Message #136429

[Mindwarp]

The best books are not read even by those who are called good
readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this
town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very
good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and
spell. Even the college-bred and so-called liberally educated men here
and elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with the English
classics; and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient
classics and Bibles, which are accessible to all who will know of
them, there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to become
acquainted with them. I know a woodchopper, of middle age, who takes a
French paper, not for news as he says, for he is above that, but to
"keep himself in practice," he being a Canadian by birth; and when I
ask him what he considers the best thing he can do in this world, he
says, beside this, to keep up and add to his English. This is about as
much as the college-bred generally do or aspire to do, and they take
an English paper for the purpose. One who has just come from reading
perhaps one of the best English books will find how many with whom
he can converse about it? Or suppose he comes from reading a Greek
or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are familiar even to
the so-called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to speak to,
but must keep silence about it. Indeed, there is hardly the
professor in our colleges, who, if he has mastered the difficulties of
the language, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the
wit and poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to
the alert and heroic reader; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or
Bibles of mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles?
Most men do not know that any nation but the Hebrews have had a
scripture. A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick
up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of
antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding
age have assured us of;- and yet we learn to read only as far as
Easy Reading, the primers and class-books, and when we leave school,
the "Little Reading," and story-books, which are for boys and
beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all
on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.

  I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord
soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I
hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my
townsman and I never saw him- my next neighbor and I never heard him
speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how actually is
it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on
the next shelf, and yet I never read them. We are underbred and
low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not
make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my
townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who
has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects.
We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first
knowing how good they were. We are a race of tit-men, and soar but
little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the
daily paper.

  It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are
probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we
could really bear and understand, would be more salutary than the
morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on
the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his
life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance,
which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present
unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions
that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to
all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered
them, according to his ability, by his words and his life. Moreover,
with wisdom we shall learn liberality. The solitary hired man on a
farm in the outskirts of Concord, who has had his second birth and
peculiar religious experience, and is driven as he believes into the
silent gravity and exclusiveness by his faith, may think it is not
true; but Zoroaster, thousands of years ago, travelled the same road
and had the same experience; but he, being wise, knew it to be
universal, and treated his neighbors accordingly, and is even said
to have invented and established worship among men. Let him humbly
commune with Zoroaster then, and through the liberalizing influence of
all the worthies, with Jesus Christ himself, and let "our church" go
by the board.

  We boast that we belong to the Nineteenth Century and are making the
most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little this village
does for its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to
be flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us. We
need to be provoked- goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have
a comparatively decent system of common schools, schools for infants
only; but excepting the half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and
latterly the puny beginning of a library suggested by the State, no
school for ourselves. We spend more on almost any article of bodily
aliment or ailment than on our mental ailment. It is time that we
had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when
we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were
universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities,
with leisure- if they are, indeed, so well off- to pursue liberal
studies the rest of their lives. Shall the world be confined to one
Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot students be boarded here and get a
liberal education under the skies of Concord? Can we not hire some
Abelard to lecture to us? Alas! what with foddering the cattle and
tending the store, we are kept from school too long, and our education
is sadly neglected. In this country, the village should in some
respects take the place of the nobleman of Europe. It should be the
patron of the fine arts. It is rich enough. It wants only the
magnanimity and refinement. It can spend money enough on such things
as farmers and traders value, but it is thought Utopian to propose
spending money for things which more intelligent men know to be of far
more worth. This town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a
town-house, thank fortune or politics, but probably it will not
spend so much on living wit, the true meat to put into that shell,
in a hundred years. The one hundred and twenty-five dollars annually
subscribed for a Lyceum in the winter is better spent than any other
equal sum raised in the town. If we live in the Nineteenth Century,
why should we not enjoy the advantages which the Nineteenth Century
offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial? If we will
read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of Boston and take the best
newspaper in the world at once?- not be sucking the pap of "neutral
family" papers, or browsing "Olive Branches" here in New England.
Let the reports of all the learned societies come to us, and we will
see if they know anything. Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers
and Redding & Co. to select our reading? As the nobleman of cultivated
taste surrounds himself with whatever conduces to his culture- genius-
learning- wit- books- paintings- statuary- music- philosophical
instruments, and the like; so let the village do-not stop short at a
pedagogue, a parson, a sexton, a parish library, and three
selectmen, because our Pilgrim forefathers got through a cold winter
once on a bleak rock with these. To act collectively is according to
the spirit of our institutions; and I am confident that, as our
circumstances are more flourishing, our means are greater than the
nobleman's. New England can hire all the wise men in the world to come
and teach her, and board them round the while, and not be provincial
at all. That is the uncommon school we want. Instead of noblemen,
let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge
over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least
over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.
SOUNDS