THE EDITOR’S EVENING.

Our Totem.

Carlyle has remarked upon the significance of symbolism. All nations seek a sign. The sign becomes the visible expression of the highest thought. It is made into an emblem around which the given people march by day and encamp by night. Thus have come all the totems which mankind have lifted up, from the brazen snake in the desert to the Stars and Stripes on the mountain.

Symbolism has its beauty and also its ugliness. In some cases the symbol is happily conceived. It is benign; it expresses hope, truth, fidelity, aspiration, even immortality. Behold the egg of the Egyptians and their circle expressive of undying life and eternity. Note the owl of the Athenians. Note the sweet lily of ancient Provence, adopted by France as the emblem of purity and national peace. Note the Irish shamrock—that delicate green trifolium which has signified so much of union and hope to an enthusiastic and failing race. On the other hand, note the serpent of the Aztecs, the crawling reptiles of Malaysia and India, the savage beasts and carnivorous birds adopted as the symbols of race-life and purpose by the coarse barbarians of northern Europe, and preserved on the flags and banners of their descendants to the present day.

Russia is a bear. Germany is a black eagle. France also, in her Bonaparte mood, is an eagle. Imperial Rome was an eagle from the days of the Cæsars. Great Britain is a lion, and Prussia is a leopard, and Siam is an elephant, and Mexico is still a snake. As for Great Britain, not satisfied with one lion, she repeats him seven times, rampant or couchant, on the royal standard. She also preserves on her coat-of-arms and coins the unicorn, that fabulous, one-horned monster of a horrid dream.

The American Republic seems to have accepted the eagle for its totem. We might have taken a bear or a caribou, but the eagle has pleased our mythologists more—and so, instead of belonging to the tribe of the Turkey, the tribe of the Dog, or the tribe of the Calf, we belong to the tribe of the Eagle. But what does our totem signify?

The eagle in our symbolism and war-myth has come to us from the past. He was of old the totem of the Romans. From the Tiber he flew beyond the Alps, to perch on the standards of German chieftains and Gallic emperors. He has visited all lands that are affected with the civil and ethnic life of Rome. He has appeared here and there on the flags of the Latin races in the Old World and the New. He has made an eyrie in our mountains, and his scream has been heard in our wars. He has settled on our flagstaffs, and has been seen by certain and sundry poets who apostrophize him in verse. He has been admired by orators whose imaginations rise as high as battle and conquest, but not as high as the Stars and Stripes. He has been adored in academic essays. He has hovered over the pages of inchoate histories, until his claim to be regarded as the American bird is established. The eagle has become traditional as the totem of the United States.

In so far as the eagle is the symbol of the independence and freedom of men, let us accept him! In so far as he represents the idea and sublimity of height and flight, let him soar! The eagle as a sign of the free voyage of the human mind, triumphant over nature, visiting on strong wing the far and otherwise inaccessible heights of escape and glory, is the noblest of all the totems ever discovered by man; for flight is the noblest and most sublime of earthly actions. Height is the sublimest of all earthly stations. Height and flight are precisely the dream which we would select from the infinite visions of the soul and have engraved on our seal as a motto for eternity. Height and flight and freedom!

In so far as the eagle may be regarded as the bird of the past; in so far as he stands for violence and conquest; in so far as he represents the rending and destruction of life, the carnivorous passion in mankind, the rage of battle and triumph,—to that extent be there no eagle for the Republic or for us! It is high time that some race of men should rise to the height of discarding violence and blood as the beginnings of fame and power. It is high time that some race should renounce all bears and leopards and lions and mythological monsters as the symbols of its spirit and purpose. It is high time that some nation should ascend to a level from which it may look down on the savage emblems and beast-born symbolism of the past world as no longer fit to express the central purposes and noblest visions of an enlightened people.

The American eagle in the better and more glorious sense—in the sense in which he typifies freedom and height and flight—is a totem of which neither philosopher nor peasant need be ashamed. The eagle’s wing is more than pinion; it is thought. The eagle’s eye is more than fierce disdain; it is a flash of ineffable light. His glance is more than terror; it is an arrow shot into the darkness. His breast is more than pressure and force; it is defiance of wind and battle-rack. His spirit is more than destruction; it is supremacy over chaotic elements and the triumph of the emancipated spirit. His scream is more than the shriek of carnal victory and rage of destroying strength; it is the cry of liberty and the shout of progress to all peoples in the valleys of the world.

Give man the spirit of the eagle. Give him height and flight and freedom. Give us who are Americans the splendid arena of the plains and the open vault of heaven. Give us the mountain, the beetling crag, the precipice, the gnarled oak, the lightning, and the cloud. Give us the warfare of the lawless elements, the world-blaze of the magnificent sun, the starlight of the profound and unspeakable night. Give us the transport of the unchained seasons, the snow-blast and the sun-flash, the tenderness of the dawn, the sorrow of the evening, the rainspout of the bursting nimbus, and the mellow light of autumn. Give us the splendid apocalypse of October and the infinite air-bath of the perfumed June. Give us all the aspirations of the man-soul standing in the midst of this splendor and mutation, standing high and opening the eagle-wing to cloudland and the sky, soaring and circling unfettered, viewing all lakes and hills from the aerial curves of freedom, alighting at will on the chosen summit, undisturbed by fear and untroubled by the torments of power!

Vive La France.

A strange fact is the apathy of the American nation towards France and the French people. There is every reason to expect a different sentiment on this side of the sea. France was ever our friend; since the colonial days we have never warred with her. The French were our allies when the days were dark and the winds of our destiny were loosed on the deep. We had been assailed by an unnatural mother. That strong mother had wronged us, treated us as aliens, erased us from her book, turned loose mercenary armies upon us, killed our patriot fathers.

In that hour of fate France appeared willingly on the scene as our champion. She succored us. Whatever may have been her motive, she put her ægis over our head. She sent her heroes to our camps; she gave us Lafayette and Rochambeau. She placed her fleets at our ports, with guns pointed seaward for protection. Then, when the fight was won, she aided us to enlarge our territories, to confirm our new republican empire. Though in the afterdays of her monarchical gloom France sometimes looked askance at our flag, the French nation was never once disloyal to us—never once indifferent to the fate of our great democracy.

In our institutional development for more than a century we have proceeded on the same general lines with the French. If we are satisfied with the result—if we believe in our republic—we ought, in good reason, to believe in the republic of France; for the republic is a universal fact, little trammelled by locality. The barrier of race ought not to predominate over political and social sympathies. The barrier of race ought not to separate us from our own. The fact that we are allied in ethnic descent with the English people ought not to make us enamored of the social life and civil institutions of Great Britain. Much less should the industrial and commercial life of England allure us as if to provoke a like manner of life in ourselves. Least of all should the financial method of Great Britain lead us by imitation to fix upon ourselves a similar incubus and horror.

This leads us to say that to break away from Great Britain, even when incited thereto by the antipathy and prejudice which we must needs hold against her; to leave her behind; to treat her as a historical fact not favorable, but inimical rather, to our progress and independent destiny,—seems to be the hardest task imposed upon the American democracy. The preference of race and language is so profound, the influences of the commercial life are so far-reaching, the admiration for political stability is so natural, the domination of centralized wealth is so overwhelming, and the allurements of consolidated power so well calculated to fascinate the masses, that even American democracy has found it hard to break the British tie and sail away uncabled and disenchanted on the sea.

This deluded instinct of attachment to Great Britain, and this unnatural lack of sympathy for France have cost us dearly. The two sentiments have modified our national life, and have left a result different by not a little from what it would have been if influenced by other and more wholesome dispositions on our part. Our nationality has lost much force on both counts—on the score of our illogical attachment to Great Britain on the one hand, and of our unnatural indifference to France on the other. Under the one influence we have become tolerant of subserviency as a national trait, and under the other we have become in a measure incapable of enthusiasm. The addition of British subserviency has been aggravated with the subtraction of French enthusiasm from our public and private life.

All this had been better otherwise. All this—even after the lapse of a hundred and twenty-one years from the great summer of our Independence—ought still to be bettered with amendment. It is not needed, stiff as we have already become in our national instincts and methods, to go forward by going backwards. To approximate Great Britain is to go backwards. The English people are among the greatest of the historic races, but the British monarchy, with its mediæval pretensions, its humbug of a throne and a crown, its subordinated ranks of society, its military and naval despotism, and its vast skein of tentaculæ stretching to every valuable thing in the world,—is perhaps the one thing that modern civilization should most dread and put away from the field of its desires.

On the other hand France is, in nearly all respects, admirable. Her mobility is life, and her warmth is a fructifying force. France gives forth more than she takes from the nations. Her republic is a splendid piece of political workmanship. Her spirit is patriotic. Her people, instead of straggling over the world like adventurers and pirates, remain in the borders of La Patrie, happy and vital in the possession of freedom.

Her lilies still bloom in the depth of the valleys.

Her vineyards are a covert under which if there be a peasantry it is not a peasantry forced down by oppression, but only the modest residue of the stronger life above and beyond. The free institutions of this beautiful land are the natural counterpart of our own; we should be all the better for warming ourselves not a little in the glow of the Gallic enthusiasm. Vive la France!

Le Siècle.