SUNSHINE IN THOUGHT.[3]

SUNSHINE IN THOUGHT.[3]

The genial pen of Mr. Leland has found an attractive theme in the title of this curious and suggestive volume. Without the formality of an inexorable system, it is written from the impulses of a large and sympathetic nature, more accustomed to the acute observation of details than to exact and rigid generalizations, but sending free and penetrating glances beneath the surface of social life, and presenting a variety of sagacious hints and comments, often admirable for their quaint, original illustrations, and seldom destitute of an important ethical bearing and significance.

In the composition of this work, Mr. Leland has aimed at the defence of that view of life which combines a cheerful earnestness of purpose with manly energy of action, as opposed to the melancholic, whining, lachrymose spirit, which has been affected by certain popular modern poets, and, through their vicious example, has been cherished as one of the essential qualities of genius. Of this style of character Mr. Leland has not the slightest degree of tolerance. Its manifestations are all abominable in his eyes, and unsavory in his nostrils. He cannot endure its presence; he regards its exercise as a nuisance: its permission in the plan of a kindly Providence is a mystery.

The influence of a morbid melancholy, whether affected or genuine, in the literature of the United States, is justly a matter of surprise and lamentation with the author. The American mind, as he remarks, has doubtless a strong tendency to humor. It delights in the expression of a mischievous irony or good-natured sarcasm. The querulous wailings which are the stock in trade of a certain class of writers are unnatural and discordant sounds. We should expect rather a serene and cheerful melody from a young and brave-hearted race, which is in intimate relations with the external world. Instead of this, we have sucked in with the milk of our Puritan mothers a forlorn and sorrowful spirit. We celebrate our festivals with a sad countenance. We attempt to make merry by singing dismal psalms. We weave our woes into poetry, and expand our wretchedness in plaintive declamations.

This is a wide departure from the genius of Christianity, as well as from the healthy instincts of humanity. In the first ages after Christ, the newborn element of thought was a pure and beautiful spring, bubbling up from the moss-grown ruins of the temple of heathendom. A hopeful, joyous tone is indicated in the symbols of the early faith preserved in the Vatican. It contained the germ of republican freedom and of a benign and beneficent civilization. But it was driven by political convulsions toward the East, and returned in the melancholy robes of the dreamy and morbid oriental. It learned from Indian fakirs that laughter was a sin, that misery was meritorious, that the hatred of beauty and joy was a virtue in the sight of Heaven. The early Christians were imbued with the sentiment of moral grandeur and loveliness; they represented Christ our Lord as the fair ideal of humanity; but a darker age decreed that his form should be meagre and homely—misled by those pagan Syrian pictures, which still disfigure the churches in Russia, and whose original may be found in the avatars of violence, modified by old Persian influence. From the seventh to the twelfth century, the tendency to asceticism was rampant. Beauty was proscribed as a temptation of the devil; deformed and crooked limbs were ranked among the beatitudes; even dirt was apotheosized, and, as a consequence, millions of men were mowed down by unheard-of forms of disease. Humanity did not submit to this rule of austerity and torture without a struggle. There was often a brave, vigorous resistance. A lively protest was uttered in the joyous strains of the troubadours and minnesingers. The glad spirit of nature could not be wholly suppressed, and from amid the social oppressions of the times sweet voices fell upon the ear, celebrating the praises of woman, the love of beauty, and the joyousness of life.

But, according to our author, none of the great names in literature have ever proclaimed the evangel of cheerfulness in all its health and purity. The world as yet has never been fit to receive it. Years may pass before it will be fully unfolded. Society is still in its earliest March spring. The fresh winds which blow are still wild and chill; the nights are long and dreary; and during these gloomy hours, the ancient crone still relates horrible legends to believing ears. If the elder or wiser ones only half believe them, most of the listeners still shiver at their weird, grotesque poetry, and when they make new songs for themselves, the old demoniac strains still linger on the air, showing the origin of their earliest lays.

In order to illustrate the lack of true joyousness in the literature of the world, Mr. Leland takes a rapid survey of some of the most distinguished writers in ancient and modern times. Aristophanes, he maintains, did not possess the genuine element in question. Allowing the claims of the great satirist to genius, he had not reached the perennial springs of cheerfulness in the depths of the human soul. In his gayest arabesques, we trace the eternal line of life, but the deep, monotonous echo of death is always nigh. He still had the sorrows which grieve the strong humorist of every age. He could not escape the deep woe of seeing social right and human happiness trodden under foot by tyranny; and folly and ignorance, pain and sorrow were the great foundation stones on which the gay temple of Grecian beauty was built. For every free citizen who wandered through the groves of the Academy, holding high converse with Plato, and revelling in the enjoyment of the divinest beauty in nature and art, there was an untold multitude of slaves and barbarians, into whose lives was crowded every element of bitterness.

But surely, the great sage of humor, glorious Father Rabelais, of later days, was an exception to the prevailing rule of joyousness in literature? Not at all, contends our author. To the young mind which hungers for truth and joy, there is something irresistibly fascinating and persuasive in the jolly philosophy and reckless worldly wisdom of Rabelais. But after all, it will not do. It is anything but attainable by most of the world. It demands good cheer and jovial company. But it dies out in the desert, and is stifled among simple, vulgar associates. Rabelais believed that he sacrificed to freedom, when he only worshipped fortune. He went through the world, familiar with the ways of princes and peers, priests and peasants, travelling in many lands, exhausting the resources of art and learning, seeing through the sins and shams and sorrows of life, and laughing at everything, like a good-natured, large-hearted Mephistopheles. But he had never learned the true philosophy of joyousness in the sincere love of nature, the deep phases of humanity, and the affluence and purity of strong affection.

Nor do we find a better specimen in the renowned English humorists, Sterne and Swift. The former closely follows his French prototype in grotesque fancies: he abounds in tender and delicate pathos, though in the highest degree artificial and forced; but do we ever arise from reading him, like a giant refreshed by wine? Sterne, in fact, has even less of the true philosophy of life than Rabelais. He affords no stimulant to joyous, healthy action, awakens no impulse to gladden life, or to make sorrow less and hope greater. It may be all very touching, very comic, very ingenious, but it is not healthy or joyous. And Swift? An immense fund of laughter, doubtless, had the witty Irish dean; but as little claim to be a joyous writer as the prophet Jeremiah, or the author of 'Groans from the Bottomless Pit.' The men who have been spoken of dealt largely in satire and humor; but joyousness deals in infinitely more. Mirth and laughter are all very well, but they are not all in all. Cheerfulness requires something more than a well-balanced Rabelaisian nonchalance in adversity and a keen relish for all pleasure.

The relation of Christianity to the theme of the volume presents a delicate, and, it may be thought, a dangerous topic of discussion, for a so decidedly secular pen as Mr. Leland's; but he touches upon it with freedom and boldness, though with frankest sympathy and reverence for the great Spirit, whose religion is the most significant fact in the history of the world. 'I must confess,' says he, 'that even regarded from a material and historical point alone, that is a poor, cowardly soul, which does not feel the deepest earnestness of truth in acknowledging the Wonderful One, Jesus Christ, as the Lord and Saviour of the whole world.' His sublime soul, profound, universal, loving beyond all power of human conception, introduced a new era for humanity. Under his teaching, philosophy became indeed truly divine, for it became infinite, and was thrown open to all. He first of all opened the consolations of free thought, of freedom from old superstition, of love, and strength, and inward joy, to the whole race of mankind. No narrow limits of sect or caste or nationality cramped him, the first great Cosmopolite. We cannot sufficiently admire the infinite adaptability, the universal knowledge of humanity, the boundless sympathy with man, which are everywhere manifest in the original Christian philosophy of life. What a depth of meaning in the symbolic bread and wine, typical of the life which flows through eternity and all its changes, of human love and birth and death, of bounteous, beautiful nature, with its continually renewed strength—the whole given, not in funereal guise, not with sombre fasting, but as a joyous feast.

The New Testament abounds in symbols, parables, and proverbs, taken from ancient tradition, but beautifully woven into a purer faith, which taught that the healthy joys of life, and all knowledge of divine truth, should be given not to a few kings or priests, a few favored with initiation into divine mysteries, as of old, but to the whole world; for the spirit of Christianity was identical with the genius of republicanism. As taught by our Lord Jesus Christ, it was eminently healthy, brave-hearted, and joyous. It did not commend celibacy, nor excess of fasting, nor too long prayers, nor righteousness overmuch. It did not approve of a plethora of outward goods, while the culture of our highest faculties was neglected. It condemned all excess of care, even in our daily duties, at the expense of that 'better part' which distinguishes us from mere ants or bees. It gave no warrant for the dismal dirges and melancholy groans which are raised in its name, by men whom Jesus would have been the first to reprove. 'It was a religion of life and of beauty, of friendship and temperate mirth, of love, truth, and manliness; one which opposed neither feasting at weddings nor "going a fishing."'

The temptation to find a refuge from the evils of life in active exertion, instead of cultivating the sources of joy in our own nature, is the subject of an ingenious and striking chapter. In a land, where enjoyment in many minds is connected with a sense of sin, it is doubtless better that the overflowing energy of character, which is a trait of the population, should seek vent in the excitements of labor, than in poisonous liquors, horse races, politics, and the gaming table. Where the natural support of life is wanting, partial methods of relief may be employed. He who can no longer swallow, may gain an imperfect nourishment by means of baths, or artificial transmission. So, the grim and hardened soul, which has lost the support of inward cheerfulness, may find strength in work, merely for the sake of work. But it is a fraud upon humanity to educate men solely as industrious animals. Hives are beautiful, honey is sweet, and wonderful is the cunning structure of the cell; but society is not a hive, nor the people bees. The day is dawning when it will be understood that cheerful songs are as essential to genuine manhood as work; that labor is not to be borne as a curse, with sighs and groans; but combined with mental culture, will become capable of self-support, and will supply its own enthusiasm.

The great problem of the age is the union of beauty with practical uses. In their highest forms, art and science blend and become identical, just as the Beautiful and the Good assimilate, as we trace them to their source in Truth. While art becomes more practical, it loses none of its beauty. In the infancy of science, it was mainly devoted to the illustration of the fanciful and ornamental. Even architecture, in the early ages, looked less to permanent comfort than to artistic effect. But everything now tends to realization. Poetry and art fall in with this influence of the age. Science is every day taking man away from the purely ideal, the morbid and visionary; from the fond fancies of old eras, and leading him to facts and to nature.

Mr. Leland never becomes formal or spiritless in the treatment of his favorite topics, and often rises to a high degree of enthusiastic eloquence. Witness the following noble appeal in behalf of a cheerful earnestness in the cultivation of literature and art:

Young writer, young artist, whoever you be, I pray you go to work in this roaring, toiling, machine-clanking, sunny, stormy, terrible, joyful, commonplace, vulgar, tremendous world in downright earnest. By all the altars of Greek beauty themselves, I swear it to you; yes, by all that Raphael painted and Shakspeare taught; by all the glory and dignity of all art and of all Thought! you will find your most splendid successes not in cultivating the worn-out romantic, but in loving the growing Actual of life. Master the past if you will, but only that you may the more completely forget it in the present. He or she is best and bravest among you who gives us the freshest draughts of reality and of Nature. It lies all around you—in the foul smoke and smell of the factory, amid the crash and slip of heavy wheels on muddy stones, in the blank-gilt glare of the steamboat saloon, by the rattling chips of the faro table, in the quiet, gentle family circle, in the opera, in the six-penny concert, the hotel, the watering-place, on the prairie, in the prison. Not as the poor playwright and little sensation-story grinder see them, not as the manufacturers of Magdalen elegies and mock-moral and mock-philanthropical tales skim them, but in their truth and freshness as facts, around and through which sweep incessantly the infinite joys and agonies, the dreams and loves and despair of humanity. Heavens! is not Life as earnest and as mysterious and as well worth the fierce grapple of Genius, here and now, in this American nineteenth century, as it ever was under the cedars of Italy, the olives of Greece, or the palms of Morning Land? Are there not as much, or more vigor and raciness in the practical souls of the multitude and in their never-ending strife with Nature, as among the spoiled and dainty darlings of fortune and among the nerveless, mind-emasculated Victims of Society who sing us their endless Miserere from the Sistine chapels of fashionable novels? You know there is, and if you watch the time, you may see that it is the warm truth from real life, which is most eagerly read and which goes most directly to the hearts of all. Never yet in history was there an age or a country so rich in great ideas, in great developments, or which offered such copious material to the writer as these of ours. Be bold and seize it with a strong hand. Those who are to live after us will wonder as we now do of the great eras of the past, that there were so few on the spot to picture them. Yet, why speak of great scenes, when humanity and Nature are always great—great in small things even, far beyond our utmost power of apprehension? Forget the spirit of the past, live in the present, and thus—and thus only—you will secure a glorious and undying reward in the future.

The fault of this volume, in the eyes of many readers, will be a certain confusion in the arrangement of the matter, and the want of sufficient expansion in the development of some of its leading suggestions. But it must be judged as the earnest utterances of a poet, rather than a grave didactic treatise. With the purpose which the author had in view, a spice of rhapsody is no defect. He presents a beautiful example of the smiling wisdom of which he is such an eloquent advocate. He has an intuitive sense of the genial and joyous aspects of life, and has no sympathies to waste on the victims of 'carking care' or morbid melancholy. A more complete exposition of the conditions of cheerfulness in the nature of man, would furnish materials for an interesting volume; but it belongs more properly to an ethical or philosophical discourse. We will not complain of the author for not doing what he has not attempted—for what he had no inward call or outward occasion; what he could not have accomplished but at the sacrifice of much which constitutes the charm and grace of the present work; while we cordially thank him for this endeavor to speak a cheering word in behalf of the joyousness of life, and to spread 'sunshine in the shady place.'

R.

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