He exaggerates the circumstance of marriage; and, though he finds false
marriages on the earth, fancies a wiser choice in heaven. But of
progressive souls, all loves and friendships are momentary. Do you
love me? means, Do you see the same truth? If you do, we are happy
with the same happiness; but presently one of us passes into the
perception of new truth;--we are divorced, and no tension in nature
can hold us to each other. I know how delicious is this cup of love,--I
existing for you, you existing for me; but it is a child's clinging
to his toy; an attempt to eternize the fireside and nuptial chamber;
to keep the picture-alphabet through which our first lessons are
prettily conveyed. The Eden of God is bare and grand: like the outdoor
landscape, remembered from the evening fireside, it seems cold and
desolate, whilst you cower over the coals; but, once abroad again, we
pity those who can forego the magnificence of nature, for candle-light
and cards. Perhaps the true subject of the "Conjugal Love" is
conversation, whose laws are profoundly eliminated. It is false, if
literally applied to marriage. For God is the bride or bridegroom of
the soul. Heaven is not the pairing of two, but the communion of all
souls. We meet, and dwell an instant under the temple of one thought,
and part as though we parted not, to join another thought in other
fellowships of joy. So far from there being anything divine in the low
and proprietary sense of, Do you love me? it is only when you leave
and lose me, by casting yourself on a sentiment which is higher than
both of us, that I draw near, and find myself at your side; and I am
repelled, if you fix your eye on me, and demand love. In fact, in the
spiritual world, we change sexes every moment. You love the worth in
me; then I am your husband: but it is not me, but the worth, that fixes
the love; and that worth is a drop of the ocean of worth that is beyond
me. Meantime, I adore the greater worth in another, and so become his
wife. He aspires to a higher worth in another spirit, and is wife of
receiver of that influence.
Whether a self-inquisitorial habit, that he grew into, from jealousy
of the sins to which men of thought are liable, he has acquired, in
disentangling and demonstrating that particular form of moral disease,
an acumen which no conscience can resist. I refer to his feeling of
the profanation of thinking to what is good "from scientifics." "To
reason about faith, is to doubt and deny." He was painfully alive to
the difference between knowing and doing, and this sensibility is
incessantly expressed. Philosophers are, therefore, vipers, cockatrices,
asps, hemorrhoids, presters, and flying serpents; literary men are
conjurers and charlatans.
But this topic suggests a sad afterthought, that here we find the seat
of his own pain. Possibly Swedenborg paid the penalty of introverted
faculties. Success, or a fortunate genius, seems to depend on a happy
adjustment of heart and brain; on a due proportion, hard to hit, of
moral and mental power, which, perhaps, obeys the law of those chemical
ratios which make a proportion in volumes necessary to combination,
as when gases will combine in certain fixed rates, but not at any rate.
It is hard to carry a full cup: and this man, profusely endowed in
heart and mind, early fell into dangerous discord with himself. In his
Animal Kingdom, he surprises us, by declaring that he loved analysis,
and not synthesis; and now, after his fiftieth year, he falls into
jealousy of his intellect; and, though aware that truth is not solitary,
nor is goodness solitary, but both must ever mix and marry, he makes
war on his mind, takes the part of the conscience against it, and, on
all occasions, traduces and blasphemes it. The violence is instantly
avenged. Beauty is disgraced, love is unlovely, when truth, the half
part of heaven, is denied, as much as when a bitterness in men of
talent leads to satire, and destroys the judgment. He is wise, but
wise in his own despite. There is an air of infinite grief, and the
sound of wailing, all over and through this lurid universe. A vampyre
sits in the seat of the prophet, and turns with gloomy appetite to the
images of pain. Indeed, a bird does not more readily weave its nest,
or a mole bore into the ground, than this seer of souls substructs a
new hell and pit, each more abominable than the last, round every new
crew of offenders. He was let down through a column that seemed of
brass, but it was formed of angelic spirits, that he might descend
safely amongst the unhappy, and witness the vastation of souls; and
heard there, for a long continuance, their lamentations; he saw their
tormentors, who increase and strain pangs to infinity; he saw the hell
of the jugglers, the hell of the assassins, the hell of the lascivious;
the hell of robbers, who kill and boil men; the infernal tun of the
deceitful; the excrementitious hells; the hell of the revengeful, whose
faces resembled a round, broad-cake, and their arms rotate like a
wheel. Except Rabelais and Dean Swift, nobody ever had such science
of filth and corruption.
These books should be used with caution. It is dangerous to sculpture
these evanescing images of thought. True in transition, they become
false if fixed. It requires, for his just apprehension, almost a genius
equal to his own. But when his visions become the stereotyped language
of multitudes of persons, of all degrees of age and capacity, they are
perverted. The wise people of the Greek race were accustomed to lead
the most intelligent and virtuous young men, as part of their education,
through the Eleusinian mysteries, wherein, with much pomp and
graduation, the highest truths known to ancient wisdom were taught.
An ardent and contemplative young man, at eighteen or twenty years,
might read once these books of Swedenborg, these mysteries of love and
conscience, and then throw them aside forever. Genius is ever haunted
by similar dreams, when the hells and the heavens are opened to it.
But these pictures are to be held as mystical, that is, as a quite
arbitrary and accidental picture of the truth--not as the truth. Any
other symbol would be as good: then this is safely seen.
Swedenborg's system of the world wants central spontaneity; it is
dynamic, not vital, and lacks power to generate life. There is no
individual in it. The universe is a gigantic crystal, all those atoms
and laminae lie in uninterrupted order, and with unbroken unity, but
cold and still. What seems an individual and a will, is none. There
is an immense chain of intermediation, extending from center to
extremes, which bereaves every agency of all freedom and character.
The universe, in his poem, suffers under a magnetic sleep, and only
reflects the mind of the magnetizer. Every thought comes into each
mind by influence from a society of spirits that surround it, and into
these from a higher society, and so on. All his types mean the same
few things. All his figures speak one speech. All his interlocutors
Swedenborgize. Be they who they may, to this complexion must they come
at last. This Charon ferries them all over in his boat; kings,
counselors, cavaliers, doctors, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Hans Sloane,
King George II., Mahomet, or whosoever, and all gather one grimness
of hue and style. Only when Cicero comes by, our gentle seer sticks
a little at saying he talked with Cicero, and, with a touch of human
relenting, remarks, "one whom it was given me to believe was Cicero;"
and when the _soi disant_ Roman opens his mouth, Rome and eloquence
have ebbed away,--it is plain theologic Swedenborg, like the rest. His
heavens and hells are dull; fault of want of individualism. The
thousand-fold relation of men is not there. The interest that attaches
in nature to each man, because he is right by his wrong, and wrong by
his right, because he defies all dogmatizing and classification, so
many allowances, and contingencies, and futurities, are to be taken
into account, strong by his vices, often paralyzed by his
virtues,--sinks into entire sympathy with his society. This want reacts
to the center of the system. Though the agency of "the Lord" is in
every line referred to by name, it never becomes alive. There is no
lustre in that eye which gazes from the center, and which should vivify
the immense dependency of beings.
The vice of Swedenborg's mind is its theologic determination. Nothing
with him has the liberality of universal wisdom, but we are always in
a church. That Hebrew muse, which taught the lore of right and wrong
to man, had the same excess of influence for him, it has had for the
nations. The mode, as well as the essence, was sacred. Palestine is
ever the more valuable as a chapter in universal history, and ever the
less an available element in education. The genius of Swedenborg,
largest of all modern souls in this department of thought, wasted
itself in the endeavor to reanimate and conserve what had already
arrived at its natural term, and, in the great secular Providence, was
retiring from its prominence, before western modes of thought and
expression. Swedenborg and Behmen both failed by attaching themselves
to the Christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment, which
carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities, in its
bosom.
The excess of influence shows itself in the incongruous importation
of a foreign rhetoric. "What have I to do," asks the impatient reader,
"with jasper and sardonyx, beryl and chalcedony; what with arks and
passovers, ephahs and ephods; what with lepers and emerods; what with
heave-offerings and unleavened bread; chariots of fire, dragons crowned
and horned, behemoth and unicorn? Good for orientals, these are nothing
to me. The more learning you bring to explain them, the more glaring
the impertinence. The more coherent and elaborate the system, the less
I like it. I say, with the Spartan, 'Why do you speak so much to the
purpose, of that which is nothing to the purpose?' My learning is such
as God gave me in my birth and habit, in the delight and study of my
eyes, and not of another man's. Of all absurdities, this of some
foreigner, purposing to take away my rhetoric, and substitute his own,
and amuse me with pelican and stork, instead of thrush and robin;
palm-trees and shittim-wood, instead of sassafras and hickory,--seems
the most needless." Locke said, "God, when he makes the prophet, does
not unmake the man." Swedenborg's history points the remark. The parish
disputes, in the Swedish church, between the friends and foes of Luther
and Melancthon, concerning "faith alone," and "works alone," intrude
themselves into his speculations upon the economy of the universe, and
of the celestial societies. The Lutheran bishop's son, for whom the
heavens are opened, so that he sees with eyes, and in the richest
symbolic forms, the awful truth of things, and utters again, in his
books, as under a heavenly mandate, the indisputable secrets of moral
nature,--with all these grandeurs resting upon him, remains the Lutheran
bishop's son; his judgments are those of a Swedish polemic, and his
vast enlargements purchased by adamantine limitations. He carries his
controversial memory with him, in his visits to the souls. He is like
Michel Angelo, who, in his frescoes, put the cardinal who had offended
him to roast under a mountain of devils; or, like Dante, who avenged,
in vindictive melodies, all his private wrongs; or, perhaps still more
like Montaigne's parish priest, who, if a hailstorm passes over the
village, thinks the day of doom has come, and the cannibals already
have got the pip. Swedenborg confounds us not less with the pains of
Melancthon, and Luther, and Wolfius, and his own books, which he
advertises among the angels.
Under the same theologic cramp, many of his dogmas are bound. His
cardinal position in morals is, that evils should be shunned as sins.
But he does not know what evil is, or what good is, who thinks any
ground remains to be occupied, after saying that evil is to be shunned
as evil. I doubt not he was led by the desire to insert the element
of personality of Deity. But nothing is added. One man, you say, dreads
crysipelas,--show him that this dread is evil: or, one dreads
hell,--show him that dread is evil. He who loves goodness, harbors
angels, reveres reverence, and lives with God. The less we have to do
with our sins, the better. No man can afford to waste his moments in
compunctions. "That is active duty," say the Hindoos, "which is not
for our bondage; that is knowledge, which is for our liberation; all
other duty is good only unto weariness."
Another dogma, growing out of this pernicious theologic limitation,
is this Inferno. Swedenborg has devils. Evil, according to old
philosophers, is good in the making. That pure malignity can exist,
is the extreme proposition of unbelief. It is not to be entertained
by a rational agent; it is atheism; it is the last profanation.
Euripides rightly said,--
"Goodness and being in the gods are one; He who imputes ill to them
makes them none."
To what a painful perversion had Gothic theology arrived, that
Swedenborg admitted no conversion for evil spirits! But the divine
effort is never relaxed; the carrion in the sun will convert itself
to grass and flowers; and man, though in brothels, or jails, or on
gibbets, is on his way to all that is good and true. Burns, with the
wild humor of his apostrophe to "poor old Nickie Ben,"
"O wad ye tak a thought, and mend!"
has the advantage of the vindictive theologian. Everything is
superficial, and perishes, but love and truth only. The largest is
always the truest sentiment, and we feel the more generous spirit of
the Indian Vishnu,-"I am the same to all mankind. There is not one who
is worthy of my love or hatred. They who serve me with adoration,--I
am in them, and they in me. If one whose ways are altogether evil,
serve me alone, he is as respectable as the just man; he is altogether
well employed; he soon becometh of a virtuous spirit, and obtaineth
eternal happiness."
For the anomalous pretension of Revelations of the other world,--only
his probity and genius can entitle it to any serious regard. His
revelations destroy their credit by running into detail. If a man say,
that the Holy Ghost hath informed him that the Last Judgment (or the
last of the judgments) took place in 1757; or, that the Dutch, in the
other world, live in a heaven by themselves, and the English in a
heaven by themselves; I reply, that the Spirit which is holy, is
reserved, taciturn, and deals in laws. The rumors of ghosts and
hobgoblins gossip and tell fortunes. The teachings of the high Spirit
are abstemious, and, in regard to particulars, negative. Socrates'
Genius did not advise him to act or to find, but if he proposed to do
somewhat not advantageous, it dissuaded him. "What God is," he said,
"I know not; what he is not I know." The Hindoos have denominated the
Supreme Being, the "Internal Check." The illuminated Quakers explained
their Light, not as somewhat which leads to any action, but it appears
as an obstruction to anything unfit. But the right examples are private
experiences, which are absolutely at one on this point. Strictly
speaking, Swedenborg's revelation is a confounding of planes,--a capital
offence in so learned a categorist. This is to carry the law of surface
into the plane of substance, to carry individualism and its fopperies
into the realm of essences and generals, which is dislocation and
chaos.
The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. No imprudent, no sociable
angel ever dropt an early syllable to answer the longings of saints,
the fears of mortals. We should have listened on our knees to any
favorite, who, by stricter obedience, had brought his thoughts into
parallelism with the celestial currents, and could hint to human ears
the scenery and circumstance of the newly parted soul. But it is certain
that it must tally with what is best in nature. It must not be inferior
in tone to the already known works of the artist who sculptures the
globes of the firmament, and writes the moral law. It must be fresher
than rainbows, stabler than mountains, agreeing with flowers, with
tides, and the rising and setting of autumnal stars. Melodious poets
shall be hoarse as street ballads, when once the penetrating key-note
of nature and spirit is sounded,--the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart-beat
which makes the tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of blood,
and the sap of trees.
In this mood, we hear the rumor that the seer has arrived, and his
tale is told. But there is no beauty, no heaven: for angels, goblins.
The sad muse loves night and death, and the pit. His Inferno is
mesmeric. His spiritual world bears the same relation to the
generosities and joys of truth, of which human souls have already made
us cognizant, as a man's bad dreams bear to his ideal life. It is
indeed very like, in its endless power of lurid pictures, to the
phenomena of dreaming, which nightly turns many an honest gentleman,
benevolent but dyspeptic, into a wretch, skulking like a dog about the
outer yards and kennels of creation. When he mounts into the heavens,
I do not hear its language. A man should not tell me that he has walked
among the angels; his proof is, that his eloquence makes me one. Shall
the archangels be less majestic and sweet than the figures that have
actually walked the earth? These angels that Swedenborg paints give
us no very high idea of their discipline and culture; they are all
country parsons; their heaven is a _fete champetre_, and evangelical
picnic, or French distribution of prizes to virtuous peasants. Strange,
scholastic, didactic, passionless, bloodless man, who denotes classes of
souls as a botanist disposes of a carex, and visits doleful hells as a
stratum of chalk or hornblende! He has no sympathy. He goes up and down
the world of men, a modern Rhadamanthus in gold-headed cane and peruke,
and with nonchalance, and the air of a referee, distributing souls. The
warm, many-weathered, passionate-peopled world is to him a grammar of
hieroglyphs, or an emblematic freemason's procession. How different is
Jacob Behmen! he is tremulous with emotion, and listens awe-struck, with
the gentlest humanity, to the Teacher whose lessons he conveys; and when
he asserts that, "in some sort, love is greater than God," his heart
beats so high that the thumping against his leathern coat is audible
across the centuries. 'Tis a great difference. Behmen is healthily and
beautifully wise, notwithstanding the mystical narrowness and
incommunicableness. Swedenborg is disagreeably wise, and, with all his
accumulated gifts, paralyzes and repels.
It is the best sign of a great nature, that it opens a foreground,
and, like the breath of morning landscapes, invites us onward.
Swedenborg is retrospective, nor can we divest him of his mattock and
shroud. Some minds are forever restrained from descending into nature;
others are forever prevented from ascending out of it. With a force
of many men, he could never break the umbilical cord which held him
to nature, and he did not rise to the platform of pure genius.
It is remarkable that this man, who, by his perception of symbols, saw
the poetic construction of things, and the primary relation of mind
to matter, remained entirely devoid of the whole apparatus of poetic
expression, which that perception creates. He knew the grammar and
rudiments of the Mother-Tongue,--how could he not read off one strain
into music? Was he like Saadi, who, in his vision, designed to fill
his lap with the celestial flowers, as presents for his friends; but
the fragrance of the roses so intoxicated him, that the skirt dropped
from his hands? or, is reporting a breach of the manners of that
heavenly society? or, was it that he saw the vision intellectually,
and hence that chiding of the intellectual that pervades his books?
Be it as it may, his books have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no
relief to the dead prosaic level. In his profuse and accurate imagery
is no pleasure, for there is no beauty. We wander forlorn in a lack-
lustre landscape. No bird ever sang in all these gardens of the dead.
The entire want of poetry in so transcendent a mind betokens the
disease, and, like a hoarse voice in a beautiful person, is a kind of
warning. I think, sometimes, he will not be read longer. His great
name will turn a sentence. His books have become a monument. His laurels
so largely mixed with cypress, a charnel-breath so mingles with the
temple incense, that boys and maids will shun the spot.
Yet, in this immolation of genius and fame at the shrine of conscience,
is a merit sublime beyond praise. He lived to purpose: he gave a
verdict. He elected goodness as the clue to which the soul must cling
in all this labyrinth of nature. Many opinions conflict as to the true
center. In the shipwreck, some cling to running rigging, some to cask
and barrel, some to spars, some to mast; the pilot chooses with
science,--I plant myself here; all will sink before this; "he comes
to land who sails with me." Do not rely on heavenly favor, or on
compassion to folly, or on prudence, on common sense, the old usage
and main chance of men; nothing can keep you,--not fate, nor health,
nor admirable intellect; none can keep you, but rectitude only,
rectitude forever and ever!--and, with a tenacity that never swerved
in all his studies, inventions, dreams, he adheres to this brave choice.
I think of him as of some transmigratory votary of Indian legend, who
says, "Though I be dog, or jackal, or pismire, in the last rudiments
of nature, under what integument or ferocity, I cleave to right, as
the sure ladder that leads up to man and to God."
Swedenborg has rendered a double service to mankind, which is now only
beginning to be known. By the science of experiment and use, he made
his first steps; he observed and published the laws of nature; and,
ascending by just degrees, from events to their summits and causes,
he was fired with piety at the harmonies he felt, and abandoned himself
to his joy and worship. This was his first service. If the glory was
too bright for his eyes to bear, if he staggered under the trance of
delight, the more excellent is the spectacle he saw, the realities of
being which beam and blaze through him, and which no infirmities of
the prophet are suffered to obscure; and he renders a second passive
service to men, not less than the first,--perhaps, in the great circle
of being, and in the retributions of spiritual nature, not less glorious
or less beautiful to himself.
IV. MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC.
Every fact is related on one side to sensation and, on the other, to
morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two
sides, to find the other; given the upper, to find the under side.
Nothing so thin, but has these two faces; and, when the observer has
seen the obverse, he turns it over to see the reverse.
Life is a pitching of this penny,--heads or tails. We never tire of
this game, because there is still a slight shudder of astonishment at
the exhibition of the other face, at the contrast of the two faces.
A man is flushed with success, and bethinks himself what this good
luck signifies. He drives his bargain in the street; but it occurs
that he also is bought and sold. He sees the beauty of a human face,
and searches the cause of that beauty, which must be more beautiful.
He builds his fortunes, maintains the laws, cherishes his children;
but he asks himself, why? and whereto? This head and this tail are
called, in the language of philosophy, Infinite and Finite; Relative
and Absolute; Apparent and Real; and many fine names beside.
Each man is born with a predisposition to one or the other of these
sides of nature; and it will easily happen that men will be found
devoted to one or the other. One class has the perception of difference,
and is conversant with facts and surfaces; cities and persons; and the
bringing certain things to pass;--the men of talent and action. Another
class have the perception of identity, and are men of faith and
philosophy, men of genius.