The Friar Bernard lamented in his cell on Mount Cenis the crimes of

mankind, and rising one morning before day from his bed of moss and dry

leaves, he gnawed his roots and berries, drank of the spring, and set

forth to go to Rome to reform the corruption of mankind. On his way he

encountered many travellers who greeted him courteously; and the cabins

of the peasants and the castles of the lords supplied his few wants.

When he came at last to Rome, his piety and good will easily introduced

him to many families of the rich, and on the first day he saw and talked

with gentle mothers with their babes at their breasts, who told him how

much love they bore their children, and how they were perplexed in their

daily walk lest they should fail in their duty to them. ‘What!’ he

said, ‘and this on rich embroidered carpets, on marble floors, with

cunning sculpture, and carved wood, and rich pictures, and piles of

books about you?’--‘Look at our pictures and books, they said, and we

will tell you, good Father, how we spent the last evening. These are

stories of godly children and holy families and romantic sacrifices made

in old or in recent times by great and not mean persons; and last

evening, our family was collected, and our husbands and brothers

discoursed sadly on what we could save and give in the hard times.’ Then

came in the men, and they said, ‘What cheer, brother? Does thy convent

want gifts?’ Then the friar Bernard went home swiftly with other

thoughts than he brought, saying, ‘This way of life is wrong, yet these

Romans, whom I prayed God to destroy, are lovers, they are lovers; what

can I do?’

The reformer concedes that these mitigations exist, and that, if he

proposed comfort, he should take sides with the establishment. Your

words are excellent, but they do not tell the whole. Conservatism is

affluent and openhanded, but there is a cunning juggle in riches. I

observe that they take somewhat for everything they give. I look bigger,

but am less; I have more clothes, but am not so warm; more armor, but

less courage; more books, but less wit. What you say of your planted,

builded and decorated world, is true enough, and I gladly avail myself

of its convenience; yet I have remarked that what holds in particular,

holds in general, that the plant Man does not require for his most

glorious flowering this pomp of preparation and convenience, but the

thoughts of some beggarly Homer who strolled, God knows when, in the

infancy and barbarism of the old world; the gravity and sense of some

slave Moses who leads away his fellow slaves from their masters; the

contemplation of some Scythian Anacharsis; the erect, formidable valor

of some Dorian townsmen in the town of Sparta; the vigor of Clovis the

Frank, and Alfred the Saxon, and Alaric the Goth, and Mahomet, Ali, and

Omar the Arabians, Saladin the Curd, and Othman the Turk, sufficed, to

build what you call society, on the spot and in the instant when the

sound mind in a sound body appeared. Rich and fine is your dress, O

conservatism! your horses are of the best blood; your roads are well cut

and well paved; your pantry is full of meats and your cellar of wines,

and a very good state and condition are you for gentlemen and ladies to

live under; but every one of these goods steals away a drop of my

blood. I want the necessity of supplying my own wants. All this costly

culture of yours is not necessary. Greatness does not need it. Yonder

peasant, who sits neglected there in a corner, carries a whole

revolution of man and nature in his head, which shall be a sacred

history to some future ages. For man is the end of nature; nothing so

easily organizes itself in every part of the universe as he; no moss, no

lichen is so easily born; and he takes along with him and puts out from

himself the whole apparatus of society and condition _extempore_, as an

army encamps in a desert, and where all was just now blowing sand,

creates a white city in an hour, a government, a market, a place for

feasting, for conversation, and for love.

These considerations, urged by those whose characters and whose fortunes

are yet to be formed, must needs command the sympathy of all reasonable

persons. But beside that charity which should make all adult persons

interested for the youth, and engage them to see that he has a free

field and fair play on his entrance into life, we are bound to see that

the society, of which we compose a part, does not permit the formation

or continuance of views and practices injurious to the honor and welfare

of mankind. The objection to conservatism, when embodied in a party,

is, that in its love of acts, it hates principles; it lives in the

senses, not in truth; it sacrifices to despair; it goes for

availableness in its candidate, not for worth; and for expediency in its

measures, and not for the right. Under pretence of allowing for

friction, it makes so many additions and supplements to the machine of

society, that it will play smoothly and softly, but will no longer grind

any grist.

The conservative party in the universe concedes that the radical would

talk sufficiently to the purpose, if we were still in the garden of

Eden; he legislates for man as he ought to be; his theory is right, but

he makes no allowance for friction; and this omission makes his whole

doctrine false. The idealist retorts, that the conservative falls into a

far more noxious error in the other extreme. The conservative assumes

sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total

legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and

flannels, with bib and papspoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea. Sickness

gets organized as well as health, the vice as well as the virtue. Now

that a vicious system of trade has existed so long, it has stereotyped

itself in the human generation, and misers are born. And now that

sickness has got such a foothold, leprosy has grown cunning, has got

into the ballot-box; the lepers outvote the clean; society has resolved

itself into a Hospital Committee, and all its laws are quarantine. If

any man resist, and set up a foolish hope he has entertained as good

against the general despair, society frowns on him, shuts him out of her

opportunities, her granaries, her refectories, her water and bread, and

will serve him a sexton’s turn. Conservatism takes as low a view of

every part of human action and passion. Its religion is just as bad; a

lozenge for the sick; a dolorous tune to beguile the distemper;

mitigations of pain by pillows and anodynes; always mitigations, never

remedies; pardons for sin, funeral honors,--never self-help, renovation,

and virtue. Its social and political action has no better aim; to keep

out wind and weather, to bring the day and year about, and make the

world last our day; not to sit on the world and steer it; not to sink

the memory of the past in the glory of a new and more excellent

creation; a timid cobbler and patcher, it degrades whatever it touches.

The cause of education is urged in this country with the utmost

earnestness,--on what ground? why on this, that the people have the

power, and if they are not instructed to sympathize with the

intelligent, reading, trading, and governing class, inspired with a

taste for the same competitions and prizes, they will upset the fair

pageant of Judicature, and perhaps lay a hand on the sacred muniments of

wealth itself, and new distribute the land. Religion is taught in the

same spirit. The contractors who were building a road out of Baltimore,

some years ago, found the Irish laborers quarrelsome and refractory, to

a degree that embarrassed the agents, and seriously interrupted the

progress of the work. The corporation were advised to call off the

police, and build a Catholic chapel; which they did; the priest

presently restored order, and the work went on prosperously. Such hints,

be sure, are too valuable to be lost. If you do not value the Sabbath,

or other religious institutions, give yourself no concern about

maintaining them. They have already acquired a market value as

conservators of property; and if priest and church-member should fail,

the chambers of commerce and the presidents of the Banks, the very

innholders and landlords of the county would muster with fury to their

support.

Of course, religion in such hands loses its essence. Instead of that

reliance, which the soul suggests on the eternity of truth and duty, men

are misled into a reliance on institutions, which, the moment they cease

to be the instantaneous creations of the devout sentiment, are

worthless. Religion among the low becomes low. As it loses its truth, it

loses credit with the sagacious. They detect the falsehood of the

preaching, but when they say so, all good citizens cry, Hush; do not

weaken the state, do not take off the strait jacket from dangerous

persons. Every honest fellow must keep up the hoax the best he can; must

patronize providence and piety, and wherever he sees anything that will

keep men amused, schools or churches or poetry, or picture-galleries or

music, or what not, he must cry “Hist-a-boy,” and urge the game on. What

a compliment we pay to the good Spirit with our superserviceable zeal!

But not to balance reasons for and against the establishment any longer,

and if it still be asked in this necessity of partial organization,

which party on the whole has the highest claims on our sympathy? I bring

it home to the private heart, where all such questions must have their

final arbitrement. How, will every strong and generous mind choose its

ground,--with the defenders of the old? or with the seekers of the new?

Which is that state which promises to edify a great, brave, and

beneficent man; to throw him on his resources, and tax the strength of

his character? On which part will each of us find himself in the hour

of health and of aspiration?

I understand well the respect of mankind for war, because that breaks up

the Chinese stagnation of society, and demonstrates the personal merits

of all men. A state of war or anarchy, in which law has little force, is

so far valuable, that it puts every man on trial. The man of principle

is known as such, and even in the fury of faction is respected. In the

civil wars of France, Montaigne alone, among all the French gentry, kept

his castle gates unbarred, and made his personal integrity as good at

least as a regiment. The man of courage and resources is shown, and the

effeminate and base person. Those who rise above war, and those who fall

below it, it easily discriminates, as well as those, who, accepting its

rude conditions, keep their own head by their own sword.

But in peace and a commercial state we depend, not as we ought, on our

knowledge and all men’s knowledge that we are honest men, but we

cowardly lean on the virtue of others. For it is always at last the

virtue of some men in the society, which keeps the law in any reverence

and power. Is there not something shameful that I should owe my peaceful

occupancy of my house and field, not to the knowledge of my countrymen

that I am useful, but to their respect for sundry other reputable

persons, I know not whom, whose joint virtue still keep the law in good

odor?

It will never make any difference to a hero what the laws are. His

greatness will shine and accomplish itself unto the end, whether they

second him or not. If he have earned his bread by drudgery, and in the

narrow and crooked ways which were all an evil law had left him, he will

make it at least honorable by his expenditure. Of the past he will take

no heed; for its wrongs he will not hold himself responsible: he will

say, all the meanness of my progenitors shall not bereave me of the

power to make this hour and company fair and fortunate. Whatsoever

streams of power and commodity flow to me, shall of me acquire healing

virtue, and become fountains of safety. Cannot I too descend a Redeemer

into nature? Whosoever hereafter shall name my name, shall not record a

malefactor, but a benefactor in the earth. If there be power in good

intention, in fidelity, and in toil, the north wind shall be purer, the

stars in heaven shall glow with a kindlier beam, that I have lived. I am

primarily engaged to myself to be a public servant of all the gods, to

demonstrate to all men that there is intelligence and good will at the

heart of things, and ever higher and yet higher leadings. These are my

engagements; how can your law further or hinder me in what I shall do to

men? On the other hand, these dispositions establish their relations to

me. Wherever there is worth, I shall be greeted. Wherever there are men,

are the objects of my study and love. Sooner or later all men will be my

friends, and will testify in all methods the energy of their regard. I

cannot thank your law for my protection. I protect it. It is not in its

power to protect me. It is my business to make myself revered. I depend

on my honor, my labor, and my dispositions, for my place in the

affections of mankind, and not on any conventions or parchments of

yours.

But if I allow myself in derelictions, and become idle and dissolute, I

quickly come to love the protection of a strong law, because I feel no

title in myself to my advantages. To the intemperate and covetous person

no love flows; to him mankind would pay no rent, no dividend, if force

were once relaxed; nay, if they could give their verdict, they would

say, that his self-indulgence and his oppression deserved punishment

from society, and not that rich board and lodging he now enjoys. The law

acts then as a screen of his unworthiness, and makes him worse the

longer it protects him.

In conclusion, to return from this alternation of partial views, to the

high platform of universal and necessary history, it is a happiness for

mankind that innovation has got on so far, and has so free a field

before it. The boldness of the hope men entertain transcends all former

experience. It calms and cheers them with the picture of a simple and

equal life of truth and piety. And this hope flowered on what tree? It

was not imported from the stock of some celestial plant, but grew here

on the wild crab of conservatism. It is much that this old and

vituperated system of things has borne so fair a child. It predicts that

amidst a planet peopled with conservatives, one Reformer may yet be

born.

THE TRANSCENDENTALIST.

A LECTURE READ AT THE MASONIC TEMPLE, BOSTON, JANUARY, 1842.

THE TRANSCENDENTALIST.

The first thing we have to say respecting what are called _new views_

here in New England, at the present time, is, that they are not new, but

the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these new times. The

light is always identical in its composition, but it falls on a great

variety of objects, and by so falling is first revealed to us, not in

its own form, for it is formless, but in theirs; in like manner, thought

only appears in the objects it classifies. What is popularly called

Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842.

As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and

Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on

consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the

senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and

say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the

things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts,

on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man;

the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on

miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of thinking are both

natural, but the idealist contends that his way of thinking is in higher

nature. He concedes all that the other affirms, admits the impressions

of sense, admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and then asks

the materialist for his grounds of assurance that things are as his

senses represent them. But I, he says, affirm facts not affected by the

illusions of sense, facts which are of the same nature as the faculty

which reports them, and not liable to doubt; facts which in their first

appearance to us assume a native superiority to material facts,

degrading these into a language by which the first are to be spoken;

facts which it only needs a retirement from the senses to discern. Every

materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward

to be a materialist.

The idealist, in speaking of events, sees them as spirits. He does not

deny the sensuous fact: by no means; but he will not see that alone. He

does not deny the presence of this table, this chair, and the walls of

this room, but he looks at these things as the reverse side of the

tapestry, as the _other end_, each being a sequel or completion of a

spiritual fact which nearly concerns him. This manner of looking at

things, transfers every object in nature from an independent and

anomalous position without there, into the consciousness. Even the

materialist Condillac, perhaps the most logical expounder of

materialism, was constrained to say, “Though we should soar into the

heavens, though we should sink into the abyss, we never go out of

ourselves; it is always our own thought that we perceive.” What more

could an idealist say?

The materialist, secure in the certainty of sensation, mocks at

fine-spun theories, at star-gazers and dreamers, and believes that his

life is solid, that he at least takes nothing for granted, but knows

where he stands, and what he does. Yet how easy it is to show him, that

he also is a phantom walking and working amid phantoms, and that he need

only ask a question or two beyond his daily questions, to find his solid

universe growing dim and impalpable before his sense. The sturdy

capitalist, no matter how deep and square on blocks of Quincy granite he

lays the foundations of his banking-house, or Exchange, must set it, at

last, not on a cube corresponding to the angles of his structure, but

on a mass of unknown materials and solidity, red-hot or white-hot,

perhaps at the core, which rounds off to an almost perfect sphericity,

and lies floating in soft air, and goes spinning away, dragging bank and

banker with it at a rate of thousands of miles the hour, he knows not

whither,--a bit of bullet, now glimmering, now darkling through a small

cubic space on the edge of an unimaginable pit of emptiness. And this

wild balloon, in which his whole venture is embarked, is a just symbol

of his whole state and faculty. One thing, at least, he says is certain,

and does not give me the headache, that figures do not lie; the

multiplication table has been hitherto found unimpeachable truth; and,

moreover, if I put a gold eagle in my safe, I find it again

to-morrow;--but for these thoughts, I know not whence they are. They

change and pass away. But ask him why he believes that an uniform

experience will continue uniform, or on what grounds he founds his faith

in his figures, and he will perceive that his mental fabric is built up

on just as strange and quaking foundations as his proud edifice of

stone.

In the order of thought, the materialist takes his departure from the

external world, and esteems a man as one product of that. The idealist

takes his departure from his consciousness, and reckons the world an

appearance. The materialist respects sensible masses, Society,

Government, social art, and luxury, every establishment, every mass,

whether majority of numbers, or extent of space, or amount of objects,

every social action. The idealist has another measure, which is

metaphysical, namely, the _rank_ which things themselves take in his

consciousness; not at all, the size or appearance. Mind is the only

reality, of which men and all other natures are better or worse

reflectors. Nature, literature, history, are only subjective phenomena.

Although in his action overpowered by the laws of action, and so, warmly

coöperating with men, even preferring them to himself, yet when he

speaks scientifically, or after the order of thought, he is constrained

to degrade persons into representatives of truths. He does not respect

labor, or the products of labor, namely, property, otherwise than as a

manifold symbol, illustrating with wonderful fidelity of details the

laws of being; he does not respect government, except as far as it

reiterates the law of his mind; nor the church; nor charities; nor arts,

for themselves; but hears, as at a vast distance, what they say, as if

his consciousness would speak to him through a pantomimic scene. His

thought,--that is the Universe. His experience inclines him to behold

the procession of facts you call the world, as flowing perpetually

outward from an invisible, unsounded centre in himself, centre alike of

him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all things as having a

subjective or relative existence, relative to that aforesaid Unknown

Centre of him.

From this transfer of the world into the consciousness, this beholding

of all things in the mind, follow easily his whole ethics. It is simpler

to be self-dependent. The height, the deity of man is, to be

self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when

it does not violate me; but best when it is likest to solitude.

Everything real is self-existent. Everything divine shares the

self-existence of Deity. All that you call the world is the shadow of

that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of the powers of

thought, of those that are dependent and of those that are independent

of your will. Do not cumber yourself with fruitless pains to mend and

remedy remote effects; let the soul be erect, and all things will go

well. You think me the child of my circumstances: I make my

circumstance. Let any thought or motive of mine be different from that

they are, the difference will transform my condition and economy.

I--this thought which is called I,--is the mould into which the world is

poured like melted wax. The mould is invisible, but the world betrays

the shape of the mould. You call it the power of circumstance, but it is

the power of me. Am I in harmony with myself? my position will seem to

you just and commanding. Am I vicious and insane? my fortunes will seem

to you obscure and descending. As I am, so shall I associate, and, so

shall I act; Cæsar’s history will paint out Cæsar. Jesus acted so,

because he thought so. I do not wish to overlook or to gainsay any

reality; I say, I make my circumstance: but if you ask me, Whence am I?

I feel like other men my relation to that Fact which cannot be spoken,

or defined, nor even thought, but which exists, and will exist.

The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine.

He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to

new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in

ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to

demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state

of man, without the admission of anything unspiritual; that is, anything

positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus, the spiritual measure of

inspiration is the depth of the thought, and never, who said it? And so

he resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures on the spirit

than its own.

In action, he easily incurs the charge of antinomianism by his avowal

that he, who has the Lawgiver, may with safety not only neglect, but

even contravene every written commandment. In the play of Othello, the

expiring Desdemona absolves her husband of the murder, to her attendant

Emilia. Afterwards, when Emilia charges him with the crime, Othello

exclaims,

“You heard her say herself it was not I.”

Emilia replies,

“The more angel she, and thou the blacker devil.”

Of this fine incident, Jacobi, the Transcendental moralist, makes use,

with other parallel instances, in his reply to Fichte. Jacobi, refusing

all measure of right and wrong except the determinations of the private

spirit, remarks that there is no crime but has sometimes been a virtue.

“I,” he says, “am that atheist, that godless person who, in opposition

to an imaginary doctrine of calculation, would lie as the dying

Desdemona lied; would lie and deceive, as Pylades when he personated

Orestes; would assassinate like Timoleon; would perjure myself like

Epaminondas, and John de Witt; I would resolve on suicide like Cato; I

would commit sacrilege with David; yea, and pluck ears of corn on the

Sabbath, for no other reason than that I was fainting for lack of food.

For, I have assurance in myself, that, in pardoning these faults

according to the letter, man exerts the sovereign right which the

majesty of his being confers on him; he sets the seal of his divine

nature to the grace he accords.”[A]

[A] Coleridge’s Translation.

In like manner, if there is anything grand and daring in human thought

or virtue, any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any presentiment; any

extravagance of faith, the spiritualist adopts it as most in nature. The

oriental mind has always tended to this largeness. Buddhism is an

expression of it. The Buddhist who thanks no man, who says, “do not

flatter your benefactors,” but who, in his conviction that every good

deed can by no possibility escape its reward, will not deceive the

benefactor by pretending that he has done more than he should, is a

Transcendentalist.

You will see by this sketch that there is no such thing as a

Transcendental _party_; that there is no pure Transcendentalist; that

we know of none but prophets and heralds of such a philosophy; that all

who by strong bias of nature have leaned to the spiritual side in

doctrine, have stopped short of their goal. We have had many harbingers

and forerunners; but of a purely spiritual life, history has afforded no

example. I mean, we have yet no man who has leaned entirely on his

character, and eaten angels’ food; who, trusting to his sentiments,

found life made of miracles; who, working for universal aims, found

himself fed, he knew not how; clothed, sheltered, and weaponed, he knew

not how, and yet it was done by his own hands. Only in the instinct of

the lower animals, we find the suggestion of the methods of it, and

something higher than our understanding. The squirrel hoards nuts, and

the bee gathers honey, without knowing what they do, and they are thus

provided for without selfishness or disgrace.

Shall we say, then, that Transcendentalism is the Saturnalia or excess

of Faith; the presentiment of a faith proper to man in his integrity,

excessive only when his imperfect obedience hinders the satisfaction of

his wish. Nature is transcendental, exists primarily, necessarily, ever

works and advances, yet takes no thought for the morrow. Man owns the

dignity of the life which throbs around him in chemistry, and tree, and

animal, and in the involuntary functions of his own body; yet he is

balked when he tries to fling himself into this enchanted circle, where

all is done without degradation. Yet genius and virtue predict in man

the same absence of private ends, and of condescension to circumstances,

united with every trait and talent of beauty and power.

This way of thinking, falling on Roman times, made Stoic philosophers;

falling on despotic times, made patriot Catos and Brutuses; falling on

superstitious times, made prophets and apostles; on popish times, made

protestants and ascetic monks, preachers of Faith against the preachers

of Works; on prelatical times, made Puritans and Quakers; and falling on

Unitarian and commercial times, makes the peculiar shades of Idealism

which we know.

It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism of the

present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of that

term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical

philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the

intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by

showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative

forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience

was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he

denominated them _Transcendental_ forms. The extraordinary profoundness

and precision of that man’s thinking have given vogue to his

nomenclature, in Europe and America, to that extent, that whatever

belongs to the class of intuitive thought, is popularly called at the

present day _Transcendental_.

Although, as we have said, there is no pure Transcendentalist, yet the

tendency to respect the intuitions, and to give them, at least in our

creed, all authority over our experience, has deeply colored the

conversation and poetry of the present day; and the history of genius

and of religion in these times, though impure, and as yet not incarnated

in any powerful individual, will be the history of this tendency.

It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that

many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the

common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake

themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which

no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. They hold

themselves aloof: they feel the disproportion between their faculties

and the work offered them, and they prefer to ramble in the country and

perish of ennui, to the degradation of such charities and such ambitions

as the city can propose to them. They are striking work, and crying out

for somewhat worthy to do! What they do, is done only because they are

overpowered by the humanities that speak on all sides; and they consent

to such labor as is open to them, though to their lofty dream the

writing of Iliads or Hamlets, or the building of cities or empires seems

drudgery.

Now every one must do after his kind, be he asp or angel, and these

must. The question, which a wise man and a student of modern history

will ask, is, what that kind is? And truly, as in ecclesiastical history

we take so much pains to know what the Gnostics, what the Essenes, what

the Manichees, and what the Reformers believed, it would not misbecome

us to inquire nearer home, what these companions and contemporaries of

ours think and do, at least so far as these thoughts and actions appear

to be not accidental and personal, but common to many, and the

inevitable flower of the Tree of Time. Our American literature and

spiritual history are, we confess, in the optative mood; but whoso knows

these seething brains, these admirable radicals, these unsocial

worshippers, these talkers who talk the sun and moon away, will believe

that this heresy cannot pass away without leaving its mark.

They are lonely; the spirit of their writing and conversation is lonely;

they repel influences; they shun general society; they incline to shut

themselves in their chamber in the house, to live in the country rather

than in the town, and to find their tasks and amusements in solitude.

Society, to be sure, does not like this very well; it saith, Whoso goes

to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he declareth all to be unfit to

be his companions; it is very uncivil, nay, insulting; Society will

retaliate. Meantime, this retirement does not proceed from any whim on

the part of these separators; but if any one will take pains to talk

with them, he will find that this part is chosen both from temperament

and from principle; with some unwillingness, too, and as a choice of the

less of two evils; for these persons are not by nature melancholy, sour,

and unsocial,--they are not stockish or brute,--but joyous; susceptible,

affectionate; they have even more than others a great wish to be loved.

Like the young Mozart, they are rather ready to cry ten times a day,

“But are you sure you love me?” Nay, if they tell you their whole

thought, they will own that love seems to them the last and highest

gift of nature; that there are persons whom in their hearts they daily

thank for existing,--persons whose faces are perhaps unknown to them,

but whose fame and spirit have penetrated their solitude,--and for whose

sake they wish to exist. To behold the beauty of another character,

which inspires a new interest in our own; to behold the beauty lodged in

a human being, with such vivacity of apprehension, that I am instantly

forced home to inquire if I am not deformity itself: to behold in

another the expression of a love so high that it assures

itself,--assures itself also to me against every possible casualty

except my unworthiness;--these are degrees on the scale of human

happiness, to which they have ascended; and it is a fidelity to this

sentiment which has made common association distasteful to them. They

wish a just and even fellowship, or none. They cannot gossip with you,

and they do not wish, as they are sincere and religious, to gratify any

mere curiosity which you may entertain. Like fairies, they do not wish

to be spoken of. Love me, they say, but do not ask who is my cousin and

my uncle. If you do not need to hear my thought, because you can read it

in my face and behavior, then I will tell it you from sunrise to sunset.

If you cannot divine it, you would not understand what I say. I will

not molest myself for you. I do not wish to be profaned.

And yet, it seems as if this loneliness, and not this love, would

prevail in their circumstances, because of the extravagant demand they

make on human nature. That, indeed, constitutes a new feature in their

portrait, that they are the most exacting and extortionate critics.

Their quarrel with every man they meet, is not with his kind, but with

his degree. There is not enough of him,--that is the only fault. They

prolong their privilege of childhood in this wise, of doing

nothing,--but making immense demands on all the gladiators in the lists

of action and fame. They make us feel the strange disappointment which

overcasts every human youth. So many promising youths, and never a

finished man! The profound nature will have a savage rudeness; the

delicate one will be shallow, or the victim of sensibility; the richly

accomplished will have some capital absurdity; and so every piece has a

crack. ’Tis strange, but this masterpiece is the result of such an

extreme delicacy, that the most unobserved flaw in the boy will

neutralize the most aspiring genius, and spoil the work. Talk with a

seaman of the hazards to life in his profession, and he will ask you,

“Where are the old sailors? do you not see that all are young men?” And

we, on this sea of human thought, in like manner inquire, Where are the

old idealists? where are they who represented to the last generation

that extravagant hope, which a few happy aspirants suggest to ours? In

looking at the class of counsel, and power, and wealth, and at the

matronage of the land, amidst all the prudence and all the triviality,

one asks, Where are they who represented genius, virtue, the invisible

and heavenly world, to these? Are they dead,--taken in early ripeness to

the gods,--as ancient wisdom foretold their fate? Or did the high idea

die out of them, and leave their unperfumed body as its tomb and tablet,

announcing to all that the celestial inhabitant, who once gave them

beauty, had departed? Will it be better with the new generation? We

easily predict a fair future to each new candidate who enters the lists,

but we are frivolous and volatile, and by low aims and ill example do

what we can to defeat this hope. Then these youths bring us a rough but

effectual aid. By their unconcealed dissatisfaction, they expose our

poverty, and the insignificance of man to man. A man is a poor limitary

benefactor. He ought to be a shower of benefits--a great influence,

which should never let his brother go, but should refresh old merits

continually with new ones; so that, though absent, he should never be

out of my mind, his name never far from my lips; but if the earth should

open at my side, or my last hour were come, his name should be the

prayer I should utter to the Universe. But in our experience, man is

cheap, and friendship wants its deep sense. We affect to dwell with our

friends in their absence, but we do not; when deed, word, or letter

comes not, they let us go. These exacting children advertise us of our

wants. There is no compliment, no smooth speech with them; they pay you

only this one compliment, of insatiable expectation; they aspire, they

severely exact, and if they only stand fast in this watch-tower, and

persist in demanding unto the end, and without end, then are they

terrible friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in

awe; and what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been

without service to the race of man.

With this passion for what is great and extraordinary, it cannot be

wondered at, that they are repelled by vulgarity and frivolity in

people. They say to themselves, It is better to be alone than in bad

company. And it is really a wish to be met,--the wish to find society

for their hope and religion,--which prompts them to shun what is called

society. They feel that they are never so fit for friendship, as when

they have quitted mankind, and taken themselves to friend. A picture, a

book, a favorite spot in the hills or the woods, which they can people

with the fair and worthy creation of the fancy, can give them often

forms so vivid, that these for the time shall seem real, and society the

illusion.

But their solitary and fastidious manners not only withdraw them from

the conversation, but from the labors of the world; they are not good

citizens, not good members of society; unwillingly they bear their part

of the public and private burdens; they do not willingly share in the

public charities, in the public religious rites, in the enterprises of

education, of missions foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the

slave-trade, or in the temperance society. They do not even like to

vote. The philanthropists inquire whether Transcendentalism does not

mean sloth: they had as lief hear that their friend is dead, as that he

is a Transcendentalist; for then is he paralyzed, and can never do

anything for humanity. What right, cries the good world, has the man of

genius to retreat from work, and indulge himself? The popular literary

creed seems to be, ‘I am a sublime genius; I ought not therefore to

labor.’ But genius is the power to labor better and more availably.

Deserve thy genius: exalt it. The good, the illuminated, set apart from

the rest, censuring their dulness and vices, as if they thought that, by

sitting very grand in their chairs, the very brokers, attorneys, and

congressmen would see the error of their ways, and flock to them. But

the good and wise must learn to act, and carry salvation to the

combatants and demagogues in the dusty arena below.

On the part of these children, it is replied, that life and their

faculty seem to them gifts too rich to be squandered on such trifles as

you propose to them. What you call your fundamental institutions, your

great and holy causes, seem to them great abuses, and, when nearly seen,

paltry matters. Each ‘Cause,’ as it is called,--say Abolition,

Temperance, say Calvinism, or Unitarianism,--becomes speedily a little

shop, where the article, let it have been at first never so subtle and

ethereal, is now made up into portable and convenient cakes, and

retailed in small quantities to suit purchasers. You make very free use

of these words ‘great’ and ‘holy,’ but few things appear to them such.

Few persons have any magnificence of nature to inspire enthusiasm, and

the philanthropies and charities have a certain air of quackery. As to

the general course of living, and the daily employments of men, they

cannot see much virtue in these, since they are parts of this vicious

circle; and, as no great ends are answered by the men, there is nothing

noble in the arts by which they are maintained. Nay, they have made the

experiment, and found that, from the liberal professions to the coarsest

manual labor, and from the courtesies of the academy and the college to

the conventions of the cotillon-room and the morning call, there is a

spirit of cowardly compromise and seeming, which intimates a frightful

skepticism, a life without love, and an activity without an aim.

Unless the action is necessary, unless it is adequate, I do not wish to

perform it. I do not wish to do one thing but once. I do not love

routine. Once possessed of the principle, it is equally easy to make

four forty thousand applications of it. A great man will be content to

have indicated in any the slightest manner his perception of the

reigning Idea of his time, and will leave to those who like it the

multiplication of examples. When he has hit the white, the rest may

shatter the target. Every thing admonishes us how needlessly long life

is. Every moment of a hero so raises and cheers us, that a twelvemonth

is an age. All that the brave Xanthus brings home from his wars, is the

recollection that, at the storming of Samos, “in the heat of the battle,

Pericles smiled on me, and passed on to another detachment.” It is the

quality of the moment, not the number of days, of events, or of actors,

that imports.

New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if you want

the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of the labor.

We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust: but we do

not like your work.

‘Then,’ says the world, ‘show me your own.’

‘We have none.’

‘What will you do, then?’ cries the world.

‘We will wait.’

‘How long?’

‘Until the Universe rises up and calls us to work.’

‘But whilst you wait, you grow old and useless.’

‘Be it so: I can sit in a corner and _perish_, (as you call it,) but I

will not move until I have the highest command. If no call should come

for years, for centuries, then I know that the want of the Universe is

the attestation of faith by my abstinence. Your virtuous projects, so

called, do not cheer me. I know that which shall come will cheer me. If

I cannot work, at least I need not lie. All that is clearly due to-day

is not to lie. In other places, other men have encountered sharp trials,

and have behaved themselves well. The martyrs were sawn asunder, or hung

alive on meat-hooks. Cannot we screw our courage to patience and truth,

and without complaint, or even with good-humor, await our turn of action

in the Infinite Counsels?’

But, to come a little closer to the secret of these persons, we must

say, that to them it seems a very easy matter to answer the objections

of the man of the world, but not so easy to dispose of the doubts and

objections that occur to themselves. They are exercised in their own

spirit with queries, which acquaint them with all adversity, and with

the trials of the bravest heroes. When I asked them concerning their

private experience, they answered somewhat in this wise: It is not to be

denied that there must be some wide difference between my faith and

other faith; and mine is a certain brief experience, which surprised me

in the highway or in the market, in some place, at some time,--whether

in the body or out of the body, God knoweth,--and made me aware that I

had played the fool with fools all this time, but that law existed for

me and for all; that to me belonged trust, a child’s trust and

obedience, and the worship of ideas, and I should never be fool more.

Well, in the space of an hour, probably, I was let down from this

height; I was at my old tricks, the selfish member of a selfish society.

My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world; I ask, When

shall I die, and be relieved of the responsibility of seeing an Universe

which I do not use? I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for

continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.

These two states of thought diverge every moment, and stand in wild

contrast. To him who looks at his life from these moments of

illumination, it will seem that he skulks and plays a mean, shiftless,

and subaltern part in the world. That is to be done which he has not

skill to do, or to be said which others can say better, and he lies by,

or occupies his hands with some plaything, until his hour comes again.

Much of our reading, much of our labor, seems mere waiting: it was not

that we were born for. Any other could do it as well, or better. So

little skill enters into these works, so little do they mix with the

divine life, that it really signifies little what we do, whether we turn

a grindstone, or ride, or run, or make fortunes, or govern the state.

The worst feature of this double consciousness is, that the two lives,

of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, really show very

little relation to each other, never meet and measure each other: one

prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all

infinitude and paradise; and, with the progress of life, the two

discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves. Yet, what is my

faith? What am I? What but a thought of serenity and independence, an

abode in the deep blue sky? Presently the clouds shut down again; yet we

retain the belief that this petty web we weave will at last be overshot

and reticulated with veins of the blue, and that the moments will

characterize the days. Patience, then, is for us, is it not? Patience,

and still patience. When we pass, as presently we shall, into some new

infinitude, out of this Iceland of negations, it will please us to

reflect that, though we had few virtues or consolations, we bore with

our indigence, nor once strove to repair it with hypocrisy or false heat

of any kind.

But this class are not sufficiently characterized, if we omit to add

that they are lovers and worshippers of Beauty. In the eternal trinity

of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, each in its perfection including the

three, they prefer to make Beauty the sign and head. Something of the

same taste is observable in all the moral movements of the time, in the

religious and benevolent enterprises. They have a liberal, even an

æsthetic spirit. A reference to Beauty in action sounds, to be sure, a

little hollow and ridiculous in the ears of the old church. In politics,

it has often sufficed, when they treated of justice, if they kept the

bounds of selfish calculation. If they granted restitution, it was

prudence which granted it. But the justice which is now claimed for the

black, and the pauper, and the drunkard is for Beauty,--is for a

necessity to the soul of the agent, not of the beneficiary. I say, this

is the tendency, not yet the realization. Our virtue totters and trips,

does not yet walk firmly. Its representatives are austere; they preach

and denounce; their rectitude is not yet a grace. They are still liable

to that slight taint of burlesque which, in our strange world, attaches

to the zealot. A saint should be as dear as the apple of the eye. Yet we

are tempted to smile, and we flee from the working to the speculative

reformer, to escape that same slight ridicule. Alas for these days of

derision and criticism! We call the Beautiful the highest, because it

appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness of the good, and

the heartlessness of the true.--They are lovers of nature also, and

find an indemnity in the inviolable order of the world for the violated

order and grace of man.

There is, no doubt, a great deal of well-founded objection to be spoken

or felt against the sayings and doings of this class, some of whose

traits we have selected; no doubt, they will lay themselves open to

criticism and to lampoons, and as ridiculous stories will be to be told

of them as of any. There will be cant and pretension; there will be

subtilty and moonshine. These persons are of unequal strength, and do

not all prosper. They complain that everything around them must be

denied; and if feeble, it takes all their strength to deny, before they

can begin to lead their own life. Grave seniors insist on their respect

to this institution, and that usage; to an obsolete history; to some

vocation, or college, or etiquette, or beneficiary, or charity, or

morning or evening call, which they resist, as what does not concern

them. But it costs such sleepless nights, alienations and

misgivings,--they have so many moods about it;--these old guardians

never change _their_ minds; they have but one mood on the subject,

namely, that Antony is very perverse,--that it is quite as much as

Antony can do, to assert his rights, abstain from what he thinks

foolish, and keep his temper. He cannot help the reaction of this

injustice in his own mind. He is braced-up and stilted; all freedom and

flowing genius, all sallies of wit and frolic nature are quite out of

the question; it is well if he can keep from lying, injustice, and

suicide. This is no time for gaiety and grace. His strength and spirits

are wasted in rejection. But the strong spirits overpower those around

them without effort. Their thought and emotion comes in like a flood,

quite withdraws them from all notice of these carping critics; they

surrender themselves with glad heart to the heavenly guide, and only by

implication reject the clamorous nonsense of the hour. Grave seniors

talk to the deaf,--church and old book mumble and ritualize to an

unheeding, preöccupied and advancing mind, and thus they by happiness of

greater momentum lose no time, but take the right road at first.

But all these of whom I speak are not proficients; they are novices;

they only show the road in which man should travel, when the soul has

greater health and prowess. Yet let them feel the dignity of their

charge, and deserve a larger power. Their heart is the ark in which the

fire is concealed, which shall burn in a broader and universal flame.

Let them obey the Genius then most when his impulse is wildest; then

most when he seems to lead to uninhabitable desarts of thought and

life; for the path which the hero travels alone is the highway of health

and benefit to mankind. What is the privilege and nobility of our

nature, but its persistency, through its power to attach itself to what

is permanent?

Society also has its duties in reference to this class, and must behold

them with what charity it can. Possibly some benefit may yet accrue from

them to the state. In our Mechanics’ Fair, there must be not only

bridges, ploughs, carpenters’ planes, and baking troughs, but also some

few finer instruments,--rain gauges, thermometers, and telescopes; and

in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few

persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character;

persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who betray the smallest

accumulations of wit and feeling in the bystander. Perhaps too there

might be room for the exciters and monitors; collectors of the heavenly

spark with power to convey the electricity to others. Or, as the

storm-tossed vessel at sea speaks the frigate or ‘line packet’ to learn

its longitude, so it may not be without its advantage that we should now

and then encounter rare and gifted men, to compare the points of our

spiritual compass, and verify our bearings from superior chronometers.

Amidst the downward tendency and proneness of things, when every voice

is raised for a new road or another statute, or a subscription of stock,

for an improvement in dress, or in dentistry, for a new house or a

larger business, for a political party, or the division of an

estate,--will you not tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land,

speaking for thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable? Soon

these improvements and mechanical inventions will be superseded; these

modes of living lost out of memory; these cities rotted, ruined by war,

by new inventions, by new seats of trade, or the geologic changes:--all

gone, like the shells which sprinkle the seabeach with a white colony

to-day, forever renewed to be forever destroyed. But the thoughts which

these few hermits strove to proclaim by silence, as well as by speech,

not only by what they did, but by what they forbore to do, shall abide

in beauty and strength, to reorganize themselves in nature, to invest

themselves anew in other, perhaps higher endowed and happier mixed clay

than ours, in fuller union with the surrounding system.

THE YOUNG AMERICAN.

A LECTURE READ BEFORE THE MERCANTILE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, BOSTON,

FEBRUARY 7, 1844.

THE YOUNG AMERICAN.

GENTLEMEN:

It is remarkable, that our people have their intellectual culture from

one country, and their duties from another. This false state of things

is newly in a way to be corrected. America is beginning to assert itself

to the senses and to the imagination of her children, and Europe is

receding in the same degree. This their reaction on education gives a

new importance to the internal improvements and to the politics of the

country. Who has not been stimulated to reflection by the facilities now

in progress of construction for travel and the transportation of goods

in the United States?

This rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast

distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade,

inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the

Union staunch, whose days seemed already numbered by the mere

inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges, and officers

across such tedious distances of land and water. Not only is distance

annihilated, but when, as now, the locomotive and the steamboat, like

enormous shuttles, shoot every day across the thousand various threads

of national descent and employment, and bind them fast in one web, an

hourly assimilation goes forward, and there is no danger that local

peculiarities and hostilities should be preserved.

1. But I hasten to speak of the utility of these improvements in

creating an American sentiment. An unlooked for consequence of the

railroad, is the increased acquaintance it has given the American people

with the boundless resources of their own soil. If this invention has

reduced England to a third of its size, by bringing people so much

nearer, in this country it has given a new celerity to _time_, or

anticipated by fifty years the planting of tracts of land, the choice of

water privileges, the working of mines, and other natural advantages.

Railroad iron is a magician’s rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping

energies of land and water.

The railroad is but one arrow in our quiver, though it has great value

as a sort of yard-stick, and surveyor’s line. The bountiful continent

is ours, state on state, and territory on territory, to the waves of the

Pacific sea;

“Our garden is the immeasurable earth,

The heaven’s blue pillars are Medea’s house.”

The task of surveying, planting, and building upon this immense tract,

requires an education and a sentiment commensurate thereto. A

consciousness of this fact, is beginning to take the place of the purely

trading spirit and education which sprang up whilst all the population

lived on the fringe of sea-coast. And even on the coast, prudent men

have begun to see that every American should be educated with a view to

the values of land. The arts of engineering and of architecture are

studied; scientific agriculture is an object of growing attention; the

mineral riches are explored; limestone, coal, slate, and iron; and the

value of timber-lands is enhanced.

Columbus alleged as a reason for seeking a continent in the West, that

the harmony of nature required a great tract of land in the western

hemisphere, to balance the known extent of land in the eastern; and it

now appears that we must estimate the native values of this broad region

to redress the balance of our own judgments, and appreciate the

advantages opened to the human race in this country, which is our

fortunate home. The land is the appointed remedy for whatever is false

and fantastic in our culture. The continent we inhabit is to be physic

and food for our mind, as well as our body. The land, with its

tranquilizing, sanative influences, is to repair the errors of a

scholastic and traditional education, and bring us into just relations

with men and things.

The habit of living in the presence of these invitations of natural

wealth is not inoperative; and this habit, combined with the moral

sentiment which, in the recent years, has interrogated every

institution, usage, and law, has, naturally, given a strong direction to

the wishes and aims of active young men to withdraw from cities, and

cultivate the soil. This inclination has appeared in the most unlooked

for quarters, in men supposed to be absorbed in business, and in those

connected with the liberal professions. And, since the walks of trade

were crowded, whilst that of agriculture cannot easily be, inasmuch as

the farmer who is not wanted by others can yet grow his own bread,

whilst the manufacturer or the trader, who is not wanted, cannot,--this

seemed a happy tendency. For, beside all the moral benefit which we may

expect from the farmer’s profession, when a man enters it

considerately, this promised the conquering of the soil, plenty, and

beyond this, the adorning of the country with every advantage and

ornament which labor, ingenuity, and affection for a man’s home, could

suggest.

Meantime, with cheap land, and the pacific disposition of the people,

every thing invites to the arts of agriculture, of gardening, and

domestic architecture. Public gardens, on the scale of such plantations

in Europe and Asia, are now unknown to us. There is no feature of the

old countries that strikes an American with more agreeable surprise than

the beautiful gardens of Europe; such as the Boboli in Florence, the

Villa Borghese in Rome, the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, the gardens at

Munich, and at Frankfort on the Maine: works easily imitated here, and

which might well make the land dear to the citizen, and inflame

patriotism. It is the fine art which is left for us, now that sculpture,

painting, and religious and civil architecture have become effete, and

have passed into second childhood. We have twenty degrees of latitude

wherein to choose a seat, and the new modes of travelling enlarge the

opportunity of selection, by making it easy to cultivate very distant

tracts, and yet remain in strict intercourse with the centres of trade

and population. And the whole force of all the arts goes to facilitate

the decoration of lands and dwellings. A garden has this advantage, that

it makes it indifferent where you live. A well-laid garden makes the

face of the country of no account; let that be low or high, grand or

mean, you have made a beautiful abode worthy of man. If the landscape is

pleasing, the garden shows it,--if tame, it excludes it. A little grove,

which any farmer can find, or cause to grow near his house, will, in a

few years, make cataracts and chains of mountains quite unnecessary to

his scenery; and he is so contented with his alleys, woodlands, orchards

and river, that Niagara, and the Notch of the White Hills, and Nantasket

Beach, are superfluities. And yet the selection of a fit houselot has

the same advantage over an indifferent one, as the selection to a given

employment of a man who has a genius for that work. In the last case,

the culture of years will never make the most painstaking apprentice his

equal: no more will gardening give the advantage of a happy site to a

house in a hole or on a pinnacle. In America, we have hitherto little to

boast in this kind. The cities drain the country of the best part of its

population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns,

and the country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The

land,--travel a whole day together,--looks poverty-stricken, and the

buildings plain and poor. In Europe, where society has an aristocratic

structure, the land is full of men of the best stock, and the best

culture, whose interest and pride it is to remain half the year on their

estates, and to fill them with every convenience and ornament. Of

course, these make model farms, and model architecture, and are a

constant education to the eye of the surrounding population. Whatever

events in progress shall go to disgust men with cities, and infuse into

them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a

service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most

poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the

native but hidden graces of the landscape.

I look on such improvements, also, as directly tending to endear the

land to the inhabitant. Any relation to the land, the habit of tilling

it, or mining it, or even hunting on it, generates the feeling of

patriotism. He who keeps shop on it, or he who merely uses it as a

support to his desk and ledger, or to his manufactory, values it less.

The vast majority of the people of this country live by the land, and

carry its quality in their manners and opinions. We in the Atlantic

states, by position, have been commercial, and have, as I said, imbibed

easily an European culture. Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed

the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and

continental element into the national mind, and we shall yet have an

American genius. How much better when the whole land is a garden, and

the people have grown up in the bowers of a paradise. Without looking,

then, to those extraordinary social influences which are now acting in

precisely this direction, but only at what is inevitably doing around

us, I think we must regard the _land_ as a commanding and increasing

power on the citizen, the sanative and Americanizing influence, which

promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come.

2. In the second place, the uprise and culmination of the new and

anti-feudal power of Commerce, is the political fact of most

significance to the American at this hour.

We cannot look on the freedom of this country, in connexion with its

youth, without a presentiment that here shall laws and institutions

exist on some scale of proportion to the majesty of nature. To men

legislating for the area betwixt the two oceans, betwixt the snows and

the tropics, somewhat of the gravity of nature will infuse itself into

the code. A heterogeneous population crowding on all ships from all

corners of the world to the great gates of North America, namely,

Boston, New York, and New Orleans, and thence proceeding inward to the

prairie and the mountains, and quickly contributing their private

thought to the public opinion, their toll to the treasury, and their

vote to the election, it cannot be doubted that the legislation of this

country should become more catholic and cosmopolitan than that of any

other. It seems so easy for America to inspire and express the most

expansive and humane spirit; new-born, free, healthful, strong, the land

of the laborer, of the democrat, of the philanthropist, of the believer,

of the saint, she should speak for the human race. It is the country of

the Future. From Washington, proverbially ‘the city of magnificent

distances,’ through all its cities, states, and territories, it is a

country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, of expectations.

Gentlemen, there is a sublime and friendly Destiny by which the human

race is guided,--the race never dying, the individual never spared,--to

results affecting masses and ages. Men are narrow and selfish, but the

Genius or Destiny is not narrow, but beneficent. It is not discovered in

their calculated and voluntary activity, but in what befalls, with or

without their design. Only what is inevitable interests us, and it turns

out that love and good are inevitable, and in the course of things. That

Genius has infused itself into nature. It indicates itself by a small

excess of good, a small balance in brute facts always favorable to the

side of reason. All the facts in any part of nature shall be tabulated,

and the results shall indicate the same security and benefit; so slight

as to be hardly observable, and yet it is there. The sphere is flattened

at the poles, and swelled at the equator; a form flowing necessarily

from the fluid state, yet _the_ form, the mathematician assures us,

required to prevent the protuberances of the continent, or even of

lesser mountains cast up at any time by earthquakes, from continually

deranging the axis of the earth. The census of the population is found

to keep an invariable equality in the sexes, with a trifling

predominance in favor of the male, as if to counterbalance the

necessarily increased exposure of male life in war, navigation, and

other accidents. Remark the unceasing effort throughout nature at

somewhat better than the actual creatures: _amelioration in nature_,

which alone permits and authorizes amelioration in mankind. The

population of the world is a conditional population; these are not the

best, but the best that could live in the existing state of soils,

gases, animals, and morals: the best that could _yet_ live; there shall

be a better, please God. This Genius, or Destiny, is of the sternest

administration, though rumors exist of its secret tenderness. It may be

styled a cruel kindness, serving the whole even to the ruin of the

member; a terrible communist, reserving all profits to the community,

without dividend to individuals. Its law is, you shall have everything

as a member, nothing to yourself. For Nature is the noblest engineer,

yet uses a grinding economy, working up all that is wasted to-day into

to-morrow’s creation;--not a superfluous grain of sand, for all the

ostentation she makes of expense and public works. It is because Nature

thus saves and uses, laboring for the general, that we poor particulars

are so crushed and straitened, and find it so hard to live. She flung us

out in her plenty, but we cannot shed a hair, or a paring of a nail, but

instantly she snatches at the shred, and appropriates it to the general

stock. Our condition is like that of the poor wolves: if one of the

flock wound himself, or so much as limp, the rest eat him up

incontinently.

That serene Power interposes the check upon the caprices and

officiousness of our wills. Its charity is not our charity. One of its

agents is our will, but that which expresses itself in our will, is

stronger than our will. We are very forward to help it, but it will not

be accelerated. It resists our meddling, eleemosynary contrivances. We

devise sumptuary and relief laws, but the principle of population is

always reducing wages to the lowest pittance on which human life can be

sustained. We legislate against forestalling and monopoly; we would have

a common granary for the poor; but the selfishness which hoards the corn

for high prices, is the preventive of famine; and the law of

self-preservation is surer policy than any legislation can be. We

concoct eleemosynary systems, and it turns out that our charity

increases pauperism. We inflate our paper currency, we repair commerce

with unlimited credit, and are presently visited with unlimited

bankruptcy.

It is easy to see that the existing generation are conspiring with a

beneficence, which, in its working for coming generations, sacrifices

the passing one, which infatuates the most selfish men to act against

their private interest for the public welfare. We build railroads, we

know not for what or for whom; but one thing is certain, that we who

build will receive the very smallest share of benefit. Benefit will

accrue; they are essential to the country, but that will be felt not

until we are no longer countrymen. We do the like in all matters:--

“Man’s heart the Almighty to the Future set

By secret and inviolable springs.”

We plant trees, we build stone houses, we redeem the waste, we make

prospective laws, we found colleges and hospitals, for remote

generations. We should be mortified to learn that the little benefit we

chanced in our own persons to receive was the utmost they would yield.

The history of commerce, is the record of this beneficent tendency. The

patriarchal form of government readily becomes despotic, as each person

may see in his own family. Fathers wish to be the fathers of the minds

of their children, and behold with impatience a new character and way of

thinking presuming to show itself in their own son or daughter. This

feeling, which all their love and pride in the powers of their children

cannot subdue, becomes petulance and tyranny when the head of the clan,

the emperor of an empire, deals with the same difference of opinion in

his subjects. Difference of opinion is the one crime which kings never

forgive. An empire is an immense egotism. “I am the State,” said the

French Louis. When a French ambassador mentioned to Paul of Russia, that

a man of consequence in St. Petersburg was interesting himself in some

matter, the Czar interrupted him,--“There is no man of consequence in

this empire, but he with whom I am actually speaking; and so long only

as I am speaking to him, is he of any consequence.” And Nicholas, the

present emperor, is reported to have said to his council, “The age is

embarrassed with new opinions; rely on me, gentlemen, I shall oppose an

iron will to the progress of liberal opinions.”

It is easy to see that this patriarchal or family management gets to be

rather troublesome to all but the papa; the sceptre comes to be a

crowbar. And this unpleasant egotism, Feudalism opposes, and finally

destroys. The king is compelled to call in the aid of his brothers and

cousins, and remote relations, to help him keep his overgrown house in

order; and this club of noblemen always come at last to have a will of

their own; they combine to brave the sovereign, and call in the aid of

the people. Each chief attaches as many followers as he can, by

kindness, maintenance, and gifts; and as long as war lasts, the nobles,

who must be soldiers, rule very well. But when peace comes, the nobles

prove very whimsical and uncomfortable masters; their frolics turn out

to be insulting and degrading to the commoner. Feudalism grew to be a

bandit and brigand.

Meantime Trade had begun to appear: Trade, a plant which grows wherever

there is peace, as soon as there is peace, and as long as there is

peace. The luxury and necessity of the noble fostered it. And as quickly

as men go to foreign parts, in ships or caravans, a new order of things

springs up; new command takes place, new servants and new masters. Their

information, their wealth, their correspondence, have made them quite

other men than left their native shore. _They_ are nobles now, and by

another patent than the king’s. Feudalism had been good, had broken the

power of the kings, and had some good traits of its own; but it had

grown mischievous, it was time for it to die, and, as they say of dying

people, all its faults came out. Trade was the strong man that broke it

down, and raised a new and unknown power in its place. It is a new

agent in the world, and one of great function; it is a very intellectual

force. This displaces physical strength, and instals computation,

combination, information, science, in its room. It calls out all force

of a certain kind that slumbered in the former dynasties. It is now in

the midst of its career. Feudalism is not ended yet. Our governments

still partake largely of that element. Trade goes to make the

governments insignificant, and to bring every kind of faculty of every

individual that can in any manner serve any person, _on sale_. Instead

of a huge Army and Navy, and Executive Departments, it converts

Government into an Intelligence-Office, where every man may find what he

wishes to buy, and expose what he has to sell, not only produce and

manufactures, but art, skill, and intellectual and moral values. This is

the good and this the evil of trade, that it would put everything into

market, talent, beauty, virtue, and man himself.

By this means, however, it has done its work. It has its faults, and

will come to an end, as the others do. The philosopher and lover of man

have much harm to say of trade; but the historian will see that trade

was the principle of Liberty; that trade planted America and destroyed

Feudalism; that it makes peace and keeps peace, and it will abolish

slavery. We complain of its oppression of the poor, and of its building

up a new aristocracy on the ruins of the aristocracy it destroyed. But

the aristocracy of trade has no permanence, is not entailed, was the

result of toil and talent, the result of merit of some kind, and is

continually falling, like the waves of the sea, before new claims of the

same sort. Trade is an instrument in the hands of that friendly Power

which works for us in our own despite. We design it thus and thus; it

turns out otherwise and far better. This beneficent tendency, omnipotent

without violence, exists and works. Every line of history inspires a

confidence that we shall not go far wrong; that things mend. That is the

moral of all we learn, that it warrants Hope, the prolific mother of

reforms. Our part is plainly not to throw ourselves across the track, to

block improvement, and sit till we are stone, but to watch the uprise of

successive mornings, and to conspire with the new works of new days.

Government has been a fossil; it should be a plant. I conceive that the

office of statute law should be to express, and not to impede the mind

of mankind. New thoughts, new things. Trade was one instrument, but

Trade is also but for a time, and must give way to somewhat broader and

better, whose signs are already dawning in the sky.

3. I pass to speak of the signs of that which is the sequel of trade.

In consequence of the revolution in the state of society wrought by

trade, Government in our times is beginning to wear a clumsy and

cumbrous appearance. We have already seen our way to shorter methods.

The time is full of good signs. Some of them shall ripen to fruit. All

this beneficent socialism is a friendly omen, and the swelling cry of

voices for the education of the people, indicates that Government has

other offices than those of banker and executioner. Witness the new

movements in the civilized world, the Communism of France, Germany, and

Switzerland; the Trades’ Unions; the English League against the Corn

Laws; and the whole _Industrial Statistics_, so called. In Paris, the

blouse, the badge of the operative, has begun to make its appearance in

the saloons. Witness, too, the spectacle of three Communities which have

within a very short time sprung up within this Commonwealth, besides

several others undertaken by citizens of Massachusetts within the

territory of other States. These proceeded from a variety of motives,

from an impatience of many usages in common life, from a wish for

greater freedom than the manners and opinions of society permitted, but

in great part from a feeling that the true offices of the State, the

State had let fall to the ground; that in the scramble of parties for

the public purse, the main duties of government were omitted,--the duty

to instruct the ignorant, to supply the poor with work and with good

guidance. These communists preferred the agricultural life as the most

favorable condition for human culture; but they thought that the farm,

as we manage it, did not satisfy the right ambition of man. The farmer,

after sacrificing pleasure, taste, freedom, thought, love, to his work,

turns out often a bankrupt, like the merchant. This result might well

seem astounding. All this drudgery, from cockcrowing to starlight, for

all these years, to end in mortgages and the auctioneer’s flag, and

removing from bad to worse. It is time to have the thing looked into,

and with a sifting criticism ascertained who is the fool. It seemed a

great deal worse, because the farmer is living in the same town with men

who pretend to know exactly what he wants. On one side, is agricultural

chemistry, coolly exposing the nonsense of our spendthrift agriculture

and ruinous expense of manures, and offering, by means of a teaspoonful

of artificial guano, to turn a sandbank into corn; and, on the other,

the farmer, not only eager for the information, but with bad crops and

in debt and bankruptcy, for want of it. Here are Etzlers and mechanical

projectors, who, with the Fourierists, undoubtingly affirm that the

smallest union would make every man rich;--and, on the other side, a

multitude of poor men and women seeking work, and who cannot find enough

to pay their board. The science is confident, and surely the poverty is

real. If any means could be found to bring these two together!

This was one design of the projectors of the Associations which are now

making their first feeble experiments. They were founded in love, and in

labor. They proposed, as you know, that all men should take a part in

the manual toil, and proposed to amend the condition of men, by

substituting harmonious for hostile industry. It was a noble thought of

Fourier, which gives a favorable idea of his system, to distinguish in

his Phalanx a class as the Sacred Band, by whom whatever duties were

disagreeable, and likely to be omitted, were to be assumed.

At least, an economical success seemed certain for the enterprise, and

that agricultural association must, sooner or later, fix the price of

bread, and drive single farmers into association, in selfdefence; as

the great commercial and manufacturing companies had already done. The

Community is only the continuation of the same movement which made the

joint-stock companies for manufactures, mining, insurance, banking, and

so forth. It has turned out cheaper to make calico by companies; and it

is proposed to plant corn, and to bake bread by companies.

Undoubtedly, abundant mistakes will be made by these first adventurers,

which will draw ridicule on their schemes. I think, for example, that

they exaggerate the importance of a favorite project of theirs, that of

paying talent and labor at one rate, paying all sorts of service at one

rate, say ten cents the hour. They have paid it so; but not an instant

would a dime remain a dime. In one hand it became an eagle as it fell,

and in another hand a copper cent. For the whole value of the dime is in

knowing what to do with it. One man buys with it a land-title of an

Indian, and makes his posterity princes; or buys corn enough to feed the

world; or pen, ink, and paper, or a painter’s brush, by which he can

communicate himself to the human race as if he were fire; and the other

buys barley candy. Money is of no value; it cannot spend itself. All

depends on the skill of the spender. Whether, too, the objection almost

universally felt by such women in the community as were mothers, to an

associate life, to a common table, and a common nursery, &c., setting a

higher value on the private family with poverty, than on an association

with wealth, will not prove insuperable, remains to be determined.

But the Communities aimed at a higher success in securing to all their

members an equal and thorough education. And on the whole, one may say,

that aims so generous, and so forced on them by the times, will not be

relinquished, even if these attempts fail, but will be prosecuted until

they succeed.

This is the value of the Communities; not what they have done, but the

revolution which they indicate as on the way. Yes, Government must

educate the poor man. Look across the country from any hill-side around

us, and the landscape seems to crave Government. The actual differences

of men must be acknowledged, and met with love and wisdom. These rising

grounds which command the champaign below, seem to ask for lords, true

lords, _land_-lords, who understand the land and its uses, and the

applicabilities of men, and whose government would be what it should,

namely, mediation between want and supply. How gladly would each

citizen pay a commission for the support and continuation of good

guidance. None should be a governor who has not a talent for governing.

Now many people have a native skill for carving out business for many

hands; a genius for the disposition of affairs; and are never happier

than when difficult practical questions, which embarrass other men, are

to be solved. All lies in light before them; they are in their element.

Could any means be contrived to appoint only these! There really seems a

progress towards such a state of things, in which this work shall be

done by these natural workmen; and this, not certainly through any

increased discretion shown by the citizens at elections, but by the

gradual contempt into which official government falls, and the

increasing disposition of private adventurers to assume its fallen

functions. Thus the costly Post Office is likely to go into disuse

before the private transportation-shop of Harnden and his competitors.

The currency threatens to fall entirely into private hands. Justice is

continually administered more and more by private reference, and not by

litigation. We have feudal governments in a commercial age. It would be

but an easy extension of our commercial system, to pay a private

emperor a fee for services, as we pay an architect, an engineer, or a

lawyer. If any man has a talent for righting wrong, for administering

difficult affairs, for counselling poor farmers how to turn their

estates to good husbandry, for combining a hundred private enterprises

to a general benefit, let him in the county-town, or in Court-street,

put up his sign-board, Mr. Smith, _Governor_, Mr. Johnson, _Working

king_.

How can our young men complain of the poverty of things in New England,

and not feel that poverty as a demand on their charity to make New

England rich? Where is he who seeing a thousand men useless and unhappy,

and making the whole region forlorn by their inaction, and conscious

himself of possessing the faculty they want, does not hear his call to

go and be their king?

We must have kings, and we must have nobles. Nature provides such in

every society,--only let us have the real instead of the titular. Let us

have our leading and our inspiration from the best. In every society

some men are born to rule, and some to advise. Let the powers be well

directed, directed by love, and they would everywhere be greeted with

joy and honor. The chief is the chief all the world over, only not his

cap and his plume. It is only their dislike of the pretender, which

makes men sometimes unjust to the accomplished man. If society were

transparent, the noble would everywhere be gladly received and

accredited, and would not be asked for his day’s work, but would be felt

as benefit, inasmuch as he was noble. That were his duty and stint,--to

keep himself pure and purifying, the leaven of his nation. I think I see

place and duties for a nobleman in every society; but it is not to drink

wine and ride in a fine coach, but to guide and adorn life for the

multitude by forethought, by elegant studies, by perseverance,

self-devotion, and the remembrance of the humble old friend, by making

his life secretly beautiful.

I call upon you, young men, to obey your heart, and be the nobility of

this land. In every age of the world, there has been a leading nation,

one of a more generous sentiment, whose eminent citizens were willing to

stand for the interests of general justice and humanity, at the risk of

being called, by the men of the moment, chimerical and fantastic. Which

should be that nation but these States? Which should lead that movement,

if not New England? Who should lead the leaders, but the Young American?

The people, and the world, is now suffering from the want of religion

and honor in its public mind. In America, out of doors all seems a

market; in doors, an air-tight stove of conventionalism. Every body who

comes into our houses savors of these habits; the men, of the market;

the women, of the custom. I find no expression in our state papers or

legislative debate, in our lyceums or churches, specially in our

newspapers, of a high national feeling, no lofty counsels, that

rightfully stir the blood. I speak of those organs which can be presumed

to speak a popular sense. They recommend conventional virtues, whatever

will earn and preserve property; always the capitalist; the college, the

church, the hospital, the theatre, the hotel, the road, the ship, of the

capitalist,--whatever goes to secure, adorn, enlarge these, is good;

what jeopardizes any of these, is damnable. The ‘opposition’ papers, so

called, are on the same side. They attack the great capitalist, but with

the aim to make a capitalist of the poor man. The opposition is against

those who have money, from those who wish to have money. But who

announces to us in journal, or in pulpit, or in the street, the secret

of heroism,

“Man alone

Can perform the impossible?”

I shall not need to go into an enumeration of our national defects and

vices which require this Order of Censors in the state. I might not set

down our most proclaimed offences as the worst. It is not often the

worst trait that occasions the loudest outcry. Men complain of their

suffering, and not of the crime. I fear little from the bad effect of

Repudiation; I do not fear that it will spread. Stealing is a suicidal

business; you cannot repudiate but once. But the bold face and tardy

repentance permitted to this local mischief, reveal a public mind so

preoccupied with the love of gain, that the common sentiment of

indignation at fraud does not act with its natural force. The more need

of a withdrawal from the crowd, and a resort to the fountain of right,

by the brave. The timidity of our public opinion, is our disease, or,

shall I say, the publicness of opinion, the absence of private opinion.

Good-nature is plentiful, but we want justice, with heart of steel, to

fight down the proud. The private mind has the access to the totality of

goodness and truth, that it may be a balance to a corrupt society; and

to stand for the private verdict against popular clamor, is the office

of the noble. If a humane measure is propounded in behalf of the slave,

or of the Irishman, or the Catholic, or for the succor of the poor, that

sentiment, that project, will have the homage of the hero. That is his

nobility, his oath of knighthood, to succor the helpless and oppressed;

always to throw himself on the side of weakness, of youth, of hope, on

the liberal, on the expansive side, never on the defensive, the

conserving, the timorous, the lock and bolt system. More than our

good-will we may not be able to give. We have our own affairs, our own

genius, which chains us to our proper work. We cannot give our life to

the cause of the debtor, of the slave, or the pauper, as another is

doing; but to one thing we are bound, not to blaspheme the sentiment and

the work of that man, not to throw stumbling-blocks in the way of the

abolitionist, the philanthropist, as the organs of influence and opinion

are swift to do. It is for us to confide in the beneficent Supreme

Power, and not to rely on our money, and on the state because it is the

guard of money. At this moment, the terror of old people and of vicious

people, is lest the Union of these States be destroyed: as if the Union

had any other real basis than the good pleasure of a majority of the

citizens to be united. But the wise and just man will always feel that

he stands on his own feet; that he imparts strength to the state, not

receives security from it; and that if all went down, he and such as he

would quite easily combine in a new and better constitution. Every

great and memorable community has consisted of formidable individuals,

who, like the Roman or the Spartan, lent his own spirit to the state and

made it great. Yet only by the supernatural is a man strong; nothing is

so weak as an egotist. Nothing is mightier than we, when we are vehicles

of a truth before which the state and the individual are alike

ephemeral.

Gentlemen, the development of our American internal resources, the

extension to the utmost of the commercial system, and the appearance of

new moral causes which are to modify the state, are giving an aspect of

greatness to the Future, which the imagination fears to open. One thing

is plain for all men of common sense and common conscience, that here,

here in America, is the home of man. After all the deductions which are

to be made for our pitiful politics, which stake every gravest national

question on the silly die, whether James or whether Jonathan shall sit

in the chair and hold the purse; after all the deduction is made for our

frivolities and insanities, there still remains an organic simplicity

and liberty, which, when it loses its balance, redresses itself

presently, which offers opportunity to the human mind not known in any

other region.

It is true, the public mind wants self-respect. We are full of vanity,

of which the most signal proof is our sensitiveness to foreign and

especially English censure. One cause of this is our immense reading,

and that reading chiefly confined to the productions of the English

press. It is also true, that, to imaginative persons in this country,

there is somewhat bare and bald in our short history, and unsettled

wilderness. They ask, who would live in a new country, that can live in

an old? and it is not strange that our youths and maidens should burn to

see the picturesque extremes of an antiquated country. But it is one

thing to visit the pyramids, and another to wish to live there. Would

they like tithes to the clergy, and sevenths to the government, and

horse-guards, and licensed press, and grief when a child is born, and

threatening, starved weavers, and a pauperism now constituting

one-thirteenth of the population? Instead of the open future expanding

here before the eye of every boy to vastness, would they like the

closing in of the future to a narrow slit of sky, and that fast

contracting to be no future? One thing, for instance, the beauties of

aristocracy, we commend to the study of the travelling American. The

English, the most conservative people this side of India, are not

sensible of the restraint, but an American would seriously resent it.

The aristocracy, incorporated by law and education, degrades life for

the unprivileged classes. It is a questionable compensation to the

embittered feeling of a proud commoner, the reflection that a fop, who,

by the magic of title, paralyzes his arm, and plucks from him half the

graces and rights of a man, is himself also an aspirant excluded with

the same ruthlessness from higher circles, since there is no end to the

wheels within wheels of this spiral heaven. Something may be pardoned to

the spirit of loyalty when it becomes fantastic; and something to the

imagination, for the baldest life is symbolic. Philip II. of Spain rated

his ambassador for neglecting serious affairs in Italy, whilst he

debated some point of honor with the French ambassador; “You have left a

business of importance for a ceremony.” The ambassador replied, “Your

majesty’s self is but a ceremony.” In the East, where the religious

sentiment comes in to the support of the aristocracy, and in the Romish

church also, there is a grain of sweetness in the tyranny; but in

England, the fact seems to me intolerable, what is commonly affirmed,

that such is the transcendent honor accorded to wealth and birth, that

no man of letters, be his eminence what it may, is received into the

best society, except as a lion and a show. The English have many

virtues, many advantages, and the proudest history of the world; but

they need all, and more than all the resources of the past to indemnify

a heroic gentleman in that country for the mortifications prepared for

him by the system of society, and which seem to impose the alternative

to resist or to avoid it. That there are mitigations and practical

alleviations to this rigor, is not an excuse for the rule. Commanding

worth, and personal power, must sit crowned in all companies, nor will

extraordinary persons be slighted or affronted in any company of

civilized men. But the system is an invasion of the sentiment of justice

and the native rights of men, which, however decorated, must lessen the

value of English citizenship. It is for Englishmen to consider, not for

us; we only say, let us live in America, too thankful for our want of

feudal institutions. Our houses and towns are like mosses and lichens,

so slight and new; but youth is a fault of which we shall daily mend.

This land, too, is as old as the Flood, and wants no ornament or

privilege which nature could bestow. Here stars, here woods, here hills,

here animals, here men abound, and the vast tendencies concur of a new

order. If only the men are employed in conspiring with the designs of

the Spirit who led us hither, and is leading us still, we shall quickly

enough advance out of all hearing of other’s censures, out of all

regrets of our own, into a new and more excellent social state than

history has recorded.

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

the most trival=> the most trivial {pg 26}

actions externized=> actions externalized {pg 69}

Suscess treads=> Success treads {pg 98}

below not in unsion=> below not in unison {pg 110}

may rightlfully hold=> may rightfully hold {pg 152}

its sparking January heaven=> its sparkling January heaven {pg 153}

and exponent of the world=> an exponent of the world {pg 193}

tools runs away=> tools run away {pg 200}

Whosover hereafter=> Whosoever hereafter {pg 313}