And how has it been with the other instrumentalities of American culture, during the last twenty-five years? Schools have been improved, periodical publications multiplied, libraries quadrupled, music and pictures made more accessible, at least in our larger cities. These are gains, to be balanced by a few losses. For instance, an institution which was once more potent than all of these for the intellectual training of the adult American has almost ceased to exist in its Original form. The engrossing excitement of public affairs has nearly abolished the old “Lyceum,” and put a political orator in the lecturer’s place. Science and art have almost ceased to be subjects available for a popular lecture. Agassiz and Bayard Taylor, by dint of exceedingly rapid and continuous travelling, can still find a few regions which Americans will consent to hear described, outside of America; and a few wandering lecturers on geology still haunt the field, their discourses being almost coeval with their specimens. Emerson still makes his stately tour, through wondering Western towns, where an enterprising public spirit sometimes, it is said, plans a dance for the same evening in the same hall,— “Tickets to lecture and ball one dollar.” Yet the fact remains, that nine addresses out of ten in every popular course are simply stump-speeches, more or less eloquent; and though an enlightened moral sentiment is doubtless the result of this change of diet, yet to science and art it is almost a total loss. Take away the Lowell and the Cooper Institutes, and all our progress in wealth has secured for the public no increased means of intellectual culture through lectures.
Now there are two aspects to all material successes. They are sublime or base only as they prepare the way for higher triumphs, or displace them. Horace Mann lamented that in European exhibitions the fine arts were always assigned a more conspicuous place than the useful arts. Theodore Parker complained that in Rome the studios were better than the carpenters’ shops. Both exulted in the thought that in America these things were better ordered; and both therein approached the verge of concessions which would sacrifice the noblest aims of man. For carpentry and upholstery, good as a beginning, are despicable as an ending. What cultivated person would not prefer poorer lodgings and better galleries? I remember that, many years since, in a crowded country-house, I slept one night on the floor beneath Retzsch’s copy of the Sistine Madonna, — then perhaps the loveliest work of art on this continent. As I lay and watched the silent moonbeams enter and rest upon the canvas, I felt that my share of the hospitality was after all the best. The couch might be comfortless, but the dreams were divine. It is such a hospitality that one wishes, after all, from the age in which he lives. Culture is the training and finishing of the whole man, until he sees physical demands to be merely secondary, and pursues science and art as objects of intrinsic worth. It undoubtedly places the fine arts above the useful arts, in a certain sense, and is willingly impoverished in material comforts, if it can thereby obtain nobler living. When this impulse takes the form of a reactionary distrust of the whole spirit of the age, it is unhealthy and morbid. In its healthy form, it simply keeps alive the conviction that the life is more than meat; and so supplies that counterpoise to mere wealth which Europe vainly seeks to secure by aristocracies of birth.
So far as our colleges go, what is needed seems tolerably plain. Our educational system requires a process of addition, not of subtraction; not to save our children from the painful necessity of studying this or that, but to gain for them the opportunity of studying that and more, in their own way. The demand for high culture outruns the supply. This is proved by the palpable fact, that more and more pupils are sent to Europe for instruction, every year; and more from the West
