ILLUSIONS.

Some years ago, in company with an agreeable party, I spent a long

summer day in exploring the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. We traversed,

through spacious galleries affording a solid masonry foundation for the

town and county overhead, the six or eight black miles from the mouth of

the cavern to the innermost recess which tourists visit,--a niche or

grotto made of one seamless stalactite, and called, I believe, Serena's

Bower. I lost the light of one day. I saw high domes, and bottomless

pits; heard the voice of unseen waterfalls; paddled three quarters of a

mile in the deep Echo River, whose waters are peopled with the blind

fish; crossed the streams "Lethe" and "Styx;" plied with music and guns

the echoes in these alarming galleries; saw every form of stalagmite and

stalactite in the sculptured and fretted chambers,--icicle,

orange-flower, acanthus, grapes, and snowball. We shot Bengal lights

into the vaults and groins of the sparry cathedrals, and examined all

the masterpieces which the four combined engineers, water, limestone,

gravitation, and time, could make in the dark.

The mysteries and scenery of the cave had the same dignity that belongs

to all natural objects, and which shames the fine things to which we

foppishly compare them. I remarked, especially, the mimetic habit, with

which Nature, on new instruments, hums her old tunes, making night to

mimic day, and chemistry to ape vegetation. But I then took notice, and

still chiefly remember, that the best thing which the cave had to offer

was an illusion. On arriving at what is called the "Star-Chamber," our

lamps were taken from us by the guide, and extinguished or put aside,

and, on looking upwards, I saw or seemed to see the night heaven thick

with stars glimmering more or less brightly over our heads, and even

what seemed a comet flaming among them. All the party were touched with

astonishment and pleasure. Our musical friends sung with much feeling a

pretty song, "The stars are in the quiet sky," &c., and I sat down on

the rocky floor to enjoy the serene picture. Some crystal specks in the

black ceiling high overhead, reflecting the light of a half-hid lamp,

yielded this magnificent effect.

I own, I did not like the cave so well for eking out its sublimities

with this theatrical trick. But I have had many experiences like it,

before and since; and we must be content to be pleased without too

curiously analyzing the occasions. Our conversation with Nature is not

just what it seems. The cloud-rack, the sunrise and sunset glories,

rainbows, and northern lights are not quite so spheral as our childhood

thought them; and the part our organization plays in them is too large.

The senses interfere everywhere, and mix their own structure with all

they report of. Once, we fancied the earth a plane, and stationary. In

admiring the sunset, we do not yet deduct the rounding, coordinating,

pictorial powers of the eye.

The same interference from our organization creates the most of our

pleasure and pain. Our first mistake is the belief that the

circumstance gives the joy which we give to the circumstance. Life is

an ecstasy. Life is sweet as nitrous oxide; and the fisherman dripping

all day over a cold pond, the switchman at the railway intersection, the

farmer in the field, the negro in the rice-swamp, the fop in the street,

the hunter in the woods, the barrister with the jury, the belle at the

ball, all ascribe a certain pleasure to their employment, which they

themselves give it. Health and appetite impart the sweetness to sugar,

bread, and meat. We fancy that our civilization has got on far, but we

still come back to our primers.

We live by our imaginations, by our admirations, by our sentiments. The

child walks amid heaps of illusions, which he does not like to have

disturbed. The boy, how sweet to him is his fancy! how dear the story of

barons and battles! What a hero he is, whilst he feeds on his heroes!

What a debt is his to imaginative books! He has no better friend or

influence, than Scott, Shakspeare, Plutarch, and Homer. The man lives

to other objects, but who dare affirm that they are more real? Even the

prose of the streets is full of refractions. In the life of the

dreariest alderman, fancy enters into all details, and colors them with

rosy hue. He imitates the air and actions of people whom he admires,

and is raised in his own eyes. He pays a debt quicker to a rich man

than to a poor man. He wishes the bow and compliment of some leader in

the state, or in society; weighs what he says; perhaps he never comes

nearer to him for that, but dies at last better contented for this

amusement of his eyes and his fancy.

The world rolls, the din of life is never hushed. In London, in Paris,

in Boston, in San Francisco, the carnival, the masquerade is at its

height. Nobody drops his domino. The unities, the fictions of the piece

it would be an impertinence to break. The chapter of fascinations is

very long. Great is paint; nay, God is the painter; and we rightly

accuse the critic who destroys too many illusions. Society does not love

its unmaskers. It was wittily, if somewhat bitterly, said by

D'Alembert, "_qu'un etat de vapeur etait un etat tres fachieux,

parcequ'il nous faisait voir les choses comme elles sont._" I find men

victims of illusion in all parts of life. Children, youths, adults, and

old men, all are led by one bawble or another. Yoganidra, the goddess

of illusion, Proteus, or Momus, or Gylfi's Mocking,--for the Power has

many names,--is stronger than the Titans, stronger than Apollo. Few

have overheard the gods, or surprised their secret. Life is a

succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is

riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle. There are as many

pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream

into another dream. The toys, to be sure, are various, and are

graduated in refinement to the quality of the dupe. The intellectual

man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is

drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with

music and banner and badge.

Amid the joyous troop who give in to the charivari, comes now and then a

sad-eyed boy, whose eyes lack the requisite refractions to clothe the

show in due glory, and who is afflicted with a tendency to trace home

the glittering miscellany of fruits and flowers to one root. Science is

a search after identity, and the scientific whim is lurking in all

corners. At the State Fair, a friend of mine complained that all the

varieties of fancy pears in our orchards seem to have been selected by

somebody who had a whim for a particular kind of pear, and only

cultivated such as had that perfume; they were all alike. And I

remember the quarrel of another youth with the confectioners, that, when

he racked his wit to choose the best comfits in the shops, in all the

endless varieties of sweetmeat he could only find three flavors, or two.

What then? Pears and cakes are good for something; and because you,

unluckily, have an eye or nose too keen, why need you spoil the comfort

which the rest of us find in them? I knew a humorist, who, in a good

deal of rattle, had a grain or two of sense. He shocked the company by

maintaining that the attributes of God were two,--power and risibility;

and that it was the duty of every pious man to keep up the comedy. And

I have known gentlemen of great stake in the community, but whose

sympathies were cold,--presidents of colleges, and governors, and

senators,--who held themselves bound to sign every temperance pledge,

and act with Bible societies, and missions, and peace-makers, and cry

_Hist-a-boy!_ to every good dog. We must not carry comity too far, but

we all have kind impulses in this direction. When the boys come into my

yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter into Nature's

game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that any

moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this

tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very

thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears

is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the

less they hung it round with frippery romance, like the children of the

happiest fortune, and talked of "the dear cottage where so many joyful

hours had flown." Well, this thatching of hovels is the custom of the

country. Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion.

Being fascinated, they fascinate. They see through Claude-Lorraines.

And how dare any one, if he could, pluck away the _coulisses_, stage

effects, and ceremonies, by which they live? Too pathetic, too

pitiable, is the region of affection, and its atmosphere always liable

to _mirage_.

We are not very much to blame for our bad marriages. We live amid

hallucinations; and this especial trap is laid to trip up our feet with,

and all are tripped up first or last. But the mighty Mother who had

been so sly with us, as if she felt that she owed us some indemnity,

insinuates into the Pandora-box of marriage some deep and serious

benefits, and some great joys. We find a delight in the beauty and

happiness of children, that makes the heart too big for the body. In

the worst-assorted connections there is ever some mixture of true

marriage. Teague and his jade get some just relations of mutual

respect, kindly observation, and fostering of each other, learn

something, and would carry themselves wiselier, if they were now to

begin.

'Tis fine for us to point at one or another fine madman, as if there

were any exempts. The scholar in his library is none. I, who have all

my life heard any number of orations and debates, read poems and

miscellaneous books, conversed with many geniuses, am still the victim

of any new page; and, if Marmaduke, or Hugh, or Moosehead, or any other,

invent a new style or mythology, I fancy that the world will be all

brave and right, if dressed in these colors, which I had not thought of.

Then at once I will daub with this new paint; but it will not stick.

'Tis like the cement which the peddler sells at the door; he makes

broken crockery hold with it, but you can never buy of him a bit of the

cement which will make it hold when he is gone.

Men who make themselves felt in the world avail themselves of a certain

fate in their constitution, which they know how to use. But they never

deeply interest us, unless they lift a corner of the curtain, or betray

never so slightly their penetration of what is behind it. 'Tis the

charm of practical men, that outside of their practicality are a certain

poetry and play, as if they led the good horse Power by the bridle, and

preferred to walk, though they can ride so fiercely. Bonaparte is

intellectual, as well as Caesar; and the best soldiers, sea-captains,

and railway men have a gentleness, when off duty; a good-natured

admission that there are illusions, and who shall say that he is not

their sport? We stigmatize the cast-iron fellows, who cannot so detach

themselves, as "dragon-ridden," "thunder-stricken," and fools of fate,

with whatever powers endowed.

Since our tuition is through emblems and indirections, 'tis well to know

that there is method in it, a fixed scale, and rank above rank in the

phantasms. We begin low with coarse masks, and rise to the most subtle

and beautiful. The red men told Columbus, "they had an herb which took

away fatigue;" but he found the illusion of "arriving from the east at

the Indies" more composing to his lofty spirit than any tobacco. Is not

our faith in the impenetrability of matter more sedative than narcotics?

You play with jackstraws, balls, bowls, horse and gun, estates and

politics; but there are finer games before you. Is not time a pretty

toy? Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals. Yonder

mountain must migrate into your mind. The fine star-dust and nebulous

blur in Orion, "the portentous year of Mizar and Alcor," must come down

and be dealt with in your household thought. What if you shall come to

discern that the play and playground of all this pompous history are

radiations from yourself, and that the sun borrows his beams? What

terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in

magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all

trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps

out of men's minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and

their fathers held and were framed upon.

There are deceptions of the senses, deceptions of the passions, and the

structural, beneficent illusions of sentiment and of the intellect.

There is the illusion of love, which attributes to the beloved person

all which that person shares with his or her family, sex, age, or

condition, nay, with the human mind itself. 'Tis these which the lover

loves, and Anna Matilda gets the credit of them. As if one shut up

always in a tower, with one window, through which the face of heaven and

earth could be seen, should fancy that all the marvels he beheld

belonged to that window. There is the illusion of time, which is very

deep; who has disposed of it? or come to the conviction that what seems

the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal

series? The intellect sees that every atom carries the whole of Nature;

that the mind opens to omnipotence; that, in the endless striving and

ascents, the metamorphosis is entire, so that the soul doth not know

itself in its own act, when that act is perfected. There is illusion

that shall deceive even the elect. There is illusion that shall deceive

even the performer of the miracle. Though he make his body, he denies

that he makes it. Though the world exist from thought, thought is

daunted in presence of the world. One after the other we accept the

mental laws, still resisting those which follow, which however must be

accepted. But all our concessions only compel us to new profusion. And

what avails it that science has come to treat space and time as simply

forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical, and withal our

pretension of property and even of self-hood are fading with the rest,

if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities; but the incessant

flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which yesterday

was a finality, to-day is yielding to a larger generalization?

With such volatile elements to work in, 'tis no wonder if our estimates

are loose and floating. We must work and affirm, but we have no guess

of the value of what we say or do. The cloud is now as big as your

hand, and now it covers a county. That story of Thor, who was set to

drain the drinking-horn in Asgard, and to wrestle with the old woman,

and to run with the runner Lok, and presently found that he had been

drinking up the sea, and wrestling with Time, and racing with Thought,

describes us who are contending, amid these seeming trifles, with the

supreme energies of Nature. We fancy we have fallen into bad company

and squalid condition, low debts, shoe-bills, broken glass to pay for,

pots to buy, butcher's meat, sugar, milk, and coal. 'Set me some great

task, ye gods! and I will show my spirit.' 'Not so,' says the good

Heaven; 'plod and plough, vamp your old coats and hats, weave a

shoestring; great affairs and the best wine by and by.' Well, 'tis all

phantasm; and if we weave a yard of tape in all humility, and as well as

we can, long hereafter we shall see it was no cotton tape at all, but

some galaxy which we braided, and that the threads were Time and Nature.

We cannot write the order of the variable winds. How can we penetrate

the law of our shifting moods and susceptibility? Yet they differ as

all and nothing. Instead of the firmament of yesterday, which our eyes

require, it is to-day an eggshell which coops us in; we cannot even see

what or where our stars of destiny are. From day to day, the capital

facts of human life are hidden from our eyes. Suddenly the mist rolls

up, and reveals them, and we think how much good time is gone, that

might have been saved, had any hint of these things been shown. A

sudden rise in the road shows us the system of mountains, and all the

summits, which have been just as near us all the year, but quite out of

mind. But these alternations are not without their order, and we are

parties to our various fortune. If life seem a succession of dreams,

yet poetic justice is done in dreams also. The visions of good men are

good; it is the undisciplined will that is whipped with bad thoughts and

bad fortunes. When we break the laws, we lose our hold on the central

reality. Like sick men in hospitals, we change only from bed to bed,

from one folly to another; and it cannot signify much what becomes of

such castaways,--wailing, stupid, comatose creatures,--lifted from bed

to bed, from the nothing of life to the nothing of death.

In this kingdom of illusions we grope eagerly for stays and foundations.

There is none but a strict and faithful dealing at home, and a severe

barring out of all duplicity or illusion there. Whatever games are

played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our

privacy with the last honesty and truth. I look upon the simple and

childish virtues of veracity and honesty as the root of all that is

sublime in character. Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your

debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my

word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or

dissipated, or undermined, to all the _eclat_ in the universe. This

reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art. At

the top or at the bottom of all illusions, I set the cheat which still

leads us to work and live for appearances, in spite of our conviction,

in all sane hours, that it is what we really are that avails with

friends, with strangers, and with fate or fortune.

One would think from the talk of men, that riches and poverty were a

great matter; and our civilization mainly respects it. But the Indians

say, that they do not think the white man with his brow of care, always

toiling, afraid of heat and cold, and keeping within doors, has any

advantage of them. The permanent interest of every man is, never to be

in a false position, but to have the weight of Nature to back him in all

that he does. Riches and poverty are a thick or thin costume; and our

life--the life of all of us--identical. For we transcend the

circumstance continually, and taste the real quality of existence; as in

our employments, which only differ in the manipulations, but express the

same laws; or in our thoughts, which wear no silks, and taste no

ice-creams. We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of

Nature.

The early Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Xenophanes measured their

force on this problem of identity. Diogenes of Apollonia said, that

unless the atoms were made of one stuff, they could never blend and act

with one another. But the Hindoos, in their sacred writings, express

the liveliest feeling, both of the essential identity, and of that

illusion which they conceive variety to be "The notions, '_I am_,' and

'_This is mine_,' which influence mankind, are but delusions of the

mother of the world. Dispel, O Lord of all creatures! the conceit of

knowledge which proceeds from ignorance." And the beatitude of man they

hold to lie in being freed from fascination.

The intellect is stimulated by the statement of truth in a trope, and

the will by clothing the laws of life in illusions. But the unities of

Truth and of Right are not broken by the disguise. There need never be

any confusion in these. In a crowded life of many parts and performers,

on a stage of nations, or in the obscurest hamlet in Maine or

California, the same elements offer the same choices to each new comer,

and, according to his election, he fixes his fortune in absolute Nature.

It would be hard to put more mental and moral philosophy than the

Persians have thrown into a sentence:--

"Fooled thou must be, though wisest of the wise:

Then be the fool of virtue, not of vice."

There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and

gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal

enters the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with them alone,

they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to

their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snow-storms of

illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and

that, and whose movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself

poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither,

now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he

that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every

moment, new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to baffle and

distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and

the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on

their thrones,--they alone with him alone.