Culture hero

“ Our coal, thousands of people were saying, is the real basis of our national greatness; if our coal runs short, there is an end of the greatness of England. But what is greatness?—culture makes us ask. Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration. ”

“ One of the strong points of that national tradition which these highest circles defended and endeavoured to continue, was the recognition of talent in every shape; they envisaged literature and art with many-sided culture and wide sympathy. ”

“ In fact, every nation has its traditions, which illumine its history and enrich its life. From tradition springs the flower of culture. On it chiefly depends the cultivation of the character, the customs and manners, of a people. ”

“ Of the cultivation of the Beautiful through Literature I have already spoken. Bear with me whilst I urge on you to cultivate the other branches. The history of a people may be read in their arts as clearly as in their language. And no people can reach a high standard of culture, or fully develop the social and unselfish elements of its character, the aesthetic side of whose nature is left uncared for. ”

“ The culture which we wish to see prevail throughout our country is not learning and literary skill; it is character and intellectual openness,—that higher humanity which is latent within us all; which is power, wisdom, truth, goodness, love, sympathy, grace, and beauty; whose surpassing excellence the poor may know as well as the rich; whose charm the multitude may feel as well as the chosen few. ”

“ Such individuals have genius in one or another form and offer themselves and their products as a gift to the general welfare of their generation. Scientists, poets, musicians, inventors, artists, teachers, healers, philosophers, statesmen have appeared in each civilization adding their mite to the sum-total of community culture. ”

“ When does culture or art in him attain to the highest? It is when going beyond all thoughts of culture and art, he flings himself, in perfect sympathy and free communion, into the great mass of human interests. It is so that the greatest things have been achieved in all the higher fields of human effort—in writing, in eloquence, in painting and sculpture and music; and it is so, especially, that the doers of great things, have become the noblest men. "Art for art's sake," has been the motto for culture, with some. ”

“ From his childhood this man was taught the honored traditions of his people, and, thus trained in pride of ancestry, grew up to believe that the supreme things of life are what his kind call education, refinement, and culture. ”

“ The high virtues are not debonair, but have their redress in being illustrious at last. What forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion of their contemporaries! The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.
Let me say here, that culture cannot begin too early. In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem. ”

“ So the plays and games were schools of genius and valor: the people were refined by contact with the refinements of the best citizens, the guardians of public taste and honor providing hereby a polite and manly culture suited to the needs of the state. Education extended into the age of ripe maturity. Nor was the disciple committed to himself till he became the master. And through life he was prompted by incentives of virtue and fame. The state was venerable, ennobled as it was by the genius and services of great men; great men earning honorably their renown by teaching. ”

“ This is true of the poem of Dante; it is true of everything which we conceive of as inherited from our great predecessors, from those who built up the patrimony of human culture. Culture then is not before us, a treasure ready to be excavated from the depths of the earth, awaiting to be revealed to us. Culture is what we ourselves are making; it is the life of our spirit. ”

“ Their manners, that first of accomplishments, delight us in return, showing that the sense of beauty has dawned and their culture fairly begun. 'Tis a culture to watch them through their days' doings. ”

“ Without thinking that the heathen legends were altogether allegorical, we may suppose that the poets did not without meaning, assign the culture of the earth as the appropriate employment of mankind during the golden age, the reign of peace, innocence, and happiness. ”

“ The culture that narrows the sympathies, instead of enlarging them, has surely missed the object that should give its chief worth and dignity. The culture that reveals beauty in all its forms, that refines the sensibilities, and expands the mental horizon, that, without a sense of superiority, desires to share these things with others, and makes the lives of all men better worth living, is like the glow of fire in a cold room. ”

“ Happy he who has such a gift as this, an original faculty thus accomplished by culture, by which he can make our common life rich, significant and fair,—can give to the hour a beauty and brilliancy which shall make it eminent long after, amid dreary years of level routine! ”

“ In their sayings and doings is represented the subsoil of American character—the home life and modes of thought of those who made the culture and progress; thus endeavoring, in a pleasing manner, to teach those great truths which lie at the foundation of thrift, progress, and morality. ”

“ As one devoted to self-culture in its noblest form, who ornamented society by his imposing and graceful bearing, who electrified audiences with the splendor of his rhetoric, and lured scholars to his presence by the fame of his acquirements ”

“ The tone, the habits, the tastes, the pleasures, and, in a large sense, the morals of society depend upon its culture. I use the word culture with the meaning which is commonly given to it in the conversational language of this country, signifying not merely that training of the mental faculties by which useful knowledge is acquired, but the knowledge, appreciation and enjoyment of the beautiful in nature, literature and art, and of the noble, elevated and refined in sentiment and feeling. ”

“ She had seen nothing of the glittering tinsel of that cheap culture that is death to all true refinement, But in the daily companionship of her gentle teacher, she had lived in touch with true aristocracy, the aristocracy of heart and spirit. ”

“ Until this time the humanists had, to some extent, monopolized the treasures of classic culture, in order to parade their knowledge of which the multitude remained destitute, and so to become strange prodigies of learning and elegance. ”

“ It is not too much to say that the representative of culture—always in the high and special sense in which he practised that faith—had before him in the United States of those days a great and arduous mission, requiring plentiful courage as well as plentiful knowledge, endless good humour as well as assured taste. ”

“ If not only knowledge and art, but at the same time moral and political excellence, be taken into consideration, it becomes yet harder to reckon on an ideal scale the advance or decline from stage to stage of culture. ”

“ To reach this ideal, culture is an indispensable aid, and that is the true value of culture.' Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it; ”

“ Upon a thorough mental culture sit gracefully, and quite at home, philosophy, history, poetry, eloquence, music, painting—all in literature and the arts that can refine the taste, refresh the heart, and lead the fancy captive. ”

“ Understood in this broadest and deepest sense, a folk-lore is truer, more vital and more significant than an art-lore. It is a clearer mirror of a people’s past, a more reliable interpreter of its present trends, and a safer prophet of its culture to come. It is all this because it is the body and soul of that culture, where art is merely a vestment. The art which fits best this body and soul, this basic ethnic character, is the best art. ”

“ But culture, revealing the high origin of the apparent world and aiming at the perfection of the man as the end, degrades everything else, as health and bodily life, into means. It sees prudence not to be a several faculty, but a name for wisdom and virtue conversing with the body and its wants. Cultivated men always feel and speak so as if a great fortune, the achievement of a civil or social measure, great personal influence, a graceful and commanding address, had their value as proofs of the energy of the spirit. ”

“ By helping us to understand the life about us, culture shows us the better how to solve our own problems, and saves us from the tragedy of putting our energies into fiction, poetry, and the drama give us an insight into the longings, the temptations, the ideals of others, and so indirectly into our own hearts. ”

“ The ideal presented is that of complete harmonious culture, the aim of which is not to make an artisan, a physician, a merchant, a lawyer, but a man alive in all his faculties, touching the world at many points, for whom all knowledge is desirable, all beauty lovable, and for whom fine bearing and noble acting are indispensable. ”

“ And it must be admitted that the chief object of culture is, not merely to fill the mind with other men’s thoughts, and to be the passive recipient of their impressions of things, but to enlarge our individual intelligence, and render us more useful and efficient workers in the sphere of life to which we may be called. ”

“ As those blessings that are far off and difficult to be attained are usually those which are most highly prized, we often find persons sighing for the culture to be obtained from music, painting, and sculpture, and overlooking or undervaluing the higher culture to be derived from poetry and romance. ”

“ Those who know their besetting faults, those who have watched them and listened to them, or those who will read the instructive account recently given of them by one of themselves, the Journeyman Engineer, will agree that the idea which culture sets before us of perfection,—an increased spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy,—is an idea which the new democracy needs far more than the idea of the blessedness of the franchise, or the wonderfulness of their own industrial performances. ”

“ My dear wife, since I have been an observer in this country, I have been more and more convinced that the hero age has not yet gone. This country, so highly favored by nature, a land emphatically of sun and flowers, so abject in the slavishness and brutality of its people, needs a hero spirit for its regeneration. ”

“ Knowledge is power; we never know what bit of apparently useless insight may find application in our own lives and help us to solve our personal problems.
(3) Moreover, culture is not only informative, it is inspirational. History and biography fire the youth with a noble spirit of emulation; poetry, fiction, and the drama, and to some extent music, painting, and sculpture, arouse the emotions and direct them-if the art is good-into proper channels. ”

“ However important it may be, it must yield precedence to those kinds of culture which bear directly upon daily duties. As before hinted, literature and the fine arts are made possible by those activities which make individual and social life possible ”

“ Every vocation, even the lowliest, which we pursue in a spirit of entire sincerity, is a means of acquiring culture. The artisan may be, in his way, as truly a cultivated man as the artist or the scholar, for by culture I understand insight gained into all manner of activities through genuineness and thoroughness in one. To be cultivated is to see things in their relations. ”

“ But this term of reproach has gathered about itself all the glory that belongs to genius and skill in the useful arts, to industry, thrift and purity in the home, to patriotic valor on the field of battle, and to unpurchasable and unconquerable devotion to principle, and is now a name that is venerated by [Pg 202] every clear-headed and sound-hearted and well-informed and unprejudiced person in the world. ”

“ The problems of physical comfort and material progress, of practical charity, of political justice, of social purity, of the rights of all classes of men, of [Pg 227] education, of peace and good will, of the true grounds of religious faith are at the front, and claim our interest and devotion. Romance is not dead. The modern hero has his opportunity, an opportunity open as never before to all kinds and conditions of men. Every educated young man has an unlimited field, a free lance, and a cause worthy of his valor. ”

“ So we see that the cultivation of the intellectual nature, the acquirement of accomplishments, the practice of any art, the advantages of travel, the surroundings of elegance, may or may not tend to the genuine culture of the spirit; and as wise and earnest parents and teachers perceive this truth, they realize more and more that the great problem of culture, alike for parent and teacher, is how to develop the moral sentiment. ”

“ They are now all defunct but the parent chapter, and that is in a prosperous condition.
The society proclaims its object to be social and literary culture and the exalting of the Western standard of literary excellence. ”

“ All opportunities ought to be considered as opportunities for service. As my brother David regarded the possession of honours and wealth as demanding sacrifice for the common good, so I regarded special knowledge and special culture as means for advancing the culture of all. ”

“ But better than the literature or the history is the heroic spirit of the man, which triumphed over pain and all other physical obstacles, and brought a work of such value to his country and his time into existence. There is a great lesson as well as a lofty example in such a career, and in the service which such a man rendered by his life and work to literature and to his country. ”