Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub
[graphic]

as well as physical and animal humanity, would stoop to the grade of the wigwam. Dr. Ellis states it well:

"The red man and the white man on the frontiers have very often interlinked their lot and destiny, and merged all their differences. Hundreds of white men have been barbarized on this continent for each single red man that has been civilized. The whites have assimilated all the traits and qualities of the savage, and mastered his resources in war and hunting, and his shifts for living, in tricks, in subtlety, and cruelty.1

I found it a proverb on the plains and in the mountains that it takes six years to make an Indian into a white man, but six weeks to make a white man into an Indian.

The fears of Washington Irving and of Commodore Wilkes were based on the progeny of the degenerated white man and the Indian savage whom he had debased. "It is to be feared that a great part of this desert will form a lawless interval between the abodes of civilized man, like the wastes of the ocean and the deserts of Arabia, and, like them, be subject to the depredations of the marauders. . . Some [of its half-breed races] may gradually become pastoral hordes, like those rude and migratory people, half shepherd and half nomad, who, with their flocks and herds, roam the plains of Upper Asia. But others, it is to be apprehended, will become predatory hordes, mounted upon the fleet steeds of the prairies, with the open plains for their marauding grounds, and the mountains for their retreats and lurkingplaces." 2

"It seems

Commodore Wilkes had similar forebodings. probable that, in a few years, all that formerly gave life to the country, both the hunter and his prey, will become extinct, and that their place will be supplied by a thin white and half-breed population, scattered along the few fertile valleys, supported by pasture instead of the chase, and gradually degenerating into barbarism, far more offensive than that of the savage which degrades the backwoodsman." 8

Irving and Wilkes were both in error as to the future of our interior, while they judged well of the qualities of the half-breed and border white men of their day. Civilizing forces have averted the perils which they foresaw to the extent to which we have been civil and Christian missionaries.

1 The Red Man and the White Man, by George E. Ellis, P. 364.

2 Astoria, chap. xxii.

& Wilkes' Exploring Expedition, vol. iv.

[graphic]

ranges on our latitudes and longitudes west of the Alleghanies, the more deeply the conviction takes him that we are building a nation, not only in a new world, and under a new system of government, but with a new people. While we take in the enterprising and energetic from all the old world, we are forming a new people or race, as distinct as were the Aryans, or Romans, or Scandinavians. We are no longer English; that expresses but one of our polygenous ingredients. We are Americans.

READING, MASS.

William Barrows.

THE OVER-ESTIMATION OF GOETHE.

WHEN it is related of Professor Bonamy Price that he "refused to read the works of a great modern writer whose character he disapproved," when we find him saying, "I can't read them," "with a curious mixture," we are told, "of obstinacy and penitence," we have little doubt, in the absence of knowledge, what writer is meant. There is, we should say, but one, in whose regard the worse has so sedulously been made the better reason, that the "curious mixture of obstinacy and penitence" points to him infallibly.

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

Schopenhauer somewhere rails at "those rogues" who, "because a great genius discloses to them the treasures of his mind, consider themselves entitled to hale his moral personality before their judgment-seat," — a railing, we may remark in passing, natural to a man who could acknowledge to a sister his dishonorable intentions toward a woman whom there was nothing against his marrying if he would. And admirers and disciples of Schopenhauer are not wanting to assure us that we have no right to interpret the works of a man of genius by his life, if indeed they do not hold Schopenhauer's view that a genius has a right to a certain modicum of cakes and ale in the way of license prohibited to his fellow-men, by virtue of the benefit his genius confers upon them. Schopenhauer's doctrine, stated baldly, is too large for the average attainment. This is shown, we think, by the zeal with which Goethe-worshipers find a moral in the most unmoral, to put it mildly, of writers, the zeal with which they set up a special standard, to which ordinary standards must be subordinate, for his character and conduct. The doctrine is there, however;

[ocr errors]
[graphic]
« НазадПродовжити »