The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 12, October, 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 12, October, 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
And this noble man must be likewise a _new_ man,--not merely a migrated
European. Western Europe pushed a little farther west does not meet our
demand. Why should Europe go three thousand miles off to be Europe
still? Besides, can we afford to England, France, Spain, a larger room
in the world? Are we more than satisfied with their occupancy of that
they already possess? The Englishman is undeniably a wholesome picture
to the mental eye; but will not twenty million copies of him do, for
the present? It would seem like a poverty in Nature, were she unable to
vary, but must go helplessly on to reproduce that selfsame British
likeness over all North America. But history fully warrants the
expectation of a new form of man for the new continent. German and
Scandinavian Teutons peopled England; but the Englishman is _sui
generis_, not merely an exported Teuton. Egypt, says Bunsen, was
peopled by a colony from Western Asia; but the genius and physiognomy
of Egypt are peculiar and its own. Mr. Pococke will have it that Greece
was a migrated India: it was, of course, a migration from some place
that first planted the Hellenic stock in Europe; but if the man who
carved the Zeus, and built the Parthenon, and wrote the "Prometheus"
and the "Phaedrus," were a copy, where shall we find the original?
Indeed, there has never been a great migration that did not result in a
new form of national genius. And it is the thoroughness of the
transformations thus induced which makes the chief difficulty in
tracing the affinities of peoples.
So it is that the world is enriched. Every new form of man establishes
another current in those reciprocations of thought, in those electrical
streams of sympathy,--of wholesome attraction and wholesome
repulsion,--by which the intellectual life is kindled and quickened.
Thought begins not until two men meet. Col. Hamilton Smith makes it
quite clear that civilization has found its first centres there where
two highways of national movement crossed, and dissimilar men looked
each other in the face. They have met, it may be, with the rudest kind
of greetings; but have obtained good thoughts from hard blows, and
beaten ideas _out_ of each other's heads, if not _into_ them, according
to the ancient pedagogic tradition. Higher culture brings higher terms
of meeting; traffic succeeds war, conversation follows upon traffic;
ever the necessity of various men to each other remains. There is no
pure white light until seven colors blend; so to the mental
illumination of humanity many hues of national genius must consent: and
the value of life to all men is greater so soon as a new man has made
his advent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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