civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the
crops--no, but the kind of man the country turns out. I see the vast
advantages of this country, spanning the breadth of the temperate zone. I
see the immense material prosperity--towns on towns, states on states, and
wealth piled in the massive architecture of cities; California quartz
mountains dumped down in New York to be repiled architecturally
along-shore from Canada to Cuba, and thence westward to California again.
But it is not New York streets, built by the confluence of workmen and
wealth of all nations, though stretching out toward Philadelphia until
they touch it, and northward until they touch New Haven, Hartford,
Springfield, Worcester, and Boston--not these that make the real
estimation. But, when I look over this constellation of cities which
animate and illustrate the land, and see how little the government has to
do with their daily life, how self-helped and self-directed all families
are,--knots of men in purely natural societies,--societies of trade, of
kindred blood, of habitual hospitality, house and house, man acting on man
by weight of opinion of longer or better-directed industry, the refining
influence of women, the invitation which experience and permanent causes
open to youth and labor,--when I see how much each virtuous and gifted
person, whom all men consider, lives affectionately with scores of
excellent people who are not known far from home, and perhaps with great
reason reckons these people his superiors in virtue, and in the symmetry
and force of their qualities, I see what cubic values America has, and in
these a better certificate of civilization than great cities or enormous
wealth.
In strictness, the vital refinements are the moral and intellectual steps.
The appearance of the Hebrew Moses, of the Indian Buddh,--in Greece, of
the Seven Wise Masters, of the acute and upright Socrates, and of the
Stoic Zeno,--in Judaea, the advent of Jesus,--and in modern Christendom, of
the realists Huss, Savonarola, and Luther,--are casual facts which carry
forward races to new convictions, and elevate the rule of life. In the
presence of these agencies, it is frivolous to insist on the invention of
printing or gunpowder, of steam-power or gas-light, percussion-caps and
rubber-shoes, which are toys thrown off from that security, freedom, and
exhilaration which a healthy morality creates in society. These arts add a
comfort and smoothness to house and street life; but a purer morality,
which kindles genius, civilizes civilization, casts backward all that we
held sacred into the profane, as the flame of oil throws a shadow when
shined upon by the flame of the Bude-light. Not the less the popular
measures of progress will ever be the arts and the laws.
But if there be a country which cannot stand any one of these tests--a
country where knowledge cannot be diffused without perils of mob-law and
statute-law,--where speech is not free,--where the post-office is
violated, mailbags opened, and letters tampered with,--where public debts
and private debts outside of the State are repudiated,--where liberty is
attacked in the primary institution of social life,--where the position of
the white woman is injuriously affected by the outlawry of the black
woman,--where the arts, such as they have, are all imported, having no
indigenous life,--where the laborer is not secured in the earnings of his
own hands,--where suffrage is not free or equal,--that country is, in all
these respects, not civil, but barbarous; and no advantages of soil,
climate, or coast can resist these suicidal mischiefs.
Morality and all the incidents of morality are essential: as, justice to
the citizen and personal liberty. Montesquieu says: "Countries are well
cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free"; and the remark
holds not less, but more true, of the culture of men, than of the tillage
of land. And the highest proof of civility is, that the whole public
action of the State is directed on securing the greatest good of the
greatest number.
ILLUSIONS[15]
Flow, flow the waves hated,
Accursed, adored,
The waves of mutation:
No anchorage is.
Sleep is not, death is not;
Who seem to die, live.
House you were born in,
Friends of your spring-time,
Old man and young maid,
Day's toil and its guerdon--
They are all vanishing,
Fleeing to fables,
Cannot be moored.
See the stars through them,
Through treacherous marbles.
Know, the stars yonder,
The stars everlasting
Are fugitive also,
And emulate, vaulted,
The lambent heat-lightning,
And fire-fly's flight.
When thou dost return
On the wave's circulation,
Beholding the shimmer,
The will's dissipation,
And, out of endeavor
To change and to flow,
The gas become solid,
And phantoms and nothings
Return to be things,
And endless imbroglio
Is law and the world,--
Then first shalt thou know,
That in the wild turmoil,
Horsed on the Proteus,
Thou ridest to power,
And to endurance.
Some years ago, in company with an agreeable party, I spent a long summer
day in exploring the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. We traversed, through
spacious galleries affording a solid masonry foundation for the town and
county overhead, the six or eight black miles from the mouth of the cavern
to the innermost recess which tourists visit--a niche or grotto made of
one seamless stalactite and called, I believe, Serena's Bower. I lost the
light of one day. I saw high domes, and bottomless pits; heard the voice
of unseen waterfalls; paddled three quarters of a mile in the deep Echo
River, whose waters are peopled with the blind fish; crossed the streams
"Lethe" and "Styx"; plied with music and guns the echoes in these alarming
galleries; saw every form of stalagmite and stalactite in the sculptured
and fretted chambers--icicle, orange-flower, acanthus, grapes, and
snowball. We shot Bengal lights into the vaults and groins of the sparry
cathedrals, and examined all the masterpieces which the four combined
engineers, water, limestone, gravitation, and time, could make in the
dark.
The mysteries and scenery of the cave had the same dignity that belongs to
all natural objects, and shames the fine things to which we foppishly
compare them. I remarked, especially, the mimetic habit, with which
Nature, on new instruments, hums her old tunes, making night to mimic day,
and chemistry to ape vegetation. But I then took notice, and still chiefly
remember, that the best thing which the cave had to offer was an illusion.
On arriving at what is called the "Star Chamber," our lamps were taken
from us by the guide, and extinguished or put aside, and, on looking
upwards, I saw or seemed to see the night heaven thick with stars
glimmering more or less brightly over our heads, and even what seemed a
comet flaming among them. All the party were touched with astonishment
and pleasure. Our musical friends sung with much feeling a pretty song,
"The stars are in the quiet sky," etc., and I sat down on the rocky floor
to enjoy the serene picture. Some crystal specks in the black ceiling high
overhead, reflecting the light of a half-hid lamp, yielded this
magnificent effect.
I own, I did not like the cave so well for eking out its sublimities with
this theatrical trick. But I have had many experiences like it, before and
since; and we must be content to be pleased without too curiously
analyzing the occasions. Our conversation with Nature is not just what it
seems. The cloud-rack, the sunrise and sunset glories, rainbows, and
northern lights, are not quite so spheral as our childhood thought them;
and the part our organization plays in them is too large. The senses
interfere everywhere, and mix their own structure with all they report of.
Once, we fancied the earth a plane, and stationary. In admiring the
sunset, we do not yet deduct the rounding, coordinating, pictorial powers
of the eye.
The same interference from our organization creates the most of our
pleasure and pain. Our first mistake is the belief that the circumstance
gives the joy which we give to the circumstance. Life is an ecstasy. Life
is sweet as nitrous oxide; and the fisherman dripping all day over a cold
pond, the switchman at the railway intersection, the farmer in the field,
the negro in the rice-swamp, the fop in the street, the hunter in the
woods, the barrister with the jury, the belle at the ball, all ascribe a
certain pleasure to their employment, which they themselves give it.
Health and appetite impart the sweetness to sugar, bread, and meat. We
fancy that our civilization has got on far, but we still come back to our
primers.
We live by our imaginations, by our admirations, by our sentiments. The
child walks amid heaps of illusions, which he does not like to have
disturbed. The boy, how sweet to him is his fancy! how dear the story of
barons and battles! What a hero he is, whilst he feeds on his heroes! What
a debt is his to imaginative books! He has no better friend or influence
than Scott, Shakespeare, Plutarch, and Homer. The man lives to other
objects, but who dares affirm that they are more real? Even the prose of
the streets is full of refractions. In the life of the dreariest alderman,
fancy enters into all details, and colors them with rosy hue. He imitates
the air and actions of people whom he admires, and is raised in his own
eyes. He pays a debt quicker to a rich man than to a poor man. He wishes
the bow and compliment of some leader in the state, or in society; weighs
what he says; perhaps he never comes nearer to him for that, but dies at
last better contented for this amusement of his eyes and his fancy.
The world rolls, the din of life is never hushed. In London, in Paris, in
Boston, in San Francisco, the carnival, the masquerade is at its height.
Nobody drops his domino. The unities, the fictions of the piece, it would
be an impertinence to break. The chapter of fascinations is very long.
Great is paint; nay, God is the painter; and we rightly accuse the critic
who destroys too many illusions. Society does not love its unmaskers. It
was wittily, if somewhat bitterly, said by D'Alembert, "qu'un etat de
vapeur etait un etat tres facheux, parcequ'il nous faisait voir les choses
comme elles sont." I find men victims of illusion in all parts of life.
Children, youths, adults, and old men, all are led by one bauble or
another. Yoganidra, the goddess of illusion, Proteus, or Momus, or Gylfi's
Mocking,--for the Power has many names,--is stronger than the Titans,
stronger than Apollo. Few have overheard the gods, or surprised their
secret. Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be
understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.
There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snowstorm. We wake
from one dream into another dream. The toys, to be sure, are various, and
are graduated in refinement to the quality of the dupe. The intellectual
man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is
drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with
music and banner and badge.
Amid the joyous troop who give in to the charivari, comes now and then a
sad-eyed boy, whose eyes lack the requisite refractions to clothe the show
in due glory, and who is afflicted with a tendency to trace home the
glittering miscellany of fruits and flowers to one root. Science is a
search after identity, and the scientific whim is lurking in all corners.
At the State Fair, a friend of mine complained that all the varieties of
fancy pears in our orchards seem to have been selected by somebody who had
a whim for a particular kind of pear, and only cultivated such as had that
perfume; they were all alike. And I remember the quarrel of another youth
with the confectioners, that, when he racked his wit to choose the best
comfits in the shops, in all the endless varieties of sweetmeat he could
only find three flavors, or two. What then? Pears and cakes are good for
something; and because you, unluckily, have an eye or nose too keen, why
need you spoil the comfort which the rest of us find in them?
I knew a humorist who, in a good deal of rattle, had a grain or two of
sense. He shocked the company by maintaining that the attributes of God
were two--power and risibility; and that it was the duty of every pious
man to keep up the comedy. And I have known gentlemen of great stake in
the community, but whose sympathies were cold,--presidents of colleges,
and governors, and senators,--who held themselves bound to sign every
temperance pledge, and act with Bible societies, and missions, and
peacemakers, and cry, _Hist-a-boy!_ to every good dog. We must not carry
comity too far, but we all have kind impulses in this direction. When the
boys come into my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter
into Nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly,
fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy
chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid
on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to
tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the
less they hung it round with frippery romance, like the children of the
happiest fortune, and talked of "the dear cottage where so many joyful
hours had flown." Well, this thatching of hovels is the custom of the
country. Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion.
Being fascinated, they fascinate. They see through Claude-Lorraines. And
how dare anyone, if he could, pluck away the _coulisses_, stage-effects,
and ceremonies, by which they live? Too pathetic, too pitiable, is the
region of affection, and its atmosphere always liable to _mirage_.
We are not very much to blame for our bad marriages. We live amid
hallucinations; and this especial trap is laid to trip up our feet with,
and all are tripped up first or last. But the mighty Mother who had been
so sly with us, as if she felt that she owed us some indemnity, insinuates
into the Pandora-box of marriage some deep and serious benefits, and some
great joys. We find a delight in the beauty and happiness of children that
makes the heart too big for the body. In the worst-assorted connections
there is ever some mixture of true marriage. Teague and his jade get some
just relations of mutual respect, kindly observation, and fostering of
each other, learn something, and would carry themselves wiselier, if they
were now to begin.
'Tis fine for us to point at one or another fine madman, as if there were
any exempts. The scholar in his library is none. I, who have all my life
heard any number of orations and debates, read poems and miscellaneous
books, conversed with many geniuses, am still the victim of any new page;
and, if Marmaduke, or Hugh, or Moosehead, or any other, invent a new style
or mythology, I fancy that the world will be all brave and right if
dressed in these colors, which I had not thought of. Then at once I will
daub with this new paint: but it will not stick. 'Tis like the cement
which the peddler sells at the door; he makes broken crockery hold with
it, but you can never buy of him a bit of the cement which will make it
hold when he is gone.
Men who make themselves felt in the world avail themselves of a certain
fate in their constitution, which they know how to use. But they never
deeply interest us, unless they lift a corner of the curtain, or betray
never so slightly their penetration of what is behind it. 'Tis the charm
of practical men, that outside of their practicality are a certain poetry
and play, as if they led the good horse Power by the bridle, and preferred
to walk, though they can ride so fiercely. Bonaparte is intellectual, as
well as Caesar; and the best soldiers, sea-captains, and railway men have a
gentleness, when off duty; a good-natured admission that there are
illusions, and who shall say that he is not their sport? We stigmatize the
cast-iron fellows, who cannot so detach themselves, as "dragon-ridden,"
"thunder-stricken," and fools of fate, with whatever powers endowed.
Since our tuition is through emblems and indirections, 'tis well to know
that there is method in it, a fixed scale, and rank above rank in the
phantasms. We begin low with coarse masks, and rise to the most subtle and
beautiful. The red men told Columbus, "they had an herb which took away
fatigue"; but he found the illusion of "arriving from the east at the
Indies" more composing to his lofty spirit than any tobacco. Is not our
faith in the impenetrability of matter more sedative than narcotics? You
play with jack-straws, balls, bowls, horse and gun, estates and politics;
but there are finer games before you. Is not time a pretty toy? Life will
show you masks that are worth all your carnivals. Yonder mountain must
migrate into your mind. The fine star-dust and nebulous blur in Orion,
"the portentous year of Mizar and Alcor," must come down and be dealt with
in your household thought. What if you shall come to discern that the play
and playground of all this pompous history are radiations from yourself,
and that the sun borrows his beams? What terrible questions we are
learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples,
cities, and men were swallowed up and all trace of them gone. We are
coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds all
vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were
framed upon.
There are deceptions of the senses, deceptions of the passions, and the
structural, beneficent illusions of sentiment and of the intellect. There
is the illusion of love, which attributes to the beloved person all which
that person shares with his or her family, sex, age, or condition, nay,
with the human mind itself. 'Tis these which the lover loves, and Anna
Matilda gets the credit of them. As if one shut up always in a tower, with
one window, through which the face of heaven and earth could be seen,
should fancy that all the marvels he beheld belonged to that window. There
is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? or
come to the conviction that what seems the _succession_ of thought is only
the distribution of wholes into causal series? The intellect sees that
every atom carries the whole of Nature; that the mind opens to
omnipotence; that, in the endless striving and ascents, the metamorphosis
is entire, so that the soul doth not know itself in its own act, when that
act is perfected. There is illusion that shall deceive even the elect.
There is illusion that shall deceive even the performer of the miracle.
Though he make his body, he denies that he makes it. Though the world
exist from thought, thought is daunted in presence of the world. One after
the other we accept the mental laws, still resisting those which follow,
which however must be accepted. But all our concessions only compel us to
new profusion. And what avails it that science has come to treat space and
time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical,
and withal our pretension of _property_ and even of self-hood are fading
with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities; but the
incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which
yesterday was a finality to-day is yielding to a larger generalization?
With such volatile elements to work in, 'tis no wonder if our estimates
are loose and floating. We must work and affirm, but we have no guess of
the value of what we say or do. The cloud is now as big as your hand, and
now it covers a county. That story of Thor, who was set to drain the
drinking-horn in Asgard, and to wrestle with the old woman, and to run
with the runner Lok, and presently found that he had been drinking up the
sea, and wrestling with Time, and racing with Thought, describes us who
are contending, amid these seeming trifles, with the supreme energies of
Nature. We fancy we have fallen into bad company and squalid condition,
low debts, shoe-bills, broken glass to pay for, pots to buy, butcher's
meat, sugar, milk, and coal. "Set me some great task, ye gods! and I will
show my spirit." "Not so," says the good Heaven; "plod and plough, vamp
your old coats and hats, weave a shoestring; great affairs and the best
wine by-and-by." Well, 'tis all phantasm; and if we weave a yard of tape
in all humility, and as well as we can, long hereafter we shall see it was
no cotton tape at all, but some galaxy which we braided, and that the
threads were Time and Nature.
We cannot write the order of the variable winds. How can we penetrate the
law of our shifting moods and susceptibility? Yet they differ as all and
nothing. Instead of the firmament of yesterday, which our eyes require, it
is to-day an eggshell which coops us in; we cannot even see what or where
our stars of destiny are. From day to day, the capital facts of human life
are hidden from our eyes. Suddenly the mist rolls up, and reveals them,
and we think how much good time is gone, that might have been saved had
any hint of these things been shown. A sudden rise in the road shows us
the system of mountains, and all the summits, which have been just as near
us all the year, but quite out of mind. But these alternations are not
without their order, and we are parties to our various fortune. If life
seem a succession of dreams, yet poetic justice is done in dreams also.
The visions of good men are good; it is the undisciplined will that is
whipped with bad thoughts and bad fortunes. When we break the laws, we
lose our hold on the central reality. Like sick men in hospitals, we
change only from bed to bed, from one folly to another; and it cannot
signify much what becomes of such castaways,--wailing, stupid, comatose
creatures,--lifted from bed to bed, from the nothing of life to the
nothing of death.
In this kingdom of illusions we grope eagerly for stays and foundations.
There is none but a strict and faithful dealing at home, and a severe
barring out of all duplicity or illusion there. Whatever games are played
with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy
with the last honesty and truth. I look upon the simple and childish
virtues of veracity and honesty as the root of all that is sublime in
character. Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all
kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as
my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined,
to all the _eclat_ in the universe. This reality is the foundation of
friendship, religion, poetry, and art. At the top or at the bottom of all
illusions, I set the cheat which still leads us to work and live for
appearances, in spite of our conviction, in all sane hours, that it is
what we really are that avails with friends, with strangers, and with fate
or fortune.
One would think from the talk of men, that riches and poverty were a great
matter; and our civilization mainly respects it. But the Indians say, that
they do not think the white man with his brow of care, always toiling,
afraid of heat and cold, and keeping within doors, has any advantage of
them. The permanent interest of every man is, never to be in a false
position, but to have the weight of Nature to back him in all that he
does. Riches and poverty are a thick or thin costume; and our life--the
life of all of us--identical. For we transcend the circumstance
continually, and taste the real quality of existence; as in our
employments, which only differ in the manipulations, but express the same
laws; or in our thoughts, which wear no silks and taste no ice-creams. We
see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.
The early Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Xenophanes measured their
force on this problem of identity. Diogenes of Apollonia said, that unless
the atoms were made of one stuff, they could never blend and act with one
another. But the Hindoos, in their sacred writings, express the liveliest
feeling, both of the essential identity, and of that illusion which they
conceive variety to be: "The notions, _I am_, and _This is mine_, which
influence mankind, are but delusions of the mother of the world. Dispel, O
Lord of all creatures! the conceit of knowledge which proceeds from
ignorance." And the beatitude of man they hold to lie in being freed from
fascination.