SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE.
TWELVE CHAPTERS.
BY
RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
[Illustration]
BOSTON:
FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.
1870.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by
RALPH WALDO EMERSON,
in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.
UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & CO.,
CAMBRIDGE.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 1
CIVILIZATION 15
ART 31
ELOQUENCE 53
DOMESTIC LIFE 91
FARMING 121
WORKS AND DAYS 139
BOOKS 167
CLUBS 199
COURAGE 225
SUCCESS 251
OLD AGE 279
SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE.
SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE.
I fell in with a humorist, on my travels, who had in his chamber a
cast of the Rondanini Medusa, and who assured me that the name which
that fine work of art bore in the catalogues was a misnomer, as he
was convinced that the sculptor who carved it intended it for Memory,
the mother of the Muses. In the conversation that followed, my new
friend made some extraordinary confessions. “Do you not see,” he said,
“the penalty of learning, and that each of these scholars whom you
have met at S----, though he were to be the last man, would, like the
executioner in Hood’s poem, guillotine the last but one?” He added many
lively remarks, but his evident earnestness engaged my attention, and,
in the weeks that followed, we became better acquainted. He had good
abilities, a genial temper, and no vices; but he had one defect,--he
could not speak in the tone of the people. There was some paralysis
on his will, such that, when he met men on common terms, he spoke
weakly, and from the point, like a flighty girl. His consciousness
of the fault made it worse. He envied every drover and lumberman in
the tavern their manly speech. He coveted Mirabeau’s _don terrible de
la familiarité_, believing that he whose sympathy goes lowest is the
man from whom kings have the most to fear. For himself, he declared
that he could not get enough alone to write a letter to a friend. He
left the city; he hid himself in pastures. The solitary river was not
solitary enough; the sun and moon put him out. When he bought a house,
the first thing he did was to plant trees. He could not enough conceal
himself. Set a hedge here; set oaks there,--trees behind trees; above
all, set evergreens, for they will keep a secret all the year round.
The most agreeable compliment you could pay him was, to imply that you
had not observed him in a house or a street where you had met him.
Whilst he suffered at being seen where he was, he consoled himself with
the delicious thought of the inconceivable number of places where he
was not. All he wished of his tailor was to provide that sober mean
of color and cut which would never detain the eye for a moment. He
went to Vienna, to Smyrna, to London. In all the variety of costumes,
a carnival, a kaleidoscope of clothes, to his horror he could never
discover a man in the street who wore anything like his own dress. He
would have given his soul for the ring of Gyges. His dismay at his
visibility had blunted the fears of mortality. “Do you think,” he
said, “I am in such great terror of being shot,--I, who am only waiting
to shuffle off my corporeal jacket, to slip away into the back stars,
and put diameters of the solar system and sidereal orbits between me
and all souls,--there to wear out ages in solitude, and forget memory
itself, if it be possible?” He had a remorse running to despair, of his
social _gaucheries_, and walked miles and miles to get the twitchings
out of his face, the starts and shrugs out of his arms and shoulders.
God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in
heaven or earth. He admired in Newton, not so much his theory of the
moon, as his letter to Collins, in which he forbade him to insert
his name with the solution of the problem in the “Philosophical
Transactions”: “It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing
which I chiefly study to decline.”
These conversations led me somewhat later to the knowledge of
similar cases, and to the discovery that they are not of very
infrequent occurrence. Few substances are found pure in nature.
Those constitutions which can bear in open day the rough dealing of
the world must be of that mean and average structure,--such as iron
and salt, atmospheric air, and water. But there are metals, like
potassium and sodium, which, to be kept pure, must be kept under
naphtha. Such are the talents determined on some specialty, which a
culminating civilization fosters in the heart of great cities and in
royal chambers. Nature protects her own work. To the culture of the
world, an Archimedes, a Newton is indispensable; so she guards them by
a certain aridity. If these had been good fellows, fond of dancing,
port, and clubs, we should have had no “Theory of the Sphere,” and no
“Principia.” They had that necessity of isolation which genius feels.
Each must stand on his glass tripod, if he would keep his electricity.
Even Swedenborg, whose theory of the universe is based on affection,
and who reprobates to weariness the danger and vice of pure intellect,
is constrained to make an extraordinary exception: “There are also
angels who do not live consociated, but separate, house and house;
these dwell in the midst of heaven, because they are the best of
angels.”
We have known many fine geniuses with that imperfection that they
cannot do anything useful, not so much as write one clean sentence.
’Tis worse, and tragic, that no man is fit for society who has fine
traits. At a distance, he is admired; but bring him hand to hand, he
is a cripple. One protects himself by solitude, and one by courtesy,
and one by an acid, worldly manner,--each concealing how he can the
thinness of his skin and his incapacity for strict association. But
there is no remedy that can reach the heart of the disease, but either
habits of self-reliance that should go in practice to making the man
independent of the human race, or else a religion of love. Now he
hardly seems entitled to marry; for how can he protect a woman, who
cannot protect himself?
We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall
not be, if there is anything good in you. Dante was very bad company,
and was never invited to dinner. Michel Angelo had a sad, sour time
of it. The ministers of beauty are rarely beautiful in coaches and
saloons. Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself. Yet
each of these potentates saw well the reason of his exclusion. Solitary
was he? Why, yes; but his society was limited only by the amount of
brain Nature appropriated in that age to carry on the government of the
world. “If I stay,” said Dante, when there was question of going to
Rome, “who will go? and if I go, who will stay?”
But the necessity of solitude is deeper than we have said, and is
organic. I have seen many a philosopher whose world is large enough for
only one person. He affects to be a good companion; but we are still
surprising his secret, that he means and needs to impose his system on
all the rest. The determination of each is _from_ all the others, like
that of each tree up into free space. ’Tis no wonder, when each has his
whole head, our societies should be so small. Like President Tyler,
our party falls from us every day, and we must ride in a sulky at last.
Dear heart! take it sadly home to thee,--there is no co-operation.
We begin with friendships, and all our youth is a reconnoitring and
recruiting of the holy fraternity they shall combine for the salvation
of men. But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light; yet
there is no group which a telescope will not resolve, and the dearest
friends are separated by impassable gulfs. The co-operation is
involuntary, and is put upon us by the Genius of Life, who reserves
this as a part of his prerogative. ’Tis fine for us to talk, we sit and
muse, and are serene and complete; but the moment we meet with anybody,
each becomes a fraction.
Though the stuff of tragedy and of romances is in a moral union of two
superior persons, whose confidence in each other for long years, out of
sight, and in sight, and against all appearances, is at last justified
by victorious proof of probity to gods and men, causing joyful
emotions, tears and glory,--though there be for heroes this _moral
union_, yet, they, too, are as far off as ever from an intellectual
union, and the moral union is for comparatively low and external
purposes, like the co-operation of a ship’s company or of a fire-club.
But how insular and pathetically solitary are all the people we know!
Nor dare they tell what they think of each other, when they meet in
the street. We have a fine right, to be sure, to taunt men of the world
with superficial and treacherous courtesies!
Such is the tragic necessity which strict science finds underneath
our domestic and neighborly life, irresistibly driving each adult
soul as with whips into the desert, and making our warm covenants
sentimental and momentary. We must infer that the ends of thought were
peremptory, if they were to be secured at such ruinous cost. They are
deeper than can be told, and belong to the immensities and eternities.
They reach down to that depth where society itself originates and
disappears,--where the question is, Which is first, man or men?--where
the individual is lost in his source.
But this banishment to the rocks and echoes no metaphysics can make
right or tolerable. This result is so against nature, such a half-view,
that it must be corrected by a common sense and experience. “A man is
born by the side of his father, and there he remains.” A man must be
clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty,
as of a displaced and unfurnished member. He is to be dressed in
arts and institutions, as well as in body-garments. Now and then a
man exquisitely made can live alone, and must; but coop up most men,
and you undo them. “The king lived and ate in his hall with men, and
understood men,” said Selden. When a young barrister said to the late
Mr. Mason, “I keep my chamber to read law,”--“Read law!” replied the
veteran, “’tis in the court-room you must read law.” Nor is the rule
otherwise for literature. If you would learn to write, ’tis in the
street you must learn it. Both for the vehicle and for the aims of fine
arts, you must frequent the public square. The people, and not the
college, is the writer’s home. A scholar is a candle which the love and
desire of all men will light. Never his lands or his rents, but the
power to charm the disguised soul that sits veiled under this bearded
and that rosy visage is his rent and ration. His products are as
needful as those of the baker or the weaver. Society cannot do without
cultivated men. As soon as the first wants are satisfied, the higher
wants become imperative.
’Tis hard to mesmerize ourselves, to whip our own top; but through
sympathy we are capable of energy and endurance. Concert fires people
to a certain fury of performance they can rarely reach alone. Here is
the use of society: it is so easy with the great to be great; so easy
to come up to an existing standard;--as easy as it is to the lover
to swim to his maiden through waves so grim before. The benefits of
affection are immense; and the one event which never loses its romance
is the encounter with superior persons on terms allowing the happiest
intercourse.
It by no means follows that we are not fit for society, because
_soirées_ are tedious, and because the _soirée_ finds us tedious. A
backwoodsman, who had been sent to the university, told me that, when
he heard the best-bred young men at the law-school talk together, he
reckoned himself a boor; but whenever he caught them apart, and had one
to himself alone, then they were the boors, and he the better man. And
if we recall the rare hours when we encountered the best persons, we
then found ourselves, and then first society seemed to exist. That was
society, though in the transom of a brig, or on the Florida Keys.
A cold, sluggish blood thinks it has not facts enough to the purpose,
and must decline its turn in the conversation. But they who speak
have no more,--have less. ’Tis not new facts that avail, but the heat
to dissolve everybody’s facts. Heat puts you in right relation with
magazines of facts. The capital defect of cold, arid natures is the
want of animal spirits. They seem a power incredible, as if God should
raise the dead. The recluse witnesses what others perform by their
aid, with a kind of fear. It is as much out of his possibility as the
prowess of Cœur de Lion, or an Irishman’s day’s-work on the railroad.
’Tis said, the present and the future are always rivals. Animal spirits
constitute the power of the present, and their feats are like the
structure of a pyramid. Their result is a lord, a general, or a boon
companion. Before these, what a base mendicant is Memory with his
leathern badge! But this genial heat is latent in all constitutions,
and is disengaged only by the friction of society. As Bacon said of
manners, “To obtain them, it only needs not to despise them,” so we say
of animal spirits, that they are the spontaneous product of health and
of a social habit. “For behavior, men learn it, as they take diseases,
one of another.”
But the people are to be taken in very small doses. If solitude is
proud, so is society vulgar. In society, high advantages are set
down to the individual as disqualifications. We sink as easily as we
rise, through sympathy. So many men whom I know are degraded by their
sympathies, their native aims being high enough, but their relation
all too tender to the gross people about them. Men cannot afford to
live together on their merits, and they adjust themselves by their
demerits,--by their love of gossip, or by sheer tolerance and animal
good-nature. They untune and dissipate the brave aspirant.
The remedy is, to reinforce each of these moods from the other.
Conversation will not corrupt us, if we come to the assembly in our
own garb and speech, and with the energy of health to select what
is ours and reject what is not. Society we must have; but let it be
society, and not exchanging news, or eating from the same dish. Is it
society to sit in one of your chairs? I cannot go to the houses of my
nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone. Society exists by
chemical affinity, and not otherwise.
Put any company of people together with freedom for conversation, and a
rapid self-distribution takes place, into sets and pairs. The best are
accused of exclusiveness. It would be more true to say, they separate
as oil from water, as children from old people, without love or hatred
in the matter, each seeking his like; and any interference with the
affinities would produce constraint and suffocation. All conversation
is a magnetic experiment. I know that my friend can talk eloquently;
you know that he cannot articulate a sentence: we have seen him in
different company. Assort your party, or invite none. Put Stubbs and
Coleridge, Quintilian and Aunt Miriam, into pairs, and you make them
all wretched. ’Tis an extempore Sing-Sing built in a parlor. Leave them
to seek their own mates, and they will be as merry as sparrows.
A higher civility will re-establish in our customs a certain reverence
which we have lost. What to do with these brisk young men who break
through all fences, and make themselves at home in every house? I find
out in an instant if my companion does not want me, and ropes cannot
hold me when my welcome is gone. One would think that the affinities
would pronounce themselves with a surer reciprocity.
Here again, as so often, Nature delights to put us between extreme
antagonisms, and our safety is in the skill with which we keep the
diagonal line. Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal. We must
keep our head in the one and our hands in the other. The conditions are
met, if we keep our independence, yet do not lose our sympathy. These
wonderful horses need to be driven by fine hands. We require such a
solitude as shall hold us to its revelations when we are in the street
and in palaces; for most men are cowed in society, and say good things
to you in private, but will not stand to them in public. But let us
not be the victims of words. Society and solitude are deceptive names.
It is not the circumstance of seeing more or fewer people, but the
readiness of sympathy, that imports; and a sound mind will derive its
principles from insight, with ever a purer ascent to the sufficient and
absolute right, and will accept society as the natural element in which
they are to be applied.
CIVILIZATION.
CIVILIZATION.
A certain degree of progress from the rudest state in which man is
found,--a dweller in caves, or on trees, like an ape,--a cannibal,
and eater of pounded snails, worms, and offal,--a certain degree of
progress from this extreme is called Civilization. It is a vague,
complex name, of many degrees. Nobody has attempted a definition.
Mr. Guizot, writing a book on the subject, does not. It implies the
evolution of a highly organized man, brought to supreme delicacy of
sentiment, as in practical power, religion, liberty, sense of honor,
and taste. In the hesitation to define what it is, we usually suggest
it by negations. A nation that has no clothing, no iron, no alphabet,
no marriage, no arts of peace, no abstract thought, we call barbarous.
And after many arts are invented or imported, as among the Turks
and Moorish nations, it is often a little complaisant to call them
civilized.
Each nation grows after its own genius, and has a civilization of its
own. The Chinese and Japanese, though each complete in his way, is
different from the man of Madrid or the man of New York. The term
imports a mysterious progress. In the brutes is none; and in mankind
to-day the savage tribes are gradually extinguished rather than
civilized. The Indians of this country have not learned the white man’s
work; and in Africa, the negro of to-day is the negro of Herodotus.
In other races the growth is not arrested; but the like progress that
is made by a boy “when he cuts his eye-teeth,” as we say,--childish
illusions passing daily away, and he seeing things really and
comprehensively,--is made by tribes. It is the learning the secret of
cumulative power, of advancing on one’s self. It implies a facility
of association, power to compare, the ceasing from fixed ideas. The
Indian is gloomy and distressed when urged to depart from his habits
and traditions. He is overpowered by the gaze of the white, and his eye
sinks. The occasion of one of these starts of growth is always some
novelty that astounds the mind, and provokes it to dare to change. Thus
there is a Cadmus, a Pytheas, a Manco Capac at the beginning of each
improvement,--some superior foreigner importing new and wonderful arts,
and teaching them. Of course, he must not know too much, but must have
the sympathy, language, and gods of those he would inform. But chiefly
the sea-shore has been the point of departure to knowledge, as to
commerce. The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the
most. The power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him
very fast, and the change of shores and population clears his head of
much nonsense of his wigwam.
Where shall we begin or end the list of those feats of liberty and
wit, each of which feats made an epoch of history? Thus, the effect
of a framed or stone house is immense on the tranquillity, power, and
refinement of the builder. A man in a cave or in a camp, a nomad,
will die with no more estate than the wolf or the horse leaves. But
so simple a labor as a house being achieved, his chief enemies are
kept at bay. He is safe from the teeth of wild animals, from frost,
sun-stroke, and weather; and fine faculties begin to yield their fine
harvest. Invention and art are born, manners and social beauty and
delight. ’Tis wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log-hut on the
frontier. You would think they found it under a pine-stump. With it
comes a Latin grammar,--and one of those tow-head boys has written a
hymn on Sunday. Now let colleges, now let senates take heed! for here
is one who, opening these fine tastes on the basis of the pioneer’s
iron constitution, will gather all their laurels in his strong hands.
When the Indian trail gets widened, graded, and bridged to a good
road, there is a benefactor, there is a missionary, a pacificator,
a wealth-bringer, a maker of markets, a vent for industry. Another
step in civility is the change from war, hunting, and pasturage to
agriculture. Our Scandinavian forefathers have left us a significant
legend to convey their sense of the importance of this step. “There
was once a giantess who had a daughter, and the child saw a husbandman
ploughing in the field. Then she ran and picked him up with her finger
and thumb, and put him and his plough and his oxen into her apron, and
carried them to her mother, and said, ‘Mother, what sort of a beetle is
this that I found wriggling in the sand?’ But the mother said, ‘Put it
away, my child; we must begone out of this land, for these people will
dwell in it.’” Another success is the post-office, with its educating
energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious
sentiment in mankind; so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or
gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea, over land, and comes to
its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a
fine metre of civilization.
The division of labor, the multiplication of the arts of peace, which
is nothing but a large allowance to each man to choose his work
according to his faculty,--to live by his better hand,--fills the State
with useful and happy laborers; and they, creating demand by the very
temptation of their productions, are rapidly and surely rewarded by
good sale: and what a police and ten commandments their work thus
becomes. So true is Dr. Johnson’s remark that “men are seldom more
innocently employed than when they are making money.”
The skilful combinations of civil government, though they usually
follow natural leadings, as the lines of race, language, religion, and
territory, yet require wisdom and conduct in the rulers, and in their
result delight the imagination. “We see insurmountable multitudes
obeying, in opposition to their strongest passions, the restraints
of a power which they scarcely perceive, and the crimes of a single
individual marked and punished at the distance of half the earth.”[A]
Right position of woman in the State is another index. Poverty and
industry with a healthy mind read very easily the laws of humanity, and
love them: place the sexes in right relations of mutual respect, and
a severe morality gives that essential charm to woman which educates
all that is delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing, breeds courtesy
and learning, conversation and wit, in her rough mate; so that I have
thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good
women.
Another measure of culture is the diffusion of knowledge, overrunning
all the old barriers of caste, and, by the cheap press, bringing the
university to every poor man’s door in the newsboy’s basket. Scraps of
science, of thought, of poetry are in the coarsest sheet, so that in
every house we hesitate to burn a newspaper until we have looked it
through.
The ship, in its latest complete equipment, is an abridgment
and compend of a nation’s arts: the ship steered by compass
and chart,--longitude reckoned by lunar observation and by
chronometer,--driven by steam; and in wildest sea-mountains, at vast
distances from home,
“The pulses of her iron heart
Go beating through the storm.”
No use can lessen the wonder of this control, by so weak a creature, of
forces so prodigious. I remember I watched, in crossing the sea, the
beautiful skill whereby the engine in its constant working was made to
produce two hundred gallons of fresh water out of salt-water, every
hour,--thereby supplying all the ship’s want.
The skill that pervades complex details; the man that maintains
himself; the chimney taught to burn its own smoke; the farm made to
produce all that is consumed on it; the very prison compelled to
maintain itself and yield a revenue, and, better still, made a reform
school, and a manufactory of honest men out of rogues, as the steamer
made fresh water out of salt,--all these are examples of that tendency
to combine antagonisms, and utilize evil, which is the index of high
civilization.
Civilization is the result of highly complex organization. In the
snake, all the organs are sheathed; no hands, no feet, no fins, no
wings. In bird and beast, the organs are released, and begin to play.
In man, they are all unbound, and full of joyful action. With this
unswaddling he receives the absolute illumination we call Reason, and
thereby true liberty.
Climate has much to do with this melioration. The highest civility has
never loved the hot zones. Wherever snow falls, there is usually civil
freedom. Where the banana grows, the animal system is indolent and
pampered at the cost of higher qualities: the man is sensual and cruel.
But this scale is not invariable. High degrees of moral sentiment
control the unfavorable influences of climate; and some of our grandest
examples of men and of races come from the equatorial regions,--as the
genius of Egypt, of India, and of Arabia.
These feats are measures or traits of civility; and temperate climate
is an important influence, though not quite indispensable, for there
have been learning, philosophy, and art in Iceland, and in the tropics.
But one condition is essential to the social education of man, namely,
morality. There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though
it may not always call itself by that name, but sometimes the point
of honor, as in the institution of chivalry; or patriotism, as in the
Spartan and Roman republics; or the enthusiasm of some religious sect
which imputes its virtue to its dogma; or the cabalism, or _esprit de
corps_, of a masonic or other association of friends.
The evolution of a highly-destined society must be moral; it must run
in the grooves of the celestial wheels. It must be catholic in aims.
What is _moral_? It is the respecting in action catholic or universal
ends. Hear the definition which Kant gives of moral conduct: “Act
always so that the immediate motive of thy will may become a universal
rule for all intelligent beings.”
Civilization depends on morality. Everything good in man leans on what
is higher. This rule holds in small as in great. Thus, all our strength
and success in the work of our hands depend on our borrowing the aid of
the elements. You have seen a carpenter on a ladder with a broad-axe
chopping upward chips from a beam. How awkward! at what disadvantage he
works! But see him on the ground, dressing his timber under him. Now,
not his feeble muscles, but the force of gravity brings down the axe;
that is to say, the planet itself splits his stick. The farmer had much
ill-temper, laziness, and shirking to endure from his hand-sawyers,
until one day he bethought him to put his saw-mill on the edge of a
waterfall; and the river never tires of turning his wheel: the river is
good-natured, and never hints an objection.
We had letters to send: couriers could not go fast enough, nor far
enough; broke their wagons, foundered their horses; bad roads in
spring, snow-drifts in winter, heats in summer; could not get the
horses out of a walk. But we found out that the air and earth were
full of Electricity; and always going our way,--just the way we wanted
to send. _Would he take a message?_ Just as lief as not; had nothing
else to do; would carry it in no time. Only one doubt occurred, one
staggering objection,--he had no carpet-bag, no visible pockets, no
hands, not so much as a mouth, to carry a letter. But, after much
thought and many experiments, we managed to meet the conditions, and
to fold up the letter in such invisible compact form as he could
carry in those invisible pockets of his, never wrought by needle and
thread,--and it went like a charm.
I admire still more than the saw-mill the skill which, on the
sea-shore, makes the tides drive the wheels and grind corn, and which
thus engages the assistance of the moon, like a hired hand, to grind,
and wind, and pump, and saw, and split stone, and roll iron.
Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor,
to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods
themselves. That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of
the elements. The forces of steam, gravity, galvanism, light, magnets,
wind, fire, serve us day by day, and cost us nothing.
Our astronomy is full of examples of calling in the aid of these
magnificent helpers. Thus, on a planet so small as ours, the want of
an adequate base for astronomical measurements is early felt, as, for
example, in detecting the parallax of a star. But the astronomer,
having by an observation fixed the place of a star, by so simple an
expedient as waiting six months, and then repeating his observation,
contrived to put the diameter of the earth’s orbit, say two hundred
millions of miles, between his first observation and his second, and
this line afforded him a respectable base for his triangle.
All our arts aim to win this vantage. We cannot bring the heavenly
powers to us, but, if we will only choose our jobs in directions in
which they travel, they will undertake them with the greatest pleasure.
It is a peremptory rule with them, that _they never go out of their
road_. We are dapper little busybodies, and run this way and that
way superserviceably; but they swerve never from their foreordained
paths,--neither the sun, nor the moon, nor a bubble of air, nor a mote
of dust.
And as our handiworks borrow the elements, so all our social and
political action leans on principles. To accomplish anything excellent,
the will must work for catholic and universal ends. A puny creature
walled in on every side, as Daniel wrote,--
“Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!”
but when his will leans on a principle, when he is the vehicle of
ideas, he borrows their omnipotence. Gibraltar may be strong, but ideas
are impregnable, and bestow on the hero their invincibility. “It was
a great instruction,” said a saint in Cromwell’s war, “that the best
courages are but beams of the Almighty.” Hitch your wagon to a star.
Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let
us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams
going the other way,--Charles’s Wain, Great Bear, Orion, Leo, Hercules:
every god will leave us. Work rather for those interests which the
divinities honor and promote,--justice, love, freedom, knowledge,
utility.
If we can thus ride in Olympian chariots by putting our works in the
path of the celestial circuits, we can harness also evil agents, the
powers of darkness, and force them to serve against their will the ends
of wisdom and virtue. Thus, a wise government puts fines and penalties
on pleasant vices. What a benefit would the American government, not
yet relieved of its extreme need, render to itself, and to every city,
village, and hamlet in the States, if it would tax whiskey and rum
almost to the point of prohibition! Was it Bonaparte who said that he
found vices very good patriots?--“he got five millions from the love of
brandy, and he should be glad to know which of the virtues would pay
him as much.” Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully
carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such
joy as they give and such harm as they do.
These are traits, and measures, and modes; and the true test of
civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the
crops,--no, but the kind of man the country turns out. I see the vast
advantages of this country, spanning the breadth of the temperate
zone. I see the immense material prosperity,--towns on towns, states
on states, and wealth piled in the massive architecture of cities;
California quartz-mountains dumped down in New York to be repiled
architecturally along-shore from Canada to Cuba, and thence westward
to California again. But it is not New York streets built by the
confluence of workmen and wealth of all nations, though stretching out
towards Philadelphia until they touch it, and northward until they
touch New Haven, Hartford, Springfield, Worcester, and Boston,--not
these that make the real estimation. But, when I look over this
constellation of cities which animate and illustrate the land, and
see how little the government has to do with their daily life, how
self-helped and self-directed all families are,--knots of men in purely
natural societies,--societies of trade, of kindred blood, of habitual
hospitality, house and house, man acting on man by weight of opinion,
of longer or better-directed industry, the refining influence of
women, the invitation which experience and permanent causes open to
youth and labor,--when I see how much each virtuous and gifted person,
whom all men consider, lives affectionately with scores of excellent
people who are not known far from home, and perhaps with great reason
reckons these people his superiors in virtue, and in the symmetry and
force of their qualities, I see what cubic values America has, and
in these a better certificate of civilization than great cities or
enormous wealth.
In strictness, the vital refinements are the moral and intellectual
steps. The appearance of the Hebrew Moses, of the Indian Buddh,--in
Greece, of the Seven Wise Masters, of the acute and upright Socrates,
and of the Stoic Zeno,--in Judæa, the advent of Jesus,--and in modern
Christendom, of the realists Huss, Savonarola, and Luther, are causal
facts which carry forward races to new convictions, and elevate the
rule of life. In the presence of these agencies, it is frivolous to
insist on the invention of printing or gunpowder, of steam-power or
gas-light, percussion-caps and rubber-shoes, which are toys thrown off
from that security, freedom, and exhilaration which a healthy morality
creates in society. These arts add a comfort and smoothness to house
and street life; but a purer morality, which kindles genius, civilizes
civilization, casts backward all that we held sacred into the profane,
as the flame of oil throws a shadow when shined upon by the flame of
the Bude-light. Not the less the popular measures of progress will ever
be the arts and the laws.
But if there be a country which cannot stand any one of these tests,--a
country where knowledge cannot be diffused without perils of mob-law
and statute-law,--where speech is not free,--where the post-office is
violated, mail-bags opened, and letters tampered with,--where public
debts and private debts outside of the State are repudiated,--where
liberty is attacked in the primary institution of social life,--where
the position of the white woman is injuriously affected by the
outlawry of the black woman,--where the arts, such as they have, are
all imported, having no indigenous life,--where the laborer is not
secured in the earnings of his own hands,--where suffrage is not free
or equal,--that country is, in all these respects, not civil, but
barbarous; and no advantages of soil, climate, or coast can resist
these suicidal mischiefs.
Morality and all the incidents of morality are essential; as, justice
to the citizen, and personal liberty. Montesquieu says: “Countries are
well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free”; and
the remark holds not less but more true of the culture of men, than of
the tillage of land. And the highest proof of civility is, that the
whole public action of the State is directed on securing the greatest
good of the greatest number.
ART.
ART.
All departments of life at the present day,--Trade, Politics, Letters,
Science, or Religion,--seem to feel, and to labor to express, the
identity of their law. They are rays of one sun; they translate each
into a new language the sense of the other. They are sublime when seen
as emanations of a Necessity contradistinguished from the vulgar Fate,
by being instant and alive, and dissolving man, as well as his works,
in its flowing beneficence. This influence is conspicuously visible in
the principles and history of Art.
On one side in primary communication with absolute truth through
thought and instinct, the human mind on the other side tends, by an
equal necessity, to the publication and embodiment of its thought,
modified and dwarfed by the impurity and untruth which, in all our
experience, injure the individuality through which it passes. The
child not only suffers, but cries; not only hungers, but eats. The
man not only thinks, but speaks and acts. Every thought that arises
in the mind, in its rising aims to pass out of the mind into act;
just as every plant, in the moment of germination, struggles up to
light. Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second
form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that
it may be uttered and acted. The more profound the thought, the more
burdensome. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it
knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done.
What is in, will out. It struggles to the birth. Speech is a great
pleasure, and action a great pleasure; they cannot be foreborne.
The utterance of thought and emotion in speech and action may be
conscious or unconscious. The sucking child is an unconscious actor.
The man in an ecstasy of fear or anger is an unconscious actor. A large
part of our habitual actions are unconsciously done, and most of our
necessary words are unconsciously said.
The conscious utterance of thought, by speech or action, to any end,
is Art. From the first imitative babble of a child to the despotism of
eloquence, from his first pile of toys or chip bridge to the masonry
of Minot Rock Light-house or the Pacific Railroad, from the tattooing
of the Owhyhees to the Vatican Gallery, from the simplest expedient
of private prudence to the American Constitution, from its first to
its last works, Art is the spirit’s voluntary use and combination
of things to serve its end. The Will distinguishes it as spiritual
action. Relatively to themselves, the bee, the bird, the beaver, have
no art; for what they do, they do instinctively; but relatively to
the Supreme Being, they have. And the same is true of all unconscious
action: relatively to the doer, it is instinct; relatively to the First
Cause, it is Art. In this sense, recognizing the Spirit which informs
Nature, Plato rightly said, “Those things which are said to be done
by Nature are indeed done by Divine Art.” Art, universally, is the
spirit creative. It was defined by Aristotle, “The reason of the thing,
without the matter.”
If we follow the popular distinction of works according to their aim,
we should say, the Spirit, in its creation, aims at use or at beauty,
and hence Art divides itself into the Useful and the Fine Arts.
The useful arts comprehend not only those that lie next to instinct,
as agriculture, building, weaving, &c., but also navigation, practical
chemistry, and the construction of all the grand and delicate tools and
instruments by which man serves himself: as language, the watch, the
ship, the decimal cipher; and also the sciences, so far as they are
made serviceable to political economy.
When we reflect on the pleasure we receive from a ship, a railroad,
a dry-dock; or from a picture, a dramatic representation, a statue,
a poem, we find that these have not a quite simple, but a blended
origin. We find that the question, What is Art? leads us directly to
another,--Who is the artist? and the solution of this is the key to the
history of Art.
I hasten to state the principle which prescribes, through different
means, its firm law to the useful and the beautiful arts. The law
is this. The universal soul is the alone creator of the useful and
the beautiful; therefore, to make anything useful or beautiful, the
individual must be submitted to the universal mind.
In the first place, let us consider this in reference to the useful
arts. Here the omnipotent agent is Nature; all human acts are
satellites to her orb. Nature is the representative of the universal
mind, and the law becomes this,--that Art must be a complement to
nature, strictly subsidiary. It was said, in allusion to the great
structures of the ancient Romans,--the aqueducts and bridges,--that
“their Art was a Nature working to municipal ends.” That is a true
account of all just works of useful art. Smeaton built Eddystone
Light-house on the model of an oak-tree, as being the form in nature
best designed to resist a constant assailing force. Dollond formed his
achromatic telescope on the model of the human eye. Duhamel built a
bridge by letting in a piece of stronger timber for the middle of the
under surface, getting his hint from the structure of the shin-bone.
The first and last lesson of the useful arts is, that Nature tyrannizes
over our works. They must be conformed to her law, or they will be
ground to powder by her omnipresent activity. Nothing droll, nothing
whimsical will endure. Nature is ever interfering with Art. You cannot
build your house or pagoda as you will, but as you must. There is a
quick bound set to your caprice. The leaning tower can only lean so
far. The verandah or pagoda roof can curve upward only to a certain
point. The slope of your roof is determined by the weight of snow. It
is only within narrow limits that the discretion of the architect may
range: gravity, wind, sun, rain, the size of men and animals, and such
like, have more to say than he. It is the law of fluids that prescribes
the shape of the boat,--keel, rudder, and bows,--and, in the finer
fluid above, the form and tackle of the sails. Man seems to have no
option about his tools, but merely the necessity to learn from Nature
what will fit best, as if he were fitting a screw or a door. Beneath
a necessity thus almighty, what is artificial in man’s life seems
insignificant. He seems to take his task so minutely from intimations
of Nature, that his works become as it were hers, and he is no longer
free.
But if we work within this limit, she yields us all her strength. All
powerful action is performed by bringing the forces of nature to bear
upon our objects. We do not grind corn or lift the loom by our own
strength, but we build a mill in such position as to set the north wind
to play upon our instrument, or the elastic force of steam, or the ebb
and flow of the sea. So in our handiwork, we do few things by muscular
force, but we place ourselves in such attitudes as to bring the force
of gravity, that is, the weight of the planet, to bear upon the spade
or the axe we wield. In short, in all our operations we seek not to use
our own, but to bring a quite infinite force to bear.
Let us now consider this law as it affects the works that have beauty
for their end, that is, the productions of the Fine Arts. Here again
the prominent fact is subordination of man. His art is the least part
of his work of art. A great deduction is to be made before we can know
his proper contribution to it.
Music, Eloquence, Poetry, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture. This is
a rough enumeration of the Fine Arts. I omit Rhetoric, which only
respects the form of eloquence and poetry. Architecture and eloquence
are mixed arts, whose end is sometimes beauty and sometimes use.
It will be seen that in each of these arts there is much which is
not spiritual. Each has a material basis, and in each the creating
intellect is crippled in some degree by the stuff on which it works.
The basis of poetry is language, which is material only on one side.
It is a demi-god. But being applied primarily to the common necessities
of man, it is not new-created by the poet for his own ends.
The basis of music is the qualities of the air and the vibrations of
sonorous bodies. The pulsation of a stretched string or wire gives the
ear the pleasure of sweet sound, before yet the musician has enhanced
this pleasure by concords and combinations.
Eloquence, as far as it is a fine art, is modified how much by the
material organization of the orator, the tone of the voice, the
physical strength, the play of the eye and countenance. All this is
so much deduction from the purely spiritual pleasure,--as so much
deduction from the merit of Art,--and is the attribute of Nature.
In painting, bright colors stimulate the eye, before yet they are
harmonized into a landscape. In sculpture and in architecture the
material, as marble or granite, and in architecture the mass, are
sources of great pleasure, quite independent of the artificial
arrangement. The art resides in the model, in the plan; for it is on
that the genius of the artist is expended, not on the statue or the
temple. Just as much better as is the polished statue of dazzling
marble than the clay model, or as much more impressive as is the
granite cathedral or pyramid than the ground-plan or profile of them
on paper, so much more beauty owe they to Nature than to Art.
There is a still larger deduction to be made from the genius of the
artist in favor of Nature than I have yet specified.
A jumble of musical sounds on a viol or a flute, in which the rhythm of
the tune is played without one of the notes being right, gives pleasure
to the unskilful ear. A very coarse imitation of the human form on
canvas, or in wax-work,--a coarse sketch in colors of a landscape,
in which imitation is all that is attempted,--these things give to
unpractised eyes, to the uncultured, who do not ask a fine spiritual
delight, almost as much pleasure as a statue of Canova or a picture of
Titian.
And in the statue of Canova, or the picture of Titian, these give the
great part of the pleasure; they are the basis on which the fine spirit
rears a higher delight, but to which these are indispensable.
Another deduction from the genius of the artist is what is conventional
in his art, of which there is much in every work of art. Thus how
much is there that is not original in every particular building, in
every statue, in every tune, painting, poem, or harangue!--whatever is
national or usual; as the usage of building all Roman churches in the
form of a cross, the prescribed distribution of parts of a theatre, the
custom of draping a statue in classical costume. Yet who will deny
that the merely conventional part of the performance contributes much
to its effect?
One consideration more exhausts, I believe, all the deductions from
the genius of the artist in any given work. This is the adventitious.
Thus the pleasure that a noble temple gives us is only in part owing to
the temple. It is exalted by the beauty of sunlight, the play of the
clouds, the landscape around it, its grouping with the houses, trees,
and towers in its vicinity. The pleasure of eloquence is in greatest
part owing often to the stimulus of the occasion which produces it,--to
the magic of sympathy, which exalts the feeling of each by radiating on
him the feeling of all.
The effect of music belongs how much to the place,--as the church, or
the moonlight walk; or to the company; or, if on the stage, to what
went before in the play, or to the expectation of what shall come after.
In poetry, “It is tradition more than invention that helps the poet to
a good fable.” The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the
greater delight which a verse gives in happy quotation than in the poem.
It is a curious proof of our conviction that the artist does not feel
himself to be the parent of his work, and is as much surprised at the
effect as we, that we are so unwilling to impute our best sense of
any work of art to the author. The highest praise we can attribute to
any writer, painter, sculptor, builder, is, that he actually possessed
the thought or feeling with which he has inspired us. We hesitate at
doing Spenser so great an honor as to think that he intended by his
allegory the sense we affix to it. We grudge to Homer the wide human
circumspection his commentators ascribe to him. Even Shakspeare,
of whom we can believe everything, we think indebted to Goethe and
to Coleridge for the wisdom they detect in his Hamlet and Antony.
Especially have we this infirmity of faith in contemporary genius. We
fear that Allston and Greenough did not foresee and design all the
effect they produce on us.