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 student, yet how few particulars 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 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 liberal 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 inferred 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 speakers 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 debaters to his
own affair. Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find,
but symmetrical 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 this 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 of his body is small or deformed. I observe a person who
makes a good public appearance, and conclude thence the perfection of
his private character, on which this is based; but he has no private
character. He is a graceful cloak or lay-figure for holidays. 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 Angelo, 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 verily believe 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 useful,
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
cripple. 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.
Our native love of reality joins with this experience to teach us a
little reserve, and to dissuade a too sudden surrender to the brilliant
qualities of persons. Young people admire talents or particular
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 solitary 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 constitutional to thee, and
incommunicable.' Whilst we speak the loadstone is withdrawn; down falls
our filing in a heap with the rest, and we continue our mummery to the
wretched shaving. Let us go for universals; for the magnetism, 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 speakers: the Will-of-the-wisp vanishes if you go too 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 particular 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 terrestrial landscape. We are practically skilful
in detecting 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 addition of all
their measurable properties. There is a genius of a nation, which is
not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the
society. England, strong, punctual, practical, well-spoken England
I should not find if I should 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, conventional, 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 America, where, from the intellectual quickness of the
race, the genius of the country is more splendid in its promise and more
slight in its performance. 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 cannot
be debauched. In any controversy concerning morals, an appeal may be
made with safety to the sentiments which the language of the people
expresses. Proverbs, words, and grammar-inflections convey the public
sense with more purity and precision 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. 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 keeps the accounts of the world, and is always moral. The
property will be found where the labor, the wisdom, and the virtue have
been in nations, in classes, and (the whole life-time considered, with
the compensations) in the individual also. How wise the world appears,
when the laws and usages of nations are largely detailed, and the
completeness of the municipal system is considered! Nothing is left
out. If you go into the markets and the custom-houses, the insurers' and
notaries' offices, the offices of sealers of weights and measures, of
inspection of provisions,--it will appear as if one man had made it
all. Wherever you go, a wit like your own has been before you, and
has realized its thought. The Eleusinian mysteries, the Egyptian
architecture, the Indian astronomy, the Greek sculpture, show that there
always were seeing and knowing men in the planet. The world is full of
masonic ties, of guilds, of secret and public legions of honor; that
of scholars, for example; and that of gentlemen, fraternizing with the
upper class of every country and every culture.
I am very much struck in literature by the appearance that one person
wrote all the books; as if the editor of a journal planted his body of
reporters in different parts of the field of action, and relieved 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 Pope'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 help 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. 'Tis 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 concert, where I went to hear Handel's Messiah. As the
master overpowered the littleness and incapableness of the performers
and made them conductors of his electricity, so it was easy to observe
what efforts nature was making, through so many hoarse, wooden, and
imperfect persons, to produce beautiful voices, fluid and soul-guided
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 proportion, 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 denotes. Proportion is almost impossible to human
beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men
are encumbered with personality, and talk too much. In modern 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 study in exceptions the
law of the world. Anomalous 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 insignificant as an art of healing, but of great value as criticism
on the hygeia or medical practice of the time. So with Mesmerism,
Swedenborgism, Fourierism, and the Millennial Church; they are poor
pretensions enough, but good criticism on the science, 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 execute 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 sometimes I must pinch
myself to keep awake and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast
into each other that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an
effort to treat them as individuals. Though the uninspired man certainly
finds persons a conveniency 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 surface of the water. But this is
flat rebellion. Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing,
and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million of fresh
particulars. 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 remain orbed in a thought, but rushes into
persons; and when each person, inflamed to a fury of personality, 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 somebody else, and the world will be round.
Everything must have its flower or effort at the beautiful, coarser or
finer according to its stuff. They relieve and recommend each other,
and the sanity of society is a balance of a thousand insanities. She
punishes abstractionists, and will only forgive an induction 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 universal 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
every property in the universe, establishes thousandfold occult mutual
attractions among her offspring, that all this wash and waste of power
may be imparted and exchanged.
Great dangers undoubtedly accrue from this incarnation and distribution
of the godhead, and hence Nature has her maligners, as if she were
Circe; and Alphonso of Castille fancied he could have given useful
advice. But she does not go unprovided; she has hellebore at the bottom
of the cup. Solitude would ripen a plentiful crop of despots. The
recluse thinks of men as having his manner, or as not having his manner;
and as having degrees 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 modestly enough of his
own endowment. When afterwards he comes to unfold it in propitious
circumstance, 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 meridian,
reaches to every gift of man, and we all take turns at the top.
For Nature, 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 would 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
faults of character in a chief, which the intellectual force of the
persons, with ordinary opportunity and not hurled into aphelion by
hatred, could 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 astronomy, of having the diameter of the earth's orbit for
a base of its triangles. Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy,
but in the State and in the schools it is indispensable to resist the
consolidation of all men into a few men. If John was perfect, why are
you and I alive? As long as any man exists, there is some need of him;
let him fight for his own. A new poet has appeared; a new character
approached us; why should we refuse 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 this 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 thinks 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 down into an epithet or an image for daily use:--
"Into paint will I grind thee, my bride!"
To embroil the confusion, and make it impossible to arrive at any
general statement,--when we have insisted on the imperfection of
individuals, our affections and our experience urge that every
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 statesman looks at
many, and compares the few habitually with 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 contest 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 with all your limitations. For rightly every
man is a channel through which heaven floweth, and whilst I fancied I
was criticising him, I was censuring or rather terminating my own soul.
After taxing Goethe as a courtier, 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 played. If we were not
kept among surfaces, every thing 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 all things subsist and do not die but only
retire a little from sight and afterwards return again. Whatever does
not concern 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.
Really, all things and persons are related to us, but according to our
nature they act on us not at once but in succession, 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
full. As the ancient said, the world is a plenum or solid; and if we saw
all things that really surround us we should be imprisoned and unable to
move. For though nothing is impassable to the soul, but all things are
pervious 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 particular soul, from the senses of that
individual. Through 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 attempts
to pass through it, but takes another way. When he has exhausted for
the time the nourishment 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 looking out of the window, sound and
well, in 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 voluntary and conscious steps in the admirable science
of universals, let us see the parts wisely, and infer the genius of
nature from the 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 commonly 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
marriage 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
better 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, that nature secures him 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 spins 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 private
affair, works out, though as it were under a disguise, the universal
problem. We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every
pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history. The
rabid democrat, as soon as he is senator and rich man, has ripened
beyond possibility 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 would be damned
but he would begin as agitator."
We hide this universality if we can, but it appears at all points. We
are as ungrateful as children. 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 making the
commonest offices beautiful by the energy and heart with which she does
them; and seeing this we admire and love her and them, and say, 'Lo! a
genuine creature of the fair earth, not dissipated 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 tomorrow his
prophet shall not unsay 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 were
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! 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
regulation, 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.
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 explanation 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 incurable
partialist, and himself a universalist? I talked yesterday with a pair
of philosophers; I endeavored to show my good men that I love everything
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 understand 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 welcome 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.
*****