Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 November 1886 — What Is Culture? [ARTICLE]

What Is Culture?

This is a very large question, but we must help along our bashful young friend: “Will you kindly inform a young man what the essentials of ‘culture’ are? also what are proper works to read ? I desire to be a good conversationalist, but always feel ill at ease and am bashful. - Can you suggest a way to successfully ggercome the latter?” Ralph Waldo Emerson prefixes to an essay oficulture these lines, from which, young man, you may try to get a general notion of what culture is: “Can rules or tutors educate The demigod whom we await? Ho must be musical, Tremulous, impressional, Alive to gentle influence Of landscape and of sky, And tender to the spirit-touch Of man’s or maiden’s eye; But to his native center fast, Shall into Future fuse the Past, And the world’s flowing iates in his own mold recast." Do these lines only serve to mystify the subject still farther for .you? Well, that is because Emerson himself could not exactly define culture, and if you read his essay through you would probably be even more in the dark. Indeed, it does not seem to us the wonderful work the disciples and followers of the Concord philosopher thought it to be at the time it first appeared. Culture, dear boy, has come to be a cant term, and no end of nonsense and platitude has been written and talked about it since the day when Emerson made it the theme of Boston discussion. You want to know what is necessary to make you a cultivated man. Everything within t he range of knowledge, of thought, and of taste is necessary. All good books will help you to the end, and some which are not good may assist you in the way of comparison. Association with cultivated people and conversation with them are indispensable aids. The taste to discriminate the good from the bad in all art is essential. Social refinement is requisite. But nobody can know it all. You can learn only a very little, but what you learn learn thoroughly. Be careful to read the books of the masters of the 1 terary art, so that you will be insensibly affected by their style until you come at last to distinguish and prefer and require the superior sort. If you go to hear music, see to it that it is the music of the great artists, and take pains to look at good pictures, for gradually you will find yourself learning to enjoy them alone. And so in all things seek the best and reject the poor and commonplace. As to conversation, you will get along well enough in that wlien you become interested in what interests cultivated people. You will forget yourself in your absorption in what you are talking about. That is the way to overcome bashfulness, which comes from self-consciousness. Remember that you are not so important in other people’s eyes as in your own, and they are not singling you out for observation. You are only one among many—a drop in the bucket of humanity. So don’t worry yourself about what people are thinking of you, for they are likely to think of you not at all, or in the most careless way, unless you attract their attention by your awkward bashfulness. Even then what they think is of little consequence. What you are is the essential matter. Brave it out and regard indifference with philosophy. Cultivation ? That is something upon which a man must expend his whole life’s effort, and when all is done he will only have started on his quest. — New York Sun.