WHERE 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, yet we have no superfluity of spirit for new creation? We 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 upper 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 accomplished, and much was begun in us. All our
days are so unprofitable while they pass, that 'tis wonderful 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 martyrdoms 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
record it. Men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual
retreating and reference. 'Yonder uplands are rich 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. 'Tis
the trick of nature thus to degrade to-day; a good deal of buzz, and
somewhere a result slipped magically in. Every roof is agreeable to
the eye until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women and
hard-eyed husbands 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 retrospect, 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, Warton, 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 would 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 disturb 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 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 counterfeit. 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 between 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 property would be
a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would
leave me as it found me,--neither better nor worse. So is it with this
calamity: it does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part of
me, which could not be torn away without tearing 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. Nothing 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 objects, which lets them
slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most
unhandsome part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed,
and likes that we should 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 casual.
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 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 books 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 always genius; but only a few hours so
serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends
on structure or temperament. Temperament 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
giggle? or if he apologize? or is infected with egotism? 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 concave 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 experiment, 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 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 dependent 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 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
experience that some unfriendly excess or imbecility neutralizes the
promise of genius. We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily
and lavishly 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 creatures 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 impulse in them. In the moment it seems impulse; 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 everything of time, place, and condition, and is
inconsumable in the flames of religion. Some modifications 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 platform of ordinary
life, but must not leave it without noticing the capital exception. For
temperament is a power which 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 kidnappers and slave-drivers, they esteem each
man the victim of another, who winds him round 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 spiritual should be, that which is its own evidence.
What notions do they attach to love! what to religion! One would not
willingly pronounce these 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 disguise
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. Temperament is the veto or limitation-power in the
constitution, very justly applied to restrain an opposite excess in the
constitution, but absurdly offered as a bar to original equity. When
virtue is in presence, all subordinate powers 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 would 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
intellect, 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 ourselves to so base a state.
The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession
of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is
quicksand. This onward trick of nature is too strong for us: Pero si
muove. When at night I look at the moon and stars, I seem stationary,
and they to hurry. Our love of the real draws us to permanence, but
health of body consists in circulation, and sanity of mind in variety
or facility of association. We 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 in Goethe; even in Bettine; but now I turn the pages of
either of them languidly, whilst I still cherish their genius. So with
pictures; each will bear 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 pictures 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 deduction must be made from the opinion which even the wise
express of 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! 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 which murmurs from
it in regard 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 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 particular angle; then it
shows deep and beautiful colors. There is no adaptation or universal
applicability in men, but each has his special talent, and the mastery
of successful men consists in adroitly keeping 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
who is not superfluous sometimes. But is not this pitiful? 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 fine, whoever
loses, we are always of the gaining party. Divinity is behind our
failures and follies also. The plays of children are nonsense, but very
educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with
commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every
man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it. Like a bird
which alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from bough to bough, is the
Power which 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 people 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 activity. 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 would not
rub down a horse; and the men and maidens it left pale and hungry. A
political orator wittily compared our party promises to western roads,
which opened stately enough, with planted trees on either side to
tempt the traveller, 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. Unspeakably sad and barren does life look to those who a few
months ago were dazzled with the splendor 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 objections 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
yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere. 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 speak her very sense when they say, "Children,
eat your victuals, and say no more of it." To fill the hour,--that is
happiness; to fill the hour and leave no crevice for a repentance or an
approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate
well on them. Under the oldest mouldiest 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 itself is a
mixture of power and form, and will not bear the least excess of either.
To finish the moment, 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, 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 today are worth as much to me as five minutes in the next
millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. 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 labor. It is a tempest of fancies, and the
only ballast I know is a respect to the present hour. Without 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 whomsoever we deal with,
accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or
odious as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated
its whole pleasure 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 however a thoughtful man may suffer
from the defects and absurdities of his company, he cannot without
affectation deny to any set of men and women a 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
capricious 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 sympathy a little 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 gossip in the bar-room. I am
thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who
expects everything of the universe and is disappointed 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 account
in sots and bores also. They give a reality to the circumjacent picture
which such a vanishing meteorous appearance can ill spare. 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 great gifts are not got by analysis.
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 Poussin, a crayon-sketch of Salvator; but the
Transfiguration, 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 hundred and fifty-seven
guineas, an autograph of Shakspeare; but for nothing a school-boy
can read Hamlet 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
impatient of so public a life and planet, 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 not so
intimately domesticated in the planet as the wild man and the wild beast
and bird. But the exclusion reaches them also; reaches the climbing,
flying, 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 interspaces betwixt atom
and atom, shows that the world is all outside; it has no inside.
The mid-world 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 harbor such disconsolate consciences, borrowed too from the
consciences of other nations. We must set up the strong present tense
against all the rumors of wrath, past or to come. So many things are
unsettled which it is of the first importance 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 century or two,
New and Old England may keep shop. Law of copyright and international
copyright is to be discussed, and in the interim we will sell our books
for the most we can. Expediency of literature, reason of literature,
lawfulness of writing down 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! 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.
Human life is made up of the two elements, power and form, and the
proportion must be invariably 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 excess; every good quality is noxious if
unmixed, and, to carry the danger to the edge of ruin, nature causes
each man's peculiarity to superabound. Here, among the farms, we adduce
the scholars as examples of this treachery. They are nature's victims 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 farmers, and
themselves victims of partiality, very hollow 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
you out. Irresistible nature 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 perceives that
nature joined with his enemy. A man is a golden impossibility. The line
he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom is
made a fool.
How easily, if fate would suffer it, we might keep forever these
beautiful limits, and adjust ourselves, 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 business that manly
resolution and adherence to the multiplication-table through all
weathers will insure success. But ah! presently comes a day, or is
it only a half-hour, with its angel-whispering,--which discomfits the
conclusions of nations and of years! Tomorrow again everything 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 business on
this understanding would be quickly bankrupt. Power keeps quite another
road than the turnpikes of choice and will; namely the subterranean 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 with
grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen
of purest sky, and another behind us of purest sky. 'You will not
remember,' 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 casualties. 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
observation." 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 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 I 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 results 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 somewhat comes of it
all, but an unlooked-for result. The individual is always mistaken.
He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors,
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 promised himself.
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 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 expounded 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 reception of spiritual
law. Bear with these distractions, with this coetaneous growth of the
parts; they will one day be members, 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
inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection; 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 satisfactions, as when, being thirsty, I drink water;
or go to the fire, being cold; no! but I am at first apprised of my
vicinity to a new and excellent region of life. By persisting to read
or to think, this region gives further sign of itself, as it were in
flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and
repose, as if the clouds that covered it parted at intervals and showed
the approaching 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 opening to me of this
august magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable ages,
young with 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 found 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 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 ever is, not
what you have done or forborne, but at whose command you have done or
forborne it.
Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost,--these are quaint names, too narrow
to cover this unbounded substance. The baffled intellect must still
kneel before this cause, which refuses to be named,--ineffable cause,
which every fine genius has essayed 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 generalization. "I fully understand
language," he said, "and nourish well my vast-flowing vigor."--"I beg
to ask what you call vast-flowing vigor?"--said his companion. "The
explanation," replied Mencius, "is difficult. This vigor is supremely
great, and in the highest degree unbending. Nourish it correctly and do
it no injury, and it will fill up the vacancy between heaven and earth.
This vigor accords with and assists justice and reason, and leaves no
hunger."--In our more correct writing we give to this generalization the
name of Being, 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 interminable 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
faculty; 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 universal
impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance 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 plentiful 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 do them that office. They believe that we communicate 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 presence where I am should be
as useful to the commonwealth of friendship and wisdom, as would be my
presence in that place. I exert the same quality 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
moments we know that a new picture of life and duty is already possible;
the elements already exist in many minds around 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 unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For skepticisms are not gratuitous
or lawless, but are limitations of the affirmative 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 discovery we have
made that we exist. That discovery 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 distorting 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, persons, letters, religions, objects,
successively tumble 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 chagrins 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. 'Tis 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 type or
representative of humanity, with the name of hero or saint. Jesus, the
"providential man," is a good man on whom many 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 speedy 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 object. 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 magazine 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 private 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 lasts 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 universal 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 permit all things to
ourselves, and that which we call sin in others is experiment for us. It
is an instance 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 nowise 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 unsettle 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 confounding 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 found destructive of society. No man at last believes that he can be
lost, nor that the crime in him is as black as in the felon. Because the
intellect qualifies in our own case the moral judgments. For there is
no crime to the intellect. That is antinomian 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 intellect. 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 stealing 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 will, it is pravity or bad. 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 language we will, we can never say anything but what we are;
Hermes, Cadmus, Columbus, Newton, Bonaparte, are the mind's ministers.
Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter 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 extravagance, 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 hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with
tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups
and downs of fate,--and meantime it is only puss and her tail. How long
before our masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, laughter, and
shouting, 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 Kepler 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 hate these
developments, and will find a way to punish 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. And yet is the God the native of these
bleak rocks. That need makes in morals the capital virtue of self-trust.
We must hold hard to this poverty, however scandalous, and by more
vigorous self-recoveries, after the sallies of action, possess our axis
more firmly. The life of truth is cold and so far mournful; 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 own as
persuades 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
drowning 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 compliance takes away the power of being
greatly useful. 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 other people; an attention, and to an aim which
makes their wants frivolous. This is a divine answer, and leaves no
appeal and no hard thoughts. In Flaxman's drawing of the Eumenides of
Aeschylus, Orestes supplicates Apollo, whilst the Furies sleep on
the threshold. The face of the god expresses 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 his 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, Surprise, 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 itself into relief
and form, but I am too young yet by some ages to compile a code. I
gossip for my hour concerning the eternal politics. I have seen many
fair pictures not in vain. A wonderful time I have lived in. I am not
the novice I 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 pitiful to demand a
result on this town and county, 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 reception; I am and I
have: but I do not get, and when I have fancied I had gotten anything,
I found I did not. I worship with wonder the great Fortune. My reception
has been so large, that I am not annoyed by receiving this or that
superabundantly. I say to the Genius, if he will pardon the proverb,
In for a mill, in for a million. When I receive a new gift, I do not
macerate my body to make the account square, for if I should die I could
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 receiving.
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. Hardest roughest
action is visionary also. It is but a choice between soft and turbulent
dreams. People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge
doing. I am very content with knowing, if only I could know. That is
an august entertainment, 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 soul 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 observe that difference, and shall observe it.
One day I shall know the value and law of this discrepance. 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 time to eat or to sleep,
or to earn a hundred dollars, 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 household with our wives, and these things
make no impression, are forgotten next week; but, in the solitude 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.
*****