And now, this being told in the hope that it may incite others, and
especially youth, to make experiments like it elsewhere, to what impulse
shall we appeal?
Will it not suffice if we invoke that adolescent instinct which moves us
to merge our individual life--to consolidate it, as the
stock-manipulators say--in the world's one great life, our "celestial
selfishness" being intuitively assured that our own priceless
individuality will gain, not lose, thereby?
Or shall we make our plea to an "art impulse"? No? Is the world already
artificial enough? Not by half, although it is full, crammed, with the
things the long-vanished dead have done for it in every art, from cameos
to shade-trees; done for it because it was already so fair that, live
long or die soon, they could not hold themselves back from making it
fairer.
Yet, all that aside, is not this concerted gardening precisely such a
work that young manhood and womanhood, however artificial or
unartificial, anywhere, everywhere, Old World or newest frontier, ought
to take to naturally? Adam and Eve did, and they--but we have squeezed
Adam and Eve dry enough.
Patriotism! Can you imagine a young man or woman without it? And if you
are young and a lover of your country, do you not love its physical
aspects, "its rocks and rills, its woods and templed hills"? And if so,
do you love only those parts of it which you never see and the
appearance of which you have no power to modify? Or do you love the land
only and not the people, the nation, the government? Or, loving these,
have you no love for the nearest public fraction of it, your own town
and neighbors? Why, then, your love of the Stars and Stripes is the
flattest, silliest idolatry; so flat and silly it is hardly worth
chiding.
Pages:
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104