No More Learning

To turn now to other matters, there are two things upon which it should
seem fitting to dilate somewhat more largely in this place,--the Yankee
character and the Yankee dialect. And, first, of the Yankee character,
which has wanted neither open maligners, nor even more dangerous enemies
in the persons of those unskilful painters who have given to it that
hardness, angularity, and want of proper perspective, which, in truth,
belonged, not to their subject, but to their own niggard and unskilful
pencil.

New England was not so much the colony of a mother country, as a Hagar
driven forth into the wilderness. The little self-exiled band which came
hither in 1620 came, not to seek gold, but to found a democracy. They
came that they might have the privilege to work and pray, to sit upon
hard benches and listen to painful preachers as long as they would, yea,
even unto thirty-seventhly, if the spirit so willed it. And surely, if
the Greek might boast his Thermopylae, where three hundred men fell in
resisting the Persian, we may well be proud of our Plymouth Rock, where
a handful of men, women, and children not merely faced, but vanquished,
winter, famine, the wilderness, and the yet more invincible _storge_
that drew them back to the green island far away. These found no lotus
growing upon the surly shore, the taste of which could make them forget
their little native Ithaca; nor were they so wanting to themselves in
faith as to burn their ship, but could see the fair west-wind belly the
homeward sail, and then turn unrepining to grapple with the terrible
Unknown.

As Want was the prime foe these hardy exodists had to fortress
themselves against, so it is little wonder if that traditional feud be
long in wearing out of the stock. The wounds of the old warfare were
long a-healing, and an east-wind of hard times puts a new ache into
every one of them. Thrift was the first lesson in their horn-book,
pointed out, letter after letter, by the lean finger of the hard
schoolmistress, Necessity. Neither were those plump, rosy-gilled
Englishmen that came hither, but a hard-faced, atrabilious, earnest-eyed
race, stiff from long wrestling with the Lord in prayer, and who had
taught Satan to dread the new Puritan hug. Add two hundred years'
influence of soil, climate, and exposure, with its necessary result of
idiosyncrasies, and we have the present Yankee, full of expedients,
half-master of all trades, inventive in all but the beautiful, full of
shifts, not yet capable of comfort, armed at all points against the old
enemy Hunger, longanimous, good at patching, not so careful for what is
best as for what will _do_, with a clasp to his purse and a button to
his pocket, not skilled to build against Time, as in old countries, but
against sore-pressing Need, accustomed to move the world with no [Greek:
pou sto] but his own two feet, and no lever but his own long forecast. A
strange hybrid, indeed, did circumstance beget, here in the New World,
upon the old Puritan stock, and the earth never before saw such
mystic-practicalism, such niggard-geniality, such
calculating-fanaticism, such cast-iron-enthusiasm, such
sour-faced-humor, such close-fisted-generosity. This new _Graeculus
esuriens_ will make a living out of anything. He will invent new trades
as well as tools.
His brain is his capital, and he will get education at
all risks. Put him on Juan Fernandez, and he would make a spelling-book
first, and a salt-pan afterward. _In coelum, jusseris, ibit_,--or the
other way either,--it is all one, so anything is to be got by it. Yet,
after all, thin, speculative Jonathan is more like the Englishman of two
centuries ago than John Bull himself is. He has lost somewhat in
solidity, has become fluent and adaptable, but more of the original
groundwork of character remains. He feels more at home with Fulke
Greville, Herbert of Cherbury, Quarles, George Herbert, and Browne, than
with his modern English cousins. He is nearer than John, by at least a
hundred years, to Naseby, Marston Moor, Worcester, and the time when, if
ever, there were true Englishmen. John Bull has suffered the idea of the
Invisible to be very much fattened out of him. Jonathan is conscious
still that he lives in the world of the Unseen as well as of the Seen.
To move John you must make your fulcrum of solid beef and pudding; an
abstract idea will do for Jonathan.

* * * * *



*** TO THE INDULGENT READER


My friend, the Rev. Mr. Wilbur, having been seized with a dangerous fit
of illness, before this Introduction had passed through the press, and
being incapacitated for all literary exertion, sent to me his notes,
memoranda, &c. , and requested me to fashion them into some shape more
fitting for the general eye. This, owing to the fragmentary and
disjointed state of his manuscripts, I have felt wholly unable to do;
yet being unwilling that the reader should be deprived of such parts of
his lucubrations as seemed more finished, and not well discerning how to
segregate these from the rest, I have concluded to send them all to the
press precisely as they are.

COLUMBUS NYE,

_Pastor of a Church in Bungtown Corner.