Archives for August 2020

At the very beginning of his great treatise on rhetoric—a work to whose immortal wisdom and constant guidance, all accomplished talkers still return—Aristotle enumerated the three crucial components on which every persuasive speech ought to be built. Combined, they form a sturdy triad of oratorical legs, a base of articulate strength upon which all good speech must stand. In the order of their descending import, a ranking of their superiority from first to last, the components on which the effective and, hopefully, persuasive speaker must lean are ethos, pathos, and logos.

I love muttering to myself the delightful music of these words—germinal not only to the language, but to the very thought of man—almost as much as I enjoy reading them in print. Perhaps, at the conclusion of this entry, you’ll feel much the same. Either way, one borrows them, obligingly, from the vaunted language of the Greeks, that once dominant, now antiquated tongue in which our garrulous Stagirite, our venerable Aristotle, once lectured and wrote. We take from him, from them, these three crisp and elegant words, these tightly-packaged expressions whose meanings are boundless, for which our ponderous English offers little in the way of a satisfactory translation.

Still, we must try our very best to render them intelligible to the learned ineloquence, to the rugged lassitude of our modern American tongue.

Ethos, in a word, relates to one’s character. It takes its meaning from the nature, personality, or disposition of the person upon whom our eye (or, in this case, our ear) is cast. Specifically, it’s an appeal to the character of the speaker, the stage-occupying figure out of whose dancing lips, the sweet words of a musical script flow. The audience before which he stands, upon whose curious heads his persuasive and honeyed droplets of knowledge will soon shower, must believe with absolute confidence in his professional qualification, as well as his personal merit. That by which it must be convinced, of whose falseness or deception, like a child whose intuition is supernaturally keen, it’ll be immediately aware, is his credibility and his character as it pertains to his work.

Without ethos, all else is lost; victory, in this fantastic battle of oratory, simply can’t be regained. The ethos, or the character of the speaker is, after all, “the most effective means of persuasion”, as Aristotle said—a boldly-drawn line from which our own opinion wouldn’t dare swerve. It is the singular tool without which, though doubtless equipped with other sharp rhetorical gadgets by his side, a man striving to persuade others can’t hope to succeed.

The primacy of ethos, then, is unquestioned. It enjoys the dominance of a ranking from which it can’t be moved.

Pathos, second on our list,is the next instrument to be brandished from the rhetorical utility belt. Coming at the heels of ethos, it too can be employed with dexterity, puissance, and tact. It refers not to reason, but to passion, not to character, but to feeling. It is sentimentality, and—so far as it’s measured against the iron weight of reason, or logos, the final, much-celebrated item on our list—it’s always supreme. Whereas the ethos concerns itself with the character of the speaker, the pathos appeals to the emotions of the audience, the crowd by whom the tear-provoking, laugh-inciting, anger-rousing words are to be received.

The human soul is an entity divided; it’s as though a chariot pulled by two horses, one charging to the left, the other mounted to the right. It’s the job of the charioteer, the symbol of the intellect and the ally of truth, the only part of man in whose grasp the reigns of navigation reside, to control and synchronize the vigorous movements of their thrust. This was the allegory put forward by Plato, the great thinker to whom much of Aristotle’s philosophy is owed. The one horse, more intractable than the other, is passion. He’s irrational, sensuous, and prone to an impulsivity at which his tranquil colleague sneers. As such, he’s the side to whom pathos will have far easier access, the part on which, in the deployment of his pathetic words, the successful orator will do well to focus.

It’s a focus by which he’ll richly profit; as the Scottish empiricist, David Hume famously noted, reason is, and always ought to be, “the slave of the passions”. In other words, the left horse, author of so much bucking and kicking, tossing and biting, is the equine tyrant in absolute control. This, in the age of modern psychology, seems to have become a maxim up to which no better proof or argument stands. It is by appealing, if not supplicating to these masterful passions that the audience, in the words of Aristotle, is put “into a certain frame of mind” by which it can then be moved. Of course, this “frame of mine” is one on which the pathetic speaker can then proceed to work, into which he can press his fingers, as though molding a pliant, soft piece of clay.

We’re left finally with logos. Third on our list, it’s the least influential component on which the edifice of persuasive speech is built. While still important, it’s a relatively weaker leg through which that building’s weight is to be borne. The term, since the time of Aristotle, has been adopted and redefined for every convenience of Christological use. It’s unburdened itself of its original Greek meaning to which, in a moment, we’ll try to repair. However, for now, in the pious understanding of the Western mind, it’s connoted with the divinity of God and his only begotten son. It’s the one term by which the startling prologue of John’s concluding gospel is remembered. To the devout Christian, logos is well-neigh synonymous with that sect’s eponymous founding Jew—the carpenter, moonlighting as a messiah, who absorbed our sins and edified our souls. 

For Aristotle, and for those centuries of Greek thinkers by whom the founder of the Christian faith was preceded, logos meant something rather different. In a word, it meant “reason”. It was the logic, so to speak, of sound discourse and intelligent thought, of cognizance, sagacity, and wisdom. It was the jewel of the philosopher and the conceit of the sophist, the pride of Plato and the affectation of Protagoras. It was the attainment of which, for differing purposes, all educated men were desirous. And while it was highly valued in those disparate fields, and insatiably chased by the hungry men by which they were tilled, it was not considered especially useful in the cultivation of an audience’s love.

Logos stirred not the audience’s soul. It was provocative of no movement by which an inch of persuasion might be gained. Its chief purpose, rather, was to supplement and strengthen the other two legs on which persuasive speech was to be balanced: ethos and pathos. To the former, it added credibility and to the latter, it transferred force. On its own, however, or placed, errantly, in a position to which all other components would be inferior, it would be dry, pallid, academic, and vacant. It would sound as though an empty statistic on a hollow graph. The audience would fail to succumb to the cold persuasion of such lifeless data. It would reject the barren, nearly automated regurgitation of so many stillborn facts. Character and emotion, ethos and pathos—those were the robes in which nude and colorless data, lifeless and ugly logos, must be dressed. They were the sparks by which those data might be enlivened, by which the audience might be persuaded.

As we enter the most politically-fraught time of the season, a sixty-day period during whose every hour, we’ll be inundated by campaign speech after speech, we might quietly repeat to ourselves these three rhetorical words: ethos, pathos, and logos. We mustn’t forget them, as they’ll be our guidance. We mustn’t neglect them, as they’ll be our loyal friend. They’ll serve as our rubric as we endeavor to assess the relative worth or demerit of every speaker. Those that are most persuasive will be the ones who can employ, in agreeable proportion and with a fidelity to the sequence described above, all three.

Allow us to scrutinize our politics, as seldom we do, with a sensitive, rhetorical, Aristotelian ear.

Throughout the long history of English politics, a history out of which, not so many years ago, the dazzling appeal of our own American system so brilliantly emerged, the men who sought the repute and esteem of public office, for whom a seat in the House of Commons or, should they be so lucky, in that of the Lords was considered one of life’s highest achievements, one of society’s most beguiling adornments, seldom lifted a finger to campaign for the satisfaction of that end.

They neither stood nor ran, fought nor crawled for the offices to which their eyes were fixed. To do so would be to affect the mannerism of an ill-bred beast, a meanly political animal to whose swirling passion, the superiority of their reason would never dare to condescend. They neither jumped into the trenches through which, with an unblinking fixation on the outcome ahead, our modern politicians so breathlessly wade, nor leapt into the battles by which their reputations might be sullied or bruised. Such acts would’ve been, in the minds of so leisured a class, exertions unbecoming of the noble gentleman. Nobility, after all, was the quintessence of life, the engine of ascent and the spark of improvement by which, to greater heights, they might be propelled, while the gentleman was the ideal figure in whose image they so meticulously cultivated their own.

To act in so bestial and desperate a way, then, would’ve offended the quiet repose of said gentlemanly calm. It would’ve ripped the silky-gossamer of that aristocratic spirit, and deflated it of all its puffed-up wind. It would’ve demeaned the haughty grandeur of that patrician soul, that deep core of refinement atop which an elegantly-tailored suit—in combination, perhaps, with a smart frock coat and crisp chapeau—might not wish to get themselves too sweaty. These were items, and this was a man, to which perspiration was completely unwelcome, to whom politicking was absolutely unwholesome.

The physicality, the direct contact, the crude and low competition, weren’t at all to these men’s liking. Such maneuvers, rough and rustic, weren’t consistent with the urbanity of their taste. They sought, instead, the comfort of the unnavigable distance at whose furthest reach, they sat and watched. They relished the atmosphere of an extraordinarily high elevation, a mountain of sophistication, a tower of dignity from which, with Olympian froideur, they could coolly look down. This was where they were most at home.

As such, they very seldom deigned to interact with those lower members of the species, with the uneducated class upon whom, however burdensomely, their political fortunes inescapably depended. It was a descent upon which they were loath to embark. They sneered at the idea of groveling at the feet of those contemptible vulgarians, the workaday herd, upon whose suffrage their career’s public advancement ultimately relied. They wouldn’t think to supplicate their electorate, prostrate themselves before the crowd, nor humble themselves to listen to the inarticulate mutterings of the barbarians and the hoi polloi. They wouldn’t pander to the shifting weight of the citizenry’s bloated caprice, a swelling abdomen around which no consistency, much less rationality, could ever be girded.

They scorned populists, detested demagogues, and hated those rabble-rousing arrivistes in whom, so far as they could tell, there was to be found neither sincerity, philosophy, nor scruple. These, they thought, were more parasites than politicians, scoundrels than statesman, rogues than representatives of the people whom they ostensibly “served”. They preferred, instead, the cold disinterest of a yet unpurchased man. Their opinion was not to be bought and sold, as if a cheapened commodity in circulation through the open-air market. This was a place, after all, through whose avenues and bodegas, unpredictable winds so regularly flowed. Venality, to them, was a grievous and unforgivable sin, one to which those parasites, scoundrels, and rogues might very well be susceptible, but with which they were pristinely unacquainted. In the best possible way, they were autonomous actors and wonderfully independent men.

Others, you see, were dependent on them. We call these people by their varying names: subordinates, pamphleteers, apparatchiks, party coordinators, door-knocking volunteers, campaign officials. And though patronage might’ve been, from the first to the last, their unspoken eventual aim, they acted with the unblemished ardor of a fraternal spirit. The purity of their motivations wasn’t always in question, and they struggled indefatigably for the victory of their man. He was, after all, the champion behind whom all their energy was cast, into whom all their loftiest political hopes were invested.

The man standing (or, as we conduct ourselves here in the America, running) for office wasn’t the man campaigning for office. The subordinates, as opposed to that potential statesman of whom we speak, were the people by whom this was done. They were the workers by whom, while he quietly watched, his message was forwarded and refined. In the forest of the night, in the suburb and the street, they were the echoes by which his agenda was amplified and grown. They were the ones responsible for dealing in those quotidian but necessary matters on which campaigns live or die—for delivering “stump” speeches to the hungry appetites of gathering crowds; for accumulating monetary donations from those unencumbered by tight pockets; for securing to the public man his requisite share of the faceless population’s vote.

All the while, he stood silent, always allowing others to clamor on his behalf. The toil would be theirs, the laurels, his. This was the way in which political campaigns were conducted in the older, and perhaps the better time from which we’ve since evolved. And, considering the ineloquence, the ineptitude, the senility, the bellicosity, and the loutish behavior of the two candidates between whom, come one fissile Tuesday at the dawn of November, we’ll have the opportunity to choose, I’m not sure that we shouldn’t adopt that old Anglican maneuver. Maybe we’d be better off having candidates sitting quietly, distantly aloof, instead of running like hamsters debasing themselves.

There are moral obligations, iron dictates of right and wrong, from which all states—though never the citizens by whom they’re populated, from whom their large revenues are drawn—are to be granted an exemption. States are, in this way, more approximate to divine entities in the repose of their Olympian calm, to lofty beings upon whom our windy ethical injunctions leave but a faint impression. There, high above us, floating in a world unseen, they look down upon the masses from the summit of their froideur, an air by which, like clouds, they’re encircled and chilled. They gaze, with the coolness of an unblinking eye, at the length of their separation, and content themselves with the distance they see.

States, as opposed to citizens, are untroubled of our scruples; they’re superior to our morals, contemptuous of our codes. At least they would be, if they perceived them at all. Really, they’re insensitive to that by which, with a more or less tolerable and healthy effect on the individual and the community of which he’s a part, we’re all collectively restrained. This is the fate of the mortal, the conceit of the state. The former fills the pages of a century, at best; the latter, of a history—though possibly a longer time even than this. Yet it’s always important to note that they’re not equivalent things. Thus, states, in the end, don’t feel the common touch of this shared morality to which we humans are all jointly submissive, don’t sense the stern discouragement from evils and the ebullient guidance toward the goods to which, for the improvement of all, we ought to be inclined.

Indeed, in order to ensure the continued existence of the state, in an attempt to guarantee its life from one age to the next, from that era in which it’s living, to that into which it’ll soon jump, it must be untouched by the fetters of morality. It must be free of those heavy, ponderous weights to which the rest of the citizenry is chained. Simply put, states can’t long be preserved, much less prosperously grown, unless they’re immune to those same crimes for which, rightly, any other human being would be punished. They must be absolved of their charges in advance of their crimes, liberated from the moral codes to which the citizens over whom they have dominion are, without exception, heir.

This is, simply put, the Machiavellian point of view—that subtle Florentine’s bold doctrine of the amorality of states. For him, and for those mighty despots for whom he was so persuasive a defender, and for those devious royalists to whom he remains so eloquent an ally, self-preservation was to be valued above all else. Nothing, in the mind of the striving politician, was to be considered more pressing in importance than this. Those manipulative, virile, hardened statesmen to whom he dedicated his most memorable work, The Prince, must be prepared, he said, to commit any number of atrocities, to effectuate any variety of misdeed, to kill, plunder, or “disappear” all enemies and dissidents, if only to preserve the integrity of his state. That, and that alone, was the undying goal for which he, ruthless and admired leader he was, was originally created. He must be willing to injure every amiable sentiment, to hurt every gentle expectation of civility, decency, and truth, if only to bolster and protect the longevity of himself and his state.

Pace Machiavelli, Hugo Grotius—the seventeenth-century wunderkind of the land of the Dutch—maintained, more convincingly than any political philosopher about whom we still busy ourselves to speak, a contrary view. He was, in the words of Frederick the Great—who knew more than a little about subtlety and statecraft, ends and the means by which they’re procured—something of an anti-Machiavel. He was the Dutch antidote to an Italian venom, the enlightened healer of a noxious Renaissance point of view. For that reason alone, we might do well to inoculate ourselves with his words, to protect our politics with the salubrious nectar of his wisdom.

That said, it would be inaccurate to enlist under the name of “political philosopher” the great and ever-nimble Grotius, who would’ve described himself, before all else, as a humble and devoted jurist (to note, he was also a diplomat, theologian, lawyer, magistrate, and scholar. Despite so omnivorous a palate of interests, however, and an energy with which they might be pursued, he died an impecunious and maltreated author). Yet, unconditionally, the law was his love. Politics offered him no succor, nor was there charity to be gained from the mass. Jurisprudence was the spark of his philosophical flame, the deepest stirring of a heart intolerant to idleness forever in search of a friend.

Rightly, if not in his, then doubtless in our age, he’s considered the “founding father” of international law, the patriarch of a lineage that has sprouted many branches, and many fruits. He approached every subject on which he wrote, many of them dealing with the interactions of competing nations, from a legal, rather than a political point of view, and we have this creative approach to thank for the shocking novelty and fresh perspective of his thought.

In that field of study of international law, a subject by whose vastness, even the largest of minds have been intimidated and quelled, Grotius has bequeathed to us a sprawling patrimony. It is a boundless yard in which we play, a deep and plummeting valley with whose bottom, we’ve yet to come into contact. It is a fertile land that’s fallen into our lap, a serious intellectual landscape from which we still pick baskets hungrily gorged with fruit. By and large, it’s been cultivated since his time, albeit with paroxysms of disregard and abuse, but we’ve always lent credence to the fundamental principles on which it’s built.

For one, contrary to Machiavelli, Grotius believed that all states, especially those actively engaged in commerce or war, peace or unrest, weren’t so unimpeachable as to be exempt from every species of law. While they might be unmolested by positive, or man-made laws (those crafted by the expedience of positing men), they hadn’t the ability to avoid ius naturale, “natural right”—or, as we’ve more familiarly come to know it, “natural law”. This is the law, the most rudimentary and pervasive of all laws, to which every state, like every man, is inescapably bound. To the universality of this edict, there is no exception. After all, it is the law drawn by the very hand of the author of nature, the faceless deity from whom every curve of the globe, every wave of the sea, has been molded and stirred.

In his words, natural law is the “Dictate of right reason showing the moral turpitude, or the moral necessity, of any act from its agreement or disagreement with a rational nature, and consequently showing that such an act is either forbidden or commanded by God, the author of nature”. In organizing and expressing his definition as he does, Grotius reveals one of his chief inspirations—the Philosopher himself. I speak, of course, of that famous Stagirite in whose image every Medieval scholar pictured himself, that son of Macedon and doyen of Greece by the exalted name of Aristotle.

Grotius, like many classically-trained scholars and faithful humanists of his day, was devoted to the word of Aristotle; indeed, it was held in a veneration just beneath that of God. Aristotle was, after all, the summit of sophistication and the apex of the academy, the ne plus ultra as it pertained to the boundaries of philosophical thought. He was not only the creator, but the master of nearly every scholastic field with which a man of letters would’ve been expected to be familiar. He was the originator of neigh every subject of which the liberal curriculum was eventually to be composed, of which a young Grotius would become an ardent student. Thus, it’s no surprise that Grotius, like so many of us, was filled with the spirit of Aristotle when finally he embarked on a path of his own.

The Aristotelian presupposition on which Grotius leans is that man is, by the essence of his nature, a rational animal. This is a characteristic unshared by the vegetable and animal life over whom, as a result of his evolution and the concomitant growth of his brain, he’s become so startlingly ascendant. The former is endowed with the nutritive soul, merely, by which its own sustenance and propagation is provided; the latter, with a soul that’s perceptive, by which he comes to acknowledge his own feelings the sensations by which his flesh is touched, or his attention moved. Man, and man alone, serves as the embodiment of the rational soul, a unique mental treasury out which the very essence of his humanity springs. Reason is the distinct activity of which he’s capable—of which those other, lesser forms of life are so unfortunately bereft.

It’s around this Aristotelian insight—this fundamental tenet of his work—that Grotius’ famed treatise on international law, his refutation of Machiavelli’s rule for kings and states, revolves. Reason is much greater than base desire, the thoughtless, vagarious whims by which those lesser beings are excited. It is exactly through this rational faculty by which the virtue of justice, a virtue that’s completely good in and for itself, is perceived. This form of justice is uncorrupted by any ignoble consideration of self-interest, self-aggrandizement, self-promotion, or wanton expediency—all things of which Machiavelli would be both practitioner and advocate. This is a justice whose purity is not only universally felt, but immediately accessible. It’s an idea with which all rational beings are inherently familiar.

As such, all men—and all the well-fastened, numerous states of which they’re the builders—seek justice by the ineluctable force of their nature. They behave justly because they must, unjustly only when they can. The former is a universal dictate to which every man and state is bound; he follows it as he would the natural beckoning of his untarnished reason. The latter, on the other hand, is a peculiar aberration by which, at the urging of Machiavelli, he’s frequently led astray. The one is natural, while the other is a perversion; the first, piously to be followed, the second, meanly to be indulged.

States, in the final opinion of Grotius, aren’t free from the constraints of morals. In imitation of the citizens to whom they serve as homes, they must observe the ethical standards under which all of us, state and man alike, contract to live. Perhaps we give the state more lenience in its endeavors, more latitude for wrong-doing than we give ourselves, but it is, always and naturally, a moral actor. It must incline toward justice, goodness, humanity, and peace, and far away from the Machiavellian worldview.

Even if, God forbid, good art entirely lost its currency in the vast marketplace of the world, even if it were cheapened in the opinion of the lumbering herd, the chattering cattle by whom, with blurred vision and dirt-filled hooves, such swift and errant appraisals are often made, even if it were turned into an object of whose real value these empty masses became completely neglectful, “it would still be abundantly worthwhile to continue to enjoy it by oneself”. That, at least, was the conclusion drawn by the British poet, Matthew Arnold, the sage writer and dazzling conversationalist to whom, as it happens, the notion of solitude was rather foreign.

Still, in the intervals of his coffee house visits and nightly soirees (out of which, reliably, he emerged society’s incontestable favorite), Arnold recognized the place demanded by art in the unaccompanied mind. There it sat, in need of no further adornment, in the quiet repose of individual thought. It allowed no distraction, and caused no encumbrance in the mind of the host in which it now lived. There was a time, not long ago, when good art wasn’t forced to resign itself to so discreet a place, to so silent a convent as only the anchorite or the monk might know, but that time has since passed. Sadly, it no longer is so universally relished, and we must savor it where and when we can.

Yet, that said, despite good art having become, since the age of Arnold, a solitary and isolated pursuit, one for which the countless Philistines among whom we live have neither the sensitivity nor the leisure, the refinement nor the taste, it would remain, doubtless, a beloved and satisfactory pleasure. Not for all, mind you—though none is excluded from the enjoyment that it brings—but for the individual alone.

In this way, good art would forever persist. It would do so as if an undying ember, one resilient to the frigid gusts of persuasion and the mean hostilities of the wind. It would steel itself from the whirling tempests by which, from one climate to the next, one age to another, the art-loving man is continually battered. Confident in his stance—slightly bent at the knees and tensed at the waist—he would stand athwart the assaults of this irascible weather. He would push back against the enormity of its howl and elude the flying projectiles of its malice. All the while, in the silent chamber of his heart, now fiery, now lonely, the inextinguishable light of good art would burn in its corner without flicker, without cease.

For him, good art would remain a quiet happiness, a gentle and warm delight, a source of hot aesthetic bliss out of which one, and one alone, might derive an inexpressible joy. But, according to this maxim, these lines of Arnold from which we might seek further encouragement, in which, for the sake of art, we might find our everlasting hope, art “never will lose currency with the world”. It won’t and it can’t. Its continuance is absolute, its regal sovereignty, confirmed. This is our abiding comfort, the great conclusion at which, thoroughly wearied by the journey we’ve trodden, we gratefully arrive. So too is it the knowledge by which, in our movement forward into the distance of uncertain decades, we might be fortified and led.

In spite of monetary appearances, crude assessments, and the vagaries of the herd atop whose neck the beam of the common sentiment is yoked, good art “never will lose supremacy.” Arnold’s faith in the future of art, to put it mildly, is not just optimistic; it’s pure and categorical. Its continued success is a reality of which, despite the passion of an aesthetic outburst to which, surely, the steady guidance of Arnold’s reason lent an unfailing hand, he’s completely assured. We might call Arnold an art supremacist, an uncompromising acolyte of beauty and good taste, to the frankness of whose honest discrimination, we might calibrate our own. This is a kind of supremacy—a supremacy of beauty—by which we, a nation of egalitarians, might be made to feel uneasy, yet one to which, with no loss of benefit, we might do well to adjust ourselves.  

Ultimately, though, we humans aren’t the final arbiters of what is or isn’t aesthetically supreme. We merely follow the dictates of a higher judgment, a deeper reason, an inner force about which can hardly speak. On this ineffable feeling, the herd of opinion can have no effect. As it pertains to good art, great statuary and fine painting, those subjects to which our attention, if we don’t blind it, is so devotedly fixed, “Currency and supremacy are insured to it, not indeed by the worlds’ deliberate and conscious choice, but by something far deeper—by the instinct of self-preservation in humanity”.

Thus is good art immune to the caprice of the unruly market, to the fleshy valuation of both merchant and client at whose bartered price, it simply turns and laughs. It cares not for the appraisal of those money-grubbing men, those avaricious, uncultured changers of coin above whom, with ethereal dignity, it floats. At this distance, it can’t be touched; it rests with Plato and his Forms, Pythagoras and his spheres, Jesus and his apotheosis in the clouds. It listens not to those by whom it’s diminished or besmirched. Their mud-slinging is useless, their estimation dumb, for good art deals in a currency beyond that of the world in which they undercut, lie, and steal.

That, at least, was the philosophy of our dear Matthew Arnold, the philosophy by which the whole process of evolution, that incremental and slow change of one species to its successor, is undergirded. That’s the instinct of self-preservation. It is an instinct, mostly salutary in the forests of nature, to which all blood-soaked beings must finally submit. Humanity, despite the creativity of its mind and the occasional self-loathing of its spirit, is no exception to this mean dictate and natural law. Its applicability admits no exemption, and none can bend or evade its demand. And while we, as humans, might clamor with the unique anatomy of our mouths, with the honeyed articulations of our lips, and with the dizzying contours of our reason for self-perfection—preservation, in the end, will always suffice.

In adherence to this doctrine, then, art will never escape us. It is not something of which we can be dispossessed; it’s far too deeply entrenched in our souls, as if intertwined in the double helix out of whose subtle combination, our living, breathing body blooms. It is the immutable quality of a species forever in a state of flux, the fixed component of a people always in a process of change. “Amidst all the variety of caprice of taste”, the philosopher David Hume once observed, “there are certain general principles of approbation or blame, whose influence a careful eye may trace in all operations of the mind”. Good art, I think, is that very general principle of which the brilliant Scotsman spoke, onto which our approbation will forever be cast. But I think a “careful” eye isn’t even necessary for its detection; one merely needs an open eye—not an especially acute one—with the assistance, of course, of a feeling heart.

Both are the inheritances of the individual man, the solitary being to whom—despite the mean assessments of the world in which he lives—good art will forever be a pleasure. His eyes turn toward his heart, his heart toward his eyes, and both synchronize their fluttered pulse in the veneration of good art.

“The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people”. This, then, is an encomium to that very class of people, to the common people, that group to whom, like the great Walt Whitman from whom, greedily I borrow, I’ll proceed to dedicate a few lines.

The common people is the class—that of which, meanly, our high-browed society of sophisticates has become so openly derisive, that to which it presently affixes far too little import—upon which we’re our ailing nation is dependent. Yet, each and every day, we fail to take note of the magnitude of this dependence, for which, inexplicably, we’re so blithely ungrateful. We fail to appreciate its Brobdingnagian size and the fertility of its growth. While pervasive, it’s one that eludes all measurement. It becomes a picture of whose scale we’ve not even the slightest hint. If and when we do think about it, we might guess at its size, predict the depth of the furrows of its skin, but we’d inevitably be wrong. We might imagine its contours, describe the curves of its mien, but we’d surely frustrate ourselves in attempting their depiction. We’d underestimate and offend them, if ever we tried.

I think, because the dependence we have on the common people is immeasurable, it’s also unfathomable. Thus, we decide not only that we won’t, but we can’t think about it in any serious way. We struggle with its conception, one of many ideas by which our sleepy minds are arrested in the drowsiness of our age. This, I gather, is our excuse for having ignored it for so long a time; it strains, and eventually exhausts the faculties of the satiated and recumbent brain. It provokes into action the preferred languor of our idle talk. It stirs into thinking the quietude of our thought, and this is an activity for which we’ve lost all necessary interest and verve. And so, its breadth is one around which we can’t even begin to wrap our limp minds, and we hardly bother ourselves to try.

Though ignorant of this common man and his sweat-filled face and bruise-ridden body, though blind to this nameless, wearied person for whom, otherwise, we’d not spare a moment’s consideration, he knows us with an intimacy by whose closeness we’d be shocked. He knows our wants and he services our needs. He anticipates our whims and begrudges them not. He ensures the availability of all the things on which the comforts of our modern life are dependent: water, electricity, groceries, medicine, and the thousand other commodities without which our existence would be insufferably bleak. Food, fuel, health, convenience, exchange—these are his contributions by which we all profit, for which he goes almost completely unacknowledged. If not for the daily toil of his effort, by whose quiet persistence, our various needs and wants are satisfied in every conceivable way, we, as a society, would sooner collapse. We’d fall, quite painfully, if not for the endurance of his unwavering support. We’d tumble if not for the reliability of his toil.

The source of our national wisdom, the root and flower of our collective genius—they are to be found in the soul of the common people, of whose great fecundity and enduring brilliance, we must now, and forevermore, sing. It is the most fertile of soils out of which a national identity can grow. It is the most exalted of spirits, the most euphonious of tunes, with which our lively national lips can harmonize. It is the class, much more than that “high”, gilded, and bedazzled one to which so many of us errantly aspire, in which the truest, most distinct coloring of our genius is to be found. With vibrancy, do we see it, with glee does it tickle the eye. Gazing upon it, we’re forever astonished by its radiance and overcome by the clarity of its force. It is the most inclusive and robust, the humblest and heartiest, the most unostentatious and proud group of people with whom, on the most infrequent of occasions, we come into contact. It is the fount of our wisdom, the grit of our teeth, the strength of our back, the bend of our joints. The common people are the sinew, muscle, heart, and bone of a nation so recently and incessantly battered by the cruel pestilence of eastern winds. Most importantly, though, they are soul by which those same noxious gusts are resisted, the shield through which those external threats can never cut.  

The common people, as opposed to the haughty people, is that class to which, if we’re to live life once, but well, we should all aspire. That is the class toward which our veneration and thanks ought to be directed, in whose image we should construct our own. They are, after all, the essential people, by which I mean the people most faithfully drawn in the mold of the American essence. They are the essential workers, skilled in every way, upon whose indomitable persistence, our cherished economy, our continued health, and our national character relies. Without them, we are but a barren continent placed in the whirling midst of two tempestuous seas. Without them, we are nothing. They are essential, and we, at least here in these lines, are their supplicants offering for the first time our thanks. All others, while useful, are but superficiality and of a lighter substance. The common people are heavy, empathic, and real. All others, especially executives and legislatures, newspapers and authors, are but vapidity shorn of genius, talking heads from which earnest thinking has long since fled. The common people is our reservoir for this genius, the source out of which our sincere national philosophy flows.

They are, in every way, their own. In the words of Walt Whitman, with which, dutifully, I’ll now end my piece: “Their manners, speech, dress, friendships—the freshness and candor of their physiognomy—the picturesque looseness of their carriage; their deathless attachment to freedom; their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or mean; the practical acknowledgement of the citizens of one state by the citizens of all other states; the fierceness of their roused resentment; their curiosity and welcome novelty; their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy; their susceptibility to a slight; the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors; the fluency of their speech; their delight in music, the sure symptom of manly tenderness and native elegance of soul”.

If this is a common people, it’s the most uncommon of all. We celebrate, now and forever, the undying genius of its spirit.