dor, and Carlyle have done. And Cardinal de Retz, at a critical moment in the Parliament of Paris, described himself in an extemporary Latin sentence, which he pretended to quote from a classic author, and which told admirably well. It is a curious reflex effect of this enhancement of our thought by citing it from another, that many men can write better under a mask than for themselves, — as Cliatterton in archaic ballad, Le Sage in Spanish costume, Macpherson as " Ossian," — and, I doubt not, many a young barrister in.chambers in London, who forges good thunder for the " Times," but never works as well under his own name. This is a sort of dramatizing talent; as it is not rare to find great powers of recitation, without the least original elo quence, — or people who copy drawings with admi rable skill, but are incapable of any design.
In hours of high mental activity we sometimes do the book too much honor, reading out of it bet ter things than the author wrote, — reading, as we say, between the lines. You have had the like ex perience in conversation: the wit was in what you heard, not in what the speakers said. Our best thought came from others. We heard in their words a deeper sense than the speakers put into them, and could express ourselves in other people's phrases to QUOTATION AND OEIGINALITY. 175 finer purpose than they knew. In Moore's Diary, Mr. Hallam is reported as mentioning at dinner one of his friends who had said, " I don't know how it is, a thing that falls flat from me seems quite an excellent joke when given at second-hand by Sheridan. I never like my own bon-mots until he adopts them." Dumont was exalted by being used by Mirabeau, by Bentham, and by Sir Philip Fran cis, who, again, was less than his own " Junius "; and James Hogg (except in his poems " Kilmeny " and "The Witch of Fife") is but a third-rate author, owing his fame to his effigy colossalized through the lens of John Wilson, — who, again, writes bet ter under the domino of "Christopher North" than in his proper clothes. The bold theory of Delia Bacon, that Shakspeare's plays were written by a society of wits, — by Sir Walter Ealeigh, Lord Bacon, and others around the Earl of Southamp ton, — had plainly for her the charm of the supe rior meaning they would acquire when read under this light; this idea of the authorship controlling our appreciation of the works themselves. We once knew a man overjoyed at the notice of his pamphlet in a leading newspaper. What range he gave his imagination! Who could have writ ten it? Was it not Colonel Carbine, or Senator Tonitrus, or, at the least, Professor Maximilian? Yes, he could detect in the style that fine Roman hand. How it seemed the very voice of the refined 176 QUOTATION AND OKIGINALITT.
and discerning public, inviting merit at last to consent to fame, and come up and take place in the reserved and authentic chairs! He carried the journal with haste to the sympathizing Cousin Matilda, who is so proud of all we do. But what dismay, when the good Matilda, pleased with his pleasure, confessed she had written the criticism, and carried it with her own hands to the post- office! " Mr. Wordsworth," said Charles Lamb, " allow me to introduce to you my only admirer."
Swedenborg threw a formidable theory into the world, that every soul existed in a society of souls, from which all its thoughts passed into it, as the blood of the mother circulates in her unborn child; and he noticed that, when in his bed, — alternately sleeping and waking, — sleeping, he was surrounded by persons disputing and offering opinions on the one side and on the other side of a proposition; waking, the like suggestions occurred for and against the proposition as his own thoughts; sleep ing again, he saw and heard the speakers as before: and this as often as he slept or waked. And if we expand the image, does it not look as if we men were thinking and talking out of an enormous an tiquity, as if we stood, not in a coterie of prompters that filled a sitting-room, but in a circle of intel ligences that reached through all thinkers, poets, inventors, and wits, men and women, English, Ger man, Celt, Aryan, Xinevite, Copt, — back to the QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 177 first geometer, bard, mason, carpenter, planter, shep herd, — back to the first negro, who, with more health or better perception, gave a shriller sound or name for the thing he saw and dealt with? Our benefactors are as many as the children who in vented speech, word by word. Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.
Havra pel: all things are in flux. It is inevita ble that you are indebted to the past. You are fed and formed by it. The old forest is decomposed for the composition of the new forest. The old ani mals have given their bodies to the earth to furnish through chemistry the forming race, and every in dividual is only a momentary fixation of what was yesterday another's, is to-day his, and will belong to a third to-morrow. So it is in thought. Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds: our language, our science, our religion, our opinions, our fancies we inherited. Our country, customs, laws, our ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair, — all these we never made; we found them ready-made; we but quote them. Goethe frankly said, " What would remain to me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius? Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand things: 178 QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY.
wise and foolish have brought me, without suspect ing it, the offering of their thoughts, faculties, and experience. My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature; it bears the name of Goethe."
But there remains the indefeasible persistency of the individual to be himself. One leaf, one blade of grass, one meridian, does not resemble another. Every mind is different; and the more it is un folded, the more pronounced is that difference. He must draw the elements into him for food, and, if they be granite and silex, will prefer them cooked by sun and rain, by time and art, to his hand. But, however received, these elements pass into the sub stance of his constitution, will be assimilated, and tend always to form, not a partisa'n, but a possessor of truth. To all that can be said of the prepon derance of the Past, the single word Genius is a sufficient reply. The divine resides in the new. The divine never quotes, but is, and creates. The profound apprehension of the Present is Genius, which makes the Past forgotten. Genius believes its faintest presentiment against the testimony of all history; for it knows that facts are not ulti- mates, but that a state of mind is the ancestor of everything. And what is Originality? It is being, being one's self, and reporting accurately what we see and are. Genius is, in the first instance, sensibility, the capacity of receiving just impressions from the QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 179 external world, and the power of co-ordinating these after the laws of thought. It implies Will, or origi nal force, for their right distribution and expression. If to this the sentiment of piety be added, if the thinker feels that the thought most strictly his own is not his own, and recognizes the perpetual sugges tion of the Supreme Intellect, the oldest thoughts become new and fertile whilst he speaks them.
Originals never lose their value. There is always in them a style and weight of speech, which the im manence of the oracle bestowed, and which cannot be counterfeited. Hence the permanence of the high poets. Plato, Cicero, and Plutarch cite the poets in the manner in which Scripture is quoted in our churches. A phrase or a single word is adduced, with honoring emphasis, from Pindar, Hesiod, or Euripedes, as precluding all argument, because thus had they said: importing that the bard spoke not his own, but the words of some god. True poets have always ascended to this lofty platform, and met this expectation. Shakspeare, Milton, Wordsworth, were very conscious of their responsibilities. When a man thinks happily, he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses. All spontaneous thought is irrespective of all else. Pindar uses this haughty defiance, as if it were impossible to find his sources: " There are many swift darts within my quiver, which have • a voice for those with understanding; but to the crowd 180 QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY.
they need interpreters. He is gifted with genius who knoweth much by natural talent."
Our pleasure in seeing each mind take the sub ject to which it has a proper right is seen in mere fitness in time. He that comes second must needs quote him that comes first. The earliest describers of savage life, as Captain Cook's account of the Society Islands, or Alexander Henry's travels among our Indian tribes, have a charm of truth and just point of viewT. Landsmen and sailors freshly come from the most civilized countries, and with no false expectation, no sentimentality yet about wild life, healthily receive and report what they saw, — see ing what they must, and using no choice; and no man suspects the superior merit of the description, until Chateaubriand, or Moore, or Campbell, or By ron, or the artists arrive, and mix so much art with their picture that the incomparable advantage of the first narrative appears. For the same reason we dislike that the poet should choose an antique or far-fetched subject for his muse, as if he avowed want of insight. The great deal always with the nearest. Only as braveries of too prodigal power can we pardon it, when the life of genius is so redundant that out of petulance it flings its fire into some old mummy, and, lo! it walks and blushes again here in the street.
We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim. The Past is QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 181 for us; but the sole terms on which it can be come ours are its subordination to the Present. Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul. 'T is certain that thought has its own proper motion, and the hints which flash from it, the words overheard at unawares by the free mind, are trustworthy and fertile, when obeyed, and not perverted to low and selfish account. This vast memory is only raw material. The divine gift is ever the instant life, which receives and uses and creates, and can well bury the old in the omnipotency with which Nature decomposes all her harvest for recomposition.
PROGRESS OF CULTURE.
PROGRESS OF CULTURE.
ADDRESS READ BEFORE THE <t> B K SOCIETY AT CAMBRIDGE, WE meet to-day under happy omens to our an cient society, to the commonwealth of letters, to the country, and to mankind. No good citizen but shares the wonderful prosperity of the Federal Union. The heart still beats with the public pulse of joy, that the country has withstood the rude trial which threatened its existence, and thrills with the vast augmentation of strength which it draws from this proof. The storm which has been re sisted is a crown of honor and a pledge of strength to the ship. We may be well contented with our fair inheritance. Was ever such coincidence of ad vantages in time and place- as in America to-day? — the fusion of races and religions; the hungry cry for men which goes up from the wide conti nent; the answering facility of immigration, per mitting every wanderer to choose his climate and government. Men come hither by nations. Sci ence surpasses the old miracles of mythology, to fly with them over the sea, and to send their mes- 186 PROGRESS OF CULTURE.
sages under it. They come from crowded, anti quated kingdoms to the easy sharing of our simple forms. Land without price is offered to the settler, cheap education to his children. The temper of our people delights in this whirl of life. Who would live in the stone age, or the bronze, or the iron, or the lacustrine? Who does not prefer the age of steel, of gold, of coal, petroleum, cotton, steam, electricity, and the spectroscope?
" Prisca juvent alios, ego me nunc denique natum Gratulor."
All this activity has added to the value of life,, and to the scope of the intellect. I will not say that American institutions have given a new enlarge ment to our idea of a finished man, but they have added important features to the sketch.
Observe the marked ethical quality of the inno vations urged or adopted. The new claim of woman to a political status is itself an honorable testimony to the civilization which has given her a civil status new in history. Now that, by the increased humanity of law she controls her property, she in evitably takes the next step to her share in power. The war gave us the abolition of slavery, the suc cess of the Sanitary Commission and of the Freed- men's Bureau. Add to these the new scope of social science; the abolition of capital punishment and of imprisonment for debt; the improvement of prisons; the efforts for the suppression of intern- PROGRESS OF CULTURE. ' 187 perance; the search for just rules affecting labor; the co-operative societies; the insurance of life and limb; the free-trade league; the improved alms- houses; the enlarged scale of charities to relieve local famine, or burned towns, or the suffering Greeks; the incipient series of international con gresses, — all, one may say, in a high degree revo lutionary, — teaching nations the taking of govern ment into their own hands, and superseding kings.
The spirit is new. A silent revolution has im pelled, step by step, all this activity. A great many full-blown conceits have burst. The cox comb goes to the wall. To his astonishment he has found that this country and this age belong to the most liberal persuasion; that the day of ruling by scorn and sneers is past; that good sense is now in power, and that resting on a vast constituency of intelligent labor, and, better yet, on perceptions less and less dim of laws the most sublime. Men are now to be astonished by seeing acts of good-nature, common civility, and Christian charity proposed by statesmen, and executed by justices of the peace, — by policemen and the constable. The fop is unable to cut the patriot in the street; nay, he lies at his mercy in the ballot of the club.
Mark, too, the large resources of a statesman, of a socialist, of a scholar, in this age. When classes are exasperated against each other, the peace of the world is always kept by striking a new note. In- 188 PROGRESS OF CULTURE.
stantly the units part, and form in a new order, and those who were opposed are now side by side. In this country the prodigious mass of work that must be done has either made new divisions of labor or created new professions. Consider, at this time, what variety of issues, of enterprises public and private, what genius of science, what of administra tion, what of practical skill, what masters, each in his several province, the railroad, the telegraph, the mines, the inland and marine explorations, the novel and powerful philanthropies, as well as agri culture, the foreign trade and the home trade (whose circuits in this country are as spacious as the foreign), manufactures, the very inventions, all on a national scale too, have evoked! — all imply ing the appearance of gifted men, the rapid ad dition to our society of a class of true nobles, by which the self-respect of each town and State is enriched.
Take as a type the boundless freedom here in Massachusetts. People have in all countries been burned and stoned for saying things which are commonplaces at all our breakfast-tables. Every one who was in Italy twenty-five years ago will re member the caution with which his host or guest, in any house looked around him, if a political topic were broached. Here the tongue is free, and the hand; and the freedom of action goes to the brink, if not over the brink, of license.
PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 189 A controlling influence of the times has been the wide and successful study of Natural Science. Steffens said, " The religious opinions of men rest on their views of nature." Great strides have been made within the present century. Geology, as tronomy, chemistry, optics, have yielded grand results. The correlation of forces and the polariza tion of light have carried us to sublime generaliza tions, — have affected an imaginative race like poetic inspirations. We have been taught to tread famil iarly on giddy heights of thought, and to wont ourselves to daring conjectures. The narrow sec tarian cannot read astronomy with impunity. The creeds of his church shrivel like dried leaves at the door of the observatory, and a new and healthful air regenerates the human mind, and imparts a sym pathetic enlargement to its inventions and method. That cosmical west-wind which, meteorologists tell us, constitutes, by the revolution of the globe, the upper current, is alone broad enough to carry to every city and suburb — to the farmer's house, the miner's shanty, and the fisher's boat • — the in spirations of this new hope of mankind. Now, if any one say we have had enough of these boastful recitals, then I say, Happy is the land wherein benefits like these have grown trite • and common place.
We confess that in America everything looks new and recent. Our towns are still rude, — the 190 PROGRESS OF CULTURE.
make-shifts of emigrants, — and the whole archi tecture tent-like, when compared with the monu mental solidity of mediaeval and primeval remains in Europe and Asia. But geology has effaced these distinctions. Geology, a science of forty or fifty summers, has had the effect to throw an air of novelty and mushroom speed over entire history. The oldest empires, — what we called venerable antiquity, — now that we have true measures of duration, show like creations of yesterday. 'T is yet quite too early to draw sound conclusions. The old six thousand years of chronology become a kitchen clock, — no more a measure of time than an hour-glass or an egg-glass, — since the duration of geologic periods has come into view. Geology itself is only chemistry with the element of time added; and the rocks of Nahant or the dikes of the White Hills disclose that the world is a crystal, and the soil of the valleys and plains a continual decomposition and recomposition. Nothing is old but the mind.
But I find not only this equality between new and old countries, as seen by the eye of science, but also a certain equivalence of the ages of his tory; and as the child is in his playthings work ing incessantly at problems of natural philoso phy, — working as hard and as successfully as Newton, — so it were ignorance not to see that each nation and period has done its full part to PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 191