Fifty years ago, when I was a boy of fifteen and
helping to inhabit a Missourian village on the banks of the Mississippi, I had
a friend whose society was very dear to me because I was forbidden by my mother
to partake of it. He was a gay and impudent and satirical and delightful young
black man – a slave – who daily preached sermons from the top of his master's
woodpile, with me for sole audience. He imitated the pulpit style of the
several clergymen of the village, and did it well, and with fine passion and
energy. To me he was a wonder. I believed he was the greatest orator in the
United States and would some day be heard from. But it did not happen; in the
distribution of rewards he was overlooked. It is the way, in this world.
He interrupted his preaching, now and then, to saw a
stick of wood; but the sawing was a pretense – he did it with his mouth;
exactly imitating the sound the bucksaw makes in shrieking its way through the
wood. But it served its purpose; it kept his master from coming out to see how
the work was getting along. I listened to the sermons from the open window of a
lumber room at the back of the house. One of his texts was this:
"You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is."
I can never forget it. It was deeply impressed upon
me. By my mother. Not upon my memory, but elsewhere. She had slipped in upon me
while I was absorbed and not watching. The black philosopher's idea was that a
man is not independent, and cannot afford views which might interfere with his
bread and butter. If he would prosper, he must train with the majority; in
matters of large moment, like politics and religion, he must think and feel
with the bulk of his neighbors, or suffer damage in his social standing and in
his business prosperities. He must restrict himself to corn-pone opinions – at
least on the surface. He must get his opinions from other people; he must
reason out none for himself; he must have no first-hand views.
I think Jerry was right, in the main, but I think he
did not go far enough.
It was his idea that a man conforms to the majority
view of his locality by calculation and intention.
This happens, but I think it is not the rule.
It was his idea that there is such a thing as a first-hand
opinion; an original opinion; an opinion which is coldly reasoned out in a
man's head, by a searching analysis of the facts involved, with the heart
unconsulted, and the jury room closed against outside influences. It may be
that such an opinion has been born somewhere, at some time or other, but I
suppose it got away before they could catch it and stuff it and put it in the
museum.
I am persuaded that a coldly-thought-out and
independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or
politics, or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of
our notice and interest, is a most rare thing – if it has indeed ever existed.
A new thing in costume appears – the flaring
hoopskirt, for example – and the passers-by are shocked, and the irreverent
laugh. Six months later everybody is reconciled; the fashion has established
itself; it is admired, now, and no one laughs. Public opinion resented it
before, public opinion accepts it now, and is happy in it. Why? Was the resentment
reasoned out? Was the acceptance reasoned out? No. The instinct that moves to
conformity did the work. It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not
many can successfully resist. What is its seat? The inborn requirement of
self-approval. We all have to bow to that; there are no exceptions. Even the
woman who refuses from first to last to wear the hoopskirt comes under that law
and is its slave; she could not wear the skirt and have her own approval; and
that she must have, she cannot help herself. But as a rule our self-approval
has its source in but one place and not elsewhere – the approval of other
people. A person of vast consequences can introduce any kind of novelty in
dress and the general world will presently adopt it – moved to do it, in the
first place, by the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something
recognized as authority, and in the second place by the human instinct to train
with the multitude and have its approval. An empress introduced the hoopskirt,
and we know the result. A nobody introduced the bloomer, and we know the
result. If Eve should come again, in her ripe renown, and reintroduce her
quaint styles – well, we know what would happen. And we should be cruelly
embarrassed, along at first.
The hoopskirt runs its course and disappears. Nobody
reasons about it. One woman abandons the fashion; her neighbor notices this and
follows her lead; this influences the next woman; and so on and so on, and
presently the skirt has vanished out of the world, no one knows how nor why,
nor cares, for that matter. It will come again, by and by and in due course
will go again.
Twenty-five years ago, in England, six or eight wine
glasses stood grouped by each person's plate at a dinner party, and they were
used, not left idle and empty; today there are but three or four in the group,
and the average guest sparingly uses about two of them. We have not adopted
this new fashion yet, but we shall do it presently. We shall not think it out;
we shall merely conform, and let it go at that. We get our notions and habits
and opinions from outside influences; we do not have to study them out.
Our table manners, and company manners, and street
manners change from time to time, but the changes are not reasoned out; we
merely notice and conform. We are creatures of outside influences; as a rule we
do not think, we only imitate. We cannot invent standards that will stick; what
we mistake for standards are only fashions, and perishable. We may continue to
admire them, but we drop the use of them. We notice this in literature.
Shakespeare is a standard, and fifty years ago we used to write tragedies which
we couldn't tell from – from somebody else's; but we don't do it any more, now.
Our prose standard, three quarters of a century ago, was ornate and diffuse;
some authority or other changed it in the direction of compactness and
simplicity, and conformity followed, without argument. The historical novel
starts up suddenly, and sweeps the land. Everybody writes one, and the nation
is glad. We had historical novels before; but nobody read them, and the rest of
us conformed – without reasoning it out. We are conforming in the other way,
now, because it is another case of everybody.
The outside influences are always pouring in upon us,
and we are always obeying their orders and accepting their verdicts. The Smiths
like the new play; the Joneses go to see it, and they copy the Smith verdict.
Morals, religions, politics, get their following from surrounding influences
and atmospheres, almost entirely; not from study, not from thinking. A man must
and will have his own approval first of all, in each and every moment and
circumstance of his life – even if he must repent of a self-approved act the
moment after its commission, in order to get his self-approval again: but,
speaking in general terms, a man's self-approval in the large concerns of life
has its source in the approval of the peoples about him, and not in a searching
personal examination of the matter. Mohammedans are Mohammedans because they
are born and reared among that sect, not because they have thought it out and
can furnish sound reasons for being Mohammedans; we know why Catholics are
Catholics; why Presbyterians are Presbyterians; why Baptists are Baptists; why
Mormons are Mormons; why thieves are thieves; why monarchists are monarchists;
why Republicans are Republicans and Democrats, Democrats. We know it is a
matter of association and sympathy, not reasoning and examination; that hardly
a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics, or religion which he
got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking,
there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, corn-pone stands
for self-approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other
people. The result is conformity. Sometimes conformity has a sordid business
interest – the bread-and-butter interest – but not in most cases, I think. I
think that in the majority of cases it is unconscious and not calculated; that
it is born of the human being's natural yearning to stand well with his fellows
and have their inspiring approval and praise – a yearning which is commonly so
strong and so insistent that it cannot be effectually resisted, and must have
its way.
A political emergency brings out the corn-pone opinion
in fine force in its two chief varieties – the pocketbook variety, which has
its origin in self-interest, and the bigger variety, the sentimental variety –
the one which can't bear to be outside the pale; can't bear to be in disfavor;
can't endure the averted face and the cold shoulder; wants to stand well with
his friends, wants to be smiled upon, wants to be welcome, wants to hear the
precious words, "He's on the right track!" Uttered, perhaps by an
ass, but still an ass of high degree, an ass whose approval is gold and
diamonds to a smaller ass, and confers glory and honor and happiness, and
membership in the herd. For these gauds many a man will dump his lifelong
principles into the street, and his conscience along with them. We have seen it
happen. In some millions of instances.
Men think they think upon great political questions,
and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its
literature, but not that of the other side; they arrive at convictions, but
they are drawn from a partial view of the matter in hand and are of no
particular value. They swarm with their party, they feel with their party, they
are happy in their party's approval; and where the party leads they will
follow, whether for right and honor, or through blood and dirt and a mush of
mutilated morals.
In our late canvass half of the nation passionately
believed that in silver lay salvation, the other half as passionately believed
that that way lay destruction. Do you believe that a tenth part of the people,
on either side, had any rational excuse for having an opinion about the matter
at all? I studied that mighty question to the bottom – and came out empty. Half
of our people passionately believe in high tariff, the other half believe otherwise.
Does this mean study and examination, or only feeling? The latter, I think. I
have deeply studied that question, too – and didn't arrive. We all do no end of
feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation
which we consider a Boon. Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence.
It settles everything. Some think it the Voice of God. Pr'aps.
I suppose that in more cases than we should like to
admit, we have two sets of opinions: one private, the other public; one secret
and sincere, the other corn-pone, and more or less tainted.
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