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essays: second series
BEING VOLUME III.
OF
EMERSON'S COMPLETE WORKS
ESSAYS
BY
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
SECOND SERIES
ii^etD anH Eebtsicli 6tittton
BOSTON
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street
®{)e Hiticrsitre Pres";^, Camfcritioe 1888
' ^ ^9.
Copyright, 1856 and 1876, Bt RALPH WALDO LMEHSON,
Copyright, 1883, Bt EDWAUD W. EMERSON.
All rights reserved.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge : Electrotjped ood Priuted by U. 0. Houghton & Co.
CONTENTS. >
PAGE
I. The Poet 7
n. Experience 47
III. Character 87
IV. Manners 115
V. Gifts 151
VI. Nature 161
VII. Politics 189
VIII. Nominalist and Eealist 213
New England Reformers. Lecture at Amory Hall . 237
THE POET.
A moody child and wildly "wise
Pursued the game with joyful eyes,
Which chose, like meteors, their way,
And rived the dark "svith private ray :
They overleapt the horizon's edge,
Searched with Apollo's privilege ;
Through man, and woman, and sea, and star
Saw the dance of nature forward far ;
Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times
Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.
01}Tnpian bards who sung Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young, And always keej) us so.
THE POET.
Those who are esteemed umpires of taste are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an in- clination for whatever is elegant ; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form, which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doc- trine of beauty as it lies in the minds of ovir ama- teurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan to be carried about : but there is no accurate ad- justment between the spirit and the organ, much
10 THE POET.
less is the latter the germination of the former. So in regard to other forms, the intellectual men do not believe in any essential dependence of the ma- terial world on thought and volition. Theologians think it a pretty air-castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a con- tract, but they prefer to come again to the solid ground of historical evidence ; and even the poets are contented with a civil and conformed manner of living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a safe distance from their own experience. But the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or shall I say the quadruple or the centuple or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact ; Orpheus, Emped- ocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swe- denborg, and the masters of sculpture, picture, and poetry. For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but chil- dren of the fire, made of it, and only the same di- vinity transmuted and at two or three removes, when we know least about it. And this hidden truth, that the fountains whence all this river of Time and its creatures floweth are intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws us to the consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet, or the man of Beauty ; to the means and materials he uses, and to the general aspect of the art in tho present time.
THE POET. 11
The breadtli of the problem is great, for the poet is representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common wealth. The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is. They receive of the soul as he also receives, but they more. Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among liis contemporaries by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.
Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate expression is rare. I know not how it is that we need an interpreter, but the great major- ity of men seem to be minors, who have not yet come into possession of their own, or mutes, who cannot report the conversation they have had with nature. There is no man who does not anticipate a sujiersensual utility in the sun and stars, earth and water. These stand and wait to render him a peculiar service. But there is some obstruction or some excess of phlegm in our constitution, which
12 THE POET.
does not suffer them to yield the due effect. Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist that he could rei)ort in conversation what had befallen him. Yet, in our experience, the rays or appulses have sufficient force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick and compel the reproduction of themselves in speech. The poet is the person in whom these powers are In balance, the man with- out impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of expe- rience, and Is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to im- part.
For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear under different names in axevy system of thought, whether they be called cause, operation, and effect ; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune ; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son ; but which we will call here the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of tmth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that which he is, essen- tially, so that he cannot be surmounted or ana- lyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others latent in him, and his o\\'n, patent.
THE POET. 13
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the cen- tre. For the world is not painted or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful ; and God has not made some beautifid things, but Beauty is the cre- ator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materi- alism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact that some men, namely poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confoimds them with those whose pro^Tace is action but who quit it to imitate the sayers. But Homer's words are as costly and admirable to Homer as Agamemnon's victories are to Agamemnon. The poet does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others, though primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries and servants ; as sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assistants who bring building-mate- rials to an architect.
For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to
14 THE POET.
write them clown, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faith- fully, and tliese transcripts, though imperfect, be- come the songs of the nations. For nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as it is reasonable, and must as much appear as it must be done, or be known. Words and deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy. Words are also ac- tions, and actions are a kind of words.
The sign and credentials of the poet are that he announces that which no man foretold. He is the true and only doctor ; he knows and tells ; he is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he describes. He is a be- holder of ideas and an utterer of the necessary and causal. For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industi-y and skill in metre, but of the true poet. I took part in a conversation the other day concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind, whose head appeared to be a music- box of delicate tunes and rhythms, and whose skill and conmiand of language we coidd not sufficiently praise. But when the question arose whether he was not only a lyrist but a poet, we were obliged to confess that he is plainly a contemporary, not an eternal man. He does not stand out of our low
THE POET. 15
limitations, like a Chimborazo under tlie line, run- ning up from a torrid base tlu-ough all the climates of the globe, with belts of the herbage of every lat- itude on its high and mottled sides ; but this gen- ius is the landscape - garden of a modern house, adorned with fountains and statues, with well-bred men and women standing and sitting in the walks and terraces. AYe hear, through all the varied music, the ground-tone of conventional life. Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the chil- dren of music. The argument is secondary, the finish of the verses is primary.
For it is not metres, but a metre-making argu- ment that makes a poem, — a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an ani- mal it has an architecture of its o^\ti, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the or- der of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought ; he has a whole new expe- rience to unfold ; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet, I remember when I was young how much I was moved one morning by tidings that genius had appeared in a youth who sat near me at table. He had left his work and gone rambling none knew
16 rilE POET.
whither, and had written hundreds of lines, hut couhl not tell whether that which was in him was therein told ; he could teU nothing but that all was changed, — man, beast, heaven, earth and sea. How gladly we listened ! how credidous ! Society seemed to be compromised. We sat in the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all the stars. Boston seemed to be at twice the distance it had the night before, or was much farther than that. Kome, — what was Rome ? Plutarch and Shak- speare were in the yellow leaf, and Homer no more shoidd be heard of. It is much to know that po- etry has been written this very day, under this very roof, by your side. What ! that wonderful spirit has not expired ! These stony moments are still sparkling and animated ! I had fancied that the oracles were all silent, and nature had sjDent her fires ; and behold ! all night, from every pore, these fine auroras have been streaming. Every one has some interest in the advent of the poet, and no one knows how much it may concern him. We know that the secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall be om- interpreter, we know not. A mountain ramble, a new style of face, a new person, may put the key into our hands. Of course the value of genius to us is in the veracity of its report. Talent may frolic and juggle ; genius realizes and adds. IMankind in good earnest have availed so fai
THE POET. 17
in understanding themselves and their work, that the foremost watchman on the peak announces his news. It is the truest word ever spoken, and the phrase will be the fittest, most musical, and the im- erring voice of the world for that time.
All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology. Man, never so often deceived, still watches for the arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a truth imtil he has made it his own. With what joy I begin to read a poem which I confide in as an inspiration ! And now my chains are to be broken ; I shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in which I live, — opaque, though they seem transpar- ent, — and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my relations. That will reconcile me to life and renovate nature, to see trifles ani- mated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life will no more be a noise ; now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by which they may be discerned from fools and satans. This day shall be better than my birthday : then I became an ani- mal ; now I am invited into the science of the real. Such is the hope, but the fruition is postponed. Of- tener it falls that this winged man, who will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into mists, then leaps and frisks about with me as it were from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he is botmd heavenward ;
18 THE POET.
and I, being myself a novice, am slow in perceiving tliat lie does not know the way into the heavens, and is merely bent that I should admire his skill to rise, like a fowl or a flying fish, a little way from the groimd or the water ; but the all-piercing, all-feed- ing, and ocular air of heaven that man shall never inhabit. I tiunble down again soon into my old nooks, and lead the life of exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith in the possibility of any guide who can lead me thither where I would be.
But, leaving these \'ictims of vanity, let us, with new hope, observe how nature, by worthier im- pulses, has insured the poet's fidelity to his office of announcement and affirming, namely by the beauty of things, which becomes a new and higher beauty when expressed. Nature offers all her crea- tures to him as a picture-language. Being used as a ty[5e, a second wonderf id value appears in the ob- ject, far better than its old value ; as the carjien- ter's stretched cord, if you hold your ear close enough, is musical in the breeze. " Things more excellent than every image," says Jamblichus, " are expressed through images." Things admit of be- ing used as symbols because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part. Every line we can draw in the sand has expression ; and there is no body without its spirit or genius. All form is an effect of character ; all condition, of the quality of
TEE POET. 19
the life ; all harmony, of health ; and for this rea- son a perception of beauty should be sympathetic, or proper only to the good. The beautifid rests on the foundations of the necessary. The soul makes the body, as the wise Spenser teaches : —
" So every spirit, as it is more piire, And hath in it the more of heavenly light, So it the fairer body doth procure To habit in, and it more fairly dight, With cheerful grace and amiable sight. For, of the soul, the body form doth take, For soul is form, and doth the body make."
Here we find ourselves suddenly not in a critical speculation but in a holy place, and should go very warily and reverently. We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appear- ance and Unity into Variety.
The Universe is the externization of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth and the heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self -existent ; but these are the retinue of that Being we have. " The mighty heaven," said Proclus, " exhibits, in its transfigurations, clear images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions; being moved in conjrmction with the unapparent periods of intellectual natures." Therefore science
20 THE POET.
always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, kcei)ing step with religion and metaphysics ; or the state of science is an index of our self-knowl- edge. Since every thing in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark it is because the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.
No wonder then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over them with a religious regard. The beauty of the fable proves the importance of the sense ; to the poet, and to all others ; or, if you please, every man is so far a poet as to be suscep- tible of these enchantments of nature ; for all men have the thoughts whereof the universe is the cele- bration. I find that the fascination resides in the symbol. Who loves nature ? Who does not ? Is it only poets, and men of leisxtre and cultivation, who live with her ? No ; but also hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, though they express their af- fection in their choice of life and not in their choice of words. The \\Titer wonders what the coachman or the hunter values in riding, in horses and dogs. It is not superficial qualities. When you talk with him he holds these at as slight a rate as you. His worship is sympathetic ; he has no definitions, but he is commanded in nature by the living power which he feels to be there present. No imitation or placing of these things would content him ; he loves
THE POET. 21
the earnest of the north wind, of rain, of stone, and wood, and iron. A beauty not explicable is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of. It is nature the symbol, nature certifjang the super- natural, body overflowed by life which he worships with coarse but sincere rites.
The inwardness and mystery of this attachment drive men of every class to the use of emblems. The schools of poets and philosophers are not more intoxicated with their symbols than the populace with theirs. In oiu' political parties, compute the power of badges and emblems. See the great ball which they roll from Baltimore to Bunker Hill! In the political processions, Lowell goes in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship. Witness the cider-barrel, the log-cabin, the hickory-stick, the palmetto, and all the cognizances of party. See the power of national emblems. Some stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other figui*e which came into credit God knows how, on an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind on a fort at the ends of the earth, shall make the blood tingle under the rudest or the most conventional exterior. The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics !
Beyond this universality of the symbolic language, we are apprised of the divineness of this superior use of things, whereby the world is a temple whose
22 THE POET.
walls are covered with emblems, pictures, ana com- mantlments of the Deity, — in this, that there is no fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense of nature ; and the distinctions which we make in events and in affairs, of low and high, honest and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol. Tliought makes everything fit for use. The vocab- ulary of an omniscient man woidd embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the ob- scene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connec- tion of thought. The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an ex- ample of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive. Small and mean things serve as well as great symbols. The meaner the type by which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the more lasting in the memories of men ; just as we choose the smallest box or case in which any need- fid utensil can be carried. Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind ; as it is related of Lord Chatham that he was accustomed to read in Bailey's Dictionary when he was preparing to speak in Parliament. The poor- est experience is rich enough for all the pm'poses of expressing thought. Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would
THE POET. 23
all trades and all spectacles. "We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few sym- bols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word. Also we use defects and deformities to a sacred purpose, so ex- pressing our sense that the evils of the world are such only to the evil eye. In the old mythology, mythologists observe, defects are ascribed to divine natures, as lameness to Vulcan, blindness to Cupid, and the like, — to signify exuberances.
For as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole, — re- attaching even artificial things and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight, — disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts. Read- ers of poetry see the factory-village and the rail- way, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these ; for these works of art are not yet consecrated in their reading ; but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the beehive or the spider's geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own. Be* sides, in a centred mind, it signifies nothing how many mechanical inventions you exhibit. Though
24 THE POET.
you add millions, and never so surprising, the fact of mechanics has not gained a gTain's weight. The spiritual fact remains imalterable, by many or by few particulars ; as no moimtain is of any appreci- able height to break the curve of the sphere. A shrewd country-boy goes to the city for the first time, and the complacent citizen is not satisfied with his little wonder. It is not that he does not see all the fine houses and know that he never saw such before, but he disposes of them as easily as the poet finds place for the railway. The chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of Life, which can dwarf any and every circumstance, and to which the belt of wam- pum and the commerce of America are alilie.
Tlie woi'ld being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it. For though life is great, and fascinates and absorbs ; and though all men are intelligent of the symbols through which it is named ; yet they cannot origi- nally use them. We are symbols and inhabit sym- bols ; workmen, work, and tools, words and things, bii-th and death, all are emblems ; but we sympa- thize ^^^th the symbols, and being infatuated with the economical uses of things, we do not know that they are thoughts. The poet, by an idterior intel- lectual i)erception, gives them a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes and a tongue
THE POET. 25
into every dumb and Inanimate object. He per- ceives tlie independence of the thought on the sym- bol, the stability of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession. For through that bet- ter perception he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis ; perceives that thought is multiform ; that wdthin the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form ; and following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature. All the facts of the animal economy, sex, nutriment, ges- tation, birth, growth, are symbols of the passage of the world into the soul of man, to suffer there a change and reappear a new and liigher fact. He uses forms according to the life, and not according to the form. This is true science. The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation and anima- tion, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain or meadow of space was strown with these flowers we call suns and moons and stars ; why the great deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods ; for in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.
26 THE POET.
By vii'tue of this science the poet is the Namer or Lan^iage-maker, naming things sometimes after their ajjpearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary. The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the dead- est word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This expres- sion or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature is a cei^tain self-regulated motion or change ; and nature does all things by her own hands, and does not leave another to baptize her but baptizes herself ; and this through the meta- morphosis again. I remember that a certain poet described it to me thus : —
THE POET. 27
Genius is the activity which repairs the decays of things, whether wholly or partly of a material and finite kind. Nature, through all her king- doms, insures herself. Nobody cares for planting the poor fungus ; so she shakes down from the gills of one agaric countless spores, any one of which, being preserved, transmits new billions of spores to-morrow or next day. The new agaric of this hour has a chance which the old one had not. This atom of seed is thrown into a new place, not subject to the accidents which destroyed its parent two rods off. She makes a man ; and having brought him to ripe age, she will no longer run the risk of losing this wonder at a blow, but she de- taches from him a new self, that the kind may be safe from accidents to which the individual is ex- posed. So when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs, — a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the acci- dents of the weary kingdom of time ; a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such was the virtue of the soul out of which they came) which carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecovera- bly into the hearts of men. These wings are the beauty of the poet's soul. The songs, thus flying immortal from their mortal parent, are pursued by clamorous flights of censures, which swarm in far
28 THE POET.
greater numbers and threaten to devour them ; but these last are not winged. At the end of a very short leap they fall plump down and rot, ha^^ng re- ceived from the souls out of which they came no beautiful wings. But the melodies of the poet as- cend and leap and pierce into the deeps of infinite time.
So far the bard taught me, using his freei speech. But nature has a higher end, in the pro- duction of new individuals, than security, namely ascension, or the passage of the soid into higher forms. I knew in my younger days the sculptor who made the statue of the youth which stands in the public garden. He was, as I remember, unable to tell directly what made him happy or unhappy, but by wonderful indirections he could tell. He rose one day, according to his habit, before the dawn, and saw the morning break, grand as the eternity out of which it came, and for many days after, he strove to express, this tranquillity, and lo! his chisel had fashioned out of marble the form of a beautiful youth. Phosphorus, whose aspect is such that it is said all persons who look on it become silent. The poet also resigns himself to his mood, and that thought which agitated him is expressed, but alter idem, in a manner totally new. The ex- pression is organic, or the new type which thinga
THE POET. 29
themselves take when liberated. As, in the sun, ob- jects paint their images on the retina of the eye, so they, sharing the asj)iration of the whole universe, tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their es- sence in his mind. Like the metamorphosis of things into higher organic forms is their change into melodies. Over everything stands its daemon or soul, and, as the form of the thing is reflected by the eye, so the soul of the thing is reflected by a melody. The sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed, pre-exist, or super-exist, in pre-can- tations, which sail like odors in the air, and when any man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them and endeavors to write down the notes without diluting or depraving them. And herein is the legitimation of criticism, in the mind's faith that the poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature with which they ought to be made to tally. A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of a sea- shell, or the resembling difference of a group of flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are ; a tempest is a rough ode, without falsehood or rant ; a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordinating how many admirably executed parts. Why shoidd not the s}Tiimetry and truth that mod- ulate these, glide into our spirits, and we particic pate the invention of nature ?
80 THE POET.
This insight, which expresses itseK by what is called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees ; by sharing the path or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others. The path of things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them ? A spy they will not suffer ; a lover, a poet, is the transcendency of their own nature, — him they will suffer. The condition of true naming, on the poet's part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes through forms, and accompanying that.
It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that beyond the energy of his pos- sessed and conscious intellect he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things ; that beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power on which he can draw, by un- locking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him ; then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet linows that he speaks ade- quately then only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or " with the flower of the mind ; " not with the in>
THE POET. 31
tellect used as an organ, but with the intellect re- leased from all service and suffered to take its di- rection from its celestial life ; or as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. As the traveller who has lost his way throws his reins on his horse's neck and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature ; the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible.
This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal- wood and tobacco, or whatever other procurers of animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of such means as they can, to add this extraordinary power to their normal powers ; and to this end they prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, danc- ing, theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal intoxication, — which are several coarser or finer g-wasi-mechan- ical substitutes for the true nectar, which is the rav- ishment of the intellect by coming nearer to the fact. These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal ten- dency of a man, to his passage out into free space, and they help him to escape the custody of that body
82 THE POET.
in which he is pent up, and of that jail-yard of in- dividual relations in which he is enclosed. Hence a great number of such as were professionally jex- pressers of Beauty, as painters, poets, musicians, and actors, have been more than others wont to lead a life of pleasure and indulgence ; all but the few who received the true nectar ; and, as it was a spu- rious mode of attaining freedom, as it was an eman- cipation not into the heavens but into the freedom of baser places, they were punished for that advan- tage they won, by a dissipation and deterioration. But never can any advantage be taken of nature by a trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the Creator, comes not forth to the sor- ceries of opium or of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body. That is not an inspiration, which we owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit excitement and fury. Milton says that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not ' Devil's wine,' but God's vnne. It is with this as it is with toys. We fill the hands and nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums, and horses ; mthdrawing their eyes from the plain face and sufficing objects of nature, the sun, and moon, the animals, the water, and
THE POET. 33
Stones, wliicli sliould be their toys. So the poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common influences should delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight ; the air shoidd suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tijjsy with water. That spirit which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such from every dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine- stump and half-imbedded stone on which the dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hun- gry, and such as are of simple taste. If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fash- ion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods.
If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other men. The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men. "\Ye seem to be touched by a wand which makes us dance and run about happily, like children. We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on tis of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating gods. Men have really got a new sense, and found within their world another world, or nest of worlds ;
34 THE POET.
for, the metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does not stop. I will not now consider how much this makes the charm of algebra and the mathemat ics, which also have their tropes, but it is felt in every definition; as when Aristotle defines S2Kice to be an immovable vessel in which things are con- tained ; — or when Plato defines a line to be a flow- ing point ; or figure to be a bound of solid ; and many the like. What a joyful sense of freedom we have when Vitruvius announces the old opinion of artists that no architect can build any house well who does not know something of anatomy. When Socrates, in Charmides, tells us that the soul is cured of its maladies by certain incantations, and that these incantations are beautiful reasons, from which temperance is generated in souls ; when Plato calls the world an animal, and Timaeus af- firms that the plants also are animals ; or affirms a man to be a heavenly tree, growing with his root, which is his head, upward ; and, as George Chap- man, following him, writes, —
" So in our tree of man, whose nervie root Springs in his top ; " —
when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as "that wliite flower which marks extreme old age ; " when Pro- clus calls the universe the statue of the intellect ; when Chaucer, in his praise of ' Gentilesse,' com-
TEE POET. 35
pares good blood in mean condition to fire, which, though carried to the darkest house betwixt this and the mount of Caucasus, will yet hold its natu- ral office and bum as bright as if twenty thousand men did it behold ; when John saw, in the Apoca- lypse, the ruin of the world tlu-ough evil, and the stars fall from heaven as the figtree casteth her imtimely fruit ; when ^sop reports the whole cat- alogue of common daily relations through the mas- querade of birds and beasts ; — we take the cheer- ful hint of the immortality of our essence and its versatile habit and escapes, as when the gypsies say of themselves "it is in vain to hang them, they cannot die."
The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient British bards had for the title of their order, " Those who are free throughout the world." They are free, and they make free. An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stim- tdating us through its tropes, than afterward when we arrive at the precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to that degree that lie forgets the authors and the public and heeds only this one dream which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the argumertts and histories and criti-
36 THE POET.
cism. All the value wliicli attaches to Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other who in- troduces questionable facts into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmer- ism, and so on, is the certificate we have of depar- ture from routine, and that here is a new witness. That also is the best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the world like a ball in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems ; how mean to study, when an emotion com- mimicates to the intellect the power to sap and up- heave nature ; how great the perspective ! nations, times, systems, enter and disappear like threads in tapestry of large figure and many colors ; dream delivers us to dream, and while the drunkenness lasts we will sell our bed, our philosophy, our re- ligion, in our opulence.
There is good reason why we should prize this liberation. The fate of the poor shejiherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm, j^erishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state of man. On the brink of the waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying. The inaccessibleness of every thought but that we are in, is wonderful. What if you come near to it; you are as remote when you are nearest as when you are farthest. Every thought is also a prison ;
THE POET. 37
every heaven is also a prison. Therefore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode or in an action or in looks and behavior has yielded us a new thought. He unlocks our chains and admits us to a new scene.
This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power to impart it, as it must come from greater depth and scope of thought, is a measure of intel- lect. Therefore aU books of the imagination en- dure, all which ascend to that truth that the writer sees nature beneath him, and uses it as his expo- nent. Every verse or sentence possessing this vir- tue will take care of its own immortality. The re- ligions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.
But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. The poet did not stop at the color or the form, but read their meaning ; neither may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same ob- jects exponents of his new thought. Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional ; all language is vehicidar and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol
38 THE POET.
for an universal one. Tlie morning-redness hap- pens to be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob Bfhmen, and comes to stand to him for truth and faith ; and, he believes, should stand for the same realities to every reader. But the first reader pre- fers as naturally the symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing a gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equally good to the person to whom they are sig- nificant. Only they must be held lightly, and be very willingly translated into the equivalent terms which others use. And the mystic must be steadily told, — All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric, — universal signs, instead of these village symbols, — and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.
Swcdenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands eminently for the translator of nature into thought. I do not knov/ the man in history to whom things stood so uniformly for words. Before him the metamorj^hosis continually jjlays. Everj'-thing on which his eye rests, obeys the impulses of moral nature. The figs become grapes whilst he eat3
THE POET. 89
them. When some of his angels affirmed a trnth, the laurel twig v/hich they held blossomed in their hands. The noise which at a distance appeared like gnashing and thumping, on coming nearer was found to be the voice of disputants. The men in one of his visions, seen in heavenly light, appeared like dragons, and seemed in darkness ; but to each other they appeared as men, and when the light from heaven shone into their cabin, they com- plained of the darkness, and were compelled to shut the window that they might see.
There was this perception in him which makes the poet or seer an object of awe and terror, name- ly that the same man or society of men may wear one aspect to themselves and their companions, and a different aspect to higher intelligences. Cer- tain priests, w^hom he describes as conversing very learnedly together, appeared to the children who were at some distance, like dead horses ; and many the like misappearances. And instantly the mind inquires whether these fishes under the bridge, yon- der oxen in the pastm-e, those dogs in the yard, are immutably fishes, oxen, and dogs, or only so appear to me. and perchance to themselves appear upright men ; and whether I appear as a man to all eyes. The Bramins and Pythagoras propounded the same question, and if any poet has witnessed the trans- formation he doubtless found it in harmony with
40 THE POET.
various experiences. We have all seen changes as considerable in wheat and caterpillars. He is the poet and shall draw us with love and terror, who sees through the flowing vest the firm nature, and can declare it.
I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. "VYe do not with sufficient plainness or sufficient profoundness address ourselves to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstance. If we filled the day with braveiy, we shoidd not shrink from celebrating it. Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await. Dante's praise is that he dared to write his auto- biogTaphy in colossal cipher, or into universality. We have yet had no genius in America, with tp'an- nous eye, which knew the value of our incompa- rable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer ; then in the Middle Age ; then in Calvin- ism. Banks and tariffs, the newspajDcr and caucus, Methodism and Unitarianism, are flat and dvdl to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy and the temple of Del- phi, and are as swiftly passing away. Our logroll- ing, our stiunps and their politics, our fisheries our Negroes and Indians, our boats and our repu
THE POET. 41
diations, the wrath of rogues and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes ; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. If I have not found that excellent combination of gifts in my countrymen which I seek, neither could I aid my- self to fix the idea of the poet by reading now and then in Chalmers's collection of five centuries of English poets. These are wits more than poets, though there have been poets among them. But when we adhere to the ideal of the poet, we have our difficidties even with Milton and Homer. Mil- ton is too literary, and Homer too literal and his- torical.
But I am not wise enough for a national criti- cism, and must use the old largeness a little longer, to discharge my errand from the muse to the poet concerning his art.
Art is the path of the creator to his work. The paths or methods are ideal and eternal, though few men ever see them ; not the artist himself for years, or for a lifetime, unless he come into the conditions. The painter, the scidptor, the composer, the epic rhapsodist, the orator, all partake one desire, namely to express themselves symmetrically and abundant- ly, not dwarfishly and f ragmentarily. They found
42 THE POET.
or put themselves in certain conditions, as, the painter anil sculptor before some impressive human figures ; the orator, into the assembly of the peo- ple; and the others in such scenes as each has found exciting to his intellect ; and each presently feels the new desire. He hears a voice, he sees a beckoning. Then he is ap^Drised, with wonder, what herds of daemons hem him in. He can no more rest; he says, with the old painter, " By God it is in me and must go forth of me." He pursues a beauty, half seen, which flies before him. The poet pours out verses in every solitude. Most of the things he says are conventional, no doubt ; but by and by he says something which is original and beautiful. That charms him. He would say noth- ing else but such things. In our way of talking we say ' That is yours, this is mine ; ' but the poet knows well that it is not his ; that it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you ; he would fain hear the like eloquence at length. Once having tasted this immortal ichor, he cannot have enough of it, and as an admirable creative power exists in these intellections, it is of the last importance that these things get spoken. "What a little of all we know is said ! What drops of all the sea of our science are baled up ! and by what accident it is that these are exposed, when so many secrets sleep in nature ] Hence the necessity of speech and song ; hence
THE POET. 43
these throbs and heart-beatings in the orator, at the door of the assembly, to the end namely that thought may be ejaculated as Logos, or Word.
Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that c?ream-power which every night shows thee is thine own ; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity. Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in txirn arise and walk before him as exponent of his mean- ing. Comes he to that power, liis genius is no longer exhaustible. All the creatures by pairs and by tribes pour into his mind as into a Noah's ark, to come forth again to people a new world. This is like the stock of air for our respiration or for the combustion of our fireplace ; not a measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere if wanted. And therefore the rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer, Shak- speare, and Raphael, have obviously no limits to their works except the limits of their lifetime, and resemble a mirror carried through the street, ready to render an image of every created thing.
O poet I a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in castles or by the sword- blade any longer. The conditions are hard, but
44 THE POET.
equal. Tlioii shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or ojsinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou ab- dicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee ; others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is fidl of re- nunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine ; thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to rehearse the names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old shame before tlie holy ideal. And this is the reward ; that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not trouble- some to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for
THE POET. 45
thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy ; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own, and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea- lord ! air - lord ! Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is himg by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, — there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldst walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inoppor- tune or ignoble.
EXPERIENCE.
The lords of life, the lords of life,— I saw them pass, In theii- own guise, Like and unlike. Portly and grim. Use and Surprise, Surface and Dream, Succession swift, and spectral "Wrong, Temperament without a tongue, And the inventor of the game Omnipresent without name ; — Some to see, some to he guessed, They marched from east to west : Little man, least of all. Among the legs of his guardians tall, Walked about with puzzled look : — Him by the hand dear Nature took ; Dearest Nature, strong and kind, Whispered, ' DarHng, never mind ! To-morrow they will wear another face. The founder thou ! these are thy race ! '
n.
EXPERIENCE.
Wheee do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair ; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended ; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which according to the old belief stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again. Did our birth fall in some fit of indigence and frugality in nature, that she was so sparing of her fire and so liberal of her earth that it appears to us that we lack the affirmative principle, and though we have health and reason,
VOL. ni. 4
60 ILLUSION.
yet we have no superfluity of spirit for new creation? AVe have enough to live and bring the year about, but not an ounce to impart or to invest. Ah that our Genius were a little more of a genius ! We are like millers on the lower levels of a stream, when the factories above them have exhausted the water. We too fancy that the uj^per people must have raised their dams.
If any of us knew what we were doing, or where we are going, then when we think we best know ! We do not know to-day whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that much was accom- plished and much was begun in us. All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that 't is Avonderf ul where or when we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere, like those that Hermes won with dice of the Moon, that Osiris might be born. It is said all martja-doms looked mean when they were suffered. Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel and hangs on every other sail in the horizon. Our life looks trivial, and we shun to i*ecord it. IMen seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual re- treating and reference. ' Yonder uplands are rich
EXPERIENCE. 51
pasturage, and my neighbor has fertile meadow, but my field,' says the querulous farmer, ' only holds the world together.' I quote another man's saying; unluckily that other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me. 'T is the trick of nature thus to degrade to-day ; a good deal of buzz, and some- where a resvdt slij)ped magically in. Every roof is agieeable to the eye until it is lifted ; then we find tragedy and moaning women and hard-eyed hus- bands and deluges of lethe, and the men ask, * What's the news?' as if the old were so bad. How many individuals can we count in society? how many actions ? how many opinions ? So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrosjDCct, that the pith of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours. The history of literature, — take the net result of Tiraboschi, War ton, or Schlegel, — is a sum of very few ideas and of very few original tales ; all the rest being variation of these. So in this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis woidd find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense. There are even few opinions, and these seem organic in the speakers, and do not dis- turb the universal necessity.
What opium is instilled into all disaster! It shows formidable as we approach it, but there is at last no rough rasping friction, but the most slippery
62 ILLUSION.
sliding surfaces ; we fall soft on a thought ; Ate Dea is gentle, —
"Over men's heads walking aloft, With tender feet treading so soft."
People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say. There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here at least we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and coiuiterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in contact ? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves be- tween us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, — no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If to-morrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my proi^eity would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years ; but it would leave me as it foimd me, — neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity ; it does not
^
EXPERIENCE. 53
toucli me ; sometliing which I fancied was a part of me, which coiild not be torn away without tear- ing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature. The Indian who was laid under a curse that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer- rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Notliing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying There at least is reality that will not dodge us.
I take this evanescence and lubricity of all ob- jects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhand- some part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we shoidd be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make ; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and cas- ual.
j Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove
..-^l.tv i
s» )» V '^ *?
54
TEMPERAMENT.
to be many-eolorecl lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain jou see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate.] Nature and hooks belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is al- ways genius ; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Tem- perament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective nature ? Who cares what sensibility or discrimination a man has at some time shown, if he falls asleep in his chair ? or if he laugh and gig- gle ? or if he apologize ? or is infected with ego- tism ? or thinks of his dollar ? or cannot go by food ? or has gotten a child in his boyhood ? Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too con- cave and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life ? Of what use, if the brain is too cold or too hot, and the man does not care enough for results to stimulate him to experi- ment, and hold him up in it ? or if the web is too finely woven, too irritable by pleasure and pain, so that life stagnates from too much reception without due outlet? Of what use to make heroic vows of
aintL--
^ k-
P.w
V^ fr
t% -U
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EXPERIENCE.
55
amendment, if the same old law-breaker is to keep tliem? What cheer can the religious sentiment yield, when that is suspected to be secretly dejiend' ent on the seasons of the year and the state of the blood ? I knew a witty physician who found the creed in the biliary duct, and used to a£&rm that if there was disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian. Very mortifying is the reluctant ex- perience that some imfriendly excess or imbecility neutralizes the promise of genius. We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lav- ishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt ; they die young and dodge the account ; or if they live they lose themselves in the crowd.
Temperament also enters fully into the system of illusions and shuts us in a prison of glass v, hich we cannot see. There is an optical illusion about every person we meet. In truth they are all crea- tures of given temperament, which will appear in a given character, whose boundaries they will never pass ; but we look at them, they seem alive, and we presume there is impidse in them. In the moment it seems impidse ; in the year, in the lifetime, it turns out to be a certain uniform tune which the revolving barrel of the music-box must play. Men resist the conclusion in the morning, but adopt it as the evening wears on, that temper prevails over
54 TEMPERAMENT.
to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate.] Nature and hooks belong to the eyes that see tKm. It depends on the mood of the man whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is al- ways genius ; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Tem- perament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective nature ? Who cares what sensibility or discrimination a man has at some time shown, if he falls asleep in his chair ? or if he laugh and gig- gle ? or if he apologize ? or is infected with ego- tism ? or thinks of his dollar ? or cannot go by food ? or has gotten a child in his boyhood ? Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too con- cave and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life ? Of what use, if the brain is too cold or too hot, and the man does not care enough for results to stimulate him to experi- ment, and hold him up in it ? or if the web is too finely woven, too irritable by pleasure and pain, so that life stagnates from too much reception without due outlet? Of what use to make heroic vows of
EXPERIENCE. 65
amendment, If the same old law-breaker is to keep them? What cheer can the religious sentiment yield, when that is suspected to be secretly depend- ent on the seasons of the year and the state of the blood ? I knew a witty physician who foimd the creed in the biliary duet, and used to affirm that if there was disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian. Very mortifying is the reluctant ex- perience that some unfriendly excess or imbecility neutralizes the promise of genius. We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lav- ishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt ; they die young and dodge the account ; or if they live they lose themselves in the crowd.
Temperament also enters fully into the system of illusions and shuts us in a prison of glass which we cannot see. There is an optical illusion about every person we meet. In truth they are all crea- tures of given temperament, which will appear in a given character, whose boimdaries they will never pass ; but we look at them, they seem alive, and we presume there is impidse in them. In the moment it seems impidse ; in the year, in the lifetime, it turns out to be a certain uniform time which the revolving barrel of the music-box must play. Men resist the conclusion in the morning, but adopt it as the evening wears on, that temper prevails over
56 TEMPERAMENT.
everything of time, place, and condition, and is in< consumable in the flames of religion. Some modi- fications the moral sentiment avails to impose, but the individual texture holds its dominion, if not to bias the moral judgments, yet to fix the measure of activity and of enjoyment.
I thus express the law as it is read from the plat- form of ordinary life, but must not leave it without noticing the capital exception. For temjjerament is a power wliich no man willingly hears any one praise but himself. On the platform of physics we cannot resist the contracting influences of so-called science. Temperament puts all divinity to rout. I know the mental proclivity of physicians. I hear the chuckle of the phrenologists. Theoretic kid- nappers and slave-drivers, they esteem each man the victim of another, who winds him roimd his finger by knowing the law of his being; and, by such cheap signboards as the color of his beard or the slope of his occiput, reads the inventory of his fortunes and character. The grossest ignorance does not disgust like this impudent knowingness. The physicians say they are not materialists ; but they are : — Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness : O so thin ! — But the definition of spir- itual chould be, that which is its ovm evidence. What notions do they attach to love ! what to relig- ion ! One would not willingly pronounce these
EXPERIENCE. 57
words in their hearing, and give them the occasion to profane them. I saw a gracious gentleman who adapts his conversation to the form of the head of the man he talks with ! I had fancied that the value of life lay in its inscrutable possibilities ; in the fact that I never know, in addressing myself to a new individual, what may befall me. I carry the keys of my castle in my hand, ready to throw them at the feet of my lord, whenever and in what dis- guise soever he shall appear. I know he is in the neighborhood, hidden among vagabonds. Shall I preclude my future by taking a high seat and kindly adapting my conversation to the shape of heads? When I come to that, the doctors shall
buy me for a cent. ' But, sir, medical history ;
the report to the Institute ; the proven facts ! ' — I distrust the facts and the inferences. Tempera- ment is the veto or limitation-power in the consti- tution, very justly applied to restrain an opposite excess in the constitution, but absurdly offered as a bar to original equity. When virtue is in pres- ence, all subordinate jDowers sleep. On its own level, or in view of nature, temperament is final. I see not, if one be once caught in this trap of so- called sciences, any escape for the man from the links of the chain of physical necessity. Given such an embryo, such a history must follow. On this platform one lives in a sty of sensualism, and
58 SUCCESSION.
woixld soon come to suicide. But it is impossible that the creative power should exclude itself. Into every intelligence there is a door which is never closed, through which the creator passes. The in- tellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, lover of absolute good, intervenes for our succor, and at one whisper of these high powers we awake from ineffectual struggles with this nightmare. We hurl it into its own hell, and cannot again contract our- selves to so base a state.
The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we wovdd anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. This onward trick of nature is too strong for us : T*e7'0 si muove. AYhen at night I look at the moon and stars, I seem stationary, and they to Lurry. Our love of the real draws us to perma- nence, but health of body consists in circulation, and sanity of mind in variety or facility of associa- tion. AVe need change of objects. Dedication to one thought is quickly odious. We house with the insane, and must humor them ; then conversation dies out. Once I took such delight in Montaigne that I thought I should not need any other book ; before that, in Shakspeare ; then in Plutarch ; then in Plotinus ; at one time in Bacon ; afterwards ill Goethe ; even in Bettine j but now I turn the
EXPERIENCE. 59
pages of either of them languidly, whilst I still cherish their genius. So with pictures ; each will Lear an emphasis of attention once, which it cannot retain, though we fain would continue to be pleased in that manner. How strongly I have felt of pic- tures that when you have seen one well, you must take your leave of it ; you shall never see it again. I have had good lessons from pictures which I have since seen without emotion or remark. A deduc- tion must be made from the opinion which even the wise express on a new book or occurrence. Their opinion gives me tidings of their mood, and some vague guess at the new fact, but is nowise to be trusted as the lasting relation between that intellect and that thing. The child asks, 'Mamma, why don't I like the story as well as when you told it me yesterday ? ' Alas I child it is even so with the oldest cherubim of knowledge. But will it answer thy question to say, Because thou wert born to a whole and this story is a particular ? The reason of the pain this discovery causes us (and we make it late in respect to works of art and intellect), is the plaint of tragedy wliich murmurs from it in re- gard to persons, to friendship and love.
That immobility and absence of elasticity which we find in the arts, we find with more pain in the artist. There is no power of expansion in men. Our friends early appear to us as representatives of
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EXPERIENCK.
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early appear to us as repistutatives of
60 SUCCESSION.
certain ideas which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take the single step that would bring them there. A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand until you come to a parti cidar angle ; then it shows deep and beautifid colors. There is no adaptation or universal applicability in men, but each has his special talent, and the mastery of suc- cessfid men consists in adroitly keejiing themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be practised. We do what we must, and call it by the best names we can, and would fain have the praise of having intended the result which ensues. I cannot recall any form of man wdio is not super- fluous sometimes. But is not this pitif id ? Life is not worth the taking, to do tricks in.
Of course it needs the whole society to give the symmetry we seek. The party-colored wheel must revolve very fast to appear white. Something is earned too by conversing with so much folly and defect. In fuie, whoever loses, we are always of the gaining party. Divinity is behind our failures and follies also. The plays of children are non- sense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the liis- tory of every man's bread, and the ways by which
EXPERIENCE. 61
he is to come by it. Like a bird wliicli alights no- where, but hops perpetually from bough to bough, is the Power wliich abides in no man and in no woman, but for a moment speaks from this one, and for another moment from that one.
But what help from these fineries or pedantries ? What help from thought ? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism. Our young peoj^le have thought and written much on labor and reform, and for all that they have written, neither the world nor themselves have got on a step. Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular acti'vdty. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve. At Education-Farm the noblest theory of life sat on the noblest figures of young men and maidens, quite powerless and melancholy. It would not rake or pitch a ton of hay ; it woidd not rub down a horse ; and the men and maidens it left pale and hungry. A political orator wittily compared our party prom- ises to western roads, which opened stately enough, with planted trees on either side to tempt the trav- eller, but soon became narrow and narrower and ended in a squirrel-track and ran up a tree. So does culture with us ; it ends in headache. Un- speakably sad and barren does life look to those
62 SURFACE.
who a few months ago were dazzled with the splen- dor of the promise of the times. " There is now no longer any right course of action nor any self- devotion left among the Iranis." Objections and criticism we have had our fill of. There are objec- tions to every course of life and action, and the practical wisdom infers an indifferency, from the omnipresence of objection. The whole frame of things preaches indifferency. Do not craze your- self with thinking, but go about j'our business any- where. Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without question. Nature hates peeping, and our mothers spealt her very sense when they say, " Children, eat your vict- uals, and say no more of it." To fill the hour, — that is happiness ; to fill the hour and leave no crev- ice for a repentance or an approval. IVe live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them. Under tlie oldest moiddiest conventions a man of native force prospers just as well as in the newest world, and that by skill of handling and treatment. He can take hold anywhere. Life it- self is a mixture of power and form, and will not bear the least excess of either. To finish the mo- ment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. It is not the part of men, but of fanatics,
EXPERIENCE. 63
or of mathematicians if you will, to say that the shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring whether for so short a duration we were sprawling in want or sitting high. Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes of to- day are worth as much to me as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, to-day. Let us treat the men and women well ; treat them as if they were real ; perhaps they are. Men live in their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too soft and tremulous for successful la- bor. It is a tempest of fancies, and the only bal-' last I know is a respect to the present hour. With- out any shadow of doubt, amidst this vertigo of shows and politics, I settle myself ever the firmer in the creed that we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whom- soever we deal mth, acceiJting our actual compan- ions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasiu'e for us. If these are mean and malignant, their contentment, which is the last victory of justice, is a more satisfying echo to the heart than the voice of poets and the casual sympathy of admirable persons. I think that how- ever a thoughtfid man may suffer from the defects and absurdities of his company, he cannot without affectation deny to any set of men and women a
64 SURFACE.
sensibility to extraordinary merit. The coarse and frivolous have an instinct of superiority, if they have not a sympathy, and honor it in their blind ca- pricious way with sincere homage.
The fine young people despise life, but in me, and in such as with me are free from dyspepsia, and to whom a day is a sound and solid good, it is a great excess of politeness to look scornful and to cry for company. I am grown by sjmipathy a lit- tle eager and sentimental, but leave me alone and I should relish every hour and what it brought me, the potluck of the day, as heartily as the oldest gos- sip in the bar-room. I am thankful for small mer- cies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe and is dis- apjDointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods. I accept the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies. I find my accoimt in sots and bores also. They give a reality to the circumjacent pic- ture which such a vanisliing meteorous appearance can ill sj^are. In the morning I awake and find the old world, wife, babes, and mother. Concord and Boston, the dear old spiritual world and even the dear old devil not far off. If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures. The gieat gifts are not got by analysis.
EXPERIENCE, Qb
Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry, — a narrow belt. Moreover, in popular experience everything good is on the highway. A collector peeps into all the picture-shops of Europe for a landscape of Pous- sin, a crayon-sketch of Salvator ; but the Transfig- uration, the Last Judgment, the Communion of St. Jerome, and what are as transcendent as these, are on the walls of the Vatican, the Uffizii, or the Louvre, where every footman may see them; to say nothing of Nature's pictures in every street, of sunsets and sunrises every day, and the sculpture of the human body never absent. A collector recently bought at public auction, in London, for one hun- dred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shak- sj)eare ; but for nothing a school-boy can read Ham- let and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein. I think I will never read any but the commonest books, — the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton. Then we are im- patient of so public a life and j)lanet, and run hither and thither for nooks and secrets. The imagination delights in the woodcraft of Indians, trappers, and bee-hunters. We fancy that we are strangers, and
66 SURFACE.
not so intimately domesticated in the planet as the wild man and the wild beast and bird. But the ex- clusion reaches them also ; reaches the clim))ing, fly- ing, gliding, feathered and four-footed man. Fox and woodchuck, hawk and snipe and bittern, when nearly seen, have no more root in the deep world than man, and are just such superficial tenants of the globe. Then the new molecular philosophy shows astronomical intersi)aces betwixt atom and atom, shows that the world is all outside ; it has no inside.
The mid-worlcj is best. Nature, as we know her, is no saint. The lights of the church, the ascetics, Gentoos, and corn-eaters, she does not distinguish by any favor. She comes eating and drinking and sinning. Her darlings, the great, the strong, the beautiful, are not children of our law ; do not come out of the Sunday School, nor weigh their food, nor punctually keep the commandments. If we will be strong with her strength we must not har- bor such disconsolate consciences, borrowed too from the consciences of other nations. We must set up the strong present tense against all the ru- mors of WTath, past or to come. So many things are unsettled which it is of the first imjiortance to settle ; — and, pending their settlement, we will do as we do. Whilst the debate goes forward on the equity of commerce, and will not be closed for a
EXPERIENCE. 67
century or two, New and Old England may keep shop. Law of copyright and international copy- right is to be discussed, and in the interim we will sell oiu' books for the most we can. Exiiediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writ- ing dowTi a thought, is questioned ; much is to say on both sides, and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles add a line. Right to hold land, right of property, is disputed, and the conventions convene, and before the vote is taken, dig away in your garden, and spend your earnings as a waif or godsend to all serene and beautiful purposes. Life itself is a bubble and a skepticism, and a sleep within a sleep. Grant it, and as much more as they will, — but thou, God's darling I heed thy private dream ; thou wilt not be missed in the scorning and skepticism ; there are enough of them ; stay there in thy closet and toil until the rest are agreed what to do about it. Thy sickness, they say, and thy puny habit require that thou do this or avoid that, but know that thy life is a flitting state, a tent for a night, and do thou, sick or well, finish that stint. Thou art sick, but shalt not be worse, and the universe, which holds thee dear, shall be the better.
Hmnan life is made up of the two elements^ power and form, and the proportion must be inva-
68 SURFACE.
riably kept if we would have it sweet and sound. Each of these elements in excess makes a mischief as hurtful as its defect. Everything runs to ex- cess ; every good quality is noxious if unmixed, and, to carry the danger to the edge of ruin, na- ture causes each man's peculiarity to superabound. Here, among the farms, we adduce the scholars as examples of this treachery. They are nature's vic- tims of expression. You who see the artist, the orator, the poet, too near, and find their life no more excellent than that of mechanics or farm- ers, and themselves victims of partiality, very hol- low and haggard, and pronounce them failures, not heroes, but quacks, — conclude very reasonably that these arts are not for man, but are disease. Yet nature will not bear yo\x out. Irresistible na- ture made men such, and makes legions more of such, every day. You love the boy reading in a book, gazing at a drawing or a cast ; yet what are these millions who read and behold, but incipient writers and sculptors ? Add a little more of that quality which now reads and sees, and they will seize the pen and chisel. And if one remembers how innocently he began to be an artist, he per- ceives that nature joined with his enemy. A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise tlu-ough excess of wisdom is made a fool.
EXPERIENCE. 69
How easily, if fate would suffer it, we might keep forever these beautiful limits, and adjust our- selves, once for all, to the perfect calculation of the kingdom of known cause and effect. In the street and in the newspapers, life appears so plain a busi- ness that manly resolution and adherence to the multiplication-table through all weathers will in- sure success. But ah ! presently comes a day, or is it only a haK-hour, with its angel-whispering, — which discomfits the conclusions of nations and of years ! To-morrow again every thing looks real and angular, the habitual standards are reinstated, common sense is as rare as genius, — is the basis of genius, and experience is hands and feet to every enterprise ; — and yet, he who should do his busi- ness on this understanding would be quickly bank- rupt. Power keeps quite another road than the turnpikes of choice and will ; namely the subterra- nean and invisible tunnels and channels of life. It is ridiculous that we are diplomatists, and doctors, and considerate people ; there are no dupes like these. Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not. God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future. We would look about us, but -ftdth grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another behind us of purest sky. ' You will not remember,'
70 SURPRISE.
he seems to say, ' and you will not expect.' All good conversation, manners, and action, come from a spontaneity which forgets usages and makes the moment great. Nature hates calculators ; her methods are saltatory and impulsive. Man lives by pulses ; our organic movements are such ; and the chemical and ethereal agents are undulatory and alternate ; and the mind goes antagonizing on, and never prospers but by fits. We thrive by cas- ualties. Our chief experiences have been casual. The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely and not by the direct stroke ; men of genius, but not yet accredited ; one gets the cheer of their light without paying too great a tax. Theirs is the beauty of the bird or the morning light, and not of art. In the thought of genius there is always a surprise ; and the moral sentiment is well called " the newness," for it is never other ; as new to the oldest intelligence as to the young child ; — " the kingdom that cometh without obser- vation." In like manner, for practical success, there must not be too much design. A man will not be observed in doing that which he can do best. There is a certain magic about his properest action which stupefies your powers of observation, so that though it is done before you, you wist not of it. The art of life has a pudency, and will not be exposed. Every man is an impossibility until
EXPERIENCE. 71
he is born ; every thing impossible until we see a success. The ardors of piety agree at last with the coldest skepticism, — that nothing is of us or our works, — that all is of God. Nature will not spare us the smallest leaf of laurel. All writing comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having. I would gladly be moral and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly love, and allow the most to the will of man ; but 1 have set my heart on honesty in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from the Eternal. The residts of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and some- what comes of it all, but an unlooked-for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadju- tors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done ; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new and very unlike what he prom- ised himseK.
The ancients, struck with this irreducibleness of the elements of human life to calculation, exalted Chance into a divinity ; but that is to stay too long
72 REALITY.
at the spark, which glitters truly at one point, but the universe is warm with the latency of the same fire. The miracle of life which will not be ex- pounded but will remain a miracle, introduces a new element. In the growth of the embryo, Sir Everard Home I think noticed that the evolution was not from one central point, but coactive from three or more points. Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency. So is it with us, now skeptical or without unity, because immersed in forms and effects all seeming to be of equal yet hostile value, and now religious, whilst in the re- ception of spiritual law. Bear with these distrac- tions, with this coetaneous growth of the parts ; they will one day be meynhers^ and obey one will. On that one will, on that secret cause, they nail our attention and hope. Life is hereby melted into an expectation or a religion. Underneath the inhar- monious and trivial particidars, is a musical per- fection ; the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam. Do but observe the mode of our illumination. When I converse with a profound mind, or if at any time being alone I have good thoughts, I do not at once arrive at sat- isfactions, as when, being thirsty, I drink water ; or
EXPERIENCE. 73
go to the fire, being cold ; no ! but I am at first ap- prised of my vicinity to a new and excellent region of life. By persisting to read or to think, tliis re- gion gives further sign of itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its pro- found beauty and repose, as if the clouds that cov- ered it parted at intervals and showed the ap- proaching traveller the inland mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows spread at their base, whereon flocks graze and shepherds pipe and dance. But every insight from this realm of thought is felt as initial, and promises a sequel. I do not make it ; I arrive there, and behold what was there already. I make ! O no ! I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement before the first open- ing to me of this august magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable ages, young wdth the life of life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert. And what a future it opens ! I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new beauty. I am ready to die out of nature and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have f oimd in the West : —
" Since neither now nor yesterday began These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can A man be found who their first entrance knew."
If I have described life as a flux of moods, I must now add that there is that in us which changes not
74 REALITY.
and which ranks all sensations and states of mind. The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his body ; life above life, in infinite degrees. The sentiment from which it sprung determines the dignity of any deed, and the question ev^er is, not what you have done or for- borne, but at whose command you have done or for- borne it.
Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost, — these are quaint names, too narrow to cover this un- boimded substance. The baffled intellect must still kneel before this cause, which refuses to be named, — ineffable cause, which every fine genius has es- sayed to represent by some emphatic symbol, as, Thales by water, Anaximenes by air, Anaxagoras by (Nous) thought, Zoroaster by fire, Jesus and the moderns by love ; and the metaphor of each has become a national religion. The Chinese Mencius has not been the least successful in his generali- zation. " I fully understand language," he said, "and nourish well my vast-flowing \dgor." — "I beg to ask what you call vast-flowing vigor ? " — said his companion. "The explanation," rej)lied Mencius, "is difficult. This vigor is supremely great, and in the highest degree unbending. Nour- ish it correctly and do it no injury, and it will fill up the vacancy between heaven and earth. This
EXPERIENCE. 75
vigor accords with and assists justice and reason, and leaves no liimger." — In our more correct writ- ing we give to this generalization the name of Be- ing, and thereby confess that we have arrived as far as we can go. Suffice it for the joy of the universe that we have not arrived at a wall, but at intermi- nable oceans. Our life seems not present so much as prospective ; not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vast-flowing vigor. Most of life seems to be mere advertisement of fac- ulty ; information is given us not to sell ourselves cheap ; that we are very great. So, in particulars, our greatness is always in a tendency or direction, not in an action. It is for us to believe in the rule, not in the exception. The noble are thus known from the ignoble. So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul or the like, but the uni- versal ijnpulse to believe, that is the material cir- cumstance and is the principal fact in the history of the globe. Shall we describe this cause as that which works directly ? The spirit is not helpless or needful of mediate organs. It has plentifid powers and direct effects. I am explained without explaining, I am felt without acting, and where I am not. Therefore all just persons are satisfied with their own praise. They refuse to explain themselves, and are content that new actions should
76 REALITY.
do them that office. They believe that we com- municate without speech and above speech, and that no right action of ours is quite unaffecting to our friends, at whatever distance ; for the influence of action is not to be measured by miles. Why should I fret myself because a circumstance has occurred which hinders my presence where I was expected ? If I am not at the meeting, my pres- ence where I am shoidd be as useful to the com- monwealth of friendship and wisdom, as would be my presence in that place. I exert the same qual- ity of power in all places. Thus journeys the mighty Ideal before us ; it never was known to fall into the rear. No man ever came to an experience which was satiating, but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and onward ! In liberated mo- ments we know that a new pictm-e of life and duty is already possible ; the elements already exist in many minds aroimd you of a doctrine of life which shall transcend any written record we have. The new statement will comprise the skepticisms as well as the faiths of society, and out of imbelief s a creed shall be formed. For skef)ticisms are not gratui- tous or lawless, but are limitations of the affirma^- tive statement, and the new philosophy must take them in and make affirmations outside of them, just as much as it must include the oldest beliefs. It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the
EXPERIENCE. 77
discovery we have made that we exist. That dis- covery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and dis- torting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject- lenses have a creative power ; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw ; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, per- sons, letters, religions, objects, successively tiunble in, and God is but one of its ideas. Nature and literature are subjective phenomena ; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast. The street is full of humiliations to the proud. As the fop contrived to dress his bailiffs in his livery and make them wait on his guests at table, so the cha- grins which the bad heart gives off as bubbles, at once take form as ladies and gentlemen in the street, shopmen or bar-keepers in hotels, and threaten or insult whatever is threatenable and insultable in us. 'T is the same with our idolatries. People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a tj'pe or representative of human- ity, with the name of hero or saint. Jesus, the "providential man," is a good man on whom many
78 SUBJECT OR THE ONE.
people are agreed that these optical laws shall take effect. By love on one part and by forbearance to press objection on the other part, it is for a time settled that we will look at him in the centre of the horizon, and ascribe to him the properties that will attach to any man so seen. But the longest love or aversion has a sjieedy term. The great and crescive self, rooted in absolute nature, supplants all relative existence and ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and love. Marriage (in what is called the spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every ob- ject. The subject is the receiver of Godhead, and at every comparison must feel his being enhanced by that cryptic might. Though not in energy, yet by presence, this maga2dne of substance cannot be otherwise than felt ; nor can any force of intellect attribute to the object the proper deity which sleeps or wakes forever in every subject. Never can love make consciousness and ascription equal in force. There will be the same gulf between every me and thee as between the original and the picture. The universe is the bride of the soul. All pri- vate sympathy is partial. Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and whilst they remain in contact all other points of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a particular union lasti
EXPERIENCE. 79
the more energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire.
Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be chaos. The soul is not twin-born but the only begotten, and though revealing itself as child in time, child in appearance, is of a fatal and imiver- sal power, admitting no co-life. Every day, every act betrays the ill-concealed deity. We believe in ourselves as we do not believe in others. We per- mit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others is experiment for us. It is an in^ stance of our faith in ourselves that men never speak of crime as lightly as they think ; or every man thinks a latitude safe for himself which is no-r wise to be indulged to another. The act looks very differently on the inside and on the outside ; in its quality and in its consequences. Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it ; it does not im settle him or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles ; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated ; but in its sequel it turns out to be a horrible jangle and con- founding of all relations. Especially the crimes that spring from love seem right and fair from the actor's point of view, but when acted are foimd destructive of society. No man at last believes that he can be lost, or that the crime in him is as
80 SUBJECT OR THE ONE.
black as in the felon. Because the intellect qual- ifies in our own case the moral judgments. For there is no crime to the intellect. That is antino- mian or hypernomian, and judges law as well as fact. " It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder," said Napoleon, speaking the language of the intel- lect. To it, the world is a problem in mathematics or the science of quantity, and it leaves out praise and blame and all weak emotions. All stealins: is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal ? Saints are sad, because they behold sin (even when they speculate), from the point of view of the conscience, and not of the intellect ; a confusion of thought. Sin, seen from the thought, is a diminution, or less ; seen from the conscience or wiU, it is pravity or had. The intellect names it shade, absence of light, and no essence. The conscience must feel it as essence, essential evil. This it is not ; it has an objective existence, but no subjective.
Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges ; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see ; use what lang-uage we will, we can never say anything but what we are ; Hermes, Cadmus, Co- lumbus, Newton, Bonaparte, are the mind's minis- ters. Instead of feeling a poverty when we encoun«
EXPERIENCE. 81
ter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist who passes through our estate and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture. The partial action of each strong mind in one direction is a telescope for the objects on which it is pointed. But every other part of knowledge is to be pushed to the same ex- travagance, ere the soul attains her due sphericity. Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes you might see her surrounded with himdreds of figures per- forming complex dramas, with tragic and comic is- sues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate, — and meantime it is only puss and her tail. How long before oiu' masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, laughter, and shout- ing, and we shall find it was a solitary performance ? A subject and an object, — it takes so much to make the galvanic circuit complete, but magnitude adds nothing. What imports it whether it is Kep- ler and the sphere, Columbus and America, a reader and his book, or puss with her tail ?
It is true that all the muses and love and religion bate these developments, and will find a way to pimish the chemist who publishes in the parlor the secrets of the laboratory. And we cannot say too little of our constitutional necessity of seeing things under private aspects, or saturated with our humors.
82 SUBJECT OR THE ONE.
And yet is the God the native of these bleak rocka. That need makes in morals the capital virtue of self-trust. We must hold hard to this poverty, how- ever scandalous, and by more vigorous self -recover- ies, after the sallies of action, possess our axis more firmly. The life of truth is cold and so far mourn- ful ; but it is not the slave of tears, contritions and perturbations. It does not attempt another's work, nor adopt another's facts. It is a main lesson of wisdom to know your own from another's. I have learned that I cannot dispose of other people's facts ; but I possess such a key to my o^\^l as per- suades me, against all their denials, that they also have a key to theirs. A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drown- ing men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg or a finger they will drown him. They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices. Charity would be wasted on this poor waiting on the symptoms. A wise and hardy physician will say, Come out of that., as the first condition of advice.
In this our talking America we are ruined by our good nature and listening on all sides. This com- pliance takes away the power of being greatly use- ful. A man should not be able to look other than directly and forthright. A preoccupied attention is the only answer to the importunate frivolity of
EXPERIENCE. 85
other people; an attention, and to an aim which makes their wants frivolous. This is a divine an- swer, and leaves no appeal and no hard thoughts. In Flaxman's drawing of the Eumenides of ^scliy- lus, Orestes supplicates Apollo, whilst the Furies sleep on the threshold. The face of the god ex- presses a shade of regret and compassion, but is calm with the conviction of the irreconcilableness of the two spheres. He is born into other politics, into the eternal and beautiful. The man at his feet asks for liis interest in turmoils of the earth, into which his nature cannot enter. And the Eumenides there lying express pictorially this disparity. The god is surcharged with his divine destiny.
Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Sur- prise, Reality, Subjectiveness, — these are threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life. I dare not assume to give their order, but I name them as I find them in my way. I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me. I can very confidently announce one or another law, which throws itseK into relief and form, but I am too young yet by some ages to compile a code. I gos- sip for my hour concerning the eternal politics. I have seen many fair pictures not in vain. A won- derful time I have lived in. I am not the novice I
84 EXPERIENCE.
was fourteen, nor yet seven years ago. Let who will ask Where is the fruit ? I find a private fruit sufficient. This is a fruit, — that I should not ask for a rash effect from meditations, counsels and the hiving of truths. I should feel it pitif id to demand a result on this town and coimty, an overt effect on the instant month and year. The effect is deep and secular as the cause. It works on periods in which mortal lifetime is lost. All I know is recep- tion ; I am and I have : but I do not get, and when I have fancied I had gotten anything, I foimd I did not. I worship with wonder the great Fortime. My reception has been so large, that I am not an- noyed by receiving tliis or that superabundantly. I say to the Genius, if he will pardon the proverb, In for a mill, in for a million. ^^Tien I receive a new gift, I do not macerate my body to make the account square, for if I shoidd die I coidd not make the account square. The benefit overran the merit the first day, and has overrun the merit ever since. The merit itself, so-called, I reckon part of the re- ceiving.
Also that hankering after an overt or practical effect seems to me an apostasy. In good earnest I am willing to spare this most unnecessary deal of doing. Life wears to me a visionary face. Hard- est roughest action is visionary also. It is but a choice between soft and turbulent dreams. People
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disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am very content with knowing, if only I could know. That is an august entertain- ment, and would suffice me a great while. To know a little would be worth the expense of this world. I hear always the law of Adrastia, " that every soid which had acquired any truth, should be safe from harm until another period."
I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think. I ob- serve that difference, and shall observe it. One day I shall know the value and law of this dis- crepance. But I have not found that much was gained by manipular attempts to realize the world of thought. Many eager persons successively make an experiment in this way, and make themselves ridiculous. They acquire democratic manners, they foam at the mouth, they hate and deny. Worse, I observe that in the history of mankind there is never a solitary example of success, — taking their own tests of success. I say this polemically, or in reply to the inquiry. Why not realize your world ? But far be from me the despair which prejudges the law by a paltry empiricism ; — since there never was a right endeavor but it succeeded. Patience and patience, we shall win at the last. We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of
86 EXPERIENCE.
time to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dol- lars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life. We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the house- hold with our wives, and these things make no im- pression, are forgotten next week ; but, in the soli- tude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat ; up again, old heart ! — it seems to say, — there is victory yet for all justice ; and the true romance which the world exists to realize will be the transformation of genius into practical power.
CHARACTER.
The sun set ; but set not his hope : Stars rose ; his faith was earlier up l Fixed on the enormous galaxy, Deeper and older seemed his eye : And matched his sufferance sublime The taciturnity of time. He spoke, and words more soft than raia Brought the Age of Gold again : His action won such reverence sweet, As hid all measure of the feat.
Work of his hand He nor commends nor grieves I Pleads for itself the fact ; As unrepenting Nature leaves Her every act.
in.
CHAEACTER.
I HAVE read that those who listened to Lord Chatham felt that there was something finer in the man than any thing which he said. It has been comjilained of our brilliant English historian of the French Revolution that when he has told all his facts about Mirabeau, they do not justify his esti- mate of his genius. The Gracchi, Agis, Cle- omenes, and others of Plutarch's heroes, do not in the record of facts equal their own fame. Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Ra» leigh, are men of great figure and of few deeds. We cannot find the smallest part of the personal weight of Washington in the narrative of his ex- ploits. The authority of the name of Schiller is too great for his books. This inequality of the reputation to the works or the anecdotes is not accoimted for by saying that the reverberation is longer than the thunder-clap, but somewhat re- sided in these men which begot an expectation that outran all their performance. The largest part of
90 CHARACTER.
their power was latent. This is that which we call Character, — a reserved force, which acts directly by presence and without means. It is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a Familiar or Genius, by whose impulses the man is guided but whose counsels he cannot impart ; which is com- pany for him, so that such men are often solitary, or if they chance to be social, do not need society but can entertain themselves very well alone. The purest literary talent appears at one time great, at another time small, but character is of a stellar and undiminishable greatness. What others effect by talent or by eloquence, this man accomplishes by some magnetism. " Half his strength he put not forth." His victories are by demonstration of su- periority, and not by crossing of bayonets. He conquers because his arrival alters the face of af- fairs. " O lole ! how did you know that Hercules was a god ? " " Because," answered lole, " I was content the moment my eyes fell on him. When I beheld Theseus, I desired that I might see him offer battle, or at least guide his horses in the char- iot-race ; but Hercules did not wait for a contest ; he conquered whether he stood, or walked, or sat, or whatever thing he did." Man, ordinarily a pen- dant to events, only half attached, and that awk- wardly, to the world he lives in, in these examples appears to share the life of things, and to be an ex
CHARACTER. 91
presslon of tlie same laws which control the tides aud the sun, numbers and quantities.
But to use a more modest illustration and nearer home, I observe that in our political elections, where this element, if it appears at all, can only occur in its coarsest form, we sufficiently under- stand its incomparable rate. The people know that they need in their representative much more than talent, namely the power to make his talent trusted. They cannot come at their ends by send- ing to Congress a learned, acute, and fluent speaker, if he be not one who, before he was appointed by the people to represent them, was appointed by Almighty God to stand for a fact, — invincibly persuaded of that fact in himself, — so that the most confident and the most violent persons learn that here is resistance on which both impudence and terror ^e wasted, namely faith in a fact. The men who carry their points do not need to inquire of their constituents what they should say, but are themselves the country which they represent ; no- where are its emotions or opinions so instant and true as in them ; nowhere so pure from a selfish infusion. The constituency at home hearkens to their words, watches the color of their cheek, and therein, as in a glass, dresses its own. Our public assemblies are pretty good tests of manly force. Our frank countrymen of the west and south have
92 CHARACTER.
a taste for character, and like to know whether the New Englancler is a substantial man, or whether the hand can pass through him.
Tlie same motive force appears in trade. There are geniuses in trade, as well as in war, or the State, or letters ; and the reason why this or that man is fortunate is not to be told. It lies in the man ; that is all anybody can tell you about it. See him and you will know as easily why he suc- ceeds, as, if you see Napoleoui, you woidd compre- hend his fortune. In the new objects we recognize the old game, the habit of fronting the fact, and not dealing with it at second hand, through the percep- tions of somebody else. Nature seems to authorize trade, as soon as you see the natural merchant, who appears not so much a private agent as her factor and Minister of Commerce. His natural probity combines with his insight into the fabric of society to put him above tricks, and he communicates to all his own faith that contracts are of no private interjaretation. The habit of his mind is a refer- ence to standards of natural equity and public ad- vantage ; and he inspires respect and the wish to deal with him, both for the quiet spirit of honor wliich attends him, and for the intellectual pastime which the spectacle of so much ability affords. This immensely stretched trade, which makes the capes of the Southern Ocean his wharves and the
CHARACTER. 93
Atlantic Sea Ms familiar port, centres in his brain only ; and nobody in the universe can make his place good. In his parlor I see very well that he has been at hard work this morning, with that knitted brow and that settled humor, which all his desire to be courteous cannot shake off. I see plainly how many firm acts have been done ; how many valiant noes have this day been spoken, when others would have uttered ruinous yeas. I see, with the pride of art and skill of masterly arithmetic and power of remote combination, the consciousness of being an agent and playfellow of the original laws of the world. He too believes that none can supply him, and that a man must be born to trade or he cannot learn it.
This virtue draws the mind more when it ap- pears in action to ends not so mixed. It works with most energy in the smallest companies and in private relations. In all cases it is an extraordi- nary and incomputable agent. The excess of phys- ical strength is paralyzed by it. Higher natures overpower lower ones by affecting them with a cer- tain sleep. The faculties are locked up, and offer no resistance. Perhaj)s that is the universal law. When the high cannot bring up the low to itself, it benimibs it, as man charms down the resistance of the lower animals. Men exert on each other a similar occult power. How often has the influence
94 CHARACTER.
of a true master realized all the tales of magic ! A river of command seemed to run down from his eyes into all those who beheld him, a torrent of strong sad light, like an Ohio or Danube, which pervaded them with his thoughts and colored all events with the hue of his mind. " What means did you employ ? " was the question asked of the wife of Concini, in regard to her treatment of Mary of Medici ; and the answer was, " Only that influ- ence which every strong mind has over a weak one." Cannot Caisar in irons shuffle off the irons and transfer them to the person of Hippo or Thra- so the turnkey? Is an iron handcuff so immu- table a bond ? Suppose a slaver on the coast of Guinea shoidd take on board a gang of negroes which shoidd contain persons of the stamp of Tous- saint L'Ouverture : or, let us fancy, under these swarthy masks he has a gang of Washingtons in chains. When they arrive at Cuba, will the rela- tive order of the ship's company be the same ? Is there nothing but rope and iron ? Is there no love, no reverence ? Is there never a glimpse of right in a poor slave-captain's mind ; and cannot these be supposed available to break or elude or in any manner overmatch the tension of an inch or two of iron ring ?
This is a natural power, like light and heat, and all nature cooperates with it. The reason why we
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feel one man's presence and do not feel another's is as simple as gravity. Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs. All individual natures stand in a scale, according to the puritj of this element in them. The will of the pure runs down from them into other natures, as water runs down from a his/her into a lower ves- sel. This natural force is no more to be withstood than any other natural force. We can drive a stone upward for a moment into the air, but it is yet true that all stones will forever faU ; and what- ever instances can be quoted of unpunished theft, or of a lie which somebody credited, justice must prevail, and it is the privilege of truth to make it- self believed. Character is this moral order seen through the medium of an individual nature. An individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no longer. Now, the imiverse is a close or pound. All things exist in the man tinged with the man- ners of his sold. With what quality is in him he infuses all nature that he can reach ; nor does he tend to lose himself in vastness, but, at how long a curve soever, all his regards return into his own good at last. He animates all he can, and he sees only what he animates. He encloses the world, as the patriot does his country, as a material basis for his character, and a theatre for action. A healthy
96 CHARACTER.
soul stands united with the Just and the True, as the magnet arranges itself with the j^ole ; so that he stands to all beholders like a transparent object be- twixt them and the sun, and whoso journeys to- wards the sun, journeys towards that person. He is thus the medium of the highest influence to all who are not on the same level. Thus men of char- acter are the conscience of the society to which they belong.
The natural measure of this power is the resist- ance of circumstances. Imjiure men consider life as it is reflected in opinions, events, and persons. They cannot see the action until it is done. Yet its moral element preexisted in the actor, and its quality as right or wrong it was easy to predict. Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive and a negative pole. There is a male and a female, a spirit and a fact, a north and a south. Spirit is the positive, the event is the negative. Will is the north, action the south pole. Character may be ranked as having its natural place in the north. It shares the magnetic currents of the system. The feeble souls are drawn to the south or negative pole. They look at the profit or hurt of the action. They never behold a principle until it is lodged in a person. They do not wish to be lovely, but to be loved. Men of character like to hear of their faults ; the other class do not like to hear of faults ; they
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worship events ; secure to them a fact, a connection, a certain chain of circumstances, and they will ask no more. The hero sees that the event is ancil- lary ; it must follow him. A given order of events has no power to secure to him the satisfaction which the imagination attaches to it ; the soul of goodness escapes from any set of circumstances ; whilst prosperity belongs to a certain mind, and will introduce that power and victory which is its natural fruit, into any order of events. No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character. We boast our emancipation from many supersti- tions ; but if we have broken any idols it is through a transfer of the idolatry. What have I gained, that I no longer immolate a bull to Jove or to Nep- tune, or a mouse to Hecate ; that I do not tremble before the Eumenides, or the Catholic Purgatory, or the Calvinistic Judgment-day, — if I quake at opin- ion, the public opinion as we call it ; or at the threat of assault, or contumely, or bad neighbors, or pov- erty, or mutilation, or at the rumor of revolution, or of murder ? If I quake, what matters it what I quake at ? Our proper vice takes form in one or another shape, according to the sex, age, or temper- ament of the person, and, if we are capable of fear, will readily find terrors. The covetousness or the malignity which saddens me when I ascribe it to so- ciety, is my own. I am always environed by myself.
98 CHARACTER.
On the other part, rectitude is a perpetual victory, celebrated not by cries of joy but by serenity, which is joy fixed or habitual. It is disgraceful to fly to events for confirmation of our truth and worth. The capitalist does not run every hour to the broker to coin his advantages into current money of the realm ; he is satisfied to read in the quotations of the market that his stocks have risen. The same transport which the occurrence of the best events in the best order would occasion me, I must learn to taste purer in the perception that my position is every hour meliorated, and does already command those events I desire. That exultation is only to be checked by the foresight of an order of things so excellent as to throw all our prosperities into the deepest shade.
The face which character wears to me is seK- sufficingness. I revere the person who is riches ; so that I cannot think of him as alone, or poor, or exiled, or imhappy, or a client, but as perpetual pa- tron, benefactor, and beatified man. Character is centrality, the impossibility of being displaced or overset. A man should give us a sense of mass. Society is frivolous, and shreds its day into scraps, its conversation into ceremonies and escapes. But if I go to see an ingenious man I shall think my- self poorly entertained if he give me nimble pieces of benevolence and etic[uette ; rather he shall stand
CHARACTER. 99
stoutly in his place and let me apprehend i£ it were only his resistance ; know that I have encountered a new and positive quality ; — great refreshment for both of us. It is much that he does not accept the conventional opinions and practices. That non- conformity will remain a goad and remembrancer, and every inquirer will have to dispose of him, in the first place. There is nothing real or useful that is not a seat of war. Our houses ring with laughter and personal and critical gossip, but it helps little. But the uncivil, unavailable man, who is a problem and a threat to society, whom it can- not let pass in silence but must either worship or hate, — and to whom all parties feel related, both the leaders of opinion and the obscure and eccen- tric, — he helps ; he puts America and Europe in the wrong, and destroys the skepticism which says, ' man is a doll, let us eat and drink, 't is the best we can do,' by illuminating the untried and un- known. Acquiescence in the establishment and appeal to the public, indicate infirm faith, heads which are not clear, and which must see a house built, before they can comprehend the plan of it. The wise man not only leaves out of his thought the many, bixt leaves out the few. Fountains, the self-moved, the absorbed, the commander because he is commanded, the assured, the primary, — they are good ; for these annoimce the instant presence of supreme power.
100 CUARACTER.
Our action should rest mathematically on our substance. In nature there are no false valuations. A pound of water in the ocean - tempest has no more gravity than in a midsummer pond. All things work exactly according to their quality and according to their quantity ; attempt nothing they cannot do, except man only. lie has pretension ; he wishes and attempts things beyond Ins force. I read in a book of English memoirs, " Mr. Fox (afterwards Lord Holland) said, he must have the Treasury ; he had served up to it, and would have it." Xenophon and his Ten Thousand were quite equal to what they attempted, and did it ; so equal, that it was not suspected to be a grand and inimita- ble exploit. Yet there stands that fact imrepeated, a high-water mark in military history. Many have attempted it since, and not been equal to it. It is only on reality that any power of action can be based. No institution wiU be better than the insti- tutor. I knew an amiable and accomplished person who undertook a practical reform, yet I was never able to find in him the enterprise of love he took in hand. He adopted it by car and by the imder- standing from the books he had been reading. All his action was tentative, a piece of the city carried out into the fields, and was the city still, and no new fact, and could not inspire enthusiasm. Had there been something latent in the man, a terrible
CHARACTER. 101
tm demonstrated genius agitating and embarrassing his demeanor, we had watched for its advent. It is not enough that the intellect should see the evils and their remedy. We shall still postpone our ex- istence, nor take the gTound to which we are en- titled, whilst it is only a thought and not a spirit that incites us. We have not yet served up to it.
These are properties of life, and another trait is the notice of incessant growth. Men should be in- telligent and earnest. They must also make us feel that they have a controlling happy future opening before them, whose early twilights already kindle in the passing hour. The hero is misconceived and misreported ; he cannot therefore wait to unravel any man's blunders ; he is again on his road, add- ing new powers and honors to his domain and new claims on your heart, which will bankrupt you if you have loitered about the old things and have not kept your relation to him by adding to your wealth. New actions are the only apologies and explana- tions of old ones which the noble can bear to offer or to receive. If your friend has displeased you, you shall not sit down to consider it, for he has already lost all memory of the passage, and has doubled his power to serve you, and ere you can rise up again will burden you with blessings.
We have no pleasure in thinking of a benevo- lence that is only measured by its works. Love is
102 CHARACTER.
inexhaustible, and if its estate is wasted, its gran- ary emptied, still cheers and enriches, and the man, though he sleep, seems to purify the air and his house to adorn the landscajDC and strengthen the laws. People always recognize this difference. We know who is benevolent, by quite other means than the amount of subscription to soup-societies. It is only low merits that can be enumerated. Fear, when your friends say to you what you have done well, and say it through ; but when they stand with uncertain timid looks of respect and half-dislike, and must suspend their judgment for years to come, you may begin to hojje. Those who live to the fu- ture must always appear selfish to those who live to the present. Therefore it was droll in the good Eiemer, who has written memoirs of Goethe, to make out a list of his donations and good deeds, as, so many hundred thalers given to Stilling, to Hegel, to Tischbein ; a lucrative place found for Professor Voss, a post under the Grand Duke for Herder, a pension for Meyer, two professors recommended to foreign universities ; &c., &c. The longest list of sjDecifieations of benefit woidd look very short. A man is a poor creature if he is to be measured so. For all these of course are exceptions, and the rule and hodiernal life of a good man is benefac- tion. The true charity of Goethe is to be inferred from the account he gave Dr. Eckermann of the
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way in which he had spent his fortune. " Each hon-mot of mine has cost a purse of gold. Half a million of my own money, the fortune I inherited, my salary and the large income derived from my writings for fifty years back, have been expended to instruct me in what I now know. I have besides seen," &c.
I own it is but poor chat and gossip to go to enumerate traits of this simple and rapid power, and we are painting the lightning with charcoal ; but in these long nights and vacations I like to console myself so. Nothing but itself can copy it. A word warm from the heart enriches me. I sur- render at discretion. How death-cold is literary genius before this fire of life ! These are the touches that reanimate my heavy soul and give it eyes to pierce the dark of nature. I find, where I thought myself poor, there was I most rich. Thence comes a new intellectual exaltation, to be again rebuked by some new exhibition of charac- ter. Strange alternation of attraction and repul- sion ! Character repudiates intellect, yet excites it ; and character passes into thought, is published so, and then is ashamed before new flashes of moral worth.
Character is nature in the highest form. It is of no use to ape it or to contend with it. Some- what is possible of resistance, and of persistence,
104 CHARACTER.
and of creation, to this power, which will foil all emulation.
This masterj^iece is best where no hands but na- ture's have been laid on it. Care is taken that the greatly-destined shall slip up into life in the shade, with no thousand-eyed Athens to watch and blazon every new thought, every blushing emotion of young genius. Two persons lately, very young children of the most high God, have given me occasion for thought. When I explored the source of their sanctity and charm for the imagination, it seemed as if each answered, ' From my nonconformity ; I never listened to your people's law, or to what they call their gospel, and wasted my time. I was con- tent with the simple rural poverty of my own ; hence this sweetness ; my work never reminds you of that ; — is pure of that.' And nature advertises me in such persons that in democratic America she wiU not be democratized. How cloistered and con- stitutionally sequestered from the market and from scandal ! It was only this morning that I sent away some wild flowers of these wood-gods. They are a relief from literature, — these fresh draughts from the sources of thought and sentiment ; as we read, in an age of polish and criticism, the first lines of written prose and verse of a nation. How captivating is their devotion to their favorite books, whether ^schylus, Dante, Shakspeare, or Scott,
CHARACTER, 105
as feeling tliat tliey have a stake in that book ; who touches that, touches them ; — and especially the total solitude of the critic, the Patmos of thought from which he writes, in unconsciousness of any eyes that shall ever read this writing. Could they dream on still, as angels, and not wake to comparisons and to be flattered ! Yet some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise, and wherever the vein of thought reaches down into the profound, there is no danger from vanity. Sol- emn friends will warn them of the danger of the head's being turned by the flourish of trimipets, but they can afford to smile. I remember the in- dignation of an eloquent INIethodist at the kind ad- monitions of a Doctor of Di\dnity, — 'My friend, a man can neither be j)raised nor insulted.' But forgive the counsels ; they are very natural. I remember the thought which occurred to me when some ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to America, was, Have you been victimized in being brought hither ? — or, prior to that, answer me this, ' Are you victimizable ? '
As I have said. Nature keeps these sovereignties in her own hands, and however pertly our sermons and disciplines would divide some share of credit, and teach that the laws fashion the citizen, she goes her own gait and puts the wisest in the wrong. She makes very light of gospels and prophets, as
106 CHARACTER.
one who has a great many more to produce and no excess of time to spare on any one. There is a chiss of men, individuals of which appear at long inter- vals, so eminently endowed with insight and virtue that they have been unanimously saluted as divine^ and who seem to he an accumulation of that power we consider. Divine persons are character born, or, to borrow a phrase from Napoleon, they are victory organized. They are usually received with ill-will, because they are new and because they set a bound to the exaggeration that has been made of the personality of the last divine person. Nature never rhymes her children, nor makes two men alike. When we see a great man we fancy a re- semblance to some historical person, and predict the sequel of his character and fortune ; a result which he is sure to disappoint. None will ever . solve the problem of his character according to our prejudice, but only in his own high unprecedented way. Character wants room ; must not be crowded on by persons nor be judged from glimpses got in the press of affairs or on few occasions. It needs perspective, as a great building. It may not, probably does not, form relations rapidly ; and we should not require rash explanation, either on the nopular ethics, or on our own, of its action.
I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and
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blood. Every trait which the artist recorded in stone he had seen in life, and better than his copy. We have seen many counterfeits, but we are born believers in great men. How easily we read in old books, when men were few, of the smallest action of the patriarchs. We require that a man shoidd be so large and coliunnar in the landscape, that it should deserve to be recorded that he arose, and girded up his loins, and departed to such a place. The most credible pictures are those of majestic men who prevailed at their entrance, and convinced the senses ; as happened to the eastern magian who was sent to test the merits of Zertusht or Zoroaster. When the Yunani sage arrived at Balkh, the Persians tell us, Gushtasp appointed a day on which the Mobeds of every country should assemble, and a golden chair was placed for the Yunani sage. Then the beloved of Yezdam, the jDrophet Zertusht, advanced into the midst of the as- sembly. The Yunani sage, on seeing that chief, said, " This form and this gait cannot lie, and nothing but truth can proceed from them." Plato said it was impossible not to believe in the children of the gods, " though they should speak without probable or necessary arguments." I should think myself very unhappy in my associates if I could not credit the best things in history. " John Bradshaw," says Milton, " appears like a consul, from whom the
108 CHARACTER.
fasces are not to depart with the year ; so that not on the tribunal only, but throughout his life, you would regard him as sitting in judgment uj^on kings." I find it more credible, since it is anterior information, that one man should know heaven, as the Chinese say, than that so many men should know the world. " The virtuous prince confronts the gods, without any misgiving. He waits a him- dred ages tUl a sage comes, and does not doubt. He who confronts the gods, without any misgi\dng, knows heaven ; he who waits a hundred ages until a sage comes, without doubting, knows men. Hence the \artuous prince moves, and for ages shows em- pire the way." But there is no need to seek remote examples. He is a dull observer whose experience has not taught him the reality and force of magic, as well as of chemistry. The coldest precisian cannot go abroad ^vithout encountering inexplicable influ- ences. One man fastens an eye on him and the graves of the memory render up their dead ; the secrets that make him wretched either to keep or to betray must be yielded ; — another, and he cannot speak, and the bones of his body seem to lose their cartilages ; the entrance of a friend adds grace, boldness, and eloquence to him ; and there are per- sons he cannot choose but remember, who gave a transcendent expansion to his thought, and kindled another life in liis bosom.
j
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What is so excellent as strict relations of amity, when they spring from this deep root ? The suf- ficient reply to the skeptic who doubts the power and the furniture of man, is in that possibility of joyful intercourse with persons, which makes the faith and practice of all reasonable men. I know nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profound good understanding which can subsist, after much exchange of good offices, between two virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himseK and sure of his friend. It is a happiness which post- pones all other gratifications, and makes politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap. For when men shall meet as they ought, each a benefactor, a shower of stars, clothed with thoughts, with deeds, with accomplishments, it should be the festival of nature which all things announce. Of such friend- ship, love in the sexes is the first symbol, as all other things are symbols of love. Those relations to the best men, which, at one time, we reckoned the romances of youth, become, in the progress of the character, the most solid enjoyment.
If it were possible to live in right relations with men ! — if we could abstain from asking any- thing of them, from asking their praise, or help, or pity, and content us with compelling them through the virtue of the eldest laws ! Could we not deal with a few persons, — with one person, — after
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the unwritten statutes, and make an experiment of their efficacy ? Conltl we not pay our friend the compliment of truth, of silence, of forbearing? Need we be so eager to seek him ? If we are re- lated, we shall meet. It was a tradition of the an- cient world that no metamorphosis could hide a god from a god ; and there is a Greek verse which runs, —
" The Gods are to each other not unknown."
Friends also follow the laws of divine necessity ; they gravitate to each other, and cannot other- wise : —
"When each the other sliall avoid, Shall each by each he most enjoyed.
Their relation is not made, but allowed. The gods must seat themselves without seneschal in our Ol^'m- pus, and as they can instal themselves by seniority divine. Society is spoiled if pains are taken, if the associates are brought a mile to meet. And if it be not society, it is a mischievous, low, degrading jangle, though made up of the best. All the great- ness of each is kept back atid every foible in pain- ful activity, as if the Olympians should meet to ex- change snuff-boxes.
Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we are hunted by some fear or com- mand behind us. But if suddenly we encounter a
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friend, we pause ; our heat and hurry look foolish enough ; now pause, now possession is required, and the power to swell the moment from the resources of the heart. The moment is all, in all noble rela- tions.
A divine person is the prophecy of the mind ; a friend is the hope of the heart. Our beatitude waits for the fulfilment of these two in one. The ages are opening this moral force. All force is the shadow or symbol of that. Poetry is joyful and strong as it draws its inspiration thence. Men write their names on the world as they are filled with this. History has been mean ; our nations have been mobs ; we have never seen a man : that divine form we do not yet know, but only the dream and prophecy of such : we do not know the majestic manners which belong to him, which appease and exalt the beholder. We shall one day see that the most private is the most public energy, that quality atones for quantity, and grandeur of character acts in the dark, and succors them who never saw it. What greatness has yet appeared is beginnings and encouragements to us in this direction. The history of those gods and saints which the world has writ- ten and then worshipped, are documents of charac- ter. The ages have exulted in the manners of a youth who owed nothing to fortune, and who was hanged at the Tyburn of his nation, who, by the
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pure quality of his nature, shed an epic splendor around the facts of his death which has transfigured every particidar into an universal symbol for the eyes of mankind. This great defeat is hitherto our highest fact. But the mind requires a victory to the senses ; a force of character which will convert judge, jury, soldier, and king ; which will rule ani- mal and mineral virtues, and blend with the courses of sap, of rivers, of winds, of stars, and of moral agents.
If we cannot attain at a bound to these gran- deurs, at least let us do them homage. In society, high advantages are set down to the possessor as disadvantages. It reqmres the more wariness in our private estimates. I do not forgive in my friends the failure to know a fine character and to entertain it with thankful hospitality. When at last that wliich we have always longed for is arrived and shines on us with glad rays out of that far ce- lestial land, then to be coarse, then to be critical and treat such a visitant with the jabber and sus- picion of the streets, argues a vulgarity that seems to shut the doors of heaven. This is confusion, this the right insanity, when the soid no longer knows its own, nor where its allegiance, its religion, are due. Is there any religion but this, to know that wherever in the wide desert of being the holy senti- ment we cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms
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for me ? if none sees it, I see it ; I am aware, if I alone, of the greatness of the fact. Whilst it blooms, I will keep sabbath or holy time, and suspend my gloom and my folly and jokes. Nature is indulged by the presence of this guest. There are many eyes that can detect and honor the prudent and household virtues ; there are many that can discern Genius on his starry track, though the mob is in- capable ; but when that love which is all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring, which has vowed to it- self that it will be a wretch and also a fool in this world sooner than soil its white hands by any com- pliances, comes into our streets and houses, — only the pure and aspiring can know its face, and the only compliment they can pay it is to own it.
MANNERS.
** How near to good is what is fair ! Which we no sooner see, But with the lines and outward air Our senses taken be.
Again yourselves compose, And now put all the aptness on Of Figure, that Proportion
Or Color can disclose ; That if those silent arts were lost, Design and Picture, they might boast
From you a newer ground, Instructed by the heightening sense Of dignity and reverence
In their true motions foimd."
Ben Jonson.
IV.
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Half the world, it is said, knows not how the other half live. Our Exploring Expedition saw the Feejee islanders getting their dinner off human bones; and they are said to eat their own wives and children. The husbandry of the modern in- habitants of Gournou (west of old Thebes) is philosophical to a fault. To set up their house- keeping nothing is requisite but two or three earthen j)ots, a stone to gTind meal, and a mat which is the bed. The house, namely a tomb, is ready without rent or taxes. No rain can pass through the roof, and there is no door, for there is no want of one, as there is nothing to lose. If the house do not please them, they walk out and enter another, as there are several hundreds at their command. " It is somewhat singidar," adds Bel- zoni, to whom we owe this account, " to talk of happiness among people who live in sepulchres, among the corpses and rags of an ancient nation which they know nothing of." In the deserts of
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Borgoo the rock-Tibboos still dwell in caves, like cliff-swallows, and the language of these negroes is compared by their neighbors to the shrieking of bats and to the whistling of birds. Again, the Bor- noos have no proper names ; individuals are called after their height, thickness, or other accidental qualit}'', and have nicknames merely. But the salt, the dates, the ivory, and the gold, for which these horrible regions are visited, find their way into countries where the purchaser and consumer can hardly be ranked in one race with these cannibals and man-stealers ; countries where man serves hmi- self with metals, wood, stone, glass, gmn, cotton, silk, and wool ; honors himself vnth. architecture ; writes laws, and contrives to execute his will through the hands of many nations ; and, espe- cially, establishes a select society, running through all the countries of intelligent men, a self-consti- tuted aristocracy, or fraternity of the best, which, without written law or exact usage of any kind, perpetuates itself, colonizes every new-planted isl- and and adopts and makes its own whatever per- sonal beauty or extraordinary native endowment anywhere appears.
"What fact more conspicuous in modern history than the creation of the gentleman? Chivalry is that, and loyalty is that, and, in English literature half the drama, and all the novels, from Sir Philip
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Sidney to Sir Walter Scott, paint this figure. The word gentleman., which, like the word Christian, must hereafter characterize the present and the few preceding centuries by the importance attached to it, is a homage to personal and incommunicable properties. Frivolous and fantastic additions have got associated with the name, but the steady inter- est of mankind in it must be attributed to the valu- able properties which it designates. An element which unites all the most forcible persons of every country, makes them intelligible and agreeable to each other, and is somewhat so precise that it is at once felt if an indi'ddual lack the masonic sigTi, — cannot be any casual product, but must be an av- erage result of the character and faculties univer- sally found in men. It seems a certain permanent average ; as the atmosphere is a permanent compo- sition, whilst so many gases are combined only to be decompounded. Comme ilfaut., is the French- man's description of good society : as we must he. It is a spontaneous fruit of talents and feelings of precisely that class who have most vigor, who take the lead in the world of this hour, and though far from pure, far from constituting the gladdest and highest tone of human feeling, it is as good as the whole society permits it to be. It is made of the spirit, more than of the talent of men, and is a compound result into which every great force en-
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ters as an ingredient, namely virtue, wit, beauty, wealth, and power.
There is something equivocal in all the words in use to express the excellence of manners and so- cial cultivation, because the quantities are fluxional, and the last effect is assumed by the senses as the cause. The word gentleman has not any correla- tive abstract to express the quality. Gentility is mean, and gentilesse is obsolete. But we must keep alive in the vernacular the distinction be- tween yas^io??, a word of narrow and often sinister meaning, and the heroic character which the gentle- man imports. The usual words, however, must be respected ; they will be found to contain the root of the matter. The point of distinction in all this class of names, as courtesy, chivalry, fashion, and the like, is that the flower and fruit, not the grain of the tree, are contemplated. It is beauty which is the aim this time, and not worth. The result is now in question, although our words intimate well enough the popular feeling that the appearance supposes a substance. The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his behavior ; not in any manner de- pendent and servile, either on persons, or opinions, or possessions. Beyond this fact of truth and real force, the word denotes good -nature or benevo- lence: manhood first, and then gentleness. The
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popular notion certainly adds a condition of ease and fortune ; but that is a natural result of per- sonal force and love, that they should possess and dispense the goods of the world. In times of violence, every eminent person must fall in with many opportimities to approve his stoutness and worth ; therefore every man's name that emerged at all from the mass in the feudal ages, rattles in our ear like a flourish of trumpets. But personal force never goes out of fashion. That is still par- amount to-day, and in the moving crowd of good society the men of valor and reality are known and rise to their natural place. The competition is transferred from war to politics and trade, but the personal force appears readily enough in these new arenas.
Power first, or no leading class. In politics and in trade, bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks. God knows that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door ; but whenever used in strictness and with any emphasis, the name will be found to point at original energy. It de- scribes a man standing in his own right and work- ing after imtaught methods. In a good lord there must first be a good animal, at least to the extent of yielding the incomparable advantage of animal spirits. The ruling class must have more, but they must have these, giving in every company the
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sense of power, which makes things easy to he done which daunt the wise. The society of the en- ergetic class, in their friendly and festive meetings, is full of courage and of attempts which intimidate the pale scholar. The courage which girls exhibit is like a battle of Lundy's Lane, or a sea-fight. The intellect relies on memory to make some sup- plies to face these extemporaneous squadrons. But memory is a base mendicant with basket and badge, in the presence of these sudden masters. The rulers of society must be up to the work of the world, and equal to their versatile office : men of the right Caesarian pattern, who have great range of affinity. I am far from belie\ang the tunid maxim of Lord Falkland (" that for ceremony there must go two to it ; since a bold fellow will go through the cunningest forms"), and am of oj)inion that the gentleman is the bold fellow whose forms are not to be broken through ; and only that plenteous nature is rightfid master which is the comi)lenient of whatever person it converses with. My gentle- man gives the law where he is ; he will outpray saints in chapel, outgeneral veterans in the field, and outshine all courtesy in the hall. He is good company for pirates and good with academicians ; so that it is useless to fortify yourself against him ; he has the private entrance to all minds, and I could as easily exclude myself, as him. The fa^
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moiis gentlemen of Asia and Europe have been of tliis strong type ; Saladin, Sapor, the Cid, Julius Csesar, Scipio, Alexander, Pericles, and the lordli- est personages. They sat very carelessly in their chairs, and were too excellent themselves, to value any condition at a high rate.
A plentifid fortime is reckoned necessary, in the popular judgment, to the completion of this man of the world ; and it is a material deputy which walks through the dance which the first has led. Money is not essential, but this wide affinity is, which tran- scends the habits of clique and caste and makes it- self felt by men of all classes. If the aristocrat is only valid in fashionable circles and not with truck- men, he will never be a leader in fashion ; and if the man of the people cannot speak on equal terms with the gentleman, so that the gentleman shall perceive that he is already really of his own or- der, he is not to be feared. Diogenes, Socrates, and Epamiuondas, are gentlemen of the best blood who have chosen the condition of poverty when that of wealth was equally open to them. I use these old names, but the men I speak of are my contemporaries. Fortune will not supply to every generation one of these well - appointed knights, but every collection of men furnishes some exam- ple of the class; and the politics of this country, and the trade of every town, are controlled by these
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hardy and irresponsible doers, who have invention to take the lead, and a broad sympathy which puts them in fellowship with crowds, and makes their action popular.
The manners of this class are observed and caught with devotion by men of taste. The asso- ciation of these masters with each other and Avith men intelligent of their merits, is mutually agreea- ble and stimulating. The good forms, the happiest expressions of each, are repeated and adopted. By swift consent everything superfluous is di'opiDcd, everything graceful is renewed. Fine manners show themselves formidable to the uncidtivated man. They are a subtler science of defence to parry and intimidate ; but once matched by the skill of the other party, they drop the point of the sword, — points and fences disappear, and the youth finds himself in a more transparent atmosj)here, wherein life is a less troublesome game, and not a misunderstanding rises between the players. Man- ners aim to facilitate life, to get rid of impediments and bring the man pure to energize. They aid our dealing and conversation as a railway aids travel- ling, by getting rid of all avoidable obstructions of the road and leaving nothing to be conquered but pure space. These forms very soon become fixed, and a fine sense of propriety is cultivated with the more heed that it becomes a badge of social and
MANNERS. 125
civil distinctions. Thus grows up Fasliion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and fol- lowed, and which morals and violence assault in vain.
There exists a strict relation between the class of power and the exclusive and polished circles. The last are always filled or filling from the first. The strong men usually give some allowance even to the petulances of fashion, for that affinity they find in it. Napoleon, child of the revolution, destroyer of the old noblesse, never ceased to court the Fau- bourg St. Germain ; doubtless with the feeling that fashion is a homage to men of his stamp. Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly vir- tue. It is virtue gone to seed : it is a kind of post- humous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great : it is a hall of the Past. It usually sets its face against the great of this hour. Great men are not commonly in its halls ; they are absent in the field : they are work- ing, not triumphing. Fashion is made up of their children ; of those who through the value and vir- tue of somebody, have acquired lustre to their name, marks of distinction, means of cultivation and gen- erosity, and in their physical organization a certain health and excellence which secure to them, if not the highest power to work, yet high power to enjoy.
126 MANNERS.
The class of power, tlie working heroes, the Cortez, the Nelson, the Napoleon, see that this is the festiv- ity and permanent celebration of such as they ; that fashion is funded talent ; is Mexico, Marengo, and Trafalgar beaten out thin ; that the brilliant names of fashion run back to just such busy names as their own, fifty or sixty years ago. They are the sowers, their sons shall be the reapers, and tJieir sons, in the ordinary course of things, must yield the pos- session of the harvest to new competitors with keener eyes and stronger frames. The city is re- cruited from the comitry. In the year 1805, it is said, every legitimate monarch in Europe was imbe- cile. The city would have died out, rotted, and ex23loded, long ago, but that it was reinforced from the fields. It is only country which came to to\vn day before yesterday that is city and court to-day.
Aristocracy and fashion are certain inevitable re- sults. These mutual selections are indestructible. If they provoke anger in the least favored class, and the excluded majority revenge themselves on the excluding minority by the strong hand and kill them, at once a new class finds itself at the top, as certainly as cream rises in a bowl of milk : and if the people should destroy class after class, imtil two men only were left, one of these would be the leader and would be involuntarily served and cop- ied by the other. You may keep this nnnority out
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fif sight and out of mind, but it is tenacious of life, and is one of the estates of the reahn. I am the more struck with this tenacity, when I see its woi^k. It respects the administration of such unimportant matters, that we should not look for any dm-ability in its rule. We sometimes meet men imder some strong moral influence, as a patriotic, a literary, a religious movement, and feel that the moral senti- ment rules man and nature. We think all other distinctions and ties will be slight and fugitive, this of caste or fashion for example ; yet come from year to year and see how permanent that is, in this Boston or New York life of man, where too it has not the least countenance from the law of the land. Not in Egypt or in India a firmer or more impas- sable line. Here are associations whose ties go over and under and through it, a meeting of mer- chants, a military corps, a college class, a fire-club, a professional association, a political, a religious convention ; — the persons seem to draw insepara- bly near; yet, that assembly once dispersed, its members will not in the year meet again. Each returns to his degree in the scale of good society, porcelain remains porcelain, and earthen earthen. The objects of fashion may be frivolous, or fashion may be objectless, but the nature of this union and selection can be neither frivolous nor accidental. Each man's rank in that perfect graduation de-
128 MANNERS.
pends on some symmetry in liis structure or some agreement in liis structure to the symmetry of so- ciety. Its doors unbar instantaneously to a natu- ral claim of their owti kind. A natural gentleman finds his way in, and will keep the oldest patrician out who has lost his intrinsic rank. Fashion un- derstands itself ; good-breeding and personal supe- riority of whatever country readily fraternize with those of every other. The chiefs of savage tribes have distinguished themselves in London and Paris by the purity of their tournure.
To say what good of fashion we can, it rests on reality, and hates nothing so much as pretenders ; to exclude and mystify pretenders and send them into everlasting ' Coventry,' is its delight. AVe contemn in turn every other gift of men of the world; but the habit even in little and the least matters of not appealing to any but our own sense of propriety, constitutes the foimdation of all chiv- alry. There is almost no kind of self-reliance, so it be sane and proportioned, which fashion does not occasionally adopt and give it the freedom of its saloons. A sainted soul is always elegant, and, if it will, passes unchallenged into the most guarded ring. But so will Jock the teamster pass, in some crisis that brings him thither, and find favor, as long as his head is not giddy with the new circima- stance, and the iron shoes do not wish to dance in
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waltzes and cotillons. For there Is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual. The maiden at her first ball, the countryman at a city dinner, believes that there is a ritual according to which every act and compliment must be performed, or the failing party must be cast out of this presence. Later they learn that good sense and character make their own forms every moment, and speak or abstain, take wine or refuse it, stay or go, sit in a chair or sprawl with children on the floor, or stand on their head, or what else soever, in a new and aboriginal way ; and that strong will is always in fashion, let who will be unfashionable. All that fashion demands is composure and seK-content. A circle of men per- fectly well-bred woidd be a company of sensible persons in which every man's native manners and character appeared. If the fashionist have not this quality, he is nothing. We are such lovers of self- reliance that we excuse in a man many sins if he will show us a complete satisfaction in his position, which asks no leave to be, of mine, or any man's good opinion. But any deference to some eminent man or woman of the world, forfeits all pri\dlege of nobility. He is an underling: I have nothing to do with him ; I will speak with his master. A man should not go where he cannot carry his whole sphere or society with him, — not bodily, the whole
130 MANNERS.
circle of his friends, but atmospherically. He should preserve in a new comj)any the same atti- tude of mind and reality of relation which his daily associates draw him to, else he is shorn of his best beams, and will be an orphan in the merriest club. " If you could see Vich Ian Vohr with his tail on !
" But Vich Ian Vohr must always carry his
belongings in some fashion, if not added as honor, then severed as disgrace.
There will always be in society certain persons who are mercuries of its approbation, and whose glance will at any time determine for the curious their standing in the world. These are the cham- berlains of the lesser gods. Accept their coldness as an omen of grace with the loftier deities, and allow them all their privilege. They are clear in their office, nor could they be thus formidable with- out their own merits. But do not measure the im- portance of this class by their pretension, or imag- ine that a fop can be the dispenser of honor and shame. They pass also at their just rate ; for how can they otherwise, in circles which exist as a sort of herald's office for the sifting of character?
As the first thing man requires of man is reality, so that appears in all the forms of society. We pointedly, and by name, introduce the parties to each other. Know you l^efore all heaven and earth, that this is Andrew, and this is Gregory, — they
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look each other in the eye ; they grasp each other's hand, to identify and signalize each other. It is a great satisfaction. A gentleman never dodges; his eyes look straight forward, and he assures the other party, first of all, that he has been met. For what is it that we seek, in so many visits and hospitali' ties ? Is it your drajjeries, pictures, and decora- tions? Or do we not insatiably ask. Was a man in the house ? I may easily go into a great house- hold where there is much substance, excellent pro- vision for comfort, luxury, and taste, and yet not encounter there any Amphitryon who shall subor- dinate these appendages. I may go into a cottage, and find a farmer who feels that he is the man I have come to see, and fronts me accordingly. It was therefore a very natural point of old feudal etiquette that a gentleman who received a visit, though it were of his sovereign, should not leave his roof, but shoiJd wait his arrival at the door of his house. No house, though it were the Tuileries or the Esciunal, is good for anything without a master. And yet we are not often gratified by this hospitality. Every body we know surrounds him- seK with a fine house, fine books, conservatory, gar- dens, equipage and all manner of toys, as screens to interpose between himself and his guest. Does it not seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive na- ture, and dreaded nothing so much as a full ren'
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contre front to front with his fellow ? It were un- merciful, I know, quite to abolish the use of these screens, which are of eminent convenience, whether the guest is too great or too little. We call to- gether many friends who keep each other in play, or by luxuries and ornaments we amuse the young people, and guard our retirement. Or if perchance a searching realist comes to our gate, before whose eye we have no care to stand, then again we run to our cm-tain, and hide ourselves as Adam at the voice of the Lord God in the garden. Cardinal Caprara, the Pope's legate at Paris, defended him- self from the glances of Napoleon by an immense pair of green spectacles. Napoleon remarked them, and speedily managed to rally them off : and yet Napoleon, in his turn, was not great enough, with eight hundred thousand troops at his back, to face a pair of f reebom eyes, but fenced himself with eti- quette and within triple barriers of reserve ; and, as all the world knows from Madame de Stael, was wont, when he foimd himself observed, to discharge his face of all expression. But emperors and rich men are by no means the most sldlful masters of good manners. No rentroll nor army-list can dig- nify skidking and dissimulation ; and the first point of courtesy must always be truth, as really aU the forms of good breeding point that way.
I have just been reading, in Mr. Hazlitt's trans«
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lation, Montaigne's account of his journey into Italy, and am struck with nothing more agreeably than the self-respecting fashions of the time. His arrival in each place, the arrival of a gentleman of France, is an event of some consequence. Wher- ever he goes he pays a visit to whatever prince or gentleman of note resides upon his road, as a duty to himself and to civilization. When he leaves any house in which he has lodged for a few weeks, he causes his arms to be painted and hung up as a per- petual sign to the house, as was the custom of gen- tlemen.
The complement of this graceful seK-respect, and that of all the points of good breeding I most re- quire and insist upon, is deference. I like that every chair should be a throne, and hold a king. I prefer a tendency to stateliness to an excess of fel- lowship. Let the incommunicable objects of nature and the metaphysical isolation of man teach us in- dependence. Let us not be too much acquainted. I would have a man enter his house through a hall filled with heroic and sacred sculptures, that he might not want the hint of tranquillity and seK- poise. We should meet each morning as from for- eign countries, and, spending the day together, shoidd depart at night, as into foreigii countries. In all things I would have the island of a man in- violate. Let us sit apart as the gods, talking fi-om
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peak to peak all round Olympus. No degree of affection need invade this religion. This is myrrb and rosemary to keep the other sweet. Lovers should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all slides into confusion and meanness. It is easy to push tliis deference to a Chinese etiquette ; but coolness and absence of heat and haste indicate fine qualities. A ge^itleman makes no noise ; a lady is serene. Proportionate is our disgust at those invaders who fill a studious house wath blast and rmming, to seciu'e some paltry convenience. Not less I dislike a low sympathy of each with his neighbor's needs. Must we have a good understand- ing with one another's palates ? as foolish people who have lived long together know when each wants salt or sugar. I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to ask me for bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, and not to hold out his plate as if I knew already. Every nat- ural function can be dignified by deliberation and privacy. Let us leave hurry to slaves. The com- pliments and ceremonies of our breeding should re- call, however remotely, the grandeur of our destiny. The flower of courtesy does not very well bide handling, but if Ave dare to open another leaf and explore what parts go to its conformation, we shall find also an intellectual quality. To the leaders of men, the brain as well as the flesh and the heart
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must furnish a proportion. Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine perceptions. Men are too coarsely made for the delicacy of beautiful carriage and customs. It is not quite sufficient to good- breeding, a union of kindness and independence. We imperatively require a perception of, and a homage to beauty in our companions. Other vir- tues are in request in the field and workyard, but a certain degree of taste is not to be spared in those we sit with. I could better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws than with a sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic. The same discrimination of fit and fair runs out, if with less rigor, into all parts of life. The average spirit of the energetic class is good sense, acting under certain limitations and to certain ends. It entertains every natural gift. Social in its natm-e, it respects everything which tends to unite men. It delights in measure. The love of beauty is mainly the love of measure or proportion. The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. You must have genius or a prodigious usefulness if you will hide the want of measure. This perception comes in to polish and perfect the parts of the social in- Btriunent. Society will pardon much to genius and
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special gifts, "but, being in its nature a convention, it loves what is conventional, or what belongs to coming together. That makes the good and bad of manners, namely what helps or hinders fellowship. For fashion is not good sense absolute, but relative ; not good sense private, but good sense entertaining company. It hates corners and sharp points of character, hates quarrelsome, egotistical, solitary, and gloomy people ; hates whatever can interfere with total blending of parties ; whilst it values all peculiarities as in the highest degree refreshing, which can consist with good fellowship. And be- sides the general infusion of wit to heighten civil- it}^, the direct splendor of intellectual power is ever welcome in fine society as the costliest addition to its ride and its credit.
The dry light must shine in to adorn our festival, but it must be tempered and shaded, or that will also offend. Accuracy is essential to beauty, and quick perceptions to politeness, but not too quick perceptions. One may be too pimctual and too precise. He must leave the omniscience of busi- ness at the door, when he comes into the palace of beauty. Society loves Creole natures, and sleej^y languishing manners, so that they cover sense, gi'ace and good-will: the air of drowsy strength, which disarms criticism ; perhaps because such a person seems to reserve himself for the best of the
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game, and not spend himself on surfaces ; an Ignor- ing eye, which does not see the annoyances, shifts, and inconveniences that cloud the brow and smother the voice of the sensitive.
Therefore besides personal force and so much perception as constitutes imerring taste, society de- mands in its patrician class another element al- ready intimated, which it significantly terms good- nature,— expressing all degrees of generosity, from the lowest willingness and facidty to oblige, up to the heights of magnanimity and love. Insight we must have, or we shall run against one another and miss the way to our food ; but Intellect is selfish and barren. The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is not happy in the company cannot find any word in his memory that will fit the occasion. All his information is a little impertinent. A man who is happy there, finds in every turn of the conversa^- tion equally lucky occasions for the introduction of that which he has to say. The favorites of society, and what it calls whole souls, are able men and of more spirit than wit, who have no uncomfortable egotism, but who exactly fill the hour and the com- pany ; contented and contenting, at a marriage or a funeral, a ball or a jury, a water-party or a shoot- ing-match. England, which is rich in gentlemen, furnished, in the beginning of the present century,
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a good model of that genius which the world loves, in Mr. Fox, who added to his great abilities the most social disposition and real love of men. Par- liamentary history has few better passages than the debate in which Burke and Fox separated in the House of Commons ; when Fox urged on his old friend the claims of old friendship with such ten- derness that the house was moved to tears. An- other anecdote is so close to my matter, that I must hazard the story. A tradesman who had long dunned liim for a note of three hundred guineas, found him one day counting gold, and demanded payment : — " No," said Fox, " I owe this money to Sheridan ; it is a debt of honor ; if an accident should happen to me, he has nothing to show." " Then," said the creditor, " I change my debt into a debt of honor," and tore the note in pieces. Fox thanlicd the man for his confidence and paid him, saying, " his debt was of older standing, and Sheri- dan must wait." Lover of liberty, friend of the Hindoo, friend of the African slave, he possessed a great personal popularity; and Napoleon said of him on the occasion of his visit to Paris, in 1805, " Mr. Fox will always hold the first place in an assembly at the Tuileries."
We may easily seem ridiculous in our eulogy of courtesy, whenever we insist on benevolence as its foundation. The painted phantasm Fashion rises to
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cast a species of derision on what we say. But I will neither be driven from some allowance to Fash- ion as a symbolic institution, nor from the belief that love is the basis of courtesy. We must obtain that, if we can ; but by all means we must affirm tins. Life owes much of its spirit to these sharp contrasts. Fashion, which affects to be honor, is often, in all men's experience, only a ballroom-code. Yet so long as it is the highest circle in the imagi- nation of the best heads on the planet, there is something necessary and excellent in it ; for it is not to be supposed that men have agreed to be the dupes of anything preposterous ; and the respect which these mysteries inspire in the most rude and sylvan characters, and the curiosity with which de- tails of high life are read, betray the universality of the love of cidtivated manners. I know that a comic disparity woidd be felt, if we should enter the acknowledged ' first circles ' and apply these terrific standards of justice, beauty, and benefit to the individuals actually found there. Monarchs and heroes, sages and lovers, these gallants are not. Fashion has many classes and many niles of probar tion and admission, and not the best alone. There is not only the right of conquest, which genius pre- tends,— the individual demonstrating his natural aristocracy best of the best ; — but less claims will pass for the time ; for Fashion loves lions, and
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points like Circe to her horned company. This gentleman is this afternoon arrived from Denmark ; and that is my Lord Ride, who came yesterday from Bagdat ; here is Captain Friese, from Cape Turnagain ; and Captain Symmes, from the inte- rior of the earth j and Monsieur Jovaire, who came do\Mi this morning in a balloon ; Mr. Hobnail, the reformer ; and Reverend Jul Bat, who has con- verted the whole torrid zone in his Sunday school ; and Signor Torre del Greco, who extinguished Ve- suvius by pouring into it the Bay of Naples ; Spahi, the Persian ambassador ; and Tul "Wil Shan, the exiled nabob of Nepaul, whose saddle is the new moon. — But these are monsters of one day, and to-morrow will be dismissed to their holes and dens ; for in these rooms every chair is waited for. The artist, the scholar, and, in general, the clerisy, win their way up into these places and get repre- sented here, somewhat on this footing of conquest. Another mode is to pass through all the degrees, spending a year and a day in St. Michael's Square, being steeped in Cologne water, and perfumed, and dined, and introduced, and properly groimded in all the biograjDhy and politics and anecdotes of the boudoirs.
Yet these fineries may have grace and wit. Let there be gi'otesque sculpture about the gates and offices of temples. Let the creed and command-
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ments even have the saucy homage of parody. The forms of politeness universally express benevolence in superlative clegTees. What if they are in the mouths of selfish men, and used as means of self- ishness ? What if the false gentleman almost bows the true out of the world ? What if the false gentleman contrives so to address his companion as civilly to exclude all others from his discourse, and also to make them feel excluded ? Real ser- vice wall not lose its nobleness. All generosity is not merely French and sentimental; nor is it to be concealed that living blood and a passion of kindness does at last distinguish God's gentleman from Fashion's. The epitaph of Sir Jenkin Grout is not wholly unintelligible to the present age : " Here lies Sir Jenkin Grout, who loved his friend and persuaded his enemy : what his mouth ate, his hand paid for : what his servants robbed, he re- stored : if a woman gave him pleasure, he sup- ported her in pain : he never forgot his children ; and whoso touched his finger, drew after it his whole body." Even the line of heroes is not ut- terly extinct. There is still ever some admirable person in plain clothes, standing on the wharf, who jumps in to rescue a drowning man ; there is still some absurd inventor of charities ; some guide and comforter of runaway slaves ; some friend of Po- land ; some Philhellene ; some fanatic who plants
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shade-trees for the second and third generation, and orchards when he is grown old ; some well-con- cealed piety ; some just man happy in an ill fame ; some youth ashamed of the favors of fortime and imj)atiently casting them on other shoidders. And these are the centres of society, on which it returns for fresh impidses. These are the creators of Fashion, which is an attempt to organize beauty of behavior. The beautiful and the generous are, in the theory, the doctors and apostles of tliis church : ScijDio, and the Cid, and Sir Philij) Sid- ney, and Washington, and every pure and valiant heart who worshipped Beauty by word and by deed. The persons who constitute the natural aristocracy are not found in the actual aristocracy, or only on its edge ; as the chemical energy of the spectrum is found to be greatest just outside of the spectrum. Yet that is the infirmity of the senes- chals, who do not know their sovereign when he appears. The theory of society supj)oses the exist- ence and sovereignty of these. It divines afar off their coming. It says with the elder gods, —
" As Heaven and Earth are fairer far Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs; And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth, In form and shape compact and beautiful; So, on our heels a fresh perfection treads; A power, more strong in beauty, born of us.
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And fated to excel us, as we pass In glory that old Darkness :
for, 't is the eternal law,
That first in beauty shall be first in might."
Therefore, witliiii the ethnical circle of good so- ciety there is a narrower and higher circle, concen- tration of its light, and flower of courtesy, to which there is always a tacit appeal of pride and refer- ence, as to its inner and imperial court ; the parlia- ment of love and chivalry. And this is constituted of those persons in whom heroic dispositions are native ; with the love of beauty, the delight in so- ciety, and the power to embellish the passing day. If the indi\aduals who compose the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe, the giiarded blood of cen- turies, should pass in review, in such manner as that we could at leisure and critically inspect their beha\aor, we might find no gentleman and no lady; for although excellent specimens of coui'tesy and high-breeding would gratify us in the assemblage, in the particulars we should detect offence. Be- cause elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth. There must be romance of character, or the most fastidious exclusion of impertinencies will not avail. It miLst be genius wliich takes that direction : it must be not courteous, but courtesy. High be- ha\aor is as rare in fiction as it is in fact. Scott is praised for the fidelity with which he painted the
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demeanor and conversation of the superior classes. Certainly, kings and queens, nobles and great la- dies, had some right to complain of the absurdity that had been put in their mouths before the days of Waverley; but neither does Scott's dialogue bear criticism. His lords brave each other in smart epigi'ammatic speeches, but the dialogue is in costume, and does not please on the second reading : it is not warm with life. In Shakspeare alone the speakers do not strut and bridle, the dia- logue is easUy great, and he adds to so many titles that of being the best-bred man in England and in Christendom. Once or twice in a lifetime we are permitted to enjoy the charm of noble manners, in the presence of a man or woman who have no bar in their nature, but whose character emanates freely in their word and gesture. A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; a beautiful behavior is better than a beautifid form : it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures ; it is the finest of the fine arts. A man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects of nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating from his countenance he may abolish aU considerations of magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty of the world. I have seen an individual whose manners, though wholly within the conventions of elegant society, were never learned there, but were original and
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commanding and held out protection and prosper- ity ; one who did not need the aid of a court-suit, but carried the holiday in his eye ; who exhilarated the fancy by flinging wide the doors of new modes of existence; who shook off the captivity of eti- quette, with happy, spirited bearing, good-natured and free as Robin Hood ; yet with the port of an emperor, if need be, — calm, serious, and fit to stand the gaze of millions.
The open air and the fields, the street and pub- lic chambers are the places where Man executes his will ; let him yield or divide the sceptre at the door of the house. Woman, with her instinct of behav- ior, instantly detects in man a love of trifles, any coldness or imbecility, or, in short, any want of that large, flowing, and magnanimous deportment which is indispensable as an exterior in the hall. Our American institutions have been friendly to her, and at this moment I esteem it a chief felicity of this country, that it excels in women. A cer- tain awkward consciousness of inferiority in the men may give rise to the new chivalry in behalf of Woman's Rights. Certainly let her be as much better placed in the laws and in social forms as the most zealous reformer can ask, but I confide so en- tirely in her inspiring and musical nature, that I believe only lierseK can show iis how she shall be served. The wonderful generosity of her senti-
YOL. lU. 10
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ments raises her at times into heroical and godlike regions, and verifies the pictures of Minerva, Juno, or Poljnnnia; and by the firmness with which she treads her upward path, she convinces the coarsest calculators that another road exists than that which their feet know. But besides those who make good in our imagination the place of muses and of Delphic Sibyls, are there not women who fill our vase with wine and roses to the brim, so that the w^ne runs over and fills the house with perfume ; who inspire us with courtesy ; w^ho unloose our tongues and we speak ; who anoint our eyes and we see ? We say things we never thought to have said ; for once, our walls of habitual reserve van- ished and left us at large ; we w- ere children play- ing with children in a wide field of flowers. Steep us, we cried, in these influences, for days, for weeks, and we shall be sunny poets and will write out in many-colored words the romance that you are. Was it Hafiz or Firdousi that said of his Persian Lilla, She was an elemental force, and as- tonished me by her amount of life, when I saw her day after day radiating, every instant, redundant joy and grace on all around her ? She was a sol- vent powerful to reconcile all heterogeneous per- sons into one society : like air or water, an element of such a gi'cat range of affinities that it combines readily with a thousand substances. Where she is
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present all others will be more than they are wont. She was a unit and whole, so that whatsoever she did, became her. She had too much sympathy and desire to please, than that you could say her man- ners were marked with dignity, yet no princess could sm'pass her clear and erect demeanor on each occasion. She did not study the Persian grammar, nor the books of the seven poets, but all the poems of the seven seemed to be written upon her. For though the bias of her nature was not to thought, but to sjanpathy, yet was she so perfect in her own nature as to meet intellectual persons by the ful- ness of her heart, warming them by her sentiments ; believing, as she did, that by dealing nobly with all, all would show themselves noble.
I know that this Byzantine pile of chivalry or Fashion, which seems so fair and picturesque to those who look at the contemporary facts for sci- ence or for entertainment, is not equally pleasant to all spectators. The constitution of our society makes it a giant's castle to the ambitious youth who have not found their names enrolled in its Golden Book, and whom it has excluded from its coveted honors and privileges. They have yet to learn that its seeming grandeur is shadowy and rel- ative : it is great by their allowance ; its proudest gates v.'ill fly open at the approach of their com*age
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and virtue. For the present distress, however, of those who are predisposed to suffer from the tyr- annies of this caprice, there are easy remedies. To remove your residence a couple of miles, or at most four, ^vill commonly relieve the most extreme sus- ceptibility. For the advantages which fashion val- ues are plants which thrive in very confined locali- ties, in a few streets namely. Out of this precinct they go for nothing ; are of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the market, in war, in the nuptial so- ciety, in the literary or scientific circle, at sea, in friendship, in the heaven of thought or virtue.
But we have lingered long enough in these painted courts. The worth of the thing signified must vindicate our taste for the emblem. Every- thing that is called fashion and courtesy hum- bles itself before the cause and foimtain of honor, creator of titles and dignities, namely the heart of love. This is the royal blood, this the fire, which, in all comitries and contingencies, will work after its kind and conquer and exj)and all that approaches it. Tliis gives new meanings to every fact. This impoverishes the rich, suffering no gran- deur but its own. What is rich ? Are you rich enough to help anybody ? to succor the unfashion- able and the eccentric? rich enough to make the Canadian in his wagon, the itinerant with his con- sul's paper which commends him " To the chai'i-
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table," the swarthy Italian with his few broken words o£ English, the lame pauper hunted, by over- seers from town to towTi, even the poor insane or besotted wreck of man or woman, feel the noble ex- ception of your presence and your house from the general bleakness and stoniness ; to make such feel that they were greeted with a voice which made them both remember and hope ? "VYhat is vulgar but to refuse the claim on acute and conclusive reasons ? What is gentle, but to aUow it, and give their heart and yoiu's one holiday from the national caution ? Without the rich heart, "wealth is an ugly beggar. The king of Schiraz could not afford to be so bountiful as the poor Osman who dwelt at his gate. Osman had a humanity so broad and deep that although his speech was so bold and free with the Koran as to disgust all the dervishes, yet was there never a poor outcast, eccentric, or insane man, some fool who had cut off his beard, or who had been mutilated imder a vow, or had a pet mad- ness in his brain, but fled at once to him ; that great heart lay there so sunny and hospitable in the cen- tre of the country, that it seemed as if the instinct of all sufferers drew them to his side. And the madness which he harbored he did not share. Is noi this to be rich ? this only to be rightly rich ?
But I shall hear without pain that I play the courtier very ill, and talk of that which I do not
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well understand. It is easy to see that what is called by distinction society and fashion has good laws as well as bad, has much that is necessary, and much that is absurd. Too good for banning, and too bad for blessing, it reminds us of a tra- dition of the pagan mythology, in any attempt to settle its character. ' I overheard Jove, one day,' said Silenus, ' talking of destroying the earth ; he said it had failed ; they were all rogues and vixens, who went from bad to worse, as fast as the days succeeded each other. Minerva said she hoj^ed not ; they were only ridicidous little creatures, with this odd circumstance, that they had a blur, or indeter- minate aspect, seen far or seen near ; if you called them bad, they would appear so; if you called them good, they would appear so ; and there was no one person or action among them wliich would not puzzle her owl, much more all Olympus, to Imow whether it was fundamentally bad or good.*
GIFTS.
Gifts of one who loved me, -» 'T was high time they cqine ; When he ceased to love me, Time they stopped for shame.
V.
GIFTS.
It is said that the world is in a state of bank- ruptcy; that the world owes the world more than the world can pay, and ought to go into chancery and be sold. I do not think this general insolvency, which involves in some sort all the population, to be the reason of the difficulty experienced at Christ- mas and New Year and other times, in bestowing gifts ; since it is always so jileasant to be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts. But the im- pediment lies in the choosing. If at any time it comes into my head that a present is due from me to somebody, I am puzzled what to give, mitil the opportunity is gone. Flowers and fruits are al- ways fit presents ; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world. These gay natures contrast with the somewhat stem countenance of ordinary nature : they are like music heard out of a work- house. Nature does not cocker us ; we are chil- dren, not pets ; she is not fond ; everything is
154 GIFTS.
dealt to us without fear or favor, after severe uni- versal laws. Yet these delicate flowers look like the frolic and interference of love and beauty. Men use to tell us that we love flattery even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted. Some- thing like that pleasure, the flowers give us : what am I to whom these sweet hints are addressed ? Fruits are acceptable gifts, because they are the flower of commodities, and admit of fantastic val- ues being attached to them. If a man should send to me to come a hundred miles to visit him and shoidd set before me a basket of fine summer-fruit, I should think there was some proportion between the labor and the reward.
For common gifts, necessity makes pertinences and beauty every day, and one is glad when an im- perative leaves him no option ; since if the man at the door have no shoes, you have not to consider whether you could procure him a paint-box. And as it is always pleasing to see a man eat bread, or drink water, in the house or out of doors, so it is always a great satisfaction to supply these fii'st wants. Necessity does everything well. In our con- dition of universal dependence it seems heroic to let the petitioner be the judge of his necessity, and to give all that is asked, though at great inconven- ience. If it be a fantastic desire, it is better to
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leave to others the office of punishing him. I can think of many parts I should prefer playing to that of the Furies. Next to things of necessity, the rule for a gift, which one of my friends prescribed, is that we might convey to some person that which properly belonged to his character, and was easily associated with him in thought. But our tokens of compliment and love are for the most part bar- barous. Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem ; the shepherd, his lamb ; the farmer, corn ; the miner, a gem ; the sailor, coral and shells ; the painter, his picture ; the girl, a handkerchief of her o^vti sewino-. This is rig-ht and pleasing, for it restores society in so far to the pri- mary basis, when a man's biography is conveyed in his gift, and every man's wealth is an index of his merifc. But it is a cold lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy me something which does not represent your life and talent, but a gold- smith's. This is fit for kings, and rich men who represent kings, and a false state of property, to make presents of gold and silver stuffs, as a kind of symbolical sin-offering, or payment of black- mail.
The law of benefits is a difficult channel, which requii-es careful sailing, or rude boats. It is not
156 GIFTS.
the office of a man to receive gifts. How dare you give tliem ? We wish to be self -sustained. We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We can receive anything from love, for that is a way of receiving it from ourselves ; but not from any one who as- sumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there seems something of de- grading dependence in living by it : —
" Brother, if Jove to thee a present make, Take heed that from his hands thou nothing take."
We ask the whole. Nothing less will content us. We arraign society if it do not give us, besides earth and fire and water, opportunity, love, rever- ence, and objects of veneration.
He is a good man who can receive a gift well. We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming. Some violence I think is done, some degradation borne, when I rejoice or grieve at a gift. I am sorry when my independence is invaded, or when a gift comes from such as do not know my spirit, and so the act is not supported ; and if the gift pleases me overmuch, then I should be ashamed that the donor should read my heart, and see that I love his commodity, and not him. The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto
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him. When the waters are at level, then my goods pass to him, and his to me. All his are mine, all mine his. I say to him, How can you give me this pot o£ oil or this flagon of wine when all your oil and wine is mine, which belief of mine this gift seems to deny ? Hence the fitness of beautiful, not useful things, for gifts. This giving is flat usurpa- tion, and therefore when the beneficiary is ungrate- ful, as all beneficiaries hate all Timons, not at aU considering the value of the gift but looking back to the greater store it was taken from, — I rather sympathize with the beneficiary than with the anger of my lord Timon. For the expectation of gratitude is mean, and is continually pimished by the total in- sensibility of the obliged person. It is a great hap- piness to get off without injury and heart-burning from one who has had the ill-luck to be served by you. It is a very onerous business, this of being served, and the debtor naturally wishes to give you a slap. A golden text for these gentlemen is that which I so admire in the Buddhist, who never thanks, and who says, "Do not flatter your bene- factors."
The reason of these discords I conceive to be that there is no commensurability between a man and any gift. You cannot give anything to a magnani- mous person. After you have served him he at once puts you in debt by his magnanimity. The
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ser\'ice a man renders his friend Is trivial and self- ish compared with the serWee he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alilce before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-wdU I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small. Besides, our action on each other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at random that we can seldom hear the acknowledgments of any person who would thank us for a benefit, without some shame and humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct stroke, but must be content with an oblique one ; we sel- dom have the satisfaction of yielding a direct bene- fit which is directly received. But rectitude scat- ters favors on every side without knowing it, and receives with wonder the thanks of all people.
I fear to breathe any treason against the majesty of love, which is the genius and god of gifts, and to whom we must not affect to prescribe. Let him give kingdoms or flower-leaves indifferently. There are persons from whom we always expect faiiy- tokens ; let us not cease to expect them. This is prerogative, and not to be limited by our municipal rules. For the rest, I like to see that we cannot be bought and sold. The best of hospitality and of generosity is also not in the will, but in fate. I find that I am not much to you ; you do not need me ; you do not feel me ; then am I thrust out of doors,
GIFTS. 1.59
though you proffer me house and lands. No ser- vices are of any value, but only likeness. When I have attempted to join myself to others by services, it proved an intellectual trick, — no more. They eat your service like apples, and leave you out. But love them, and they feel you and delight in you all the time.
I
NATURE.
The rounded world is fair to see,
Nine times folded in mystery :
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its laboring heart,
Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin ;
Self-kindled every atom glows.
And hints the future which it owes.
NATURE.
Theee are days whicli occur in tliis climate, at almost any season of the year, whereiti the world reaches its perfection ; when the air, the heavenly bodies and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring ; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba ; when everything that has life gives sign of satis- faction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcy- ons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather which we distinguish by the name of the Indian smnmer. The day, im- measurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The soli- tary places do not seem quite lonely. At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and
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small, Mase and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he takes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our he- roes. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other cii'cumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majes- tic beauties daily wi*ap us in their bosom. How willingly we would escape the barriers which ren- der them comparatively unpotent, escape the so- phistication and second thought, and suffer nature to intrance us. The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently - reported spells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into the opening land- scape, absorbed by new pictures and by thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by degrees the rec- ollection of home was crowded out of the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present, and we were led in triumph by nature.
NATURE. 165
These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly and native to us. We come to our own, and make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. We never can part with it ; the mind loves its old home % as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our eyes and hands and feet. It is firm water ; it is cold flame ; what health, what affinity ! Ever an old friend, ever like a dear friend and brother when we chat affectedly with strangers, comes in this honest face, and takes a grave liberty with us, and shames us out of our nonsense. Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath. There are all degrees of natural in- fluence, from these quarantine powers of nature, up to her dearest and gravest ministrations to the im- agination and the soul. There is the bucket of cold water from the spring, the wood-fire to which the chilled traveller rushes for safety, — and there is the sublime moral of autiunn and of noon. We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains, and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude and foretell the remotest future. The blue zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet. I
166 NATURE.
think if we should be rapt away into all that we dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel and Uriel, the upjser sky woidd be all that would remain of our furniture.
It seems as if the day was not wholly profane in which we have given heed to some natural object. The fall of snowflakes in a still air, preserving to each crystal its perfect form ; the blowing of sleet over a wide sheet of water, and over plains ; the waving ryefield ; the mimic waving of acres of houstonia, whose innumerable florets whiten and ripple before the eye ; the reflections of trees and flowers in glassy lakes ; the musical steaming odor- ous south wind, which converts all trees to wind- harps ; the crackling and spurting of hemlock in the flames, or of pine logs, which yield glory to the walls and faces in the sittiugroom, — these are the music and pictures of the most ancient religion. My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and on the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and ^\^th one stroke of the paddle I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities, behmd, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spot- ted man to enter without novitiate and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty ; we dip our hands in this painted element; our eyes
NATURE. 167
are bathed in these lights and forms. A holi- day, a villeggiatura, a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever decked and enjoyed, estab- lishes itself on the instant. These sunset clouds, these delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable glances, signify it and proffer it. I am taught the poorness of our invention, the ugli- ness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this original beauty. I am overin- structed for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive and sophisticated. I can no longer Kve without elegance, but a countryman shall be my master of revels. He who knows the most ; he who knows what sweets and vii'tues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, — is the rich and royal man. Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden- houses, islands, parks and preserves, to back their faulty personality with these strong accessories. I do not wonder that the landed interest should be invincible in the State with these dangerous auxil. iaries. These bribe and invite ; not kings, not pal.
168 NATURE.
aces, not men, not women, but these tender and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. We heard what the rich man said, we knew of his villa, his grove, his wine and his company, but the provocar tion and point of the invitation came out of these beguiling stars. In their soft glances I see what men strove to realize in some Versailles, or Paphos, or Ctesiphon. Indeed, it is the magical lights . of the horizon and the blue sky for the background which save all our works of art, which were other- wise bawbles. When the rich tax the poor with ser- vility and obsequiousness, they should consider the effect of men reputed to be the possessors of nature, on imaginative minds. Ah ! if the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches ! A boy hears a military band play on the field at night, and he has kings and queens and famous chivalry palpably before him. He hears the echoes of a horn in a hill coun- try, in the Notch Mountains, for example, which converts the mountains into an -^olian harp, — and this supernatural tiralira restores to him the Dorian mythology, Apollo, Diana, and aU divine hunters and huntresses. Can a musical note be so lofty, so haughtily beautiful ! To the poor young poet, thus fabulous is his picture of society ; he is loyal ; he respects the rich ; they are rich for the sake of his imagination ; how poor his fancy would be, if they were not rich! That they have some
NATURE. 169
high-fenced grove which they call a park ; that they live in larger and better-garnished saloons than he has visited, and go in coaches, keeping only the society of the elegant, to watering-places and to distant cities, — these make the groundwork from which he has delineated estates of romance, com- pared with which their actual possessions are shan- ties and paddocks. The muse herself betrays her son, and enhances the gifts of wealth and well-born beauty by a radiation out of the air, and clouds, and forests that skirt the road, — a certain haughty favor, as if from patrician genii to patricians, a kind of aristocracy in nature, a prince of the power of the air.
The moral sensibility which makes Edens and Tempes so easily, may not be always foimd, but the material landscape is never far off. We can find these enchantments without visiting the Como Lake, or the Madeira Islands. We exaggerate the praises of local scenery. In every landscape the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock as well as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over the brownest, home- liest common with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna, or on the mar- ble deserts of Eg}"pt. The uproUed clouds and the colors of morning and evening will transfigure
170 NATURE.
maples and alders. The difference between land- scape and landscape is small, but there is great difference in the beholders. There is nothing so wonderfid in any particular landscape as the neces- sity of being beautiful under which every landscape lies. Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beau- ty breaks in everywhere.
But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers on this topic, which schoolmen called natura natiirata, or nature passive. One can hardly speak directly of it without excess. It is as easy to broach in mixed companies what is called " the subject of religion." A suscej^tible person does not like to in- dulge his tastes in this kind without the apology of some trivial necessity : he goes to see a wood-lot, or to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral from a remote locality, or he carries a fowling-piece or a fishing-rod. I suppose this shame must have a good reason. A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. The fop of fields is no better than his brother of Broadway. Men are naturally himt- ers and inquisitive of wood-craft, and I suppose that such a gazetteer as wood-cutters and Indians should furnish facts for, would take place in the most sumptuous drawing-rooms of all the "Wreaths" and " Flora's chaplets " of the bookshops ; yet or- dinarily, whether we are too clumsy for so subtle a topic, or from whatever cause, as soon as men begin
NATURE. 171
to write on nature, they fall Into eupliulsm. Fri- volity is a most unfit tribute to Pan, who ought to be represented in the mythology as the most con- tinent of gods. I would not be frivolous before the admirable reserve and prudence of time, yet I cannot renounce the right of returning often to this old topic. The multitude of false churches accred- its the true religion. Literature, poetry, science are the homage of man to this unfathomed secret, con- cerning which no sane man can affect an indiffer- ence or incuriosity. Nature is loved by what is best in us. It is loved as the city of God, although, or rather because there is no citizen. The sunset is unlike anything that is imderneath it : It wants men. And the beauty of nature must always seem unreal and mocking, until the landscape has human figures that are as good as itself. If there were good men, there would never be this rapture in na- ture. If the king is In the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture. The critics who complain of the sickly separation of the beauty of nature from the thing to be done, must consider that our hunting of the picturesque is Inseparable from our protest against false society. Man is fallen ; nature is erect, and serves as a
172 NATURE.
differential tliermometer, detecting the presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man. By fault of our dulness and selfishness we are looking up to nature, but when we are convalescent, nature will look up to us. We see the foaming brook with compunction : if our owti life flowed with the right energy, we shoidd shame the brook. The stream of zeal sparkles with real fu-e, and not with reflex rays of sun and moon. Nature may be as selfishly studied as trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology ; psychology, mesmerism (with intent to show where our spoons are gone); and anatomy and j)hysiology become phrenology and palmistry.
But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on this topic, let us not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, natura natu- ra?is, the quick cause before wliich all forms flee as the driven snows ; itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and multitudes, (as the ancients represented nature by Proteus, a shepherd.) and in imdescribable variety. It publishes itself in crea- tures, reaching from particles and spiculae through transformation on transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate results without a shock or a leap. A little heat, that is a little mo- tion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling white and deadly cold poles of the earth fi'om the prolific tropical climates. All changes pass without vio-
NATURE. 173
lenee, by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space and boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the secularity of nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-school measures, and exchange our Mosaic and Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. We knew nothing rightly, for want of per- spective. Now we learn what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed ; then before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the door for the remote Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite ! how far the quadruped ! how inconceivably remote is man ! All didy arrive, and then race after race of men. It is a long way from granite to the oyster ; farther yet to Plato and the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet all must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides.
Motion or change and identity or rest are the first and second secrets of nature : — Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring. The whirling bubble on the surface of a brook admits us to the secret of the mechanics of the sky. Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A little water made to rotate in a cup explains the formation of the simpler shells ; the addition of matter from
174 NATURE.
year to year arrives at last at the most complex forms ; and yet so poor is nature with all her craft, that from the beginning to the end of the universe she has but one stuff, — but one stuff with its two ends, to serve up all her dream-like variety. Com- pound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the same prop- erties.
Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms and equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and at the same time she arms and equips another animal to destroy it. Space exists to divide crea- tures ; but by clothing the sides of a bird with a few feathers she gives him a petty omnii^resence. The direction is forever onward, but the artist still goes back for materials and begins again with the first elements on the most advanced stage : otherwise all goes to ruin. If we look at her work, we seem to catch a glance of a system in transition. Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness ; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground. The animal is the novice and j)robationer of a more advanced order. The men, though young, having tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, aro
NATURE. 175
already dissipated : the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt ; yet no doubt when they come to con- sciousness they too will curse and swear. Flowers so strictly belong to youth that we adult men soon come to feel that their beautiful generations con- cern not us : we have had our day ; now let the children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our ridicidous tenderness.
Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the eye, from any one object the parts and properties of any other may be predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wall would certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as readily as the city. That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great in- tervals on oiu' customary scale. We talk of devia- tions from natural life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is directly related, there amid es- sences and billetsdoux, to Himmaleh mountain- chains and the axis of the globe. If we consider how much we are nature's, we need not be supersti- tious about towns, as if that terrific or benefic force did not find us there also, and fashion cities. Na- ture, who made the mason, made the house. We may easily hear too much of rural influences. The
176 NATURE.
cool disengagecT air of natural objects makes them envial)le to us, chafed and irritable creatures with red faces, and we think we shall be as grand as they if we camp out and eat roots ; but let us be men instead of woodchucks and the oak and the elm shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets of silk.
Tliis guiding identity runs through all the sur- prises and contrasts of the piece, and characterizes every law. Man carries the world in his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because the history of nature is charac- tered in his brain, therefore is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recomizius; laws which bind the farthest regions of nature : mo^n, plant, gas, crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its own, and recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment. The common sense of Franklin, Dalton, Davy and Black, is the same common sense which made the arrangements which now it discovers.
If the identity expresses organized rest, the coun- ter action runs also into organization. The astron- omers said, ' Give us matter and a little motion and we will construct the universe. It is not enough
NATURE. 177
that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse, one shove to launch the mass and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and centrijj- etal forces. Once heave the ball from the hand, and we can show how all this mighty order grew.' — ' A very unreasonable postulate, ' said the meta- physicians, 'and a plain begging of the question. Could you not prevail to know the genesis of pro- jection, as well as the continuation of it ? ' Nature, meanwhile, had not waited for the discussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed the impulse, and the balls rolled. It was no great affair, a mere push, but the astronomers were right in making much of it, for there is no end to the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push propagates itself through all the balls of the system, and through every atom of every ball ; through all the races of creatures, and throuo;h the history and performances of every individual. Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the world without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse ; so to every creatiu-e nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way ; in every instance a slight gen- erosity, a drop too much. Witliout electricity the air would rot, and without tliis violence of direc- tion which men and women have, without a spice of
VOL. UI. 12
178 NATURE.
big'ot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We aim above the mark to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it. And when now and then comes along some sad, sharp- eyed man, who sees how paltry a game is played, and refuses to play but blabs the secret ; — how then? Is the bird flown? O no, the wary Na- ture sends a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths, with a little more excess of direction to hold them fast to their several aim ; makes them a little wrong-headed in that direction in which they are Tightest, and on goes the game again with new whirl, for a generation or two more. The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to com- pare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon or a ginger- bread-dog, individualizing ever}i;hing, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new tiling, lies dowoi at night overpowered by the fatigue which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Na- tm-e has answered her purpose with the curly, dim- pled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the S}Tnmetrical growth of the bodily frame by all these attitudes and exertions, — an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own. This glitter, this oj)aline lustre plays round the top of every toy to
NATURE. 179
his eye to insure his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We are made alive and kept alive by the same arts. Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of li^dng, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant them- selves ; that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity ; that at least one may replace the parent. All things betray the same calculated pro- fusion. The excess of fear with which the animal frame is hedged round, shrinking from cold, start- ing at sight of a snake or at a sudden noise, pro- tects us, through a multitude of groundless alarms, from some one real danger at last. The lover seeks in marriage his private felicity and perfection, Avith no prospective end ; and nature hides in his happi- ness her own end, namely progeny, or the perpe- tuity of the race.
But the craft with which the world is made, runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane ; each has a vein of folly in his com- position, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to heart. Great causes are never tried on their merits ; but the cause is re-
180 NATURE.
duccd to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters. Not less remarkable is the overfaith of each man in the importance of what he has to do or say. The poet, the prophet, has a higher value for what he utters than any hearer, and therefore it gets spoken. The strong, self-complacent Luther declares with an emphasis not to be mistaken, that " God him- self cannot do without wise men." Jacob Belunen and George Fox betray their egotism in the perti- nacity of their controversial tracts, and James Nay- lor once suffered himself to be worshipped as the Christ. Each prophet comes presently to identify himself with his thought, and to esteem his hat and shoes sacred. However this may discredit such per- sons with the judicious, it helps them mth the peo- ple, as it gives heat, pungency, and publicity to their words. A similar experience is not infrequent in private life. Each young and ardent person writes a diary, in which, w'hen the hours of prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. The 2)ages thus \\Titten are to him biu'ning and fragrant ; he reads them on his knees by midnight and by the morning star ; he wets them with his tears ; they are saci'ed; too good for the world, and hai'dly yet to be shown to the dearest friend. This is the man- child that is born to the soul, and her life still cir- culates in the babe. The umbilical cord has not yet
NATURE. 181
been cut. After some time has elapsed, he begins to wish to admit his friend to this hallowed experi- ence, and with hesitation, yet with firmness, exposes the pages to his eye. Will they not bum his eyes ? The friend coldly turns them over, and passes from the writing to conversation, with easy transition, which strikes the other party with astonishment and vexation. He cannot suspect the writing itself. Days and nights of fervid life, of commimion with angels of darkness and of light have engTaved their shadowy characters on that tear-stained book. He suspects the intelligence or the heart of his friend. Is there then no friend ? He cannot yet credit that one may have impressive experience and yet may not laiow how to put his private fact into literatiu-e : and perhaps the discovery that wisdom has other tongues and ministers than we, that though we should hold our peace the truth would not the less be spoken, might check injuriously the flames of our zeal. A man can only speak so long as he does not feel Ms speech to be partial and inadequate. It is partial, but he does not see it to be so whilst he utters it. As soon as he is released from the instinctive and particular and sees its partiality, he shuts his mouth in disgust. For no man can wi-ite anything who does not think that what he writes is for the time the history of the world ; or do any- thing well who does not esteem his work to be of
182 NATURE.
importance. My work may be of none, but T must not think it of none, or I shall not do it with im- punity.
In like manner, there is throughout nature some- thing mocking, something that leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere ; keeps no faith with us. All promise outruns the performance. We live in a system of approximations. Eyery end is prosj^ec- tive of some other end, which is also temporary ; a round and final success nowhere. We are en- camjjed in nature, not domesticated. Hunger and thirst lead us on to eat and to drink ; but bread and wine, mix and cook them how you will, leave us hungry and thirsty, after the stomach is full. It is the same with all our arts and performances. Our music, our poetry, our language itself are not satis- factions, but suggestions. The hmiger for wealth, which reduces the planet to a garden, fools the eager pursuer. What is the end sought? Plainly to secvire the ends of good sense and beauty from the intrusion of deformity or vulgarity of any kind. But what an ojoerose method! What a train of means to secure a little conversation ! This palace of brick and stone, these servants, this kitchen, these stables, horses and equipage, this bank-stock and file of mortgages ; trade to all the world, coun- try-house and cottage by the waterside, all for a little conversation, high, clear, and spiritual ! Could
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it not be had as well by beggars on the high- way? No, all these things came from successive efforts of these beggars to remove friction from the wheels of life, and give opportimity. Conversa- tion, character, were the avowed ends ; wealth was good as it appeased the animal cravings, cured the smoky chimney, silenced the creaking door, brought friends together in a warm and quiet room, and kept the children and the dimier-table in a differ- ent apartment. Thought, virtue, beauty, were the ends; but it was known that men of thought and virtue sometimes had the headache, or wet feet, or could lose good time whilst the room was getting warm in winter days. Unluckily, in the exertions necessary to remove these inconveniences, the main attention has been diverted to this object; the old aims have been lost sight of, and to remove friction has come to be the end. That is the ridi- cule of rich men ; and Boston, London, Vienna, and now the governments generally of the world are cities and governments of the rich ; and the masses are not men, hut poor men^ that is, men who would be rich ; this is the ridicide of the class, that they arrive with pains and sweat and fury nowhere ; when all is done, it is for nothing. They are like one who has interrupted the conversation of a company to make his speech, and now has forgot- ten what he went to say. The appearance strikes
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the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of aun-i less nations. Were the ends of nature so great and cogent as to exact this immense sacrifice of men?
Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is, as might be expected, a similar effect on the eye from the face of external nature. There is in woods and waters a certain enticement and flat- tery, together with a failure to yield a present sat- isfaction. This disappointment is felt in every landscape. I have seen the softness and beauty of the siunmer clouds floating feathery overhead, enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege of motion, whilst yet they appeared not so much the drapery of this place and hour, as forelooking to some pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond. It is an odd jealousy, but the poet finds himself not near enough to his object. The pine-tree, the river, the bank of flowers before him does not seem to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere. This or this is but outskirt and far-off reflection and echo of the triumph that has passed by and is now at its glancing splendor and heyday, perchance in the neighboring fields, or, if you stand in the field, then in the adjacent woods. The present object shall give you this sense of stillness that follows a pageant wliich has just gone by. What splendid distance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and lovo.
NATURE, 185
Hness in the sunset ! But who can go where they are, or lay his hand or plant his foot thereon? Off they fall from the round world forever and ever. It is the same among the men and women as among the silent trees ; always a referred exist- ence, an absence, never a presence and satisfac- tion. Is it that beauty can never be grasped ? in persons and in landscajDe is equally inaccessible? The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wild- est charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven whilst he pursued her as a star : she cannot be heaven if she stoops to such a one as he.
What shall we say of this omnipresent appear- ance of that first projectile impidse, of this flattery and balldng of so many well-meaning creatures? Must we not suppose somewhere in the universe a slight treachery and derision ? Are we not en- gaged to a serious resentment of tliis use that is made of us ? Are we ticlded trout, and fools of nature ? One look at the face of heaven and earth lays all petulance at rest, and soothes us to \\iser convictions. To the intelligent, nature converts it- self into a vast promise, and will not be rashly ex- plained. Her secret is untold. Many and many an CEdipus arrives ; he has the whole mystery teem- ing in his brain. Alas ! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill ; no syllable can he shape on his lips. Hei
186 NATURE.
mighty orbit vaults like the fresh rainbow into the deep, but no archangel's wing was yet strong enough to follow it and report of the return of the curve. But it also appears that our actions are seconded and disposed to greater conclusions than we designed. We are escorted on every hand through life by spir- itual agents, and a beneficent purpose lies in wait for us. We cannot bandy words with Nature, or deal with her as we deal with persons. If we meas- ure our individual forces against hers we may easily feel as if we were the sport of an insuperable des- tiny. But if, instead of identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that the soul of the worlanan streams through us, we shall find the peace of the morning dwelling first in our hearts, and the fath- omless powers of gravity and chemistry, and, over them, of life, preexisting within us in their highest form.
The imeasiness which the thought of our help- lessness in the chain of causes occasions us, residts from looking too much at one condition of natui'e, namely. Motion. But the drag is never taken from the wheel. Wherever the impiUse exceeds, the Rest or Identity insinuates its compensation. All over the wide fields of earth grows the prunella or self- heal. After every foolish day we sleep off the fumes and furies of its hours; and though we are always engaged wdtli particulars, and often enslaved
NATURE. 187
to them, we bring with us to every experiment the innate miiversal laws. These, while they exist in the mind as ideas, stand around us in nature for- ever embodied, a present sanity to expose and cure the insanity o£ men. Our servitude to particu- lars betrays us into a hundred foolish expectations. We anticipate a new era from the invention of a locomotive, or a balloon ; the new engine brings with it the old checks. They say that by electro- magnetism your salad shall be grown from the seed whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner ; it is a sym- bol of our modem aims and endeavors, of our con- densation and acceleration of objects; — but noth- ing is gained ; natiu'e cannot be cheated ; man's life is but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow. In these checks and impossibilities how- ever we find our advantage, not less than in the im- pulses. Let the victory fall where it will, we are on that side. And the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the centre to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every possi- bility, lends that sublime lustre to death, which philosophy and religion have too outwardly and lit- erally striven to express in the popidar doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no dis- continuity, no spent ball. The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the incarnation of
188 NATURE.
a tliouglit, and turns to a thought again, as ice he- comes water and gas. The world is mind precipi- tated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the vir- tue and pungency of the influence on the mind of natural objects, whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. That power which does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the particle its equal channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and distils its essence into every drop of rain. Every moment instructs, and every object ; for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood ; it convulsed us as pain ; it slid into us as pleasure ; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful la- bor ; we did not guess its essence until after a long time.
POLITICS.
Gold and iron are good
To buy iron and gold ;
AU earth's fleece and food
For their like are sold.
Boded Merlin wise,
Proved Napoleon great, —
Nor kind nor coinage buys
Aught above its rate.
Fear, Craft, and Avarice
Cannot rear a State.
Out of dust to build
What is more than dust, -=
"Walls Amphion piled
Phoebus stabhsh must.
When the Muses nine
With the Virtues meet,
Find to theu' design
An Atlantic seat,
By green orchard boughs
Fended from the heat.
Where the statesman ploughs
Furrow for the wheat ;
When the Church is social worth.
When the state-house is the hearth.
Then the perfect State is come,
The republican at home.
VII. POLITICS.
In dealing with the State we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born ; that they are not su- perior to the citizen ; that every one of them was once the act of a single man ; every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case ; that they all are imitable, all alterable ; we may make as good, we may make better. Society is an illusion to the young citizen. It lies before liim in rigid repose, with certain names, men and institu- tions rooted like oak-trees to the centre, round which all arrange themselves the best they can. But the old statesman knows that society is fluid ; there are no such roots and centres, but any parti- cle may suddenly become the centre of the move- ment and compel the system to gyrate round it ; as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus or Crom- well, does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato or Paul, does forever. But politics rest on necessary foundations, and cannot be treated with
192 POLITICS.
levity. Republics abound in young civilians who believe that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living and emi)lo}Tnents of the popidation, that commerce, ed- ucation, and religion, may be voted in or out ; and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people if only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wdse know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting ; that the State must follow and not lead the character and progi-ess of the citizen ; the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of ; and they only who build on Ideas, build for eternity ; and that the form of government which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the pop- ulation which permits it. The law is only a mem- orandum. We are superstitious, and esteem the statute somewhat: so much life as it has in the character of li\nng men is its force. The statute stands there to say, Yesterday we agreed so and so, but how feel ye this article to-day ? Oiu* statute is a currency which we stamp with our own por- trait : it soon becomes unrecognizable, and in pro- cess of time will return to the mint. Nature is not democratic, nor limited-monarchical, but despotic, and will not be fooled or abated of any jot of her authority by the pertest of her sons ; and as fast as the public mind is opened to more intelligence, the
POLITICS. 193
code is seen to be brute and stammering. It speaks not articulately, and must be made to. Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints to-day, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies ; then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hun- dred years, until it gives place in tiu^ to new pray- ers and pictures. The history of the State sketches in coarse outline the progress of thought, and fol- lows at a distance the delicacy of culture and of as- piration.
The theory of politics which has possessed the mind of men, and which they have expressed the best they could in their laws and in their revolu- tions, considers persons and property as the two ob- jects for whose protection government exists. Of persons, all have equal rights, in virtue of being identical in nature. This interest of course with its whole power demands a democracy. Whilst the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights in property are very unequal. One man owns his clothes, and another owns a county. This accident, depending primari- ly on the skill and ^^Ttue of the parties, of which
VOL. 111. 13
194 POLITICS.
there is every degree, and secondarily on patrimo- ny, falls unequally, and its rights of course are unequal. Personal rights, universally the same, demand a government framed on the ratio of the census ; property demands a government framed on the ratio of owners and of owning. Laban, who has flocks and herds, wishes them looked after by an officer on the frontiers, lest the Midianites shall drive them off ; and pays a tax to that end. Jacob has no flocks or herds and no fear of the Midian- ites, and pays no tax to the officer. It seemed fit that Laban and Jacob should have equal rights to elect the officer who is to defend their persons, but that Laban and not Jacob should elect the officer who is to guard the sheep and cattle. And if ques- tion arise whether additional officers or watch-tow- ers should be provided, must not Laban and Isaac, and those who must sell part of their herds to buy protection for the rest, judge better of this, and with more right, than Jacob, who, because he is a youth and a traveller, eats their bread and not his own ?
In the earliest society the proprietors made their own wealth, and so long as it comes to the owners in the direct way, no other opinion would arise in any equitable community than that property should make the law for property, and persons the law for persons.
But property passes through donation or inherit
POLITICS. 195
ance to those who do not create it. Gift, in one case, makes it as really the new owner's, as labor made it the first owner's : in the other case, of pat- rimony, the law makes an ownership which will be valid in each man's view according* to the estimate which he sets on the public tranquillity.
It was not however found easy to embody the readily admitted principle that property should make law for property, and persons for persons ; since persons and property mixed themselves in every transaction. At last it seemed settled that the rightful distinction was that the proprietors should have more elective franchise than non-pro- prietors, on the Spartan principle of " calling that which is just, equal ; not that which is equal, just."
That principle no longer looks so seK-evident as it appeared in former times, partly because doubts have arisen whether too much weight had not been allowed in the laws to property, and such a struc- ture given to our usages as allowed the rich to en- croach on the poor, and to keep them poor ; but mainly because there is an instinctive sense, how- ever obscure and yet inarticulate, that the whole constitution of property, on its present tenures, is . njurious, and its influence on persons deteriorating and degrading ; that truly the only interest for the consideration of the State is persons ; that property will always follow persons ; that the highest end of
196 POLITICS.
government is the culture of men ; and that if men can he educated, the institutions will share their improvement and the moral sentiment will write the law of the land.
If it be not easy to settle the equity of this ques- tion, the peril is less when we take note of our nat- ural defences. We are kept by better guards than the \dgilance of such magistrates as we commonly elect. Society always consists in greatest part of young and foolish persons. The old, who have seen through the hy[30crisy of courts and statesmen, die and leave no wisdom to their sons. They be- lieve their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age. AVith such an ignorant and deceivable majority, States would soon nm to ruin, but that there are limitations beyond which the folly and ambition of governors cannot go. Things have their laws, as well as men ; and things refuse to be trifled with. Property will be protected. Corn will not grow miless it is planted and manui'ed ; but the farmer will not plant or hoe it unless the chances are a hundred to one that he will cut and harvest it. Under any forms, persons and property must and will have their just sway. They exert their power, as steadily as matter its atti'action. Cover up a pound of earth never so cunningly, divide and subdivide it ; melt it to liquid, convert it to gas ; it will always weigh a pound ; it will always attract
POLITICS. 197
and resist other matter by the full virtue of one pound weight : — and the attributes of a person, his wit and his moral energy, will exercise, under any law or extinguishing tyranny, their proper force, — if not overtly, then covertly ; if not for the law, then against it ; if not wholesomely, then poison- ously ; with right, or by might.
The boundaries of personal influence it is impos- sible to fix, as persons are organs of moral or super- natural force. Under the dominion of an idea which possesses the minds of multitudes, as civil freedom, or the religious sentiment, the powers of persons are no longer subjects of calculation. A nation of men unanimously bent on freedom or con- quest can easily confound the arithmetic of statists, and achieve extravagant actions, out of all propor- tion to their means ; as the Greeks, the Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans, and the French have done.
In like manner to every particle of property be- longs its own attraction. A cent is the representa- tive of a certain quantity of corn or other commod- ity. Its value is in the necessities of the animal man. It is so much warmth, so much bread, so much water, so much land. The law may do what it will with the owTier of property ; its just power will still attach to the cent. The law may in a mad freak say that all shall have power except the
198 POLITICS.
owners of property ; they shall have no vote. Nevertheless, by a higher law, the property will, year after year, write every statute that respects property. The non-proprietor will be the scribe of the proprietor. What the owners wish to do, the whole power of property will do, either through the law or else in defiance of it. Of course I speak of all the property, not merely of the great estates. When the rich are outvoted, as frequently happens, it is the joint treasury of the poor which exceeds their accumulations. Every man owns something, if it is only a cow, or a wheel-barrow, or his arms, and so has that property to dispose of.
The same necessity which secures the rights of person and property against the malignity or folly of the magistrate, determines the form and meth- ods of governing, which are projDer to each nation and to its habit of thought, and nomse transferable to other states of society. In this country we are very vain of our political institutions, which are singular in this, that they sprung, within the mem- ory of living men, from the character and condition of the people, which they still express with suffi- cient fidelity, — and we ostentatiously prefer them to any other in history. They are not better, but only fitter for us. We may be wise in asserting the advantage in modern times of the democratic form, but to other states of society, in which relig.
POLITICS. 199
ion consecrated tlie monarchical, that and not this was expedient. Democracy is better for us, be- cause the religious sentiment of the present time accords better with it. Born democrats, we are no- wise qualified to judge of monarchy, which, to our fathers livins; in the monarchical idea, was also rel- atively right. But our institutions, though in coin- cidence with the spirit of the age, have not any exemption from the practical defects which have discredited other forms. Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word politic, which now for ages has signified cunning.) intimat- ing that the State is a trick ?
The same benign necessity and the same practi- cal abuse appear in the parties, into which each State divides itself, of opponents and defenders of the administration of the government. Parties are also founded on instincts, and have better gmides to their own humble aims than the sagacity of their leaders. They have nothing perverse in their ori- gin, but rudely mark some real and lasting relation. We might as wisely reprove the east wind or the frost, as a political party, whose members, for the most part, could give no account of their position, but stand for the defence of those interests in which they find themselves. Our quarrel mth
200 POLITICS.
them begins when they quit this deep natural ground at the bidding of some leader, and obeying personal considerations, throw themselves into the maintenance and defence of points nowise belong- ing to their system. A party is perpetually cor- rupted by personality. Whilst we absolve the as- sociation from dishonesty, we cannot extend the same charity to their leaders. They reap the re- wards of the docility and zeal of the masses which they direct. Ordinarily our parties are parties of circumstance, and not of principle ; as the planting interest in conflict with the commercial ; the paTty of capitalists and that of operatives : j^arties which are identical in their moral character, and which can easily change ground with each other in the support of many of their measures. Parties of principle, as, religious sects, or the party of free- trade, of universal suffrage, of abolition of slavery, of abolition of capital punishment, — degenerate into personalities, or would inspire enthusiasm. The \dce of our leading parties in this country (which may be cited as a fair specimen of these so- cieties of opinion) is that they do not plant them- selves on the deep and necessary grounds to which they are respectively entitled, but lash themselves to fury in the carrying of some local and momen- tary measure, nowise useful to the commonwealth. Of the two great parties which at this hour almost
POLITICS. 201
share tlie nation between tliem, I slionlcl say that one has the best cause, and the other contains the best men. The philosopher, the poet, or the relig- ious man, will of course wish to cast his vote with the democrat, for free-trade, for wide suffrage, for the abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code, and for facilitating in every manner the access of the yoimg and the poor to the sources of wealth and power. But he can rarely accept the persons whom the so-called popular party propose to him as representatives of these liberalities. They have not at heart the ends which give to the name of democracy what hope and virtue are in it. The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless : it is not loving ; it has no ulterior and divine ends, but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness. On the other side, the conserva- tive party, composed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid, and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy ; it does not build, nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant. From neither party, when in power, has the world any benefit to expect in science, art, or hiunanity, at all commensurate with the resources of the nation.
202 POLITICS.
I do not for these defects despair of our republic. We are not at the mercy of any waves of chance. In the strife of ferocious parties, human nature al- ways finds itself cherished ; as the children of the convicts at Botany Bay are found to have as healthy a moral sentiment as other children. Citizens of feudal states are alai'med at om* democratic institu- tions lapsing into anarchy, and the older and more cautious among ourselves are learning from Euro- peans to look with some terror at our turbulent freedom. It is said that in our license of constru- ing the Constitution, and in the despotism of pub- lic opinion, we have no anchor ; and one foreign observer thinks he has found the safeguard in the sanctity of Marriage among us ; and another thinks he has found it in our Calvinism. Fisher Ames expressed the popidar security more wisely, when he compared a monarchy and a republic, sajang that a monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom ; whilst a republic is a raft, which would never sink, but then your feet are always in water. No forms can have any dangerous importance whilst we are befriended by the laws of things. It makes no difference how many tons weight of atmosphere presses on our heads, so long as the same pressure resists it witliin the lungs. Augment the mass a thousand fold, it cannot begin to crush us, as long
POLITICS. 203
as reaction is equal to action. The fact o£ two poles, of two forces, centripetal and centrifugal, is universal, and each force by its own activity devel- ops the other. Wild liberty develops iron con- science. Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience. 'Lynch-law' prevails only where there is greater hardihood and self-subsistency in the leaders. A mob cannot be a permanency; everybody's interest requires that it shoidd not exist, and only justice satisfies all.
We must trust infinitely to the beneficent neces- sity which sliines through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in them as characteristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads ; and an abstract of the codes of nations woidd be a transcript of the common conscience. Governments have their ori- gin in the moral identity of men. Reason for one is seen to be reason for another, and for every other. There is a middle measure which satisfies all pai*- ties, be they never so many or so resolute for their own. Every man finds a sanction for his simplest claims and deeds, in decisions of his own mind, which he calls Truth and Holiness. In these de- cisions all the citizens find a perfect agreement, and only in these ; not in what is good to eat, good to wear, good use of time, or what amount of land or of public aid each is entitled to claim. This truth and justice men presently endeavor to make appli-
204 POLITICS.
cation of to the measuring of land, the apportion* ment of service, the protection of life and property. Their first endeavors, no doubt, are very awkward. Yet absolute right is the first governor ; or, every government is an imjDure theocracy. The idea after which each commimity is aiming to make and mend its law, is the will of the wise man. The wise man it cannot find in nature, and it makes awk- ward but earnest efforts to secure his government by contrivance ; as by causing the entire people to give their voices on every measure ; or by a double choice to get the representation of the whole ; or by a selection of the best citizens ; or to secm-e the advantages of efficiency and internal peace by con- fiding the government to one, who may himself select his agents. All forms of government sym- bolize an immortal government, common to all dy- nasties and independent of numbers, perfect where two men exist, perfect where there is only one man.
Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the character of his fellows. My right and my ^vrong is their right and their wrong. Whilst I do what is fit for me, and abstain from what is imfit, my neighbor and I shall often agTce in our means, and work together for a time to one end. But whenever I find my dominion over my self not sufficient for me, and undertake the direo.
POLITICS. 205
tion of lilm also, I overstep the truth, and come into false relations to him. I may have so much more skill or strength than he that he cannot ex- press adequately his sense of wrong, but it is a lie, and hurts like a lie both him and me. Love and nature cannot maintain the assumption ; it must be executed by a practical lie, namely by force. Tliis undertakino; for another is the blunder which stands in colossal ugliness in the governments of the world. It is the same thing in nmubers, as in a pair, only not quite so intelligible. I can see well enough a great difference between my setting myself down to a self-control, and my going to make somebody else act after my views; but when a quarter of the human race assume to tell me what I must do, I may be too much disturbed by the circumstances to see so clearly the absurdity of their command. Therefore all public ends look vague and quixotic beside private ones. For any laws but those which men make for themselves, are laughable. If I put myself in the place of my child, and we stand in one thought and see that things are thus or thus, that perception is law for him and me. We are both there, both act. But if, without carrying him into the thought, I look over into his plot, and, guess- ing how it is with him, ordain this or that, he will never obey me. This is the history of governments, »— one man does something wliich is to bind an*
206 POLITICS.
other. A man who cannot be acquainted with me, taxes me ; looking from afar at me ordains that a part of my labor shall go to this or that whimsical end, — not as I, but as he happens to fancy. Be- hold the consequence. Of all debts men are least willing to pay the taxes. What a satire is this on government ! Everywhere they think they get their money's worth, except for these.
Hence the less government we have the better, — the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government is the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual ; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy ; the appearance of the wise man ; of whom the existing government is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation. That which all things tend to educe ; which freedom, cidtivation, intercourse, revolv^tions, go to form and deliver, is character ; that is the end of Nature, to reach unto this coronation of her king. To educate the wise man the State exists, and with the appearance of the wise man the State expires. The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary. The wise man is the State. He needs no army, fort, or navy, — he loves men too well ; no bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him ; no vantage ground, no favorable circmnstance. He needs no library, for he has not done thinking ; no church,
POLITICS. 207
for lie is a prophet ; no statute book, for lie lias tlie lawgiver ; no money, for lie is value ; no road, for he is at home where he is ; no experience, for the life of the creator shoots through him, and looks from his eyes. He has no personal friends, for he who has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him needs not husband and educate a few to share with him a select and poetic life. His relation to men is angelic ; his memory is myrrh to them; his presence, frankincense and flowers.
We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morn- ing star. In our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy. As a political power, as the rightful lord who is to tumble all rulers from their chairs, its presence is hardly yet suspected. Malthus and Ricardo quite omit it ; the Annual Register is silent ; in the Conversations' Lexicon it is not set down ; the President's Message, the Queen's Speech, have not mentioned it; and yet it is never nothing. Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world, alters the world. The gladiators in the lists of power feel, through all their frocks of force and simulation, the pres- ence of worth. I think the very strife of trade and ambition is confession of this divinity; and suc- cesses in thoso fields are the poor amends, the fig-
208 POLITICS.
leaf with which the shamed soul attempts to hide its nakedness. I find the lilce unwilling homage in all quarters. It is because we know how much is due from us that we are impatient to show some petty talent as a substitute for worth. AVe are haunted by a conscience of tliis right to grandeur of character, and are false to it. But each of us has some talent, can do somewhat useful, or grace- fid, or formidable, or amusing, or lucrative. That we do, as an apology to others and to ourselves for not reaching the mark of a good and equal life. But it does not satisfy «s, whilst we thrust it on the notice of our companions. It may throw dust in their eyes, but does not smooth our own brow, or give us the tranquillity of the strong when we walk abroad. We do penance as we go. Oiu' tal- ent is a sort of expiation, and we are constrained to reflect on our splendid moment with a certain humiliation, as somewhat too fine, and not as one act of many acts, a fair expression of our perma- nent energy. Most persons of ability meet in so- ciety with a kind of tacit appeal. Each seems to say, ' I am not aU here.' Senators and presidents have climbed so high with pain enough, not be- cause they think the place specially agreeable, but as an apology for real worth, and to vindicate their manhood in our eyes. This conspicuous chair is their compensation to themselves for being of a
POLITICS. 209
poor, cold, hard nature. They must do what they cau. Like one class of forest animals, they have nothing but a prehensile tail ; climb they must, or crawl. If a man found himself so rich-natured that he could enter into strict relations with the best persons and make life serene around him by the dignity and sweetness of his behavior, could he afford to circumvent the favor of the caucus and the press, and covet relations so hollow and pom- pous as those of a politician ? Surely nobody would be a charlatan who covdd afford to be sincere.
The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self- government, and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own constitu- tion; which work with more energy than we be- lieve whilst we depend on artificial restraints. The movement in this direction has been very marked in modern history. Much has been blind and dis- creditable, but the nature of the revolution is not affected by the vices of the revolters ; for this is a purely moral force. It was never adopted by any party in history, neither can be. It separates the individual from all party, and unites him at the same time to the race. It promises a recognition of higher rights than those of personal freedom, or the security of property. A man has a right to be employed, to be trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never
VOL. III. 14
210 POLITICS.
been tiied. "We must not Imagine that all things are lapsing into confusion if every tender protest- ant he not compelled to bear his part in certain social conventions ; nor doubt that roads can be built, letters carried, and the fruit of labor secured, when the government of force is at an end. Are our methods now so excellent that all competition is hopeless ? could not a nation of friends even devise better ways ? On the other hand, let not the most conservative and timid fear anything from a pre- mature surrender of the bayonet and the system of force. For, according to the order of nature, which is quite suj)erior to our will, it stands thus ; there will always be a government of force where men are selfish ; and when they are pure enough to ab- jure the code of force they will be wise enough to see how these public ends of the post-office, of the highway, of commerce and the exchange of prop- erty, of museimas and libraries, of in^itutions of art and science can be answered.
We live in a very low state of the world, and pay imwilling tribute to governments founded on force. There is not, among the most religious and instructed men of the most religious and civil na- tions, a reliance on the moral sentiment and a suf- ficient belief in the unity of things, to persuade them that society can be maintained without artifi- cial restraints, as weU as the solar system ; or that
POLITICS. 211
the private citizen might be reasonable and a good neighbor, without the hint of a jail or a confiscation. What is strange too, there never was in any man sufficient faith in the power of rectitude to inspire him with the broad design of renovating the State on the principle of right and love. All those w^ho have pretended this design have been partial re- formers, and have admitted in some manner the suj^remacy of the bad State. I do not call to mind a single human being who has steadily denied the authority of the laws, on the simple gTound of his own moral nature. Such designs, full of genius and full of faith as they are, are not entertained except avowedly as air-pictures. If the indi\ddual who exhibits them dare to think them practicable, he disgusts scholars and churchmen ; and men of talent and women of superior sentiments cannot hide their contempt. Not the less does nature con- tinue to fill the heart of youth with suggestions of this enthusiasm, and there are now men, — if in- deed I can speak in the plural number, — more ex- actly, I will say, I have just been conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.
NOMINALIST AND REALISTo
In countless upward-striving waves
The moon-drawn tide-wave strives :
In thousand far-transplanted grafts
The parent fruit survives ;
So, in the new-born inUlions,
The perfect Adam Uves.
Not less are summer mornings dear
To every child they wake,
And each with novel life his sphere
Fills for his proper sake.
VIII. NOMINALIST AND REALIST.
I CANNOT often enough say that a man is only a relative and representative nature. Each is a hint of the truth, but far enough from being that truth which yet he quite newly and inevitably suggests to us. If I seek it in him I shall not find it. Could any man conduct into me the pure stream of that which he pretends to be ! Long afterwards I find that quality elsewhere which he promised me. The genius of the Platonists is intoxicating to the stu- dent, yet how few particvdars of it can I detach from all their books. The man momentarily stands for the thought, but will not bear examination ; and a society of men will cursorily represent well enough a certain quality and culture, for example, chivalry or beauty of manners ; but separate them and there is no gentleman and no lady in the group. The least hint sets us on the pursuit of a character which no man realizes. We have such exorbitant eyes that on seeing the smallest arc we complete the curve, and when the curtain is lifted from the diagram
216 NOMINALIST AND REALIST.
which it seemed to veil, we are vexed to find that no more was drawn than just that fragment of an arc which we first beheld. We are greatly too lib- eral in our construction of each other's faculty and promise. Exactly what the parties have already done they shall do again ; but that which we in- ferred from their nature and inception, they will not do. That is in nature, but not in them. That happens in the world, which we often witness in a public debate. Each of the sj)eakers expresses himself imperfectly ; no one of them hears much that another says, such is the preoccupation of mind of each ; and the audience, who have only to hear and not to speak, judge very wisely and superiorly how wrongheaded and unskilful is each of the de- baters to his own affair. Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but spnmetrical men never. When I meet a pure intellectual force or a generosity of affection, I believe here then is man ; and am presently mortified by the discovery that tliis individual is no more available to his own or to the general ends than his companions ; because the power which drew my respect is not supported by the total symphony of his talents. All persons exist to society by some shining trait of beauty or utility which they have. We borrow the proportions of the man from that one fine feature, and finish the portrait symmetrically ; which is false, for the rest
NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 217
of his body is small or deformed. I observe a per- son who makes a good public appearance, and con- clude thence the perfection of his private character, on which this is based ; but he has no private char- acter. He is a gracefvd cloak or lay-figure for holi- days. All our poets, heroes, and saints, fail utterly in some one or in many parts to satisfy our idea, fail to draw our spontaneous interest, and so leave us without any hope of realization but in our own future. Our exaggeration of all fine characters arises from the fact that we identify each in turn with the soul. But there are no such men as we fable ; no Jesus, nor Pericles, nor Caesar, nor An- gelo, nor Washington, such as we have made. We consecrate a great deal of nonsense because it was allowed by great men. There is none without his foible. I believe that if an angel should come to chant the chorus of the moral law, he would eat too much gingerbread, or take liberties with private letters, or do some precious atrocity. It is bad enough that our geniuses cannot do anything use- ful, but it is worse that no man is fit for society who has fine traits. He is admired at a distance, but he cannot come near without appearing a crip- ple. The men of fine parts protect themselves by solitude, or by courtesy, or by satire, or by an acid worldly manner ; each concealing as he best can his incapacity for useful association, but they want either love or self-reliance.
218 NOMINALIST AND REALIST.
Our native love of reality joins with this experi- enee to teacli us a little reserve, and to dissuade a too sudden surrender to the brilliant qualities of persons. Young people admire talents or particu- lar excellences ; as we grow older we value total powers and effects, as the impression, the quality, the spirit of men and things. The genius is all. The man, — it is his system : we do not try a soli- tary word or act, but his habit. The acts which you praise, I praise not, since they are departures from his faith, and are mere compliances. The magnetism which arranges tribes and races in one polarity is alone to be respected ; the men are steel- filings. Yet we unjustly select a particle, and say, ' O steel-filing number one ! what heart-drawings I feel to thee ! what prodigious virtues are these of thine ! how constitvitional to thee, and incommuni- cable ! ' Whilst we speak the loadstone is with- drawn ; down falls our filing in a heap with the rest, and we continue our mummery to the "VNTctched shaving. Let us go for universals ; for the mag- netism, not for the needles. Human life and its persons are poor empirical pretensions. A personal influence is an ignis fatuus. If they say it is great, it is great ; if they say it is small, it is small ; you see it, and you see it not, by turns ; it borrows all its size from the momentary estimation of the sjDcak- ers : the AViU-of-the-wisp vanishes if you go too
NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 219
near, vanishes if you go too far, and only blazes at one angle. Who can tell if Washington be a great man or no ? Who can tell if Franklin be ? Yes, or any but the twelve, or six, or three great gods of fame ? And they too loom and fade before the eternal.
We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets of faculties, the particu- lar and the catholic. We adjust our instrument for general observation, and sweep the heavens as easily as we pick out a single figure in the terres- trial landscape. We are practically skilful in de- tecting elements for which we have no place in our theory, and no name. Thus we are very sensible of an atmospheric influence in men and in bodies of men, not accounted for in an arithmetical ad- dition of all theii" measurable properties. There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be foimd in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society. England, strong, punctual, practical, well-spoken England I should not find if I shoidd go to the island to seek it. In the parliament, in the play-house, at dinner-tables, I might see a great number of rich, ignorant, book-read, conven- tional, proud men, — many old women, — and not anywhere the Englishman who made the good speeches, combined the accurate engines, and did the bold and nervous deeds. It is even worse in
220 NOMINALIST AND REALIST.
America, wliere, from tlie intellectual quickness of the race, the genius of the country is more splen- did in its promise and more slight in its perform- ance. Webster cannot do the work of Webster. We conceive distinctly enough the French, the Spanish, the German genius, and it is not the less real that perhaps we should not meet in either of those nations a single individual who corresponded with the type. We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone. And, universally, a good example of this social force is the veracity of language, which can- not be debauched. In any controversy concerning morals, an aj^peal may be made with safety to the sentiments which the language of the peoj^le ex- presses. Proverbs, words, and grammar-inflections convey the public sense with more purity and pre- cision than the wisest individual.
In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the Realists had a good deal of reason. General ideas are essences. They are our gods : they round and ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living. Our proclivity to details cannot quite degrade our life and divest it of poetry. The day-laborer is reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale, yet he is saturated with the laws of the world
NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 221
His measures are the hours ; morning and night, solstice and equinox, geometry, astronomy and all the lovely accidents of nature play through his mind. Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses. Property keej)s the accounts of the world, and is always moral. The property will be found where the labor, the wisdom, and the ^drtue have been in nations, in classes, and (the whole life-time considered, with the compensations) in the individ- ual also. How wise the world appears, when the laws and usages of nations are largely detailed, and the completeness of the mimicipal system is consid- ered! Nothing is left out. If you go into the markets and the custom-houses, the insurers' and notaries' of&ces, the offices of sealers of weights and measures, of inspection of provisions, — it will ap- pear as if one man had made it all. Wherever you go, a wit like your own has been before you, and has realized its thoiight. The Eleusinian mys- teries, the Egyptian architecture, the Indian as- tronomy, the Greek sculpture, show that there al- ways were seeing and knowing men in the planet. The world is fvill of masonic ties, of guilds, of se- cret and public legions of honor ; that of scholars, for example ; and that of gentlemen, fraternizing with the upper class of every coimtry and every culture.
222 NOMINALrST AND REALIST.
I am very ruucli struck in literature by the ap- pearance that one person ^^Tote all the books ; as if the editor of a journal planted his body of report- ers in different parts of the field of action, and re- lieved some by others from time to time ; but there is such equality and identity both of judgment and point of view in the narrative that it is plainly the work of one all-seeing, all-hearing gentleman. I looked into Poise's Odyssey yesterday : it is as correct and elegant after our canon of to-day as if it were newly written. The modernness of all good books seems to give me an existence as wide as man. What is well done I feel as if I did ; what is ill done I reck not of. Shakspeare's passages of passion (for example, in Lear and Hamlet) are in the very dialect of the present year. I am faithful again to the whole over the members in my use of books. I find the most pleasure in reading a book in a manner least flattering to the author. I read Proclus, and sometimes Plato, as I might read a dictionary, for a mechanical helj) to the fancy and the imagination. I read for the lustres, as if one should use a fine picture in a chromatic experiment, for its rich colors. 'T is not Proclus, but a piece of nature and fate that I explore. It is a greater joy to see the author's author, than himself. A higher pleasure of the same kind I found lately at a con- cert, where I went to hear Handel's Messiah. As
NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 223
the master overpowered the littleness and incapa- bleness of the performers and made them conduc- tors of his electricity, so it was easy to observe what efforts natm-e was making, through so many hoarse, wooden, and imperfect persons, to produce beautifid voices, fluid and soid-giiided men and women. The genius of nature was paramount at the oratorio.
This preference of the genius to the parts is the secret of that deification of art, which is found in all superior minds. Art, in the artist, is propor- tion, or a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it de- notes. Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men are encumbered -wdth person- ality, and talk too much. In modem sculpture, picture, and poetry, the beauty is miscellaneous ; the artist works here and there and at all points, adding and adding, instead of unfolding the unit of his thought. Beautiful details we must have, or no artist ; but they must be means and never other. The eye must not lose sight for a moment of the purpose. Lively boys write to their ear and eye, and the cool reader finds nothing but sweet jingles in it. When they grow older, they respect the argument.
We obey the same intellectual integrity when we
224 NOMINALIST AND REALIST.
study in exceptions the law of the world. Anom- alous facts, as the never quite obsolete rumors of magic and demonology, and the new allegations of phrenologists and neurologists, are of ideal use. They are good indications. Homoeopathy is insig- nificant as an art of healing, but of great value as criticism on the hygeia or medical practice of the time. So with Mesmerism, Swedenborgism, Fou- rierism, and the Millennial Church ; they are poor pretensions enough, but good criticism on the sci- ence, philosophy, and preaching of the day. For these abnormal insights of the adepts ought to be normal, and things of course.
All things show us that on every side we are very near to the best. It seems not worth while to exe- cute with too much pains some one intellectual, or aesthetical, or civil feat, when presently the dream will scatter, and we shall burst into universal power. The reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes. Whilst we are waiting we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with crimes.
Thus we settle it in our cool libraries, that all the agents with which we deal are subalterns, which we can well afford to let pass, and life will be simpler when we live at the centre and flout the surfaces. I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but some*
NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 225
times I must pincli myself to keep awake and pre- serve the due decorum. They melt so fast iuto each other that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals. Though the uninsj)ired man certainly finds persons a conven- iency in household matters, the divine man does not respect them ; he sees them as a rack of clouds, or a fleet of ripples which the wind drives over the sur- face of the water. But this is flat rebellion. Na- ture will not be Buddhist : she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million of fresh particidars. It is all idle talking : as much as a man is a whole, so is he also a part ; and it were partial not to see it. What you say in your pompous distribution only distributes you into your class and section. You have not got rid of parts by denying them, but are the more partial. You are one thing, but Nature is one thing and the other thing, in the same moment. She will not re- main orbed in a thought, but rushes into persons ; and when each jjerson, inflamed to a fury of person- ality, would conquer all things to his poor crotchet, she raises up against him another person, and by many persons incarnates again a sort of whole. She will have all. Nick Bottom cannot play all the parts, work it how he may ; there will be some- body else, and the world will be round. Everything
must have its flower or effort at the beautifid, VOL. in. 15
226 NOMINALIST AND REALIST.
coarser or finer according to its stuff. They re- lieve and recommend each other, and the sanity of society is a balance of a thousand insanities. She punishes abstractionists, and will only forgive an in- duction which is rare and casual. We like to come to a height of land and see the landscape, just as we value a general remark in conversation. But it is not the intention of Nature that we should live by general views. We fetch fire and water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and get our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are the victims of these details ; and once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational moment. If we were not thus infatuated, if we saw the real from hour to hour, we should not be here to write and to read, but should have been burned or frozen long ago. She would never get anything done, if she suffered admirable Crichtons and vmiversal geniuses. She loves better a wheelwright who dreams all night of wheels, and a groom who is part of his horse ; for she is full of work, and these are her hands. As the frugal farmer takes care that his cattle shall eat down the rowen, and swine shall eat the waste of his house, and poultry shall pick the crumbs, — so our economical mother dispatches a new genius and habit of mind into every district and condition of existence, plants an eye wherever a new ray of light can fall, and gathering up into some man
NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 227
every property in the universe, establishes thou- sandfold occult mutual attractions among her off- spring, that aU this wash and waste of power may be imparted and exchanged.
Great dangers undoubtedly accrue from this in- carnation and distribution of the godhead, and hence Nature has her maligners, as if she were Circe; and Alphonso of Castile fancied he could have given useful advice. But she does not go un- provided ; she has hellebore at the bottom of the cup. Solitude would ripen a plentiful crop of des- pots. The recluse thinks of men as having his manner, or as not having his manner ; and as hav- ing degTees of it, more and less. But when he comes into a public assembly he sees that men have very different manners from his own, and in their way admirable. In his childhood and youth he has had many checks and censures, and thinks mod- estly enough of his own endowment. When after- wards he comes to unfold it in propitious circum- stance, it seems the only talent; he is delighted with his success, and accounts himself already the fellow of the great. But he goes into a mob, into a banking house, into a mechanic's shop, into a mill, into a laboratory, into a ship, into a camp, and in each new place he is no better than an idiot ; other talents take place, and rule the hour. The rotation which whirls every leaf and pebble to the
228 NOMINALIST AND REALIST.
niericllan, reaches to every gift of man, and we all take turns at the top.
For Xature, who abhors mannerism, has set her heart on breaking up all styles and tricks, and it is so much easier to do what one has done before than to do a new thing, that there is a perpetual tendency to a set mode. In every conversation, even the highest, there is a certain trick, which may be soon learned by an acute person and then that particular style continued indefinitely. Each man too is a tyrant in tendency, because he would impose his idea on others ; and their trick is their natural defence. Jesus woidd absorb the race; but Tom Paine or the coarsest blasphemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of power. Hence the immense benefit of party in politics, as it reveals faidts of character in a chief, which the intellectual force of the persons, with ordinary op- portunity and not hurled into aphelion by hatred, coidd not have seen. Since we are all so stupid, what benefit that there should be two stupidities ! It is like that brute advantage so essential to as- tronomy, of having the diameter of the earth's or- bit for a base of its triangles. Democracy is mo- rose, and runs to anarchy, but in the State and in the schools it is indispensable to resist the consol- idation of all men into a few men. If John was perfect, why are you and I alive ? As long as any
NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 229
man exists, there is some need of him ; let him fight for his o^Ti. A new poet has appeared ; a new character approached us ; why should we re- fuse to eat bread until we have found his regiment and section in our old army-files ? Why not a new man ? Here is a new enterprise of Brook Farm, of Skeneateles, of Northampton : why so impatient to baptize them Essenes, or Port-Royalists, or Shakers, or by any known and effete name ? Let it be a new way of living. Why have only two or three ways of life, and not thousands ? Every- man is wanted, and no man is wanted much. We came tliis time for condiments, not for corn. We want the great genius only for joy ; for one star more in our constellation, for one tree more in our grove. But he tliinks we wish to belong to him, as he wishes to occupy us. He greatly mistakes us. I think I have done well if I have acquired a new word from a good author ; and my business with him is to find my own, though it were only to melt him dowTi into an epithet or an image for daily use: —
" Into pair.t •n'ill I grind tliee, my bride ! "
To embroil the confusion, and make it impossi- ble to arrive at any general statement, — when we have insisted on the imperfection of indi\dduals, our affections and our experience lu-ge that every
230 NOMINALIST AND REALIST.
individual is entitled to honor, and a very generous treatment is sure to be repaid. A recluse sees only two or three persons, and allows them all their room ; they spread themselves at large. The states- man looks at many, and compares the few habitu- ally wdth others, and these look less. Yet are they not entitled to this generosity of reception ? and is not munificence the means of insight ? For though gamesters say that the cards beat all the players, though they were never so skilful, yet in the con- test we are now considering, the players are also the game, and share the power of the cards. If you criticise a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and instead of the poet, are censuring your own caricature of him. For there is somewhat spheral and infinite in every man, especially in every genius, which, if you can come very near him, sports wuth all your limita- tions. For rightly every man is a channel through which heaven floweth, and whilst I fancied I was criticising him, I was censuring or rather terminat- ing my own sold. After taxing Goethe as a cour- tier, artificial, unbelieving, worldly, — I took up this book of Helena, and found him an Indian of the wilderness, a piece of pure nature like an apple or an oak, large as morning or night, and virtuous as a brier-rose.
But care is taken that the whole tune shall be
NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 231
played. If we were not kept among surfaces, everything would be large and universal ; now the excluded attributes burst in on us with the more brightness that they have been excluded. " Your turn now, my turn next," is the rule of the game. The universality being hindered in its primary form, comes in the secondary form of all sides; the points come in succession to the meridian, and by the speed of rotation a new whole is formed. Nature keeps herself whole and her representation complete in the experience of each mind. She suffers no seat to be vacant in her college. It is the secret of the world that aU things subsist and do not die but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again. Whatever does not con- cern us is concealed from us. As soon as a person is no longer related to our present well-being, he is concealed, or dies, as we say. Eeally, aU things and persons are related to us, but according to our nature they act on us not at once but in suc- cession, and we are made aware of their presence one at a time. All persons, all things which we have known, are here present, and many more than we see ; the world is f uU. As the ancient said, the world is a ^9?e7i«m or solid ; and if we saw all things that really surroimd us we should be impris- oned and unable to move. For though nothing is impassable to the soul, but aU things are pervious
232 NOMINALIST AND REALIST.
to it and like highways, yet this is only whilst the soul does not see them. As soon as the soul sees any object, it stops before that object. Therefore the divine Providence which keeps the universe open in every direction to the soul, conceals all the furniture and all the persons that do not concern a particidar soul, from the senses of that individual. Tlirough solidest eternal things the man finds his road as if they did not subsist, and does not once suspect their being. As soon as he needs a new object, suddenly he beholds it, and no longer at- tempts to pass through it, but takes another way. When he has exhausted for the time the nom-ish- ment to be drawn from any one person or thing, that object is withdrawn from his observation, and though still in his immediate neighborhood, he does not suspect its presence. Nothing is dead : men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand look- ing out of the window, sound and well, m some new and strange disguise. Jesus is not dead; he is very well alive : nor John, nor Paul, nor Mahomet, nor Aristotle ; at times we believe we have seen them all, and could easily tell the names under which they go.
If we cannot make volimtary and conscious steps in the admirable science of universals, let us see the parts wisely, and infer the genius of nature
NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 233
from tlie best particulars with a becoming charity. What is best in each kind is an index of what should be the average of that thing. Love shows me the opulence of nature, by disclosing to me in my friend a hidden wealth, and I infer an equal depth of good in every other direction. It is com- monly said by farmers that a good pear or apple costs no more time or pains to rear than a poor one; so I would have no work of art, no speech, or action, or thought, or friend, but the best.
The end and the means, the gamester and the game, — life is made up of the intermixture and reaction of these two amicable powers, whose mar- riage appears beforehand monstrous, as each denies and tends to abolish the other. We must reconcile the contradictions as we can, but their discord and their concord introduce wild absurdities into our thinking and speech. No sentence will hold the whole truth, and the only way in which we can be just, is by giving ourselves the lie ; Speech is bet- ter than silence ; silence is better than speech ; — All things are in contact ; every atom has a sphere of repulsion ; — Things are, and are not, at the same time ; — and the like. All the universe over, there is but one thing, this old Two-Face, creator- creature, mind-matter, right-wrong, of which any proposition may be affirmed or denied. Very fitly therefore I assert that every man is a partialist ;
234 NOMINALIST AND REALIST.
that nature secures Mm as an instrument by self- conceit, preventing the tendencies to religion and science ; and now further assert, that, each man's genius being nearly and affectionately explored, he is justified in his individuality, as his nature is found to be immense ; and now I add that every man is a universalist also, and, as our earth, whilst it spms on its own. axis, spins all the time around the sun through the celestial spaces, so the least of its rational children, the most dedicated to his pri- vate affair, works out, though as it were under a disguise, the universal problem. We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pump- kin in the field goes through every point of pump- kin history. The rabid democrat, as soon as he is senator and rich man, has ripened beyond possibil- ity of sincere radicalism, and unless he can resist the sun, he must be conservative the remainder of his days. Lord Eldon said in his old age that " if he were to begin life again, he woidd be damned but he would begin as agitator."
We hide this imiversality if we can, but it ap- pears at all points. We are as ungrateful as chil- dren. There is nothing we cherish and strive to draw to us but in some hour we turn and rend it. We keep a running fire of sarcasm at ignorance and the life of the senses ; then goes by, perchance, a fair girl, a piece of life, gay and happy, and
NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 235
making the commonest offices beautiful by the en- ergy and heart with which she does them ; and see- ing this we admire and love her and them, and say, ' Lo ! a genuine creature of the fair earth, not dis- sipated or too early ripened by books, philosophy, religion, society, or care ! ' insinuating a treachery and contempt for all we had so long loved and wrought in ourselves and others.
If we could have any security against moods ! If the profoundest prophet could be holden to his words, and the hearer who is ready to sell all and join the crusade could have any certificate that to- morrow his prophet shall not imsay his testimony ! But the Truth sits veiled there on the Bench, and never interposes an adamantine syllable ; and the most sincere and revolutionary doctrine, put as if the ark of God wpre carried forward some furlongs, and planted there for the succor of the world, shall in a few weeks be coldly set aside by the same speaker, as morbid ; " I thought I was right, but I was not," — and the same immeasurable credulity demanded for new audacities. If we were not of all opinions I if we did not in any moment shift the platform on which we stand, and look and speak from another ! if there could be any regidation, any ' one-hour-rule,' that a man should never leave his point of view without sound of trumpet. I am always insincere, as always knowing there are other moods.
236 NOMINALIST AND REALIST.
How sincere and confidential we can be, saying all that lies in the mind, and yet go away feeling that all is yet unsaid, from the incapacity of the parties to know each other, although they use the same words ! My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to exj)lanation until all is said which words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption. Is it that every man believes every other to be an in- curable partialist, and himself a universalist ? I talked yesterday with a pair of philosophers ; I en- deavored to show my good men that I liked every- thing by turns and nothing long ; that I loved the centre, but doated on the superficies ; that I loved man, if men seemed to me mice and rats ; that I revered saints, but woke up glad that the old pagan world stood its ground and died hard ; that I was glad of men of every gift and nobility, but would not live in their arms. Could they but once under- stand that I loved to know that they existed, and heartily wished them God-speed, yet, out of my poverty of life and thought, had no word or wel- come for them when they came to see me, and could well consent to their living in Oregon for any claim I felt on them, — it would be a great satisfaction.
NEW ENGLAND REFOEMERS.
In the suburb, in the town, On the railway, in the square. Came a beam of goodness down Doubling daylight everywhere : Peace now each for malice takes, Beauty for his sinful weeds. For the angel Hope aye makes Him an angel whom she leads.
NEW ENGLAND REEORMEES.
A LECTURE READ BEFORE THE SOCIETY IX AMORY HALL, ON SUNDAY, MARCH 3, 1844.
Whoever has had opportunity of acquaintance with society in New England during the last twen- ty-five years, with those middle and with those lead- ing sections that may constitute any just represen- tation of the character and aim of the commimity, will have been struck with the great activity of thought and experimenting. His attention must be commanded by the signs that the Church, or relig- ious party, is falling from the Church nominal, and is appearing in temperance and non-resistance socie- ties ; in movements of abolitionists and of social- ists ; and in very significant assemblies called Sab- bath and Bible Conventions ; composed of idtraists, of seekers, of all the soul of the soldiery of dissent, and meeting to call in question the authority of the Sabbath, of the priesthood, and of the Church. In these movements nothing was more remarkable than the discontent they begot in the movers. The spirit of protest and of detachment drove the mem- bers of these Conventions to bear testimony against
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the Church, and immediately afterwards to declare their discontent with these Conventions, their inde- pendence of their colleagues, and their impatience of the methods whereby they were working. They defied each other, like a congi-ess of kings, each of whom had a realm to rule, and a way of his own that made concert unprofitable. What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world ! One apostle thought all men should go to farming, and another that no man shoidd buy or sell, that the use of money was the cardinal evil ; another that the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and drink damnation. These made imleavened bread, and were foes to the death to fermentation. It was in vain urged by the housewife that God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation ; that fermentation develops the saccharine element in the grain, and makes it more palatable and more digestible. No ; they wish the jDure wheat, and ^^^ll die but it shall not ferment. Stop, dear nature, these incessant advances of thine ; let us scotch these ever-rolling wheels ! Others attacked the system of agricul- ture, the use of animal manures in farming, and the tyranny of man over brute nature ; these abuses polluted his food. The ox must be taken from the plough and the horse from the cart, the hundred acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man must
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walk, wlierever boats and locomotives will not carry him. Even the insect world was to be defended, — that had been too long neglected, and a society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, and mosqui- tos was to be incorporated without delay. With these appeared the adepts of homoeopathy, of hy- dropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenology, and their wonderful theories of the Christian miracles I Oth- ers assailed particular vocations, as that of the law- yer, that of the merchant, of the manufacturer, of the clergyman, of the scholar. Others attacked the institution of marriage as the fountain of social evils. Others devoted themselves to the worrjdng of churches and meetings for public worship ; and the fertile forms of antinomianism among the elder puritans seemed to have their match in the plenty of the new harvest of reform.
With this din of opinion and debate there was a keener scrutiny of institutions and domestic life than any we had known ; there was sincere protest- ing against existing evils, and there were changes of emplopnent dictated by conscience. No doubt there was plentiful vaporing, and cases of backslid- ing might occur. But in each of these movements emerged a good residt, a tendency to the adoption of simpler methods, and an assertion of the suffi- ciency of the private man. Thus it was directly in the spirit and genius of the age, what happened in
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one instance when a church censured and threatened to excommunicate one of its members on account of the somewhat hostile part to the church which his conscience led him to take in the anti-slavery busi- ness ; the threatened individual immediately ex- communicated the church, in a public and formal process. This has been several times repeated: it was excellent when it was done the first time, but of course loses all value when it is copied. Every project in the history of reform, no matter how vio- lent and surprising, is good when it is the dictate of a man's genius and constitution, but very dull and suspicious when adopted from another. It is right and beautiful in any man to say, ' I will take this coat, or this book, or this measure of com of yours,' — in whom we see the act to be original, and to flow from the whole spirit and faith of him ; for then that taking will have a giving as free and divine ; but we are very easily disposed to resist the same generosity of speech when we miss origi- nality and truth to character in it.
There was in all the practical activities of New England for the last quarter of a century, a grad- ual withdrawal of tender consciences from the so- cial organizations. There is observable throughout, the contest between mechanical and spiritual meth- ods, but with a steady tendency of the thoughtful and %artuous to a deeper belief and reliance on spir- itual facts.
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In politics for example it is easy to see the pro- gress of dissent. The country is full of rebellion ; the country is full of kings. Hands oif ! let there be no control and no int«^rference in the adminis- tration of the affairs of this kingdom of me. Hence the growth of the doctrine and of the party of Free Trade, and the willingness to try that ex- periment, in the face of what appear incontestable facts. I confess, the motto of the Globe news- paper is so attractive to me that I can seldom find much appetite to read what is below it in its col- umns : " The world is governed too much." So the country is frequently affording solitary exam- ples of resistance to the government, solitary nul- lifiers, who throw themselves on their reserved rights ; nay, who have reserved all their rights ; who reply to the assessor and to the clerk of court that they do not know the State, and embarrass the courts of law by non-juring and the commander- in-chief of the militia by non-resistance.
The same disposition to scrutiny and dissent ap. peared in civil, festive, neighborly, and domestic society. A restless, prying, conscientious criticism broke out in unexpected quarters. Who gave me the money with which I bought my coat ? Why should professional labor and that of the counting- house be paid so disproportionately to the labor of the porter and woodsawyer? This whole business
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of Trade gives me to pause and think, as it consti- tutes false relations between men ; inasmuch as I am prone to count myself relieved of any respon- sibility to behave well and nobly to that person whom I pay with money ; whereas if I had not that commodity, I should be put on my good behaWor in all companies, and man would be a benefactor to man, as being liimself his only certificate that he had a right to those aids and services which each asked of the other. Am I not too protected a per- son ? is there not a wide disparity between the lot of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my poor sister ? Am I not defrauded of my best cul- ture in the loss of those gjinnastics which manual labor and the emergencies of poverty constitute ? I find nothing healthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of society ; I do not like the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my conformity. The same insatiable criticism may be traced in the efforts for the reform of Education. The pop- ular education has been taxed with a want of truth and nature. It was complained that an education to things was not given. We are students of words : we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words,
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and do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or oui* legs, or our eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the woods, we cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour of the day by the sun. It is well if we can swim and skate. We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, of a dog, of a snake, of a spider. The Roman rule was to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, ' All summer in the field, and all winter in the study.' And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow-men. The lessons of science should be ex- perimental also. The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy ; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow, outv^alues all the theories ; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than vol- umes of chemistry.
One of the traits of the new spirit is the in- quisition it fixed on our scholastic devotion to the dead lang-uages. The ancient languages, with great beauty of structure, contain wonderful remains of genius, which draw, and always will draw, certain likeminded men, — Greek men, and Roman men, — in all coimtries, to their study ; but by a wonderful drowsiness of usage they had exacted the study of
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all men. Once (say two centuries ago), Latin and Greek had a strict relation to all the science and culture there was in Europe, and the Mathematics had a momentary importance at some era of activ- ity in physical science. These things became ste- reotyped as education, as the manner of men is. But the Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Latin, Greek, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high and dry on the beach, and was now creating and feeding other matters at other ends of the world. But in a hundred high schools and colleges this warfare against common sense still goes on. Four, or six, or ten years, the pupil is parsing Greek and Latin, and as soon as he leaves the University, as it is ludicrously styled, he shuts those books for the last time. Some thou- sands of yoimg men are graduated at our colleges in this country every year, and the persons who, at forty years, still read Greek, can all be coimted on your hand. I never met with ten. Four or five persons I have seen who read Plato.
But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal talent of this country should be directed in its best years on studies w^hich lead to nothing? What was the consequence? Some intelligent j^ersons said or thought, 'Is that Greek and Latin some spell to conjure with, and not words of reason ? If
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the physician, the lawyer, the divine, never use it to come at their ends, I need never learn it to come at mine. Conjuring is gone out o£ fashion, and I will omit this conjugating, and go straight to af- fairs.' So they jumped the Greek and Latin, and read law, medicine, or sermons, without it. To the astonishment of all, the self-made men took even ground at once with the oldest of the regidar graduates, and in a few months the most conserva- tive circles of Boston and New York had quite forgotten who of their gownsmen was college-bred, and who was not.
One tendency appears alike in the philosophical speculation and in the rudest democratical move- ments, through all the petulance and all the puer- ility, the wish, namely, to cast aside the superfluous and arrive at short methods ; urged, as I suppose, by an intuition that the human spirit is equal to all emergencies, alone, and that man is more often injured than helped by the means he uses.
I conceive this gradual casting off of material aids, and the indication of gi'owing trust in the private self-supplied powers of the indi\adual, to be the affirmative princii^le of the recent philos- ophy, and that it is feeling its owti profound truth and is reaching forward at this very hour to the happiest conclusions. I readily concede that in this, as in every period of intellectual activity,
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there has been a noise of denial and protest ; much was to be resisted, much was to be got rid of by those who were reared in the old, before they could begin to affirm and to construct. Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish ; and that makes the oifensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are not equal to the work they pretend. They lose their way ; in the assaidt on the kingdom of darkness they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit. It is of little moment that one or two or twenty errors of our social system be corrected, but of much that the man be in his senses.
The criticism and attack on institutions, which we have witnessed, has made one thing plain, that society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him : he has become tediously good in some j^articular but negligent or narrow in the rest ; and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result.
It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than to make a sally against evil by some single improvement, without sup- porting it by a total regeneration. Do not be so vain of your one objection. Do you think there is only one ? Alas ! my good friend, there is no part of society or of life better than any other
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part. All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of e\'il washes all our institutions alike. Do you complain of our Marriage ? Our marriage is no worse than our education, our diet, our trade, our social customs. Do you complain of the laws of Property ? It is a pedantry to give such impor- tance to them. Can we not play the game of life with these counters, as well as with those ? in the institution of property, as well as out of it ? Let into it the new and renewing principle of love, and property will be universality. No one gives the impression of superiority to the institution, which he must give who will reform it. It makes no difference what you say, you must make me feel that you are aloof from it ; by your natural and supernatural advantages do easily see to the end of it, — do see how man can do without it. Now all men are on one side. No man deserves to be heard against property. Only Love, only an Idea, is against property as we hold it.
I cannot afford to be irritable and captious, nor to waste all my time in attacks. If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment X could never stay there five minutes. But why come out ? the street is as false as the church, and when I get to my house, or to my manners, or to my speech, I have not got away from the lie. "When we see an eager assailant of one of these
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wrongs, a special reformer, we feel like asking him, What right have you, sir, to your one virtue ? Is virtue piecemeal ? This is a jewel amidst the rags of a beggar.
In another way the right will be vindicated. In the midst of abuses, in the heart of cities, in the aisles of false churches, alike in one place and in another,^ wherever, namely, a just and heroic soul finds itself, there it will do what is next at hand, and by the new quality of character it shall put forth it shall abrogate that old condition, law or school in which it stands, before the law of its own mind.
If partiality was one fault of the movement party, the other defect was their reliance on Asso- ciation, Doubts such as those I have intimated drove many good persons to agitate the questions of social reform. But the revolt against the spirit of commerce, the spirit of aristocracy, and the inveterate abuses of cities, did not appear jjossible to individuals ; and to do battle against numbers they armed themselves with numbers, and against concert they relied on new concert.
Following or advancing beyond the ideas of St. Simon, of Fourier, and of Owen, three communities have already been formed in Massachusetts on kindred plans, and many more in the country at large. They aim to give every member a share in
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the manual labor, to give an equal reward to labor and to talent, and to unite a liberal culture with an education to labor. The scheme offers, by the economies of associated labor and expense, to make every member rich, on the same amount of proper- ty that, in separate families, woidd leave every member poor. These new associations are com- posed of men and women of superior talents and sentiments ; yet it may easUy be questioned wheth- er such a community will draw, except in its begin- nings, the able and the good ; whether those who have energy will not prefer their chance of superi- ority and power in the world, to the humble cer- tainties of the association ; whether such a retreat does not promise to become an asylum to those who have tried and failed, rather than a field to the strong ; and whether the members will not necessa- rily be fractions of men, because each finds that he cannot enter it without some compromise. Friend- ship and association are very fine things, and a grand phalanx of the best of the human race, band- ed for some catholic object ; yes, excellent ; but re- member that no society can ever be so large as one man. He, in his friendship, in his natural and mo- mentary associations, doubles or multiplies himself ; but in the hour in which he mortgages himself to two or ten or twenty, he dwarfs himself below the stature of one.
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But the men of less faith could not thus believe, and to such, concert appears the sole specific of strength. I have failed, and you have failed, but perhaps together we shall not fail. Our house- keeping is not satisfactory to us, but perhaps a phalanx, a community, might be. Many of us have differed in opinion, and we could find no man who could make the truth plain, but possibly a college, or an ecclesiastical council, might. I have not been able either to persuade my brother or to prevail on myself to disuse the traffic or the potation of brandy, but perhaps a pledge of total abstinence might effectually restrain us. The candidate my party votes for is not to be trusted with a dollar, but he will be honest in the Senate, for we can bring public opinion to bear on him. Thus concert was the specific in all cases. But concert is neither better nor worse, neither more nor less potent, than indi\adual force. All the men in the world cannot make a statue walk and speak, cannot make a drop of blood, or a blade of grass, any more than one man can. But let there be one man, let there be truth in two men, in ten men, then is concert for the first time possible ; because the force which moves the world is a new quality, and can never be furnished by adding whatever quantities of a differ- ent kind. "What is the use of the concert of the false and the disunited ? There can be no concert
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in two, where there is no concert in one. When the individual is not individual, but is dual ; when his thoughts look one way and his actions another ; when his faith is traversed b} his habits ; when his will, enlightened by reason, is warped by his sense ;, when with one hand he rows and with the other backs water, what concert can be ?
I do not wonder at the interest these projects in- spire. The world is awaking to the idea of union, and these experiments show what it is thinking of. It is and will be magic. Men will live and com- municate, and plough, and reap, and govern, as by added ethereal power, when once they are united ; as in a celebrated experiment, by expiration and respiration exactly together, four persons lift a heavy man from the ground by the little finger only, and without sense of weight. But this union must be inward, and not one of covenants, and is to be reached by a reverse of the methods they use. The imion is only perfect when all the uniters are isolated. It is the imion of friends who live in different streets or to"svns. Each man, if he attempts to join himself to others, is on all sides cramped and diminished of his proportion ; and the stricter the union the smaller and the more pitiful he is. But leave him alone, to recognize in every hour and place the secret soul ; he will go up and dowTi doing the works of a true member, and, to the astonish-
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ment of all, the work will be done with concert, though no man spoke. Government will be ada- mantine without any governor. The union must be ideal in actual individualism.
I pass to the indication in some particulars of that faith in man, which the heart is preaching to us in these days, and which engages the more re- gard, from the consideration that the specidations of one generation are the history of the next fol- lowing.
In allud^ing just now to our system of education, I spoke of the deadness of its details. But it is open to gi'aver criticism than the palsy of its mem- bers : it is a system of despair. The disease with which the human mind now labors is want of faith. Men do not believe in a power of education. We do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in man, and we do not try. We renounce all high aims. We believe that the defects of so many perverse and so many frivolous people who make up societj^ are organic, and society Is a hospital of incvirables. A man of good sense but of little faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to church as often as he went there, said to me that " he liked to have concerts, and fairs, and churches, and other public amusements go on." I am afraid the re^ mark is too honest, and comes from the same ori- gin as the maxim of the tyrant, " If you would rule
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the world quietly, you must keep it amused." I notice too that the ground on which eminent public servants urge the claims of popular education is fear ; ' This coimtry is filling uj) with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our throats,' We do not be- lieve that any education, any system of philosoph}', any influence of genius, will ever give depth of in- sight to a superficial mind. Ha\ang settled our- selves into this infidelity, our skill is expended to procure alleviations, diversion, opiates. AVe adorn the victim with manual skill, his tongue with lan- guages, his body with inoffensive and comely man- ners. So have we cunningly hid the tragedy of limitation and inner death we cannot avert. Is it strange that society should be devoured by a secret melancholy which breaks through all its smiles and all its gayety and games ?
But even one step farther our infidelity has gone. It appears that some doubt is felt by good and wise men whether reaUy the happiness and probity of men is increased by the cidture of the mind in those disciplines to which we give the name of education. Unhappily too the doubt comes from scholars, from persons who have tried these methods. In their experience the scholar was not raised by the sa- cred thoughts amongst which he dwelt, but used them to selfish ends. He was a profane person,
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and became a showman, turning liis gifts to a mar- ketable use, and not to his own sustenance and growth. It was found that the intellect coidd be independently developed, that is, in separation from the man, as any single organ can be invigorated, and the resvdt was monstrous. A canine appetite for knowledge was generated, which must still be fed but was never satisfied, and this knowledge, not being directed on action, never took the character of substantial, humane truth, blessing those whom it entered. It gave the scholar certain powers of expression, the power of speech, the power of po- etry, of literary art, but it did not bring him to peace or to beneficence.
When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange that society should be dis- heartened and sensualized by unbelief. What rem- edy ? Life must be lived on a higher plane. We must go up to a higher platform, to which we are always invited to ascend ; there, the whole aspect of things changes. I resist the skepticism of our education and of our educated men. I do not be- lieve that the differences of opinion and character in men are organic. I do not recognize, beside the class of the good and the wise, a permanent class of skejjtics, or a class of conservatives, or of malig- nants, or of materialists. I do not believe in two classes. You remember the story of the poor wo-
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man wlio importuned King Philip of Macedon to gTant her justice, which Philip refused : the woman exclaimed, " I appeal : " the king, astonished, asked to whom she appealed : the woman replied, " From Philip drimk to Philip sober." The text will suit me very well. I believe not in two classes of men, but in man in two moods, in Philip drimk and Philip sober. I think, according to the good- hearted word of Plato, "Unwillingly the soid is deprived of truth." Iron conservative, miser, or thief, no man is but by a supposed necessity which he tolerates by shortness or torpidity of sight. The sold lets no man go without some visitations and holydays of a diviner presence. It would be easy to show, by a narrow scanning of any man's biog- raphy, that we are not so wedded to our paltry per- formances of every kind but that every man has at intervals the grace to scorn his performances, in comparing them with his belief of what he shoidd do ; — that he puts himself on the side of his ene- mies, listening gladly to what they say of him, and accusing liimseK of the same things.
What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which degrades all it has done ? Genius counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own idea it never executed. The Iliad, the Hamlet, the Doric column, the Roman arch, the Gothic minster, the German anthem, when they are ended, the
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master casts behind lilm. How sinks the song in the waves of melody wliich the universe pours over his soul ! Before that gracious Infinite out of which he drew these few strokes, how mean they look, though the praises of the world attend them. From the triimiphs of his art he tiu'ns with desire to this greater defeat. Let those admire who will. With silent joy he sees himself to be capable of a beauty that eclipses all which his hands have done ; all which human hands have ever done.
Well, we are all the children of genius, the chil- dren of virtue, — and feel their inspirations in our happier hours. Is not every man sometimes a rad- ical in politics ? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before tak- ing their rest ; when they are sick, or aged : in the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused ; when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals. In the circle of the rankest tories that could be collected in Eng- land, Old or New, let a powerful and stimulating intellect, a man of great heart and mmd act on them, and very quickly these frozen conservators will yield to the friendly influence, these hopeless will begin to hope, these haters will begin to love, these immovable statues will begin to spin and re- volve. I cannot help recalling the fine anecdote
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which Warton relates of Bishop Berkeley, when he was preparing to leave England with his plan of planting the gospel among the American savages. "Lord Bathurst told me that the members of the Scriblerus club being met at his house at dinner, they agreed to rally Berkeley, who was also his guest, on his scheme at Bermudas. Berkeley, hav- ing listened to the many lively things they had to say, begged to be heard in his turn, and displayed his plan with such an astonishing and animating force of eloquence and enthusiasm that they were struck dumb, and, after some pause, rose up all to- gether with earnestness, exclaiming, ' Let us set out with him immediately.' " Men in all ways are bet- ter than they seem. They like flattery for the mo- ment, but they know the truth for their own. It is a foolish cowardice which keeps us from trusting them and speaking to them rude truth. They re- sent your honesty for an instant, they wiU thank you for it always. What is it we heartily wish of each other ? Is it to be pleased and flattered ? No, but to be convicted and exposed, to be shamed out of our nonsense of all kinds, and made men of, in- stead of ghosts and phantoms. We are weary of gliding ghostlike through the world, which is itseK so slight and unreal. We crave a sense of reality, though it come in strokes of pain. I exjjlain so, — by this manlike love of truth, — those excesses and
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errors into wliich souls of great vigor, but not equal insight, often fall. They feel the poverty at the bottom of all the seeming affluence of the world. They know the speed with which they come straight through the thin masquerade, and conceive a dis- gust at the indigence of nature : Eousseau, Mira- beau, Charles Fox, Napoleon, Byron, — and I could easily add names nearer home, of raging riders, who drive their steeds so hard, in the violence of living to forget its illusion : they would know the worst, and tread the floors of hell. The heroes of ancient and modern fame, Cimon, Themistocles, Alcibiades, Alexander, Caesar, have treated life and fortime as a game to be well and skilfully played, but the stake not to be so valued but that any time it could be held as a trifle light as air, and thrown up. Caesar, just before the battle of Pharsalia, dis- courses with the Eg}q3tian priest concerning the foimtains of the Nile, and offers to quit the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, if he will show him those mysterious sources.
The same magnanimity shows itself in our social relations, in the preference, namely, which each man gives to the society of superiors over that of his equals. All that a man has will he give for right relations with his mates. All that he has will he give for an erect demeanor in every com- pany and on each occasion. He aims at such
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things as his neighbors prize, and gives his days and nights, his talents and his heart, to strike a good stroke, to acquit himself in all men's sight as a man. The consideration of an eminent citizen, of a noted merchant, of a man of mark in his pro- fession ; a naval and military honor, a general's commission, a marshal's baton, a ducal coronet, the laurel of poets, and, anyhow procured, the acknowl- edgment of eminent merit, — have this lustre for each candidate that they enable him to walk erect and unashamed in the presence of some persons be- fore whom he felt himself inferior. Having raised himself to this rank, having established his equal- ity with class after class of those with whom he would live well, he still finds certain others be- fore whom he cannot possess himself, because they have somewhat fairer, somewhat grander, somewhat purer, which extorts homage of him. Is his ambi- tion pure ? then will his laurels and his possessions seem worthless : instead of avoiding these men who make his fine gold dim, he will cast all behind him and seek their society only, woo and embrace this his humiliation and mortification, imtil he shall know why his eye sinks, his voice is husky, and his brilliant talents are paralyzed in this presence. He is sure that the soid which gives the lie to all things will tell none. His constitution will not mislead him. If it cannot carry itself as it ought,
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high and unmatchable in the presence of any man ; if the secret oracles whose whisper makes the sweet- ness and dignity of his life do here withdraw and accompany him no longer, — it is time to under- value what he has valued, to dispossess himself of what he has acquired, and with Caesar to take in his hand the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, and saj, " All these will I relinquish, if you will show me the fountains of the Nile." Dear to us are those who love us ; the swift moments we spend with them are a compensation for a great deal of misery ; they enlarge our life ; — but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add an- other life : they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.
As every man at heart wishes the best and not inferior society, wishes to be convicted of his error and to come to himself,— so he wishes that the same healing should not stop in his thought, but should penetrate his will or active power. The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit. AVhat he most wishes is to be lifted to some higher platform, that he may see beyond his present fear the transalpine good, so that his fear, his coldness, his custom may be broken up like
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fragments of ice, melted and carried away in the great stream of good will. Do you ask my aid ? I also wish to be a benefactor. I wish more to be a benefactor and servant than you wish to be served by me ; and surely the greatest good fortune that could befall me is precisely to be so moved by you that I should say, ' Take me and all mine, and use me and mine freely to your ends ! ' for I could not say it otherwise than because a great enlarge- ment had come to my heart and mind, which made me superior to my fortunes. Here we are para- lyzed with fear ; we hold on to our little properties, house and land, office and money, for the bread which they have in our experience yielded us, al- though we confess that our being does not flow through them. We desire to be made great ; we desire to be touched with that fire which shall com- mand this ice to stream, and make our existence a benefit. If therefore we start objections to your project, O friend of the slave, or friend of the poor or of the race, understand well that it is because we wish to drive you to drive us into your meas- ures. We wish to hear ourselves confuted. We are haunted with a belief that you have a secret which it would higliliest advantage us to learn, and we woidd force you to impart it to us, though it should bring us to prison or to worse extremity. Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every
264 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. i
man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The entertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and profanation. There is no skepticism, no athe- ism but that. Coidd it be received into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet. It has had a name to live in some dogmatic theology, but each man's iimocence and his real liking of his neighbor have kept it a dead letter. I remember standing at the polls one day when the anger of the political contest gave a certain grimness to the faces of the independent electors, and a good man at my side, looking on the people, remarked, " I am satisfied that the largest part of these men, on ei- ther side, mean to vote right." I suppose consider- ate observers, looking at the masses of men in their blameless and in their equivocal actions, will assent, that in spite of selfishness and frivolity, the gen- eral purpose in the great number of persons is fidel- ity. The reason why any one refuses his assent to your opinion, or his aid to your benevolent design, is in you : he refuses to accept you as a bringer of truth, because though you think you have it, he feels that you have it not. You have not given him the authentic sign.
If it were worth while to run into details this general doctrine of the latent but ever soliciting Spirit, it would be easy to adduce illustration in
NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 265
particulars of a man's equality to the Church, of his equality to the State, and of his equality to every other man. It is yet in all men's memory that, a few years ago, the liberal churches com- plained that the Calvinistic church denied to them the name of Christian. I think the complaint was confession : a religious chui'ch would not complain. A religious man, like Behmen, Fox, or Sweden- borg is not irritated by wanting the sanction of the Church, but the Church feels the accusation of his presence and belief.
It only needs that a just man shoidd walli in our streets to make it appear how pitiful and inarti- ficial a contrivance is our legislation. The man whose part is taken and who does not wait for society in anj'tliing, has a power which society can- not choose but feel. The familiar experiment caUed the hydrostatic paradox, in which a capillary col- umn of water balances the ocean, is a symbol of the relation of one man to the whole family of men. The wise Dandamis, on hearing the lives of Soc- rates, Pythagoras and Diogenes read, " judged them to be great men every way, excepting that they were too much subjected to the reverence of the laws, which to second and authorize, true vir- tue must abate very much of its original vigor."
And as a man is equal to the Church and equal to the State, so he is equal to every other man.
2GG NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS.
The disparities of power in men are superficial; and all frank and searching conversation, in which a man lays himself open to his brother, apprises each of their radical unity. When two persons sit and converse in a thoroughly good understanding, the remark is sure to be made, See how we have disputed about words ! Let a clear, apprehensive mind, such as every man knows among his friends, converse with the most commanding poetic genius, I think it would appear that there was no inequal- ity such as men fancy, between them ; that a per- fect understanding, a like receiving, a like perceiv- ing, abolished differences ; and the poet would con- fess that liis creative imagination gave him no deep advantage, but only the superficial one tliat he could express himself and the other could not ; that his advantage was a Imack, which might impose on indolent men but could not impose on lovers of truth ; for they know the tax of talent, or what a price of greatness the power of expression too often pays. I believe it is the conx'iction of the purest men that the net amount of man and man does not much vary. Each is incomparably superior to his companion in some facidty. His want of skill in other directions has added to his fitness for his own work. Each seems to have some compensation yielded to him by his infirmity, and every hinder- ance operates as a concentration of his force.
NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 267
These and tlie like experiences intimate that man stands in strict connection with a higher fact never yet manifested. There is power over and behind us, and we are the channels of its commu- nications. We seek to say thus and so, and over our head some spirit sits which contradicts what we say. We would persuade our fellow to this or that ; another self within our eyes dissuades him. That which we keep back, this reveals. In vain we compose our faces and our words ; it holds uncontrollable communication with the enemy, and he answers civilly to us, but believes the spirit. We exclaim, ' There 's a traitor in the house ! ' but at last it appears that he is the true man, and I am the traitor. This open channel to the highest life is the first and last reality, so subtle, so quiet, yet so tenacious, that although I have never expressed the truth, and although I have never heard the expression of it from any other, I know that the whole truth is here for me. What if I cannot answer your questions ? I am not pained that I cannot frame a reply to the question. What is the operation we call Providence ? There lies the un- spoken thing, present, omnipresent. Every time we converse we seek to translate it into speech, but whether we hit or whether we miss, we have the fact. Every discourse is an approximate an- swer : but it is of small consequence that we do
268 N£]V ENGLAND REFORMERS.
not get it into verbs and nouns, whilst it abides for contemplation forever.
If the auguries of the prophesying heart shall make themselves good in time, the man who shall be born, whose advent men and events prej^are and foreshow, is one who shall enjoy his connection with a higher life, with the man within man : shall destroy distrust by his trust, shall use his native but forgotten methods, shall not take counsel of flesh and blood, but shall rely on the Law alive and beautiful which w^orks over our heads and under our feet. Pitiless, it avails itself of our suc- cess when we obey it, and of our ruin when we contravene it. Men are all secret believers in it, else the word justice would have no meaning : they believe that the best is the true ; that right is done at last ; or chaos would come. It rewards actions after their nature, and not after the design of the agent. ' Work,' it saith to man, ' in every hour, paid or unpaid, see only that thou work, and thou canst not escape the reward : whether thy work be fine or coarse, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own appro- bation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought : no matter how often defeated, you are born to victory. The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.'
As soon as a man is wonted to look beyond
NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 269
surfaces, and to see how this high will prevails without an exception or an interval, he settles him- self into serenity. He can already rely on the laws of gravity, that every stone will fall where it is due ; the good globe is faithful, and carries us securely through the celestial spaces, anxious or resigned, we need not interfere to help it on : and he will learn one day the mild lesson they teach, that our own orbit is all our task, and we need not assist the administration of the universe. Do not be so impatient to set the town right concerning the unfounded pretensions and the false reputation of certain men of standing. They are laboring harder to set the town right concerning themselves, and -^ill certainly succeed. Suppress for a few days your criticism on the insufficiency of this or that teacher or experimenter, and he will have demonstrated his insufficiency to aU men's eyes. In like manner, let a man fall into the divine cir- cuits, and he is enlarged. Obedience to his genius is the only liberating influence. We wish to escape from subjection and a sense of inferiority, and we make seK-denying ordinances, we drink water, we eat grass, we refuse the laws, we go to jail : it is all in vain ; only by obedience to his genius, only by the freest activity in the way constitutional to him, does an angel seem to arise before a man and lead him by the hand out of all the wards of the prison.
270 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS.
That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is cheerfulness and courage, and the endeavor to realize oui* aspirations. The life of man is the true romance, which when it is val- iantly conducted will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction. All around us what powers are wrapped up under the coarse mattings of cus- tom, and all wonder prevented. It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not occur to them that it is jast as wonderful that he shoiUd see with them ; and that is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise : the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual. Shall not the heart which has received so much, trust the Power by which it lives ? May it not quit other leadings, and listen to the Soul that has guided it so gently and taught it so much, secure that the future will be worthy of the past ?
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