Letters to a gentleman in Germany

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Letter I

So you wish me, my deaf- friend, to write a whole " series of letters." Why, you seem to have studied with the Franciscans, with whom " begging boldly " is constitutional. " Vadatis pro eleemosyna confidenier^^* says their founder and saint in the constitution of the order. And on what shall I write? On the United States? You give me a subject as vast as their territory, and surely you do not wish a series of letters running through six volumes as big and heavy as a novel ofold ! Besides a book of that size would be quite out of season. Nowadays every thing, even commentaries on a code, must be twelve-moed out to the public. Nay, this diminutive size is too troublesome for many, may I say for most, people? They require their intellectual dishes to be chopped and minced into a newspaper pie. " Sir," said an old and thoroughly experienced editor lately to me, " an article, calculated for being read, ought never to exceed haif a column," and he knows the palate of the public as well as any man in the meat or fruit market. Were I to write a history of modern civilization, I should follow the most philosophical rule, by making

* " Go and beg boldly." — Editoh, my division into periods according to striking manifestations of powerful and characteristic principles. I would call one of the great divisions the period of folios; the time when controversialists knew of no more poisonous arrow to bury in the heart of their opponent, than to remind him that he had written but a quarto! See D'Israeli's Curiosities, where he speaks of Nominalists. This huge folio age might go down to Cartesius or thereabouts.* Whatever was the subject, folio was the requisite form. Next is the epoch of quartos and the dawn ofnewspapers — small and single leaves, half of the first page occupied by a quaint title in letters phantastically ornamented. The discovery of a new world and the news of all the wonders successively appearing to the European there, were given to astounded mankind in little diminutive sheets, true " flying leaves,"t not so large as now the smallest handbill which informs you of a pocket having been picked or a colt having leaped the fence. Next, comes the period of octavos; newspapers grow rapidly, so does the quantity of books. It is succeeded by the age of twelve-mos (as the booksellers classically call duodeci-

• Though our author seems to take the whole in joke, there is much scope for reflection in his remark; and not only is the size of books characteristic of an age, but also, and, perhaps in a still greater degree, their price. But a few centuries ago, a breviary would be left to one heir as an equivalent for all the other personal property, even of considerable value, bequeathed to another. At present, we have Penny Magazines, Cyclopsedias, Gazetteers, &c., accessible by the meanest. Knowledge, whilst soaring, on the one haixl, to the highest regions, and expanding with increasing vigor in all dh-ections, has, on tlie other hand, followed the general tendency o^ our age, th&t o? popularization, while, at first, it greatly co-operated in bringing it about. It is of no use to speak of •' penny literature " with the sneer of learned aristocracy. The cheap catechisms which contain the simplest and most important principles of Christianity, belong to the " penny literature;" and complaints, too, were raised in early times against the Christian religion, on account of its having no mystery for an initiated few. — Editor. <■

+ The bookbinders call fly-leaves the blank-leaves between the printed pages of a book and its cover. — Euitob.

• mos;) newspapers expand with the quickness of a new-born butterfly, and stretch from the tree of knowledge like farreaching palm-leaves, to overshadow civilization, which grows beneath; and, at length, we arrive at our own time; books have shrunk to 24mos, (yes, my friend, encyclopaedias have been issued in 48mos,) and newspapers have grown so large that Dido would have made a better bargain than she did, had she asked for her colony as much land as can be covered by a London Extra Times, or a handbill of an American menagerie. I have lately seen one of eleven feet by nine and a half, and well executed, too.* A German philosopher might develop some profound reasonings on this peculiar diminution on the one side and growth on the other. There must be some mysterious pi-inciple in this tendency to the inverse ratio. Formerly, knowledge was hidden in deep and inaccessible wells, or it ran in contracted but deep channels; now literature often flows, lilce shallow water, over a whole country, sometimes irrigating, sometimes inundating, sometimes choking the germs of noble plants by the steril sand which it deposites. In olden times, folios and quartos were often written on the most trifling things; now loquacious editors tell us of a big pumpkin, a large turnip, a monstrous cabbage, or of an excellent hat in that store, and good confectionary in another, (which smacks of tasting it.) Of kings and princes other people tell us of their every step, and of every breath they draw. The emperor of China manages this matter the best; he has his biographer close at his heels, who notes down every trifle of his majesty's life. Editors do all this for themselves, they are their own historiographers; make us participate in all their personal difficulties and quarrels, or tell us that, they went a few days ago to such a place and found the dinner abundant, &c.

Ecco a fair specimen of what you have to expect in let-

* This must have reference to the enormous handbills (whose size is perfectly incompatible with their name) of June, Titus, Angevine, & Co., near ly as large as the elephant they advertise. — Editok.

ters of mine — ^excursions to the right and left, adhering to the subject like a member of congress. I am in ordinaryaccustomed to such dead ahead scribbling, that in my letters I must be permitted to tack about after the manner of Commodore Trunnion, and to get at my point as besiegers do — in a zigzag. Do you agree to this? I lay down my pen; draw up your spectacles, and weigh the matter well. It must be a treaty as solemn as theyjw/a; d^aiiberge* between Yorick and the Piedmontese lady, clearly defined, well understood, and strictly observed. You say, yes? you will not grumble and scold if I sometimes leap about like a chamois in its mountains; or would the comparison with the noisy grasshopper be more in keeping? You say yes? Very well, then I return to my first subject: on what shall I write? It is easy to take a passage in Liverpool for New- York, to enjoy the aromatic rolls at breakfast, to go about and philosophize on every handbill, generalize every straw, explain every push you may get in a bustling street by the elementary principles of the government under which the society around you lives; to deliver letters of recommendation and see how they operate, to talk about jolting stages and chewing passengers, to meditate on a baby and a hog, to deplore the want of wigs on the bench,t or pronounce a

• The autlior probably calls this peace after the Treaty of the Bridge between Castile and Arragon by the mediation of France, because concluded on the bridge of the Bidassoa. — Editor.

-j- We think the author must here have In his eye Captain Basil Hall, who, in his Travels in North America, raises a lament for the United States because the judges of this country have cast off their wigs. Eveiy one to his taste! But what must have been the captain's feelings when the papers of his countiT informed him that the whig chancellor appeared in the house of lords with a wig of considerably smaller size, and horribile diciu — when he read that the Bishop of Carlisle appeared in his place in the house of lords without a wig, and magis horribile diciu — when he found after a short time that the Bishop of Oxford had followed the example of his right reverend brother of Carlisle? Thou too, Brutus! Orthodox Oxford!

Before we had become acquainted with Captain Hall's Travels, we read in the biography of Jovellanos, that he was the first Spanish judge who attempted to appear without a wig, and that it required the whole support of the wise opinion on the number of copies of the fathers of the church in the United States, or sweepingly to declare all New England to be inhabited by wretches prostrated before Mammon, their only god; it is easy (I now speak of the

premier, Count "Aranda, to carry this innovation. We smiled, we laughed at the strong- predilections of mankind, at the tenacity with which we cling to errors, follies, evils, sins, hugging them as our dearest blessings, but now we are better infoi-med, we believe Jovellanos a demagogue, and his opponents sound politicians. They, with Hall and all who believe the British empire would crumble to pieces the very moment when no wig should be seen on the woolsack, have, undoubtedly, studied Lichtenberg's Physiognomy of Cues, in which that distinguished writer not only proves the great importance of cues to the general welfore of mankind, but also shows how closely connected their form, twist and bend, ai-e with the dispositions, views, and desires of tlie wearer. The work is embellished with engravings representing the most important cues; it was written at the time, when, with innovations of all kinds, the cuttiAg off of cues, spread from France eastward. A continuation of this instructive work ought speedily to be written, and who would do it better than the author of the above mentioned travels? To say the truth, we have stopped sometimes at the windows of the hairdressers near the learned inns in London, and silently meditated on the variety, beauty, utility, and superior importance of tlie wigs in la haute politique. There was the short and closely trimmed covering of a. counsellor's vertex, the weightier one to cover the weightier head of the judge; the flapping periwig of the chancellor, like a lion's mane, and, — what is not surpassed in venerable beauty, — a bishop's wig! Shall all this splendor pass away? Shall nothing remain with us but naked prose? Shall life be stripped of all its characteristic ornaments, on which the poet may seize, by taking the sign for the thing? Shall we be obliged to see all heads in hideous democratic nudity ? Shall the portrait of a Turenne soon stand before us as a beauty unattainable, yet admired, an Apollo of times gone by ? Did not Frederic the Great conquer with the long spiral cues of his grenadiers? Has Napoleon not won his victories with the short stout cues of his guards? Has Eugene not won his battles with flowing locks, slightly tied together? Did Marlborough expect assistance from Mars, with a head shorn like a sheep in June? If the Romans have conquered the world trimmed like blackguards, what is it to us; they were heathens, and we are Christians. If Magna Charta was extorted by unpowdered heads, it is by well-wigged ones that it was expounded, developed, and applied. Can you imagine Blackstone or Mansfield looking differently than a weasel peeping out of a haystack ? It is blasphemy to imagine them for a moment clipped and stripped of their exalted costume! Honor for ever to the wig! — Editor.

most refined and exalted traveller that ever visited this country, a reverend gentleman,) to crowd a book with statements, which, to name them by their only befitting name, would require three little letters not very frequently used among gentlemen, though of great import; or to tell us of foreigners in this country placed by the Yankees as outposts before their private fortresses, in order to examine visiters before they are allowed to approach the autochthones themselves, (pooh! what an ass a man must be to use such a simile, which has no sense, to imagine the possibility of such an absurdity, or to believe others so brainless as to give credit to this clumsy story;) it is very easy to make a trip of six weeks through the country and yet write a quarto volume, like the clever author who described a journey round his table, but to speak sensibly of a people and their institutions, to let the " guessing" and the chewing for a moment rest, and occupy ourselves with matters of substantial value, to treat them merely with becoming attention and not in a flimsy flippant way, calculated to catch the many, not to gain the thinking, is, I say by no means impossible, yet not very easy. It requires thinking, patience, a manly calmness, and some pains — requisites not as often met with as the extraordinary faculty enjoyed by some, who can throw off a book as readily as the deer throws off" yearly its antlers. Such travellers resemble inexperienced youths, to whom every thing is new, every thing important; to whom every thing affords the delightful pleasure of proving to themselves and the world their great sagacity by connecting every trifle with deep, hidden motives, first discovered by their own sharp-sightedness. They have not that experience which leads us to look at the essence of things, and to expect less variety in the ground-plan and springs of human affairs than their superficial appearance would induce the staring novelty-hunter to expect.

Two kinds of silly travellers (I do not speak, you will observe, of all the travellers who have written on this country; very excellent men indeed have been amongst them) are, from time to time, thrown on our shore, almost periodically like the eruptions of the Geysers on Iceland. The one class arrives here with a ready made opinion against the country they have yet to see, and a very high one in favor of themselves. They have not formed their opinion after a careful examination of all the necessary data, but, because this opinion suits them, or, because they start from a preconceived idea, vulgarly called prejudice. Whatever they are or may have been, students of mankind or not, whether they have read or seen much or little, as soon as they set foot on this shore, they are suddenly initiated into all branches of human industry and knowledge, know the principles of all occupations, and are judges of all sciences, all arts, and all institutions. But one art which they have never endeavored to learn and practise is to take things as they are. A gentleman has been an officer in the army and has written a novel — two very good things; he arrives here, and forthwith begins; he speaks, now in a flippant, now in a dogmatic style, in one breath, about every thing that comes under his eye, and very many that do not come within the horizon of his vision — about science, arts, politics, trades, commerce, statistics, society, education, industry, history, laws, canals, railroads, scenery, agriculture, cookery, navigation, horses, morals, prisons, pauperism, about every thing on, above, and under the earth; he is an adept in every subject cognizable by man. A polyhistor like Leibnitz would be but a schoolboy compared to a traveller of this kind. You know me, my dear friend, too well to suspect me of criticizing others merely because they criticize the United States. Nothing is farther from me; do I always praise this country? If a man prefer a monarchy to a republic, why not; let him state his reasons, and try to make out his case by taking the Americans as an example. One of my best friends in Rome was a Dominican, and with more than one royalist I am on terms of intimacy. Let me but see sincerity, the wish to arrive at truth and readiness to acknowledge it, and I am satisfied, I am, indeed.

not one of those who believe that every institution here is incomprehensible to all human beings except the natives of this country. The institutions of the United States are the w^ork of man, and can be understood by men, if they are founded in reason; but the action of a cotton spinning machine cannot be comprehended in half an hour by one previously unacquainted with it, nor a nation with all its various aspects within a day. I love spirited animadversion dearly, but let it be spirited, and not a bubble of vanity, and above all, let it abstain from positive falsehoods with which the reverend tourist has seen fit to grace every page of his classical production.

The other kind of travellers arrives with an opinion equally ready, but enthusiastically in favor of the country. They expect — heaven knows what. The most phantastic illusions fill their brains. They believe to find at every corner at least one Aristides, on every farm a Cincinnatus, and every street sweeper with silk ribands coleur de rose, flowing from his liberty cap, which he would be as far from doffing before Gessler's hat on the pole, as was William Tell. When I was in Liverpool, I visited, with a friend of mine and another young man, a self-deceiver of this kind, the packet which was to carry me the next day to this shore. The first thing we happened to see on board of this noble and elegant vessel, was an old hat belonging, perhaps, to the " doctor."* "What," exclaimed my friend, apparently surprised, "an old hat in youthful America!" I thought it a good hit, but it had no effect on the enthusiast; he continued to believe that heroes and matchless citizens were stalking about here arm in arm with pure philanthropists and never-sullied politicians. He crossed the Atlantic, and what was the consequence, I need not say. I undertake to foretell of every European arriving here, what he will think and say of this country a year hence, if he will fairly tell me at the time

• It is a strange, yet quite general custom with American and Englisli sailors to cull the cook, especially when a black man, "tlxe doctor." — Editor, what he expects to find. I have done it often, and never failed.

With me it was different. I came here expecting little, because I expected little from man. I had lived in many countries and in a great variety of situations; I had already learned to sail when occasion required it, with a jury-mast on the wide sea of life, nor was its daily treadmill altogether unknown to me. Experience and reality had already forced upon me, young as I was, that patient shoulder-shrugging way of regarding matters and things, which, bitter as it may be, no thinking man, whose lot it is to see mankind through the microscope, can help arriving at. Recollect what men of all ages have said, from Solomon down to the last sage. I think, then, that I took things a little more as they are than many others do; and this may be the cause of my having arrived at different conclusions. I found that the Americans have their good and bad points of character. I have won friends among them, whom I shall dearly love wherever I may be, even among the proscribed New Englanders. Their country I have found wanting in many interesting things and abounding in others. It is true, here is no gallery of pictures or great collection of statues to delight your friend, whom you know to have spent days and days in the Vatican, feeding his soul upon those realized perfections, which nature seems continually to strive for, but which to conceive is left to the human mind. Suppose, however, I were obliged to live in a European provincial town, what should I have there? Say, what has a man who lives in Manchester or Breslaw? I find that people often compare America with Europe, when they mean London, Paris, or Rome.

The great interest of this country lies in its institutions. There the observer of society and student of mankind finds enough with which to occupy himself. You may observe at once, in this country, some of the boldest applications of principles, the most recently developed, and the first manifestations, the first pulsations, so to speak, of those drinciples of life which lie at the bottom of every political society. You may see in the farthest west, beyond the boundaries of organized society, the incipient stages of political relations, of law and justice laid bare, as if prepared for the student of history, and of the gradual development of man as a member of political society. Perhaps all this would become clearer to you, should I write you about the regulators and the manner in which communities, beyond the limits of established law, meet the imperious necessity of dealing out justice; of this kind was one of the most interesting cases that ever came to my knowledge, when, lately, the assembled men of a district, arrested, tried, and executed a murderer. By what right? — By the right to punish crime, natural, indispensable and inalienable to every society, and growing out of the necessity, both physical and moral, of punishment.

The United States form a republic of thirteen millions of inhabitants, founded on broader principles of liberty, than any former political society. This is a fact, and is it not interesting to study how so great a fact came to pass? But you will agree that, with a subject matter of this kind, institutions and their operations must be studied, which is what most travellers are not very willing to do. My habits and occupations have afforded me the opportunity of collecting more materials in regard to the United States than, perhaps, ever a native of a foreign country had either the disposition or opportunity to collect, whilst my long residence here, together with some additional causes, have rendered me intimately acquainted with the whole social life of the Americans. I can say, in this respect, of them what Byron said of his acquaintance with the Italians.

If, then, you do not think me quite destitute of skill and a habit of observation, you may possibly, as you in fact intimate in your letter, consider me, in some measure, qualified to give a correct picture of this, at least, interesting country. But I could not do it, even if so many travellers had not given me a distaste for this kind of authorship. I dislike the idea of being classed among the travellers by profession. They are, besides the Bedouins, the most dangerous class of people to deal with, and I no longer permit one of them to approach me with his pencil unsheathed. " Lay down your arms," I cry, " come like an honest man, but no stabbing in the back, and you are welcome; don't drink my wine, and go many thousand miles off and say you drank cider; and put things into my mouth which never dropped from my lips."

Yet I might give a work, treating of the country, its institutions, and the true state of its civilization, without any gossip of the kind. This could be properly done only in a work similar to that of Goede on England;* and still deeper than that ought it to enter into all important matters. The time to do this has not yet come for me, and I dislike exceedingly to be half understood. A true and clear picture of the state of religion, theology, and church affairs, alone would require half a volume. If I say that theology, catholic and protestant, is at least a century behind the theology of Germany, — I speak here of the science as such, and of the general state only, because who does not know the distinguished merits of a Stuart in Andover, — that we meet with the same controversial views and limited philological knowledge, which existed with us at that time, my assertions would be immediately extended, and conclusions made, to which I should be very unwilling to subscribe. How would it be possible to treat thoroughly of law and jurisprudence in a short chapter? You may unqualifiedly praise or censure in very few words; I am not willing to do either; truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, on subjects of this kind, requires a detailed investigation.

You must not then expect me to give you a connected account, claiming to show the United States like a well-dried plant laid out on the blotting paper of a herbarium. For my views on some single institutions, I must refer you to

* It has been translated into English. — Edttoh.

single works of mine. However, as I have just made a trip to Niagara, I will write, for you and our private circle, some letters on subjects as they may happen to occur to my mind in recalling the events of my journey. But do not forget two things; it is summer, and a summer in Philadelphia is no trifle — and you know that mercury and the human mind are like the two buckets in the well, when one is up the other is down. For several weeks we have been forcibly reminded of the situation of the three men in the fiery furnace; yes, I have thought that we shall stand in need of some such annealing place, in order to pass with safety from this heat into the cooler days of autumn. When the air we inhale is as hot as the steam in the Stufe di Nerone* when from the bed which receives us, parched and arid, in the evening, after the trouble of falling asleep, we rise in the morning unrefreshed and unrestored to elasticity of mind, to drag ourselves through the same existence for the next twelve hours, which is rather a permission of breathing than a real life — you must not be surprised, should you find Dante's heavy, leaden mantle of mediocrity hanging round my mind. I am astonished that we do not all become beau-ideals of morality, since this heat ought to purify the basest metals.

Without ice we should undoubtedly melt, and it is fortutunate that the active farmer of the north omits not to lay in a quantity during winter, and that the enterprising merchant of New England ships it in summer to the south, to the Carolinas, Georgia, New Orleans, and Havanna. By the way, have you seen in the papers, that an ice-merchant of Boston has sent a cargo of his goods to the East Indies? It arrived well-conditioned, and the captain of the vessel received a silver tankard with an appropriate inscription from

• This, it is hardly necessary to say, is an exag-geration. The baths of Nero, near Pozziioli, are so hot that it is necessary to undress in order to approach their wells. Few travellers dare to follow the guide who is in the habit of fetching water from them, in order to boil eggs. We remember how scorchingly hot the air felt in the lungs when we visited the place, and s\icceeded in penetrating to the end with our guide. — Editdk.

tlie governor at Calcutta. Other cargoes have followed. What an enterprise ! Vasco did not dream of discovering the way for Kennebec and Boston ice to the " land of spices," when he doubled the Cape. Compare it to the paddling and creeping along the shores of the ancients, and yet Ulysses had his Homer. Some years ago, I remember, some ice arrived in London from Sweden, and the custom-house officers did not know what rate of duty to demand. They were as embarrassed as the officers here some years ago when a mummy arrived from Egypt. Was it a manufactured article? Did we want protection for our mummies? These were the important questions. Certainly it ought to pay duty. If salt pork pays duty, why not smoked emigrant? It was lucky that the spiced man, being accustomed to waiting, did not suffer from delay like the Swedish ice, which melted, and, before the decision had arrived what duty should be paid, the article which was to pay, had vanished, a situation similar to many law-cases.*

In addition to heat and other things, I have to plead want of time; I must steal an hour here and an hour there, and you cannot expect that spirit which a man may give to his writings, who has the whole twenty-four at his disposal, and may choose the time when his mind is the brightest — with myself, after I have taken that decoction which Voltaire could not obtain strong enough and Leibnitz not weak enough. I will write most piously, in the sense of Sterne: begin, and trust the rest to the gods, as many politicians do. I know not how many letters you will probably receive, for I cannot speak with the precision with which the author of the Fredoniad was able to sing; —

" Songs thjrty I have sung", yet ten remain. Crude, undigested, written in the brain."

• It is not a little characteristic of the enterprising turn of the Americans, that, while Bostonians send their ice to distant shores of Asia, a keeper of a menagerie sends an expedition to the Cape of Good Hope; to catch new and interesting animals. It has succeeded, and we have now here some of the rarest and most interesting animals. — EuiTon.

He knew how much his indigestion would allow him to produce. Have you seen the Fredoniad? All I knew of it for a long time was, that it was an absurd concoction not looked at by any one, until chance threw it into my hands at an auction. If he who makes us laugh be really our benefactor, this poet deserves a more flourishing wreath than Esculapius himself. How I have enjoyed this grand poem ! It is hardly known now; and this is a pity, for it is eminently fitted to shake the diaphragm.