Читать книгу Cannibals all! or, Slaves without masters - Fitzhugh George - Страница 9

Liberty and political economy beget and encourage free trade, as well between different localities and different nations, as between individuals of the same towns, neighborhoods or nations. The nations possessed of most skill and capital, and commercial enterprise, and cunning, gradually absorb the wealth of those nations who possess less of those qualities. The effect of international free trade, aided by the facilities of the credit system, of the mail, and speedy steam communication, is to centralize wealth in a few large cities, such as New York, Paris and London; and of social free trade to aggregate wealth in a few hands in those cities. Theoretically, the disparities of shrewdness, of skill and business capacity, between nations and individuals, would, in the commercial and trading war of the wits, rob the weak and simple, and enrich the strong and cunning. The facts of history, and of the increasing inequalities of social, individual and national wealth, under the system of free trade, stimulated by political economy, correspond with the theory. Every month brings forth its millionaire, and every day its thousands of new paupers. New York and London grow richer rapidly on the fruits of a trade that robs the less commercial and skillful people who traffic with them.

But the worst effect of free trade is, that it begets centres of opinion, thought and fashions, robs men of their nationality, and impairs their patriotism by teaching them to ape foreign manners, affect foreign dress and opinions, and despise what is domestic. Paris, as the centre of thought and fashion, wields as much power, and makes almost as much money as London, by being the centre of trade and capital. An American or Englishman will give five prices for an article because it is made in Paris. Thus the want of true self-respect in America and England, makes labor produce more in Paris than elsewhere. A Virginian thinks it a disgrace to be dressed in home-spun, because home-spun is unfashionable. The Frenchman prides himself on being a Frenchman; all other people affect the cosmopolitan.

The tendency of all this is to transfer all wealth to London, New York and Paris, and reduce the civilization of Christendom to a miserable copy of French civilization, itself an indifferent copy of Roman civilization, which was an imitation, but a falling off from that of Greece.

We pay millions monthly for French silks, French wines, French brandy, and French trinkets, although we can and do make as comfortable articles for dress, and as good liquors, at home. But we despise ourselves, and admire the French, and give four hours of American labor for one of French labor, just to be in the fashion. And what is our fashion? To treat whatever is American with contempt. People who thus act are in a fair way to deserve and meet with from others, that contempt which they feel for themselves. The little States of Greece each had its dialect, and cultivated it, and took pride in it. Now, dialects are vulgar and provincial. We shall have no men like the Greeks, till the manners, dress, and dialect of gentlemen, betray, like the wines of Europe, the very neighborhood whence they come. So thought Mr. Calhoun, and talked South Carolina dialect in the Senate. But for all that, it was the best English of the day. Its smack of provincialism gave it a higher flavor.

We of the South teach political economy, because it is taught in Europe. Yet political economy, and all other systems of moral science, which we derive from Europe, are tainted with abolition, and at war with our institutions. We must build up centres of trade, of thought and fashion at home. We must become national, nay, provincial, and cease to be imitative cosmopolitans. We must, especially, have good colleges and universities, where young men may learn to admire their homes, not to despise them.

The South feels the truth of all this, and after a while will begin to understand it. She has been for years earnestly and actively engaged in promoting the exclusive and protective policy, and preaching free trade, non-interference of government and 'let alone.' But she does not let alone. She builds roads and canals, encourages education, endows schools and colleges, improves river navigation, excludes, or taxes heavily foreign show-men, foreign pedlars, sellers of clocks, &c.; tries to build up by legislation Southern commerce, and by State legislation to multiply and encourage industrial pursuits. Protection by the State Government is her established policy – and that is the only expedient or constitutional protection. It is time for her to avow her change of policy and opinion, and to throw Adam Smith, Say, Ricardo & Co., in the fire.

We want American customs, habits, manners, dress, manufactures, modes of thought, modes of expression, and language. We should encourage national and even State peculiarities; for there are peculiarities and differences in the wants and situations of all people, that require provincial and national, not cosmopolitan, institutions and productions. Take language, for instance. It is a thing of natural growth and development, and adapts itself naturally to the changes of time and circumstance. It is never ungrammatical as spoken by children, but always expressive, practical and natural. Nature is always grammatical, and language, the child of nature, would continue so, but for the grammarians, who, with their Procrustean rules, disturb its proportions, destroy its variety and adaptation, and retard its growth. They are to language what dentists are to teeth: they more often injure it than improve it.

Grammar, lexicography, and rhetoric, applied to language, destroy its growth, variety and adaptability – stereotype it, make it at once essentially a dead language, and unfit for future use; for new localities, and changes of time and circumstances, beget new ideas, and require new words and new combinations of words. Centralization and cosmopolitanism have precisely the same effect. They would furnish a common language from the centre, which is only fully expressive and comprehensive at that centre. Walking and talking are equally natural, and talking masters and walking masters equally useless. Neither can foresee and provide for the thousands of new circumstances which make change of language, or varieties of movement necessary. Nature is never at a loss, and is the only reliable dancing master and grammar teacher. She is always graceful and appropriate, and always ready to adapt herself to changes of time, situation and circumstances.

Paris is becoming the universal model and grammar of Christendom; nothing is right unless it be a la Parisienne. Now, in truth, nothing can be right, natural, appropriate, or in good taste, outside of Paris, that is Parisienne. When will our monkey imitative world cease to sacrifice millions of money, cease to show its want of good sense and propriety, and cease to render itself ridiculous by aping, what, in the nature of things, is unsuitable, inappropriate, and unnatural? Fashion, aided by free trade and centralization, is subjecting us to the dominion of Parisian thought; and commerce, by means of the same agencies, makes us tributaries to London. Trade and fashion conquer faster than arms.

After the Romans had conquered Greece, Athens became the school and centre of thought for the civilized world. Men had but one set of ideas, but one set of models to imitate, in the whole range of the fine arts. Inventiveness and originality ceased, and genius was subdued. The rule of Horace, "Nullius addictus in verba magistri jurare," was versed, and men ceased to think for themselves, but looked to the common fountain of thought at Athens; where the teachers of mankind borrowed all their ideas from the past. Improvement and progress ceased, and imitation, chaining the present to the car of the past, soon induced rapid retrogression. Thus, we think centralization of thought occasioned the decline of civilization. Northern invaders introduced new ideas, broke up centralization, arrested imitation, and begot originality and inventiveness. Thus a start was given to a new and Christian civilization. Now, a centralization occasioned by commerce and fashion, threatens the overthrow of our civilization, as arms and conquest overthrew the ancient.

The ill effect of centralization of thought, whether its centre be the past, or some locality of the present, is apparent in the arts and literature of the Latin nations of Europe. France, Spain and Italy, though possessed of more genius, have displayed less originality than England and Germany. French art is a mere re-hash of Roman art, and very inferior to its original. The natural growth, changes and adaptation of language, are admirably described by Horace in his De Arte Poetica. He makes a great blunder in advising the forming and compounding words from the Greek, however; for the very want that occasions new words, shows that they cannot be supplied from the past. In the passage we are about to quote, he seems to have seen and deplored the advent of that age of rule and criticism that was to stereotype language, thought, art itself, prevent progress, and inaugurate decline. From Horace's day, criticism ruled, language and art were stereotyped, and the world declined:

Italy, of the middle ages, imbibed more of the Christian and chivalric element, threw off for a while imitation and subserviency to the past, and shone forth with brilliant originality in all the works of art. But she, like France, has relapsed into imitation of the antique, and falls far below either Roman or mediæval art. With the age of Cervantes, Spanish genius expired. His happy ridicule expelled the absurdities of Knight Errantry, but unfortunately expelled, at the same time, the new elements of thought which Christianity and Chivalry had introduced into modern literature. They were its only progressive elements, in the Latin nations of Europe, who in all else were mere Romans.

Fenelon's Telemaque is a servile imitation of Virgil's Æneid, and that is an equally servile imitation of Homer. Each copy falls below the original.

Nothing shows so strongly the want of originality and want of independence of taste and thought among these Latin nations, as their contempt for Shakspeare. He violates all the rules of Greek and Roman art, and erects a higher art of his own; but Frenchmen, Italians, and Spaniards, have no tastes and no ideas differing from, or in advance of, the ancients, and can neither understand nor appreciate the genius of Shakspeare. In Germany, he is almost as much read and admired as in England.

Imitation, grammar and slavery suit the masses. Liberty and Laissez faire, the men of genius, and the men born to command. Genius, in her most erratic flights, represents a higher Grammar than Dr. Blair or Lindlay Murray – the grammar of progressive nature. To secure true progress, we must unfetter genius, and chain down mediocrity. Liberty for the few – Slavery, in every form, for the mass!

The rules of art destroy art. Homer never could have produced the Iliad, had he learned grammar and rhetoric and criticism. 'Tis well for the world, he lived before Longinus. Euripides, Sophocles, and Aristophanes, and the Greek Masters in Sculpture and Painting, knew nothing of the rules of art and canons of criticism. Without the modern helps to art, Grecian art so far excelled ours, that it is a popular theory that they possessed an Ideal that has been lost. Early in the days of the Roman Empire, the rhetoricians, by attempting to teach eloquence by rule, so corrupted it, that the Emperors found it necessary to banish them from Rome.

We are no doubt indebted to the ignorance of the ancients for the invention of Gothic architecture. No one taught to reverence Greek architecture, would have violated its rules by imitating the Gothic.

When about the time of the Reformation, the study of the ancients was revived, each Gothic spire stopped half way in its course towards heaven. Mediæval art expired: – and now the world has no art, but basely copies the past.

Had Shakspeare been as learned as Ben Jonson, he would have written no better than Ben Jonson. The lofty genius of Milton would have created a glorious English epic, had he not travelled too much abroad, and dwelt too much with the past. The Paradise Lost is a splendid piece of Mosaic, made up of bits of Greek and Roman mythology, Hebrew theology, Christian morality, Mediæval romance, set in the purest Anglo-Saxon, twisted into Latin collocation. 'Tis the song of the mocking-bird.

What, then? Shall we not in boyhood sojourn and linger at Athens and at Rome, nor in manhood travel into France and Italy?

Est modus in rebus. Study the past, but be careful not to copy it, and never travel abroad until age has matured your love and respect for your native land.