will by clothing the laws of life in illusions. But the unities of Truth
and of Right are not broken by the disguise. There need never be any
confusion in these. In a crowded life of many parts and performers, on a
stage of nations, or in the obscurest hamlet in Maine or California, the
same elements offer the same choices to each new comer, and, according to
his election, he fixes his fortune in absolute nature. It would be hard to
put more mental and moral philosophy than the Persians have thrown into a
sentence:--
Fooled thou must be, though wisest of the wise:
Then be the fool of virtue, not of vice.
There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and
gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal
enters the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with them alone, they
pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their
thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snow-storms of illusions.
He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and
whose movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned,
insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously
commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should
resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment, new
changes, and new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract him. And
when, by-and-by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a
little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones--they
alone with him alone.
FATE[16]
Delicate omens traced in air
To the lone bard true witness bare;
Birds with auguries on their wings
Chanted undeceiving things,
Him to beckon, him to warn;
Well might then the poet scorn
To learn of scribe or courier
Hints writ in vaster character;
And on his mind, at dawn of day,
Soft shadows of the evening lay.
For the prevision is allied
Unto the thing so signified;
Or say, the foresight that awaits
Is the same Genius that creates.
It chanced during one winter, a few years ago, that our critics were bent
on discussing the theory of the Age. By an odd coincidence, four or five
noted men were each reading a discourse to the citizens of Boston or New
York, on the Spirit of the Times. It so happened that the subject had the
same prominence in some remarkable pamphlets and journals issued in London
in the same season. To me, however, the question of the times resolved
itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live?
We are incompetent to solve the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge
orbits of the prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their
opposition. We can only obey our own polarity. 'Tis fine for us to
speculate and elect our course, if we must accept an irresistible
dictation.
In our first steps to gain our wishes, we come upon immovable limitations.
We are fired with the hope to reform men. After many experiments, we find
that we must begin earlier--at school. But the boys and girls are not
docile; we can make nothing of them. We decide that they are not of good
stock. We must begin our reform earlier still--at generation: that is to
say, there is Fate, or laws of the world.
But, if there be irresistible dictation, this dictation understands
itself. If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm
liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the
power of character. This is true, and that other is true. But our geometry
cannot span these extreme points, and reconcile them. What to do? By
obeying each thought frankly, by harping, or, if you will, pounding on
each string, we learn at last its power. By the same obedience to other
thoughts, we learn theirs, and then comes some reasonable hope of
harmonizing them. We are sure, that, though we know not how, necessity
does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with
the spirit of the times. The riddle of the age has for each a private
solution. If one would study his own time, it must be by this method of
taking up in turn each of the leading topics which belong to our scheme of
human life, and, by firmly stating all that is agreeable to experience on
one, and doing the same justice to the opposing facts in the others, the
true limitations will appear. Any excess of emphasis, on one part, would
be corrected, and a just balance would be made.
But let us honestly state the facts. Our America has a bad name for
superficialness. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and
buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves
to face it. The Spartan, embodying his religion in his country, dies
before its majesty without a question. The Turk, who believes his doom is
written on the iron leaf in the moment when he entered the world, rushes
on the enemy's sabre with undivided will. The Turk, the Arab, the Persian,
accepts the fore-ordained fate.
On two days, it steads not to run from thy grave,
The appointed, and the unappointed day;
On the first, neither balm nor physician can save,
Nor thee, on the second, the Universe slay.
The Hindoo, under the wheel, is as firm. Our Calvinists, in the last
generation, had something of the same dignity. They felt that the weight
of the Universe held them down to their place. What could _they_ do? Wise
men feel that there is something which cannot be talked or voted away--a
strap or belt which girds the world.
The Destiny, minister general,
That executeth in the world o'er all,
The purveyance which God hath seen beforne,
So strong it is that tho' the world had sworn
The contrary of a thing by yea or nay,
Yet sometime it shall fallen on a day
That falleth not oft in a thousand year,
For, certainly, our appetites here,
Be it of war, or peace, or hate, or love,
All this is ruled by the sight above.
CHAUCER: _The Knighte's Tale_.
The Greek Tragedy expressed the same sense: "Whatever is fated, that will
take place. The great immense mind of Jove is not to be transgressed."
Savages cling to a local god of one tribe or town. The broad ethics of
Jesus were quickly narrowed to village theologies, which preach an
election or favoritism. And, now and then, an amiable parson, like Jung
Stilling, or Robert Huntington, believes in a pistareen-Providence, which,
whenever the good man wants a dinner, makes that somebody shall knock at
his door, and leave a half-dollar. But Nature is no sentimentalist--does
not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly,
and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like
a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood,
benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the
elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons. The way of
Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the snap of
the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones
of his prey in the coil of the anaconda--these are in the system, and our
habits are like theirs. You have just dined, and, however scrupulously the
slaughter-house is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is
complicity--expensive races--race living at the expense of race. The
planet is liable to shocks from comets, perturbations from planets,
rendings from earthquake and volcano, alterations of climate, precessions
of equinoxes. Rivers dry up by opening of the forest. The sea changes its
bed. Towns and counties fall into it. At Lisbon, an earthquake killed men
like flies. At Naples, three years ago, ten thousand persons were crushed
in a few minutes. The scurvy at sea; the sword of the climate in the west
of Africa, at Cayenne, at Panama, at New Orleans, cut off men like a
massacre. Our Western prairie shakes with fever and ague. The cholera, the
small-pox, have proved as mortal to some tribes, as a frost to the
crickets, which, having filled the summer with noise, are silenced by a
fall of the temperature of one night. Without uncovering what does not
concern us; or counting how many species of parasites hang on a bombyx; or
groping after intestinal parasites, or infusory biters, or the obscurities
of alternate generation;--the forms of the shark, the _labrus_, the jaw of
the sea-wolf paved with crushing teeth, the weapons of the grampus, and
other warriors hidden in the sea--are hints of ferocity in the interiors
of nature. Let us not deny it up and down. Providence has a wild, rough,
incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its
huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in
a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity.
Will you say, the disasters which threaten mankind are exceptional, and
one need not lay his account for cataclysms every day? Ay, but what
happens once, may happen again, and so long as these strokes are not to be
parried by us, they must be feared.
But these shocks and ruins are less destructive to us than the stealthy
power of other laws which act on us daily. An expense of ends to means is
fate--organization tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or forms and
powers of the spine, is a book of fate: the bill of the bird, the skull of
the snake, determines tyrannically its limits. So is the scale of races,
of temperaments; so is sex; so is climate; so is the reaction of talents
imprisoning the vital power in certain directions. Every spirit makes its
house; but afterwards the house confines the spirit.
The gross lines are legible to the dull: the cabman is phrenologist so
far: he looks in your face to see if his shilling is sure. A dome of brow
denotes one thing; a pot-belly another; a squint, a pug-nose, mats of
hair, the pigment of the epidermis, betray character. People seem sheathed
in their tough organization. Ask Spurzheim, ask the doctors, ask Quetelet,
if temperaments decide nothing? or if there be anything they do not
decide? Read the description in medical books of the four temperaments,
and you will think you are reading your own thoughts which you had not yet
told. Find the part which black eyes, and which blue eyes, play severally
in the company. How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off
from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father's or his
mother's life? It often appears in a family, as if all the qualities of
the progenitors were potted in several jars--some ruling quality in each
son or daughter of the house--and sometimes the unmixed temperament, the
rank unmitigated elixir, the family vice, is drawn off in a separate
individual, and the others are proportionally relieved. We sometimes see a
change of expression in our companion, and say, his father, or his mother,
comes to the windows of his eyes, and sometimes a remote relative. In
different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if
there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin,--seven or
eight ancestors at least,--and they constitute the variety of notes for
that new piece of music which his life is. At the corner of the street,
you read the possibility of each passenger, in the facial angle, in the
complexion, in the depth of his eye. His parentage determines it. Men are
what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves
huckaback, why it does not make cashmere, as expect poetry from this
engineer or a chemical discovery from that jobber. Ask the digger in the
ditch to explain Newton's laws: the fine organs of his brains have been
pinched by overwork and squalid poverty from father to son, for a hundred
years. When each comes forth from his mother's womb, the gate of gifts
closes behind him. Let him value his hands and feet, he has but one pair.
So he has but one future, and that is already predetermined in his lobes,
and described in that little fatty face, pig-eye, and squat form. All the
privilege and all the legislation of the world cannot meddle or help to
make a poet or a prince of him.
Jesus said, "When he looketh on her, he hath committed adultery." But he
is an adulterer before he has yet looked on the woman, by the superfluity
of animal, and the defect of thought, in his constitution. Who meets him,
or who meets her, in the street, sees that they are ripe to be each
other's victim.
In certain men, digestion and sex absorb the vital force, and the stronger
these are, the individual is so much weaker. The more of these drones
perish, the better for the hive. If, later, they give birth to some
superior individual, with force enough to add to this animal a new aim,
and a complete apparatus to work it out, all the ancestors are gladly
forgotten. Most men and most women are merely one couple more. Now and
then, one has a new cell or camarilla opened in his brain--an
architectural, a musical, or a philological knack, some stray taste or
talent for flowers, or chemistry, or pigments, or story-telling, a good
hand for drawing, a good foot for dancing, an athletic frame for wide
journeying, etc.--which skill nowise alters rank in the scale of nature,
but serves to pass the time, the life of sensation going on as before. At
last, these hints and tendencies are fixed in one, or in a succession.
Each absorbs so much food and force as to become itself a new centre. The
new talent draws off so rapidly the vital force, that not enough remains
for the animal functions, hardly enough for health; so that, in the second
generation, if the like genius appear, the health is visibly deteriorated,
and the generative force impaired.
People are born with the moral or with the material bias; uterine brothers
with this diverging destination; and I suppose, with high magnifiers, Mr.
Frauenhofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to distinguish in the embryo at
the fourth day, this is a Whig, and that a Free-soiler.
It was a poetic attempt to lift this mountain of Fate, to reconcile this
despotism of race with liberty, which led the Hindoos to say, "Fate is
nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence." I find the
coincidence of the extremes of eastern and western speculation in the
daring statement of Schelling, "There is in every man a certain feeling,
that he has been what he is from all eternity, and by no means became
such in time." To say it less sublimely--in the history of the individual
is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party
to his present estate.
A good deal of our politics is physiological. Now and then, a man of
wealth in the heyday of youth adopts the tenet of broadest freedom. In
England, there is always some man of wealth and large connection planting
himself, during all his years of health, on the side of progress, who, as
soon as he begins to die, checks his forward play, calls in his troops,
and becomes conservative. All conservatives are such from personal
defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and
blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act
on the defensive. But strong natures, backwoodsmen, New Hampshire giants,
Napoleons, Burkes, Broughams, Websters, Kossuths, are inevitable patriots,
until their life ebbs, and their defects and gout, palsy and money, warp
them.
The strongest idea incarnates itself in majorities and nations, in the
healthiest and strongest. Probably, the election goes by avoirdupois
weight, and, if you could weigh bodily the tonnage of any hundred of the
Whig and the Democratic party in a town, on the Dearborn balance, as they
passed the hay scales, you could predict with certainty which party would
carry it. On the whole, it would be rather the speediest way of deciding
the vote, to put the selectmen or the mayor and aldermen at the hayscales.
In science, we have to consider two things: power and circumstance. All we
know of the egg, from each successive discovery, is, _another vesicle_;
and if, after five hundred years, you get a better observer, or a better
glass, he finds within the last observed another. In vegetable and animal
tissue, it is just alike, and all that the primary power or spasm
operates, is, still, vesicles, vesicles. Yes--but the tyrannical
Circumstance! A vesicle in new circumstances, a vesicle lodged in
darkness, Oken thought, became animal; in light, a plant. Lodged in the
parent animal, it suffers changes, which end in unsheathing miraculous
capability in the unaltered vesicle, and it unlocks itself to fish, bird,
or quadruped, head and foot, eye and claw. The Circumstance is Nature.
Nature is, what you may do. There is much you may not. We have two
things--the circumstance, and the life. Once we thought, positive power
was all. Now we learn, that negative power, or circumstance, is half.
Nature is the tyrannous circumstance, the thick skull, the sheathed snake,
the ponderous, rock-like jaw; necessitated activity; violent direction;
the conditions of a tool, like the locomotive, strong enough on its track,
but which can do nothing but mischief off it; or skates, which are wings
on the ice, but fetters on the ground.
The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She turns the gigantic pages--leaf
after leaf--never re-turning one. One leaf she lays down, a floor of
granite; then a thousand ages, and a bed of slate; a thousand ages, and a
measure of coal; a thousand ages, and a layer of marl and mud; vegetable
forms appear; her first misshapen animals, zoophyte, trilobium, fish,
then, saurians--rude forms, in which she has only blocked her future
statue, concealing under these unwieldy monsters the fine type of her
coming king. The face of the planet cools and dries, the races meliorate,
and man is born. But when a race has lived its term, it comes no more
again.
The population of the world is a conditional population; not the best, but
the best that could live now; and the scale of tribes, and the steadiness
with which victory adheres to one tribe, and defeat to another, is as
uniform as the superposition of strata. We know in history what weight
belongs to race. We see the English, French, and Germans, planting
themselves on every shore and market of America and Australia, and
monopolizing the commerce of these countries. We like the nervous and
victorious habit of our own branch of the family. We follow the step of
the Jew, of the Indian, of the Negro. We see how much will has been
expended to extinguish the Jew, in vain. Look at the unpalatable
conclusions of Knox, in his "Fragment of Races,"--a rash and
unsatisfactory writer, but charged with pungent and unforgettable truths.
"Nature respects race, and not hybrids." "Every race has its own
_habitat_." "Detach a colony from the race, and it deteriorates to the
crab." See the shades of the picture. The German and Irish millions, like
the negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried
over the Atlantic, and carted over America, to ditch and to drudge, to
make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of green
grass on the prairie.
One more faggot of these adamantine bandages, is, the new science of
Statistics. It is a rule, that the most casual and extraordinary
events--if the basis of population is broad enough--become matter of fixed
calculation. It would not be safe to say when a captain like Bonaparte, a
singer like Jenny Lind, or a navigator like Bowditch, would be born in
Boston: but, on a population of twenty or two hundred millions, something
like accuracy may be had.[17]
'Tis frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions. They
have all been invented over and over fifty times. Man is the arch machine,
of which all these shifts drawn from himself are toy models. He helps
himself on each emergency by copying or duplicating his own structure,
just so far as the need is. 'Tis hard to find the right Homer, Zoroaster,
or Menu; harder still to find the Tubal Cain, or Vulcan, or Cadmus, or
Copernicus, or Fust, or Fulton, the indisputable inventor. There are
scores and centuries of them. "The air is full of men." This kind of
talent so abounds, this constructive tool-making efficiency, as if it
adhered to the chemic atoms, as if the air he breathes were made of
Vaucansons, Franklins, and Watts.
Doubtless, in every million there will be an astronomer, a mathematician,
a comic poet, a mystic. No one can read the history of astronomy, without
perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not new men, or a new
kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empedocles,
Aristarchus, Pythagoras, OEnopides, had anticipated them; each had the
same tense geometrical brain, apt for the same vigorous computation and
logic, a mind parallel to the movement of the world. The Roman mile
probably rested on a measure of a degree of the meridian. Mahometan and
Chinese know what we know of leap-year, of the Gregorian calendar, and of
the precession of the equinoxes. As, in every barrel of cowries, brought
to New Bedford, there shall be one _orangia_, so there will, in a dozen
millions of Malays and Mahometans, be one or two astronomical skulls. In a
large city, the most casual things, and things whose beauty lies in their
casualty, are produced as punctually and to order as the baker's muffin
for breakfast. "Punch" makes exactly one capital joke a week; and the
journals contrive to furnish one good piece of news every day.
And not less work the laws of repression, the penalties of violated
functions. Famine, typhus, frost, war, suicide, and effete races, must be
reckoned calculable parts of the system of the world.
These are pebbles from the mountain, hints of the terms by which our life
is walled up, and which show a kind of mechanical exactness, as of a loom
or mill, in what we call casual or fortuitous events.
The force with which we resist these torrents of tendency looks so
ridiculously inadequate, that it amounts to little more than a criticism
or a protest made by a minority of one, under compulsion of millions. I
seemed, in the height of a tempest, to see men overboard struggling in the
waves, and driven about here and there. They glanced intelligently at each
other, but 'twas little they could do for one another; 'twas much if each
could keep afloat alone. Well, they had a right to their eye-beams, and
all the rest was Fate.
* * * * *
We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping out in our planted
gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity
that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a
necessity which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he
learns its arc.
The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate,
is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we call Fate. If we are
brute and barbarous, the fate takes a brute and dreadful shape. As we
refine, our checks become finer. If we rise to spiritual culture, the
antagonism takes a spiritual form. In the Hindoo fables, Vishnu follows
Maya through all her ascending changes, from insect and crawfish up to
elephant; whatever form she took, he took the male form of that kind,
until she became at last woman and goddess, and he a man and a god. The
limitations refine as the soul purifies, but the ring of necessity is
always perched at the top.
When the gods in the Norse heaven were unable to bind the Fenris Wolf with
steel or with weight of mountains,--the one he snapped and the other he
spurned with his heel,--they put round his foot a limp band softer than
silk or cobweb, and this held him: the more he spurned it, the stiffer it
grew. So soft and so staunch is the ring of Fate. Neither brandy, nor
nectar, nor sulphuric ether, nor hell-fire, nor ichor, nor poetry, nor
genius, can get rid of this limp band. For if we give it the high sense in
which the poets use it, even thought itself is not above Fate: that too
must act according to eternal laws, and all that is willful and fantastic
in it is in opposition to its fundamental essence.