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Hugo, and the rest, had begun to weaken, it would be succeeded by a Rococo Sentimentalism, or metaphysical sorrow; just as a growing youth's intense yearnings, that he might have been a Troubador, or a Pirate, are commonly succeeded by despairing grief, that he can be absolutely nothing at all. And this being foreseen, it would not be impossible to prophesy, that a practical steam-wheel age of advancing science would every year encroach on Art with its artificialisms and conventionalisms, until the latter eventually became practical, material, and natural. Ay! wail as you will, sweet singers of sorrow; fond pipers of your own beautiful woes, your hours are counted, you know that your life-material is exhausted, there is rapping at the gates without, that new generation which will tear down your fetid dungeons, and overthrow your unholy towers of spiritual pride, and burn your Narrhallas; and the fresh air of heaven shall sweep over it all, and your captives shall be free!

But they remonstrate, these endless singers of dirges and doles, and tell us that suffering is inseparable from humanity; that man has always sorrowed, always must sorrow. But sorrow requires earnest, cheering consolation; not brooding despair, or the howls of Irish wakes. And what consolation, what strength or aid do you bring; what beauty or hope do you proffer in life? Better, far better, the muscle and bone and self-reliance of antique heathen sin, than such nerveless, boneless, pulpy non-resistance; such lying groaning by the road-side; such giving yourself over, soul and body, to the devil of despair; such selling yourself for the vain luxury of beggarly pity and astonishment from the world, because you are so sorrowful. He who gave us the bane for our medicine, gave us an antidote as part thereof. We have swallowed the former; we will not swallow the latter. We 'likes to be persecuted.'

Never yet was there a writer of generally recognized condition and power, who gave to the world any thing cheerful or merry, but the world at once expressed the utmost amazement at the condescension, and surprise that from such a 'gifted pen' there should flow any thing like 'trifling.' Schoppins Dunderheadius's great work on 'Spiritual Beadledom,' which never had a dozen readers, and whose first and only edition long since enveloped cheese and lined trunks, was in its time 'a production eminently creditable to the tremendous genius of its erudite author.' But pleasant books, full of the brave spirit of cosmopolite cheerfulness, of exuberant, healthy merriment, and of graceful gallantry; these are 'mere trifles,' though reprinted by thousands in every age; though found in every library, though read by every body, and though perhaps they act among the great motive powers of the age.

What Anglo-Saxondom-the ghost of John Kemble may complain, but the word is a useful one—what Anglo-Saxondom, and particularly America, most needs just at present, is a RATIONAL cultivation of genial, cheerful thought. We are too dismal. There is too much sour seriousness, and too much neglect of Life and Beauty, and the indefinable yet very practical and common-sense spirit of pleasantness in our social relations. We do not laugh enough, or if the word laughter seem trivial and foolish, let us say, that there is too little of that joyous feeling which abounds every where in Nature—is continually

taught by her and yet is always driven away by artificial, moping, melancholy man. In short, at the present time, if there is one subject more than any other which it is the duty of artist and author to set forth, it is that of JOYOUSNESS.

And here some may ask, what do you mean by joyousness? while the more unthinking still will shrug their shoulders, and say, inspired by the petty pride of second-hand sentiment: 'So you consider fun as the great duty of life, hey? Well, it may do very well for a clown in the ring, but I have a finer appreciation of something higher; I am of a 'serious' turn-my spirit is not like that of the common herd. I

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Oh! patience, good friends, patience, all! Faint and murky, indeed, are your ideas of the world-wide philosophy, and infinite wisdom, concealed in the perfumed depths of the lotus word joyousness. As little, perhaps, do you understand true seriousness; for it is characteristic of great truths, as of great styles of art, that those most truly appreciate and love the one who have the keenest relish for its very opposite. And the world has not yet seen one great cosmopolitan thinker, who was infinitely earnest, who did not become so by endless yearning for the exquisite beauty and consolation of the joyous.

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Joyousness is not, as many think, a constant leaping up to catch the bubbles of fun as they rise before the mind in grotesque fancies. The everlasting punster who interrupts in the most mal-apropos manner some sensible sentence, breaking in with cracked humor, which is as welcome as a straining scrape from a creaky saw might be is no minister of joyousness. Neither is the sour satirist, who cuts indifferently at good or bad, satisfied if he can only raise a laugh from those of not delicate fibre; who, while disliking infractions of the laws to which they are accustomed, still relish cruelty. Neither is the drunkard, be he of the opium, brandy, or hasheesh order, really joyous while breaking in on the laws of physical health; and as little is the zealot, the one inspired by mob electricity; the man grimly smiling in a triumph of ambition, which has cost a sour, dismal life-time, the delighted fanatic or the noisy fool. The one whose whole life is whirled away in a fashionable routine of folly, is no true disciple of joyousness; and any persons, be they whom they may, who are entirely given over to conventional rules and artificial-isms, have nothing in common with it. For they violate the laws of moral health, and if there is one characteristic more than another peculiar to joyousness, it is health. In fact, health is almost its definition, only that it lacks the intensity, elevation, and above all, the inner spirit of joyousness.

For nearly two thousand years, the advancing tide of civilization, or of ‘culture,' has thrust joyousness back as a very inferior, trivial element, and given the preference to morbid, artificial thought, developed by artificial life, and having very little place in pure health, or beautiful, inspiring nature. In the first century, the new-born element of thought was a pure beautiful spring, bubbling up from the ruined piles of the temple of Heathenism. Its every symbol preserved in the Vatican, shows, like those of early Christianity, a healthy, joyous tone, and an inspired hope, notwithstanding the terrible and melancholy-inducing persecutions which assailed it at every turn. It bore within it

self the entire germ of republicanism and of perfect civilization. But political convulsions drove it toward the East, and it returned pure perhaps at heart, but clothed in the robes of ineffable melancholy of the morbid and sickly Oriental. It came back with a hatred of joyousness and of beauty, for it had learned from Indian fakirs that it was a sin to laugh, and a great merit to be unutterably miserable. It came with all the asceticism, and gloom, and contempt for the body, which had gathered like foul vapors for thousands of years in the caves of Ellora, in the depths of the darkness of Budd' and Brahm', and with this precious provision for happiness, it set sail down the stormy sea of the Dark Ages. It met with congenial company on those waters, for it sailed right into the myriads of monsters of Northern Mythology. Undefined and terrible ghastly, and mystical, all the shapes of Scandinavian cloud-goblin land, of the German Krutschman-Moloch, and the Slavonic Cremara, or Swine Deity, gave it welcome. Their whole idea of happiness had been heretofore summed up in one word, 'blood,' and they lent a ready hand to Orientally defiled civilization, in crushing out joyousness, and all the gay train which had made life lovely to the glorious Greek. Worst of all, they attempted to force melancholy and cruelty not only into the human heart, but upon the external symbols of religion. The early Christians cherished ideas of touching beauty, and had represented CHRIST our LORD as the ideal of fair humanity. But a church council of the Dark Ages decreed, contrary to wellestablished tradition, that His form should be portrayed as meagre and homely; misled by those pagan Syrian pictures, which still disfigure every church in Russia, and whose original may be found in the avatars of Vishnu, modified by Old Persian influence. But here, at least, art and truth were too strong, and the dismal effort was repulsed. The whole Middle Age shows one long struggle between a dreary, trampling under-foot of joyousness and healthy nature, and morbid error, which, Mithridates-like, grew fat on poison; and the poison was the vanity of humanity's showing itself too great for commonsense! Then starvation and rags became a merit, and splay, crooked limbs a beauty, while dirt was apotheosized. A cardinal edict in Spain forbade ladies to wash themselves, because cleanliness promoted beauty, and beauty was sinful! Diseases utterly unknown to earlier ages sprang up, and mowed down millions. Morbid deliriums, known, indeed, of old, were revived and multiplied, driving whole countries into madness. History will never unveil the unutterable horrors, the depths under depths in illimitable seas of vileness and extraordinary perversions of mental power, which abounded from the seventh to the twelfth century. And under it all ran one note,

'A low perpetual wail, as of souls in pain,'

and the cause and the soul of the note was the edict to scorn the world and its beauty, trample down the flesh, and regard nature as devilish.

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Humanity did not submit to this rule of austerity, sourness, and demoniac torture, without a struggle; nay, it even fought bravely many times. from unholy, doggerel Latin hymns, came the old Oriental slander of women, reviling them as fair, painted devils, leading man to destruction, fit for nothing 5

VOL. LIX.

but slaves, and abusing them as the best allies of Satan; then there came back a merry note from Troubadour and Minnesinger, worshipping their lovely eyes, and pouring forth golden tributes of adoring song to their nobility of nature and warmth of heart. It is a matter of real wonder, that this extraordinary contest has attracted so little attention. While the sour ascetic sang:

'MENTIRI, nere et lacrymari, nilque tacere,

Decidere hæ veræ sunt dotes in muliere
Væ tibi fœmineo quisquis es captus jugo.'

Then a joyous Frauenlob replied with

'EARLY and late the sex I praise,

And fain their praises would deserve;
The man who mocks at woman's grace,

And from my course would make me swerve,

I'd straight attack with bitterest song.

I praise the worthy, lovely dames,
Who turn our minds from wrong.'

There were many such outbursts of the glad spirit of high-toned feeling, Love for Woman and the Beautiful, and a yearning for Joyousness, during the Middle Ages. They ring out strangely upon us from amid social oppression, like sweet voices and tinkling lutes in outer darkness. But the lot of those uttering them was a bitter one. Inexpressibly touching, well-nigh tear-awaking, are the indications here and there of those brave heretics, who dared believe that there were in Nature inexhaustible stores of beauty and consolation; if man would only lay aside his morbid, timid, crutch-requiring fears and 'ideas,' and boldly grasp at life. They peep out from wild songs of the people, from the half-hidden fancies of daring scholars, like rose-buds among leaves; from the bold books of philosophers and poets, some of whom were sainted, and some burned at the stake; yet who were all neither better nor worse than Troubadour and Minstrel; and their worst crime and best virtue was, that they wished to make the World and Life as brave, and merry, and honest, and free, as they ought to be.

And there is still need of those brave hearts, those merry men and maidens, who loved, and sang, and danced the antique hymn of joyousness; as it came down in fragments to them from the temples and groves of Arcady. The world is still too sad, too much given to straining the last nerve, grimly and dolefully, on idle nothings, which yield no return; too neglectful of the glory, and beauty, and gladness, which nature has lavished upon us. Come, friends, let us walk in those pleasant paths, where most free scope is given us, and do what we can for joyousness and genial truth. Our motto, like that of La Joyeuse, is HILARITER, and with it we will drive along with the harp-clang of stout-hearted reflections, the snapping wild-fire of hearty merriment, the trolling of gay ballads, the cheerful cries of those who push bravely on in good works; and many lovers and fair ladies shall sweep along with us, like the train of youths and maidens gay who passed away with fair Inez, into the blue West; and all that we hope is, that all who hear our lute-music, will be drawn toward us as knights were drawn of old to our fair and sovereign Lady

Venus, as she swept toward the Venusberg, kicking out of the way all canting scoundrels like the True Eckhart, who was true to nothing but dismal dog-inthe-mangerism, as such howling curs always are. Hilariter! Fall in with us, ye merry men - hilariter! Leave us not to plod along alone, like a minstrel with no company but his harp-hilariter there — joyously now! hilariter ! Saw we not the sweep of silks, and crinolines, and scarfs among yon trees? hilariter! Come on, the road is wide enough for all; the wind and sun do no harm; sweep on in the bold crusade! hilariter!

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