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THE
ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
VOL. II.--DECEMBER, 1858.--NO. XIV.
THE IDEAL TENDENCY.
We are all interested in Art; yet few of us have taken pains to justify
the delight we feel in it. No philosophy can win us away from
Shakspeare, Plato, Angelo, Beethoven, Goethe, Phidias,--from the masters
of sculpture, painting, music, and metaphor. Their truth is larger than
any other,--too large to be stated directly and lodged in systems,
theories, definitions, or formulas. They suggest and assure to us what
cannot be spoken. They communicate life, because they do not endeavor to
measure life. Philosophy will present the definite; Art refers always to
the vast,--to that which cannot be comprehended, but only enjoyed and
adored. Art is the largest expression. It is not, like Science, a basket
in which meat and drink may be carried, but a hand which points toward
the sky. Our eyes follow its direction, and our souls follow our eyes.
Man needs only to be shown an open space. He will rise into it with
instant expansion. We are made partakers of that illimitable energy.
Only poetry can give account of poetry, only Art can justify Art; and we
cannot hope to speak finally of this elastic Truth, to draw a circle
around that which is vital, because it has in it something of
infinity,--but we may hope to remove a doubt growing out of the very
largeness which exalts and refreshes us. Art is not practical. It offers
no precept, but lies abroad like Nature, not to be grasped and
exhausted. Neither is it anxious about its own reception, as though any
man could long escape the benefit which it brings. Every principle of
science, every deduction of philosophy, is a tool. Our very religion, as
we dare to name it, is a key which opens the heavens to admit myself and
family. Art offers only life; but perhaps that will appear worth taking
without looking beyond. Can we look beyond? Life is an end in itself,
and so better than any tool.
What is that which underlies all arts as their essence, the thing to be
expressed and celebrated? What is poetry, the creation from which the
artist is named? We shall answer boldly: it is no shaping of forms, but
a making of man. Nature is a _plenum_, is finished, and the Divine
account with her is closed; but man is only yet a chick in the egg. With
him it is still the first day of creation, and he has not received the
benediction of a completed work. And yet the completion is involved and
promised in our daily experience. Man is a perpetual seeker. He sees
always just before him his own power, which he must hasten to overtake.
He weighs himself often in thought; yet it is not his present, but a
presumptive value, of which he is taking account. We are continually
entering into our future, and it is so near us, we are already in every
hour so full of it, that we draw without fraud on the credit of
to-morrow. The student who has bought his first law-book is already a
great counsellor. With the Commentaries he carries home consideration
and the judicial habit. Some wisdom he imbibes through his pores and
those of the sheepskin cover. Now he is grave and prudent, a man of the
world and of authority; but if he had chosen differently, and brought
home the first book of Theology, his day would have been tinted with
other colors. For every choice carries a future involved in itself, and
we begin to taste that when we take our course toward it. The habit of
leaning forward and living in advance of himself has made its mark upon
every man. We look not at the history or performance of the stranger,
but at his pretensions. These are written in his dress, his air and
attitude, his tone and occupation. The past is already nothing, the
present is sliding away; to know any man, we must keep our eyes out in
advance on the road he is following. For man is an involuntary, if not a
willing traveller. Time does not roll from under his feet, but he is
carried along with the current, and can never again be where or what he
was. Nothing in his experience can ever be quite repeated. If you see
the same trees and hills, they do not appear the same from year to year.
Yesterday they were new and strange; you and they were young together.
To-day they are familiar and disregarded. Soon they will be old friends,
prattling to gray hairs of the brown locks and bounding breath of youth.
The pioneer of our growth is Imagination. Desire and Hope go on before
into the wilderness of the unknown; they open paths; they make a
clearing; they build and settle firmly before we ourselves in will and
power arrive at this opening, but they never await our coming. They are
the "Fore-runners," off again deeper into the vast possibility of being.
The boy walks in a dream of to-morrow. Two bushels of hickory-nuts in
his bag are no nuts to him, but silver shillings; yet neither are the
shillings shillings, but shining skates, into which they will presently
be transmuted. Already he is on the great pond by the roaring fire, or
ringing away into distant starry darkness with a sparkling brand.
Already, before his first skates are bought, before he has seen the coin
that buys them, he is dashing and wheeling with his fellows, a leader of
the flying train.
That early fore-reaching is a picture of our entire activity. "Care is
taken," said Goethe, "that the trees do not grow into the sky"; but man
is that tree which must outgrow the sky and lift its top into finer air
and sunshine. The essential seed is Growth; not shell and bark, nor
kernel, but a germ which pierces the soil and lifts the stone. Spirit is
such a germ, and perpetual reinforcement is its quality; so that the
great Being is known to us as a becoming Creator, adding himself to
himself, and life to life, in perpetual emanation.
The boy's thought never stops short of some personal prowess. It is
ability that charms him. To be a man, as he understands manliness, is to
have the whole planet for a gymnasium and play-ground. He would like to
have been on the other side of Hydaspes when Alexander came to that
stream. But he soon discovers that wit is the sword of sharpness,--that
he is the ruler who can reach the deepest desire of man and satisfy
that. If there is power in him, he becomes a careful student, examines
everything, examines his own enthusiasm, examines his last examination,
tries every estimate again and again. He distrusts his tools, and then
distrusts his own distrust, lifting himself by the very boot-straps in
his metaphysics, to get at some foundation which will not move. He will
know what he is about and what is great. He puts Cæsar, Milton, and
Whitfield into his crucible; but that which went in Cæsar comes out a
part of himself. The bold yet modest young chemist is egotistical. He
cannot be anybody else but John Smith. Why should he? Who knows yet what
it is to be John Smith? Napoleon and Washington are only playing his own
game for him, since he so easily understands and accepts their play. A
boy reads history as girls cut flowers from old embroidery to sew them
on a new foundation. They are interested in the new, and in the old only
for what they can make of it. So he sucks the blood of kings and
captains to help him fight his own battles. He reads of Bunker's Hill
and the Declaration of Independence with constant reference to the part
he shall take in the politics of the world. His motto is, _Sic semper
tyrannis_! Benjamin Franklin, and after him John Smith,--perhaps a
better man than he. We live on that _perhaps_. Every great man departed
has played out his last card, has taken all his chances. We are glad to
see his power limited and scaled up. Shakspeare, we say, did not know
everything; and here am I alone with the universe, nothing but a little
sleepiness between me and all that Shakspeare and Plato knew or did not
know. If I should be jostled out of my drowsiness, who can tell what may
be given me to see, to say, or to do? Let us make ready and get upon
some high ground from which we may overlook the work of the world; for
the secret of all mastery is dormant, yet breathing and stirring in you
and me.
Out of such material as we can gather we make a world in which we walk
continually up and down. In it we find friends and enemies, we love and
are loved, we travel and build. In it we are kings; we ordain and
arrange everything, and never come away worsted from any encounter. For
this sphere arises in answer to the practical question, What can I be
and do? It is an embodiment of the force that is in me. Every dreamer,
therefore, goes on to see himself among men and things which he can
understand and master, with which he can deal securely. The stable-boy
has hid an old volume among the straw, and he walks with Portia and
Desdemona while he grooms the horses. Already in his smock-frock he is a
companion for princes and queens. But the rich man's son, well born, as
we say, in the great house yonder, has one only ambition in life,--to
turn stable-boy, to own a fast team and a trotting-wagon, to vie with
gamesters upon the road. That is an activity to which he is equal, in
which his value will appear. Both boys, and all boys, are looking
upward, only from widely different levels and to different heights.
The young blasphemer does not love blasphemy, but to have his head and
be let alone by Old Aunty, who combs his hair as if he were a girl. So
always there is some ideal aim in the mixed motive. Out of six gay young
men who drive and drink together, only one cares for the meat and the
bottle. With the rest this feasting gallantly on the best, regardless of
expense, is part of a system. It is in good style, is convivial. For
these green-horns of society to live together, to be _convivæ_, is not
to think and labor together, as wise men use, but to laugh and be
drunken in company.
Into the lowest courses there enters something to keep the filth from
overwhelming self-respect. The advocates of slavery have not, as it
appears, lost all pretence of honor and honesty. Thieves are sustained
by a sense of the injustice of society. They do but right an old wrong,
taking bravely what was accumulated by cautious cunning. They cultivate
many virtues, and, like the best of us, make much of these, identify
themselves with these. If a man is harsh and tyrannical, he regrets that
he has too much force of character. And it is not safe to accuse a
harlot of stealing and lying. She has her ideal also, and strives to
keep the ulcer of sin within bounds,--to save a sweet side from
corruption.
Is this stooping very low to look for the Ideal Tendency? The greater
gain, if we find it prevailing in these depths. We may doubt whether
thieves and harlots are subject to the same law which irresistibly lifts
us, for we know that our own sin is not quite like other sin. But I must
not offer all the cheerful hope I feel for the worst offenders, because
too much faith passes for levity or impiety; and men thank God only for
deliverance from great dangers, not for preservation from all danger.
For gratitude we must not escape too easily and clean, but with some
smell of fire upon us.
Yet in our own experience this planning what we shall do and become is
constant, and always we escape from the present into larger air. The boy
will not be content with that skill in skating which occupies his mind
to-day. That belongs to the day and place, but next year he goes to the
academy and fresh exploits engage him. He works gallantly in this new
field and harness, because his thought has gone forward again, and he
sees through these studies the man of thought. Already as a student he
is a philosopher, a poet, a servant of the Muse. Bacon and Milton look
kindly on him in invitation, he is walking to their company and in their
company. The young hero-worshipper cannot remain satisfied with mere
physical or warlike prowess. He soon sees the superiority of mental and
moral mastery, of creation of good counsel. He will reverence the
valiant reformer who brings justice in his train, the saint in whom
goodness is enamored of goodness, the gentleman whose heart-beat is
courtesy, the prophet in whom a religion is born, all who have been
inspired with liberal, not dragged by sordid aims.
How beautiful to him is the society of poets! He reads with idolatry the
letters and anecdotes of Coleridge and Wordsworth, Goethe and Schiller,
Beethoven and Raphael. Look at the private thought of these men in
familiar intercourse: no plotting for lucre, but a conspiracy to reach
the best in life. The saints are even more ardent in aspiration, for
their tender hearts were pressed and saddened by fear. They are now set
on fire by a sense of great redemption. They are prisoners pardoned.
For scholars the world is peopled only with saints, philosophers, and
poets, and the studious boy seeks his own amid their large activity. So
much of it meets his want, yet the whole does not meet all his want. He
must combine and balance and embrace conflicting qualities. Every day
his view enlarges. What was noble last year will now by no means content
his conscience. Duty and beauty have risen.
The Ideal Tendency characterizes man, affords the only definition of
him; and it is a perpetual, irresistible expansion. No matter on what it
fastens, it will not stay, but spreads and soars like light in the
morning sky.
To-day we are charmed with our partners, and think we can never tire of
Alfred and Emily. To-morrow we discover without shame, after all our
protestations and engagements, that their future seems incommensurate
with our own. To our surprise, they also feel their paths diverging from
ours. We part with a show of regret, but real joy to be free.
Both parties have gained from their intercourse a certainty of power and
promise of greater power. Silly people fill the world with lamentation
over human inconstancy; but if we follow love, we cannot cling to the
beloved. We must love onward, and only when our friends go before us can
we be true both to friendship and to them.
How eager and tremulous his excitement when at last the youth encounters
all beauty in a maiden! Now he is on his trial. Can he move her? for he
must be to her nothing or all. How stately and far-removed she seems in
her crystal sphere! All her relations are fair and poetic. Her book is
not like another book. Her soft and fragrant attire, can it be woven of
ribbons and silk? She, too, has dreamed of the coming man, heroic,
lyrical, impassioned; the beat of his blood a pæan and triumphal march;
a man able to cut paths for her and lead her to all that is worthiest in
life. Her day is an expectation; her demand looks out of proud eyes.
Can he move this stately creature, pure and high above him as the clear
moon yonder, never turning from her course,--this Diana, who will love
upward and stoop to no Endymion? Now it will appear whether he can pass
with another for all he is to himself. This will be the victory for
which he was born, or blackest defeat. If she could love him! If he
should, after all, be to her only such another as her cousin Thomas, who
comes and goes with all his pretensions as unregarded as Rover the
house-dog! Between these _ifs_ he vacillates, swung like a ship on
stormy waters, touching heaven and hell.
Meanwhile the maiden dares hardly look toward this generous new-comer,
whose destiny lies broad open in his courage and desire. Others she
could conciliate and gently allure, but she will not play with the lion.
She will throw no web around his strength to tear her heart away, if it
does not hold him. For the first time she guards her fancy. She will not
think of the career that awaits him, of the help there is in him for
men, and the honor that will follow him from them,--of the high studies,
tasks, and companionship to which he is hastening. What avails this
avoidance, this turning-away of the head? A fancy that must be kept is
already lost. She read his quality in the first glance of deep-meaning
eyes. When at last he speaks, she sees suddenly how beyond all recovery
he had carried away her soul in that glance. They marry each the
expectation of the other. It was a promise in either that shone so fair.
Happy lovers, if only as wife and husband they can go on to fulfil the
promise! For love cannot be repeated; every day it must have fresh food
in a new object; and unless character is renewed, love must leave it
behind and wander on.
If the wife is still aspiring,--if she lays growing demands on her
hero,--if her thought enlarges and she stands true to it, separate from
him in integrity as he saw her first, following not his, but her own
native estimate,--she will always be his mistress. She will still have
that charm of remoteness which belongs only to those who do not lean and
borrow, to natures centred for themselves in the deep. There is
something incalculable in such independence. It is full of surprise for
the most intimate. In one breast the true wife prepares for her husband
a course of loves. Every day she offers a new heart to be won. Every day
the woman he could reach is gone, and there again before him is the
inaccessible maiden who will not accept to-day the behavior of
yesterday. This withdrawal and advancement from height to height is true
virginity, which never lies down with love but keeps him always on foot
and girded for fresh pursuit. Noble lovers rely on no pledges, point to
no past engagements, but prefer to renew their relation from hour to
hour. The heroic woman will command, and not solicit love. Let him go,
when I cease to be all to him, when I can no longer fill the horizon of
his imagination and satisfy his heart. But if there is less ascension in
a woman, she is no mate for an advancing man. He must leave her; he
walks by her side alone. So we pass many dear companions, outgrowing
alike our loves and our fears.
Once or twice in youth we meet a man of sounding reputation or real
wisdom, whose secret is hid above our discovery. His manners are
formidable while we do not understand them. In his presence our tongues
are tied, our limbs are paralyzed. Thought dies out before him, the will
is unseated and vacillates, we are cowed like Antony beside Cæsar. In
solitude we are ashamed of this cowardice and resolve to put it away;
but when the great man returns, our knees knock and we are as weak as
before. It is suicide to fly from such mortification. A brave boy faces
it as well as he can. By-and-by the dazzle abates, he sees some flaw,
some coarseness or softness, in this shining piece of metal; he begins
to fathom the motives and measure the orbit of this tyrannous
benefactor. They are the true friends who daunt and overpower us, to
whom for a little we yield more than their due.
This rule is universal, that no man can admire downward. All enthusiasm
rises and lifts the subject of it. That which seems to you so base an
activity is lifted above low natures. What matter, then, where the
standard floats at this moment, since it cannot remain fixed?
Perfection retreats, as the horizon withdraws before a traveller, and
lures us on and on. It even travels faster than our best endeavors can
follow, and so beckons to us from farther and farther away. We may give
ourselves to the ideal, or we may turn aside to appetite and sleep; but
in every moment of returning sanity we are again on our feet and again
upon an endless ascending road.
When a man has tasted power, when he sees the supply there is so near in
Nature for all need, he hungers for reinforcement. That desire is
prayer. It opens its own doors and takes supplies from God's hand. No
wise man can grudge the necessary use of the mind to serve the body with
shelter and food, for we go merrily to Nature, and with our milk we
drink order, justice, beauty, and benignity. We cannot take the husks on
which our bodies are fed, without expressing these juices also, which
circulate as sap and blood through the sphere. We cannot touch any
object but some spark of vital electricity is shot through us. Every
creature is a battery, charged not with mere vegetable or animal, but
with moral life. Our metaphysical being is fed from something hidden in
rocks and woods, in streams and skies, in fire, water, earth, and air.
While we dig roots, and gather nuts, and hunt and roast our meat, our
blood is quickened not in the heart alone. Deeper currents are swelled.
The springs of our humanity are opened in Nature; for that which streams
through the landscape, and comes in at the eye and ear, is plainly the
same fluid which enters as consciousness, and is the life by which we
live. While we enjoy this spiritual refreshment and keep ourselves open
to it, we may dig without degradation; but if our minds fasten on the
thing to be done, on commodity and safety, on getting and having, those
avenues seem to close by which the soul was fed. Then we forget our
incalculable chances and certainties; we go mad, and make the mind a
muck-rake. If a man will direct his faculties to any limited and not to
illimitable ends, he cripples his faculties. No matter whether he is
deluded by a fortune or a reputation or position, if he does not give
himself wholly to grow and be a man, regardless of minor advantages, he
has lost his way in the world. "Be true," said Schiller, "to the dream
of thy youth." That dream was generous, not sordid. We must be
surrendered to the perfection which claims us, and suffer no narrow aim
to postpone that insatiable demand.
But the potency of life will bring back every wanderer, as he well
knows. Every sinner keeps his trunk packed, ready to return to the good.
The poor traders really mean to buy love with their gold. Feeling the
hold of a chain which binds us even when we do not cling to it, we grow
prodigal of time and power. The essence of life, as we enjoy it, is a
sense of the inextinguishable ascending tendency in life; and this gives
courage when there is yet no reverence or devotion.
In development of character is involved great change of circumstances.
We cannot grow or work in a corner. It is not for greed alone or mainly
that men make war and build cities and found governments, but to try
what they can do and become, to justify themselves to themselves and to
their fellows. We desire to please and help,--but still more, at first,
to be sure that we can please and help. If he hears any man speak
effectually in public, the ambitious boy will never rest till he can
also speak, or do some other deed as difficult and as well worth doing.
For the trial of faculty we must go out into the world of institutions,
range ourselves beside the workers, take up their tools and strike
stroke for stroke with them. Every new situation and employment dazzles
till we find out the trick of it. The boy longs to escape from a farm to
college, from college to the city and practical life. Then he looks up
from his desk, or from the pit in the theatre, to the gay world of
fashion,--harder to conquer than even the world of thought. At last he
makes his way upward into the sacred circle, and finds there a little
original power and a great deal of routine. These fine parts are like
those of players, learned by heart. The men who invented them, with whom
they were spontaneous, seem to have died out and left their manners with
their wardrobes to narrow-breasted children, whom neither clothes nor
courtesies will fit. So in every department we find the snail freezing
in an oyster-shell. The judges do not know the meaning of justice. The
preacher thinks religion is a spasm of desire and fear. A young man soon
loses all respect for titles, wigs, and gowns, and looks for a muscular
master-mind. Somebody wrote the laws, and set the example of noble
behavior, and founded every religion. Only a man capable of originating
can understand, sustain, or use any institution. The Church, the State,
the Social System come tumbling ruinous over the heads of bunglers, who
cannot uphold, because they never could have built them, and the rubbish
obstructs every path in life. An honest, vigorous thinker will clear
away these ruins and begin anew at the earth. When the boy has broken
loose from home, and fairly entered the world that allured him, he finds
it not fit to live in without revolutions. He is as much cramped in it
as he was in the ways of the old homestead. Feeding the pigs and picking
up chips did not seem work for a man, but he finds that almost all the
activity of the race amounts to nothing more; no more thought or purpose
goes into it. Men find Church and State and Custom ready-made, and they
fall into the procession, ask no searching questions, but take things
for granted without reason; and their imitation is as easy as picking up
chips. It is no doing, but merely sliding down hill. The way of the
world will not suit a valiant boy. To make elbow-room and get
breathing-space, he becomes a reformer; and when now he can find no new
worlds to conquer, he will make a world, laying in truth and justice
every stone. The same seeker, who was so fired by the sight of his eyes,
looking out from a mill-yard or a shoe-shop on the many-colored activity
of his kind, who ran such a round of arts and sciences, pursuing the
very secret of his being in each new enterprise, is now discontented
with all that has been done. He begins again to look forward,--he
becomes a prophet, instead of the historian he was. He easily sees that
a true manhood would disuse our ways of teaching and worshipping, would
unbuild and rebuild every town and house, would tear away the jails and
abolish pauperism as well as slavery. He sees the power of government
lying unused and unsuspected in spelling-books and Bibles. Now he has
found a work, not for one finger, but for fighting Hercules and singing
Apollo, worthy of Minerva and of Jove. He will try what man can do for
man.
The history of every brave girl is parallel with that of her play-fellow
and yoke-fellow. She sighs for sympathy, for a gallant company of youths
and maidens worthy of all desire. Her music, drawing, and Italian are
only doors which she hopes to open upon such a company. She longs for
society to make the hours lyrical, for tasks to make them epic and
heroic. The attitudes and actions of imaginative young persons are
exalted every moment by the invisible presence of lovers, poets,
inspired and inspiring companions. Such as they are we also shall be;
when we walk among them and with them, we shall wash our hands of all
injustice, meanness, and pretension. Women are as tired as men of our
silly civilization, its compliments, restraints, and compromises. They
feel the burden of routine as heavily, and keep their elasticity under
it as long as we. What they cannot hope to do, a great-hearted man,
some lover of theirs, shall do for them; and they will sustain him with
appreciation, anticipating the tardy justice of mankind. Every generous
girl shares with her sex that new development of feminine consciousness,
which the vulgar have named, in derision, a movement for woman's rights.
She will seek to be more truly woman, to assert her special power and
privilege, to approach from her own side the common ideal, offering a
pure soprano to match the manly bass.
We all look for a future, not only better than our won past, but better
than any past. Humanity is our inheritance, but not historical humanity.
Man seems to be broken and scattered all abroad. The great lives are
only eminent examples of a single virtue, and by admiration of every
hero we have been crippled on some one side. If he is free, he is also
coarse; if delicate, he is overlaid by the gross world; saints are timid
and feverish, afraid of being spattered in the first puddle; heroes are
profane. We must melt up all the old metal to make a new man and carry
forward the common consciousness. Every failure was part of the final
success. We go over a causeway in which every timber is some soldier
fallen in this enterprise. Who doubts the result doubts God. We say,
regretfully "If I could only continue at my best!" and we ach with the
little ebb, between wave and wave, of an advancing tide. But this tide
is Omnipotence. It rises surely, if it were only an inch in a thousand
years. The changes in society are like the geologic upheaval and sinking
of continents; yet man is morally as far removed from the savage as he
is physically superior to the saurian. We do not see the corn grow or
the world revolve; yet if motion be given as the primal essence, we must
look for inconceivable results. Wisdom will take care of wisdom, and
extend. Consider the growth of intellect in the history of your own
parish for twenty years. See how old views have died out of New England
and new ones come in. Every man is fortified in his opinions, yet no man
can hold his opinions. The closer they are hugged, the faster in any
community they change. The ideas of such men as Swedenborg, Goethe,
Emerson, float in the air like spores, and wherever they light they
thrive. The crabbedest dogmatist cannot escape; for, if he open his eyes
to seek his meet, some sunshine will creep in. We have combustibles
stored in the stupidest of us, and a spark of truth kindles our
slumbering suspicion. Since the great reality is organized in man, and
waits to be revealed in him, it is of no avail to shut out the same
reality from our ears. Thinkers have held to be dangerous, and excluded
from the desks of public instruction; but the boys were already occupied
with the same thoughts. They would hear nothing new at the lecture, and
they are more encouraged by the terror of the elders than by any word
the wise man could speak. In pursuit of truth, the difficulty is to ask
a question; for in the ability to ask is involved ability to reach an
answer. The serious student is occupied with problems which the doctors
have never been able to entertain, and he knows that their discourse is
not addressed to him. If you have not wit to understand what I seek, you
may croak with the frogs: you are left out of my game.
And the old people, unhappily, suspect that this boy, whose theory they
do not comprehend, is master of their theory. They are puzzled and
panic-stricken; they strike in the dark. In all controversy, the strong
man's position is unassailed. His adversary does not see where he is,
but attacks a man of straw, some figment of his own, to the amusement of
intelligent spectators. Always our combatant is talking quite wide of
the whole question. So the wise man can never have an opponent; for
whoever is able to face and find him has already gone over to his side.
By material defences, we shut our light for a little, by going where
only our own views are repeated, and so boxing ourselves from all
danger of conviction; but if a strong thinker could gain the mere brute
advantage of having an audience confined in their seats to hear him out,
he would carry them all inevitably to his conclusion. They know it and
run away. But the press has made our whole world of civilization one
great lecture-room, from which no reading man can escape, and the only
defence against progress is stolid preoccupation with trade or trifles.
Yet this persistency is holding the breath, and can no more be continued
in the mind than that in the body. Blundering and falsehood become
intolerable to the blunderers; they must return to thought, and that is
proper in a single direction, is approached by ten thousand avenues
toward the One. It is religious, not ignorance or dogma. We cannot think
without exploration of the divine order and recognition of its divinity,
without finding ourselves carried away by it to service and adoration.
All good is assured to us in Truth, and Truth follows us hard, drives us
into many a corner, and will have us at last. So Love surprises all, and
every virtue has a pass-key to every heart. Out of conflicting
experience, amid barbarism and dogmatism, from feathers that float and
stones that fall, we deduce the great law of moral gravitation, which
binds spirit to spirit, and all souls to the best. Recognition of that
law is worship. We rejoice in it without a taint of selfishness. We
adore it with entire satisfaction. Worship is neither belief nor hope,
but this certainty of repose upon Perfection. We explore over our heads
and under our feet a harmony that is only enriched by dissolving
discords. The drag of time, the cramp of organization, are only false
fifths. It is blasphemy to deny the dominant. We cannot escape our good;
we shall be purified. When our destiny is thus assured to us, we become
impatient of sleep and sin, and redouble exertion. We devote ourselves
to this certainty, and our allegiance is religion. There is nothing in
man omitted from the uplift of Ideality. That is a central and total
expansion of him, is an inmost entering into his inmost, is more himself
than he is himself. All reverence is directed toward this Creator
revealed in flesh, though not compassed. We adore him in others, while
yet we despise him in ourselves. Every other motion of man has an
external centre, is some hunger or passion, acts on us from its seat in
Nature or the body, and we can face it, deny and repudiate it with the
body; but this is the man flowing down from his source.
We must not be tempted to call things by too fine names, lest we should
disguise them. All that is great is plain and familiar. The Ideal
Tendency is simple love of life, felt first as desire and then as
satisfaction. The men who represent it are not seekers, but finders, who
go on to find more and more; for in the poet desire has fulfilled
itself. Enjoyment makes the artist. He has gone on before us, reaching
into the abyss of possibility; but he has reached more mightily. He
begins to know what is promised in the universal attraction, in this
eager turning of all faces toward our future. There is a centre from
which no eye can be diverted, for it is the beam of sight. Look which
way you will, that centre is everywhere. The universe is flooded with a
ray from it, and the light of common day on every object is a refraction
or reflection of that brightness.
Shallow men think of Ideality as another appetite, to be fed with pretty
baubles, as the body is satisfied with meat and sleep; but the
representative of that august impulse feels in it his immortality, and
by all his lovely allegories, mythologies, fables, pictures, statues,
manners, songs, and symphonies, he seeks to communicate his own feeling,
that by specific gravity man must rise. It is no wonder, then, that we
love Art while it offers us reinforcement of being, and despise the
pretenders, for whom it is pastime, not prophecy.
For, in spite of all discouragement from the materialists, men
stultified by trade or tradition, we have trusted the high desire and
followed it thus far. We felt the sacredness of life even in ourselves,
and there was always reverence in our admiration. We could not be made
to doubt the divinity of that which walked with us in the wood or looked
on us in the morning. The grasses and pebbles, the waters and rocks,
clouds and showers, snow and wind, were too brother-like to be denied.
They sang the same song which fills the breast, and our love for them
was pure. The men and women we sought, were they not worthy of honor?
The artist comes to bid us trust the Ideal Tendency, and not dishonor
him who moves therein. He is no trifler, then, to be thrust aside by the
doctors with their sciences, or the economists with production and use.
He offers manhood to man and womanhood to woman.
We have named Ideality a love of life. Nay, what is it but life
itself,--and that loving but true living? What word can have any value
for us, unless it is a record of inevitable expansions in character. The
universe is pledged to every heart, and the artist represents its
promise. He sings, because he sees the manchild advancing, by blind
paths it may be, but under sure guidance, propelled by inextinguishable
desires toward the largest experience. He is no longer afraid of old
bugbears. He feels for one, that nothing in the universe, call it by
what ugly name you will, can crush or limit the lift of that leaven
which works in the breast. Out of all eyes there looks on him the same
expectation, and what for others is a great _perhaps_ for him has become
unavoidable certainty.
THE HOUR BEFORE DAWN.
"The mind of man is first led to adore the forces of Nature,
and certain objects of the material world; at a later period,
it yields to religious impulses of a higher and purely
spiritual character."
HUMBOLDT
CHAPTER I.
Alpheus and Eleusa, Thessalian Greeks, travelled in their old age, to
escape poverty and misfortune, which had surely taken joint lease with
themselves of a certain hut among the hills, and managed both household
and flock.
The Halcyon builds its nest upon a floating weed; so to the drifting
fortunes of these wanderers clung a friendless child, innocent and
beautiful Evadne.
Some secret voice, the country-people say, lured the shepherd from his
home, to embark on the Ægean Sea, and lead the little one away, together
with his aged wife, to look for a new home in exile. Mariners bound for
Troas received them into their vessel, and the voyage began.
The Greeks lamented when they beheld the shores of Asia. Heavy clouds
and the coming night concealed the landmarks which should have guided
their approach, and, buffeted by the uncertain winds, they waited for
the morning. By the light of dawn, they saw before them an unknown
harbor, and the dwellings of men; and here the mariners determined to be
rid of their passengers, who vexed them by their fears; while to these
three any port seemed desirable, and they readily consented to put off
towards the shore. At the hour when the winds rise, at early dawn, they
gladly parted from the seamen and the tossing ship, and took the way
before them to the little town.
No fisherman, shadowless, trod the sands; no pious hand lighted the fire
of sacrifice in the vanishing twilight; even the herds failed to cry
out for the coming day. Strange fears began to chill the hearts of the
Thessalians. They walked upon a trackless way, and when they entered the
dwellings they found them untenanted. Over the doorways hung vines
dropping their grapes, and birds flew out at the open windows. They
climbed a hill behind the town, and saw how the sea surrounded them. The
land on which they stood was no promontory, but an island, separated by
a foaming interval of water from the shore, which they now saw, not
distant, but inaccessible.
Then these miserable ones clung to each other on the summit of the rock,
gazing, until they were fully persuaded of their misfortune. The winds
waved and fluttered their garments, the waters uttered a voice breaking
on the rocky shore, and rose mute upon the farther coast. The rain now
began to fall from a morning cloud, and the travellers, for the first
time, found shelter under a foreign roof.
All day they watched the sails approaching the headlands, or veering
widely away and beating towards unseen harbors, as when a bird driven by
fear abandons its nest, but drawn by love returns and hovers around it.
Four days and nights had passed before the troubled waves ceased to
hinder the craft of the fisherman. The Greeks saw with joy that their
signals were answered, and a boat approached, so that they could hear a
man's voice crying to them,--
"What are you who dwell on the island of the profane, and gather fruits
sacred to Apollo?"
"If I may be said to dwell here," replied the old man, "it is contrary
to my own will. I am a Greek of Thessaly. Apollo himself should not have
forbidden me to gather the wild grapes of this island, since I and this
child and Eleusa, my wife, have not during many days found other food."
"It is indeed true," exclaimed the boatman, "that madness presently
falls upon those who eat of these grapes, since you speak impious words
against the god. Behold, yonder is woody Tenedos, where his altar
stands; it is now many years, since, filled with wrath against the
dwellers here, he seized this rock, and hurled it into the sea; the very
hills melted in the waves. I myself, a child then, beheld the waters
violently urged upon the land. Moved without winds, they rose, climbing
upon the very roofs of the houses. When the sea became calm, a gulf lay
between this and the coast, and what had been a promontory was left
forever an island. Nor has any man dared to dwell upon it, nor to gather
its accursed fruits. Many men have I known who saw gods walking upon
this shore, visible sometimes on the high cliffs inaccessible to human
feet. Therefore, if you, being a stranger, have ignorantly trespassed on
this garden, which the divinities reserve, perhaps for their own
pleasure, strive to escape their resentment and offer sacrifices on the
altar of Tenedos."
"Give me a passage in your boat to the land yonder, and I will depart
out of your coasts," replied the Greek.
The fisherman, hitherto so friendly, remained silent, and words were
wanting to him wherewith to instruct the stranger. When he again spoke,
he said,--
"Why, old man, not having the vigor or the carelessness of youth, have
you quitted your home, leading this woman into strange lands, and this
child, whose eyes are tearful for the playmates she has left? I call a
little maid daughter, who is like unto her, and she remains guarded at
home by her mother, until we shall give her in marriage to one of her
own nation and language."
"Waste no more words," answered the old man, "I will narrate my story as
we row towards your harbor."
"It were better for you," said the boatman, "that they who brought you
hither should take you into their ship again. Enter our town, if you
will, but be not amazed at what shall befall you. It is a custom with us
to make slaves of those who approach us unsolicited, in order to
protect ourselves against the pirates and their spies, who have formerly
lodged themselves among us in the guise of wayfaring men, and so robbed
us of our possessions. Therefore it is our law, that those who land on
our coast shall, during a year, serve us in bondage."
Anger flamed in the eye of the stranger.
"You do well," he cried, "to ask of me why I left the land which bore
me. Never did I there learn to suspect vile and inhospitable customs. If
you have pity for the aged and the unfortunate, and would not gladly see
them cast into slavery, bring hither some means of life to this rock,
which cowards have abandoned for me. Meanwhile, I will watch for some
friendly sail, which, approaching, may bear me to any harbor, where
worse reception can hardly await me.--Know that I fear not the anger of
your gods; many years have I lived, and I have never yet beheld a god.
My father has told me, that, in all his wanderings, among lonely hills,
at the hour of dawn, or by night, or, again, in populous places, he has
never seen one whom he believed to be a god. Moreover, in Athens itself
are those who doubt their existence. Leave me to gather the grapes of
Apollo!"
So saying, he turned away from the shore, not deigning to ask more from
the stranger.
When the golden crescent moon, no sooner visible than ready to vanish in
the rosy western sky, was smiling on the exiles with the old familiar
look she wore above the groves of Thessaly, the sad-hearted ones were
roused again by the voice of their unknown friend.
"Come down to the shore," he cried; "I have returned to you with gifts;
my heart yearns to the child; she is gentle, and her eyes are like those
of the stag when the hunters surround him. Take my flasks of oil and
wine, and these cakes of barley and wheat. I bring you nets, and cords
also, which we fishermen know how to use. May the gods, whom you
despise, protect you!"
Late into the night the Greeks remained upon the border of the sea,
wondering at their strange fate. To the idle the day is never
sufficiently long,--the night also is wasted in words.