Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 12, October, 1858

one million of men who would stand for the broadest justice as Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans stood for Lacedaemon! But Hebrew David was thought to be punished for taking a census; nor is the story without significance. To reckon numbers alone a success is a sin, and a blunder beside. Russia has sixty millions of people: who would not gladly swap her out of the world for glorious little Greece back again, and Plato and Aeschylus and Epaminondas still there? Who would exchange Concord or Cambridge in Massachusetts for any hundred thousand square miles of slave-breeding dead-level? Who Massachusetts in whole for as many South American (or Southern) republics as would cover Saturn and all his moons? Make sure of depth and breadth of soul as the national characteristic; then roll up the census columns; and roll out a hallelujah for each additional thousand.

Thus had the great Genoese been destined merely to make a new highway on the ocean and new lines on the map,—to add the potato, maize, and tapioca to the known list of edibles, and tobacco to that of narcotics,—to explode Spain, give England a cotton-field, Ireland a hospital, and Africa a hell. This could by no means seem sufficient. The crew of the Pinta shouted, "Land! Land!"—peering through the dark at the new shores; the Spanish nation chanted, "Gold! Gold!"—gazing out through murky desires toward the wondrous West; but it is only with the cry of "Man! Man!" as at the sight of new cerebral shores and wealth of more than golden humanities, that the true America is discovered and announced. So whatever reason we have to assert for America a really independent existence and destiny, the same have we for predicting an opulence of heart and brain, to which Western prairies and Californian gold shall seem the natural appurtenance.

And this noble man must be likewise a new man,—not merely a migrated European. Western Europe pushed a little farther west does not meet our demand. Why should Europe go three thousand miles off to be Europe still? Besides, can we afford to England, France, Spain, a larger room in the world? Are we more than satisfied with their occupancy of that they already possess? The Englishman is undeniably a wholesome picture to the mental eye; but will not twenty million copies of him do, for the present? It would seem like a poverty in Nature, were she unable to vary, but must go helplessly on to reproduce that selfsame British likeness over all North America. But history fully warrants the expectation of a new form of man for the new continent. German and Scandinavian Teutons peopled England; but the Englishman is sui generis , not merely an exported Teuton. Egypt, says Bunsen, was peopled by a colony from Western Asia; but the genius and physiognomy of Egypt are peculiar and its own. Mr. Pococke will have it that Greece was a migrated India: it was, of course, a migration from some place that first planted the Hellenic stock in Europe; but if the man who carved the Zeus, and built the Parthenon, and wrote the "Prometheus" and the "Phaedrus," were a copy, where shall we find the original? Indeed, there has never been a great migration that did not result in a new form of national genius. And it is the thoroughness of the transformations thus induced which makes the chief difficulty in tracing the affinities of peoples.

So it is that the world is enriched. Every new form of man establishes another current in those reciprocations of thought, in those electrical streams of sympathy,—of wholesome attraction and wholesome repulsion,—by which the intellectual life is kindled and quickened. Thought begins not until two men meet. Col. Hamilton Smith makes it quite clear that civilization has found its first centres there where two highways of national movement crossed, and dissimilar men looked each other in the face. They have met, it may be, with the rudest kind of greetings; but have obtained good thoughts from hard blows, and beaten ideas out of each other's heads, if not into them, according to the ancient pedagogic tradition. Higher culture brings higher terms of meeting; traffic succeeds war, conversation follows upon traffic; ever the necessity of various men to each other remains. There is no pure white light until seven colors blend; so to the mental illumination of humanity many hues of national genius must consent: and the value of life to all men is greater so soon as a new man has made his advent.

All this is matter of daily experience with us. We do not, indeed, tire of old friends. A soul whose wealth we have once recognized must be ever rich to us. Gold turns not to copper by keeping; and perhaps old friends are rather like old wine, and can never be too old. Yet who does not mark in the calendar those days wherein he has met a new rich soul, that has a physiognomy, a grace and expression, peculiarly its own? Even decided repulsions have also a use. We whet our conscience on our neighbors' faults, as sober Spartans were made by the spectacle of drunken Helots;—though he who makes habitual talk about his neighbors' faults whets his conscience across the edge. If there be sermons in stones, no less is there blessing in bores and in bullies. We found one day in the face of a black bear what could not be so well found in libraries. The creature regarded us attentively, and with affection rather than malice,—saw simply certain amounts of savory flesh, useful for the satisfaction of ursine hungers,—and saw nothing more. It was an incomparable lesson to teach that the world is an endless series of levels, and that each eye sees what its own altitude commands; the rest to it is non-extant. That bear was in his natural covering of hair; his brothers we frequently meet in broadcloth.

Now, as Nature keeps up this inexhaustible variety of individual genius which individual quickening requires, so on the larger scale is she ever working and compounding to produce varieties of national genius. Her aim is the same in both cases,—to enrich the whole by this electrical and enlivening relation between its parts. And thus an American man, no copy, but an original, formed in unprecedented moulds, with his own unborrowed grandeur, his own piquancy and charm, is to be looked for,—is, indeed, even now to be seen,—on this shore.

Yes, the man we seek is already found, his features rapidly becoming distinct. He is the offspring of Northern Europe; he occupies Central North-America. Other fresh forms are doubtless to appear, but, though dimly shaping themselves, are as yet inchoate. But the Anglo-American is an existing fact, to be spoken of without prognostication, save as this is implied in the recognition of tendencies established and unfolding into results. The Anglo-American may be considered the latest new-comer into this planet. Let us, then, a little celebrate his advent. Let us make all lawful and gentle inquiry about the distinguished stranger.

First, what is his pedigree? He need not be ashamed to tell; for he comes of a noble family, the Teutonic,—a family more opulent of human abilities, and those, for the most part, the deeper kind of abilities, than any other on the earth at present. He reckons among his progenitors and relatives such names as Shakspeare, Goethe, Milton, the two Bacons, Lessing, Richter, Schiller, Carlyle, Hegel, Luther, Behmen, Swedenborg, Gustavus Adolphus, William of Orange, Cromwell, Frederick II., Wellington, Newton, Leibnitz, Humboldt, Beethoven, Handel, Turner; and nations might be enriched out of the names that remain when the supreme ones in each class have been mentioned. Consider what incomparable range and variety, as well as depth, of genius are here affirmed. Greece and India possessed powers not equally represented here; but otherwise these might stand for the full abilities of mankind, each in its handsomest illustration.—It is remarkable, too, that our Anglo-American has no "poor relations." Not a scurvy nation comes of this stock. They are the Protestant nations, giving religion a moral expression, and reconciling it with freedom of thought. They are the constitutional nations, exacting terms of government that acknowledge private right. Resource may also be emphasized as a characteristic of these nations. Hitherto they have honored every draft that has been made upon them. The Dutch first fished their country out from under the sea, and afterwards defended it in a war of eighty years' duration against the first military power on the globe: two feats, perhaps, equally without parallel.

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