"Ay, but the roughness of those new countries--the absence of
refinement--the absolute want of polish and delicacy."
"The roughness will not offend me, if it is manly. The world is full
of it. To be anything, a man must not have too nice a stomach. Such
a stomach will make him recoil from sights of misery and misfortune;
and he who recoils from such sights, will be the last to relieve,
to repair them. But while I admit the roughness and the want
of polish among these frontier men, I deny the want of delicacy.
Their habits are rude and simple, perhaps, but their tastes are
pure and unaffected, and their hearts in the right place. They
have strong affections; and strong affections, properly balanced,
are the true sources of the better sort of delicacy. All other is
merely conventional, and consists of forms and phrases, which are
very apt to keep us from the thing itself which they are intended
to represent. Give me these frank men and women of the frontier,
while my own feelings are yet strong and earnest. Here, I am
perpetually annoyed by the struggle to subdue within the social
limits the expression of that nature which is for ever boiling
up within me, and the utterance of which is neither more nor less
than the heart's utterance of the faith and hope which are in it.
We are told of those nice preachers who 'never mention hell to ears
polite.' They are the preachers of your highly-refined, sentimental
society. Whatever hell may be, they are the very teachers that,
by their mincing forbearance, conduct the poor soul that relies on
them into its jaws. It is a sort of lie not to use the properest
language to express our thoughts, but rather so to falsify our
thoughts by a sort of lack-a-daisaical phraseology which deprives
them of all their virility. A nation or community is in a bad way
for truth, when there is a tacit understanding among their members
to deal in the diminutives of a language, and forbear the calling
of things by their right names. An Englishman, wishing to designate
something which is graceful, pleasing, delicate, or fine, uses
the word 'nice'--more fitly applied to bon-bons or beefsteaks,
according to the stomach of the speaker. An energetic form of
speech is rated, in fashionable society, as particularly vulgar.
In our larger American cities, where they have much pretension but
little character, a leg must not be spoken of as such. You may say
'limb,' but not 'leg.' The word 'woman'--one of the sweetest in the
language--is supposed to disparage the female to whom it is applied.
She must be called a 'lady,' forsooth; and this word, originally
intended to pacify an aristocratic vanity, has become the ordinary
appellative of every member of that gross family which, in the
language of Shakspere, is only fit to 'suckle fools and chronicle
small beer.' I shall be more free, and feel more honest in that
rough world of the west; a region in which the dilettantism, such
as it is, of our Atlantic cities, is always very prompt to sneer
at and disparage; but I look to see the day, even in our time, when
that west shall be, not merely an empire herself, but the nursing
mother of great empires. There shall be a genius born in that vast,
wide world--a rough, unlicked genius it may be, but one whose
words shall fall upon the hills like thunder, and descend into the
valleys like a settled, heavy rain, which shall irrigate them all
with a new life. Perhaps--"