of himself: “Meanwhile the Cardinal Ippolito, in whom all my best hopes
were placed, being dead, I began to understand that the promises of
this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms, and that to confide
in one’s self, and become something of worth and value, is the best and
safest course.” Now, though I am by no means sure that the reader will
assent to all my propositions, yet I think we shall agree in my first
rule for success,--that we shall drop the brag and the advertisement,
and take Michel Angelo’s course, “to confide in one’s self, and be
something of worth and value.”
Each man has an aptitude born with him to do easily some feat
impossible to any other. Do your work. I have to say this often, but
nature says it oftener. ’Tis clownish to insist on doing all with
one’s own hands, as if every man should build his own clumsy house,
forge his hammer, and bake his dough; but he is to dare to do what
he can do best; not help others as they would direct him, but as he
knows his helpful power to be. To do otherwise is to neutralize all
those extraordinary special talents distributed among men. Yet, whilst
this self-truth is essential to the exhibition of the world and to the
growth and glory of each mind, it is rare to find a man who believes
his own thought or who speaks that which he was created to say. As
nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain-dealing, so
nothing is more rare in any man than an act of his own. Any work looks
wonderful to him, except that which he can do. We do not believe our
own thought; we must serve somebody; we must quote somebody; we dote
on the old and the distant; we are tickled by great names; we import
the religion of other nations; we quote their opinions; we cite their
laws. The gravest and learnedest courts in this country shudder to face
a new question, and will wait months and years for a case to occur that
can be tortured into a precedent, and thus throw on a bolder party the
_onus_ of an initiative. Thus we do not carry a counsel in our breasts,
or do not know it; and because we cannot shake off from our shoes this
dust of Europe and Asia, the world seems to be born old, society is
under a spell, every man is a borrower and a mimic, life is theatrical,
and literature a quotation; and hence that depression of spirits, that
furrow of care, said to mark every American brow.
Self-trust is the first secret of success, the belief that, if you are
here, the authorities of the universe put you here, and for cause, or
with some task strictly appointed you in your constitution, and so
long as you work at that you are well and successful. It by no means
consists in rushing prematurely to a showy feat that shall catch the
eye and satisfy spectators. It is enough if you work in the right
direction. So far from the performance being the real success, it is
clear that the success was much earlier than that, namely, when all the
feats that make our civility were the thoughts of good heads. The fame
of each discovery rightly attaches to the mind that made the formula
which contains all the details, and not to the manufacturers who now
make their gain by it; although the mob uniformly cheers the publisher,
and not the inventor. It is the dulness of the multitude that they
cannot see the house, in the ground-plan; the working, in the model of
the projector. Whilst it is a thought, though it were a new fuel, or
a new food, or the creation of agriculture, it is cried down; it is a
chimera: but when it is a fact, and comes in the shape of eight per
cent, ten per cent, a hundred per cent, they cry, ‘It is the voice of
God.’ Horatio Greenough, the sculptor, said to me of Robert Fulton’s
visit to Paris: “Fulton knocked at the door of Napoleon with steam,
and was rejected; and Napoleon lived long enough to know that he had
excluded a greater power than his own.”
Is there no loving of knowledge, and of art, and of our design, for
itself alone? Cannot we please ourselves with performing our work, or
gaining truth and power, without being praised for it? I gain my point,
I gain all points, if I can reach my companion with any statement
which teaches him his own worth. The sum of wisdom is, that the time
is never lost that is devoted to work. The good workman never says,
‘There, that will do’; but, ‘There, that is it: try it, and come again,
it will last always.’ If the artist, in whatever art, is well at work
on his own design, it signifies little that he does not yet find orders
or customers. I pronounce that young man happy who is content with
having acquired the skill which he had aimed at, and waits willingly
when the occasion of making it appreciated shall arrive, knowing well
that it will not loiter. The time your rival spends in dressing up his
work for effect, hastily, and for the market, you spend in study and
experiments towards real knowledge and efficiency. He has thereby sold
his picture or machine, or won the prize, or got the appointment; but
you have raised yourself into a higher school of art, and a few years
will show the advantage of the real master over the short popularity of
the showman. I know it is a nice point to discriminate this self-trust,
which is the pledge of all mental vigor and performance, from the
disease to which it is allied,--the exaggeration of the part which we
can play;--yet they are two things. But it is sanity to know, that,
over my talent or knack, and a million times better than any talent,
is the central intelligence which subordinates and uses all talents;
and it is only as a door into this, that any talent or the knowledge it
gives is of value. He only who comes into this central intelligence,
in which no egotism or exaggeration can be, comes into self-possession.
My next point is that, in the scale of powers, it is not talent, but
sensibility, which is best: talent confines, but the central life
puts us in relation to all. How often it seems the chief good to be
born with a cheerful temper, and well adjusted to the tone of the
human race. Such a man feels himself in harmony, and conscious by
his receptivity of an infinite strength. Like Alfred, “good fortune
accompanies him like a gift of God.” Feel yourself, and be not daunted
by things. ’Tis the fulness of man that runs over into objects, and
makes his Bibles and Shakspeares and Homers so great. The joyful reader
borrows of his own ideas to fill their faulty outline, and knows not
that he borrows and gives.
There is something of poverty in our criticism. We assume that there
are few great men, all the rest are little; that there is but one
Homer, but one Shakspeare, one Newton, one Socrates. But the soul in
her beaming hour does not acknowledge these usurpations. We should know
how to praise Socrates, or Plato, or Saint John, without impoverishing
us. In good hours we do not find Shakspeare or Homer over-great,--only
to have been translators of the happy present,--and every man and woman
divine possibilities. ’Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a
good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem
confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for
his ear.
The light by which we see in this world comes out from the soul of
the observer. Wherever any noble sentiment dwelt, it made the faces
and houses around to shine. Nay, the powers of this busy brain are
miraculous and illimitable. Therein are the rules and formulas by which
the whole empire of matter is worked. There is no prosperity, trade,
art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it
home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.
Is all life a surface affair? ’Tis curious, but our difference of wit
appears to be only a difference of impressionability, or power to
appreciate faint, fainter, and infinitely faintest voices and visions.
When the scholar or the writer has pumped his brain for thoughts and
verses, and then comes abroad into Nature, has he never found that
there is a better poetry hinted in a boy’s whistle of a tune, or in
the piping of a sparrow, than in all his literary results? We call
it health. What is so admirable as the health of youth?--with his
long days because his eyes are good, and brisk circulations keep him
warm in cold rooms, and he loves books that speak to the imagination;
and he can read Plato, covered to his chin with a cloak in a cold
upper chamber, though he should associate the Dialogues ever after
with a woollen smell. ’Tis the bane of life that natural effects are
continually crowded out, and artificial arrangements substituted.
We remember when, in early youth, the earth spoke and the heavens
glowed; when an evening, any evening, grim and wintry, sleet and snow,
was enough for us; the houses were in the air. Now it costs a rare
combination of clouds and lights to overcome the common and mean. What
is it we look for in the landscape, in sunsets and sunrises, in the sea
and the firmament? what but a compensation for the cramp and pettiness
of human performances? We bask in the day, and the mind finds somewhat
as great as itself. In Nature, all is large, massive repose. Remember
what befalls a city boy who goes for the first time into the October
woods. He is suddenly initiated into a pomp and glory that brings to
pass for him the dreams of romance. He is the king he dreamed he was;
he walks through tents of gold, through bowers of crimson, porphyry,
and topaz, pavilion on pavilion, garlanded with vines, flowers, and
sunbeams, with incense and music, with so many hints to his astonished
senses; the leaves twinkle and pique and flatter him, and his eye and
step are tempted on by what hazy distances to happier solitudes. All
this happiness he owes only to his finer perception. The owner of the
wood-lot finds only a number of discolored trees, and says, ‘They
ought to come down; they aren’t growing any better; they should be cut
and corded before spring.’
Wordsworth writes of the delights of the boy in Nature:--
“For never will come back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower.”
But I have just seen a man, well knowing what he spoke of, who told me
that the verse was not true for him; that his eyes opened as he grew
older, and that every spring was more beautiful to him than the last.
We live among gods of our own creation. Does that deep-toned bell,
which has shortened many a night of ill nerves, render to you nothing
but acoustic vibrations? Is the old church, which gave you the first
lessons of religious life, or the village school, or the college where
you first knew the dreams of fancy and joys of thought, only boards or
brick and mortar? Is the house in which you were born, or the house
in which your dearest friend lived, only a piece of real estate whose
value is covered by the Hartford insurance? You walk on the beach and
enjoy the animation of the picture. Scoop up a little water in the
hollow of your palm, take up a handful of shore sand; well, these are
the elements. What is the beach but acres of sand? What is the ocean
but cubic miles of water? a little more or less signifies nothing.
No, it is that this brute matter is part of somewhat not brute. It is
that the sand floor is held by spheral gravity, and bent to be a part
of the round globe, under the optical sky,--part of the astonishing
astronomy, and existing, at last, to moral ends and from moral causes.
The world is not made up to the eye of figures, that is, only half; it
is also made of color. How that element washes the universe with its
enchanting waves! The sculptor had ended his work, and behold a new
world of dream-like glory. ’Tis the last stroke of Nature; beyond color
she cannot go. In like manner, life is made up, not of knowledge only,
but of love also. If thought is form, sentiment is color. It clothes
the skeleton world with space, variety, and glow. The hues of sunset
make life great; so the affections make some little web of cottage and
fireside populous, important, and filling the main space in our history.
The fundamental fact in our metaphysic constitution is the
correspondence of man to the world, so that every change in that
writes a record in the mind. The mind yields sympathetically to the
tendencies or law which stream through things, and make the order of
nature; and in the perfection of this correspondence or expressiveness,
the health and force of man consist. If we follow this hint into our
intellectual education, we shall find that it is not propositions, not
new dogmas and a logical exposition of the world, that are our first
need; but to watch and tenderly cherish the intellectual and moral
sensibilities, those fountains of right thought, and woo them to stay
and make their home with us. Whilst they abide with us, we shall not
think amiss. Our perception far outruns our talent. We bring a welcome
to the highest lessons of religion and of poetry out of all proportion
beyond our skill to teach. And, further, the great hearing and sympathy
of men is more true and wise than their speaking is wont to be. A deep
sympathy is what we require for any student of the mind; for the chief
difference between man and man is a difference of impressionability.
Aristotle, or Bacon, or Kant propound some maxim which is the key-note
of philosophy thenceforward. But I am more interested to know, that,
when at last they have hurled out their grand word, it is only some
familiar experience of every man in the street. If it be not, it will
never be heard of again.
Ah! if one could keep this sensibility, and live in the happy sufficing
present, and find the day and its cheap means contenting, which
only ask receptivity in you, and no strained exertion and cankering
ambition, overstimulating to be at the head of your class and the head
of society, and to have distinction and laurels and consumption! We are
not strong by our power to penetrate, but by our relatedness. The world
is enlarged for us, not by new objects, but by finding more affinities
and potencies in those we have.
This sensibility appears in the homage to beauty which exalts the
faculties of youth, in the power which form and color exert upon
the soul; when we see eyes that are a compliment to the human race,
features that explain the Phidian sculpture. Fontenelle said: “There
are three things about which I have curiosity, though I know nothing of
them,--music, poetry, and love.” The great doctors of this science are
the greatest men,--Dante, Petrarch, Michel Angelo, and Shakspeare. The
wise Socrates treats this matter with a certain archness, yet with very
marked expressions. “I am always,” he says, “asserting that I happen to
know, I may say, nothing but a mere trifle relating to matters of love;
yet in that kind of learning I lay claim to being more skilled than
any one man of the past or present time.” They may well speak in this
uncertain manner of their knowledge, and in this confident manner of
their will, for the secret of it is hard to detect, so deep it is; and
yet genius is measured by its skill in this science.
Who is he in youth, or in maturity, or even in old age, who does not
like to hear of those sensibilities which turn curled heads round at
church, and send wonderful eye-beams across assemblies, from one to
one, never missing in the thickest crowd. The keen statist reckons by
tens and hundreds; the genial man is interested in every slipper that
comes into the assembly. The passion, alike everywhere, creeps under
the snows of Scandinavia, under the fires of the equator, and swims in
the seas of Polynesia. Lofn is as puissant a divinity in the Norse Edda
as Camadeva in the red vault of India, Eros in the Greek, or Cupid in
the Latin heaven. And what is specially true of love is, that it is a
state of extreme impressionability; the lover has more senses and finer
senses than others; his eye and ear are telegraphs; he reads omens on
the flower, and cloud, and face, and form, and gesture, and reads them
aright. In his surprise at the sudden and entire understanding that is
between him and the beloved person, it occurs to him that they might
somehow meet independently of time and place. How delicious the belief
that he could elude all guards, precautions, ceremonies, means, and
delays, and hold instant and sempiternal communication! In solitude, in
banishment, the hope returned, and the experiment was eagerly tried.
The supernal powers seem to take his part. What was on his lips to say
is uttered by his friend. When he went abroad, he met, by wonderful
casualties, the one person he sought. If in his walk he chanced to look
back, his friend was walking behind him. And it has happened that the
artist has often drawn in his pictures the face of the future wife whom
he had not yet seen.
But also in complacences, nowise so strict as this of the passion, the
man of sensibility counts it a delight only to hear a child’s voice
fully addressed to him, or to see the beautiful manners of the youth
of either sex. When the event is past and remote, how insignificant
the greatest compared with the piquancy of the present! To-day at the
school examination the professor interrogates Sylvina in the history
class about Odoacer and Alaric. Sylvina can’t remember, but suggests
that Odoacer was defeated; and the professor tartly replies, “No, he
defeated the Romans.” But ’tis plain to the visitor, that ’tis of no
importance at all about Odoacer, and ’tis a great deal of importance
about Sylvina; and if she says he was defeated, why he had better,
a great deal, have been defeated, than give her a moment’s annoy.
Odoacer, if there was a particle of the gentleman in him, would have
said, Let me be defeated a thousand times.
And as our tenderness for youth and beauty gives a new and just
importance to their fresh and manifold claims, so the like sensibility
gives welcome to all excellence, has eyes and hospitality for merit in
corners. An Englishman of marked character and talent, who had brought
with him hither one or two friends and a library of mystics, assured me
that nobody and nothing of possible interest was left in England,--he
had brought all that was alive away. I was forced to reply: “No, next
door to you, probably, on the other side of the partition in the same
house, was a greater man than any you had seen.” Every man has a
history worth knowing, if he could tell it, or if we could draw it from
him. Character and wit have their own magnetism. Send a deep man into
any town, and he will find another deep man there, unknown hitherto
to his neighbors. That is the great happiness of life,--to add to our
high acquaintances. The very law of averages might have assured you
that there will be in every hundred heads, say ten or five good heads.
Morals are generated as the atmosphere is. ’Tis a secret, the genesis
of either; but the springs of justice and courage do not fail any more
than salt or sulphur springs.
The world is always opulent, the oracles are never silent; but
the receiver must by a happy temperance be brought to that top of
condition, that frolic health, that he can easily take and give these
fine communications. Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign
is cheerfulness,--an open and noble temper. There was never poet who
had not the heart in the right place. The old trouveur, Pons Capdueil,
wrote,--
“Oft have I heard, and deem the witness true,
Whom man delights in, God delights in too.”
All beauty warms the heart, is a sign of health, prosperity, and the
favor of God. Everything lasting and fit for men, the Divine Power
has marked with this stamp. What delights, what emancipates, not what
scares and pains us, is wise and good in speech and in the arts. For,
truly, the heart at the centre of the universe with every throb hurls
the flood of happiness into every artery, vein, and veinlet, so that
the whole system is inundated with the tides of joy. The plenty of the
poorest place is too great: the harvest cannot be gathered. Every sound
ends in music. The edge of every surface is tinged with prismatic rays.
One more trait of true success. The good mind chooses what is positive,
what is advancing,--embraces the affirmative. Our system is one of
poverty. ’Tis presumed, as I said, there is but one Shakspeare, one
Homer, one Jesus,--not that all are or shall be inspired. But we must
begin by affirming. Truth and goodness subsist forevermore. It is true
there is evil and good, night and day: but these are not equal. The day
is great and final. The night is for the day, but the day is not for
the night. What is this immortal demand for more, which belongs to our
constitution? this enormous ideal? There is no such critic and beggar
as this terrible Soul. No historical person begins to content us. We
know the satisfactoriness of justice, the sufficiency of truth. We
know the answer that leaves nothing to ask. We know the Spirit by its
victorious tone. The searching tests to apply to every new pretender
are amount and quality,--what does he add? and what is the state of
mind he leaves me in? Your theory is unimportant; but what new stock
you can add to humanity, or how high you can carry life? A man is a man
only as he makes life and nature happier to us.
I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition in all
points to the real and wholesome success. One adores public opinion,
the other private opinion; one fame, the other desert; one feats, the
other humility; one lucre, the other love; one monopoly, and the other
hospitality of mind.
We may apply this affirmative law to letters, to manners, to art,
to the decorations of our houses, etc. I do not find executions or
tortures or lazar-houses, or grisly photographs of the field on the day
after the battle fit subjects for cabinet pictures. I think that some
so-called “sacred subjects” must be treated with more genius than I
have seen in the masters of Italian or Spanish art to be right pictures
for houses and churches. Nature does not invite such exhibition. Nature
lays the ground-plan of each creature accurately,--sternly fit for
all his functions; then veils it scrupulously. See how carefully she
covers up the skeleton. The eye shall not see it: the sun shall not
shine on it. She weaves her tissues and integuments of flesh and skin
and hair and beautiful colors of the day over it, and forces death down
underground, and makes haste to cover it up with leaves and vines, and
wipes carefully out every trace by new creation. Who and what are you
that would lay the ghastly anatomy bare?
Don’t hang a dismal picture on the wall, and do not daub with sables
and glooms in your conversation. Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate
preacher. Don’t bewail and bemoan. Omit the negative propositions.
Nerve us with incessant affirmatives. Don’t waste yourself in
rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
When that is spoken which has a right to be spoken, the chatter and the
criticism will stop. Set down nothing that will not help somebody;
“For every gift of noble origin
Is breathed upon by Hope’s perpetual breath.”
The affirmative of affirmatives is love. As much love, so much
perception. As caloric to matter, so is love to mind; so it enlarges,
and so it empowers it. Good-will makes insight, as one finds his way
to the sea by embarking on a river. I have seen scores of people who
can silence me, but I seek one who shall make me forget or overcome the
frigidities and imbecilities into which I fall. The painter Giotto,
Vasari tells us, renewed art, because he put more goodness into his
heads. To awake in man and to raise the sense of worth, to educate his
feeling and judgment so that he shall scorn himself for a bad action,
that is the only aim.