Title: Essays — First Series
Author: Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Language: English
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ESSAYS, FIRST SERIES

By Ralph Waldo Emerson


Contents

  I. HISTORY
  II. SELF-RELIANCE
  III. COMPENSATION
  IV. SPIRITUAL LAWS
  V. LOVE
  VI. FRIENDSHIP
  VII. PRUDENCE
  VIII. HEROISM
  IX. THE OVER-SOUL
  X. CIRCLES
  XI. INTELLECT
  XII. ART


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I.
HISTORY


There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are
And it cometh everywhere.


I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Cæsar’s hand, and Plato’s brain,
Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakspeare’s strain.



HISTORY


There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet
to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the
right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has
thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any
time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this
universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is
the only and sovereign agent.

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is
illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing
less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human
spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every
thought, every emotion, which belongs to it, in appropriate events. But
the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history
preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances
predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time.
A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand
forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain,
America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp,
kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his
manifold spirit to the manifold world.

This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must
solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all
to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between
the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe
is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book
is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise
of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal
forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages
explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is
one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact
in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men
have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every
revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind, and when the same
thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform
was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion
again it will solve the problem of the age. The fact narrated must
correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We, as we
read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and
executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret
experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or
Cæsar Borgia is as much an illustration of the mind’s powers and
depravations as what has befallen us. Each new law and political
movement has meaning for you. Stand before each of its tablets and say,
‘Under this mask did my Proteus nature hide itself.’ This remedies the
defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our actions
into perspective; and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance and the
waterpot lose their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can
see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon,
Alcibiades, and Catiline.

It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men and
things. Human life, as containing this, is mysterious and inviolable,
and we hedge it round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence
their ultimate reason; all express more or less distinctly some command
of this supreme, illimitable essence. Property also holds of the soul,
covers great spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold to it
with swords and laws and wide and complex combinations. The obscure
consciousness of this fact is the light of all our day, the claim of
claims; the plea for education, for justice, for charity; the
foundation of friendship and love and of the heroism and grandeur which
belong to acts of self-reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily we
always read as superior beings. Universal history, the poets, the
romancers, do not in their stateliest pictures,—in the sacerdotal, the
imperial palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius,—anywhere lose
our ear, anywhere make us feel that we intrude, that this is for better
men; but rather is it true that in their grandest strokes we feel most
at home. All that Shakspeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy
that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathize in
the great moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great
resistances, the great prosperities of men;—because there law was
enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was
struck, _for us_, as we ourselves in that place would have done or
applauded.

We have the same interest in condition and character. We honor the rich
because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace which we
feel to be proper to man, proper to us. So all that is said of the wise
man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader
his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self. All
literature writes the character of the wise man. Books, monuments,
pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he finds the lineaments
he is forming. The silent and the eloquent praise him and accost him,
and he is stimulated wherever he moves, as by personal allusions. A
true aspirant therefore never needs look for allusions personal and
laudatory in discourse. He hears the commendation, not of himself, but,
more sweet, of that character he seeks, in every word that is said
concerning character, yea further in every fact and circumstance,—in
the running river and the rustling corn. Praise is looked, homage
tendered, love flows, from mute nature, from the mountains and the
lights of the firmament.

These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us use in
broad day. The student is to read history actively and not passively;
to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus
compelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles, as never to those
who do not respect themselves. I have no expectation that any man will
read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by
men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he
is doing to-day.

The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or
state of society or mode of action in history to which there is not
somewhat corresponding in his life. Every thing tends in a wonderful
manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should
see that he can live all history in his own person. He must sit solidly
at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but
know that he is greater than all the geography and all the government
of the world; he must transfer the point of view from which history is
commonly read, from Rome and Athens and London, to himself, and not
deny his conviction that he is the court, and if England or Egypt have
any thing to say to him he will try the case; if not, let them for ever
be silent. He must attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts
yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike. The instinct
of the mind, the purpose of nature, betrays itself in the use we make
of the signal narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether
the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to
keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome
are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing
still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what
the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven
an immortal sign? London and Paris and New York must go the same way.
“What is history,” said Napoleon, “but a fable agreed upon?” This life
of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War,
Colonization, Church, Court and Commerce, as with so many flowers and
wild ornaments grave and gay. I will not make more account of them. I
believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain and the
Islands,—the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras, in
my own mind.

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our
private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes
subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only
biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,—must go
over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it
will not know. What the former age has epitomized into a formula or
rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good of verifying
for itself, by means of the wall of that rule. Somewhere, sometime, it
will demand and find compensation for that loss, by doing the work
itself. Ferguson discovered many things in astronomy which had long
been known. The better for him.

History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts
indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see
the necessary reason of every fact,—see how it could and must be. So
stand before every public and private work; before an oration of Burke,
before a victory of Napoleon, before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of
Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson; before a French Reign of Terror, and a
Salem hanging of witches; before a fanatic Revival and the Animal
Magnetism in Paris, or in Providence. We assume that we under like
influence should be alike affected, and should achieve the like; and we
aim to master intellectually the steps and reach the same height or the
same degradation that our fellow, our proxy has done.

All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the
excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis,—is the
desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There or Then,
and introduce in its place the Here and the Now. Belzoni digs and
measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes, until he can see the
end of the difference between the monstrous work and himself. When he
has satisfied himself, in general and in detail, that it was made by
such a person as he, so armed and so motived, and to ends to which he
himself should also have worked, the problem is solved; his thought
lives along the whole line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs,
passes through them all with satisfaction, and they live again to the
mind, or are now.

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and not done by us.
Surely it was by man, but we find it not in our man. But we apply
ourselves to the history of its production. We put ourselves into the
place and state of the builder. We remember the forest-dwellers, the
first temples, the adherence to the first type, and the decoration of
it as the wealth of the nation increased; the value which is given to
wood by carving led to the carving over the whole mountain of stone of
a cathedral. When we have gone through this process, and added thereto
the Catholic Church, its cross, its music, its processions, its Saints’
days and image-worship, we have as it were been the man that made the
minster; we have seen how it could and must be. We have the sufficient
reason.

The difference between men is in their principle of association. Some
men classify objects by color and size and other accidents of
appearance; others by intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause
and effect. The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of
causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poet, to the
philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all
events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the eye is
fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance. Every chemical
substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity
of cause, the variety of appearance.

Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating nature, soft and
fluid as a cloud or the air, why should we be such hard pedants, and
magnify a few forms? Why should we make account of time, or of
magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows them not, and genius, obeying
its law, knows how to play with them as a young child plays with
graybeards and in churches. Genius studies the causal thought, and far
back in the womb of things sees the rays parting from one orb, that
diverge, ere they fall, by infinite diameters. Genius watches the monad
through all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature.
Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the
grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through countless
individuals the fixed species; through many species the genus; through
all genera the steadfast type; through all the kingdoms of organized
life the eternal unity. Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and
never the same. She casts the same thought into troops of forms, as a
poet makes twenty fables with one moral. Through the bruteness and
toughness of matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own will.
The adamant streams into soft but precise form before it, and whilst I
look at it its outline and texture are changed again. Nothing is so
fleeting as form; yet never does it quite deny itself. In man we still
trace the remains or hints of all that we esteem badges of servitude in
the lower races; yet in him they enhance his nobleness and grace; as
Io, in Æschylus, transformed to a cow, offends the imagination; but how
changed when as Isis in Egypt she meets Osiris-Jove, a beautiful woman
with nothing of the metamorphosis left but the lunar horns as the
splendid ornament of her brows!

The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity equally
obvious. There is, at the surface, infinite variety of things; at the
centre there is simplicity of cause. How many are the acts of one man
in which we recognize the same character! Observe the sources of our
information in respect to the Greek genius. We have the _civil history_
of that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have
given it; a very sufficient account of what manner of persons they were
and what they did. We have the same national mind expressed for us
again in their _literature_, in epic and lyric poems, drama, and
philosophy; a very complete form. Then we have it once more in their
_architecture_, a beauty as of temperance itself, limited to the
straight line and the square,—a builded geometry. Then we have it once
again in _sculpture_, the “tongue on the balance of expression,” a
multitude of forms in the utmost freedom of action and never
transgressing the ideal serenity; like votaries performing some
religious dance before the gods, and, though in convulsive pain or
mortal combat, never daring to break the figure and decorum of their
dance. Thus of the genius of one remarkable people we have a fourfold
representation: and to the senses what more unlike than an ode of
Pindar, a marble centaur, the peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last
actions of Phocion?

Every one must have observed faces and forms which, without any
resembling feature, make a like impression on the beholder. A
particular picture or copy of verses, if it do not awaken the same
train of images, will yet superinduce the same sentiment as some wild
mountain walk, although the resemblance is nowise obvious to the
senses, but is occult and out of the reach of the understanding. Nature
is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums
the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her works, and
delights in startling us with resemblances in the most unexpected
quarters. I have seen the head of an old sachem of the forest which at
once reminded the eye of a bald mountain summit, and the furrows of the
brow suggested the strata of the rock. There are men whose manners have
the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the
friezes of the Parthenon and the remains of the earliest Greek art. And
there are compositions of the same strain to be found in the books of
all ages. What is Guido’s Rospigliosi Aurora but a morning thought, as
the horses in it are only a morning cloud? If any one will but take
pains to observe the variety of actions to which he is equally inclined
in certain moods of mind, and those to which he is averse, he will see
how deep is the chain of affinity.

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort
becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form
merely,—but, by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter
enters into his nature and can then draw him at will in every attitude.
So Roos “entered into the inmost nature of a sheep.” I knew a
draughtsman employed in a public survey who found that he could not
sketch the rocks until their geological structure was first explained
to him. In a certain state of thought is the common origin of very
diverse works. It is the spirit and not the fact that is identical. By
a deeper apprehension, and not primarily by a painful acquisition of
many manual skills, the artist attains the power of awakening other
souls to a given activity.

It has been said that “common souls pay with what they do, nobler souls
with that which they are.” And why? Because a profound nature awakens
in us by its actions and words, by its very looks and manners, the same
power and beauty that a gallery of sculpture or of pictures addresses.

Civil and natural history, the history of art and of literature, must
be explained from individual history, or must remain words. There is
nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest
us,—kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron shoe,—the roots of all
things are in man. Santa Croce and the Dome of St. Peter’s are lame
copies after a divine model. Strasburg Cathedral is a material
counterpart of the soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true poem is the
poet’s mind; the true ship is the ship-builder. In the man, could we
lay him open, we should see the reason for the last flourish and
tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the sea-shell preexists
in the secreting organs of the fish. The whole of heraldry and of
chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall pronounce your
name with all the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add.

The trivial experience of every day is always verifying some old
prediction to us and converting into things the words and signs which
we had heard and seen without heed. A lady with whom I was riding in
the forest said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as
if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer
had passed onward; a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance
of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet. The man
who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has
been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the
world. I remember one summer day in the fields my companion pointed out
to me a broad cloud, which might extend a quarter of a mile parallel to
the horizon, quite accurately in the form of a cherub as painted over
churches,—a round block in the centre, which it was easy to animate
with eyes and mouth, supported on either side by wide-stretched
symmetrical wings. What appears once in the atmosphere may appear
often, and it was undoubtedly the archetype of that familiar ornament.
I have seen in the sky a chain of summer lightning which at once showed
to me that the Greeks drew from nature when they painted the
thunderbolt in the hand of Jove. I have seen a snow-drift along the
sides of the stone wall which obviously gave the idea of the common
architectural scroll to abut a tower.

By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances we invent anew
the orders and the ornaments of architecture, as we see how each people
merely decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric temple preserves the
semblance of the wooden cabin in which the Dorian dwelt. The Chinese
pagoda is plainly a Tartar tent. The Indian and Egyptian temples still
betray the mounds and subterranean houses of their forefathers. “The
custom of making houses and tombs in the living rock,” says Heeren in
his Researches on the Ethiopians, “determined very naturally the
principal character of the Nubian Egyptian architecture to the colossal
form which it assumed. In these caverns, already prepared by nature,
the eye was accustomed to dwell on huge shapes and masses, so that when
art came to the assistance of nature it could not move on a small scale
without degrading itself. What would statues of the usual size, or neat
porches and wings have been, associated with those gigantic halls
before which only Colossi could sit as watchmen or lean on the pillars
of the interior?”

The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation of the forest
trees, with all their boughs, to a festal or solemn arcade; as the
bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the green withes that tied
them. No one can walk in a road cut through pine woods, without being
struck with the architectural appearance of the grove, especially in
winter, when the barrenness of all other trees shows the low arch of
the Saxons. In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily
the origin of the stained glass window, with which the Gothic
cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through
the bare and crossing branches of the forest. Nor can any lover of
nature enter the old piles of Oxford and the English cathedrals,
without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder,
and that his chisel, his saw and plane still reproduced its ferns, its
spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, oak, pine, fir and spruce.

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable
demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an
eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the
aerial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty.

In like manner all public facts are to be individualized, all private
facts are to be generalized. Then at once History becomes fluid and
true, and Biography deep and sublime. As the Persian imitated in the
slender shafts and capitals of his architecture the stem and flower of
the lotus and palm, so the Persian court in its magnificent era never
gave over the nomadism of its barbarous tribes, but travelled from
Ecbatana, where the spring was spent, to Susa in summer and to Babylon
for the winter.

In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and Agriculture are
the two antagonist facts. The geography of Asia and of Africa
necessitated a nomadic life. But the nomads were the terror of all
those whom the soil or the advantages of a market had induced to build
towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the
perils of the state from nomadism. And in these late and civil
countries of England and America these propensities still fight out the
old battle, in the nation and in the individual. The nomads of Africa
were constrained to wander, by the attacks of the gad-fly, which drives
the cattle mad, and so compels the tribe to emigrate in the rainy
season and to drive off the cattle to the higher sandy regions. The
nomads of Asia follow the pasturage from month to month. In America and
Europe the nomadism is of trade and curiosity; a progress, certainly,
from the gad-fly of Astaboras to the Anglo and Italo-mania of Boston
Bay. Sacred cities, to which a periodical religious pilgrimage was
enjoined, or stringent laws and customs, tending to invigorate the
national bond, were the check on the old rovers; and the cumulative
values of long residence are the restraints on the itineracy of the
present day. The antagonism of the two tendencies is not less active in
individuals, as the love of adventure or the love of repose happens to
predominate. A man of rude health and flowing spirits has the faculty
of rapid domestication, lives in his wagon and roams through all
latitudes as easily as a Calmuc. At sea, or in the forest, or in the
snow, he sleeps as warm, dines with as good appetite, and associates as
happily as beside his own chimneys. Or perhaps his facility is deeper
seated, in the increased range of his faculties of observation, which
yield him points of interest wherever fresh objects meet his eyes. The
pastoral nations were needy and hungry to desperation; and this
intellectual nomadism, in its excess, bankrupts the mind through the
dissipation of power on a miscellany of objects. The home-keeping wit,
on the other hand, is that continence or content which finds all the
elements of life in its own soil; and which has its own perils of
monotony and deterioration, if not stimulated by foreign infusions.

Every thing the individual sees without him corresponds to his states
of mind, and every thing is in turn intelligible to him, as his onward
thinking leads him into the truth to which that fact or series belongs.

The primeval world,—the Fore-World, as the Germans say,—I can dive to
it in myself as well as grope for it with researching fingers in
catacombs, libraries, and the broken reliefs and torsos of ruined
villas.

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history,
letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic or Homeric
age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or
five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally
through a Grecian period. The Grecian state is the era of the bodily
nature, the perfection of the senses,—of the spiritual nature unfolded
in strict unity with the body. In it existed those human forms which
supplied the sculptor with his models of Hercules, Phœbus, and Jove;
not like the forms abounding in the streets of modern cities, wherein
the face is a confused blur of features, but composed of incorrupt,
sharply defined and symmetrical features, whose eye-sockets are so
formed that it would be impossible for such eyes to squint and take
furtive glances on this side and on that, but they must turn the whole
head. The manners of that period are plain and fierce. The reverence
exhibited is for personal qualities; courage, address, self-command,
justice, strength, swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest. Luxury and
elegance are not known. A sparse population and want make every man his
own valet, cook, butcher and soldier, and the habit of supplying his
own needs educates the body to wonderful performances. Such are the
Agamemnon and Diomed of Homer, and not far different is the picture
Xenophon gives of himself and his compatriots in the Retreat of the Ten
Thousand. “After the army had crossed the river Teleboas in Armenia,
there fell much snow, and the troops lay miserably on the ground
covered with it. But Xenophon arose naked, and taking an axe, began to
split wood; whereupon others rose and did the like.” Throughout his
army exists a boundless liberty of speech. They quarrel for plunder,
they wrangle with the generals on each new order, and Xenophon is as
sharp-tongued as any and sharper-tongued than most, and so gives as
good as he gets. Who does not see that this is a gang of great boys,
with such a code of honor and such lax discipline as great boys have?

The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, and indeed of all the old
literature, is that the persons speak simply,—speak as persons who have
great good sense without knowing it, before yet the reflective habit
has become the predominant habit of the mind. Our admiration of the
antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural. The Greeks
are not reflective, but perfect in their senses and in their health,
with the finest physical organization in the world. Adults acted with
the simplicity and grace of children. They made vases, tragedies, and
statues, such as healthy senses should,—that is, in good taste. Such
things have continued to be made in all ages, and are now, wherever a
healthy physique exists; but, as a class, from their superior
organization, they have surpassed all. They combine the energy of
manhood with the engaging unconsciousness of childhood. The attraction
of these manners is that they belong to man, and are known to every man
in virtue of his being once a child; besides that there are always
individuals who retain these characteristics. A person of childlike
genius and inborn energy is still a Greek, and revives our love of the
Muse of Hellas. I admire the love of nature in the Philoctetes. In
reading those fine apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, mountains
and waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I feel the
eternity of man, the identity of his thought. The Greek had it seems
the same fellow-beings as I. The sun and moon, water and fire, met his
heart precisely as they meet mine. Then the vaunted distinction between
Greek and English, between Classic and Romantic schools, seems
superficial and pedantic. When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to
me,—when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no
more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls
are tinged with the same hue, and do as it were run into one, why
should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian
years?

The student interprets the age of chivalry by his own age of chivalry,
and the days of maritime adventure and circumnavigation by quite
parallel miniature experiences of his own. To the sacred history of the
world he has the same key. When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps
of antiquity merely echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer
of his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of
tradition and the caricature of institutions.

Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us
new facts in nature. I see that men of God have from time to time
walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart and soul
of the commonest hearer. Hence evidently the tripod, the priest, the
priestess inspired by the divine afflatus.

Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They cannot unite him
to history, or reconcile him with themselves. As they come to revere
their intuitions and aspire to live holily, their own piety explains
every fact, every word.

How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Menu, of
Socrates, domesticate themselves in the mind. I cannot find any
antiquity in them. They are mine as much as theirs.

I have seen the first monks and anchorets, without crossing seas or
centuries. More than once some individual has appeared to me with such
negligence of labor and such commanding contemplation, a haughty
beneficiary begging in the name of God, as made good to the nineteenth
century Simeon the Stylite, the Thebais, and the first Capuchins.

The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian, Brahmin, Druid,
and Inca, is expounded in the individual’s private life. The cramping
influence of a hard formalist on a young child, in repressing his
spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that without
producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even much
sympathy with the tyranny,—is a familiar fact, explained to the child
when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth
is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and words and forms
of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth. The fact
teaches him how Belus was worshipped and how the Pyramids were built,
better than the discovery by Champollion of the names of all the
workmen and the cost of every tile. He finds Assyria and the Mounds of
Cholula at his door, and himself has laid the courses.

Again, in that protest which each considerate person makes against the
superstition of his times, he repeats step for step the part of old
reformers, and in the search after truth finds, like them, new perils
to virtue. He learns again what moral vigor is needed to supply the
girdle of a superstition. A great licentiousness treads on the heels of
a reformation. How many times in the history of the world has the
Luther of the day had to lament the decay of piety in his own
household! “Doctor,” said his wife to Martin Luther, one day, “how is
it that whilst subject to papacy we prayed so often and with such
fervor, whilst now we pray with the utmost coldness and very seldom?”

The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has in
literature,—in all fable as well as in all history. He finds that the
poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible situations,
but that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true for one and
true for all. His own secret biography he finds in lines wonderfully
intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born. One after another
he comes up in his private adventures with every fable of Æsop, of
Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and verifies them
with his own head and hands.

The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper creations of the
imagination and not of the fancy, are universal verities. What a range
of meanings and what perpetual pertinence has the story of Prometheus!
Beside its primary value as the first chapter of the history of Europe,
(the mythology thinly veiling authentic facts, the invention of the
mechanic arts and the migration of colonies,) it gives the history of
religion, with some closeness to the faith of later ages. Prometheus is
the Jesus of the old mythology. He is the friend of man; stands between
the unjust “justice” of the Eternal Father and the race of mortals, and
readily suffers all things on their account. But where it departs from
the Calvinistic Christianity and exhibits him as the defier of Jove, it
represents a state of mind which readily appears wherever the doctrine
of Theism is taught in a crude, objective form, and which seems the
self-defence of man against this untruth, namely a discontent with the
believed fact that a God exists, and a feeling that the obligation of
reverence is onerous. It would steal if it could the fire of the
Creator, and live apart from him and independent of him. The Prometheus
Vinctus is the romance of skepticism. Not less true to all time are the
details of that stately apologue. Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus,
said the poets. When the gods come among men, they are not known. Jesus
was not; Socrates and Shakspeare were not. Antaeus was suffocated by
the gripe of Hercules, but every time he touched his mother earth his
strength was renewed. Man is the broken giant, and in all his weakness
both his body and his mind are invigorated by habits of conversation
with nature. The power of music, the power of poetry, to unfix and as
it were clap wings to solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus.
The philosophical perception of identity through endless mutations of
form makes him know the Proteus. What else am I who laughed or wept
yesterday, who slept last night like a corpse, and this morning stood
and ran? And what see I on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus?
I can symbolize my thought by using the name of any creature, of any
fact, because every creature is man agent or patient. Tantalus is but a
name for you and me. Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking the
waters of thought which are always gleaming and waving within sight of
the soul. The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were; but
men and women are only half human. Every animal of the barn-yard, the
field and the forest, of the earth and of the waters that are under the
earth, has contrived to get a footing and to leave the print of its
features and form in some one or other of these upright, heaven-facing
speakers. Ah! brother, stop the ebb of thy soul,—ebbing downward into
the forms into whose habits thou hast now for many years slid. As near
and proper to us is also that old fable of the Sphinx, who was said to
sit in the road-side and put riddles to every passenger. If the man
could not answer, she swallowed him alive. If he could solve the
riddle, the Sphinx was slain. What is our life but an endless flight of
winged facts or events? In splendid variety these changes come, all
putting questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a
superior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts
encumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine, the
men of _sense_, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished
every spark of that light by which man is truly man. But if the man is
true to his better instincts or sentiments, and refuses the dominion of
facts, as one that comes of a higher race; remains fast by the soul and
sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly and supple into their
places; they know their master, and the meanest of them glorifies him.

See in Goethe’s Helena the same desire that every word should be a
thing. These figures, he would say, these Chirons, Griffins, Phorkyas,
Helen and Leda, are somewhat, and do exert a specific influence on the
mind. So far then are they eternal entities, as real to-day as in the
first Olympiad. Much revolving them he writes out freely his humor, and
gives them body to his own imagination. And although that poem be as
vague and fantastic as a dream, yet is it much more attractive than the
more regular dramatic pieces of the same author, for the reason that it
operates a wonderful relief to the mind from the routine of customary
images,—awakens the reader’s invention and fancy by the wild freedom of
the design, and by the unceasing succession of brisk shocks of
surprise.

The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of the bard, sits
on his neck and writes through his hand; so that when he seems to vent
a mere caprice and wild romance, the issue is an exact allegory. Hence
Plato said that “poets utter great and wise things which they do not
themselves understand.” All the fictions of the Middle Age explain
themselves as a masked or frolic expression of that which in grave
earnest the mind of that period toiled to achieve. Magic and all that
is ascribed to it is a deep presentiment of the powers of science. The
shoes of swiftness, the sword of sharpness, the power of subduing the
elements, of using the secret virtues of minerals, of understanding the
voices of birds, are the obscure efforts of the mind in a right
direction. The preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual
youth, and the like, are alike the endeavour of the human spirit “to
bend the shows of things to the desires of the mind.”

In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul a garland and a rose bloom on the
head of her who is faithful, and fade on the brow of the inconstant. In
the story of the Boy and the Mantle even a mature reader may be
surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the triumph of the gentle
Venelas; and indeed all the postulates of elfin annals,—that the
fairies do not like to be named; that their gifts are capricious and
not to be trusted; that who seeks a treasure must not speak; and the
like,—I find true in Concord, however they might be in Cornwall or
Bretagne.

Is it otherwise in the newest romance? I read the Bride of Lammermoor.
Sir William Ashton is a mask for a vulgar temptation, Ravenswood Castle
a fine name for proud poverty, and the foreign mission of state only a
Bunyan disguise for honest industry. We may all shoot a wild bull that
would toss the good and beautiful, by fighting down the unjust and
sensual. Lucy Ashton is another name for fidelity, which is always
beautiful and always liable to calamity in this world.

But along with the civil and metaphysical history of man, another
history goes daily forward,—that of the external world,—in which he is
not less strictly implicated. He is the compend of time; he is also the
correlative of nature. His power consists in the multitude of his
affinities, in the fact that his life is intertwined with the whole
chain of organic and inorganic being. In old Rome the public roads
beginning at the Forum proceeded north, south, east, west, to the
centre of every province of the empire, making each market-town of
Persia, Spain and Britain pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so
out of the human heart go as it were highways to the heart of every
object in nature, to reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a
bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the
world. His faculties refer to natures out of him and predict the world
he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists,
or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live
without a world. Put Napoleon in an island prison, let his faculties
find no men to act on, no Alps to climb, no stake to play for, and he
would beat the air, and appear stupid. Transport him to large
countries, dense population, complex interests and antagonist power,
and you shall see that the man Napoleon, bounded that is by such a
profile and outline, is not the virtual Napoleon. This is but Talbot’s
shadow;—

“His substance is not here.
For what you see is but the smallest part
And least proportion of humanity;
But were the whole frame here,
It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch,
Your roof were not sufficient to contain it.”
—Henry VI.

Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon. Newton and Laplace
need myriads of age and thick-strewn celestial areas. One may say a
gravitating solar system is already prophesied in the nature of
Newton’s mind. Not less does the brain of Davy or of Gay-Lussac, from
childhood exploring the affinities and repulsions of particles,
anticipate the laws of organization. Does not the eye of the human
embryo predict the light? the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of
harmonic sound? Do not the constructive fingers of Watt, Fulton,
Whittemore, Arkwright, predict the fusible, hard, and temperable
texture of metals, the properties of stone, water, and wood? Do not the
lovely attributes of the maiden child predict the refinements and
decorations of civil society? Here also we are reminded of the action
of man on man. A mind might ponder its thought for ages and not gain so
much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day. Who
knows himself before he has been thrilled with indignation at an
outrage, or has heard an eloquent tongue, or has shared the throb of
thousands in a national exultation or alarm? No man can antedate his
experience, or guess what faculty or feeling a new object shall unlock,
any more than he can draw to-day the face of a person whom he shall see
to-morrow for the first time.

I will not now go behind the general statement to explore the reason of
this correspondency. Let it suffice that in the light of these two
facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its
correlative, history is to be read and written.

Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and reproduce its treasures
for each pupil. He too shall pass through the whole cycle of
experience. He shall collect into a focus the rays of nature. History
no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just
and wise man. You shall not tell me by languages and titles a catalogue
of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you
have lived. A man shall be the Temple of Fame. He shall walk, as the
poets have described that goddess, in a robe painted all over with
wonderful events and experiences;—his own form and features by their
exalted intelligence shall be that variegated vest. I shall find in him
the Foreworld; in his childhood the Age of Gold, the Apples of
Knowledge, the Argonautic Expedition, the calling of Abraham, the
building of the Temple, the Advent of Christ, Dark Ages, the Revival of
Letters, the Reformation, the discovery of new lands, the opening of
new sciences and new regions in man. He shall be the priest of Pan, and
bring with him into humble cottages the blessing of the morning stars,
and all the recorded benefits of heaven and earth.

Is there somewhat overweening in this claim? Then I reject all I have
written, for what is the use of pretending to know what we know not?
But it is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one
fact without seeming to belie some other. I hold our actual knowledge
very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the
fungus under foot, the lichen on the log. What do I know
sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of life? As old as
the Caucasian man,—perhaps older,—these creatures have kept their
counsel beside him, and there is no record of any word or sign that has
passed from one to the other. What connection do the books show between
the fifty or sixty chemical elements and the historical eras? Nay, what
does history yet record of the metaphysical annals of man? What light
does it shed on those mysteries which we hide under the names Death and
Immortality? Yet every history should be written in a wisdom which
divined the range of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols. I
am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is.
How many times we must say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What
does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to
these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or
succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kanaka in his
canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?

Broader and deeper we must write our annals,—from an ethical
reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative
conscience,—if we would trulier express our central and wide-related
nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to
which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us,
shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science and of letters is
not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child and
unschooled farmer’s boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to
be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.



II.
SELF-RELIANCE


“Ne te quæsiveris extra.”

“Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”

_Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune._


Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat,
Wintered with the hawk and fox.
Power and speed be hands and feet.



SELF-RELIANCE


I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which
were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition
in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they
instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe
your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private
heart is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent
conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due
time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us
by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind
is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is
that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men,
but what _they_ thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that
gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the
lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without
notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we
recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a
certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting
lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous
impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry
of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with
masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the
time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from
another.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the
conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he
must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the
wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to
him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given
to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and
none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until
he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes
much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory
is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray
should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half
express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us
represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good
issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work
made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his
heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done
otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not
deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no
invention, no hope.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the
place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your
contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done
so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age,
betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated
at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their
being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same
transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected
corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers
and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing on Chaos and
the Dark.

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text in the face and
behavior of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel
mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed
the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their
mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in
their faces we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody; all
conform to it; so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the
adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty
and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it
enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand
by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak
to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear
and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries.
Bashful or bold then, he will know how to make us seniors very
unnecessary.

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as
much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy
attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in the
playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on
such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their
merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting,
silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about
consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine
verdict. You must court him; he does not court you. But the man is as
it were clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once
acted or spoken with _éclat_ he is a committed person, watched by the
sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter
into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass
again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges and, having
observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable,
unaffrighted innocence,—must always be formidable. He would utter
opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not private but
necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men and put them in
fear.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and
inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in
conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is
a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better
securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and
culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity.
Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but
names and customs.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather
immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must
explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity
of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the
suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I
was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me
with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, “What have I
to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?”
my friend suggested,—“But these impulses may be from below, not from
above.” I replied, “They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the
Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.” No law can be sacred
to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily
transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my
constitution; the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry
himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were
titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we
capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead
institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways
me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the
rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of
philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful
cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes,
why should I not say to him, ‘Go love thy infant; love thy
wood-chopper; be good-natured and modest; have that grace; and never
varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible
tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite
at home.’ Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is
handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some
edge to it,—else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached,
as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and
whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius
calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, _Whim_. I hope
it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in
explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude
company. Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my
obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they _my_ poor?
I tell thee thou foolish philanthropist that I grudge the dollar, the
dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I
do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual
affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be;
but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of
fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now
stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies;—though I
confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a
wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the
rule. There is the man _and_ his virtues. Men do what is called a good
action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a
fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are
done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world,—as
invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I
do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for
a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it
be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I
wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask
primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the
man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no difference
whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent. I
cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few
and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own
assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This
rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for
the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder
because you will always find those who think they know what is your
duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the
world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the
great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect
sweetness the independence of solitude.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is
that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the
impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute
to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the
government or against it, spread your table like base
housekeepers,—under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the
precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your
proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and
you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a
blindman’s-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I
anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and
topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not
know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous
word? Do I not know that with all this ostentation of examining the
grounds of the institution he will do no such thing? Do I not know that
he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, the permitted
side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained
attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation.
Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief,
and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion.
This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a
few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite
true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so
that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to
set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the
prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut
of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine
expression. There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does
not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean “the
foolish face of praise,” the forced smile which we put on in company
where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not
interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved but moved by a low
usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the
most disagreeable sensation.

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And
therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The by-standers
look askance on him in the public street or in the friend’s parlor. If
this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own
he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the
multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on
and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is the
discontent of the multitude more formidable than that of the senate and
the college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the world to
brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and
prudent, for they are timid, as being very vulnerable themselves. But
when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added,
when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent
brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and
mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike
as a trifle of no concernment.

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a
reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no
other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath
to disappoint them.

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about
this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have
stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict
yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on
your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring
the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in
a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the
Deity, yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them
heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color.
Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and
flee.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by
little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great
soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his
shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and
to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it
contradict every thing you said to-day.—‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be
misunderstood.’—Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was
misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and
Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took
flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will
are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes
and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it
matter how you gauge and try him. A character is like an acrostic or
Alexandrian stanza;—read it forward, backward, or across, it still
spells the same thing. In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God
allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect
or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical,
though I mean it not and see it not. My book should smell of pines and
resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should
interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web
also. We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men
imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt
actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be
each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions
will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost
sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One
tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line
of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it
straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will
explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Your
conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done
singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can
be firm enough to-day to do right and scorn eyes, I must have done so
much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now.
Always scorn appearances and you always may. The force of character is
cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into
this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field,
which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great
days and victories behind. They shed an united light on the advancing
actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels. That is it
which throws thunder into Chatham’s voice, and dignity into
Washington’s port, and America into Adams’s eye. Honor is venerable to
us because it is no ephemera. It is always ancient virtue. We worship
it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it and pay it homage
because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is
self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate
pedigree, even if shown in a young person.

I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and
consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.
Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan
fife. Let us never bow and apologize more. A great man is coming to eat
at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to
please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it
kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth
mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face
of custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all
history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working
wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or
place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He
measures you and all men and all events. Ordinarily, every body in
society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other person.
Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the
whole creation. The man must be so much that he must make all
circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an
age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish
his design;—and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of
clients. A man Cæsar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman
Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his
genius that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An
institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the
Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox;
Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called
“the height of Rome”; and all history resolves itself very easily into
the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him
not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy,
a bastard, or an interloper in the world which exists for him. But the
man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the
force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when
he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an
alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say
like that, ‘Who are you, Sir?’ Yet they all are his, suitors for his
notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take
possession. The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me,
but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular fable of the sot
who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s
house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his
waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured
that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it
symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot,
but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a
true prince.

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history our imagination
plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier
vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common
day’s work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total
of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred and Scanderbeg
and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue? As
great a stake depends on your private act to-day, as followed their
public and renowned steps. When private men shall act with original
views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to
those of gentlemen.

The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized the
eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual
reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful loyalty with which
men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, or the great
proprietor to walk among them by a law of his own, make his own scale
of men and things and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money
but with honor, and represent the law in his person, was the
hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified their consciousness of
their own right and comeliness, the right of every man.

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we
inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the
aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is
the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax,
without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into
trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear?
The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of
virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote
this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are
tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis
cannot go, all things find their common origin. For the sense of being
which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse
from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with
them and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and
being also proceed. We first share the life by which things exist and
afterwards see them as appearances in nature and forget that we have
shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here
are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom and which
cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of
immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs
of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do
nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask
whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all
philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can
affirm. Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind
and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary
perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the expression of
them, but he knows that these things are so, like day and night, not to
be disputed. My wilful actions and acquisitions are but roving;—the
idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion, command my curiosity and
respect. Thoughtless people contradict as readily the statement of
perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more readily; for they do
not distinguish between perception and notion. They fancy that I choose
to see this or that thing. But perception is not whimsical, but fatal.
If I see a trait, my children will see it after me, and in course of
time all mankind,—although it may chance that no one has seen it before
me. For my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun.

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is
profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh
he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the
world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls,
from the centre of the present thought; and new date and new create the
whole. Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, old
things pass away,—means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now,
and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are made
sacred by relation to it,—one as much as another. All things are
dissolved to their centre by their cause, and in the universal miracle
petty and particular miracles disappear. If therefore a man claims to
know and speak of God and carries you backward to the phraseology of
some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe
him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and
completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast
his ripened being? Whence then this worship of the past? The centuries
are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. Time and
space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is
light: where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an
impertinence and an injury if it be any thing more than a cheerful
apologue or parable of my being and becoming.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say
‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before
the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window
make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what
they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There
is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.
Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown
flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its
nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike. But
man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with
reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround
him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and
strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not
yet hear God himself unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what
David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price
on a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote
the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the
men of talents and character they chance to see,—painfully recollecting
the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point
of view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them
and are willing to let the words go; for at any time they can use words
as good when occasion comes. If we live truly, we shall see truly. It
is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be
weak. When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory
of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his
voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of
the corn.

And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid;
probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far-off remembering
of the intuition. That thought by what I can now nearest approach to
say it, is this. When good is near you, when you have life in yourself,
it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the
footprints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall
not hear any name;—the way, the thought, the good shall be wholly
strange and new. It shall exclude example and experience. You take the
way from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed are its
forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is
somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision there is nothing that
can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over passion
beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of
Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well.
Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea; long
intervals of time, years, centuries, are of no account. This which I
think and feel underlay every former state of life and circumstances,
as it does underlie my present, and what is called life, and what is
called death.

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of
repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new
state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one
fact the world hates; that the soul _becomes;_ for that for ever
degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a
shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas
equally aside. Why then do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the
soul is present there will be power not confident but agent. To talk of
reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which
relies because it works and is. Who has more obedience than I masters
me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by
the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric when we speak of
eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man
or a company of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of
nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men,
poets, who are not.

This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on
every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE.
Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it
constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into
all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they
contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whaling, war, eloquence,
personal weight, are somewhat, and engage my respect as examples of its
presence and impure action. I see the same law working in nature for
conservation and growth. Power is, in nature, the essential measure of
right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot
help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and
orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the
vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of
the self-sufficing and therefore self-relying soul.

Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the
cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books
and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the
invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within.
Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our own law
demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our native riches.

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his
genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with
the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the
urns of other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church before
the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool,
how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or
sanctuary! So let us always sit. Why should we assume the faults of our
friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our
hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood and I
have all men’s. Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly,
even to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your isolation must not
be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At times the
whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic
trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all
knock at once at thy closet door and say,—‘Come out unto us.’ But keep
thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to
annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but
through my act. “What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave
ourselves of the love.”

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let
us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war
and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts.
This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check
this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the
expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we
converse. Say to them, ‘O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O
friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward
I am the truth’s. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law
less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities. I
shall endeavour to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the
chaste husband of one wife,—but these relations I must fill after a new
and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I
cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for
what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to
deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will
so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the
sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me and the heart appoints. If you
are noble, I will love you: if you are not, I will not hurt you and
myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same
truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this
not selfishly but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and
mine, and all men’s, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in
truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what is
dictated by your nature as well as mine, and if we follow the truth it
will bring us out safe at last.’—But so may you give these friends
pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their
sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when
they look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they justify
me and do the same thing.

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a
rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold
sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the
law of consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one or the
other of which we must be shriven. You may fulfil your round of duties
by clearing yourself in the _direct_, or in the _reflex_ way. Consider
whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin,
neighbor, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these can upbraid you. But
I may also neglect this reflex standard and absolve me to myself. I
have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of duty
to many offices that are called duties. But if I can discharge its
debts it enables me to dispense with the popular code. If any one
imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.

And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the
common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a
taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that
he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a
simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others!

If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by
distinction _society_, he will see the need of these ethics. The sinew
and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous,
desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune,
afraid of death and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and
perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our
social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot
satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to
their practical force and do lean and beg day and night continually.
Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our
marriages, our religion we have not chosen, but society has chosen for
us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where
strength is born.

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they lose all
heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is _ruined_. If the
finest genius studies at one of our colleges and is not installed in an
office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or
New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in
being disheartened and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy
lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the
professions, who _teams it, farms it, peddles_, keeps a school,
preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so
forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is
worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and
feels no shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone
his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred
chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of man and tell men they are
not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the
exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the word
made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations; that he should be
ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself,
tossing the laws, the books, idolatries and customs out of the window,
we pity him no more but thank and revere him;—and that teacher shall
restore the life of man to splendor and make his name dear to all
history.

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution
in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their
education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association;
in their property; in their speculative views.

1. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy
office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks
for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and
loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and
mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular commodity,
any thing less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation
of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the
soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God
pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private
end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature
and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not
beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer
kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with
the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though
for cheap ends. Caratach, in Fletcher’s Bonduca, when admonished to
inquire the mind of the god Audate, replies,—

     “His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors;
     Our valors are our best gods.”

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want
of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities if you can
thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work and already the
evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to
them who weep foolishly and sit down and cry for company, instead of
imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting
them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of
fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the
self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide; him all tongues
greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out
to him and embraces him because he did not need it. We solicitously and
apologetically caress and celebrate him because he held on his way and
scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated him.
“To the persevering mortal,” said Zoroaster, “the blessed Immortals are
swift.”

As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a
disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, ‘Let
not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us,
and we will obey.’ Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my
brother, because he has shut his own temple doors and recites fables
merely of his brother’s, or his brother’s brother’s God. Every new mind
is a new classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and
power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, it imposes
its classification on other men, and lo! a new system. In proportion to
the depth of the thought, and so to the number of the objects it
touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his complacency. But
chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which are also
classifications of some powerful mind acting on the elemental thought
of duty, and man’s relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism,
Quakerism, Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same delight in
subordinating every thing to the new terminology as a girl who has just
learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will
happen for a time that the pupil will find his intellectual power has
grown by the study of his master’s mind. But in all unbalanced minds
the classification is idolized, passes for the end and not for a
speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to
their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe; the
luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built.
They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to see,—how you can
see; ‘It must be somehow that you stole the light from us.’ They do not
yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any
cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call it their own.
If they are honest and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will
be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and
the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed,
million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the first morning.

2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling,
whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all
educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable
in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an
axis of the earth. In manly hours we feel that duty is our place. The
soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his
necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or
into foreign lands, he is at home still and shall make men sensible by
the expression of his countenance that he goes, the missionary of
wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign and not
like an interloper or a valet.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe for
the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is
first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding
somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get
somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows
old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and
mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to
ruins.

Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the
indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can
be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk,
embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples,
and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting,
identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I
affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not
intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness
affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and
our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our
bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation
but the travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign
taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions,
our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant.
The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his
own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his
own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed.
And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty,
convenience, grandeur of thought and quaint expression are as near to
us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love
the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil,
the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of
the government, he will create a house in which all these will find
themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every
moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of
the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half
possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach
him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has
exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakspeare?
Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington,
or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of
Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakspeare will
never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned
you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this
moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal
chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or
Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul, all
rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat
itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can
reply to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue
are two organs of one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of
thy life, obey thy heart and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again.

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our
spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of
society, and no man improves.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on
the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is
civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this
change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given something is
taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts. What a
contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American,
with a watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the
naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an
undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of
the two men and you shall see that the white man has lost his
aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage
with a broad axe and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as
if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send
the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He
has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by
the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the
information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a
star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows
as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial
in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload
his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it
may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have
not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in
establishments and forms some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was
a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard
of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A singular
equality may be observed between the great men of the first and of the
last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of
the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than Plutarch’s
heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race
progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men,
but they leave no class. He who is really of their class will not be
called by their name, but will be his own man, and in his turn the
founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period are only its
costume and do not invigorate men. The harm of the improved machinery
may compensate its good. Hudson and Behring accomplished so much in
their fishing-boats as to astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment
exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an
opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena
than any one since. Columbus found the New World in an undecked boat.
It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and
machinery which were introduced with loud laudation a few years or
centuries before. The great genius returns to essential man. We
reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of
science, and yet Napoleon conquered Europe by the bivouac, which
consisted of falling back on naked valor and disencumbering it of all
aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Las
Cases, “without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries and
carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should
receive his supply of corn, grind it in his hand-mill, and bake his
bread himself.”

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is
composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to
the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a
nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments
which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away
from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the
religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and
they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults
on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has,
and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his
property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what
he has if he see that it is accidental,—came to him by inheritance, or
gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong
to him, has no root in him and merely lies there because no revolution
or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is, does always by
necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property, which
does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or
storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man
breathes. “Thy lot or portion of life,” said the Caliph Ali, “is
seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.” Our
dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for
numbers. The political parties meet in numerous conventions; the
greater the concourse and with each new uproar of announcement, The
delegation from Essex! The Democrats from New Hampshire! The Whigs of
Maine! the young patriot feels himself stronger than before by a new
thousand of eyes and arms. In like manner the reformers summon
conventions and vote and resolve in multitude. Not so, O friends! will
the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method precisely the
reverse. It is only as a man puts off all foreign support and stands
alone that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every
recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a town? Ask nothing of
men, and, in the endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently
appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power
is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him
and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his
thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position,
commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his
feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain
all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful
these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God.
In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of
Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A
political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the
return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your
spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe
it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you
peace but the triumph of principles.



III.
COMPENSATION


The wings of Time are black and white,
Pied with morning and with night.
Mountain tall and ocean deep
Trembling balance duly keep.
In changing moon, in tidal wave,
Glows the feud of Want and Have.
Gauge of more and less through space
Electric star and pencil plays.
The lonely Earth amid the balls
That hurry through the eternal halls,
A makeweight flying to the void,
Supplemental asteroid,
Or compensatory spark,
Shoots across the neutral Dark.


Man’s the elm, and Wealth the vine,
Stanch and strong the tendrils twine:
Though the frail ringlets thee deceive,
None from its stock that vine can reave.
Fear not, then, thou child infirm,
There’s no god dare wrong a worm.
Laurel crowns cleave to deserts
And power to him who power exerts;
Hast not thy share? On winged feet,
Lo! it rushes thee to meet;
And all that Nature made thy own,
Floating in air or pent in stone,
Will rive the hills and swim the sea
And, like thy shadow, follow thee.



COMPENSATION


Ever since I was a boy I have wished to write a discourse on
Compensation; for it seemed to me when very young that on this subject
life was ahead of theology and the people knew more than the preachers
taught. The documents too from which the doctrine is to be drawn,
charmed my fancy by their endless variety, and lay always before me,
even in sleep; for they are the tools in our hands, the bread in our
basket, the transactions of the street, the farm and the
dwelling-house; greetings, relations, debts and credits, the influence
of character, the nature and endowment of all men. It seemed to me also
that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the present action of
the soul of this world, clean from all vestige of tradition; and so the
heart of man might be bathed by an inundation of eternal love,
conversing with that which he knows was always and always must be,
because it really is now. It appeared moreover that if this doctrine
could be stated in terms with any resemblance to those bright
intuitions in which this truth is sometimes revealed to us, it would be
a star in many dark hours and crooked passages in our journey, that
would not suffer us to lose our way.

I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon at church.
The preacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy, unfolded in the
ordinary manner the doctrine of the Last Judgment. He assumed that
judgment is not executed in this world; that the wicked are successful;
that the good are miserable; and then urged from reason and from
Scripture a compensation to be made to both parties in the next life.
No offence appeared to be taken by the congregation at this doctrine.
As far as I could observe when the meeting broke up they separated
without remark on the sermon.

Yet what was the import of this teaching? What did the preacher mean by
saying that the good are miserable in the present life? Was it that
houses and lands, offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are had by
unprincipled men, whilst the saints are poor and despised; and that a
compensation is to be made to these last hereafter, by giving them the
like gratifications another day,—bank-stock and doubloons, venison and
champagne? This must be the compensation intended; for what else? Is it
that they are to have leave to pray and praise? to love and serve men?
Why, that they can do now. The legitimate inference the disciple would
draw was,—‘We are to have _such_ a good time as the sinners have
now’;—or, to push it to its extreme import,—‘You sin now; we shall sin
by and by; we would sin now, if we could; not being successful, we
expect our revenge to-morrow.’

The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad are successful;
that justice is not done now. The blindness of the preacher consisted
in deferring to the base estimate of the market of what constitutes a
manly success, instead of confronting and convicting the world from the
truth; announcing the presence of the soul; the omnipotence of the
will; and so establishing the standard of good and ill, of success and
falsehood.

I find a similar base tone in the popular religious works of the day
and the same doctrines assumed by the literary men when occasionally
they treat the related topics. I think that our popular theology has
gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the superstitions it has
displaced. But men are better than their theology. Their daily life
gives it the lie. Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the doctrine
behind him in his own experience, and all men feel sometimes the
falsehood which they cannot demonstrate. For men are wiser than they
know. That which they hear in schools and pulpits without afterthought,
if said in conversation would probably be questioned in silence. If a
man dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the divine laws, he
is answered by a silence which conveys well enough to an observer the
dissatisfaction of the hearer, but his incapacity to make his own
statement.

I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to record some facts
that indicate the path of the law of Compensation; happy beyond my
expectation if I shall truly draw the smallest arc of this circle.

Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in
darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in
male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and
animals; in the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the
animal body; in the systole and diastole of the heart; in the
undulations of fluids, and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal
gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce
magnetism at one end of a needle, the opposite magnetism takes place at
the other end. If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here,
you must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that
each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole; as,
spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out;
upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay.

Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. The entire
system of things gets represented in every particle. There is somewhat
that resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and night, man and
woman, in a single needle of the pine, in a kernel of corn, in each
individual of every animal tribe. The reaction, so grand in the
elements, is repeated within these small boundaries. For example, in
the animal kingdom the physiologist has observed that no creatures are
favorites, but a certain compensation balances every gift and every
defect. A surplusage given to one part is paid out of a reduction from
another part of the same creature. If the head and neck are enlarged,
the trunk and extremities are cut short.

The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What we gain in
power is lost in time, and the converse. The periodic or compensating
errors of the planets is another instance. The influences of climate
and soil in political history are another. The cold climate
invigorates. The barren soil does not breed fevers, crocodiles, tigers
or scorpions.

The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man. Every
excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its
sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of
pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for its
moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain of
folly. For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else;
and for every thing you gain, you lose something. If riches increase,
they are increased that use them. If the gatherer gathers too much,
Nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the
estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions.
The waves of the sea do not more speedily seek a level from their
loftiest tossing than the varieties of condition tend to equalize
themselves. There is always some levelling circumstance that puts down
the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate, substantially on
the same ground with all others. Is a man too strong and fierce for
society and by temper and position a bad citizen,—a morose ruffian,
with a dash of the pirate in him?—Nature sends him a troop of pretty
sons and daughters who are getting along in the dame’s classes at the
village school, and love and fear for them smooths his grim scowl to
courtesy. Thus she contrives to intenerate the granite and felspar,
takes the boar out and puts the lamb in and keeps her balance true.

The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President
has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his
peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short
time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to
eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne. Or,
do men desire the more substantial and permanent grandeur of genius?
Neither has this an immunity. He who by force of will or of thought is
great and overlooks thousands, has the charges of that eminence. With
every influx of light comes new danger. Has he light? he must bear
witness to the light, and always outrun that sympathy which gives him
such keen satisfaction, by his fidelity to new revelations of the
incessant soul. He must hate father and mother, wife and child. Has he
all that the world loves and admires and covets?—he must cast behind
him their admiration, and afflict them by faithfulness to his truth,
and become a byword and a hissing.

This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain to build
or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long.
_Res nolunt diu male administrari_. Though no checks to a new evil
appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is cruel,
the governor’s life is not safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will
yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will
not convict. If the law is too mild, private vengeance comes in. If the
government is a terrific democracy, the pressure is resisted by an
over-charge of energy in the citizen, and life glows with a fiercer
flame. The true life and satisfactions of man seem to elude the utmost
rigors or felicities of condition and to establish themselves with
great indifferency under all varieties of circumstances. Under all
governments the influence of character remains the same,—in Turkey and
in New England about alike. Under the primeval despots of Egypt,
history honestly confesses that man must have been as free as culture
could make him.

These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented in
every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the
powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the
naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse
as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a
tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main character
of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims,
furtherances, hindrances, energies and whole system of every other.
Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world
and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human
life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its
end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man and recite all
his destiny.

The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The microscope cannot find
the animalcule which is less perfect for being little. Eyes, ears,
taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduction
that take hold on eternity,—all find room to consist in the small
creature. So do we put our life into every act. The true doctrine of
omnipresence is that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and
cobweb. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every
point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the
repulsion; if the force, so the limitation.

Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul which
within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its
inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. “It is
in the world, and the world was made by it.” Justice is not postponed.
A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. Ἀεὶ γὰρ εὖ
πίπτουσιν οἱ Διὸς κύβοι,—The dice of God are always loaded. The world
looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, which,
turn it how you will, balances itself. Take what figure you will, its
exact value, nor more nor less, still returns to you. Every secret is
told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong
redressed, in silence and certainty. What we call retribution is the
universal necessity by which the whole appears wherever a part appears.
If you see smoke, there must be fire. If you see a hand or a limb, you
know that the trunk to which it belongs is there behind.

Every act rewards itself, or, in other words integrates itself, in a
twofold manner; first in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly in
the circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance the
retribution. The causal retribution is in the thing and is seen by the
soul. The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the understanding;
it is inseparable from the thing, but is often spread over a long time
and so does not become distinct until after many years. The specific
stripes may follow late after the offence, but they follow because they
accompany it. Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is
a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which
concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot
be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end
preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.

Whilst thus the world will be whole and refuses to be disparted, we
seek to act partially, to sunder, to appropriate; for example,—to
gratify the senses we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs
of the character. The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the
solution of one problem,—how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual
strong, the sensual bright, etc., from the moral sweet, the moral deep,
the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean off this upper
surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a _one end_, without
an _other end_. The soul says, ‘Eat;’ the body would feast. The soul
says, ‘The man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul;’ the body
would join the flesh only. The soul says, ‘Have dominion over all
things to the ends of virtue;’ the body would have the power over
things to its own ends.

The soul strives amain to live and work through all things. It would be
the only fact. All things shall be added unto it,—power, pleasure,
knowledge, beauty. The particular man aims to be somebody; to set up
for himself; to truck and higgle for a private good; and, in
particulars, to ride that he may ride; to dress that he may be dressed;
to eat that he may eat; and to govern, that he may be seen. Men seek to
be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think
that to be great is to possess one side of nature,—the sweet, without
the other side, the bitter.

This dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted. Up to this day it
must be owned no projector has had the smallest success. The parted
water reunites behind our hand. Pleasure is taken out of pleasant
things, profit out of profitable things, power out of strong things, as
soon as we seek to separate them from the whole. We can no more halve
things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get an inside
that shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow. “Drive out
Nature with a fork, she comes running back.”

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek
to dodge, which one and another brags that he does not know, that they
do not touch him;—but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in
his soul. If he escapes them in one part they attack him in another
more vital part. If he has escaped them in form and in the appearance,
it is because he has resisted his life and fled from himself, and the
retribution is so much death. So signal is the failure of all attempts
to make this separation of the good from the tax, that the experiment
would not be tried,—since to try it is to be mad,—but for the
circumstance, that when the disease began in the will, of rebellion and
separation, the intellect is at once infected, so that the man ceases
to see God whole in each object, but is able to see the sensual
allurement of an object and not see the sensual hurt; he sees the
mermaid’s head but not the dragon’s tail, and thinks he can cut off
that which he would have from that which he would not have. “How secret
art thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in silence, O thou only
great God, sprinkling with an unwearied providence certain penal
blindnesses upon such as have unbridled desires!”[1]

     [1] St. Augustine, Confessions, B. I.

The human soul is true to these facts in the painting of fable, of
history, of law, of proverbs, of conversation. It finds a tongue in
literature unawares. Thus the Greeks called Jupiter, Supreme Mind; but
having traditionally ascribed to him many base actions, they
involuntarily made amends to reason by tying up the hands of so bad a
god. He is made as helpless as a king of England. Prometheus knows one
secret which Jove must bargain for; Minerva, another. He cannot get his
own thunders; Minerva keeps the key of them:—

     “Of all the gods, I only know the keys
     That ope the solid doors within whose vaults
     His thunders sleep.”

A plain confession of the in-working of the All and of its moral aim.
The Indian mythology ends in the same ethics; and it would seem
impossible for any fable to be invented and get any currency which was
not moral. Aurora forgot to ask youth for her lover, and though
Tithonus is immortal, he is old. Achilles is not quite invulnerable;
the sacred waters did not wash the heel by which Thetis held him.
Siegfried, in the Nibelungen, is not quite immortal, for a leaf fell on
his back whilst he was bathing in the dragon’s blood, and that spot
which it covered is mortal. And so it must be. There is a crack in
every thing God has made. It would seem there is always this vindictive
circumstance stealing in at unawares even into the wild poesy in which
the human fancy attempted to make bold holiday and to shake itself free
of the old laws,—this back-stroke, this kick of the gun, certifying
that the law is fatal; that in nature nothing can be given, all things
are sold.

This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps watch in the
universe and lets no offence go unchastised. The Furies they said are
attendants on justice, and if the sun in heaven should transgress his
path they would punish him. The poets related that stone walls and iron
swords and leathern thongs had an occult sympathy with the wrongs of
their owners; that the belt which Ajax gave Hector dragged the Trojan
hero over the field at the wheels of the car of Achilles, and the sword
which Hector gave Ajax was that on whose point Ajax fell. They recorded
that when the Thasians erected a statue to Theagenes, a victor in the
games, one of his rivals went to it by night and endeavored to throw it
down by repeated blows, until at last he moved it from its pedestal and
was crushed to death beneath its fall.

This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It came from thought
above the will of the writer. That is the best part of each writer
which has nothing private in it; that which he does not know; that
which flowed out of his constitution and not from his too active
invention; that which in the study of a single artist you might not
easily find, but in the study of many you would abstract as the spirit
of them all. Phidias it is not, but the work of man in that early
Hellenic world that I would know. The name and circumstance of Phidias,
however convenient for history, embarrass when we come to the highest
criticism. We are to see that which man was tending to do in a given
period, and was hindered, or, if you will, modified in doing, by the
interfering volitions of Phidias, of Dante, of Shakspeare, the organ
whereby man at the moment wrought.

Still more striking is the expression of this fact in the proverbs of
all nations, which are always the literature of reason, or the
statements of an absolute truth without qualification. Proverbs, like
the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions.
That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow
the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in
proverbs without contradiction. And this law of laws, which the pulpit,
the senate and the college deny, is hourly preached in all markets and
workshops by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as
omnipresent as that of birds and flies.

All things are double, one against another.—Tit for tat; an eye for an
eye; a tooth for a tooth; blood for blood; measure for measure; love
for love.—Give and it shall be given you.—He that watereth shall be
watered himself.—What will you have? quoth God; pay for it and take
it.—Nothing venture, nothing have.—Thou shalt be paid exactly for what
thou hast done, no more, no less.—Who doth not work shall not eat.—Harm
watch, harm catch.—Curses always recoil on the head of him who
imprecates them.—If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the
other end fastens itself around your own.—Bad counsel confounds the
adviser.—The Devil is an ass.

It is thus written, because it is thus in life. Our action is
overmastered and characterized above our will by the law of nature. We
aim at a petty end quite aside from the public good, but our act
arranges itself by irresistible magnetism in a line with the poles of
the world.

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his
will he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word.
Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a thread-ball thrown
at a mark, but the other end remains in the thrower’s bag. Or rather it
is a harpoon hurled at the whale, unwinding, as it flies, a coil of
cord in the boat, and, if the harpoon is not good, or not well thrown,
it will go nigh to cut the steersman in twain or to sink the boat.

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. “No man had ever a point
of pride that was not injurious to him,” said Burke. The exclusive in
fashionable life does not see that he excludes himself from enjoyment,
in the attempt to appropriate it. The exclusionist in religion does not
see that he shuts the door of heaven on himself, in striving to shut
out others. Treat men as pawns and ninepins and you shall suffer as
well as they. If you leave out their heart, you shall lose your own.
The senses would make things of all persons; of women, of children, of
the poor. The vulgar proverb, “I will get it from his purse or get it
from his skin,” is sound philosophy.

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are speedily
punished. They are punished by fear. Whilst I stand in simple relations
to my fellow-man, I have no displeasure in meeting him. We meet as
water meets water, or as two currents of air mix, with perfect
diffusion and interpenetration of nature. But as soon as there is any
departure from simplicity, and attempt at halfness, or good for me that
is not good for him, my neighbor feels the wrong; he shrinks from me as
far as I have shrunk from him; his eyes no longer seek mine; there is
war between us; there is hate in him and fear in me.

All the old abuses in society, universal and particular, all unjust
accumulations of property and power, are avenged in the same manner.
Fear is an instructor of great sagacity and the herald of all
revolutions. One thing he teaches, that there is rottenness where he
appears. He is a carrion crow, and though you see not well what he
hovers for, there is death somewhere. Our property is timid, our laws
are timid, our cultivated classes are timid. Fear for ages has boded
and mowed and gibbered over government and property. That obscene bird
is not there for nothing. He indicates great wrongs which must be
revised.

Of the like nature is that expectation of change which instantly
follows the suspension of our voluntary activity. The terror of
cloudless noon, the emerald of Polycrates, the awe of prosperity, the
instinct which leads every generous soul to impose on itself tasks of a
noble asceticism and vicarious virtue, are the tremblings of the
balance of justice through the heart and mind of man.

Experienced men of the world know very well that it is best to pay scot
and lot as they go along, and that a man often pays dear for a small
frugality. The borrower runs in his own debt. Has a man gained any
thing who has received a hundred favors and rendered none? Has he
gained by borrowing, through indolence or cunning, his neighbor’s
wares, or horses, or money? There arises on the deed the instant
acknowledgment of benefit on the one part and of debt on the other;
that is, of superiority and inferiority. The transaction remains in the
memory of himself and his neighbor; and every new transaction alters
according to its nature their relation to each other. He may soon come
to see that he had better have broken his own bones than to have ridden
in his neighbor’s coach, and that “the highest price he can pay for a
thing is to ask for it.”

A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of life, and know that
it is the part of prudence to face every claimant and pay every just
demand on your time, your talents, or your heart. Always pay; for first
or last you must pay your entire debt. Persons and events may stand for
a time between you and justice, but it is only a postponement. You must
pay at last your own debt. If you are wise you will dread a prosperity
which only loads you with more. Benefit is the end of nature. But for
every benefit which you receive, a tax is levied. He is great who
confers the most benefits. He is base,—and that is the one base thing
in the universe,—to receive favors and render none. In the order of
nature we cannot render benefits to those from whom we receive them, or
only seldom. But the benefit we receive must be rendered again, line
for line, deed for deed, cent for cent, to somebody. Beware of too much
good staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm worms. Pay it
away quickly in some sort.

Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws. Cheapest, say the
prudent, is the dearest labor. What we buy in a broom, a mat, a wagon,
a knife, is some application of good sense to a common want. It is best
to pay in your land a skilful gardener, or to buy good sense applied to
gardening; in your sailor, good sense applied to navigation; in the
house, good sense applied to cooking, sewing, serving; in your agent,
good sense applied to accounts and affairs. So do you multiply your
presence, or spread yourself throughout your estate. But because of the
dual constitution of things, in labor as in life there can be no
cheating. The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself.
For the real price of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and
credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited
or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue,
cannot be counterfeited or stolen. These ends of labor cannot be
answered but by real exertions of the mind, and in obedience to pure
motives. The cheat, the defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the
knowledge of material and moral nature which his honest care and pains
yield to the operative. The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you
shall have the Power; but they who do not the thing have not the power.

Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a stake to
the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of
the perfect compensation of the universe. The absolute balance of Give
and Take, the doctrine that every thing has its price,—and if that
price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained, and
that it is impossible to get any thing without its price,—is not less
sublime in the columns of a leger than in the budgets of states, in the
laws of light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of nature. I
cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees implicated in those
processes with which he is conversant, the stern ethics which sparkle
on his chisel-edge, which are measured out by his plumb and foot-rule,
which stand as manifest in the footing of the shop-bill as in the
history of a state,—do recommend to him his trade, and though seldom
named, exalt his business to his imagination.

The league between virtue and nature engages all things to assume a
hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and substances of the world
persecute and whip the traitor. He finds that things are arranged for
truth and benefit, but there is no den in the wide world to hide a
rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime,
and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals
in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and
mole. You cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the
foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or
clew. Some damning circumstance always transpires. The laws and
substances of nature,—water, snow, wind, gravitation,—become penalties
to the thief.

On the other hand the law holds with equal sureness for all right
action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just,
as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation. The good man has
absolute good, which like fire turns every thing to its own nature, so
that you cannot do him any harm; but as the royal armies sent against
Napoleon, when he approached cast down their colors and from enemies
became friends, so disasters of all kinds, as sickness, offence,
poverty, prove benefactors:—

     “Winds blow and waters roll
     Strength to the brave, and power and deity,
     Yet in themselves are nothing.”

The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As no man had ever
a point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had ever a
defect that was not somewhere made useful to him. The stag in the fable
admired his horns and blamed his feet, but when the hunter came, his
feet saved him, and afterwards, caught in the thicket, his horns
destroyed him. Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults. As
no man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against
it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with the hindrances or
talents of men until he has suffered from the one and seen the triumph
of the other over his own want of the same. Has he a defect of temper
that unfits him to live in society? Thereby he is driven to entertain
himself alone and acquire habits of self-help; and thus, like the
wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.

Our strength grows out of our weakness. The indignation which arms
itself with secret forces does not awaken until we are pricked and
stung and sorely assailed. A great man is always willing to be little.
Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he
is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he
has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns
his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation
and real skill. The wise man throws himself on the side of his
assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak
point. The wound cicatrizes and falls off from him like a dead skin and
when they would triumph, lo! he has passed on invulnerable. Blame is
safer than praise. I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as all
that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success.
But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me I feel as one
that lies unprotected before his enemies. In general, every evil to
which we do not succumb is a benefactor. As the Sandwich Islander
believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into
himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

The same guards which protect us from disaster, defect, and enmity,
defend us, if we will, from selfishness and fraud. Bolts and bars are
not the best of our institutions, nor is shrewdness in trade a mark of
wisdom. Men suffer all their life long under the foolish superstition
that they can be cheated. But it is as impossible for a man to be
cheated by any one but himself, as for a thing to be and not to be at
the same time. There is a third silent party to all our bargains. The
nature and soul of things takes on itself the guaranty of the
fulfilment of every contract, so that honest service cannot come to
loss. If you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God in
your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer The payment is
withholden, the better for you; for compound interest on compound
interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature,
to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no
difference whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A mob
is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason and
traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending to the
nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are
insane like its whole constitution. It persecutes a principle; it would
whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire and
outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these. It
resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to put out the
ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The inviolate spirit turns their
spite against the wrongdoers. The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every
lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison, a more illustrious
abode; every burned book or house enlightens the world; every
suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to
side. Hours of sanity and consideration are always arriving to
communities, as to individuals, when the truth is seen and the martyrs
are justified.

Thus do all things preach the indifferency of circumstances. The man is
all. Every thing has two sides, a good and an evil. Every advantage has
its tax. I learn to be content. But the doctrine of compensation is not
the doctrine of indifferency. The thoughtless say, on hearing these
representations,—What boots it to do well? there is one event to good
and evil; if I gain any good I must pay for it; if I lose any good I
gain some other; all actions are indifferent.

There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, its own
nature. The soul is not a compensation, but a life. The soul _is_.
Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow
with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Essence,
or God, is not a relation or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast
affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all
relations, parts and times within itself. Nature, truth, virtue, are
the influx from thence. Vice is the absence or departure of the same.
Nothing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the great Night or shade on
which as a background the living universe paints itself forth, but no
fact is begotten by it; it cannot work, for it is not. It cannot work
any good; it cannot work any harm. It is harm inasmuch as it is worse
not to be than to be.

We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil acts, because the
criminal adheres to his vice and contumacy and does not come to a
crisis or judgment anywhere in visible nature. There is no stunning
confutation of his nonsense before men and angels. Has he therefore
outwitted the law? Inasmuch as he carries the malignity and the lie
with him he so far deceases from nature. In some manner there will be a
demonstration of the wrong to the understanding also; but, should we
not see it, this deadly deduction makes square the eternal account.

Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of rectitude
must be bought by any loss. There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty
to wisdom; they are proper additions of being. In a virtuous action I
properly _am;_ in a virtuous act I add to the world; I plant into
deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing and see the darkness receding
on the limits of the horizon. There can be no excess to love, none to
knowledge, none to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the
purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism,
never a Pessimism.

His life is a progress, and not a station. His instinct is trust. Our
instinct uses “more” and “less” in application to man, of the _presence
of the soul_, and not of its absence, the brave man is greater than the
coward; the true, the benevolent, the wise, is more a man and not less,
than the fool and knave. There is no tax on the good of virtue, for
that is the incoming of God himself, or absolute existence, without any
comparative. Material good has its tax, and if it came without desert
or sweat, has no root in me, and the next wind will blow it away. But
all the good of nature is the soul’s, and may be had if paid for in
nature’s lawful coin, that is, by labor which the heart and the head
allow. I no longer wish to meet a good I do not earn, for example to
find a pot of buried gold, knowing that it brings with it new burdens.
I do not wish more external goods,—neither possessions, nor honors, nor
powers, nor persons. The gain is apparent; the tax is certain. But
there is no tax on the knowledge that the compensation exists and that
it is not desirable to dig up treasure. Herein I rejoice with a serene
eternal peace. I contract the boundaries of possible mischief. I learn
the wisdom of St. Bernard,—“Nothing can work me damage except myself;
the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real
sufferer but by my own fault.”

In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequalities of
condition. The radical tragedy of nature seems to be the distinction of
More and Less. How can Less not feel the pain; how not feel indignation
or malevolence towards More? Look at those who have less faculty, and
one feels sad and knows not well what to make of it. He almost shuns
their eye; he fears they will upbraid God. What should they do? It
seems a great injustice. But see the facts nearly and these mountainous
inequalities vanish. Love reduces them as the sun melts the iceberg in
the sea. The heart and soul of all men being one, this bitterness of
_His_ and _Mine_ ceases. His is mine. I am my brother and my brother is
me. If I feel overshadowed and outdone by great neighbors, I can yet
love; I can still receive; and he that loveth maketh his own the
grandeur he loves. Thereby I make the discovery that my brother is my
guardian, acting for me with the friendliest designs, and the estate I
so admired and envied is my own. It is the nature of the soul to
appropriate all things. Jesus and Shakspeare are fragments of the soul,
and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain.
His virtue,—is not that mine? His wit,—if it cannot be made mine, it is
not wit.

Such also is the natural history of calamity. The changes which break
up at short intervals the prosperity of men are advertisements of a
nature whose law is growth. Every soul is by this intrinsic necessity
quitting its whole system of things, its friends and home and laws and
faith, as the shell-fish crawls out of its beautiful but stony case,
because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new
house. In proportion to the vigor of the individual these revolutions
are frequent, until in some happier mind they are incessant and all
worldly relations hang very loosely about him, becoming as it were a
transparent fluid membrane through which the living form is seen, and
not, as in most men, an indurated heterogeneous fabric of many dates
and of no settled character, in which the man is imprisoned. Then there
can be enlargement, and the man of to-day scarcely recognizes the man
of yesterday. And such should be the outward biography of man in time,
a putting off of dead circumstances day by day, as he renews his
raiment day by day. But to us, in our lapsed estate, resting, not
advancing, resisting, not cooperating with the divine expansion, this
growth comes by shocks.

We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go. We do not
see that they only go out that archangels may come in. We are idolaters
of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in its proper
eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe there is any force in
to-day to rival or recreate that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the
ruins of the old tent where once we had bread and shelter and organs,
nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover, and nerve us again. We
cannot again find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful. But we sit and
weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty saith, ‘Up and onward for
evermore!’ We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither will we rely on the
new; and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, like those monsters who
look backwards.

And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the
understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a
mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of
friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure
years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The
death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but
privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for
it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an
epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up
a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the
formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It
permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances and the
reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the
next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny
garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its
head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener is
made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide
neighborhoods of men.



IV.
SPIRITUAL LAWS


The living Heaven thy prayers respect,
House at once and architect,
Quarrying man’s rejected hours,
Builds therewith eternal towers;
Sole and self-commanded works,
Fears not undermining days,
Grows by decays,
And, by the famous might that lurks
In reaction and recoil,
Makes flame to freeze, and ice to boil;
Forging, through swart arms of Offence,
The silver seat of Innocence.



SPIRITUAL LAWS


When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at
ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our life is
embosomed in beauty. Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing
forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but
even the tragic and terrible are comely as they take their place in the
pictures of memory. The river-bank, the weed at the water-side, the old
house, the foolish person, however neglected in the passing, have a
grace in the past. Even the corpse that has lain in the chambers has
added a solemn ornament to the house. The soul will not know either
deformity or pain. If in the hours of clear reason we should speak the
severest truth, we should say that we had never made a sacrifice. In
these hours the mind seems so great that nothing can be taken from us
that seems much. All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe
remains to the heart unhurt. Neither vexations nor calamities abate our
trust. No man ever stated his griefs as lightly as he might. Allow for
exaggeration in the most patient and sorely ridden hack that ever was
driven. For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the
infinite lies stretched in smiling repose.

The intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful if man will live
the life of nature and not import into his mind difficulties which are
none of his. No man need be perplexed in his speculations. Let him do
and say what strictly belongs to him, and though very ignorant of
books, his nature shall not yield him any intellectual obstructions and
doubts. Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of
original sin, origin of evil, predestination and the like. These never
presented a practical difficulty to any man,—never darkened across any
man’s road who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the
soul’s mumps and measles and whooping-coughs, and those who have not
caught them cannot describe their health or prescribe the cure. A
simple mind will not know these enemies. It is quite another thing that
he should be able to give account of his faith and expound to another
the theory of his self-union and freedom. This requires rare gifts. Yet
without this self-knowledge there may be a sylvan strength and
integrity in that which he is. “A few strong instincts and a few plain
rules” suffice us.

My will never gave the images in my mind the rank they now take. The
regular course of studies, the years of academical and professional
education have not yielded me better facts than some idle books under
the bench at the Latin School. What we do not call education is more
precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of
receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often
wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this natural
magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.

In like manner our moral nature is vitiated by any interference of our
will. People represent virtue as a struggle, and take to themselves
great airs upon their attainments, and the question is everywhere vexed
when a noble nature is commended, whether the man is not better who
strives with temptation. But there is no merit in the matter. Either
God is there or he is not there. We love characters in proportion as
they are impulsive and spontaneous. The less a man thinks or knows
about his virtues the better we like him. Timoleon’s victories are the
best victories, which ran and flowed like Homer’s verses, Plutarch
said. When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful and
pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are,
and not turn sourly on the angel and say ‘Crump is a better man with
his grunting resistance to all his native devils.’

Not less conspicuous is the preponderance of nature over will in all
practical life. There is less intention in history than we ascribe to
it. We impute deep-laid far-sighted plans to Cæsar and Napoleon; but
the best of their power was in nature, not in them. Men of an
extraordinary success, in their honest moments, have always sung, ‘Not
unto us, not unto us.’ According to the faith of their times they have
built altars to Fortune, or to Destiny, or to St. Julian. Their success
lay in their parallelism to the course of thought, which found in them
an unobstructed channel; and the wonders of which they were the visible
conductors seemed to the eye their deed. Did the wires generate the
galvanism? It is even true that there was less in them on which they
could reflect than in another; as the virtue of a pipe is to be smooth
and hollow. That which externally seemed will and immovableness was
willingness and self-annihilation. Could Shakspeare give a theory of
Shakspeare? Could ever a man of prodigious mathematical genius convey
to others any insight into his methods? If he could communicate that
secret it would instantly lose its exaggerated value, blending with the
daylight and the vital energy the power to stand and to go.

The lesson is forcibly taught by these observations that our life might
be much easier and simpler than we make it; that the world might be a
happier place than it is; that there is no need of struggles,
convulsions, and despairs, of the wringing of the hands and the
gnashing of the teeth; that we miscreate our own evils. We interfere
with the optimism of nature; for whenever we get this vantage-ground of
the past, or of a wiser mind in the present, we are able to discern
that we are begirt with laws which execute themselves.

The face of external nature teaches the same lesson. Nature will not
have us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our
learning much better than she likes our frauds and wars. When we come
out of the caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition-convention, or the
Temperance-meeting, or the Transcendental club into the fields and
woods, she says to us, ‘So hot? my little Sir.’

We are full of mechanical actions. We must needs intermeddle and have
things in our own way, until the sacrifices and virtues of society are
odious. Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our
Sunday-schools and churches and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck.
We pain ourselves to please nobody. There are natural ways of arriving
at the same ends at which these aim, but do not arrive. Why should all
virtue work in one and the same way? Why should all give dollars? It is
very inconvenient to us country folk, and we do not think any good will
come of it. We have not dollars; merchants have; let them give them.
Farmers will give corn; poets will sing; women will sew; laborers will
lend a hand; the children will bring flowers. And why drag this dead
weight of a Sunday-school over the whole Christendom? It is natural and
beautiful that childhood should inquire and maturity should teach; but
it is time enough to answer questions when they are asked. Do not shut
up the young people against their will in a pew and force the children
to ask them questions for an hour against their will.

If we look wider, things are all alike; laws and letters and creeds and
modes of living seem a travesty of truth. Our society is encumbered by
ponderous machinery, which resembles the endless aqueducts which the
Romans built over hill and dale and which are superseded by the
discovery of the law that water rises to the level of its source. It is
a Chinese wall which any nimble Tartar can leap over. It is a standing
army, not so good as a peace. It is a graduated, titled, richly
appointed empire, quite superfluous when town-meetings are found to
answer just as well.

Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways.
When the fruit is ripe, it falls. When the fruit is despatched, the
leaf falls. The circuit of the waters is mere falling. The walking of
man and all animals is a falling forward. All our manual labor and
works of strength, as prying, splitting, digging, rowing and so forth,
are done by dint of continual falling, and the globe, earth, moon,
comet, sun, star, fall for ever and ever.

The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of
a machine. He who sees moral nature out and out and thoroughly knows
how knowledge is acquired and character formed, is a pedant. The
simplicity of nature is not that which may easily be read, but is
inexhaustible. The last analysis can no wise be made. We judge of a
man’s wisdom by his hope, knowing that the perception of the
inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth. The wild fertility of
nature is felt in comparing our rigid names and reputations with our
fluid consciousness. We pass in the world for sects and schools, for
erudition and piety, and we are all the time jejune babes. One sees
very well how Pyrrhonism grew up. Every man sees that he is that middle
point whereof every thing may be affirmed and denied with equal reason.
He is old, he is young, he is very wise, he is altogether ignorant. He
hears and feels what you say of the seraphim, and of the tin-peddler.
There is no permanent wise man except in the figment of the Stoics. We
side with the hero, as we read or paint, against the coward and the
robber; but we have been ourselves that coward and robber, and shall be
again,—not in the low circumstance, but in comparison with the
grandeurs possible to the soul.

A little consideration of what takes place around us every day would
show us that a higher law than that of our will regulates events; that
our painful labors are unnecessary and fruitless; that only in our
easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong, and by contenting
ourselves with obedience we become divine. Belief and love,—a believing
love will relieve us of a vast load of care. O my brothers, God exists.
There is a soul at the centre of nature and over the will of every man,
so that none of us can wrong the universe. It has so infused its strong
enchantment into nature that we prosper when we accept its advice, and
when we struggle to wound its creatures our hands are glued to our
sides, or they beat our own breasts. The whole course of things goes to
teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance for each of us,
and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word. Why need you
choose so painfully your place and occupation and associates and modes
of action and of entertainment? Certainly there is a possible right for
you that precludes the need of balance and wilful election. For you
there is a reality, a fit place and congenial duties. Place yourself in
the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it
floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a
perfect contentment. Then you put all gainsayers in the wrong. Then you
are the world, the measure of right, of truth, of beauty. If we will
not be mar-plots with our miserable interferences, the work, the
society, letters, arts, science, religion of men would go on far better
than now, and the heaven predicted from the beginning of the world, and
still predicted from the bottom of the heart, would organize itself, as
do now the rose and the air and the sun.

I say, _do not choose;_ but that is a figure of speech by which I would
distinguish what is commonly called _choice_ among men, and which is a
partial act, the choice of the hands, of the eyes, of the appetites,
and not a whole act of the man. But that which I call right or
goodness, is the choice of my constitution; and that which I call
heaven, and inwardly aspire after, is the state or circumstance
desirable to my constitution; and the action which I in all my years
tend to do, is the work for my faculties. We must hold a man amenable
to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an
excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade.
What business has he with an evil trade? Has he not a _calling_ in his
character?

Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one
direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently
inviting him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in a river;
he runs against obstructions on every side but one, on that side all
obstruction is taken away and he sweeps serenely over a deepening
channel into an infinite sea. This talent and this call depend on his
organization, or the mode in which the general soul incarnates itself
in him. He inclines to do something which is easy to him and good when
it is done, but which no other man can do. He has no rival. For the
more truly he consults his own powers, the more difference will his
work exhibit from the work of any other. His ambition is exactly
proportioned to his powers. The height of the pinnacle is determined by
the breadth of the base. Every man has this call of the power to do
somewhat unique, and no man has any other call. The pretence that he
has another call, a summons by name and personal election and outward
“signs that mark him extraordinary, and not in the roll of common men,”
is fanaticism, and betrays obtuseness to perceive that there is one
mind in all the individuals, and no respect of persons therein.

By doing his work he makes the need felt which he can supply, and
creates the taste by which he is enjoyed. By doing his own work he
unfolds himself. It is the vice of our public speaking that it has not
abandonment. Somewhere, not only every orator but every man should let
out all the length of all the reins; should find or make a frank and
hearty expression of what force and meaning is in him. The common
experience is that the man fits himself as well as he can to the
customary details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as
a dog turns a spit. Then is he a part of the machine he moves; the man
is lost. Until he can manage to communicate himself to others in his
full stature and proportion, he does not yet find his vocation. He must
find in that an outlet for his character, so that he may justify his
work to their eyes. If the labor is mean, let him by his thinking and
character make it liberal. Whatever he knows and thinks, whatever in
his apprehension is worth doing, that let him communicate, or men will
never know and honor him aright. Foolish, whenever you take the
meanness and formality of that thing you do, instead of converting it
into the obedient spiracle of your character and aims.

We like only such actions as have already long had the praise of men,
and do not perceive that any thing man can do may be divinely done. We
think greatness entailed or organized in some places or duties, in
certain offices or occasions, and do not see that Paganini can extract
rapture from a catgut, and Eulenstein from a jews-harp, and a
nimble-fingered lad out of shreds of paper with his scissors, and
Landseer out of swine, and the hero out of the pitiful habitation and
company in which he was hidden. What we call obscure condition or
vulgar society is that condition and society whose poetry is not yet
written, but which you shall presently make as enviable and renowned as
any. In our estimates let us take a lesson from kings. The parts of
hospitality, the connection of families, the impressiveness of death,
and a thousand other things, royalty makes its own estimate of, and a
royal mind will. To make habitually a new estimate,—that is elevation.

What a man does, that he has. What has he to do with hope or fear? In
himself is his might. Let him regard no good as solid but that which is
in his nature and which must grow out of him as long as he exists. The
goods of fortune may come and go like summer leaves; let him scatter
them on every wind as the momentary signs of his infinite
productiveness.

He may have his own. A man’s genius, the quality that differences him
from every other, the susceptibility to one class of influences, the
selection of what is fit for him, the rejection of what is unfit,
determines for him the character of the universe. A man is a method, a
progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to
him wherever he goes. He takes only his own out of the multiplicity
that sweeps and circles round him. He is like one of those booms which
are set out from the shore on rivers to catch drift-wood, or like the
loadstone amongst splinters of steel. Those facts, words, persons,
which dwell in his memory without his being able to say why, remain
because they have a relation to him not less real for being as yet
unapprehended. They are symbols of value to him as they can interpret
parts of his consciousness which he would vainly seek words for in the
conventional images of books and other minds. What attracts my
attention shall have it, as I will go to the man who knocks at my door,
whilst a thousand persons as worthy go by it, to whom I give no regard.
It is enough that these particulars speak to me. A few anecdotes, a few
traits of character, manners, face, a few incidents, have an emphasis
in your memory out of all proportion to their apparent significance if
you measure them by the ordinary standards. They relate to your gift.
Let them have their weight, and do not reject them and cast about for
illustration and facts more usual in literature. What your heart thinks
great is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.

Over all things that are agreeable to his nature and genius the man has
the highest right. Everywhere he may take what belongs to his spiritual
estate, nor can he take any thing else though all doors were open, nor
can all the force of men hinder him from taking so much. It is vain to
attempt to keep a secret from one who has a right to know it. It will
tell itself. That mood into which a friend can bring us is his dominion
over us. To the thoughts of that state of mind he has a right. All the
secrets of that state of mind he can compel. This is a law which
statesmen use in practice. All the terrors of the French Republic,
which held Austria in awe, were unable to command her diplomacy. But
Napoleon sent to Vienna M. de Narbonne, one of the old noblesse, with
the morals, manners and name of that interest, saying that it was
indispensable to send to the old aristocracy of Europe men of the same
connection, which, in fact, constitutes a sort of free-masonry. M. de
Narbonne in less than a fortnight penetrated all the secrets of the
imperial cabinet.

Nothing seems so easy as to speak and to be understood. Yet a man may
come to find _that_ the strongest of defences and of ties,—that he has
been understood; and he who has received an opinion may come to find it
the most inconvenient of bonds.

If a teacher have any opinion which he wishes to conceal, his pupils
will become as fully indoctrinated into that as into any which he
publishes. If you pour water into a vessel twisted into coils and
angles, it is vain to say, I will pour it only into this or that;—it
will find its level in all. Men feel and act the consequences of your
doctrine without being able to show how they follow. Show us an arc of
the curve, and a good mathematician will find out the whole figure. We
are always reasoning from the seen to the unseen. Hence the perfect
intelligence that subsists between wise men of remote ages. A man
cannot bury his meanings so deep in his book but time and like-minded
men will find them. Plato had a secret doctrine, had he? What secret
can he conceal from the eyes of Bacon? of Montaigne? of Kant?
Therefore, Aristotle said of his works, “They are published and not
published.”

No man can learn what he has not preparation for learning, however near
to his eyes is the object. A chemist may tell his most precious secrets
to a carpenter, and he shall be never the wiser,—the secrets he would
not utter to a chemist for an estate. God screens us evermore from
premature ideas. Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that
stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened;
then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.

Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he sees. The world
is very empty, and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for all
its pride. “Earth fills her lap with splendors” _not_ her own. The vale
of Tempe, Tivoli and Rome are earth and water, rocks and sky. There are
as good earth and water in a thousand places, yet how unaffecting!

People are not the better for the sun and moon, the horizon and the
trees; as it is not observed that the keepers of Roman galleries or the
valets of painters have any elevation of thought, or that librarians
are wiser men than others. There are graces in the demeanor of a
polished and noble person which are lost upon the eye of a churl. These
are like the stars whose light has not yet reached us.

He may see what he maketh. Our dreams are the sequel of our waking
knowledge. The visions of the night bear some proportion to the visions
of the day. Hideous dreams are exaggerations of the sins of the day. We
see our evil affections embodied in bad physiognomies. On the Alps the
traveller sometimes beholds his own shadow magnified to a giant, so
that every gesture of his hand is terrific. “My children,” said an old
man to his boys scared by a figure in the dark entry, “my children, you
will never see any thing worse than yourselves.” As in dreams, so in
the scarcely less fluid events of the world every man sees himself in
colossal, without knowing that it is himself. The good, compared to the
evil which he sees, is as his own good to his own evil. Every quality
of his mind is magnified in some one acquaintance, and every emotion of
his heart in some one. He is like a quincunx of trees, which counts
five,—east, west, north, or south; or an initial, medial, and terminal
acrostic. And why not? He cleaves to one person and avoids another,
according to their likeness or unlikeness to himself, truly seeking
himself in his associates and moreover in his trade and habits and
gestures and meats and drinks, and comes at last to be faithfully
represented by every view you take of his circumstances.

He may read what he writes. What can we see or acquire but what we are?
You have observed a skilful man reading Virgil. Well, that author is a
thousand books to a thousand persons. Take the book into your two hands
and read your eyes out, you will never find what I find. If any
ingenious reader would have a monopoly of the wisdom or delight he
gets, he is as secure now the book is Englished, as if it were
imprisoned in the Pelews’ tongue. It is with a good book as it is with
good company. Introduce a base person among gentlemen, it is all to no
purpose; he is not their fellow. Every society protects itself. The
company is perfectly safe, and he is not one of them, though his body
is in the room.

What avails it to fight with the eternal laws of mind, which adjust the
relation of all persons to each other by the mathematical measure of
their havings and beings? Gertrude is enamored of Guy; how high, how
aristocratic, how Roman his mien and manners! to live with him were
life indeed, and no purchase is too great; and heaven and earth are
moved to that end. Well, Gertrude has Guy; but what now avails how
high, how aristocratic, how Roman his mien and manners, if his heart
and aims are in the senate, in the theatre and in the billiard-room,
and she has no aims, no conversation that can enchant her graceful
lord?

He shall have his own society. We can love nothing but nature. The most
wonderful talents, the most meritorious exertions really avail very
little with us; but nearness or likeness of nature,—how beautiful is
the ease of its victory! Persons approach us, famous for their beauty,
for their accomplishments, worthy of all wonder for their charms and
gifts; they dedicate their whole skill to the hour and the
company,—with very imperfect result. To be sure it would be ungrateful
in us not to praise them loudly. Then, when all is done, a person of
related mind, a brother or sister by nature, comes to us so softly and
easily, so nearly and intimately, as if it were the blood in our proper
veins, that we feel as if some one was gone, instead of another having
come; we are utterly relieved and refreshed; it is a sort of joyful
solitude. We foolishly think in our days of sin that we must court
friends by compliance to the customs of society, to its dress, its
breeding, and its estimates. But only that soul can be my friend which
I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not
decline and which does not decline to me, but, native of the same
celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience. The scholar
forgets himself and apes the customs and costumes of the man of the
world to deserve the smile of beauty, and follows some giddy girl, not
yet taught by religious passion to know the noble woman with all that
is serene, oracular and beautiful in her soul. Let him be great, and
love shall follow him. Nothing is more deeply punished than the neglect
of the affinities by which alone society should be formed, and the
insane levity of choosing associates by others’ eyes.

He may set his own rate. It is a maxim worthy of all acceptation that a
man may have that allowance he takes. Take the place and attitude which
belong to you, and all men acquiesce. The world must be just. It leaves
every man, with profound unconcern, to set his own rate. Hero or
driveller, it meddles not in the matter. It will certainly accept your
own measure of your doing and being, whether you sneak about and deny
your own name, or whether you see your work produced to the concave
sphere of the heavens, one with the revolution of the stars.

The same reality pervades all teaching. The man may teach by doing, and
not otherwise. If he can communicate himself he can teach, but not by
words. He teaches who gives, and he learns who receives. There is no
teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in
which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you and you are he;
then is a teaching, and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he
ever quite lose the benefit. But your propositions run out of one ear
as they ran in at the other. We see it advertised that Mr. Grand will
deliver an oration on the Fourth of July, and Mr. Hand before the
Mechanics’ Association, and we do not go thither, because we know that
these gentlemen will not communicate their own character and experience
to the company. If we had reason to expect such a confidence we should
go through all inconvenience and opposition. The sick would be carried
in litters. But a public oration is an escapade, a non-committal, an
apology, a gag, and not a communication, not a speech, not a man.

A like Nemesis presides over all intellectual works. We have yet to
learn that the thing uttered in words is not therefore affirmed. It
must affirm itself, or no forms of logic or of oath can give it
evidence. The sentence must also contain its own apology for being
spoken.

The effect of any writing on the public mind is mathematically
measurable by its depth of thought. How much water does it draw? If it
awaken you to think, if it lift you from your feet with the great voice
of eloquence, then the effect is to be wide, slow, permanent, over the
minds of men; if the pages instruct you not, they will die like flies
in the hour. The way to speak and write what shall not go out of
fashion is to speak and write sincerely. The argument which has not
power to reach my own practice, I may well doubt will fail to reach
yours. But take Sidney’s maxim:—“Look in thy heart, and write.” He that
writes to himself writes to an eternal public. That statement only is
fit to be made public which you have come at in attempting to satisfy
your own curiosity. The writer who takes his subject from his ear and
not from his heart, should know that he has lost as much as he seems to
have gained, and when the empty book has gathered all its praise, and
half the people say, ‘What poetry! what genius!’ it still needs fuel to
make fire. That only profits which is profitable. Life alone can impart
life; and though we should burst we can only be valued as we make
ourselves valuable. There is no luck in literary reputation. They who
make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy
readers of the hour when it appears, but a court as of angels, a public
not to be bribed, not to be entreated and not to be overawed, decides
upon every man’s title to fame. Only those books come down which
deserve to last. Gilt edges, vellum and morocco, and
presentation-copies to all the libraries will not preserve a book in
circulation beyond its intrinsic date. It must go with all Walpole’s
Noble and Royal Authors to its fate. Blackmore, Kotzebue, or Pollok may
endure for a night, but Moses and Homer stand for ever. There are not
in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and
understand Plato,—never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet
to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few
persons, as if God brought them in his hand. “No book,” said Bentley,
“was ever written down by any but itself.” The permanence of all books
is fixed by no effort, friendly or hostile, but by their own specific
gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant
mind of man. “Do not trouble yourself too much about the light on your
statue,” said Michael Angelo to the young sculptor; “the light of the
public square will test its value.”

In like manner the effect of every action is measured by the depth of
the sentiment from which it proceeds. The great man knew not that he
was great. It took a century or two for that fact to appear. What he
did, he did because he must; it was the most natural thing in the
world, and grew out of the circumstances of the moment. But now, every
thing he did, even to the lifting of his finger or the eating of bread,
looks large, all-related, and is called an institution.

These are the demonstrations in a few particulars of the genius of
nature; they show the direction of the stream. But the stream is blood;
every drop is alive. Truth has not single victories; all things are its
organs,—not only dust and stones, but errors and lies. The laws of
disease, physicians say, are as beautiful as the laws of health. Our
philosophy is affirmative and readily accepts the testimony of negative
facts, as every shadow points to the sun. By a divine necessity every
fact in nature is constrained to offer its testimony.

Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and
word, the mere air of doing a thing, the intimated purpose, expresses
character. If you act you show character; if you sit still, if you
sleep, you show it. You think because you have spoken nothing when
others spoke, and have given no opinion on the times, on the church, on
slavery, on marriage, on socialism, on secret societies, on the
college, on parties and persons, that your verdict is still expected
with curiosity as a reserved wisdom. Far otherwise; your silence
answers very loud. You have no oracle to utter, and your fellow-men
have learned that you cannot help them; for oracles speak. Doth not
Wisdom cry and Understanding put forth her voice?

Dreadful limits are set in nature to the powers of dissimulation. Truth
tyrannizes over the unwilling members of the body. Faces never lie, it
is said. No man need be deceived who will study the changes of
expression. When a man speaks the truth in the spirit of truth, his eye
is as clear as the heavens. When he has base ends and speaks falsely,
the eye is muddy and sometimes asquint.

I have heard an experienced counsellor say that he never feared the
effect upon a jury of a lawyer who does not believe in his heart that
his client ought to have a verdict. If he does not believe it his
unbelief will appear to the jury, despite all his protestations, and
will become their unbelief. This is that law whereby a work of art, of
whatever kind, sets us in the same state of mind wherein the artist was
when he made it. That which we do not believe we cannot adequately say,
though we may repeat the words never so often. It was this conviction
which Swedenborg expressed when he described a group of persons in the
spiritual world endeavoring in vain to articulate a proposition which
they did not believe; but they could not, though they twisted and
folded their lips even to indignation.

A man passes for that he is worth. Very idle is all curiosity
concerning other people’s estimate of us, and all fear of remaining
unknown is not less so. If a man know that he can do any thing,—that he
can do it better than any one else,—he has a pledge of the
acknowledgment of that fact by all persons. The world is full of
judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every
action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped. In every troop of boys
that whoop and run in each yard and square, a new-comer is as well and
accurately weighed in the course of a few days and stamped with his
right number, as if he had undergone a formal trial of his strength,
speed and temper. A stranger comes from a distant school, with better
dress, with trinkets in his pockets, with airs and pretensions; an
older boy says to himself, ‘It’s of no use; we shall find him out
to-morrow.’ ‘What has he done?’ is the divine question which searches
men and transpierces every false reputation. A fop may sit in any chair
of the world nor be distinguished for his hour from Homer and
Washington; but there need never be any doubt concerning the respective
ability of human beings. Pretension may sit still, but cannot act.
Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never
wrote an Iliad, nor drove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor
abolished slavery.

As much virtue as there is, so much appears; as much goodness as there
is, so much reverence it commands. All the devils respect virtue. The
high, the generous, the self-devoted sect will always instruct and
command mankind. Never was a sincere word utterly lost. Never a
magnanimity fell to the ground, but there is some heart to greet and
accept it unexpectedly. A man passes for that he is worth. What he is
engraves itself on his face, on his form, on his fortunes, in letters
of light. Concealment avails him nothing, boasting nothing. There is
confession in the glances of our eyes, in our smiles, in salutations,
and the grasp of hands. His sin bedaubs him, mars all his good
impression. Men know not why they do not trust him, but they do not
trust him. His vice glasses his eye, cuts lines of mean expression in
his cheek, pinches the nose, sets the mark of the beast on the back of
the head, and writes O fool! fool! on the forehead of a king.

If you would not be known to do any thing, never do it. A man may play
the fool in the drifts of a desert, but every grain of sand shall seem
to see. He may be a solitary eater, but he cannot keep his foolish
counsel. A broken complexion, a swinish look, ungenerous acts and the
want of due knowledge,—all blab. Can a cook, a Chiffinch, an Iachimo be
mistaken for Zeno or Paul? Confucius exclaimed,—“How can a man be
concealed? How can a man be concealed?”

On the other hand, the hero fears not that if he withhold the avowal of
a just and brave act it will go unwitnessed and unloved. One knows
it,—himself,—and is pledged by it to sweetness of peace and to
nobleness of aim which will prove in the end a better proclamation of
it than the relating of the incident. Virtue is the adherence in action
to the nature of things, and the nature of things makes it prevalent.
It consists in a perpetual substitution of being for seeming, and with
sublime propriety God is described as saying, I AM.

The lesson which these observations convey is, Be, and not seem. Let us
acquiesce. Let us take our bloated nothingness out of the path of the
divine circuits. Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low
in the Lord’s power and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.

If you visit your friend, why need you apologize for not having visited
him, and waste his time and deface your own act? Visit him now. Let him
feel that the highest love has come to see him, in thee its lowest
organ. Or why need you torment yourself and friend by secret
self-reproaches that you have not assisted him or complimented him with
gifts and salutations heretofore? Be a gift and a benediction. Shine
with real light and not with the borrowed reflection of gifts. Common
men are apologies for men; they bow the head, excuse themselves with
prolix reasons, and accumulate appearances because the substance is
not.

We are full of these superstitions of sense, the worship of magnitude.
We call the poet inactive, because he is not a president, a merchant,
or a porter. We adore an institution, and do not see that it is founded
on a thought which we have. But real action is in silent moments. The
epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a
calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but
in a silent thought by the way-side as we walk; in a thought which
revises our entire manner of life and says,—‘Thus hast thou done, but
it were better thus.’ And all our after years, like menials, serve and
wait on this, and according to their ability execute its will. This
revisal or correction is a constant force, which, as a tendency,
reaches through our lifetime. The object of the man, the aim of these
moments, is to make daylight shine through him, to suffer the law to
traverse his whole being without obstruction, so that on what point
soever of his doing your eye falls it shall report truly of his
character, whether it be his diet, his house, his religious forms, his
society, his mirth, his vote, his opposition. Now he is not
homogeneous, but heterogeneous, and the ray does not traverse; there
are no thorough lights, but the eye of the beholder is puzzled,
detecting many unlike tendencies and a life not yet at one.

Why should we make it a point with our false modesty to disparage that
man we are and that form of being assigned to us? A good man is
contented. I love and honor Epaminondas, but I do not wish to be
Epaminondas. I hold it more just to love the world of this hour than
the world of his hour. Nor can you, if I am true, excite me to the
least uneasiness by saying, ‘He acted and thou sittest still.’ I see
action to be good, when the need is, and sitting still to be also good.
Epaminondas, if he was the man I take him for, would have sat still
with joy and peace, if his lot had been mine. Heaven is large, and
affords space for all modes of love and fortitude. Why should we be
busybodies and superserviceable? Action and inaction are alike to the
true. One piece of the tree is cut for a weathercock and one for the
sleeper of a bridge; the virtue of the wood is apparent in both.

I desire not to disgrace the soul. The fact that I am here certainly
shows me that the soul had need of an organ here. Shall I not assume
the post? Shall I skulk and dodge and duck with my unseasonable
apologies and vain modesty and imagine my being here impertinent? less
pertinent than Epaminondas or Homer being there? and that the soul did
not know its own needs? Besides, without any reasoning on the matter, I
have no discontent. The good soul nourishes me and unlocks new
magazines of power and enjoyment to me every day. I will not meanly
decline the immensity of good, because I have heard that it has come to
others in another shape.

Besides, why should we be cowed by the name of Action? ’Tis a trick of
the senses,—no more. We know that the ancestor of every action is a
thought. The poor mind does not seem to itself to be any thing unless
it have an outside badge,—some Gentoo diet, or Quaker coat, or
Calvinistic prayer-meeting, or philanthropic society, or a great
donation, or a high office, or, any how, some wild contrasting action
to testify that it is somewhat. The rich mind lies in the sun and
sleeps, and is Nature. To think is to act.

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is
of an infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with
the celestial air until it eclipses the sun and moon. Let us seek one
peace by fidelity. Let me heed my duties. Why need I go gadding into
the scenes and philosophy of Greek and Italian history before I have
justified myself to my benefactors? How dare I read Washington’s
campaigns when I have not answered the letters of my own
correspondents? Is not that a just objection to much of our reading? It
is a pusillanimous desertion of our work to gaze after our neighbors.
It is peeping. Byron says of Jack Bunting,—

     “He knew not what to say, and so he swore.”

I may say it of our preposterous use of books,—He knew not what to do,
and so _he read_. I can think of nothing to fill my time with, and I
find the Life of Brant. It is a very extravagant compliment to pay to
Brant, or to General Schuyler, or to General Washington. My time should
be as good as their time,—my facts, my net of relations, as good as
theirs, or either of theirs. Rather let me do my work so well that
other idlers if they choose may compare my texture with the texture of
these and find it identical with the best.

This over-estimate of the possibilities of Paul and Pericles, this
under-estimate of our own, comes from a neglect of the fact of an
identical nature. Bonaparte knew but one merit, and rewarded in one and
the same way the good soldier, the good astronomer, the good poet, the
good player. The poet uses the names of Cæsar, of Tamerlane, of
Bonduca, of Belisarius; the painter uses the conventional story of the
Virgin Mary, of Paul, of Peter. He does not therefore defer to the
nature of these accidental men, of these stock heroes. If the poet
write a true drama, then he is Cæsar, and not the player of Cæsar; then
the selfsame strain of thought, emotion as pure, wit as subtle, motions
as swift, mounting, extravagant, and a heart as great, self-sufficing,
dauntless, which on the waves of its love and hope can uplift all that
is reckoned solid and precious in the world,—palaces, gardens, money,
navies, kingdoms,—marking its own incomparable worth by the slight it
casts on these gauds of men;—these all are his, and by the power of
these he rouses the nations. Let a man believe in God, and not in names
and places and persons. Let the great soul incarnated in some woman’s
form, poor and sad and single, in some Dolly or Joan, go out to
service, and sweep chambers and scour floors, and its effulgent
daybeams cannot be muffled or hid, but to sweep and scour will
instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top and radiance of
human life, and all people will get mops and brooms; until, lo!
suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some other form and
done some other deed, and that is now the flower and head of all living
nature.

We are the photometers, we the irritable goldleaf and tinfoil that
measure the accumulations of the subtle element. We know the authentic
effects of the true fire through every one of its million disguises.



V.
LOVE


“I was as a gem concealed;
Me my burning ray revealed.”
                    _Koran_.



LOVE


Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfilments; each of its joys
ripens into a new want. Nature, uncontainable, flowing, forelooking, in
the first sentiment of kindness anticipates already a benevolence which
shall lose all particular regards in its general light. The
introduction to this felicity is in a private and tender relation of
one to one, which is the enchantment of human life; which, like a
certain divine rage and enthusiasm, seizes on man at one period and
works a revolution in his mind and body; unites him to his race,
pledges him to the domestic and civic relations, carries him with new
sympathy into nature, enhances the power of the senses, opens the
imagination, adds to his character heroic and sacred attributes,
establishes marriage, and gives permanence to human society.

The natural association of the sentiment of love with the heyday of the
blood seems to require that in order to portray it in vivid tints,
which every youth and maid should confess to be true to their throbbing
experience, one must not be too old. The delicious fancies of youth
reject the least savor of a mature philosophy, as chilling with age and
pedantry their purple bloom. And therefore I know I incur the
imputation of unnecessary hardness and stoicism from those who compose
the Court and Parliament of Love. But from these formidable censors I
shall appeal to my seniors. For it is to be considered that this
passion of which we speak, though it begin with the young, yet forsakes
not the old, or rather suffers no one who is truly its servant to grow
old, but makes the aged participators of it not less than the tender
maiden, though in a different and nobler sort. For it is a fire that
kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught
from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges
until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the
universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature
with its generous flames. It matters not therefore whether we attempt
to describe the passion at twenty, at thirty, or at eighty years. He
who paints it at the first period will lose some of its later, he who
paints it at the last, some of its earlier traits. Only it is to be
hoped that by patience and the Muses’ aid we may attain to that inward
view of the law which shall describe a truth ever young and beautiful,
so central that it shall commend itself to the eye, at whatever angle
beholden.

And the first condition is, that we must leave a too close and
lingering adherence to facts, and study the sentiment as it appeared in
hope and not in history. For each man sees his own life defaced and
disfigured, as the life of man is not, to his imagination. Each man
sees over his own experience a certain stain of error, whilst that of
other men looks fair and ideal. Let any man go back to those delicious
relations which make the beauty of his life, which have given him
sincerest instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and moan. Alas! I
know not why, but infinite compunctions embitter in mature life the
remembrances of budding joy and cover every beloved name. Every thing
is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all
is sour, if seen as experience. Details are melancholy; the plan is
seemly and noble. In the actual world—the painful kingdom of time and
place—dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal,
is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the Muses sing. But
grief cleaves to names, and persons, and the partial interests of
to-day and yesterday.

The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion which this topic of
personal relations usurps in the conversation of society. What do we
wish to know of any worthy person so much, as how he has sped in the
history of this sentiment? What books in the circulating libraries
circulate? How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is
told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in
the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between
two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet
them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep
emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take
the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind
love a lover. The earliest demonstrations of complacency and kindness
are nature’s most winning pictures. It is the dawn of civility and
grace in the coarse and rustic. The rude village boy teases the girls
about the school-house door;—but to-day he comes running into the
entry, and meets one fair child disposing her satchel; he holds her
books to help her, and instantly it seems to him as if she removed
herself from him infinitely, and was a sacred precinct. Among the
throng of girls he runs rudely enough, but one alone distances him; and
these two little neighbors, that were so close just now, have learned
to respect each other’s personality. Or who can avert his eyes from the
engaging, half-artful, half-artless ways of school-girls who go into
the country shops to buy a skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and talk
half an hour about nothing with the broad-faced, good-natured shop-boy.
In the village they are on a perfect equality, which love delights in,
and without any coquetry the happy, affectionate nature of woman flows
out in this pretty gossip. The girls may have little beauty, yet
plainly do they establish between them and the good boy the most
agreeable, confiding relations, what with their fun and their earnest,
about Edgar and Jonas and Almira, and who was invited to the party, and
who danced at the dancing-school, and when the singing-school would
begin, and other nothings concerning which the parties cooed. By and by
that boy wants a wife, and very truly and heartily will he know where
to find a sincere and sweet mate, without any risk such as Milton
deplores as incident to scholars and great men.

I have been told that in some public discourses of mine my reverence
for the intellect has made me unjustly cold to the personal relations.
But now I almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words.
For persons are love’s world, and the coldest philosopher cannot
recount the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to the
power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to
nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts. For though the
celestial rapture falling out of heaven seizes only upon those of
tender age, and although a beauty overpowering all analysis or
comparison and putting us quite beside ourselves we can seldom see
after thirty years, yet the remembrance of these visions outlasts all
other remembrances, and is a wreath of flowers on the oldest brows. But
here is a strange fact; it may seem to many men, in revising their
experience, that they have no fairer page in their life’s book than the
delicious memory of some passages wherein affection contrived to give a
witchcraft, surpassing the deep attraction of its own truth, to a
parcel of accidental and trivial circumstances. In looking backward
they may find that several things which were not the charm have more
reality to this groping memory than the charm itself which embalmed
them. But be our experience in particulars what it may, no man ever
forgot the visitations of that power to his heart and brain, which
created all things anew; which was the dawn in him of music, poetry,
and art; which made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the
morning and the night varied enchantments; when a single tone of one
voice could make the heart bound, and the most trivial circumstance
associated with one form is put in the amber of memory; when he became
all eye when one was present, and all memory when one was gone; when
the youth becomes a watcher of windows and studious of a glove, a veil,
a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage; when no place is too solitary
and none too silent, for him who has richer company and sweeter
conversation in his new thoughts than any old friends, though best and
purest, can give him; for the figures, the motions, the words of the
beloved object are not like other images written in water, but, as
Plutarch said, “enamelled in fire,” and make the study of midnight:—

     “Thou art not gone being gone, where’er thou art,
     Thou leav’st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy loving heart.”

In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at the
recollection of days when happiness was not happy enough, but must be
drugged with the relish of pain and fear; for he touched the secret of
the matter who said of love,—

     “All other pleasures are not worth its pains:”

and when the day was not long enough, but the night too must be
consumed in keen recollections; when the head boiled all night on the
pillow with the generous deed it resolved on; when the moonlight was a
pleasing fever and the stars were letters and the flowers ciphers and
the air was coined into song; when all business seemed an impertinence,
and all the men and women running to and fro in the streets, mere
pictures.

The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive
and significant. Nature grows conscious. Every bird on the boughs of
the tree sings now to his heart and soul. The notes are almost
articulate. The clouds have faces as he looks on them. The trees of the
forest, the waving grass and the peeping flowers have grown
intelligent; and he almost fears to trust them with the secret which
they seem to invite. Yet nature soothes and sympathizes. In the green
solitude he finds a dearer home than with men:—

     “Fountain-heads and pathless groves,
     Places which pale passion loves,
     Moonlight walks, when all the fowls
     Are safely housed, save bats and owls,
     A midnight bell, a passing groan,—
     These are the sounds we feed upon.”

Behold there in the wood the fine madman! He is a palace of sweet
sounds and sights; he dilates; he is twice a man; he walks with arms
akimbo; he soliloquizes; he accosts the grass and the trees; he feels
the blood of the violet, the clover and the lily in his veins; and he
talks with the brook that wets his foot.

The heats that have opened his perceptions of natural beauty have made
him love music and verse. It is a fact often observed, that men have
written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write
well under any other circumstances.

The like force has the passion over all his nature. It expands the
sentiment; it makes the clown gentle and gives the coward heart. Into
the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy
the world, so only it have the countenance of the beloved object. In
giving him to another it still more gives him to himself. He is a new
man, with new perceptions, new and keener purposes, and a religious
solemnity of character and aims. He does not longer appertain to his
family and society; _he_ is somewhat; _he_ is a person; _he_ is a soul.

And here let us examine a little nearer the nature of that influence
which is thus potent over the human youth. Beauty, whose revelation to
man we now celebrate, welcome as the sun wherever it pleases to shine,
which pleases everybody with it and with themselves, seems sufficient
to itself. The lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor and
solitary. Like a tree in flower, so much soft, budding, informing
loveliness is society for itself; and she teaches his eye why Beauty
was pictured with Loves and Graces attending her steps. Her existence
makes the world rich. Though she extrudes all other persons from his
attention as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him by carrying out
her own being into somewhat impersonal, large, mundane, so that the
maiden stands to him for a representative of all select things and
virtues. For that reason the lover never sees personal resemblances in
his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a
likeness to her mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood.
The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond
mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can analyze the
nameless charm which glances from one and another face and form? We are
touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find
whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points. It is
destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to
organization. Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love
known and described in society, but, as it seems to me, to a quite
other and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy
and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. We cannot
approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves’-neck lustres,
hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things,
which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at
appropriation and use. What else did Jean Paul Richter signify, when he
said to music, “Away! away! thou speakest to me of things which in all
my endless life I have not found, and shall not find.” The same fluency
may be observed in every work of the plastic arts. The statue is then
beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out
of criticism and can no longer be defined by compass and
measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it and to
say what it is in the act of doing. The god or hero of the sculptor is
always represented in a transition _from_ that which is representable
to the senses, _to_ that which is not. Then first it ceases to be a
stone. The same remark holds of painting. And of poetry the success is
not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and
fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable. Concerning it
Landor inquires “whether it is not to be referred to some purer state
of sensation and existence.”

In like manner, personal beauty is then first charming and itself when
it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an
end; when it suggests gleams and visions and not earthly satisfactions;
when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel
his right to it, though he were Cæsar; he cannot feel more right to it
than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.

Hence arose the saying, “If I love you, what is that to you?” We say so
because we feel that what we love is not in your will, but above it. It
is not you, but your radiance. It is that which you know not in
yourself and can never know.

This agrees well with that high philosophy of Beauty which the ancient
writers delighted in; for they said that the soul of man, embodied here
on earth, went roaming up and down in quest of that other world of its
own out of which it came into this, but was soon stupefied by the light
of the natural sun, and unable to see any other objects than those of
this world, which are but shadows of real things. Therefore the Deity
sends the glory of youth before the soul, that it may avail itself of
beautiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the celestial good and
fair; and the man beholding such a person in the female sex runs to her
and finds the highest joy in contemplating the form, movement, and
intelligence of this person, because it suggests to him the presence of
that which indeed is within the beauty, and the cause of the beauty.

If however, from too much conversing with material objects, the soul
was gross, and misplaced its satisfaction in the body, it reaped
nothing but sorrow; body being unable to fulfil the promise which
beauty holds out; but if, accepting the hint of these visions and
suggestions which beauty makes to his mind, the soul passes through the
body and falls to admire strokes of character, and the lovers
contemplate one another in their discourses and their actions, then
they pass to the true palace of beauty, more and more inflame their
love of it, and by this love extinguishing the base affection, as the
sun puts out the fire by shining on the hearth, they become pure and
hallowed. By conversation with that which is in itself excellent,
magnanimous, lowly, and just, the lover comes to a warmer love of these
nobilities, and a quicker apprehension of them. Then he passes from
loving them in one to loving them in all, and so is the one beautiful
soul only the door through which he enters to the society of all true
and pure souls. In the particular society of his mate he attains a
clearer sight of any spot, any taint which her beauty has contracted
from this world, and is able to point it out, and this with mutual joy
that they are now able, without offence, to indicate blemishes and
hindrances in each other, and give to each all help and comfort in
curing the same. And beholding in many souls the traits of the divine
beauty, and separating in each soul that which is divine from the taint
which it has contracted in the world, the lover ascends to the highest
beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on this
ladder of created souls.

Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us of love in all ages. The
doctrine is not old, nor is it new. If Plato, Plutarch and Apuleius
taught it, so have Petrarch, Angelo and Milton. It awaits a truer
unfolding in opposition and rebuke to that subterranean prudence which
presides at marriages with words that take hold of the upper world,
whilst one eye is prowling in the cellar; so that its gravest discourse
has a savor of hams and powdering-tubs. Worst, when this sensualism
intrudes into the education of young women, and withers the hope and
affection of human nature by teaching that marriage signifies nothing
but a housewife’s thrift, and that woman’s life has no other aim.

But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only one scene in our
play. In the procession of the soul from within outward, it enlarges
its circles ever, like the pebble thrown into the pond, or the light
proceeding from an orb. The rays of the soul alight first on things
nearest, on every utensil and toy, on nurses and domestics, on the
house and yard and passengers, on the circle of household acquaintance,
on politics and geography and history. But things are ever grouping
themselves according to higher or more interior laws. Neighborhood,
size, numbers, habits, persons, lose by degrees their power over us.
Cause and effect, real affinities, the longing for harmony between the
soul and the circumstance, the progressive, idealizing instinct,
predominate later, and the step backward from the higher to the lower
relations is impossible. Thus even love, which is the deification of
persons, must become more impersonal every day. Of this at first it
gives no hint. Little think the youth and maiden who are glancing at
each other across crowded rooms with eyes so full of mutual
intelligence, of the precious fruit long hereafter to proceed from this
new, quite external stimulus. The work of vegetation begins first in
the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds. From exchanging glances,
they advance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion,
to plighting troth and marriage. Passion beholds its object as a
perfect unit. The soul is wholly embodied, and the body is wholly
ensouled:—

     “Her pure and eloquent blood
     Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
     That one might almost say her body thought.”

Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens
fine. Life, with this pair, has no other aim, asks no more, than
Juliet,—than Romeo. Night, day, studies, talents, kingdoms, religion,
are all contained in this form full of soul, in this soul which is all
form. The lovers delight in endearments, in avowals of love, in
comparisons of their regards. When alone, they solace themselves with
the remembered image of the other. Does that other see the same star,
the same melting cloud, read the same book, feel the same emotion, that
now delight me? They try and weigh their affection, and adding up
costly advantages, friends, opportunities, properties, exult in
discovering that willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a ransom
for the beautiful, the beloved head, not one hair of which shall be
harmed. But the lot of humanity is on these children. Danger, sorrow,
and pain arrive to them, as to all. Love prays. It makes covenants with
Eternal Power in behalf of this dear mate. The union which is thus
effected and which adds a new value to every atom in nature—for it
transmutes every thread throughout the whole web of relation into a
golden ray, and bathes the soul in a new and sweeter element—is yet a
temporary state. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations,
nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in
clay. It arouses itself at last from these endearments, as toys, and
puts on the harness and aspires to vast and universal aims. The soul
which is in the soul of each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects
incongruities, defects and disproportion in the behavior of the other.
Hence arise surprise, expostulation and pain. Yet that which drew them
to each other was signs of loveliness, signs of virtue; and these
virtues are there, however eclipsed. They appear and reappear and
continue to attract; but the regard changes, quits the sign and
attaches to the substance. This repairs the wounded affection.
Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and
combination of all possible positions of the parties, to employ all the
resources of each and acquaint each with the strength and weakness of
the other. For it is the nature and end of this relation, that they
should represent the human race to each other. All that is in the
world, which is or ought to be known, is cunningly wrought into the
texture of man, of woman:—

     “The person love does to us fit,
     Like manna, has the taste of all in it.”

The world rolls; the circumstances vary every hour. The angels that
inhabit this temple of the body appear at the windows, and the gnomes
and vices also. By all the virtues they are united. If there be virtue,
all the vices are known as such; they confess and flee. Their once
flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast, and losing in
violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a thorough good
understanding. They resign each other without complaint to the good
offices which man and woman are severally appointed to discharge in
time, and exchange the passion which once could not lose sight of its
object, for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether present or
absent, of each other’s designs. At last they discover that all which
at first drew them together,—those once sacred features, that magical
play of charms,—was deciduous, had a prospective end, like the
scaffolding by which the house was built; and the purification of the
intellect and the heart from year to year is the real marriage,
foreseen and prepared from the first, and wholly above their
consciousness. Looking at these aims with which two persons, a man and
a woman, so variously and correlatively gifted, are shut up in one
house to spend in the nuptial society forty or fifty years, I do not
wonder at the emphasis with which the heart prophesies this crisis from
early infancy, at the profuse beauty with which the instincts deck the
nuptial bower, and nature and intellect and art emulate each other in
the gifts and the melody they bring to the epithalamium.

Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person,
nor partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the
end of increasing virtue and wisdom. We are by nature observers, and
thereby learners. That is our permanent state. But we are often made to
feel that our affections are but tents of a night. Though slowly and
with pain, the objects of the affections change, as the objects of
thought do. There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the
man and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons. But in
health the mind is presently seen again,—its overarching vault, bright
with galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm loves and fears that
swept over us as clouds must lose their finite character and blend with
God, to attain their own perfection. But we need not fear that we can
lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to
the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations,
must be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, and so
on for ever.



VI.
FRIENDSHIP


A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs;
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.
I fancied he was fled,
And, after many a year,
Glowed unexhausted kindliness
Like daily sunrise there.
My careful heart was free again,—
O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red,
All things through thee take nobler form
And look beyond the earth,
The mill-round of our fate appears
A sun-path in thy worth.
Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.



FRIENDSHIP


We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Maugre all the
selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human
family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many
persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we
honor, and who honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in
church, whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the
language of these wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth.

The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain
cordial exhilaration. In poetry and in common speech, the emotions of
benevolence and complacency which are felt towards others are likened
to the material effects of fire; so swift, or much more swift, more
active, more cheering, are these fine inward irradiations. From the
highest degree of passionate love to the lowest degree of good-will,
they make the sweetness of life.

Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The
scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not
furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is
necessary to write a letter to a friend,—and forthwith troops of gentle
thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words. See, in
any house where virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation which
the approach of a stranger causes. A commended stranger is expected and
announced, and an uneasiness betwixt pleasure and pain invades all the
hearts of a household. His arrival almost brings fear to the good
hearts that would welcome him. The house is dusted, all things fly into
their places, the old coat is exchanged for the new, and they must get
up a dinner if they can. Of a commended stranger, only the good report
is told by others, only the good and new is heard by us. He stands to
us for humanity. He is what we wish. Having imagined and invested him,
we ask how we should stand related in conversation and action with such
a man, and are uneasy with fear. The same idea exalts conversation with
him. We talk better than we are wont. We have the nimblest fancy, a
richer memory, and our dumb devil has taken leave for the time. For
long hours we can continue a series of sincere, graceful, rich
communications, drawn from the oldest, secretest experience, so that
they who sit by, of our own kinsfolk and acquaintance, shall feel a
lively surprise at our unusual powers. But as soon as the stranger
begins to intrude his partialities, his definitions, his defects, into
the conversation, it is all over. He has heard the first, the last and
best he will ever hear from us. He is no stranger now. Vulgarity,
ignorance, misapprehension are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes,
he may get the order, the dress and the dinner,—but the throbbing of
the heart and the communications of the soul, no more.

What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which make a young world
for me again? What so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in
a thought, in a feeling? How beautiful, on their approach to this
beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and the true! The
moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; there is
no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennuis vanish,—all duties
even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant
of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the
universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and
cheerful alone for a thousand years.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old
and the new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth
himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and
yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely and the
noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate. Who hears me, who
understands me, becomes mine,—a possession for all time. Nor is Nature
so poor but she gives me this joy several times, and thus we weave
social threads of our own, a new web of relations; and, as many
thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by and by
stand in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and
pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My friends have come to me unsought.
The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity
of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I but the Deity in me
and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual
character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually
connives, and now makes many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent
lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths, and
enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts. These are new poetry of the
first Bard,—poetry without stop,—hymn, ode and epic, poetry still
flowing, Apollo and the Muses chanting still. Will these too separate
themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but I fear it
not; for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by simple
affinity, and the Genius of my life being thus social, the same
affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these men
and women, wherever I may be.

I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. It is
almost dangerous to me to “crush the sweet poison of misused wine” of
the affections. A new person is to me a great event and hinders me from
sleep. I have often had fine fancies about persons which have given me
delicious hours; but the joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit.
Thought is not born of it; my action is very little modified. I must
feel pride in my friend’s accomplishments as if they were mine, and a
property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the
lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden. We over-estimate
the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our
goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Every thing that is
his,—his name, his form, his dress, books and instruments,—fancy
enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.

Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy
in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship, like the immortality of the
soul, is too good to be believed. The lover, beholding his maiden, half
knows that she is not verily that which he worships; and in the golden
hour of friendship we are surprised with shades of suspicion and
unbelief. We doubt that we bestow on our hero the virtues in which he
shines, and afterwards worship the form to which we have ascribed this
divine inhabitation. In strictness, the soul does not respect men as it
respects itself. In strict science all persons underlie the same
condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by
mining for the metaphysical foundation of this Elysian temple? Shall I
not be as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know
them for what they are. Their essence is not less beautiful than their
appearance, though it needs finer organs for its apprehension. The root
of the plant is not unsightly to science, though for chaplets and
festoons we cut the stem short. And I must hazard the production of the
bald fact amidst these pleasing reveries, though it should prove an
Egyptian skull at our banquet. A man who stands united with his thought
conceives magnificently of himself. He is conscious of a universal
success, even though bought by uniform particular failures. No
advantages, no powers, no gold or force, can be any match for him. I
cannot choose but rely on my own poverty more than on your wealth. I
cannot make your consciousness tantamount to mine. Only the star
dazzles; the planet has a faint, moon-like ray. I hear what you say of
the admirable parts and tried temper of the party you praise, but I see
well that for all his purple cloaks I shall not like him, unless he is
at last a poor Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast
shadow of the Phenomenal includes thee also in its pied and painted
immensity,—thee also, compared with whom all else is shadow. Thou art
not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is,—thou art not my soul, but a
picture and effigy of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and already
thou art seizing thy hat and cloak. Is it not that the soul puts forth
friends as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently, by the
germination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf? The law of nature is
alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the
opposite. The soul environs itself with friends that it may enter into
a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a
season, that it may exalt its conversation or society. This method
betrays itself along the whole history of our personal relations. The
instinct of affection revives the hope of union with our mates, and the
returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase. Thus every man
passes his life in the search after friendship, and if he should record
his true sentiment, he might write a letter like this to each new
candidate for his love:—

DEAR FRIEND,

If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to match my mood with
thine, I should never think again of trifles in relation to thy comings
and goings. I am not very wise; my moods are quite attainable, and I
respect thy genius; it is to me as yet unfathomed; yet dare I not
presume in thee a perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art to me a
delicious torment. Thine ever, or never.

Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity and not for
life. They are not to be indulged. This is to weave cobweb, and not
cloth. Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we
have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre
of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of
one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed at a
swift and petty benefit, to suck a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the
slowest fruit in the whole garden of God, which many summers and many
winters must ripen. We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an
adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves. In vain.
We are armed all over with subtle antagonisms, which, as soon as we
meet, begin to play, and translate all poetry into stale prose. Almost
all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise, and,
what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the
beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other. What a
perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and
gifted! After interviews have been compassed with long foresight we
must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable
apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of
friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both
parties are relieved by solitude.

I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes no difference how many
friends I have and what content I can find in conversing with each, if
there be one to whom I am not equal. If I have shrunk unequal from one
contest, the joy I find in all the rest becomes mean and cowardly. I
should hate myself, if then I made my other friends my asylum:—

     “The valiant warrior famoused for fight,
     After a hundred victories, once foiled,
     Is from the book of honor razed quite,
     And all the rest forgot for which he toiled.”

Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness and apathy are a
tough husk in which a delicate organization is protected from premature
ripening. It would be lost if it knew itself before any of the best
souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. Respect the
_naturlangsamkeit_ which hardens the ruby in a million years, and works
in duration in which Alps and Andes come and go as rainbows. The good
spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price of rashness. Love,
which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth
of man. Let us not have this childish luxury in our regards, but the
austerest worth; let us approach our friend with an audacious trust in
the truth of his heart, in the breadth, impossible to be overturned, of
his foundations.

The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, and I leave,
for the time, all account of subordinate social benefit, to speak of
that select and sacred relation which is a kind of absolute, and which
even leaves the language of love suspicious and common, so much is this
purer, and nothing is so much divine.

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage.
When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the
solidest thing we know. For now, after so many ages of experience, what
do we know of nature or of ourselves? Not one step has man taken toward
the solution of the problem of his destiny. In one condemnation of
folly stand the whole universe of men. But the sweet sincerity of joy
and peace which I draw from this alliance with my brother’s soul is the
nut itself whereof all nature and all thought is but the husk and
shell. Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It might well be
built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day.
Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation and honor its law!
He who offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like an
Olympian, to the great games where the first-born of the world are the
competitors. He proposes himself for contests where Time, Want, Danger,
are in the lists, and he alone is victor who has truth enough in his
constitution to preserve the delicacy of his beauty from the wear and
tear of all these. The gifts of fortune may be present or absent, but
all the speed in that contest depends on intrinsic nobleness and the
contempt of trifles. There are two elements that go to the composition
of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in
either, no reason why either should be first named. One is truth. A
friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think
aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal
that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation,
courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal
with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom
meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and
authority, only to the highest rank; _that_ being permitted to speak
truth, as having none above it to court or conform unto. Every man
alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.
We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by
gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him
under a hundred folds. I knew a man who under a certain religious
frenzy cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliment and
commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered,
and that with great insight and beauty. At first he was resisted, and
all men agreed he was mad. But persisting—as indeed he could not help
doing—for some time in this course, he attained to the advantage of
bringing every man of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No
man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off
with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But every man was
constrained by so much sincerity to the like plaindealing, and what
love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, he did
certainly show him. But to most of us society shows not its face and
eye, but its side and its back. To stand in true relations with men in
a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not? We can seldom go
erect. Almost every man we meet requires some civility,—requires to be
humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or
philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils
all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not
my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me entertainment without
requiring any stipulation on my part. A friend therefore is a sort of
paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose
existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the
semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity,
reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the
masterpiece of nature.

The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holden to men by
every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by
lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and badge and
trifle,—but we can scarce believe that so much character can subsist in
another as to draw us by love. Can another be so blessed and we so pure
that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes dear to me I have
touched the goal of fortune. I find very little written directly to the
heart of this matter in books. And yet I have one text which I cannot
choose but remember. My author says,—“I offer myself faintly and
bluntly to those whose I effectually am, and tender myself least to him
to whom I am the most devoted.” I wish that friendship should have
feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the
ground, before it vaults over the moon. I wish it to be a little of a
citizen, before it is quite a cherub. We chide the citizen because he
makes love a commodity. It is an exchange of gifts, of useful loans; it
is good neighborhood; it watches with the sick; it holds the pall at
the funeral; and quite loses sight of the delicacies and nobility of
the relation. But though we cannot find the god under this disguise of
a sutler, yet on the other hand we cannot forgive the poet if he spins
his thread too fine and does not substantiate his romance by the
municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity and pity. I hate
the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and
worldly alliances. I much prefer the company of ploughboys and
tin-peddlers to the silken and perfumed amity which celebrates its days
of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle and dinners
at the best taverns. The end of friendship is a commerce the most
strict and homely that can be joined; more strict than any of which we
have experience. It is for aid and comfort through all the relations
and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene days and graceful
gifts and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare,
shipwreck, poverty, and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies
of the wit and the trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other
the daily needs and offices of man’s life, and embellish it by courage,
wisdom and unity. It should never fall into something usual and
settled, but should be alert and inventive and add rhyme and reason to
what was drudgery.

Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each so
well tempered and so happily adapted, and withal so circumstanced (for
even in that particular, a poet says, love demands that the parties be
altogether paired), that its satisfaction can very seldom be assured.
It cannot subsist in its perfection, say some of those who are learned
in this warm lore of the heart, betwixt more than two. I am not quite
so strict in my terms, perhaps because I have never known so high a
fellowship as others. I please my imagination more with a circle of
godlike men and women variously related to each other and between whom
subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this law of _one to one_
peremptory for conversation, which is the practice and consummation of
friendship. Do not mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good and
bad. You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several times
with two several men, but let all three of you come together and you
shall not have one new and hearty word. Two may talk and one may hear,
but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and
searching sort. In good company there is never such discourse between
two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In
good company the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul
exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No
partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister,
of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he
may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not
poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense
demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which
requires an absolute running of two souls into one.

No two men but being left alone with each other enter into simpler
relations. Yet it is affinity that determines _which_ two shall
converse. Unrelated men give little joy to each other, will never
suspect the latent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a great talent
for conversation, as if it were a permanent property in some
individuals. Conversation is an evanescent relation,—no more. A man is
reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a
word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much
reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade.
In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought he
will regain his tongue.

Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness that
piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other
party. Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my
friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his real sympathy. I am
equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an
instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that
the _not mine_ is _mine_. I hate, where I looked for a manly
furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of
concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his
echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do
without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts. There
must be very two, before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance
of two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared,
before yet they recognize the deep identity which, beneath these
disparities, unites them.

He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who is sure that
greatness and goodness are always economy; who is not swift to
intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not intermeddle with this. Leave
to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the births of
the eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment. We talk of
choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is a
great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course he has
merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honor if you must needs
hold him close to your person. Stand aside; give those merits room; let
them mount and expand. Are you the friend of your friend’s buttons, or
of his thought? To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a
thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest ground.
Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as property, and to suck
a short and all-confounding pleasure, instead of the noblest benefit.

Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation. Why should
we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them? Why insist
on rash personal relations with your friend? Why go to his house, or
know his mother and brother and sisters? Why be visited by him at your
own? Are these things material to our covenant? Leave this touching and
clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity,
a glance from him, I want, but not news, nor pottage. I can get
politics and chat and neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions.
Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal
and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in
comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that
clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify, but
raise it to that standard. That great defying eye, that scornful beauty
of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather
fortify and enhance. Worship his superiorities; wish him not less by a
thought, but hoard and tell them all. Guard him as thy counterpart. Let
him be to thee for ever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly
revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast
aside. The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be
seen if the eye is too near. To my friend I write a letter and from him
I receive a letter. That seems to you a little. It suffices me. It is a
spiritual gift worthy of him to give and of me to receive. It profanes
nobody. In these warm lines the heart will trust itself, as it will not
to the tongue, and pour out the prophecy of a godlier existence than
all the annals of heroism have yet made good.

Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as not to prejudice its
perfect flower by your impatience for its opening. We must be our own
before we can be another’s. There is at least this satisfaction in
crime, according to the Latin proverb;—you can speak to your accomplice
on even terms. _Crimen quos inquinat, æquat_. To those whom we admire
and love, at first we cannot. Yet the least defect of self-possession
vitiates, in my judgment, the entire relation. There can never be deep
peace between two spirits, never mutual respect, until in their
dialogue each stands for the whole world.

What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of
spirit we can. Let us be silent,—so we may hear the whisper of the
gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to cast about what you should
say to the select souls, or how to say any thing to such? No matter how
ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There are innumerable
degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be
frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary
and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves of
your lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a
friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer a man by getting into
his house. If unlike, his soul only flees the faster from you, and you
shall never catch a true glance of his eye. We see the noble afar off
and they repel us; why should we intrude? Late,—very late,—we perceive
that no arrangements, no introductions, no consuetudes or habits of
society would be of any avail to establish us in such relations with
them as we desire,—but solely the uprise of nature in us to the same
degree it is in them; then shall we meet as water with water; and if we
should not meet them then, we shall not want them, for we are already
they. In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man’s own
worthiness from other men. Men have sometimes exchanged names with
their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved
his own soul.

The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy
to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world.
Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope
cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the
universal power, souls are now acting, enduring, and daring, which can
love us and which we can love. We may congratulate ourselves that the
period of nonage, of follies, of blunders and of shame, is passed in
solitude, and when we are finished men we shall grasp heroic hands in
heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike
leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be.
Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no god
attends. By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little you
gain the great. You demonstrate yourself, so as to put yourself out of
the reach of false relations, and you draw to you the first-born of the
world,—those rare pilgrims whereof only one or two wander in nature at
once, and before whom the vulgar great show as spectres and shadows
merely.

It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, as if so
we could lose any genuine love. Whatever correction of our popular
views we make from insight, nature will be sure to bear us out in, and
though it seem to rob us of some joy, will repay us with a greater. Let
us feel if we will the absolute insulation of man. We are sure that we
have all in us. We go to Europe, or we pursue persons, or we read
books, in the instinctive faith that these will call it out and reveal
us to ourselves. Beggars all. The persons are such as we; the Europe,
an old faded garment of dead persons; the books, their ghosts. Let us
drop this idolatry. Let us give over this mendicancy. Let us even bid
our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, ‘Who are you?
Unhand me: I will be dependent no more.’ Ah! seest thou not, O brother,
that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be
more each other’s because we are more our own? A friend is Janus-faced;
he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my
foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a
greater friend.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them
where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on
our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot
afford to speak much with my friend. If he is great he makes me so
great that I cannot descend to converse. In the great days,
presentiments hover before me in the firmament. I ought then to
dedicate myself to them. I go in that I may seize them, I go out that I
may seize them. I fear only that I may lose them receding into the sky
in which now they are only a patch of brighter light. Then, though I
prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their
visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain
household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy or
search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I
know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods. It is
true, next week I shall have languid moods, when I can well afford to
occupy myself with foreign objects; then I shall regret the lost
literature of your mind, and wish you were by my side again. But if you
come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new visions; not with
yourself but with your lustres, and I shall not be able any more than
now to converse with you. So I will owe to my friends this evanescent
intercourse. I will receive from them not what they have but what they
are. They shall give me that which properly they cannot give, but which
emanates from them. But they shall not hold me by any relations less
subtile and pure. We will meet as though we met not, and part as though
we parted not.

It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a
friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the
other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not
capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide
and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting
planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion. If he
is unequal he will presently pass away; but thou art enlarged by thy
own shining, and no longer a mate for frogs and worms, dost soar and
burn with the gods of the empyrean. It is thought a disgrace to love
unrequited. But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited.
True love transcends the unworthy object and dwells and broods on the
eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but
feels rid of so much earth and feels its independency the surer. Yet
these things may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the
relation. The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity
and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its
object as a god, that it may deify both.



VII.
PRUDENCE


Theme no poet gladly sung,
Fair to old and foul to young;
Scorn not thou the love of parts,
And the articles of arts.
Grandeur of the perfect sphere
Thanks the atoms that cohere.



PRUDENCE


What right have I to write on Prudence, whereof I have Little, and that
of the negative sort? My prudence consists in avoiding and going
without, not in the inventing of means and methods, not in adroit
steering, not in gentle repairing. I have no skill to make money spend
well, no genius in my economy, and whoever sees my garden discovers
that I must have some other garden. Yet I love facts, and hate
lubricity and people without perception. Then I have the same title to
write on prudence that I have to write on poetry or holiness. We write
from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint
those qualities which we do not possess. The poet admires the man of
energy and tactics; the merchant breeds his son for the church or the
bar; and where a man is not vain and egotistic you shall find what he
has not by his praise. Moreover it would be hardly honest in me not to
balance these fine lyric words of Love and Friendship with words of
coarser sound, and whilst my debt to my senses is real and constant,
not to own it in passing.

Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of appearances.
It is the outmost action of the inward life. It is God taking thought
for oxen. It moves matter after the laws of matter. It is content to
seek health of body by complying with physical conditions, and health
of mind by the laws of the intellect.

The world of the senses is a world of shows; it does not exist for
itself, but has a symbolic character; and a true prudence or law of
shows recognizes the co-presence of other laws and knows that its own
office is subaltern; knows that it is surface and not centre where it
works. Prudence is false when detached. It is legitimate when it is the
Natural History of the soul incarnate, when it unfolds the beauty of
laws within the narrow scope of the senses.

There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the world. It is
sufficient to our present purpose to indicate three. One class live to
the utility of the symbol, esteeming health and wealth a final good.
Another class live above this mark to the beauty of the symbol, as the
poet and artist and the naturalist and man of science. A third class
live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing
signified; these are wise men. The first class have common sense; the
second, taste; and the third, spiritual perception. Once in a long
time, a man traverses the whole scale, and sees and enjoys the symbol
solidly, then also has a clear eye for its beauty, and lastly, whilst
he pitches his tent on this sacred volcanic isle of nature, does not
offer to build houses and barns thereon,—reverencing the splendor of
the God which he sees bursting through each chink and cranny.

The world is filled with the proverbs and acts and winkings of a base
prudence, which is a devotion to matter, as if we possessed no other
faculties than the palate, the nose, the touch, the eye and ear; a
prudence which adores the Rule of Three, which never subscribes, which
never gives, which seldom lends, and asks but one question of any
project,—Will it bake bread? This is a disease like a thickening of the
skin until the vital organs are destroyed. But culture, revealing the
high origin of the apparent world and aiming at the perfection of the
man as the end, degrades every thing 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. If a man lose his balance and immerse himself in
any trades or pleasures for their own sake, he may be a good wheel or
pin, but he is not a cultivated man.

The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and
cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature’s joke, and
therefore literature’s. The true prudence limits this sensualism by
admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world. This recognition
once made, the order of the world and the distribution of affairs and
times, being studied with the co-perception of their subordinate place,
will reward any degree of attention. For our existence, thus apparently
attached in nature to the sun and the returning moon and the periods
which they mark,—so susceptible to climate and to country, so alive to
social good and evil, so fond of splendor and so tender to hunger and
cold and debt,—reads all its primary lessons out of these books.

Prudence does not go behind nature and ask whence it is. It takes the
laws of the world whereby man’s being is conditioned, as they are, and
keeps these laws that it may enjoy their proper good. It respects space
and time, climate, want, sleep, the law of polarity, growth and death.
There revolve, to give bound and period to his being on all sides, the
sun and moon, the great formalists in the sky: here lies stubborn
matter, and will not swerve from its chemical routine. Here is a
planted globe, pierced and belted with natural laws and fenced and
distributed externally with civil partitions and properties which
impose new restraints on the young inhabitant.

We eat of the bread which grows in the field. We live by the air which
blows around us and we are poisoned by the air that is too cold or too
hot, too dry or too wet. Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible and
divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A
door is to be painted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood or oil, or
meal or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax, and
an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains, and the
stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word,—these eat
up the hours. Do what we can, summer will have its flies; if we walk in
the woods we must feed mosquitos; if we go a-fishing we must expect a
wet coat. Then climate is a great impediment to idle persons; we often
resolve to give up the care of the weather, but still we regard the
clouds and the rain.

We are instructed by these petty experiences which usurp the hours and
years. The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitant of the
northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the
fixed smile of the tropics. The islander may ramble all day at will. At
night he may sleep on a mat under the moon, and wherever a wild
date-tree grows, nature has, without a prayer even, spread a table for
his morning meal. The northerner is perforce a householder. He must
brew, bake, salt and preserve his food, and pile wood and coal. But as
it happens that not one stroke can labor lay to without some new
acquaintance with nature, and as nature is inexhaustibly significant,
the inhabitants of these climates have always excelled the southerner
in force. Such is the value of these matters that a man who knows other
things can never know too much of these. Let him have accurate
perceptions. Let him, if he have hands, handle; if eyes, measure and
discriminate; let him accept and hive every fact of chemistry, natural
history and economics; the more he has, the less is he willing to spare
any one. Time is always bringing the occasions that disclose their
value. Some wisdom comes out of every natural and innocent action. The
domestic man, who loves no music so well as his kitchen clock and the
airs which the logs sing to him as they burn on the hearth, has solaces
which others never dream of. The application of means to ends insures
victory and the songs of victory not less in a farm or a shop than in
the tactics of party or of war. The good husband finds method as
efficient in the packing of fire-wood in a shed or in the harvesting of
fruits in the cellar, as in Peninsular campaigns or the files of the
Department of State. In the rainy day he builds a work-bench, or gets
his tool-box set in the corner of the barn-chamber, and stored with
nails, gimlet, pincers, screwdriver and chisel. Herein he tastes an old
joy of youth and childhood, the cat-like love of garrets, presses and
corn-chambers, and of the conveniences of long housekeeping. His garden
or his poultry-yard tells him many pleasant anecdotes. One might find
argument for optimism in the abundant flow of this saccharine element
of pleasure in every suburb and extremity of the good world. Let a man
keep the law,—any law,—and his way will be strown with satisfactions.
There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the
amount.

On the other hand, nature punishes any neglect of prudence. If you
think the senses final, obey their law. If you believe in the soul, do
not clutch at sensual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree of
cause and effect. It is vinegar to the eyes to deal with men of loose
and imperfect perception. Dr. Johnson is reported to have said,—“If the
child says he looked out of this window, when he looked out of
that,—whip him.” Our American character is marked by a more than
average delight in accurate perception, which is shown by the currency
of the byword, “No mistake.” But the discomfort of unpunctuality, of
confusion of thought about facts, of inattention to the wants of
to-morrow, is of no nation. The beautiful laws of time and space, once
dislocated by our inaptitude, are holes and dens. If the hive be
disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of honey it will yield us
bees. Our words and actions to be fair must be timely. A gay and
pleasant sound is the whetting of the scythe in the mornings of June,
yet what is more lonesome and sad than the sound of a whetstone or
mower’s rifle when it is too late in the season to make hay?
Scatter-brained and “afternoon” men spoil much more than their own
affair in spoiling the temper of those who deal with them. I have seen
a criticism on some paintings, of which I am reminded when I see the
shiftless and unhappy men who are not true to their senses. The last
Grand Duke of Weimar, a man of superior understanding, said,—“I have
sometimes remarked in the presence of great works of art, and just now
especially in Dresden, how much a certain property contributes to the
effect which gives life to the figures, and to the life an irresistible
truth. This property is the hitting, in all the figures we draw, the
right centre of gravity. I mean the placing the figures firm upon their
feet, making the hands grasp, and fastening the eyes on the spot where
they should look. Even lifeless figures, as vessels and stools—let them
be drawn ever so correctly—lose all effect so soon as they lack the
resting upon their centre of gravity, and have a certain swimming and
oscillating appearance. The Raphael in the Dresden gallery (the only
greatly affecting picture which I have seen) is the quietest and most
passionless piece you can imagine; a couple of saints who worship the
Virgin and Child. Nevertheless, it awakens a deeper impression than the
contortions of ten crucified martyrs. For beside all the resistless
beauty of form, it possesses in the highest degree the property of the
perpendicularity of all the figures.” This perpendicularity we demand
of all the figures in this picture of life. Let them stand on their
feet, and not float and swing. Let us know where to find them. Let them
discriminate between what they remember and what they dreamed, call a
spade a spade, give us facts, and honor their own senses with trust.

But what man shall dare tax another with imprudence? Who is prudent?
The men we call greatest are least in this kingdom. There is a certain
fatal dislocation in our relation to nature, distorting our modes of
living and making every law our enemy, which seems at last to have
aroused all the wit and virtue in the world to ponder the question of
Reform. We must call the highest prudence to counsel, and ask why
health and beauty and genius should now be the exception rather than
the rule of human nature? We do not know the properties of plants and
animals and the laws of nature, through our sympathy with the same; but
this remains the dream of poets. Poetry and prudence should be
coincident. Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric
inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead
the civil code and the day’s work. But now the two things seem
irreconcilably parted. We have violated law upon law until we stand
amidst ruins, and when by chance we espy a coincidence between reason
and the phenomena, we are surprised. Beauty should be the dowry of
every man and woman, as invariably as sensation; but it is rare. Health
or sound organization should be universal. Genius should be the child
of genius and every child should be inspired; but now it is not to be
predicted of any child, and nowhere is it pure. We call partial
half-lights, by courtesy, genius; talent which converts itself to
money; talent which glitters to-day that it may dine and sleep well
to-morrow; and society is officered by _men of parts_, as they are
properly called, and not by divine men. These use their gifts to refine
luxury, not to abolish it. Genius is always ascetic, and piety, and
love. Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and they find
beauty in rites and bounds that resist it.

We have found out fine names to cover our sensuality withal, but no
gifts can raise intemperance. The man of talent affects to call his
transgressions of the laws of the senses trivial and to count them
nothing considered with his devotion to his art. His art never taught
him lewdness, nor the love of wine, nor the wish to reap where he had
not sowed. His art is less for every deduction from his holiness, and
less for every defect of common sense. On him who scorned the world as
he said, the scorned world wreaks its revenge. He that despiseth small
things will perish by little and little. Goethe’s Tasso is very likely
to be a pretty fair historical portrait, and that is true tragedy. It
does not seem to me so genuine grief when some tyrannous Richard the
Third oppresses and slays a score of innocent persons, as when Antonio
and Tasso, both apparently right, wrong each other. One living after
the maxims of this world and consistent and true to them, the other
fired with all divine sentiments, yet grasping also at the pleasures of
sense, without submitting to their law. That is a grief we all feel, a
knot we cannot untie. Tasso’s is no infrequent case in modern
biography. A man of genius, of an ardent temperament, reckless of
physical laws, self-indulgent, becomes presently unfortunate,
querulous, a “discomfortable cousin,” a thorn to himself and to others.

The scholar shames us by his bifold life. Whilst something higher than
prudence is active, he is admirable; when common sense is wanted, he is
an encumbrance. Yesterday, Cæsar was not so great; to-day, the felon at
the gallows’ foot is not more miserable. Yesterday, radiant with the
light of an ideal world in which he lives, the first of men; and now
oppressed by wants and by sickness, for which he must thank himself. He
resembles the pitiful drivellers whom travellers describe as
frequenting the bazaars of Constantinople, who skulk about all day,
yellow, emaciated, ragged, sneaking; and at evening, when the bazaars
are open, slink to the opium-shop, swallow their morsel and become
tranquil and glorified seers. And who has not seen the tragedy of
imprudent genius struggling for years with paltry pecuniary
difficulties, at last sinking, chilled, exhausted and fruitless, like a
giant slaughtered by pins?

Is it not better that a man should accept the first pains and
mortifications of this sort, which nature is not slack in sending him,
as hints that he must expect no other good than the just fruit of his
own labor and self-denial? Health, bread, climate, social position,
have their importance, and he will give them their due. Let him esteem
Nature a perpetual counsellor, and her perfections the exact measure of
our deviations. Let him make the night night, and the day day. Let him
control the habit of expense. Let him see that as much wisdom may be
expended on a private economy as on an empire, and as much wisdom may
be drawn from it. The laws of the world are written out for him on
every piece of money in his hand. There is nothing he will not be the
better for knowing, were it only the wisdom of Poor Richard, or the
State-Street prudence of buying by the acre to sell by the foot; or the
thrift of the agriculturist, to stick a tree between whiles, because it
will grow whilst he sleeps; or the prudence which consists in
husbanding little strokes of the tool, little portions of time,
particles of stock and small gains. The eye of prudence may never shut.
Iron, if kept at the ironmonger’s, will rust; beer, if not brewed in
the right state of the atmosphere, will sour; timber of ships will rot
at sea, or if laid up high and dry, will strain, warp and dry-rot;
money, if kept by us, yields no rent and is liable to loss; if
invested, is liable to depreciation of the particular kind of stock.
Strike, says the smith, the iron is white; keep the rake, says the
haymaker, as nigh the scythe as you can, and the cart as nigh the rake.
Our Yankee trade is reputed to be very much on the extreme of this
prudence. It takes bank-notes, good, bad, clean, ragged, and saves
itself by the speed with which it passes them off. Iron cannot rust,
nor beer sour, nor timber rot, nor calicoes go out of fashion, nor
money stocks depreciate, in the few swift moments in which the Yankee
suffers any one of them to remain in his possession. In skating over
thin ice our safety is in our speed.

Let him learn a prudence of a higher strain. Let him learn that every
thing in nature, even motes and feathers, go by law and not by luck,
and that what he sows he reaps. By diligence and self-command let him
put the bread he eats at his own disposal, that he may not stand in
bitter and false relations to other men; for the best good of wealth is
freedom. Let him practise the minor virtues. How much of human life is
lost in waiting! let him not make his fellow-creatures wait. How many
words and promises are promises of conversation! Let his be words of
fate. When he sees a folded and sealed scrap of paper float round the
globe in a pine ship and come safe to the eye for which it was written,
amidst a swarming population, let him likewise feel the admonition to
integrate his being across all these distracting forces, and keep a
slender human word among the storms, distances and accidents that drive
us hither and thither, and, by persistency, make the paltry force of
one man reappear to redeem its pledge after months and years in the
most distant climates.

We must not try to write the laws of any one virtue, looking at that
only. Human nature loves no contradictions, but is symmetrical. The
prudence which secures an outward well-being is not to be studied by
one set of men, whilst heroism and holiness are studied by another, but
they are reconcilable. Prudence concerns the present time, persons,
property and existing forms. But as every fact hath its roots in the
soul, and if the soul were changed, would cease to be, or would become
some other thing,—the proper administration of outward things will
always rest on a just apprehension of their cause and origin; that is,
the good man will be the wise man, and the single-hearted the politic
man. Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the
liar, but is a stab at the health of human society. On the most
profitable lie the course of events presently lays a destructive tax;
whilst frankness invites frankness, puts the parties on a convenient
footing and makes their business a friendship. Trust men and they will
be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great,
though they make an exception in your favor to all their rules of
trade.

So, in regard to disagreeable and formidable things, prudence does not
consist in evasion or in flight, but in courage. He who wishes to walk
in the most peaceful parts of life with any serenity must screw himself
up to resolution. Let him front the object of his worst apprehension,
and his stoutness will commonly make his fear groundless. The Latin
proverb says, “In battles the eye is first overcome.” Entire
self-possession may make a battle very little more dangerous to life
than a match at foils or at football. Examples are cited by soldiers of
men who have seen the cannon pointed and the fire given to it, and who
have stepped aside from the path of the ball. The terrors of the storm
are chiefly confined to the parlor and the cabin. The drover, the
sailor, buffets it all day, and his health renews itself at as vigorous
a pulse under the sleet as under the sun of June.

In the occurrence of unpleasant things among neighbors, fear comes
readily to heart and magnifies the consequence of the other party; but
it is a bad counsellor. Every man is actually weak and apparently
strong. To himself he seems weak; to others, formidable. You are afraid
of Grim; but Grim also is afraid of you. You are solicitous of the
good-will of the meanest person, uneasy at his ill-will. But the
sturdiest offender of your peace and of the neighborhood, if you rip up
_his_ claims, is as thin and timid as any, and the peace of society is
often kept, because, as children say, one is afraid, and the other
dares not. Far off, men swell, bully and threaten; bring them hand to
hand, and they are a feeble folk.

It is a proverb that ‘courtesy costs nothing’; but calculation might
come to value love for its profit. Love is fabled to be blind, but
kindness is necessary to perception; love is not a hood, but an
eye-water. If you meet a sectary or a hostile partisan, never recognize
the dividing lines, but meet on what common ground remains,—if only
that the sun shines and the rain rains for both; the area will widen
very fast, and ere you know it, the boundary mountains on which the eye
had fastened have melted into air. If they set out to contend, Saint
Paul will lie and Saint John will hate. What low, poor, paltry,
hypocritical people an argument on religion will make of the pure and
chosen souls! They will shuffle and crow, crook and hide, feign to
confess here, only that they may brag and conquer there, and not a
thought has enriched either party, and not an emotion of bravery,
modesty, or hope. So neither should you put yourself in a false
position with your contemporaries by indulging a vein of hostility and
bitterness. Though your views are in straight antagonism to theirs,
assume an identity of sentiment, assume that you are saying precisely
that which all think, and in the flow of wit and love roll out your
paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of a doubt. So at
least shall you get an adequate deliverance. The natural motions of the
soul are so much better than the voluntary ones that you will never do
yourself justice in dispute. The thought is not then taken hold of by
the right handle, does not show itself proportioned and in its true
bearings, but bears extorted, hoarse, and half witness. But assume a
consent and it shall presently be granted, since really and underneath
their external diversities, all men are of one heart and mind.

Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or men on an unfriendly
footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if we waited
for some better sympathy and intimacy to come. But whence and when?
To-morrow will be like to-day. Life wastes itself whilst we are
preparing to live. Our friends and fellow-workers die off from us.
Scarcely can we say we see new men, new women, approaching us. We are
too old to regard fashion, too old to expect patronage of any greater
or more powerful. Let us suck the sweetness of those affections and
consuetudes that grow near us. These old shoes are easy to the feet.
Undoubtedly we can easily pick faults in our company, can easily
whisper names prouder, and that tickle the fancy more. Every man’s
imagination hath its friends; and life would be dearer with such
companions. But if you cannot have them on good mutual terms, you
cannot have them. If not the Deity but our ambition hews and shapes the
new relations, their virtue escapes, as strawberries lose their flavor
in garden-beds.

Thus truth, frankness, courage, love, humility and all the virtues
range themselves on the side of prudence, or the art of securing a
present well-being. I do not know if all matter will be found to be
made of one element, as oxygen or hydrogen, at last, but the world of
manners and actions is wrought of one stuff, and begin where we will we
are pretty sure in a short space to be mumbling our ten commandments.



VIII.
HEROISM


“Paradise is under the shadow of swords.”
                    _Mahomet._

Ruby wine is drunk by knaves,
Sugar spends to fatten slaves,
Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons;
Thunderclouds are Jove’s festoons,
Drooping oft in wreaths of dread
Lightning-knotted round his head;
The hero is not fed on sweets,
Daily his own heart he eats;
Chambers of the great are jails,
And head-winds right for royal sails.



HEROISM


In the elder English dramatists, and mainly in the plays Of Beaumont
and Fletcher, there is a constant recognition of gentility, as if a
noble behavior were as easily marked in the society of their age as
color is in our American population. When any Rodrigo, Pedro or Valerio
enters, though he be a stranger, the duke or governor exclaims, ‘This
is a gentleman,—and proffers civilities without end; but all the rest
are slag and refuse. In harmony with this delight in personal
advantages there is in their plays a certain heroic cast of character
and dialogue,—as in Bonduca, Sophocles, the Mad Lover, the Double
Marriage,—wherein the speaker is so earnest and cordial and on such
deep grounds of character, that the dialogue, on the slightest
additional incident in the plot, rises naturally into poetry. Among
many texts take the following. The Roman Martius has conquered
Athens,—all but the invincible spirits of Sophocles, the duke of
Athens, and Dorigen, his wife. The beauty of the latter inflames
Martius, and he seeks to save her husband; but Sophocles will not ask
his life, although assured that a word will save him, and the execution
of both proceeds:—

_Valerius_. Bid thy wife farewell.

_Sophocles_. No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen,
Yonder, above, ’bout Ariadne’s crown,
My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste.

_Dorigen_. Stay, Sophocles,—with this tie up my sight;
Let not soft nature so transformed be,
And lose her gentler sexed humanity,
To make me see my lord bleed. So, ’tis well;
Never one object underneath the sun
Will I behold before my Sophocles:
Farewell; now teach the Romans how to die.

_Martius_. Dost know what ’t is to die?

_Sophocles_. Thou dost not, Martius,
And, therefore, not what ’tis to live; to die
Is to begin to live. It is to end
An old, stale, weary work, and to commence
A newer and a better. ’Tis to leave
Deceitful knaves for the society
Of gods and goodness. Thou thyself must part
At last from all thy garlands, pleasures, triumphs,
And prove thy fortitude what then ’t will do.

_Valerius_. But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus?

_Sophocles_. Why should I grieve or vex for being sent
To them I ever loved best? Now I’ll kneel,
But with my back toward thee; ’tis the last duty
This trunk can do the gods.

_Martius_. Strike, strike, Valerius,
Or Martius’ heart will leap out at his mouth.
This is a man, a woman. Kiss thy lord,
And live with all the freedom you were wont.
O love! thou doubly hast afflicted me
With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart,
My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn,
Ere thou transgress this knot of piety.

_Valerius_. What ails my brother?

_Sophocles_. Martius, O Martius,
Thou now hast found a way to conquer me.

_Dorigen_. O star of Rome! what gratitude can speak
Fit words to follow such a deed as this?

_Martius_. This admirable duke, Valerius,
With his disdain of fortune and of death,
Captived himself, has captivated me,
And though my arm hath ta’en his body here,
His soul hath subjugated Martius’ soul.
By Romulus, he is all soul, I think;
He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved;
Then we have vanquished nothing; he is free,
And Martius walks now in captivity.


I do not readily remember any poem, play, sermon, novel, or oration
that our press vents in the last few years, which goes to the same
tune. We have a great many flutes and flageolets, but not often the
sound of any fife. Yet, Wordsworth’s “Laodamia,” and the ode of “Dion,”
and some sonnets, have a certain noble music; and Scott will sometimes
draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord Evandale given by Balfour of
Burley. Thomas Carlyle, with his natural taste for what is manly and
daring in character, has suffered no heroic trait in his favorites to
drop from his biographical and historical pictures. Earlier, Robert
Burns has given us a song or two. In the Harleian Miscellanies there is
an account of the battle of Lutzen which deserves to be read. And Simon
Ockley’s History of the Saracens recounts the prodigies of individual
valor, with admiration all the more evident on the part of the narrator
that he seems to think that his place in Christian Oxford requires of
him some proper protestations of abhorrence. But if we explore the
literature of Heroism we shall quickly come to Plutarch, who is its
Doctor and historian. To him we owe the Brasidas, the Dion, the
Epaminondas, the Scipio of old, and I must think we are more deeply
indebted to him than to all the ancient writers. Each of his “Lives” is
a refutation to the despondency and cowardice of our religious and
political theorists. A wild courage, a Stoicism not of the schools but
of the blood, shines in every anecdote, and has given that book its
immense fame.

We need books of this tart cathartic virtue more than books of
political science or of private economy. Life is a festival only to the
wise. Seen from the nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a
ragged and dangerous front. The violations of the laws of nature by our
predecessors and our contemporaries are punished in us also. The
disease and deformity around us certify the infraction of natural,
intellectual, and moral laws, and often violation on violation to breed
such compound misery. A lock-jaw that bends a man’s head back to his
heels; hydrophobia that makes him bark at his wife and babes; insanity
that makes him eat grass; war, plague, cholera, famine, indicate a
certain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by human crime,
must have its outlet by human suffering. Unhappily no man exists who
has not in his own person become to some amount a stockholder in the
sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expiation.

Our culture therefore must not omit the arming of the man. Let him hear
in season that he is born into the state of war, and that the
commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go
dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collected and neither
defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and life
in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity dare the gibbet and the mob by
the absolute truth of his speech and the rectitude of his behavior.

Towards all this external evil the man within the breast assumes a
warlike attitude, and affirms his ability to cope single-handed with
the infinite army of enemies. To this military attitude of the soul we
give the name of Heroism. Its rudest form is the contempt for safety
and ease, which makes the attractiveness of war. It is a self-trust
which slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its
energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a mind
of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly
and as it were merrily he advances to his own music, alike in frightful
alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness. There is
somewhat not philosophical in heroism; there is somewhat not holy in
it; it seems not to know that other souls are of one texture with it;
it has pride; it is the extreme of individual nature. Nevertheless we
must profoundly revere it. There is somewhat in great actions which
does not allow us to go behind them. Heroism feels and never reasons,
and therefore is always right; and although a different breeding,
different religion and greater intellectual activity would have
modified or even reversed the particular action, yet for the hero that
thing he does is the highest deed, and is not open to the censure of
philosophers or divines. It is the avowal of the unschooled man that he
finds a quality in him that is negligent of expense, of health, of
life, of danger, of hatred, of reproach, and knows that his will is
higher and more excellent than all actual and all possible antagonists.

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in
contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism
is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual’s character. Now
to no other man can its wisdom appear as it does to him, for every man
must be supposed to see a little farther on his own proper path than
any one else. Therefore just and wise men take umbrage at his act,
until after some little time be past: then they see it to be in unison
with their acts. All prudent men see that the action is clean contrary
to a sensual prosperity; for every heroic act measures itself by its
contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last,
and then the prudent also extol.

Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of the soul at
war, and its ultimate objects are the last defiance of falsehood and
wrong, and the power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents.
It speaks the truth and it is just, generous, hospitable, temperate,
scornful of petty calculations and scornful of being scorned. It
persists; it is of an undaunted boldness and of a fortitude not to be
wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of common life. That false
prudence which dotes on health and wealth is the butt and merriment of
heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed of its body. What
shall it say then to the sugar-plums and cats’-cradles, to the toilet,
compliments, quarrels, cards and custard, which rack the wit of all
society? What joys has kind nature provided for us dear creatures!
There seems to be no interval between greatness and meanness. When the
spirit is not master of the world, then it is its dupe. Yet the little
man takes the great hoax so innocently, works in it so headlong and
believing, is born red, and dies gray, arranging his toilet, attending
on his own health, laying traps for sweet food and strong wine, setting
his heart on a horse or a rifle, made happy with a little gossip or a
little praise, that the great soul cannot choose but laugh at such
earnest nonsense. “Indeed, these humble considerations make me out of
love with greatness. What a disgrace is it to me to take note how many
pairs of silk stockings thou hast, namely, these and those that were
the peach-colored ones; or to bear the inventory of thy shirts, as one
for superfluity, and one other for use!”

Citizens, thinking after the laws of arithmetic, consider the
inconvenience of receiving strangers at their fireside, reckon narrowly
the loss of time and the unusual display; the soul of a better quality
thrusts back the unseasonable economy into the vaults of life, and
says, I will obey the God, and the sacrifice and the fire he will
provide. Ibn Hankal, the Arabian geographer, describes a heroic extreme
in the hospitality of Sogd, in Bukharia. “When I was in Sogd I saw a
great building, like a palace, the gates of which were open and fixed
back to the wall with large nails. I asked the reason, and was told
that the house had not been shut, night or day, for a hundred years.
Strangers may present themselves at any hour and in whatever number;
the master has amply provided for the reception of the men and their
animals, and is never happier than when they tarry for some time.
Nothing of the kind have I seen in any other country.” The magnanimous
know very well that they who give time, or money, or shelter, to the
stranger,—so it be done for love and not for ostentation,—do, as it
were, put God under obligation to them, so perfect are the
compensations of the universe. In some way the time they seem to lose
is redeemed and the pains they seem to take remunerate themselves.
These men fan the flame of human love and raise the standard of civil
virtue among mankind. But hospitality must be for service and not for
show, or it pulls down the host. The brave soul rates itself too high
to value itself by the splendor of its table and draperies. It gives
what it hath, and all it hath, but its own majesty can lend a better
grace to bannocks and fair water than belong to city feasts.

The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same wish to do no
dishonor to the worthiness he has. But he loves it for its elegancy,
not for its austerity. It seems not worth his while to be solemn and
denounce with bitterness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of
tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold. A great man scarcely knows
how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision his
living is natural and poetic. John Eliot, the Indian Apostle, drank
water, and said of wine,—“It is a noble, generous liquor and we should
be humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water was made before
it.” Better still is the temperance of King David, who poured out on
the ground unto the Lord the water which three of his warriors had
brought him to drink, at the peril of their lives.

It is told of Brutus, that when he fell on his sword after the battle
of Philippi, he quoted a line of Euripides,—“O Virtue! I have followed
thee through life, and I find thee at last but a shade.” I doubt not
the hero is slandered by this report. The heroic soul does not sell its
justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep
warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.
Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well
abide its loss.

But that which takes my fancy most in the heroic class, is the
good-humor and hilarity they exhibit. It is a height to which common
duty can very well attain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity. But
these rare souls set opinion, success, and life at so cheap a rate that
they will not soothe their enemies by petitions, or the show of sorrow,
but wear their own habitual greatness. Scipio, charged with peculation,
refuses to do himself so great a disgrace as to wait for justification,
though he had the scroll of his accounts in his hands, but tears it to
pieces before the tribunes. Socrates’s condemnation of himself to be
maintained in all honor in the Prytaneum, during his life, and Sir
Thomas More’s playfulness at the scaffold, are of the same strain. In
Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Sea Voyage,” Juletta tells the stout captain
and his company,—

     _Juletta_. Why, slaves, ’tis in our power to hang ye.
     _Master_. Very likely,
     ’Tis in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.

These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the bloom and glow of a
perfect health. The great will not condescend to take any thing
seriously; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were
the building of cities or the eradication of old and foolish churches
and nations which have cumbered the earth long thousands of years.
Simple hearts put all the history and customs of this world behind
them, and play their own game in innocent defiance of the Blue-Laws of
the world; and such would appear, could we see the human race assembled
in vision, like little children frolicking together, though to the eyes
of mankind at large they wear a stately and solemn garb of works and
influences.

The interest these fine stories have for us, the power of a romance
over the boy who grasps the forbidden book under his bench at school,
our delight in the hero, is the main fact to our purpose. All these
great and transcendent properties are ours. If we dilate in beholding
the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it is that we are already
domesticating the same sentiment. Let us find room for this great guest
in our small houses. The first step of worthiness will be to disabuse
us of our superstitious associations with places and times, with number
and size. Why should these words, Athenian, Roman, Asia and England, so
tingle in the ear? Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods
sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut
River and Boston Bay you think paltry places, and the ear loves names
of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we will
tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it only
that thyself is here, and art and nature, hope and fate, friends,
angels and the Supreme Being shall not be absent from the chamber where
thou sittest. Epaminondas, brave and affectionate, does not seem to us
to need Olympus to die upon, nor the Syrian sunshine. He lies very well
where he is. The Jerseys were handsome ground enough for Washington to
tread, and London streets for the feet of Milton. A great man makes his
climate genial in the imagination of men, and its air the beloved
element of all delicate spirits. That country is the fairest which is
inhabited by the noblest minds. The pictures which fill the imagination
in reading the actions of Pericles, Xenophon, Columbus, Bayard, Sidney,
Hampden, teach us how needlessly mean our life is; that we, by the
depth of our living, should deck it with more than regal or national
splendor, and act on principles that should interest man and nature in
the length of our days.

We have seen or heard of many extraordinary young men who never
ripened, or whose performance in actual life was not extraordinary.
When we see their air and mien, when we hear them speak of society, of
books, of religion, we admire their superiority; they seem to throw
contempt on our entire polity and social state; theirs is the tone of a
youthful giant who is sent to work revolutions. But they enter an
active profession and the forming Colossus shrinks to the common size
of man. The magic they used was the ideal tendencies, which always make
the Actual ridiculous; but the tough world had its revenge the moment
they put their horses of the sun to plough in its furrow. They found no
example and no companion, and their heart fainted. What then? The
lesson they gave in their first aspirations is yet true; and a better
valor and a purer truth shall one day organize their belief. Or why
should a woman liken herself to any historical woman, and think,
because Sappho, or Sévigné, or De Staël, or the cloistered souls who
have had genius and cultivation do not satisfy the imagination and the
serene Themis, none can,—certainly not she? Why not? She has a new and
unattempted problem to solve, perchance that of the happiest nature
that ever bloomed. Let the maiden, with erect soul, walk serenely on
her way, accept the hint of each new experience, search in turn all the
objects that solicit her eye, that she may learn the power and the
charm of her new-born being, which is the kindling of a new dawn in the
recesses of space. The fair girl who repels interference by a decided
and proud choice of influences, so careless of pleasing, so wilful and
lofty, inspires every beholder with somewhat of her own nobleness. The
silent heart encourages her; O friend, never strike sail to a fear!
Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas. Not in vain you
live, for every passing eye is cheered and refined by the vision.

The characteristic of heroism is its persistency. All men have
wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have
chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile
yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the
common the heroic. Yet we have the weakness to expect the sympathy of
people in those actions whose excellence is that they outrun sympathy
and appeal to a tardy justice. If you would serve your brother, because
it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back your words when you
find that prudent people do not commend you. Adhere to your own act,
and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and
extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age. It was a high
counsel that I once heard given to a young person,—“Always do what you
are afraid to do.” A simple manly character need never make an apology,
but should regard its past action with the calmness of Phocion, when he
admitted that the event of the battle was happy, yet did not regret his
dissuasion from the battle.

There is no weakness or exposure for which we cannot find consolation
in the thought—this is a part of my constitution, part of my relation
and office to my fellow-creature. Has nature covenanted with me that I
should never appear to disadvantage, never make a ridiculous figure?
Let us be generous of our dignity as well as of our money. Greatness
once and for ever has done with opinion. We tell our charities, not
because we wish to be praised for them, not because we think they have
great merit, but for our justification. It is a capital blunder; as you
discover when another man recites his charities.

To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to live with some rigor
of temperance, or some extremes of generosity, seems to be an
asceticism which common good-nature would appoint to those who are at
ease and in plenty, in sign that they feel a brotherhood with the great
multitude of suffering men. And not only need we breathe and exercise
the soul by assuming the penalties of abstinence, of debt, of solitude,
of unpopularity,—but it behooves the wise man to look with a bold eye
into those rarer dangers which sometimes invade men, and to familiarize
himself with disgusting forms of disease, with sounds of execration,
and the vision of violent death.

Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the day never
shines in which this element may not work. The circumstances of man, we
say, are historically somewhat better in this country and at this hour
than perhaps ever before. More freedom exists for culture. It will not
now run against an axe at the first step out of the beaten track of
opinion. But whoso is heroic will always find crises to try his edge.
Human virtue demands her champions and martyrs, and the trial of
persecution always proceeds. It is but the other day that the brave
Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rights of free
speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to live.

I see not any road of perfect peace which a man can walk, but after the
counsel of his own bosom. Let him quit too much association, let him go
home much, and stablish himself in those courses he approves. The
unremitting retention of simple and high sentiments in obscure duties
is hardening the character to that temper which will work with honor,
if need be in the tumult, or on the scaffold. Whatever outrages have
happened to men may befall a man again; and very easily in a republic,
if there appear any signs of a decay of religion. Coarse slander, fire,
tar and feathers and the gibbet, the youth may freely bring home to his
mind and with what sweetness of temper he can, and inquire how fast he
can fix his sense of duty, braving such penalties, whenever it may
please the next newspaper and a sufficient number of his neighbors to
pronounce his opinions incendiary.

It may calm the apprehension of calamity in the most susceptible heart
to see how quick a bound Nature has set to the utmost infliction of
malice. We rapidly approach a brink over which no enemy can follow us:—

     “Let them rave:
     Thou art quiet in thy grave.”

In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the hour when we are
deaf to the higher voices, who does not envy those who have seen safely
to an end their manful endeavor? Who that sees the meanness of our
politics but inly congratulates Washington that he is long already
wrapped in his shroud, and for ever safe; that he was laid sweet in his
grave, the hope of humanity not yet subjugated in him? Who does not
sometimes envy the good and brave who are no more to suffer from the
tumults of the natural world, and await with curious complacency the
speedy term of his own conversation with finite nature? And yet the
love that will be annihilated sooner than treacherous has already made
death impossible, and affirms itself no mortal but a native of the
deeps of absolute and inextinguishable being.



IX.
THE OVER-SOUL


“But souls that of his own good life partake,
He loves as his own self; dear as his eye
They are to Him: He’ll never them forsake:
When they shall die, then God himself shall die:
They live, they live in blest eternity.”
                    _Henry More_.


Space is ample, east and west,
But two cannot go abreast,
Cannot travel in it two:
Yonder masterful cuckoo
Crowds every egg out of the nest,
Quick or dead, except its own;
A spell is laid on sod and stone,
Night and Day ’ve been tampered with,
Every quality and pith
Surcharged and sultry with a power
That works its will on age and hour.



THE OVER-SOUL


There is a difference between one and another hour of life in their
authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice
is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which
constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other
experiences. For this reason the argument which is always forthcoming
to silence those who conceive extraordinary hopes of man, namely the
appeal to experience, is for ever invalid and vain. We give up the past
to the objector, and yet we hope. He must explain this hope. We grant
that human life is mean, but how did we find out that it was mean? What
is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What
is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by
which the soul makes its enormous claim? Why do men feel that the
natural history of man has never been written, but he is always leaving
behind what you have said of him, and it becomes old, and books of
metaphysics worthless? The philosophy of six thousand years has not
searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments
there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could
not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is
descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator
has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next
moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin
for events than the will I call mine.

As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing
river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams
into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised
spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up and put
myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the
visions come.

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the
only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we
rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity,
that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained
and made one with all other; that common heart of which all sincere
conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission;
that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and
constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his
character and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass
into our thought and hand and become wisdom and virtue and power and
beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.
Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the
universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related;
the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose
beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and
perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the
seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the
world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but
the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. Only by
the vision of that Wisdom can the horoscope of the ages be read, and by
falling back on our better thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of
prophecy which is innate in every man, we can know what it saith. Every
man’s words who speaks from that life must sound vain to those who do
not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare not speak for
it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold.
Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be
lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I
desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the
heaven of this deity and to report what hints I have collected of the
transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law.

If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, in remorse,
in times of passion, in surprises, in the instructions of dreams,
wherein often we see ourselves in masquerade,—the droll disguises only
magnifying and enhancing a real element and forcing it on our distinct
notice,—we shall catch many hints that will broaden and lighten into
knowledge of the secret of nature. All goes to show that the soul in
man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not
a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison,
but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not
the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the
will; is the background of our being, in which they lie,—an immensity
not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind,
a light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we are
nothing, but the light is all. A man is the facade of a temple wherein
all wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call man, the eating,
drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent
himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the
soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action,
would make our knees bend. When it breathes through his intellect, it
is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it
flows through his affection, it is love. And the blindness of the
intellect begins when it would be something of itself. The weakness of
the will begins when the individual would be something of himself. All
reform aims in some one particular to let the soul have its way through
us; in other words, to engage us to obey.

Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible. Language cannot
paint it with his colors. It is too subtile. It is undefinable,
unmeasurable; but we know that it pervades and contains us. We know
that all spiritual being is in man. A wise old proverb says, “God comes
to see us without bell;” that is, as there is no screen or ceiling
between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall
in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins.
The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of
spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know,
Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, but they
tower over us, and most in the moment when our interests tempt us to
wound them.

The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak is made known by its
independency of those limitations which circumscribe us on every hand.
The soul circumscribes all things. As I have said, it contradicts all
experience. In like manner it abolishes time and space. The influence
of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to that degree that
the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable;
and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of
insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of
the soul. The spirit sports with time,—

     “Can crowd eternity into an hour,
     Or stretch an hour to eternity.”

We are often made to feel that there is another youth and age than that
which is measured from the year of our natural birth. Some thoughts
always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the
universal and eternal beauty. Every man parts from that contemplation
with the feeling that it rather belongs to ages than to mortal life.
The least activity of the intellectual powers redeems us in a degree
from the conditions of time. In sickness, in languor, give us a strain
of poetry or a profound sentence, and we are refreshed; or produce a
volume of Plato or Shakspeare, or remind us of their names, and
instantly we come into a feeling of longevity. See how the deep divine
thought reduces centuries and millenniums and makes itself present
through all ages. Is the teaching of Christ less effective now than it
was when first his mouth was opened? The emphasis of facts and persons
in my thought has nothing to do with time. And so always the soul’s
scale is one, the scale of the senses and the understanding is another.
Before the revelations of the soul, Time, Space and Nature shrink away.
In common speech we refer all things to time, as we habitually refer
the immensely sundered stars to one concave sphere. And so we say that
the Judgment is distant or near, that the Millennium approaches, that a
day of certain political, moral, social reforms is at hand, and the
like, when we mean that in the nature of things one of the facts we
contemplate is external and fugitive, and the other is permanent and
connate with the soul. The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by
one, detach themselves like ripe fruit from our experience, and fall.
The wind shall blow them none knows whither. The landscape, the
figures, Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any institution past,
or any whiff of mist or smoke, and so is society, and so is the world.
The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a world before her,
leaving worlds behind her. She has no dates, nor rites, nor persons,
nor specialties nor men. The soul knows only the soul; the web of
events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed.

After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate of its progress to
be computed. The soul’s advances are not made by gradation, such as can
be represented by motion in a straight line, but rather by ascension of
state, such as can be represented by metamorphosis,—from the egg to the
worm, from the worm to the fly. The growths of genius are of a certain
_total_ character, that does not advance the elect individual first
over John, then Adam, then Richard, and give to each the pain of
discovered inferiority,—but by every throe of growth the man expands
there where he works, passing, at each pulsation, classes, populations,
of men. With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the
visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and
expires its air. It converses with truths that have always been spoken
in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and
Arrian than with persons in the house.

This is the law of moral and of mental gain. The simple rise as by
specific levity not into a particular virtue, but into the region of
all the virtues. They are in the spirit which contains them all. The
soul requires purity, but purity is not it; requires justice, but
justice is not that; requires beneficence, but is somewhat better; so
that there is a kind of descent and accommodation felt when we leave
speaking of moral nature to urge a virtue which it enjoins. To the
well-born child all the virtues are natural, and not painfully
acquired. Speak to his heart, and the man becomes suddenly virtuous.

Within the same sentiment is the germ of intellectual growth, which
obeys the same law. Those who are capable of humility, of justice, of
love, of aspiration, stand already on a platform that commands the
sciences and arts, speech and poetry, action and grace. For whoso
dwells in this moral beatitude already anticipates those special powers
which men prize so highly. The lover has no talent, no skill, which
passes for quite nothing with his enamoured maiden, however little she
may possess of related faculty; and the heart which abandons itself to
the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its works, and will travel
a royal road to particular knowledges and powers. In ascending to this
primary and aboriginal sentiment we have come from our remote station
on the circumference instantaneously to the centre of the world, where,
as in the closet of God, we see causes, and anticipate the universe,
which is but a slow effect.

One mode of the divine teaching is the incarnation of the spirit in a
form,—in forms, like my own. I live in society, with persons who answer
to thoughts in my own mind, or express a certain obedience to the great
instincts to which I live. I see its presence to them. I am certified
of a common nature; and these other souls, these separated selves, draw
me as nothing else can. They stir in me the new emotions we call
passion; of love, hatred, fear, admiration, pity; thence come
conversation, competition, persuasion, cities and war. Persons are
supplementary to the primary teaching of the soul. In youth we are mad
for persons. Childhood and youth see all the world in them. But the
larger experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing
through them all. Persons themselves acquaint us with the impersonal.
In all conversation between two persons tacit reference is made, as to
a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is
not social; it is impersonal; is God. And so in groups where debate is
earnest, and especially on high questions, the company become aware
that the thought rises to an equal level in all bosoms, that all have a
spiritual property in what was said, as well as the sayer. They all
become wiser than they were. It arches over them like a temple, this
unity of thought in which every heart beats with nobler sense of power
and duty, and thinks and acts with unusual solemnity. All are conscious
of attaining to a higher self-possession. It shines for all. There is a
certain wisdom of humanity which is common to the greatest men with the
lowest, and which our ordinary education often labors to silence and
obstruct. The mind is one, and the best minds, who love truth for its
own sake, think much less of property in truth. They accept it
thankfully everywhere, and do not label or stamp it with any man’s
name, for it is theirs long beforehand, and from eternity. The learned
and the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence
of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly. We owe
many valuable observations to people who are not very acute or
profound, and who say the thing without effort which we want and have
long been hunting in vain. The action of the soul is oftener in that
which is felt and left unsaid than in that which is said in any
conversation. It broods over every society, and they unconsciously seek
for it in each other. We know better than we do. We do not yet possess
ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more. I feel
the same truth how often in my trivial conversation with my neighbors,
that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks this by-play, and Jove
nods to Jove from behind each of us.

Men descend to meet. In their habitual and mean service to the world,
for which they forsake their native nobleness, they resemble those
Arabian sheiks who dwell in mean houses and affect an external poverty,
to escape the rapacity of the Pacha, and reserve all their display of
wealth for their interior and guarded retirements.

As it is present in all persons, so it is in every period of life. It
is adult already in the infant man. In my dealing with my child, my
Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my money stead me nothing; but
as much soul as I have avails. If I am wilful, he sets his will against
mine, one for one, and leaves me, if I please, the degradation of
beating him by my superiority of strength. But if I renounce my will
and act for the soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of
his young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and loves with me.

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we
see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people
ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, ‘How do
you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?’ We know truth when
we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are
awake. It was a grand sentence of Emanuel Swedenborg, which would alone
indicate the greatness of that man’s perception,—“It is no proof of a
man’s understanding to be able to confirm whatever he pleases; but to
be able to discern that what is true is true, and that what is false is
false,—this is the mark and character of intelligence.” In the book I
read, the good thought returns to me, as every truth will, the image of
the whole soul. To the bad thought which I find in it, the same soul
becomes a discerning, separating sword, and lops it away. We are wiser
than we know. If we will not interfere with our thought, but will act
entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, we know the particular
thing, and every thing, and every man. For the Maker of all things and
all persons stands behind us and casts his dread omniscience through us
over things.

But beyond this recognition of its own in particular passages of the
individual’s experience, it also reveals truth. And here we should seek
to reinforce ourselves by its very presence, and to speak with a
worthier, loftier strain of that advent. For the soul’s communication
of truth is the highest event in nature, since it then does not give
somewhat from itself, but it gives itself, or passes into and becomes
that man whom it enlightens; or, in proportion to that truth he
receives, it takes him to itself.

We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its
own nature, by the term _Revelation_. These are always attended by the
emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the
Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet
before the flowing surges of the sea of life. Every distinct
apprehension of this central commandment agitates men with awe and
delight. A thrill passes through all men at the reception of new truth,
or at the performance of a great action, which comes out of the heart
of nature. In these communications the power to see is not separated
from the will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, and the
obedience proceeds from a joyful perception. Every moment when the
individual feels himself invaded by it is memorable. By the necessity
of our constitution a certain enthusiasm attends the individual’s
consciousness of that divine presence. The character and duration of
this enthusiasm varies with the state of the individual, from an
ecstasy and trance and prophetic inspiration,—which is its rarer
appearance,—to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion, in which form it
warms, like our household fires, all the families and associations of
men, and makes society possible. A certain tendency to insanity has
always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they
had been “blasted with excess of light.” The trances of Socrates, the
“union” of Plotinus, the vision of Porphyry, the conversion of Paul,
the aurora of Behmen, the convulsions of George Fox and his Quakers,
the illumination of Swedenborg, are of this kind. What was in the case
of these remarkable persons a ravishment, has, in innumerable instances
in common life, been exhibited in less striking manner. Everywhere the
history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The rapture of
the Moravian and Quietist; the opening of the internal sense of the
Word, in the language of the New Jerusalem Church; the _revival_ of the
Calvinistic churches; the _experiences_ of the Methodists, are varying
forms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul
always mingles with the universal soul.

The nature of these revelations is the same; they are perceptions of
the absolute law. They are solutions of the soul’s own questions. They
do not answer the questions which the understanding asks. The soul
answers never by words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after.

Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular notion of a
revelation is that it is a telling of fortunes. In past oracles of the
soul the understanding seeks to find answers to sensual questions, and
undertakes to tell from God how long men shall exist, what their hands
shall do and who shall be their company, adding names and dates and
places. But we must pick no locks. We must check this low curiosity. An
answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions
you ask. Do not require a description of the countries towards which
you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and to-morrow
you arrive there and know them by inhabiting them. Men ask concerning
the immortality of the soul, the employments of heaven, the state of
the sinner, and so forth. They even dream that Jesus has left replies
to precisely these interrogatories. Never a moment did that sublime
spirit speak in their _patois_. To truth, justice, love, the attributes
of the soul, the idea of immutableness is essentially associated.
Jesus, living in these moral sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes,
heeding only the manifestations of these, never made the separation of
the idea of duration from the essence of these attributes, nor uttered
a syllable concerning the duration of the soul. It was left to his
disciples to sever duration from the moral elements, and to teach the
immortality of the soul as a doctrine, and maintain it by evidences.
The moment the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is
already fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility,
there is no question of continuance. No inspired man ever asks this
question or condescends to these evidences. For the soul is true to
itself, and the man in whom it is shed abroad cannot wander from the
present, which is infinite, to a future which would be finite.

These questions which we lust to ask about the future are a confession
of sin. God has no answer for them. No answer in words can reply to a
question of things. It is not in an arbitrary “decree of God,” but in
the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow;
for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause
and effect. By this veil which curtains events it instructs the
children of men to live in to-day. The only mode of obtaining an answer
to these questions of the senses is to forego all low curiosity, and,
accepting the tide of being which floats us into the secret of nature,
work and live, work and live, and all unawares the advancing soul has
built and forged for itself a new condition, and the question and the
answer are one.

By the same fire, vital, consecrating, celestial, which burns until it
shall dissolve all things into the waves and surges of an ocean of
light, we see and know each other, and what spirit each is of. Who can
tell the grounds of his knowledge of the character of the several
individuals in his circle of friends? No man. Yet their acts and words
do not disappoint him. In that man, though he knew no ill of him, he
put no trust. In that other, though they had seldom met, authentic
signs had yet passed, to signify that he might be trusted as one who
had an interest in his own character. We know each other very
well,—which of us has been just to himself and whether that which we
teach or behold is only an aspiration or is our honest effort also.

We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis lies aloft in our life
or unconscious power. The intercourse of society, its trade, its
religion, its friendships, its quarrels, is one wide, judicial
investigation of character. In full court, or in small committee, or
confronted face to face, accuser and accused, men offer themselves to
be judged. Against their will they exhibit those decisive trifles by
which character is read. But who judges? and what? Not our
understanding. We do not read them by learning or craft. No; the wisdom
of the wise man consists herein, that he does not judge them; he lets
them judge themselves and merely reads and records their own verdict.

By virtue of this inevitable nature, private will is overpowered, and,
maugre our efforts or our imperfections, your genius will speak from
you, and mine from me. That which we are, we shall teach, not
voluntarily but involuntarily. Thoughts come into our minds by avenues
which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through
avenues which we never voluntarily opened. Character teaches over our
head. The infallible index of true progress is found in the tone the
man takes. Neither his age, nor his breeding, nor company, nor books,
nor actions, nor talents, nor all together can hinder him from being
deferential to a higher spirit than his own. If he have not found his
home in God, his manners, his forms of speech, the turn of his
sentences, the build, shall I say, of all his opinions will
involuntarily confess it, let him brave it out how he will. If he have
found his centre, the Deity will shine through him, through all the
disguises of ignorance, of ungenial temperament, of unfavorable
circumstance. The tone of seeking is one, and the tone of having is
another.

The great distinction between teachers sacred or literary,—between
poets like Herbert, and poets like Pope,—between philosophers like
Spinoza, Kant and Coleridge, and philosophers like Locke, Paley,
Mackintosh and Stewart,—between men of the world who are reckoned
accomplished talkers, and here and there a fervent mystic, prophesying
half insane under the infinitude of his thought,—is that one class
speak _from within_, or from experience, as parties and possessors of
the fact; and the other class _from without_, as spectators merely, or
perhaps as acquainted with the fact on the evidence of third persons.
It is of no use to preach to me from without. I can do that too easily
myself. Jesus speaks always from within, and in a degree that
transcends all others. In that is the miracle. I believe beforehand
that it ought so to be. All men stand continually in the expectation of
the appearance of such a teacher. But if a man do not speak from within
the veil, where the word is one with that it tells of, let him lowly
confess it.

The same Omniscience flows into the intellect, and makes what we call
genius. Much of the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and the most
illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and
are not writers. Among the multitude of scholars and authors, we feel
no hallowing presence; we are sensible of a knack and skill rather than
of inspiration; they have a light and know not whence it comes and call
it their own; their talent is some exaggerated faculty, some overgrown
member, so that their strength is a disease. In these instances the
intellectual gifts do not make the impression of virtue, but almost of
vice; and we feel that a man’s talents stand in the way of his
advancement in truth. But genius is religious. It is a larger imbibing
of the common heart. It is not anomalous, but more like and not less
like other men. There is in all great poets a wisdom of humanity which
is superior to any talents they exercise. The author, the wit, the
partisan, the fine gentleman, does not take place of the man. Humanity
shines in Homer, in Chaucer, in Spenser, in Shakspeare, in Milton. They
are content with truth. They use the positive degree. They seem frigid
and phlegmatic to those who have been spiced with the frantic passion
and violent coloring of inferior but popular writers. For they are
poets by the free course which they allow to the informing soul, which
through their eyes beholds again and blesses the things which it hath
made. The soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser than any of its
works. The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we think
less of his compositions. His best communication to our mind is to
teach us to despise all he has done. Shakspeare carries us to such a
lofty strain of intelligent activity as to suggest a wealth which
beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has
created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent
poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a
passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in
Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day for ever.
Why then should I make account of Hamlet and Lear, as if we had not the
soul from which they fell as syllables from the tongue?

This energy does not descend into individual life on any other
condition than entire possession. It comes to the lowly and simple; it
comes to whomsoever will put off what is foreign and proud; it comes as
insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur. When we see those whom it
inhabits, we are apprised of new degrees of greatness. From that
inspiration the man comes back with a changed tone. He does not talk
with men with an eye to their opinion. He tries them. It requires of us
to be plain and true. The vain traveller attempts to embellish his life
by quoting my lord and the prince and the countess, who thus said or
did to _him_. The ambitious vulgar show you their spoons and brooches
and rings, and preserve their cards and compliments. The more
cultivated, in their account of their own experience, cull out the
pleasing, poetic circumstance,—the visit to Rome, the man of genius
they saw, the brilliant friend They know; still further on perhaps the
gorgeous landscape, the mountain lights, the mountain thoughts they
enjoyed yesterday,—and so seek to throw a romantic color over their
life. But the soul that ascends to worship the great God is plain and
true; has no rose-color, no fine friends, no chivalry, no adventures;
does not want admiration; dwells in the hour that now is, in the
earnest experience of the common day,—by reason of the present moment
and the mere trifle having become porous to thought and bibulous of the
sea of light.

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like
word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet
are they so cheap and so things of course, that in the infinite riches
of the soul it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or
bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole
atmosphere are ours. Nothing can pass there, or make you one of the
circle, but the casting aside your trappings, and dealing man to man in
naked truth, plain confession, and omniscient affirmation.

Souls such as these treat you as gods would, walk as gods in the earth,
accepting without any admiration your wit, your bounty, your virtue
even,—say rather your act of duty, for your virtue they own as their
proper blood, royal as themselves, and over-royal, and the father of
the gods. But what rebuke their plain fraternal bearing casts on the
mutual flattery with which authors solace each other and wound
themselves! These flatter not. I do not wonder that these men go to see
Cromwell and Christina and Charles the Second and James the First and
the Grand Turk. For they are, in their own elevation, the fellows of
kings, and must feel the servile tone of conversation in the world.
They must always be a godsend to princes, for they confront them, a
king to a king, without ducking or concession, and give a high nature
the refreshment and satisfaction of resistance, of plain humanity, of
even companionship and of new ideas. They leave them wiser and superior
men. Souls like these make us feel that sincerity is more excellent
than flattery. Deal so plainly with man and woman as to constrain the
utmost sincerity and destroy all hope of trifling with you. It is the
highest compliment you can pay. Their “highest praising,” said Milton,
“is not flattery, and their plainest advice is a kind of praising.”

Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The
simplest person who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for
ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and
unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing
to man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the
scars of our mistakes and disappointments! When we have broken our god
of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the
heart with his presence. It is the doubling of the heart itself, nay,
the infinite enlargement of the heart with a power of growth to a new
infinity on every side. It inspires in man an infallible trust. He has
not the conviction, but the sight, that the best is the true, and may
in that thought easily dismiss all particular uncertainties and fears,
and adjourn to the sure revelation of time the solution of his private
riddles. He is sure that his welfare is dear to the heart of being. In
the presence of law to his mind he is overflowed with a reliance so
universal that it sweeps away all cherished hopes and the most stable
projects of mortal condition in its flood. He believes that he cannot
escape from his good. The things that are really for thee gravitate to
thee. You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your
mind need not. If you do not find him, will you not acquiesce that it
is best you should not find him? for there is a power, which, as it is
in you, is in him also, and could therefore very well bring you
together, if it were for the best. You are preparing with eagerness to
go and render a service to which your talent and your taste invite you,
the love of men and the hope of fame. Has it not occurred to you that
you have no right to go, unless you are equally willing to be prevented
from going? O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken
over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on
thine ear! Every proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to thee
for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding
passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic will but the great and
tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this
because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall,
not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls
uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of
the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.

Let man then learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his
heart; this, namely; that the Highest dwells with him; that the sources
of nature are in his own mind, if the sentiment of duty is there. But
if he would know what the great God speaketh, he must ‘go into his
closet and shut the door,’ as Jesus said. God will not make himself
manifest to cowards. He must greatly listen to himself, withdrawing
himself from all the accents of other men’s devotion. Even their
prayers are hurtful to him, until he have made his own. Our religion
vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is
made,—no matter how indirectly,—to numbers, proclamation is then and
there made that religion is not. He that finds God a sweet enveloping
thought to him never counts his company. When I sit in that presence,
who shall dare to come in? When I rest in perfect humility, when I burn
with pure love, what can Calvin or Swedenborg say?

It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers or to one. The
faith that stands on authority is not faith. The reliance on authority
measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul. The
position men have given to Jesus, now for many centuries of history, is
a position of authority. It characterizes themselves. It cannot alter
the eternal facts. Great is the soul, and plain. It is no flatterer, it
is no follower; it never appeals from itself. It believes in itself.
Before the immense possibilities of man all mere experience, all past
biography, however spotless and sainted, shrinks away. Before that
heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily praise any
form of life we have seen or read of. We not only affirm that we have
few great men, but, absolutely speaking, that we have none; that we
have no history, no record of any character or mode of living that
entirely contents us. The saints and demigods whom history worships we
are constrained to accept with a grain of allowance. Though in our
lonely hours we draw a new strength out of their memory, yet, pressed
on our attention, as they are by the thoughtless and customary, they
fatigue and invade. The soul gives itself, alone, original and pure, to
the Lonely, Original and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits,
leads and speaks through it. Then is it glad, young and nimble. It is
not wise, but it sees through all things. It is not called religious,
but it is innocent. It calls the light its own, and feels that the
grass grows and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on,
its nature. Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal
mind. I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of
the great soul, and thereby I do Overlook the sun and the stars and
feel them to be the fair accidents and effects which change and pass.
More and more the surges of everlasting nature enter into me, and I
become public and human in my regards and actions. So come I to live in
thoughts and act with energies which are immortal. Thus revering the
soul, and learning, as the ancient said, that “its beauty is immense,”
man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the
soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders; he will
learn that there is no profane history; that all history is sacred;
that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time. He
will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will
live with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous
in his life and be content with all places and with any service he can
render. He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency of that trust
which carries God with it and so hath already the whole future in the
bottom of the heart.



X.
CIRCLES


Nature centres into balls,
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to surface and outside,
Scan the profile of the sphere;
Knew they what that signified,
A new genesis were here.



CIRCLES


The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second;
and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It
is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine
described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and
its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious
sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already deduced, in
considering the circular or compensatory character of every human
action. Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action admits of
being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around
every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but
every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on
mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable,
the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at
once the inspirer and the condemner of every success, may conveniently
serve us to connect many illustrations of human power in every
department.

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.
Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a
transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and
holds it fluid. Our culture is the predominance of an idea which draws
after it this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise into
another idea: they will disappear. The Greek sculpture is all melted
away, as if it had been statues of ice; here and there a solitary
figure or fragment remaining, as we see flecks and scraps of snow left
in cold dells and mountain clefts in June and July. For the genius that
created it creates now somewhat else. The Greek letters last a little
longer, but are already passing under the same sentence and tumbling
into the inevitable pit which the creation of new thought opens for all
that is old. The new continents are built out of the ruins of an old
planet; the new races fed out of the decomposition of the foregoing.
New arts destroy the old. See the investment of capital in aqueducts
made useless by hydraulics; fortifications, by gunpowder; roads and
canals, by railways; sails, by steam; steam by electricity.

You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so many ages.
Yet a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that which builds is
better than that which is built. The hand that built can topple it down
much faster. Better than the hand and nimbler was the invisible thought
which wrought through it; and thus ever, behind the coarse effect, is a
fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself the effect of a finer
cause. Every thing looks permanent until its secret is known. A rich
estate appears to women a firm and lasting fact; to a merchant, one
easily created out of any materials, and easily lost. An orchard, good
tillage, good grounds, seem a fixture, like a gold mine, or a river, to
a citizen; but to a large farmer, not much more fixed than the state of
the crop. Nature looks provokingly stable and secular, but it has a
cause like all the rest; and when once I comprehend that, will these
fields stretch so immovably wide, these leaves hang so individually
considerable? Permanence is a word of degrees. Every thing is medial.
Moons are no more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look,
he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his
facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea
which commands his own. The life of man is a self-evolving circle,
which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to
new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this
generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the
force or truth of the individual soul. For it is the inert effort of
each thought, having formed itself into a circular wave of
circumstance,—as for instance an empire, rules of an art, a local
usage, a religious rite,—to heap itself on that ridge and to solidify
and hem in the life. But if the soul is quick and strong it bursts over
that boundary on all sides and expands another orbit on the great deep,
which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to
bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and
narrowest pulses, it already tends outward with a vast force and to
immense and innumerable expansions.

Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. Every general
law only a particular fact of some more general law presently to
disclose itself. There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no
circumference to us. The man finishes his story,—how good! how final!
how it puts a new face on all things! He fills the sky. Lo! on the
other side rises also a man and draws a circle around the circle we had
just pronounced the outline of the sphere. Then already is our first
speaker not man, but only a first speaker. His only redress is
forthwith to draw a circle outside of his antagonist. And so men do by
themselves. The result of to-day, which haunts the mind and cannot be
escaped, will presently be abridged into a word, and the principle that
seemed to explain nature will itself be included as one example of a
bolder generalization. In the thought of to-morrow there is a power to
upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures of the
nations, and marshal thee to a heaven which no epic dream has yet
depicted. Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a
suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next
age.

Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder: the steps are actions;
the new prospect is power. Every several result is threatened and
judged by that which follows. Every one seems to be contradicted by the
new; it is only limited by the new. The new statement is always hated
by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of
scepticism. But the eye soon gets wonted to it, for the eye and it are
effects of one cause; then its innocency and benefit appear, and
presently, all its energy spent, it pales and dwindles before the
revelation of the new hour.

Fear not the new generalization. Does the fact look crass and material,
threatening to degrade thy theory of spirit? Resist it not; it goes to
refine and raise thy theory of matter just as much.

There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness. Every man
supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth
in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be
otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel was never
opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is,
every man believes that he has a greater possibility.

Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts
and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the
same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write,
whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but
yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see
so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that
wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will
not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a
weed by the wall.

The continual effort to raise himself above himself, to work a pitch
above his last height, betrays itself in a man’s relations. We thirst
for approbation, yet cannot forgive the approver. The sweet of nature
is love; yet, if I have a friend I am tormented by my imperfections.
The love of me accuses the other party. If he were high enough to
slight me, then could I love him, and rise by my affection to new
heights. A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his
friends. For every friend whom he loses for truth, he gains a better. I
thought as I walked in the woods and mused on my friends, why should I
play with them this game of idolatry? I know and see too well, when not
voluntarily blind, the speedy limits of persons called high and worthy.
Rich, noble and great they are by the liberality of our speech, but
truth is sad. O blessed Spirit, whom I forsake for these, they are not
thou! Every personal consideration that we allow costs us heavenly
state. We sell the thrones of angels for a short and turbulent
pleasure.

How often must we learn this lesson? Men cease to interest us when we
find their limitations. The only sin is limitation. As soon as you once
come up with a man’s limitations, it is all over with him. Has he
talents? has he enterprise? has he knowledge? It boots not. Infinitely
alluring and attractive was he to you yesterday, a great hope, a sea to
swim in; now, you have found his shores, found it a pond, and you care
not if you never see it again.

Each new step we take in thought reconciles twenty seemingly discordant
facts, as expressions of one law. Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the
respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle
platonizes. By going one step farther back in thought, discordant
opinions are reconciled by being seen to be two extremes of one
principle, and we can never go so far back as to preclude a still
higher vision.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all
things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a
great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There
is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned to-morrow; there
is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of
fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the
thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manners and morals
of mankind are all at the mercy of a new generalization. Generalization
is always a new influx of the divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill
that attends it.

Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have
his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will,
he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past
apprehension of truth, and his alert acceptance of it from whatever
quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to
society, his Christianity, his world, may at any time be superseded and
decease.

There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to play with it
academically, as the magnet was once a toy. Then we see in the heyday
of youth and poetry that it may be true, that it is true in gleams and
fragments. Then its countenance waxes stern and grand, and we see that
it must be true. It now shows itself ethical and practical. We learn
that God is; that he is in me; and that all things are shadows of him.
The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statement of the idealism of
Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact that all nature
is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself. Much
more obviously is history and the state of the world at any one time
directly dependent on the intellectual classification then existing in
the minds of men. The things which are dear to men at this hour are so
on account of the ideas which have emerged on their mental horizon, and
which cause the present order of things, as a tree bears its apples. A
new degree of culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system
of human pursuits.

Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the
_termini_ which bound the common of silence on every side. The parties
are not to be judged by the spirit they partake and even express under
this Pentecost. To-morrow they will have receded from this high-water
mark. To-morrow you shall find them stooping under the old
pack-saddles. Yet let us enjoy the cloven flame whilst it glows on our
walls. When each new speaker strikes a new light, emancipates us from
the oppression of the last speaker, to oppress us with the greatness
and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields us to another
redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men. O, what truths
profound and executable only in ages and orbs, are supposed in the
announcement of every truth! In common hours, society sits cold and
statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty,—knowing, possibly, that we can
be full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are not symbols to us, but
prose and trivial toys. Then cometh the god and converts the statues
into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil which
shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and
saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is manifest. The facts which
loomed so large in the fogs of yesterday,—property, climate, breeding,
personal beauty and the like, have strangely changed their proportions.
All that we reckoned settled shakes and rattles; and literatures,
cities, climates, religions, leave their foundations and dance before
our eyes. And yet here again see the swift circumspection! Good as is
discourse, silence is better, and shames it. The length of the
discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the
hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no words
would be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be
suffered.

Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal circle through which a
new one may be described. The use of literature is to afford us a
platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase
by which we may move it. We fill ourselves with ancient learning,
install ourselves the best we can in Greek, in Punic, in Roman houses,
only that we may wiselier see French, English and American houses and
modes of living. In like manner we see literature best from the midst
of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion.
The field cannot be well seen from within the field. The astronomer
must have his diameter of the earth’s orbit as a base to find the
parallax of any star.

Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not
in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of
Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. In my daily work I incline to
repeat my old steps, and do not believe in remedial force, in the power
of change and reform. But some Petrarch or Ariosto, filled with the new
wine of his imagination, writes me an ode or a brisk romance, full of
daring thought and action. He smites and arouses me with his shrill
tones, breaks up my whole chain of habits, and I open my eye on my own
possibilities. He claps wings to the sides of all the solid old lumber
of the world, and I am capable once more of choosing a straight path in
theory and practice.

We have the same need to command a view of the religion of the world.
We can never see Christianity from the catechism:—from the pastures,
from a boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of wood-birds we
possibly may. Cleansed by the elemental light and wind, steeped in the
sea of beautiful forms which the field offers us, we may chance to cast
a right glance back upon biography. Christianity is rightly dear to the
best of mankind; yet was there never a young philosopher whose breeding
had fallen into the Christian church by whom that brave text of Paul’s
was not specially prized:—“Then shall also the Son be subject unto Him
who put all things under him, that God may be all in all.” Let the
claims and virtues of persons be never so great and welcome, the
instinct of man presses eagerly onward to the impersonal and
illimitable, and gladly arms itself against the dogmatism of bigots
with this generous word out of the book itself.

The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concentric
circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations which
apprise us that this surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but
sliding. These manifold tenacious qualities, this chemistry and
vegetation, these metals and animals, which seem to stand there for
their own sake, are means and methods only,—are words of God, and as
fugitive as other words. Has the naturalist or chemist learned his
craft, who has explored the gravity of atoms and the elective
affinities, who has not yet discerned the deeper law whereof this is
only a partial or approximate statement, namely that like draws to
like, and that the goods which belong to you gravitate to you and need
not be pursued with pains and cost? Yet is that statement approximate
also, and not final. Omnipresence is a higher fact. Not through subtle
subterranean channels need friend and fact be drawn to their
counterpart, but, rightly considered, these things proceed from the
eternal generation of the soul. Cause and effect are two sides of one
fact.

The same law of eternal procession ranges all that we call the virtues,
and extinguishes each in the light of a better. The great man will not
be prudent in the popular sense; all his prudence will be so much
deduction from his grandeur. But it behooves each to see, when he
sacrifices prudence, to what god he devotes it; if to ease and
pleasure, he had better be prudent still; if to a great trust, he can
well spare his mule and panniers who has a winged chariot instead.
Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through the woods, that his feet may
be safer from the bite of snakes; Aaron never thinks of such a peril.
In many years neither is harmed by such an accident. Yet it seems to me
that with every precaution you take against such an evil you put
yourself into the power of the evil. I suppose that the highest
prudence is the lowest prudence. Is this too sudden a rushing from the
centre to the verge of our orbit? Think how many times we shall fall
back into pitiful calculations before we take up our rest in the great
sentiment, or make the verge of to-day the new centre. Besides, your
bravest sentiment is familiar to the humblest men. The poor and the low
have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as
you. “Blessed be nothing” and “The worse things are, the better they
are” are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life.

One man’s justice is another’s injustice; one man’s beauty another’s
ugliness; one man’s wisdom another’s folly; as one beholds the same
objects from a higher point. One man thinks justice consists in paying
debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very
remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that
second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself Which
debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor?
the debt of money, or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to
nature? For you, O broker, there is no other principle but arithmetic.
For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character,
the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach one duty,
like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically
on the payment of moneys. Let me live onward; you shall find that,
though slower, the progress of my character will liquidate all these
debts without injustice to higher claims. If a man should dedicate
himself to the payment of notes, would not this be injustice? Does he
owe no debt but money? And are all claims on him to be postponed to a
landlord’s or a banker’s?

There is no virtue which is final; all are initial. The virtues of
society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery
that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed
such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices:—

     “Forgive his crimes, forgive his virtues too,
     Those smaller faults, half converts to the right.”

It is the highest power of divine moments that they abolish our
contritions also. I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitableness day by
day; but when these waves of God flow into me I no longer reckon lost
time. I no longer poorly compute my possible achievement by what
remains to me of the month or the year; for these moments confer a sort
of omnipresence and omnipotence which asks nothing of duration, but
sees that the energy of the mind is commensurate with the work to be
done, without time.

And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader exclaim, you have
arrived at a fine Pyrrhonism, at an equivalence and indifferency of all
actions, and would fain teach us that _if we are true_, forsooth, our
crimes may be lively stones out of which we shall construct the temple
of the true God!

I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am gladdened by seeing the
predominance of the saccharine principle throughout vegetable nature,
and not less by beholding in morals that unrestrained inundation of the
principle of good into every chink and hole that selfishness has left
open, yea into selfishness and sin itself; so that no evil is pure, nor
hell itself without its extreme satisfactions. But lest I should
mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind
the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value
on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I
pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things.
No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an
endless seeker with no Past at my back.

Yet this incessant movement and progression which all things partake
could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle of
fixture or stability in the soul. Whilst the eternal generation of
circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides. That central life is
somewhat superior to creation, superior to knowledge and thought, and
contains all its circles. For ever it labors to create a life and
thought as Large and excellent as itself, but in vain, for that which
is made instructs how to make a better.

Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things
renew, germinate and spring. Why should we import rags and relics into
the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only
disease; all others run into this one. We call it by many names,—fever,
intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime; they are all forms of old
age; they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not newness,
not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst
we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young.
Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious eye looking upward,
counts itself nothing and abandons itself to the instruction flowing
from all sides. But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all,
they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspiration, accept the
actual for the necessary and talk down to the young. Let them, then,
become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold
truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are
perfumed again with hope and power. This old age ought not to creep on
a human mind. In nature every moment is new; the past is always
swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure
but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by
oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so
sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts.
People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there
any hope for them.

Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess to-day the mood, the
pleasure, the power of to-morrow, when we are building up our being. Of
lower states, of acts of routine and sense, we can tell somewhat; but
the masterpieces of God, the total growths and universal movements of
the soul, he hideth; they are incalculable. I can know that truth is
divine and helpful; but how it shall help me I can have no guess, for
_so to be_ is the sole inlet of _so to know_. The new position of the
advancing man has all the powers of the old, yet has them all new. It
carries in its bosom all the energies of the past, yet is itself an
exhalation of the morning. I cast away in this new moment all my once
hoarded knowledge, as vacant and vain. Now, for the first time seem I
to know any thing rightly. The simplest words,—we do not know what they
mean except when we love and aspire.

The difference between talents and character is adroitness to keep the
old and trodden round, and power and courage to make a new road to new
and better goals. Character makes an overpowering present; a cheerful,
determined hour, which fortifies all the company by making them see
that much is possible and excellent that was not thought of. Character
dulls the impression of particular events. When we see the conqueror we
do not think much of any one battle or success. We see that we had
exaggerated the difficulty. It was easy to him. The great man is not
convulsible or tormentable; events pass over him without much
impression. People say sometimes, ‘See what I have overcome; see how
cheerful I am; see how completely I have triumphed over these black
events.’ Not if they still remind me of the black event. True conquest
is the causing the calamity to fade and disappear as an early cloud of
insignificant result in a history so large and advancing.

The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget
ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our
sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in
short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without
enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment. The
great moments of history are the facilities of performance through the
strength of ideas, as the works of genius and religion. “A man,” said
Oliver Cromwell, “never rises so high as when he knows not whither he
is going.” Dreams and drunkenness, the use of opium and alcohol are the
semblance and counterfeit of this oracular genius, and hence their
dangerous attraction for men. For the like reason they ask the aid of
wild passions, as in gaming and war, to ape in some manner these flames
and generosities of the heart.



XI.
INTELLECT


Go, speed the stars of Thought
On to their shining goals;—
The sower scatters broad his seed,
The wheat thou strew’st be souls.



INTELLECT


Every substance is negatively electric to that which stands above it in
the chemical tables, positively to that which stands below it. Water
dissolves wood and iron and salt; air dissolves water; electric fire
dissolves air, but the intellect dissolves fire, gravity, laws, method,
and the subtlest unnamed relations of nature in its resistless
menstruum. Intellect lies behind genius, which is intellect
constructive. Intellect is the simple power anterior to all action or
construction. Gladly would I unfold in calm degrees a natural history
of the intellect, but what man has yet been able to mark the steps and
boundaries of that transparent essence? The first questions are always
to be asked, and the wisest doctor is gravelled by the inquisitiveness
of a child. How can we speak of the action of the mind under any
divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so
forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? Each
becomes the other. Itself alone is. Its vision is not like the vision
of the eye, but is union with the things known.

Intellect and intellection signify to the common ear consideration of
abstract truth. The considerations of time and place, of you and me, of
profit and hurt tyrannize over most men’s minds. Intellect separates
the fact considered, from you, from all local and personal reference,
and discerns it as if it existed for its own sake. Heraclitus looked
upon the affections as dense and colored mists. In the fog of good and
evil affections it is hard for man to walk forward in a straight line.
Intellect is void of affection and sees an object as it stands in the
light of science, cool and disengaged. The intellect goes out of the
individual, floats over its own personality, and regards it as a fact,
and not as _I_ and _mine_. He who is immersed in what concerns person
or place cannot see the problem of existence. This the intellect always
ponders. Nature shows all things formed and bound. The intellect
pierces the form, overleaps the wall, detects intrinsic likeness
between remote things and reduces all things into a few principles.

The making a fact the subject of thought raises it. All that mass of
mental and moral phenomena which we do not make objects of voluntary
thought, come within the power of fortune; they constitute the
circumstance of daily life; they are subject to change, to fear, and
hope. Every man beholds his human condition with a degree of
melancholy. As a ship aground is battered by the waves, so man,
imprisoned in mortal life, lies open to the mercy of coming events. But
a truth, separated by the intellect, is no longer a subject of destiny.
We behold it as a god upraised above care and fear. And so any fact in
our life, or any record of our fancies or reflections, disentangled
from the web of our unconsciousness, becomes an object impersonal and
immortal. It is the past restored, but embalmed. A better art than that
of Egypt has taken fear and corruption out of it. It is eviscerated of
care. It is offered for science. What is addressed to us for
contemplation does not threaten us but makes us intellectual beings.

The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind
that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that
spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual. Long
prior to the age of reflection is the thinking of the mind. Out of
darkness it came insensibly into the marvellous light of to-day. In the
period of infancy it accepted and disposed of all impressions from the
surrounding creation after its own way. Whatever any mind doth or saith
is after a law; and this native law remains over it after it has come
to reflection or conscious thought. In the most worn, pedantic,
introverted self-tormenter’s life, the greatest part is incalculable by
him, unforeseen, unimaginable, and must be, until he can take himself
up by his own ears. What am I? What has my will done to make me that I
am? Nothing. I have been floated into this thought, this hour, this
connection of events, by secret currents of might and mind, and my
ingenuity and wilfulness have not thwarted, have not aided to an
appreciable degree.

Our spontaneous action is always the best. You cannot with your best
deliberation and heed come so close to any question as your spontaneous
glance shall bring you, whilst you rise from your bed, or walk abroad
in the morning after meditating the matter before sleep on the previous
night. Our thinking is a pious reception. Our truth of thought is
therefore vitiated as much by too violent direction given by our will,
as by too great negligence. We do not determine what we will think. We
only open our senses, clear away as we can all obstruction from the
fact, and suffer the intellect to see. We have little control over our
thoughts. We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments
into their heaven and so fully engage us that we take no thought for
the morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own.
By and by we fall out of that rapture, bethink us where we have been,
what we have seen, and repeat as truly as we can what we have beheld.
As far as we can recall these ecstasies we carry away in the
ineffaceable memory the result, and all men and all the ages confirm
it. It is called Truth. But the moment we cease to report and attempt
to correct and contrive, it is not truth.

If we consider what persons have stimulated and profited us, we shall
perceive the superiority of the spontaneous or intuitive principle over
the arithmetical or logical. The first contains the second, but virtual
and latent. We want in every man a long logic; we cannot pardon the
absence of it, but it must not be spoken. Logic is the procession or
proportionate unfolding of the intuition; but its virtue is as silent
method; the moment it would appear as propositions and have a separate
value it is worthless.

In every man’s mind, some images, words and facts remain, without
effort on his part to imprint them, which others forget, and afterwards
these illustrate to him important laws. All our progress is an
unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an
opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud and fruit. Trust
the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain to
hurry it. By trusting it to the end, it shall ripen into truth and you
shall know why you believe.

Each mind has its own method. A true man never acquires after college
rules. What you have aggregated in a natural manner surprises and
delights when it is produced. For we cannot oversee each other’s
secret. And hence the differences between men in natural endowment are
insignificant in comparison with their common wealth. Do you think the
porter and the cook have no anecdotes, no experiences, no wonders for
you? Every body knows as much as the savant. The walls of rude minds
are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day
bring a lantern and read the inscriptions. Every man, in the degree in
which he has wit and culture, finds his curiosity inflamed concerning
the modes of living and thinking of other men, and especially of those
classes whose minds have not been subdued by the drill of school
education.

This instinctive action never ceases in a healthy mind, but becomes
richer and more frequent in its informations through all states of
culture. At last comes the era of reflection, when we not only observe,
but take pains to observe; when we of set purpose sit down to consider
an abstract truth; when we keep the mind’s eye open whilst we converse,
whilst we read, whilst we act, intent to learn the secret law of some
class of facts.

What is the hardest task in the world? To think. I would put myself in
the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I
blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he
meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live. For example,
a man explores the basis of civil government. Let him intend his mind
without respite, without rest, in one direction. His best heed long
time avails him nothing. Yet thoughts are flitting before him. We all
but apprehend, we dimly forebode the truth. We say I will walk abroad,
and the truth will take form and clearness to me. We go forth, but
cannot find it. It seems as if we needed only the stillness and
composed attitude of the library to seize the thought. But we come in,
and are as far from it as at first. Then, in a moment, and unannounced,
the truth appears. A certain wandering light appears, and is the
distinction, the principle, we wanted. But the oracle comes because we
had previously laid siege to the shrine. It seems as if the law of the
intellect resembled that law of nature by which we now inspire, now
expire the breath; by which the heart now draws in, then hurls out the
blood,—the law of undulation. So now you must labor with your brains,
and now you must forbear your activity and see what the great Soul
showeth.

The immortality of man is as legitimately preached from the
intellections as from the moral volitions. Every intellection is mainly
prospective. Its present value is its least. Inspect what delights you
in Plutarch, in Shakspeare, in Cervantes. Each truth that a writer
acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and thoughts
lay already in his mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had
littered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his private
biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the
day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm. Men say, Where
did he get this? and think there was something divine in his life. But
no; they have myriads of facts just as good, would they only get a lamp
to ransack their attics withal.

We are all wise. The difference between persons is not in wisdom but in
art. I knew, in an academical club, a person who always deferred to me;
who, seeing my whim for writing, fancied that my experiences had
somewhat superior; whilst I saw that his experiences were as good as
mine. Give them to me and I would make the same use of them. He held
the old; he holds the new; I had the habit of tacking together the old
and the new which he did not use to exercise. This may hold in the
great examples. Perhaps if we should meet Shakspeare we should not be
conscious of any steep inferiority; no, but of a great equality,—only
that he possessed a strange skill of using, of classifying, his facts,
which we lacked. For notwithstanding our utter incapacity to produce
anything like Hamlet and Othello, see the perfect reception this wit
and immense knowledge of life and liquid eloquence find in us all.

If you gather apples in the sunshine, or make hay, or hoe corn, and
then retire within doors and shut your eyes and press them with your
hand, you shall still see apples hanging in the bright light with
boughs and leaves thereto, or the tasselled grass, or the corn-flags,
and this for five or six hours afterwards. There lie the impressions on
the retentive organ, though you knew it not. So lies the whole series
of natural images with which your life has made you acquainted, in your
memory, though you know it not; and a thrill of passion flashes light
on their dark chamber, and the active power seizes instantly the fit
image, as the word of its momentary thought.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure,
is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our
wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood,
and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond;
until by and by we begin to suspect that the biography of the one
foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature
paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

In the intellect constructive, which we popularly designate by the word
Genius, we observe the same balance of two elements as in intellect
receptive. The constructive intellect produces thoughts, sentences,
poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the
marriage of thought with nature. To genius must always go two gifts,
the thought and the publication. The first is revelation, always a
miracle, which no frequency of occurrence or incessant study can ever
familiarize, but which must always leave the inquirer stupid with
wonder. It is the advent of truth into the world, a form of thought now
for the first time bursting into the universe, a child of the old
eternal soul, a piece of genuine and immeasurable greatness. It seems,
for the time, to inherit all that has yet existed and to dictate to the
unborn. It affects every thought of man and goes to fashion every
institution. But to make it available it needs a vehicle or art by
which it is conveyed to men. To be communicable it must become picture
or sensible object. We must learn the language of facts. The most
wonderful inspirations die with their subject if he has no hand to
paint them to the senses. The ray of light passes invisible through
space and only when it falls on an object is it seen. When the
spiritual energy is directed on something outward, then it is a
thought. The relation between it and you first makes you, the value of
you, apparent to me. The rich inventive genius of the painter must be
smothered and lost for want of the power of drawing, and in our happy
hours we should be inexhaustible poets if once we could break through
the silence into adequate rhyme. As all men have some access to primary
truth, so all have some art or power of communication in their head,
but only in the artist does it descend into the hand. There is an
inequality, whose laws we do not yet know, between two men and between
two moments of the same man, in respect to this faculty. In common
hours we have the same facts as in the uncommon or inspired, but they
do not sit for their portraits; they are not detached, but lie in a
web. The thought of genius is spontaneous; but the power of picture or
expression, in the most enriched and flowing nature, implies a mixture
of will, a certain control over the spontaneous states, without which
no production is possible. It is a conversion of all nature into the
rhetoric of thought, under the eye of judgment, with a strenuous
exercise of choice. And yet the imaginative vocabulary seems to be
spontaneous also. It does not flow from experience only or mainly, but
from a richer source. Not by any conscious imitation of particular
forms are the grand strokes of the painter executed, but by repairing
to the fountain-head of all forms in his mind. Who is the first
drawing-master? Without instruction we know very well the ideal of the
human form. A child knows if an arm or a leg be distorted in a picture;
if the attitude be natural or grand or mean; though he has never
received any instruction in drawing or heard any conversation on the
subject, nor can himself draw with correctness a single feature. A good
form strikes all eyes pleasantly, long before they have any science on
the subject, and a beautiful face sets twenty hearts in palpitation,
prior to all consideration of the mechanical proportions of the
features and head. We may owe to dreams some light on the fountain of
this skill; for as soon as we let our will go and let the unconscious
states ensue, see what cunning draughtsmen we are! We entertain
ourselves with wonderful forms of men, of women, of animals, of
gardens, of woods and of monsters, and the mystic pencil wherewith we
then draw has no awkwardness or inexperience, no meagreness or poverty;
it can design well and group well; its composition is full of art, its
colors are well laid on and the whole canvas which it paints is
lifelike and apt to touch us with terror, with tenderness, with desire
and with grief. Neither are the artist’s copies from experience ever
mere copies, but always touched and softened by tints from this ideal
domain.

The conditions essential to a constructive mind do not appear to be so
often combined but that a good sentence or verse remains fresh and
memorable for a long time. Yet when we write with ease and come out
into the free air of thought, we seem to be assured that nothing is
easier than to continue this communication at pleasure. Up, down,
around, the kingdom of thought has no inclosures, but the Muse makes us
free of her city. Well, the world has a million writers. One would
think then that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and
the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all
our good books; nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.
It is true that the discerning intellect of the world is always much in
advance of the creative, so that there are many competent judges of the
best book, and few writers of the best books. But some of the
conditions of intellectual construction are of rare occurrence. The
intellect is a whole and demands integrity in every work. This is
resisted equally by a man’s devotion to a single thought and by his
ambition to combine too many.

Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten his attention on a
single aspect of truth and apply himself to that alone for a long time,
the truth becomes distorted and not itself but falsehood; herein
resembling the air, which is our natural element, and the breath of our
nostrils, but if a stream of the same be directed on the body for a
time, it causes cold, fever, and even death. How wearisome the
grammarian, the phrenologist, the political or religious fanatic, or
indeed any possessed mortal whose balance is lost by the exaggeration
of a single topic. It is incipient insanity. Every thought is a prison
also. I cannot see what you see, because I am caught up by a strong
wind and blown so far in one direction that I am out of the hoop of
your horizon.

Is it any better if the student, to avoid this offence, and to
liberalize himself, aims to make a mechanical whole of history, or
science, or philosophy, by a numerical addition of all the facts that
fall within his vision? The world refuses to be analyzed by addition
and subtraction. When we are young we spend much time and pains in
filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry,
Politics, Art, in the hope that in the course of a few years we shall
have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories
at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get
no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola,
whose arcs will never meet.

Neither by detachment neither by aggregation is the integrity of the
intellect transmitted to its works, but by a vigilance which brings the
intellect in its greatness and best state to operate every moment. It
must have the same wholeness which nature has. Although no diligence
can rebuild the universe in a model by the best accumulation or
disposition of details, yet does the world reappear in miniature in
every event, so that all the laws of nature may be read in the smallest
fact. The intellect must have the like perfection in its apprehension
and in its works. For this reason, an index or mercury of intellectual
proficiency is the perception of identity. We talk with accomplished
persons who appear to be strangers in nature. The cloud, the tree, the
turf, the bird are not theirs, have nothing of them; the world is only
their lodging and table. But the poet, whose verses are to be spheral
and complete, is one whom Nature cannot deceive, whatsoever face of
strangeness she may put on. He feels a strict consanguinity, and
detects more likeness than variety in all her changes. We are stung by
the desire for new thought; but when we receive a new thought it is
only the old thought with a new face, and though we make it our own we
instantly crave another; we are not really enriched. For the truth was
in us before it was reflected to us from natural objects; and the
profound genius will cast the likeness of all creatures into every
product of his wit.

But if the constructive powers are rare and it is given to few men to
be poets, yet every man is a receiver of this descending holy ghost,
and may well study the laws of its influx. Exactly parallel is the
whole rule of intellectual duty to the rule of moral duty. A
self-denial no less austere than the saint’s is demanded of the
scholar. He must worship truth, and forego all things for that, and
choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure in thought is thereby
augmented.

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take
which you please,—you can never have both. Between these, as a
pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom the love of repose predominates
will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political
party he meets,—most likely his father’s. He gets rest, commodity, and
reputation; but he shuts the door of truth. He in whom the love of
truth predominates will keep himself aloof from all moorings, and
afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite
negations between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to
the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion, but he is a
candidate for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law
of his being.

The circle of the green earth he must measure with his shoes to find
the man who can yield him truth. He shall then know that there is
somewhat more blessed and great in hearing than in speaking. Happy is
the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man. As long as I hear truth I am
bathed by a beautiful element and am not conscious of any limits to my
nature. The suggestions are thousandfold that I hear and see. The
waters of the great deep have ingress and egress to the soul. But if I
speak, I define, I confine and am less. When Socrates speaks, Lysis and
Menexenus are afflicted by no shame that they do not speak. They also
are good. He likewise defers to them, loves them, whilst he speaks.
Because a true and natural man contains and is the same truth which an
eloquent man articulates; but in the eloquent man, because he can
articulate it, it seems something the less to reside, and he turns to
these silent beautiful with the more inclination and respect. The
ancient sentence said, Let us be silent, for so are the gods. Silence
is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great
and universal. Every man’s progress is through a succession of
teachers, each of whom seems at the time to have a superlative
influence, but it at last gives place to a new. Frankly let him accept
it all. Jesus says, Leave father, mother, house and lands, and follow
me. Who leaves all, receives more. This is as true intellectually as
morally. Each new mind we approach seems to require an abdication of
all our past and present possessions. A new doctrine seems at first a
subversion of all our opinions, tastes, and manner of living. Such has
Swedenborg, such has Kant, such has Coleridge, such has Hegel or his
interpreter Cousin seemed to many young men in this country. Take
thankfully and heartily all they can give. Exhaust them, wrestle with
them, let them not go until their blessing be won, and after a short
season the dismay will be overpast, the excess of influence withdrawn,
and they will be no longer an alarming meteor, but one more bright star
shining serenely in your heaven and blending its light with all your
day.

But whilst he gives himself up unreservedly to that which draws him,
because that is his own, he is to refuse himself to that which draws
him not, whatsoever fame and authority may attend it, because it is not
his own. Entire self-reliance belongs to the intellect. One soul is a
counterpoise of all souls, as a capillary column of water is a balance
for the sea. It must treat things and books and sovereign genius as
itself also a sovereign. If Æschylus be that man he is taken for, he
has not yet done his office when he has educated the learned of Europe
for a thousand years. He is now to approve himself a master of delight
to me also. If he cannot do that, all his fame shall avail him nothing
with me. I were a fool not to sacrifice a thousand Æschyluses to my
intellectual integrity. Especially take the same ground in regard to
abstract truth, the science of the mind. The Bacon, the Spinoza, the
Hume, Schelling, Kant, or whosoever propounds to you a philosophy of
the mind, is only a more or less awkward translator of things in your
consciousness which you have also your way of seeing, perhaps of
denominating. Say then, instead of too timidly poring into his obscure
sense, that he has not succeeded in rendering back to you your
consciousness. He has not succeeded; now let another try. If Plato
cannot, perhaps Spinoza will. If Spinoza cannot, then perhaps Kant.
Anyhow, when at last it is done, you will find it is no recondite, but
a simple, natural, common state which the writer restores to you.

But let us end these didactics. I will not, though the subject might
provoke it, speak to the open question between Truth and Love. I shall
not presume to interfere in the old politics of the skies;—“The
cherubim know most; the seraphim love most.” The gods shall settle
their own quarrels. But I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the
intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men
who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure
reason, the _Trismegisti_, the expounders of the principles of thought
from age to age. When at long intervals we turn over their abstruse
pages, wonderful seems the calm and grand air of these few, these great
spiritual lords who have walked in the world,—these of the old
religion,—dwelling in a worship which makes the sanctities of
Christianity look _parvenues_ and popular; for “persuasion is in soul,
but necessity is in intellect.” This band of grandees, Hermes,
Heraclitus, Empedocles, Plato, Plotinus, Olympiodorus, Proclus,
Synesius and the rest, have somewhat so vast in their logic, so primary
in their thinking, that it seems antecedent to all the ordinary
distinctions of rhetoric and literature, and to be at once poetry and
music and dancing and astronomy and mathematics. I am present at the
sowing of the seed of the world. With a geometry of sunbeams the soul
lays the foundations of nature. The truth and grandeur of their thought
is proved by its scope and applicability, for it commands the entire
schedule and inventory of things for its illustration. But what marks
its elevation and has even a comic look to us, is the innocent serenity
with which these babe-like Jupiters sit in their clouds, and from age
to age prattle to each other and to no contemporary. Well assured that
their speech is intelligible and the most natural thing in the world,
they add thesis to thesis, without a moment’s heed of the universal
astonishment of the human race below, who do not comprehend their
plainest argument; nor do they ever relent so much as to insert a
popular or explaining sentence, nor testify the least displeasure or
petulance at the dulness of their amazed auditory. The angels are so
enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not
distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but
speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.



XII.
ART


Give to barrows trays and pans
Grace and glimmer of romance,
Bring the moonlight into noon
Hid in gleaming piles of stone;
On the city’s paved street
Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet,
Let spouting fountains cool the air,
Singing in the sun-baked square.
Let statue, picture, park and hall,
Ballad, flag and festival,
The past restore, the day adorn
And make each morrow a new morn
So shall the drudge in dusty frock
Spy behind the city clock
Retinues of airy kings,
Skirts of angels, starry wings,
His fathers shining in bright fables,
His children fed at heavenly tables.
’Tis the privilege of Art
Thus to play its cheerful part,
Man in Earth to acclimate
And bend the exile to his fate,
And, moulded of one element
With the days and firmament,
Teach him on these as stairs to climb
And live on even terms with Time;
Whilst upper life the slender rill
Of human sense doth overfill.



ART


Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in
every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole. This
appears in works both of the useful and the fine arts, if we employ the
popular distinction of works according to their aim either at use or
beauty. Thus in our fine arts, not imitation but creation is the aim.
In landscapes the painter should give the suggestion of a fairer
creation than we know. The details, the prose of nature he should omit
and give us only the spirit and splendor. He should know that the
landscape has beauty for his eye because it expresses a thought which
is to him good; and this because the same power which sees through his
eyes is seen in that spectacle; and he will come to value the
expression of nature and not nature itself, and so exalt in his copy
the features that please him. He will give the gloom of gloom and the
sunshine of sunshine. In a portrait he must inscribe the character and
not the features, and must esteem the man who sits to him as himself
only an imperfect picture or likeness of the aspiring original within.

What is that abridgment and selection we observe in all spiritual
activity, but itself the creative impulse? for it is the inlet of that
higher illumination which teaches to convey a larger sense by simpler
symbols. What is a man but nature’s finer success in self-explication?
What is a man but a finer and compacter landscape than the horizon
figures,—nature’s eclecticism? and what is his speech, his love of
painting, love of nature, but a still finer success,—all the weary
miles and tons of space and bulk left out, and the spirit or moral of
it contracted into a musical word, or the most cunning stroke of the
pencil?

But the artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to
convey his enlarged sense to his fellow-men. Thus the new in art is
always formed out of the old. The Genius of the Hour sets his
ineffaceable seal on the work and gives it an inexpressible charm for
the imagination. As far as the spiritual character of the period
overpowers the artist and finds expression in his work, so far it will
retain a certain grandeur, and will represent to future beholders the
Unknown, the Inevitable, the Divine. No man can quite exclude this
element of Necessity from his labor. No man can quite emancipate
himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the
education, the religion, the politics, usages and arts of his times
shall have no share. Though he were never so original, never so wilful
and fantastic, he cannot wipe out of his work every trace of the
thoughts amidst which it grew. The very avoidance betrays the usage he
avoids. Above his will and out of his sight he is necessitated by the
air he breathes and the idea on which he and his contemporaries live
and toil, to share the manner of his times, without knowing what that
manner is. Now that which is inevitable in the work has a higher charm
than individual talent can ever give, inasmuch as the artist’s pen or
chisel seems to have been held and guided by a gigantic hand to
inscribe a line in the history of the human race. This circumstance
gives a value to the Egyptian hieroglyphics, to the Indian, Chinese and
Mexican idols, however gross and shapeless. They denote the height of
the human soul in that hour, and were not fantastic, but sprung from a
necessity as deep as the world. Shall I now add that the whole extant
product of the plastic arts has herein its highest value, _as history;_
as a stroke drawn in the portrait of that fate, perfect and beautiful,
according to whose ordinations all beings advance to their beatitude?

Thus, historically viewed, it has been the office of art to educate the
perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no
clear vision. It needs, by the exhibition of single traits, to assist
and lead the dormant taste. We carve and paint, or we behold what is
carved and painted, as students of the mystery of Form. The virtue of
art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the
embarrassing variety. Until one thing comes out from the connection of
things, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought. Our
happiness and unhappiness are unproductive. The infant lies in a
pleasing trance, but his individual character and his practical power
depend on his daily progress in the separation of things, and dealing
with one at a time. Love and all the passions concentrate all existence
around a single form. It is the habit of certain minds to give an
all-excluding fulness to the object, the thought, the word, they alight
upon, and to make that for the time the deputy of the world. These are
the artists, the orators, the leaders of society. The power to detach
and to magnify by detaching is the essence of rhetoric in the hands of
the orator and the poet. This rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary
eminency of an object,—so remarkable in Burke, in Byron, in
Carlyle,—the painter and sculptor exhibit in color and in stone. The
power depends on the depth of the artist’s insight of that object he
contemplates. For every object has its roots in central nature, and may
of course be so exhibited to us as to represent the world. Therefore
each work of genius is the tyrant of the hour and concentrates
attention on itself. For the time, it is the only thing worth naming to
do that,—be it a sonnet, an opera, a landscape, a statue, an oration,
the plan of a temple, of a campaign, or of a voyage of discovery.
Presently we pass to some other object, which rounds itself into a
whole as did the first; for example a well-laid garden; and nothing
seems worth doing but the laying out of gardens. I should think fire
the best thing in the world, if I were not acquainted with air, and
water, and earth. For it is the right and property of all natural
objects, of all genuine talents, of all native properties whatsoever,
to be for their moment the top of the world. A squirrel leaping from
bough to bough and making the Wood but one wide tree for his pleasure,
fills the eye not less than a lion,—is beautiful, self-sufficing, and
stands then and there for nature. A good ballad draws my ear and heart
whilst I listen, as much as an epic has done before. A dog, drawn by a
master, or a litter of pigs, satisfies and is a reality not less than
the frescoes of Angelo. From this succession of excellent objects we
learn at last the immensity of the world, the opulence of human nature,
which can run out to infinitude in any direction. But I also learn that
what astonished and fascinated me in the first work astonished me in
the second work also; that excellence of all things is one.

The office of painting and sculpture seems to be merely initial. The
best pictures can easily tell us their last secret. The best pictures
are rude draughts of a few of the miraculous dots and lines and dyes
which make up the ever-changing “landscape with figures” amidst which
we dwell. Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs.
When that has educated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness, to
grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten; so
painting teaches me the splendor of color and the expression of form,
and as I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the
boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist
stands free to choose out of the possible forms. If he can draw every
thing, why draw any thing? and then is my eye opened to the eternal
picture which nature paints in the street, with moving men and
children, beggars and fine ladies, draped in red and green and blue and
gray; long-haired, grizzled, white-faced, black-faced, wrinkled, giant,
dwarf, expanded, elfish,—capped and based by heaven, earth and sea.

A gallery of sculpture teaches more austerely the same lesson. As
picture teaches the coloring, so sculpture the anatomy of form. When I
have seen fine statues and afterwards enter a public assembly, I
understand well what he meant who said, “When I have been reading
Homer, all men look like giants.” I too see that painting and sculpture
are gymnastics of the eye, its training to the niceties and curiosities
of its function. There is no statue like this living man, with his
infinite advantage over all ideal sculpture, of perpetual variety. What
a gallery of art have I here! No mannerist made these varied groups and
diverse original single figures. Here is the artist himself
improvising, grim and glad, at his block. Now one thought strikes him,
now another, and with each moment he alters the whole air, attitude and
expression of his clay. Away with your nonsense of oil and easels, of
marble and chisels; except to open your eyes to the masteries of
eternal art, they are hypocritical rubbish.

The reference of all production at last to an aboriginal Power explains
the traits common to all works of the highest art,—that they are
universally intelligible; that they restore to us the simplest states
of mind, and are religious. Since what skill is therein shown is the
reappearance of the original soul, a jet of pure light, it should
produce a similar impression to that made by natural objects. In happy
hours, nature appears to us one with art; art perfected,—the work of
genius. And the individual, in whom simple tastes and susceptibility to
all the great human influences overpower the accidents of a local and
special culture, is the best critic of art. Though we travel the world
over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it
not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in
outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely a radiation from the
work of art of human character,—a wonderful expression through stone,
or canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of
our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls
which have these attributes. In the sculptures of the Greeks, in the
masonry of the Romans, and in the pictures of the Tuscan and Venetian
masters, the highest charm is the universal language they speak. A
confession of moral nature, of purity, love, and hope, breathes from
them all. That which we carry to them, the same we bring back more
fairly illustrated in the memory. The traveller who visits the Vatican,
and passes from chamber to chamber through galleries of statues, vases,
sarcophagi and candelabra, through all forms of beauty cut in the
richest materials, is in danger of forgetting the simplicity of the
principles out of which they all sprung, and that they had their origin
from thoughts and laws in his own breast. He studies the technical
rules on these wonderful remains, but forgets that these works were not
always thus constellated; that they are the contributions of many ages
and many countries; that each came out of the solitary workshop of one
artist, who toiled perhaps in ignorance of the existence of other
sculpture, created his work without other model save life, household
life, and the sweet and smart of personal relations, of beating hearts,
and meeting eyes; of poverty and necessity and hope and fear. These
were his inspirations, and these are the effects he carries home to
your heart and mind. In proportion to his force, the artist will find
in his work an outlet for his proper character. He must not be in any
manner pinched or hindered by his material, but through his necessity
of imparting himself the adamant will be wax in his hands, and will
allow an adequate communication of himself, in his full stature and
proportion. He need not cumber himself with a conventional nature and
culture, nor ask what is the mode in Rome or in Paris, but that house
and weather and manner of living which poverty and the fate of birth
have made at once so odious and so dear, in the gray unpainted wood
cabin, on the corner of a New Hampshire farm, or in the log-hut of the
backwoods, or in the narrow lodging where he has endured the
constraints and seeming of a city poverty, will serve as well as any
other condition as the symbol of a thought which pours itself
indifferently through all.

I remember when in my younger days I had heard of the wonders of
Italian painting, I fancied the great pictures would be great
strangers; some surprising combination of color and form; a foreign
wonder, barbaric pearl and gold, like the spontoons and standards of
the militia, which play such pranks in the eyes and imaginations of
school-boys. I was to see and acquire I knew not what. When I came at
last to Rome and saw with eyes the pictures, I found that genius left
to novices the gay and fantastic and ostentatious, and itself pierced
directly to the simple and true; that it was familiar and sincere; that
it was the old, eternal fact I had met already in so many forms,—unto
which I lived; that it was the plain _you and me_ I knew so well,—had
left at home in so many conversations. I had the same experience
already in a church at Naples. There I saw that nothing was changed
with me but the place, and said to myself—‘Thou foolish child, hast
thou come out hither, over four thousand miles of salt water, to find
that which was perfect to thee there at home?’ That fact I saw again in
the Academmia at Naples, in the chambers of sculpture, and yet again
when I came to Rome and to the paintings of Raphael, Angelo, Sacchi,
Titian, and Leonardo da Vinci. “What, old mole! workest thou in the
earth so fast?” It had travelled by my side; that which I fancied I had
left in Boston was here in the Vatican, and again at Milan and at
Paris, and made all travelling ridiculous as a treadmill. I now require
this of all pictures, that they domesticate me, not that they dazzle
me. Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so
much as common-sense and plain dealing. All great actions have been
simple, and all great pictures are.

The Transfiguration, by Raphael, is an eminent example of this peculiar
merit. A calm benignant beauty shines over all this picture, and goes
directly to the heart. It seems almost to call you by name. The sweet
and sublime face of Jesus is beyond praise, yet how it disappoints all
florid expectations! This familiar, simple, home-speaking countenance
is as if one should meet a friend. The knowledge of picture-dealers has
its value, but listen not to their criticism when your heart is touched
by genius. It was not painted for them, it was painted for you; for
such as had eyes capable of being touched by simplicity and lofty
emotions.

Yet when we have said all our fine things about the arts, we must end
with a frank confession, that the arts, as we know them, are but
initial. Our best praise is given to what they aimed and promised, not
to the actual result. He has conceived meanly of the resources of man,
who believes that the best age of production is past. The real value of
the Iliad or the Transfiguration is as signs of power; billows or
ripples they are of the stream of tendency; tokens of the everlasting
effort to produce, which even in its worst estate the soul betrays. Art
has not yet come to its maturity if it do not put itself abreast with
the most potent influences of the world, if it is not practical and
moral, if it do not stand in connection with the conscience, if it do
not make the poor and uncultivated feel that it addresses them with a
voice of lofty cheer. There is higher work for Art than the arts. They
are abortive births of an imperfect or vitiated instinct. Art is the
need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is
impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples
and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than
the creation of man and nature is its end. A man should find in it an
outlet for his whole energy. He may paint and carve only as long as he
can do that. Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of
circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of
universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist, and
its highest effect is to make new artists.

Already History is old enough to witness the old age and disappearance
of particular arts. The art of sculpture is long ago perished to any
real effect. It was originally a useful art, a mode of writing, a
savage’s record of gratitude or devotion, and among a people possessed
of a wonderful perception of form this childish carving was refined to
the utmost splendor of effect. But it is the game of a rude and
youthful people, and not the manly labor of a wise and spiritual
nation. Under an oak-tree loaded with leaves and nuts, under a sky full
of eternal eyes, I stand in a thoroughfare; but in the works of our
plastic arts and especially of sculpture, creation is driven into a
corner. I cannot hide from myself that there is a certain appearance of
paltriness, as of toys and the trumpery of a theatre, in sculpture.
Nature transcends all our moods of thought, and its secret we do not
yet find. But the gallery stands at the mercy of our moods, and there
is a moment when it becomes frivolous. I do not wonder that Newton,
with an attention habitually engaged on the paths of planets and suns,
should have wondered what the Earl of Pembroke found to admire in
“stone dolls.” Sculpture may serve to teach the pupil how deep is the
secret of form, how purely the spirit can translate its meanings into
that eloquent dialect. But the statue will look cold and false before
that new activity which needs to roll through all things, and is
impatient of counterfeits and things not alive. Picture and sculpture
are the celebrations and festivities of form. But true art is never
fixed, but always flowing. The sweetest music is not in the oratorio,
but in the human voice when it speaks from its instant life tones of
tenderness, truth, or courage. The oratorio has already lost its
relation to the morning, to the sun, and the earth, but that persuading
voice is in tune with these. All works of art should not be detached,
but extempore performances. A great man is a new statue in every
attitude and action. A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all
beholders nobly mad. Life may be lyric or epic, as well as a poem or a
romance.

A true announcement of the law of creation, if a man were found worthy
to declare it, would carry art up into the kingdom of nature, and
destroy its separate and contrasted existence. The fountains of
invention and beauty in modern society are all but dried up. A popular
novel, a theatre, or a ball-room makes us feel that we are all paupers
in the alms-house of this world, without dignity, without skill or
industry. Art is as poor and low. The old tragic Necessity, which
lowers on the brows even of the Venuses and the Cupids of the antique,
and furnishes the sole apology for the intrusion of such anomalous
figures into nature,—namely, that they were inevitable; that the artist
was drunk with a passion for form which he could not resist, and which
vented itself in these fine extravagances,—no longer dignifies the
chisel or the pencil. But the artist and the connoisseur now seek in
art the exhibition of their talent, or an asylum from the evils of
life. Men are not well pleased with the figure they make in their own
imaginations, and they flee to art, and convey their better sense in an
oratorio, a statue, or a picture. Art makes the same effort which a
sensual prosperity makes; namely to detach the beautiful from the
useful, to do up the work as unavoidable, and, hating it, pass on to
enjoyment. These solaces and compensations, this division of beauty
from use, the laws of nature do not permit. As soon as beauty is
sought, not from religion and love but for pleasure, it degrades the
seeker. High beauty is no longer attainable by him in canvas or in
stone, in sound, or in lyrical construction; an effeminate, prudent,
sickly beauty, which is not beauty, is all that can be formed; for the
hand can never execute any thing higher than the character can inspire.

The art that thus separates is itself first separated. Art must not be
a superficial talent, but must begin farther back in man. Now men do
not see nature to be beautiful, and they go to make a statue which
shall be. They abhor men as tasteless, dull, and inconvertible, and
console themselves with color-bags and blocks of marble. They reject
life as prosaic, and create a death which they call poetic. They
despatch the day’s weary chores, and fly to voluptuous reveries. They
eat and drink, that they may afterwards execute the ideal. Thus is art
vilified; the name conveys to the mind its secondary and bad senses; it
stands in the imagination as somewhat contrary to nature, and struck
with death from the first. Would it not be better to begin higher
up,—to serve the ideal before they eat and drink; to serve the ideal in
eating and drinking, in drawing the breath, and in the functions of
life? Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction
between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten. If history were
truly told, if life were nobly spent, it would be no longer easy or
possible to distinguish the one from the other. In nature, all is
useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful because it is
alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful because it is
symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a
legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in
Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the
feet of brave and earnest men. It is in vain that we look for genius to
reiterate its miracles in the old arts; it is its instinct to find
beauty and holiness in new and necessary facts, in the field and
road-side, in the shop and mill. Proceeding from a religious heart it
will raise to a divine use the railroad, the insurance office, the
joint-stock company; our law, our primary assemblies, our commerce, the
galvanic battery, the electric jar, the prism, and the chemist’s
retort; in which we seek now only an economical use. Is not the selfish
and even cruel aspect which belongs to our great mechanical works, to
mills, railways, and machinery, the effect of the mercenary impulses
which these works obey? When its errands are noble and adequate, a
steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England and
arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of
man into harmony with nature. The boat at St. Petersburg, which plies
along the Lena by magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. When
science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they
will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.


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