Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess that life
is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics. So much fate, so much
irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration enters
into it, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience
whereby to help each other. All the professions are timid and expectant
agencies. The priest is glad if his prayers or his sermon meet the
condition of any soul; if of two, if of ten, 'tis a signal success. But
he walked to the church without any assurance that he knew the
distemper, or could heal it. The physician prescribes hesitatingly out
of his few resources, the same tonic or sedative to this new and
peculiar constitution, which he has applied with various success to a
hundred men before. If the patient mends, he is glad and surprised.
The lawyer advises the client, and tells his story to the jury, and
leaves it with them, and is as gay and as much relieved as the client,
if it turns out that he has a verdict. The judge weighs the arguments,
and puts a brave face on the matter, and, since there must be a
decision, decides as he can, and hopes he has done justice, and given
satisfaction to the community; but is only an advocate after all. And
so is all life a timid and unskilful spectator. We do what we must, and
call it by the best names. We like very well to be praised for our
action, but our conscience says, "Not unto us." 'Tis little we can do
for each other. We accompany the youth with sympathy, and manifold old
sayings of the wise, to the gate of the arena, but 'tis certain that not
by strength of ours, or of the old sayings, but only on strength of his
own, unknown to us or to any, he must stand or fall. That by which a
man conquers in any passage, is a profound secret to every other being
in the world, and it is only as he turns his back on us and on all men,
and draws on this most private wisdom, that any good can come to him.
What we have, therefore, to say of life, is rather description, or, if
you please, celebration, than available rules.
Yet vigor is contagious, and whatever makes us either think or feel
strongly, adds to our power, and enlarges our field of action. We have
a debt to every great heart, to every fine genius; to those who have put
life and fortune on the cast of an act of justice; to those who have
added new sciences; to those who have refined life by elegant pursuits.
'Tis the fine souls who serve us, and not what is called fine society.
Fine society is only a self-protection against the vulgarities of the
street and the tavern. Fine society, in the common acceptation, has
neither ideas nor aims. It renders the service of a perfumery, or a
laundry, not of a farm or factory. 'Tis an exclusion and a precinct.
Sidney Smith said, "A few yards in London cement or dissolve
friendship." It is an unprincipled decorum; an affair of clean linen
and coaches, of gloves, cards, and elegance in trifles. There are other
measures of self-respect for a man, than the number of clean shirts he
puts on every day. Society wishes to be amused. I do not wish to be
amused. I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the
days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant. Now we reckon them as
bank-days, by some debt which is to be paid us, or which we are to pay,
or some pleasure we are to taste. Is all we have to do to draw the
breath in, and blow it out again? Porphyry's definition is better;
"Life is that which holds matter together." The babe in arms is a
channel through which the energies we call fate, love, and reason,
visibly stream. See what a cometary train of auxiliaries man carries
with him, of animals, plants, stones, gases, and imponderable elements.
Let us infer his ends from this pomp of means. Mirabeau said, "Why
should we feel ourselves to be men, unless it be to succeed in
everything, everywhere. You must say of nothing, _That is beneath me_,
nor feel that anything can be out of your power. Nothing is impossible
to the man who can will. _Is that necessary? That shall be_:--this is
the only law of success." Whoever said it, this is in the right key.
But this is not the tone and genius of the men in the street. In the
streets, we grow cynical. The men we meet are coarse and torpid. The
finest wits have their sediment. What quantities of fribbles, paupers,
invalids, epicures, antiquaries, politicians, thieves, and triflers of
both sexes, might be advantageously spared! Mankind divides itself into
two classes,--benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast,
the first a handful. A person seldom falls sick, but the bystanders are
animated with a faint hope that he will die:--quantities of poor lives;
of distressing invalids; of cases for a gun. Franklin said, "Mankind are
very superficial and dastardly: they begin upon a thing, but, meeting
with a difficulty, they fly from it discouraged: but they have
capacities, if they would employ them." Shall we then judge a country
by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. 'Tis
pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land,
or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.
Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame,
unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be
flattered but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them,
but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out
of them. The worst of charity is, that the lives you are asked to
preserve are not worth preserving. Masses! the calamity is the masses.
I do not wish any mass at all, but honest men only, lovely, sweet,
accomplished women only, and no shovel-handed, narrow-brained,
gin-drinking million stockingers or lazzaroni at all. If government
knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply the population.
When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be
hailed as essential. Away with this hurrah of masses, and let us have
the considerate vote of single men spoken on their honor and their
conscience. In old Egypt, it was established law, that the vote of a
prophet be reckoned equal to a hundred hands. I think it was much
under-estimated. "Clay and clay differ in dignity," as we discover by
our preferences every day. What a vicious practice is this of our
politicians at Washington pairing off! as if one man who votes wrong,
going away, could excuse you, who mean to vote right, for going away;
or, as if your presence did not tell in more ways than in your vote.
Suppose the three hundred heroes at Thermopylae had paired off with
three hundred Persians: would it have been all the same to Greece, and
to history? Napoleon was called by his men _Cent Mille_. Add honesty
to him, and they might have called him Hundred Million.
Nature makes fifty poor melons for one that is good, and shakes down a
tree full of gnarled, wormy, unripe crabs, before you can find a dozen
dessert apples; and she scatters nations of naked Indians, and nations
of clothed Christians, with two or three good heads among them. Nature
works very hard, and only hits the white once in a million throws. In
mankind, she is contented if she yields one master in a century. The
more difficulty there is in creating good men, the more they are used
when they come. I once counted in a little neighborhood, and found that
every able-bodied man had, say from twelve to fifteen persons dependent
on him for material aid,--to whom he is to be for spoon and jug, for
backer and sponsor, for nursery and hospital, and many functions beside:
nor does it seem to make much difference whether he is bachelor or
patriarch; if he do not violently decline the duties that fall to him,
this amount of helpfulness will in one way or another be brought home to
him. This is the tax which his abilities pay. The good men are
employed for private centres of use, and for larger influence. All
revelations, whether of mechanical or intellectual or moral science, are
made not to communities, but to single persons. All the marked events of
our day, all the cities, all the colonizations, may be traced back to
their origin in a private brain. All the feats which make our civility
were the thoughts of a few good heads.
Meantime, this spawning productivity is not noxious or needless. You
would say, this rabble of nations might be spared. But no, they are all
counted and depended on. Fate keeps everything alive so long as the
smallest thread of public necessity holds it on to the tree. The
coxcomb and bully and thief class are allowed as proletaries, every one
of their vices being the excess or acridity of a virtue. The mass are
animal, in pupilage, and near chimpanzee. But the units, whereof this
mass is composed are neuters, every one of which may be grown to a
queen-bee. The rule is, we are used as brute atoms, until we think:
then, we use all the rest. Nature turns all malfaisance to good.
Nature provided for real needs. No sane man at last distrusts himself.
His existence is a perfect answer to all sentimental cavils. If he is,
he is wanted, and has the precise properties that are required. That we
are here, is proof we ought to be here. We have as good right, and the
same sort of right to be here, as Cape Cod or Sandy Hook have to be
there.
To say then, the majority are wicked, means no malice, no bad heart in
the observer, but, simply, that the majority are unripe, and have not
yet come to themselves, do not yet know their opinion. That, if they
knew it, is an oracle for them and for all. But in the passing moment,
the quadruped interest is very prone to prevail: and this beast-force,
whilst it makes the discipline of the world, the school of heroes, the
glory of martyrs, has provoked, in every age, the satire of wits, and
the tears of good men. They find the journals, the clubs, the
governments, the churches, to be in the interest, and the pay of the
devil. And wise men have met this obstruction in their times, like
Socrates, with his famous irony; like Bacon, with life-long
dissimulation; like Erasmus, with his book "The Praise of Folly;" like
Rabelais, with his satire rending the nations. "They were the fools who
cried against me, you will say," wrote the Chevalier de Boufflers to
Grimm; "aye, but the fools have the advantage of numbers, and 'tis that
which decides. 'Tis of no use for us to make war with them; we shall
not weaken them; they will always be the masters. There will not be a
practice or an usage introduced, of which they are not the authors."
In front of these sinister facts, the first lesson of history is the
good of evil. Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.
'Tis the oppressions of William the Norman, savage forest-laws, and
crushing despotism, that made possible the inspirations of _Magna
Charta_ under John. Edward I. wanted money, armies, castles, and as
much as he could get. It was necessary to call the people together by
shorter, swifter ways,--and the House of Commons arose. To obtain
subsidies, he paid in privileges. In the twenty-fourth year of his
reign, he decreed, "that no tax should be levied without consent of
Lords and Commons;"--which is the basis of the English Constitution.
Plutarch affirms that the cruel wars which followed the march of
Alexander, introduced the civility, language, and arts of Greece into
the savage East; introduced marriage; built seventy cities; and united
hostile nations under one government. The barbarians who broke up the
Roman empire did not arrive a day too soon. Schiller says, the Thirty
Years' War made Germany a nation. Rough, selfish despots serve men
immensely, as Henry VIII. in the contest with the Pope; as the
infatuations no less than the wisdom of Cromwell; as the ferocity of the
Russian czars; as the fanaticism of the French regicides of 1789. The
frost which kills the harvest of a year, saves the harvests of a
century, by destroying the weevil or the locust. Wars, fires, plagues,
break up immovable routine, clear the ground of rotten races and dens of
distemper, and open a fair field to new men. There is a tendency in
things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy that
shatters a rotten system, allows things to take a new and natural order.
The sharpest evils are bent into that periodicity which makes the errors
of planets, and the fevers and distempers of men, self-limiting. Nature
is upheld by antagonism. Passions, resistance, danger, are educators.
We acquire the strength we have overcome. Without war, no soldier;
without enemies, no hero. The sun were insipid, if the universe were not
opaque. And the glory of character is in affronting the horrors of
depravity, to draw thence new nobilities of power: as Art lives and
thrills in new use and combining of contrasts, and mining into the dark
evermore for blacker pits of night. What would painter do, or what would
poet or saint, but for crucifixions and hells? And evermore in the
world is this marvellous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and
rats. Not Antoninus, but a poor washer-woman said, "The more trouble,
the more lion; that's my principle." I do not think very respectfully
of the designs or the doings of the people who went to California, in
1849. It was a rush and a scramble of needy adventurers, and, in the
western country, a general jail-delivery of all the rowdies of the
rivers. Some of them went with honest purposes, some with very bad
ones, and all of them with the very commonplace wish to find a short way
to wealth. But Nature watches over all, and turns this malfaisance to
good. California gets peopled and subdued,--civilized in this immoral
way,--and, on this fiction, a real prosperity is rooted and grown. 'Tis
a decoy-duck; 'tis tubs thrown to amuse the whale: but real ducks, and
whales that yield oil, are caught. And, out of Sabine rapes, and out of
robbers' forays, real Romes and their heroisms come in fulness of time.
In America, the geography is sublime, but the men are not: the
inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.
The agencies by which events so grand as the opening of California, of
Texas, of Oregon, and the junction of the two oceans, are effected, are
paltry,--coarse selfishness, fraud, and conspiracy: and most of the
great results of history are brought about by discreditable means.
The benefaction derived in Illinois, and the great West, from railroads
is inestimable, and vastly exceeding any intentional philanthropy on
record. What is the benefit done by a good King Alfred, or by a Howard,
or Pestalozzi, or Elizabeth Fry, or Florence Nightingale, or any lover,
less or larger, compared with the involuntary blessing wrought on
nations by the selfish capitalists who built the Illinois, Michigan, and
the network of the Mississippi valley roads, which have evoked not only
all the wealth of the soil, but the energy of millions of men. 'Tis a
sentence of ancient wisdom, "that God hangs the greatest weights on the
smallest wires."
What happens thus to nations, befalls every day in private houses. When
the friends of a gentleman brought to his notice the follies of his sons
with many hints of their danger, he replied, that he knew so much
mischief when he was a boy, and had turned out on the whole so
successfully, that he was not alarmed by the dissipation of boys; 'twas
dangerous water, but, he thought, they would soon touch bottom, and then
swim to the top. This is bold practice, and there are many failures to a
good escape. Yet one would say, that a good understanding would suffice
as well as moral sensibility to keep one erect; the gratifications of
the passions are so quickly seen to be damaging, and,--what men like
least,--seriously lowering them in social rank. Then all talent sinks
with character.
"_Croyez moi, l'erreur aussi a son merite_," said Voltaire. We see
those who surmount, by dint of some egotism or infatuation, obstacles
from which the prudent recoil. The right partisan is a heady narrow
man, who, because he does not see many things, sees some one thing with
heat and exaggeration, and, if he falls among other narrow men, or on
objects which have a brief importance, as some trade or politics of the
hour, he prefers it to the universe, and seems inspired, and a godsend
to those who wish to magnify the matter, and carry a point. Better,
certainly, if we could secure the strength and fire which rude,
passionate men bring into society, quite clear of their vices. But who
dares draw out the linchpin from the wagon-wheel? 'Tis so manifest, that
there is no moral deformity, but is a good passion out of place; that
there is no man who is not indebted to his foibles; that, according to
the old oracle, "the Furies are the bonds of men;" that the poisons are
our principal medicines, which kill the disease, and save the life. In
the high prophetic phrase, _He causes the wrath of man to praise him_,
and twists and wrenches our evil to our good. Shakspeare wrote,--
"'Tis said, best men are moulded of their faults;"
and great educators and lawgivers, and especially generals, and leaders
of colonies, mainly rely on this stuff, and esteem men of irregular and
passional force the best timber. A man of sense and energy, the late
head of the Farm School in Boston harbor, said to me, "I want none of
your good boys,--give me the bad ones." And this is the reason, I
suppose, why, as soon as the children are good, the mothers are scared,
and think they are going to die. Mirabeau said, "There are none but men
of strong passions capable of going to greatness; none but such capable
of meriting the public gratitude." Passion, though a bad regulator, is
a powerful spring. Any absorbing passion has the effect to deliver from
the little coils and cares of every day: 'tis the heat which sets our
human atoms spinning, overcomes the friction of crossing thresholds, and
first addresses in society, and gives us a good start and speed, easy to
continue, when once it is begun. In short, there is no man who is not
at some time indebted to his vices, as no plant that is not fed from
manures. We only insist that the man meliorate, and that the plant grow
upward, and convert the base into the better nature.
The wise workman will not regret the poverty or the solitude which
brought out his working talents. The youth is charmed with the fine air
and accomplishments of the children of fortune. But all great men come
out of the middle classes. 'Tis better for the head; 'tis better for
the heart. Marcus Antoninus says, that Fronto told him, "that the
so-called high-born are for the most part heartless;" whilst nothing is
so indicative of deepest culture as a tender consideration of the
ignorant. Charles James Fox said of England, "The history of this
country proves, that we are not to expect from men in affluent
circumstances the vigilance, energy, and exertion without which the
House of Commons would lose its greatest force and weight. Human nature
is prone to indulgence, and the most meritorious public services have
always been performed by persons in a condition of life removed from
opulence." And yet what we ask daily, is to be conventional. Supply,
most kind gods! this defect in my address, in my form, in my fortunes,
which puts me a little out of the ring: supply it, and let me be like
the rest whom I admire, and on good terms with them. But the wise gods
say, No, we have better things for thee. By humiliations, by defeats,
by loss of sympathy, by gulfs of disparity, learn a wider truth and
humanity than that of a fine gentleman. A Fifth-Avenue landlord, a
West-End householder, is not the highest style of man: and, though good
hearts and sound minds are of no condition, yet he who is to be wise for
many, must not be protected. He must know the huts where poor men lie,
and the chores which poor men do. The first-class minds, AEsop,
Socrates, Cervantes, Shakspeare, Franklin, had the poor man's feeling
and mortification. A rich man was never insulted in his life: but this
man must be stung. A rich man was never in danger from cold, or hunger,
or war, or ruffians, and you can see he was not, from the moderation of
his ideas. 'Tis a fatal disadvantage to be cockered, and to eat too
much cake. What tests of manhood could he stand? Take him out of his
protections. He is a good book-keeper; or he is a shrewd adviser in the
insurance office: perhaps he could pass a college examination, and take
his degrees: perhaps he can give wise counsel in a court of law. Now
plant him down among farmers, firemen, Indians, and emigrants. Set a
dog on him: set a highwayman on him: try him with a course of mobs: send
him to Kansas, to Pike's Peak, to Oregon: and, if he have true faculty,
this may be the element he wants, and he will come out of it with
broader wisdom and manly power. AEsop, Saadi, Cervantes, Regnard, have
been taken by corsairs, left for dead, sold for slaves, and know the
realities of human life.
Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner
would not miss. As we go gladly to Faneuil Hall, to be played upon by
the stormy winds and strong fingers of enraged patriotism, so is a
fanatical persecution, civil war, national bankruptcy, or revolution,
more rich in the central tones than languid years of prosperity. What
had been, ever since our memory, solid continent, yawns apart, and
discloses its composition and genesis. We learn geology the morning
after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved
plains, and the dry bed of the sea.
In our life and culture, everything is worked up, and comes in
use,--passion, war, revolt, bankruptcy, and not less, folly and
blunders, insult, ennui, and bad company. Nature is a rag-merchant, who
works up every shred and ort and end into new creations; like a good
chemist, whom I found, the other day, in his laboratory, converting his
old shirts into pure white sugar. Life is a boundless privilege, and
when you pay for your ticket, and get into the car, you have no guess
what good company you shall find there. You buy much that is not
rendered in the bill. Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when
working to another aim.
If now in this connection of discourse, we should venture on laying down
the first obvious rules of life, I will not here repeat the first rule
of economy, already propounded once and again, that every man shall
maintain himself,--but I will say, get health. No labor, pains,
temperance, poverty, nor exercise, that can gain it, must be grudged.
For sickness is a cannibal which eats up all the life and youth it can
lay hold of, and absorbs its own sons and daughters. I figure it as a
pale, wailing, distracted phantom, absolutely selfish, heedless of what
is good and great, attentive to its sensations, losing its soul, and
afflicting other souls with meanness and mopings, and with ministration
to its voracity of trifles. Dr. Johnson said severely, "Every man is a
rascal as soon as he is sick." Drop the cant, and treat it sanely. In
dealing with the drunken, we do not affect to be drunk. We must treat
the sick with the same firmness, giving them, of course, every aid,--but
withholding ourselves. I once asked a clergyman in a retired town, who
were his companions? what men of ability he saw? he replied, that he
spent his time with the sick and the dying. I said, he seemed to me to
need quite other company, and all the more that he had this: for if
people were sick and dying to any purpose, we would leave all and go to
them, but, as far as I had observed, they were as frivolous as the rest,
and sometimes much more frivolous. Let us engage our companions not to
spare us. I knew a wise woman who said to her friends, "When I am old,
rule me." And the best part of health is fine disposition. It is more
essential than talent, even in the works of talent. Nothing will supply
the want of sunshine to peaches, and, to make knowledge valuable, you
must have the cheerfulness of wisdom. Whenever you are sincerely
pleased, you are nourished. The joy of the spirit indicates its
strength. All healthy things are sweet-tempered. Genius works in
sport, and goodness smiles to the last; and, for the reason, that
whoever sees the law which distributes things, does not despond, but is
animated to great desires and endeavors. He who desponds betrays that
he has not seen it.
'Tis a Dutch proverb, that "paint costs nothing," such are its
preserving qualities in damp climates. Well, sunshine costs less, yet is
finer pigment. And so of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is
spent, the more of it remains. The latent heat of an ounce of wood or
stone is inexhaustible. You may rub the same chip of pine to the point
of kindling, a hundred times; and the power of happiness of any soul is
not to be computed or drained. It is observed that a depression of
spirits develops the germs of a plague in individuals and nations.
It is an old commendation of right behavior, "_Aliis loetus, sapiens
sibi_," which our English proverb translates, "Be merry _and_ wise." I
know how easy it is to men of the world to look grave and sneer at your
sanguine youth, and its glittering dreams. But I find the gayest
castles in the air that were ever piled, far better for comfort and for
use, than the dungeons in the air that are daily dug and caverned out by
grumbling, discontented people. I know those miserable fellows, and I
hate them, who see a black star always riding through the light and
colored clouds in the sky overhead: waves of light pass over and hide it
for a moment, but the black star keeps fast in the zenith. But power
dwells with cheerfulness; hope puts us in a working mood, whilst despair
is no muse, and untunes the active powers. A man should make life and
Nature happier to us, or he had better never been born. When the
political economist reckons up the unproductive classes, he should put
at the head this class of pitiers of themselves, cravers of sympathy,
bewailing imaginary disasters. An old French verse runs, in my
translation:--
Some of your griefs you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived;
But what torments of pain you endured
From evils that never arrived!
There are three wants which never can be satisfied: that of the rich,
who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something
different; and that of the traveller, who says, 'Anywhere but here.'
The Turkish cadi said to Layard, "After the fashion of thy people, thou
hast wandered from one place to another, until thou art happy and
content in none." My countrymen are not less infatuated with the
_rococo_ toy of Italy. All America seems on the point of embarking for
Europe. But we shall not always traverse seas and lands with light
purposes, and for pleasure, as we say. One day we shall cast out the
passion for Europe, by the passion for America. Culture will give
gravity and domestic rest to those who now travel only as not knowing
how else to spend money. Already, who provoke pity like that excellent
family party just arriving in their well-appointed carriage, as far from
home and any honest end as ever? Each nation has asked successively,
'What are they here for?' until at last the party are shamefaced, and
anticipate the question at the gates of each town.
Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance,
but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born
with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and
happiness,--whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or
statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when
he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not
apparently so.
In childhood, we fancied ourselves walled in by the horizon, as by a
glass bell, and doubted not, by distant travel, we should reach the
baths of the descending sun and stars. On experiment, the horizon flies
before us, and leaves us on an endless common, sheltered by no glass
bell. Yet 'tis strange how tenaciously we cling to that bell-astronomy,
of a protecting domestic horizon. I find the same illusion in the
search after happiness, which I observe, every summer, recommenced in
this neighborhood, soon after the pairing of the birds. The young
people do not like the town, do not like the sea-shore, they will go
inland; find a dear cottage deep in the mountains, secret as their
hearts. They set forth on their travels in search of a home: they reach
Berkshire; they reach Vermont; they look at the farms;--good farms, high
mountain-sides: but where is the seclusion? The farm is near this; 'tis
near that; they have got far from Boston, but 'tis near Albany, or near
Burlington, or near Montreal. They explore a farm, but the house is
small, old, thin; discontented people lived there, and are
gone:--there's too much sky, too much out-doors; too public. The youth
aches for solitude. When he comes to the house, he passes through the
house. That does not make the deep recess he sought. 'Ah! now, I
perceive,' he says, 'it must be deep with persons; friends only can give
depth.' Yes, but there is a great dearth, this year, of friends; hard
to find, and hard to have when found: they are just going away: they too
are in the whirl of the flitting world, and have engagements and
necessities. They are just starting for Wisconsin; have letters from
Bremen:--see you again, soon. Slow, slow to learn the lesson, that
there is but one depth, but one interior, and that is--his purpose.
When joy or calamity or genius shall show him it, then woods, then
farms, then city shopmen and cab-drivers, indifferently with prophet or
friend, will mirror back to him its unfathomable heaven, its populous
solitude.
The uses of travel are occasional, and short; but the best fruit it
finds, when it finds it, is conversation; and this is a main function of
life. What a difference in the hospitality of minds! Inestimable is he
to whom we can say what we cannot say to ourselves. Others are
involuntarily hurtful to us, and bereave us of the power of thought,
impound and imprison us. As, when there is sympathy, there needs but
one wise man in a company, and all are wise,--so, a blockhead makes a
blockhead of his companion. Wonderful power to benumb possesses this
brother. When he comes into the office or public room, the society
dissolves; one after another slips out, and the apartment is at his
disposal. What is incurable but a frivolous habit?
A fly is as untamable as a hyena. Yet folly in the sense of fun,
fooling, or dawdling can easily be borne; as Talleyrand said, "I find
nonsense singularly refreshing;" but a virulent, aggressive fool taints
the reason of a household. I have seen a whole family of quiet,
sensible people unhinged and beside themselves, victims of such a rogue.
For the steady wrongheadedness of one perverse person irritates the
best: since we must withstand absurdity. But resistance only
exasperates the acrid fool, who believes that Nature and gravitation are
quite wrong, and he only is right. Hence all the dozen inmates are soon
perverted, with whatever virtues and industries they have, into
contradictors, accusers, explainers, and repairers of this one
malefactor; like a boat about to be overset, or a carriage run away
with,--not only the foolish pilot or driver, but everybody on board is
forced to assume strange and ridiculous attitudes, to balance the
vehicle and prevent the upsetting. For remedy, whilst the case is yet
mild, I recommend phlegm and truth: let all the truth that is spoken or
done be at the zero of indifferency, or truth itself will be folly.
But, when the case is seated and malignant, the only safety is in
amputation; as seamen say, you shall cut and run. How to live with
unfit companions?--for, with such, life is for the most part spent: and
experience teaches little better than our earliest instinct of
self-defence, namely, not to engage, not to mix yourself in any manner
with them; but let their madness spend itself unopposed;--you are you,
and I am I.
Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his
competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while
they live. Our habit of thought,--take men as they rise,--is not
satisfying; in the common experience, I fear, it is poor and squalid.
The success which will content them, is, a bargain, a lucrative
employment, an advantage gained over a competitor, a marriage, a
patrimony, a legacy, and the like. With these objects, their
conversation deals with surfaces: politics, trade, personal defects,
exaggerated bad news, and the rain. This is forlorn, and they feel sore
and sensitive. Now, if one comes who can illuminate this dark house
with thoughts, show them their native riches, what gifts they have, how
indispensable each is, what magical powers over nature and men; what
access to poetry, religion, and the powers which constitute character;
he wakes in them the feeling of worth, his suggestions require new ways
of living, new books, new men, new arts and sciences,--then we come out
of our egg-shell existence into the great dome, and see the zenith over
and the nadir under us. Instead of the tanks and buckets of knowledge
to which we are daily confined, we come down to the shore of the sea,
and dip our hands in its miraculous waves. 'Tis wonderful the effect on
the company. They are not the men they were. They have all been to
California, and all have come back millionnaires. There is no book and
no pleasure in life comparable to it. Ask what is best in our
experience, and we shall say, a few pieces of plain-dealing with wise
people. Our conversation once and again has apprised us that we belong
to better circles than we have yet beheld; that a mental power invites
us, whose generalizations are more worth for joy and for effect than
anything that is now called philosophy or literature. In excited
conversation, we have glimpses of the Universe, hints of power native to
the soul, far-darting lights and shadows of an Andes landscape, such as
we can hardly attain in lone meditation. Here are oracles sometimes
profusely given, to which the memory goes back in barren hours.
Add the consent of will and temperament, and there exists the covenant
of friendship. Our chief want in life, is, somebody who shall make us
do what we can. This is the service of a friend. With him we are easily
great. There is a sublime attraction in him to whatever virtue is in
us. How he flings wide the doors of existence! What questions we ask
of him! what an understanding we have! how few words are needed! It is
the only real society. An Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Taleb, writes with
sad truth,--
"He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,
And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere."
But few writers have said anything better to this point than Hafiz, who
indicates this relation as the test of mental health: "Thou learnest no
secret until thou knowest friendship, since to the unsound no heavenly
knowledge enters." Neither is life long enough for friendship. That is
a serious and majestic affair, like a royal presence, or a religion, and
not a postilion's dinner to be eaten on the run. There is a pudency
about friendship, as about love, and though fine souls never lose sight
of it, yet they do not name it. With the first class of men our
friendship or good understanding goes quite behind all accidents of
estrangement, of condition, of reputation. And yet we do not provide
for the greatest good of life. We take care of our health; we lay up
money; we make our roof tight, and our clothing sufficient; but who
provides wisely that he shall not be wanting in the best property of
all,--friends? We know that all our training is to fit us for this, and
we do not take the step towards it. How long shall we sit and wait for
these benefactors?
It makes no difference, in looking back five years, how you have been
dieted or dressed; whether you have been lodged on the first floor or
the attic; whether you have had gardens and baths, good cattle and
horses, have been carried in a neat equipage, or in a ridiculous truck:
these things are forgotten so quickly, and leave no effect. But it
counts much whether we have had good companions, in that time;--almost
as much as what we have been doing. And see the overpowering importance
of neighborhood in all association. As it is marriage, fit or unfit,
that makes our home, so it is who lives near us of equal social
degree,--a few people at convenient distance, no matter how bad
company,--these, and these only, shall be your life's companions: and
all those who are native, congenial, and by many an oath of the heart,
sacramented to you, are gradually and totally lost. You cannot deal
systematically with this fine element of society, and one may take a
good deal of pains to bring people together, and to organize clubs and
debating societies, and yet no result come of it. But it is certain that
there is a great deal of good in us that does not know itself, and that
a habit of union and competition brings people up and keeps them up to
their highest point; that life would be twice or ten times life, if
spent with wise and fruitful companions. The obvious inference is, a
little useful deliberation and preconcert, when one goes to buy house
and land.
But we live with people on other platforms; we live with dependents, not
only with the young whom we are to teach all we know, and clothe with
the advantages we have earned, but also with those who serve us
directly, and for money. Yet the old rules hold good. Let not the tie
be mercenary, though the service is measured by money. Make yourself
necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any. This point is
acquiring new importance in American social life. Our domestic service
is usually a foolish fracas of unreasonable demand on one side, and
shirking on the other. A man of wit was asked, in the train, what was
his errand in the city? He replied, "I have been sent to procure an
angel to do cooking." A lady complained to me, that, of her two
maidens, one was absent-minded, and the other was absent-bodied. And the
evil increases from the ignorance and hostility of every ship-load of
the immigrant population swarming into houses and farms. Few people
discern that it rests with the master or the mistress what service comes
from the man or the maid; that this identical hussy was a tutelar spirit
in one house, and a haridan in the other. All sensible people are
selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it
fair. If you are proposing only your own, the other party must deal a
little hardly by you. If you deal generously, the other, though selfish
and unjust, will make an exception in your favor, and deal truly with
you. When I asked an iron-master about the slag and cinder in railroad
iron,--"O," he said, "there's always good iron to be had: if there's
cinder in the iron, 'tis because there was cinder in the pay."
But why multiply these topics, and their illustrations, which are
endless? Life brings to each his task, and, whatever art you select,
algebra, planting, architecture, poems, commerce, politics,--all are
attainable, even to the miraculous triumphs, on the same terms, of
selecting that for which you are apt;--begin at the beginning, proceed
in order, step by step. 'Tis as easy to twist iron anchors, and braid
cannons, as to braid straw, to boil granite as to boil water, if you
take all the steps in order. Wherever there is failure, there is some
giddiness, some superstition about luck, some step omitted, which Nature
never pardons. The happy conditions of life may be had on the same
terms. Their attraction for you is the pledge that they are within your
reach. Our prayers are prophets. There must be fidelity, and there must
be adherence. How respectable the life that clings to its objects!
Youthful aspirations are fine things, your theories and plans of life
are fair and commendable:--but will you stick? Not one, I fear, in that
Common full of people, or, in a thousand, but one: and, when you tax
them with treachery, and remind them of their high resolutions, they
have forgotten that they made a vow. The individuals are fugitive, and
in the act of becoming something else, and irresponsible. The race is
great, the ideal fair, but the men whiffling and unsure. The hero is he
who is immovably centred. The main difference between people seems to
be, that one man can come under obligations on which you can rely,--is
obligable; and another is not. As he has not a law within him, there's
nothing to tie him to.
'Tis inevitable to name particulars of virtue, and of condition, and to
exaggerate them. But all rests at last on that integrity which dwarfs
talent, and can spare it. Sanity consists in not being subdued by your
means. Fancy prices are paid for position, and for the culture of
talent, but to the grand interests, superficial success is of no
account. The man,--it is his attitude,--not feats, but forces,--not on
set days and public occasions, but, at all hours, and in repose alike as
in energy, still formidable, and not to be disposed of. The populace
says, with Horne Tooke, "If you would be powerful, pretend to be
powerful." I prefer to say, with the old prophet, "Seekest thou great
things? seek them not:"--or, what was said of a Spanish prince, "The
more you took from him, the greater he looked." _Plus on lui ote, plus
il est grand_.
The secret of culture is to learn, that a few great points steadily
reappear, alike in the poverty of the obscurest farm, and in the
miscellany of metropolitan life, and that these few are alone to be
regarded,--the escape from all false ties; courage to be what we are;
and love of what is simple and beautiful; independence, and cheerful
relation, these are the essentials,--these, and the wish to serve,--to
add somewhat to the well-being of men.