Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the
place the Divine providence has found for you, the society of your
contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done
so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age,
betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated
at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all
their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind
the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a
protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides,
redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing
on Chaos and the Dark.
What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text in the face and
behavior of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel
mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed
the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their
mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in
their faces we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody; all
conform to it: so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the
adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty
and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it
enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will
stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he
cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room the voice is
sufficiently clear and emphatic! It seems he knows how to speak to his
contemporaries. Bashful or bold then, he will know how to make us
seniors very unnecessary.
The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as
much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy
attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in
the play-house: independent, irresponsible, looking out from his
corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences
them on their merits, in the swift summary way of boys, as good, bad,
interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never
about consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine
verdict. You must court him; he does not court you. But the man is, as
it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has
once acted or spoken with eclat he is a committed person, watched by
the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now
enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could
pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and
having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased,
unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable. He
would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be
not private but necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men
and put them in fear.
These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint
and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in
conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is
a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better
securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty
and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity.
Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators,
but names and customs.
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather
immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must
explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity
of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the
suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I
was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me
with the dear old doctrines of the Church. On my saying, "What have I
to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from
within?" my friend suggested, "But these impulses may be from below,
not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if
I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can
be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very
readily transferable to that or this: the only right is what is after
my constitution; the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry
himself in the presence of all opposition as if everything were
titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we
capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead
institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and
sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and
speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat
of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this
bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from
Barbadoes, why should I not say to him:--"Go love thy infant; love thy
wood-chopper; be good-natured and modest; have that grace; and never
varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible
tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite
at home." Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is
handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some
edge to it, else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached,
as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and
whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius
calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, _Whim_. I
hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the
day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I
exclude company. Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day,
of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they _my_
poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the
dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me
and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by
all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to
prison if need be: but your miscellaneous popular charities; the
education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the
vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousandfold
relief societies;--though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and
give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by-and-by I shall have
the manhood to withhold....
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.
This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may
serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is
the harder because you will always find those who think they know what
is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live
after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our
own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with
perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.