John Quincy Adams, making a speech at New Bedford, many years ago,
reckoned the number of whale-ships (if I remember rightly) that sailed
out of that port, and, comparing it with some former period, took it as
a type of American success. But, alas! it is with quite other oil that
those far-shining lamps of a nation's true glory which burn forever must
be filled. It is not by any amount of material splendor or prosperity,
but only by moral greatness, by ideas, by works of imagination, that a
race can conquer the future. No voice comes to us from the once mighty
Assyria but the hoot of the owl that nests amid her crumbling palaces.
Of Carthage, whose merchant-fleets once furled their sails in every port
of the known world, nothing is left but the deeds of Hannibal. She lies
dead on the shore of her once subject sea, and the wind of the desert
only flings its handfuls of burial-sand upon her corpse. A fog can blot
Holland or Switzerland out of existence. But how large is the space
occupied in the maps of the soul by little Athens and powerless Italy!
They were great by the soul, and their vital force is as indestructible
as the soul.
Till America has learned to love art, not as an amusement, not as the
mere ornament of her cities, not as a superstition of what is _comme il
faut_ for a great nation, but for its humanizing and ennobling energy,
for its power of making men better by arousing in them a perception of
their own instincts for what is beautiful, and therefore sacred and
religious, and an eternal rebuke of the base and worldly, she will not
have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a
people, and raises it from a dead name to a living power.
Pages:
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44