"Ne te quæsiveris extra."[145]
"Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."[146]
* * * * *
Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat;
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.[147]
I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which
were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an
admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The
sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may
contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for
you in your private heart is true for all men,--that is genius.[148]
Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal
sense;[149] for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,--and our
first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last
Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest
merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato,[150] and Milton[151] is, that they
set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what
they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of
light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster
of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice
his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize
our own rejected thoughts:[152] they come back to us with a certain
alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson
for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression
with good-humored inflexibility then most when[153] the whole cry of
voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with
masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the
time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from
another.
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the
conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide;[154]
that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that
though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn
can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground
which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new
in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor
does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one
character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none.
This sculpture in the memory is not without preëstablished harmony.
The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of
that particular ray. We but half express ourselves,[155] and are
ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be
safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be
faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by
cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his
work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall
give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the
attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no
hope.
Trust thyself:[156] 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[157] 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[158] 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[159]
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 his 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[160] 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 playhouse;[161] 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 _éclat_[162] 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[163] for this. Ah,
that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who[164] 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.[165] He who would gather
immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must
explore if it be goodness.[166] Nothing is at last sacred but the
integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall
have the suffrage[167] 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;[168] 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,[169] 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_.[170] 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 thousand-fold 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.
Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the
rule. There is the man _and_ his virtues. Men do what is called a good
action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a
fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are
done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world,--as
invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances.
I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not
for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so
it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and
unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and
bleeding.[171] I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse
this appeal from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it
makes no difference whether I do or forbear those actions which are
reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I
have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am,
and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows
any secondary testimony.
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.[172]
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is,
that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the
impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church,
contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for
the government or against it, spread your table like base
housekeepers,--under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the
precise[173] man you are. And, of course, so much force is withdrawn
from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you.[174] Do
your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what
a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I
anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and
topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I
not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous
word? Do I not know that, with[175] all this ostentation of examining
the grounds of the institution, he will do no such thing? Do I not
know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side,--the
permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a
retained attorney, and these airs of the bench[176] are the emptiest
affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another
handkerchief,[177] and attached themselves to some one of these
communities of opinion.[178] This conformity makes them not false in a
few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars.
Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two,
their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us,
and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is
not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we
adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by
degrees the gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying
experience in particular which does not fail to wreak itself also in
the general history; I mean "the foolish face of praise," the forced
smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in
answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not
spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurping willfulness, grow
tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable
sensation.
For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.[179] And
therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The bystanders
look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlor. If
this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his
own, he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces
of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are
put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs.[180] Yet is
the discontent of the multitude more formidable than that of the
senate and the college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the
world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is
decorous and prudent, for they are timid as being very vulnerable
themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the
people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the
unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made
to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to
treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment.
The other terror[181] that scares us from self-trust is our
consistency;[182] a reverence for our past act or word, because the
eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit[183] than
our past acts, and we are loth to disappoint them.
But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about
this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat[184] you have
stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict
yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on
your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring
the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in
a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the
Deity; yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them
heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color.
Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and
flee.[185]
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by
little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a
great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself
with the shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words,
and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though
it contradict everything you said to-day.--"Ah, so you shall be sure
to be misunderstood."--Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?
Pythagoras[186] was misunderstood, and Socrates,[187] and Jesus, and
Luther,[188] and Copernicus,[189] and Galileo,[190] and Newton,[191]
and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to
be misunderstood.
I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will
are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of
Andes[192] and Himmaleh[193] are insignificant in the curve of the
sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him. A character is
like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza;[194]--read it forward,
backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing,
contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my
honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it
will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not. My
book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The
swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he
carries in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we are.
Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate
their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue
or vice emit a breath every moment.
There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be
each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions
will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost
sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One
tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line
of a hundred tacks.[195] See the line from a sufficient distance, and
it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action
will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your
conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already
done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If
I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes,[196] I must
have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will,
do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force
of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their
health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate
and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a
train of great days and victories behind. They shed an united light on
the advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels.
That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's[197] voice, and dignity
into Washington's port, and America into Adams's[198] eye. Honor is
venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient
virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it
and pay it homage, because it is not a trap for our love and homage,
but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old
immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.
I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and
consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.
Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the
Spartan[199] fife. Let us never bow and apologize more. A great man is
coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he
should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I
would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand
the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl
in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the
upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and
Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no
other time or place, but is the center of things. Where he is, there
is nature. He measures you, and all men, and all events. Ordinarily,
everybody in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other
person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes
place of the whole creation. The man must be so much, that he must
make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a
country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time
fully to accomplish his design;--and posterity seem to follow his
steps as a train of clients. A man Cæsar[200] is born, and for ages
after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds
so grow and cleave to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue
and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of
one man; as Monachism, of the hermit Antony;[201] the Reformation, of
Luther; Quakerism, of Fox;[202] Methodism, of Wesley;[203] Abolition,
of Clarkson.[204] Scipio,[205] Milton called "the height of Rome"; and
all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few
stout and earnest persons.
Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him
not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy,
a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. But
the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds
to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels
poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, a costly book,
have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem
to say like that, "Who are you, Sir?" Yet they all are his, suitors
for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out
and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to
command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular
fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried
to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed,
and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the
duke, and assured that he had been insane,[206] owes its popularity to
the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the
world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason,
and finds himself a true prince.
Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history, our imagination
plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier
vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common
day's work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total
of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred,[207] and
Scanderbeg,[208] and Gustavus?[209] Suppose they were virtuous; did
they wear out virtue? As great a stake depends on your private act
to-day, as followed their public and renowned steps. When private men
shall act with original views, the luster will be transferred from the
actions of kings to those of gentlemen.
The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized the
eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual
reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful loyalty with which
men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, or the great
proprietor to walk among them by a law of his own, make his own scale
of men and things, and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money
but with honor, and represent the law in his person, was the
hieroglyphic[210] by which they obscurely signified their
consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of every
man.
The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we
inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the
aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What
is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without
parallax,[211] without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of
beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of
independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the
essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity
or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all
later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind
which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For the
sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the
soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time,
from man, but one with them, and proceeds obviously from the same
source whence their life and being also proceed. We first share the
life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in
nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the
fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that
inspiration which giveth man wisdom, and which cannot be denied
without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense
intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its
activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do
nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask
whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all
philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can
affirm. Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his
mind, and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his
involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the
expression of them, but he knows that these things are so, like day
and night, not to be disputed. My willful actions and acquisitions are
but roving;--the idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion, command
my curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people contradict as readily the
statement of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more readily;
for, they do not distinguish between perception and notion. They fancy
that I choose to see this or that thing. But perception is not
whimsical, it is fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it
after me, and in course of time, all mankind,--although it may chance
that no one has seen it before me. For my perception of it is as much
a fact as the sun.
The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is
profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh
he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the
world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls,
from the center of the present thought; and new date and new create
the whole. Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom,
old things pass away,--means, teachers, texts, temples, fall; it lives
now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are
made sacred by relation to it,--one as much as another. All things
are dissolved to their center by their cause, and, in the universal
miracle, petty and particular miracles disappear. If, therefore, a man
claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the
phraseology of some old moldered nation in another country, in another
world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its
fullness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom
he has cast his ripened being?[212] Whence, then, this worship of the
past?[213] The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and
authority of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors
which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where
it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it
be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and
becoming.
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say
"I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before
the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window
make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what
they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There
is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.
Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown
flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its
nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike.
But man postpones, or remembers; he does not live in the present, but
with a reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that
surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be
happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above
time.
This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not
yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I know not
what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a
price on a few texts, on a few lives.[214] We are like children who
repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they
grow older, of the men and talents and characters they chance to
see,--painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards,
when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered
those saying, they understand them, and are willing to let the words
go; for, at any time, they can use words as good when occasion comes.
If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man
to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new
perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded
treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall
be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.
And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid;
probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far-off
remembering of the intuition. That thought, by what I can now nearest
approach to say it, is this. When good is near you, when you have
life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall
not discern the footprints of any other; you shall not see the face of
man; you shall not hear any name;--the way, the thought, the good,
shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and
experience. You take the way from man, not to man. All persons that
ever existed are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike
beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision,
there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The
soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation,
perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with
knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic
Ocean, the South Sea,--long intervals of time, years, centuries,--are
of no account. This which I think and feel underlay every former state
of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my present, and what is
called life, and what is called death.
Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of
repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new
state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one
fact the world hates, that the soul _becomes_; for that forever
degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to
shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas[215]
equally aside. Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as
the soul is present, there will be power not confident but agent.[216]
To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather
of that which relies, because it works and is. Who has more obedience
than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I
must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when
we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height,
and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to
principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities,
nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not.
This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on
every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE.
Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it
constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into
all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they
contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whaling, war eloquence,
personal weight, are somewhat, and engage my respect as examples of
its presence and impure action. I see the same law working in nature
for conservation and growth. Power is in nature the essential measure
of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which
cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise
and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the
vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of
the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul.
Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the
cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books
and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the
invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here
within.[217] Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our
own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our
native riches.
But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his
genius admonished to stay at home to put itself in communication with
the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the
urns of other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church before
the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool,
how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or
sanctuary! So let us always sit. Why should we assume the faults of
our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our
hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood, and
I have all men's.[218] Not for that will I adopt their petulance or
folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your isolation
must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At
times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with
emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want,
charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and say, "Come out unto
us." But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men
possess to annoy men, I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can
come near me but through my act. "What we love that we have, but by
desire we bereave ourselves of the love."
If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith,
let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of
war, and wake Thor and Woden,[219] courage and constancy, in our Saxon
breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth.
Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to
the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we
converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O
friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward
I am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law
less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but
proximities.[220] I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, to support
my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife,--but these relations
I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your
customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you,
or you.[221] If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the
happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should.
I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is
deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever
inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will
love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by
hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth
with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not
selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine,
and all men's however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth.
Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what is dictated by
your nature as well as mine, and, if we follow the truth, it will
bring us out safe at last.[222] But so may you give these friends
pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their
sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when
they look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they
justify me, and do the same thing.
The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a
rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism;[223] and the bold
sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the
law of consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one or
the other of which we must be shriven. You may fulfill your round of
duties by clearing yourself in the _direct_, or in the _reflex_ way.
Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother,
cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these can upbraid
you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard, and absolve me to
myself. I have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the
name of duty to many offices that are called duties. But if I can
discharge its debts, it enables me to dispense with the popular code.
If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its
commandment one day.
And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the
common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a
taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight,
that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself,
that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to
others!
If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by
distinction _society_, he will see the need of these ethics. The sinew
and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous,
desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune,
afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and
perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our
social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot
satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to
their practical force,[224] and do lean and beg day and night
continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations,
our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has
chosen for us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of
fate, where strength is born.
If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all
heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is _ruined_. If the
finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in
an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of
Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is
right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life.
A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the
professions, who _teams it, farms it_,[225] _peddles_, keeps a school,
preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so
forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet,
is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his
days, and feels no shame in not "studying a profession," for he does
not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a
hundred chances. Let a Stoic[226] open the resources of man, and tell
men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves;
that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a
man is the word made flesh,[227] born to shed healing to the
nations,[228] that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that
the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books,
idolatries and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, but
thank and revere him,--and that teacher shall restore the life of man
to splendor, and make his name dear to all history.
It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution
in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their
education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their
association; in their property; in their speculative views.
1. In what prayers do men allow themselves![229] That which they call
a holy office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad
and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign
virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural,
and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular
commodity,--anything less than all good,--is vicious. Prayer is the
contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It
is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul.[230] It is the
spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to
effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and
not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one
with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The
prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of
the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard
throughout nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach,[231] in Fletcher's
Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind of the god Audate,
replies,--
"His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors;
Our valors are our best gods."
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want
of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you
can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and
already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base.
We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company,
instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric
shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason.
The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods
and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him
all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our
love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We
solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he
held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him
because men hated him. "To the persevering mortal," said
Zoroaster,[232] "the blessed Immortals are swift."
As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a
disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, "Let
not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and
we will obey."[233] Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my
brother, because he has shut his own temple doors, and recites fables
merely of his brother's, or his brother's brother's God. Every new mind
is a new classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and
power, a Locke,[234] a Lavoisier,[235] a Hutton,[236] a Betham,[237] a
Fourier,[238] it imposes its classification on other men, and lo! a new
system. In proportion to the depth of the thought, and so to the number
of the objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his
complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which
are also classifications of some powerful mind acting on the elemental
thought of duty, and man's relation to the Highest. Such is
Calvinism,[239] Quakerism,[240] Swedenborgism.[241] The pupil takes the
same delight in subordinating everything to the new terminology, as a
girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons
thereby. It will happen for a time, that the pupil will find his
intellectual power has grown by the study of his master's mind. But in
all unbalanced minds, the classification is idolized, passes for the
end, and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the
system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the
universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their
master built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to
see,--how you can see; "It must be somehow that you stole the light from
us." They do not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable,
will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and
call it their own. If they are honest and do well, presently their neat
new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot
and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed,
million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the first morning.
2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Traveling,
whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all
educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable
in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an
axis of the earth. In manly hours, we feel that duty is our place. The
soul is no traveler; the wise man stays at home, and when his
necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or
into foreign lands, he is at home still; and shall make men sensible
by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of
wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not
like an interloper or a valet.
I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for
the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is
first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding
somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get
somewhat which he does not carry,[242] travels away from himself, and
grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes,[243] in
Palmyra,[244] his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as
they. He carries ruins to ruins.
Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the
indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can
be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk,
embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples,
and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting,
identical, that I fled from.[245] I seek the Vatican,[246] and the
palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but
I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
3. But the rage of traveling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness
affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond,
and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel
when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is
imitation but the traveling of the mind? Our houses are built with
foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our
opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the
Distant. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It
was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an
application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the
conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric[247] or the
Gothic[248] model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and
quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American
artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by
him considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the
wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will
create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and
taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.
Insist on yourself; never imitate.[249] Your own gift you can present
every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation;
but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous,
half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can
teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has
exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught
Shakespeare?[250] Where is the master who could have instructed
Franklin,[251] or Washington, or Bacon,[252] or Newton?[253] Every great
man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio[254] is precisely that part he
could not borrow. Shakespeare will never be made by the study of
Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too
much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance
brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias,[255] or
trowel of the Egyptians,[256] or the pen of Moses,[257] or Dante,[258]
but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul all rich, all
eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if
you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in
the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of
one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy
heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld[259] again.
4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our
spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of
society, and no man improves.
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on
the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is
civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this
change is not amelioration. For everything that is given, something is
taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a
contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American,
with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the
naked New Zealander,[260] whose property is a club, a spear, a mat,
and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the
health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost
his aboriginal strength. If the traveler tell us truly, strike the
savage with a broad ax, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and
heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow
shall send the white to his grave.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He
has a fine Geneva[261] watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the
hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac[262] he has, and so
being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street
does not know a star in the sky. The solstice[263] he does not
observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar
of the year is without a dial in his mind. His notebooks impair his
memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases
the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery
does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some
energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some
vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom
where is the Christian?
There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard
of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A singular
equality may be observed between great men of the first and of the
last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of
the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than
Plutarch's[264] heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in
time is the race progressive. Phocion,[265] Socrates, Anaxagoras,[266]
Diogenes,[267] are great men, but they leave no class. He who is
really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be
his own man, and, in his turn, the founder of a sect. The arts and
inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate
men. The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good.
Hudson[268] and Bering[269] accomplished so much in their fishing
boats, as to astonish Parry[270] and Franklin,[271] whose equipment
exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an
opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena
than any one since. Columbus[272] found the New World in an undecked
boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of
means and machinery, which were introduced with loud laudation a few
years or centuries before. The great genius returns to essential man.
We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of
science, and yet Napoleon[273] conquered Europe by the bivouac, which
consisted of falling back on naked valor, and disencumbering it of all
aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Las
Casas,[274] "without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries, and
carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should
receive his supply of corn, grind it in his handmill, and bake his
bread himself."
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is
composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to
the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a
nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.
And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments
which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away
from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem
the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property,
and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be
assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what
each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes
ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially
he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental,--came to him by
inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having;
it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there,
because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man
is, does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is
living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or
revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually
renews itself wherever the man breathes. "Thy lot or portion of life,"
said the Caliph Ali,[275] "is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest
from seeking after it." Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us
to our slavish respect for numbers. The political parties meet in
numerous conventions; the greater the concourse, and with each new
uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex![276] The Democrats
from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! the young patriot feels
himself stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In
like manner the reformers summon conventions, and vote and resolve in
multitude. Not so, O friends! will the god deign to enter and inhabit
you, but by a method precisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts
off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong
and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a
man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and in the endless
mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder of
all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power is inborn, that he is
weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so
perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly
rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs,
works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than
a man who stands on his head.
So use all that is called Fortune.[277] Most men gamble with her, and
gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as
unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the
chancelors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained
the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her
rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your
sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable
event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for
you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.