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Title: Essays — First Series
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Release date: December 1, 2001 [eBook #2944]
Most recently updated: February 10, 2021
Language: English
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS — FIRST
SERIES ***
 E S S AY S , F I R S T S E R I E S

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

Next Volume
 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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