three rainy days in the four weeks when I cannot take a walk.” It is hard to imagine a life which would seem to most Americans more utterly misspent than this. Misspent it was, but how harmlessly and how happily! What pure delight, what freedom from perturbation and care, when a dictionary and a dozen books furnished luxury for a lifetime! What were wealth and fame, peerages and palaces, to him who had all Æschylus for a winter residence, and Homer for the seaside! And a culture which seems remotest from practical ends may not only thus furnish exhaustless intellectual enjoyment, but may educate one’s æsthetic perceptions to the very highest point.
But I repeat, that all preference as to department of study is a secondary and incidental matter, and the special student of any pursuit will have sympathies with the devotees of all others. The essential thing is, that we should recognize, as a nation, the value of all culture, and resolutely organize it into our institutions. As a stimulus to this we must constantly bear in mind, and cheerfully acknowledge, that American literature is not yet copious, American scholarship not profound, American society not highly intellectual, and the American style of execution, in all high arts, yet hasty and superficial. It is not true, as our plain-speaking friend Von Humboldt said, that “the United States are a dead level of mediocrities”; but it is undoubtedly true that our brains as yet lie chiefly in our machine-shops. Make what apology we please for the defect, it still remains; while what the world asks of us is not excuses for failure, but facts of success. When Europe comes to America for culture, instead of America’s thronging to Europe, the fact will publish itself, and the discussion cease. There is no debate about our reapers and sewingmachines.
No candid person can compare the trade-lists of American publishers with those received from England, France, and Germany, without admitting that we are hardly yet to be ranked among the productive nations in literature. There are single works, and there are individual authors; but the readiness with which their names suggest themselves shows how exceptional they are. They represent no considerable literary class, scarcely even a cultivated class. Till Emerson came, we were essentially provincial in the tone of our thought; provincial in attainments we still are. One rarely sees in America, outside the professions, a man who gives any large portion of his life to study; and the professions themselves are with us mainly branches of practical activity, not intellectual pursuits. This is true even of the clergy, and of lawyers and physicians still more. They are absorbed, perhaps inevitably, in the practical side of their professions. I was a member, for some time, of a flourishing local Natural History Society, which counted among its active members but one of the numerous physicians of the city where it was formed. A college president, who had been long officially connected with the leading lawyers of Boston, once stated it to me as an axiom, “No eminent lawyer ever reads a book.”
The chief discouragement of American literature does not seem to me to lie in the want of an international copyright law, as some think, nor in the fact that other pursuits bid higher prices. These are subordinate things, for there will always be men like Palissy, who will starve self and wife and children, if need be, for the sake of their dream. Nor is it from the want of libraries and collections; for these are beginning to exist, and nature exists always. The true, great want is of an atmosphere of sympathy in intellectual aims. An artist can afford to be poor, but not to be companionless. It is not well that he should feel pressing on him, in addition to his own doubt whether he can achieve a certain work, the weight of the public doubt whether it be worth achieving. No one can live entirely on his own ideal. The man who is compelled by his constitution to view literature as
