effect, alone interests us. We are persuaded that a thread runs through
all things; all worlds are strung on it, as beads; and men, and events,
and life, come to us, only because of that thread; they pass and repass,
only that we may know the direction and continuity of that line. A
book or statement which goes to show that there is no line, but random
and chaos, a calamity out of nothing, a prosperity and no account of
it, a hero born from a fool, a fool from a hero,--dispirits us. Seen
or unseen, we believe the tie exists. Talent makes counterfeit ties;
genius finds the real ones. We hearken to the man of science, because
we anticipate the sequence in natural phenomena which he uncovers. We
love whatever affirms, connects, preserves; and dislike what scatters
or pulls down. One man appears whose nature is to all men's eyes
conserving and constructive; his presence supposes a well-ordered
society, agriculture, trade, large institutions, and empire. If these
did not exist, they would begin to exist through his endeavors.
Therefore, he cheers and comforts men, who feel all this in him very
readily. The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable
things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no
plan of house or state of their own. Therefore, though the town, and
state, and way of living, which our counselor contemplated, might be
a very modest or musty prosperity, yet men rightly go for him, and
reject the reformer, so long as he comes only with axe and crowbar.
But though we are natural conservers and causationists, and reject a
sour, dumpish unbelief, the skeptical class, which Montaigne represents,
have reason, and every man, at some time, belongs to it. Every superior
mind will pass through this domain of equilibration,--I should rather
say, will know how to avail himself of the checks and balances in
nature, as a natural weapon against the exaggeration and formalism of
bigots and blockheads.
Skepticism is the attitude assumed by the student in relation to the
particulars which society adores, but which he sees to be reverent
only in their tendency and spirit. The ground occupied by the skeptic
is the vestibule of the temple. Society does not like to have any
breath of question blown on the existing order. But the interrogation
of custom at all points is an inevitable stage in the growth of every
superior mind, and is the evidence of its perception of the flowing
power which remains itself in all changes.
The superior mind will find itself equally at odds with the evils of
society, and with the projects that are offered to relieve them. The
wise skeptic is a bad citizen; no conservative; he sees the selfishness
of property, and the drowsiness of institutions. But neither is he fit
to work with any democratic party that ever was constituted; for parties
wish every one committed, and he penetrates the popular patriotism.
His politics are those of the "Soul's Errand" of Sir Walter Raleigh;
or of Krishna, in the Bhagavat, "There is none who is worthy of my
love or hatred;" while he sentences law, physic, divinity, commerce,
and custom. He is a reformer: yet he is no better member of the
philanthropic association. It turns out that he is not the champion
of the operative, the pauper, the prisoner, the slave. It stands in
his mind, that our life in this world is not of quite so easy
interpretation as churches and school-books say. He does not wish to
take ground against these benevolences, to play the part of devil's
attorney, and blazon every doubt and sneer that darkens the sun for
him. But he says, There are doubts.
I mean to use the occasion, and celebrate the calendar-day of our Saint
Michel de Montaigne, by counting and describing these doubts or
negations. I wish to ferret them out of their holes, and sun them a
little. We must do with them as the police do with old rogues, who are
shown up to the public at the marshal's office. They will never be so
formidable, when once they have been identified and registered. But
I mean honestly by them--that justice shall be done to their terrors.
I shall not take Sunday objections, made up on purpose to be put down.
I shall take the worst I can find, whether I can dispose of them, or
they of me.
I do not press the skepticism of the materialist. I know the quadruped
opinion will not prevail. 'Tis of no importance what bats and oxen
think. The first dangerous symptom I report is, the levity of intellect;
as if it were fatal to earnestness to know much. Knowledge is the
knowing that we cannot know. The dull pray; the geniuses are light
mockers. How respectable is earnestness on every platform! but intellect
kills it. Nay, San Carlo, my subtle and admirable friend, one of the
most penetrating of men, finds that all direct ascension, even of lofty
piety, leads to this ghastly insight, and sends back the votary
orphaned. My astonishing San Carlo thought the lawgivers and saints
infected. They found the ark empty; saw, and would not tell; and tried
to choke off their approaching followers, by saying, "Action, action,
my dear fellows, is for you!" Bad as was to me this detection by San
Carlo, this frost in July, this blow from a brick, there was still a
worse, namely, the cloy or satiety of the saints. In the mount of
vision, ere they have yet risen from their knees, they say, "We discover
that this our homage and beatitude is partial and deformed; we must
fly for relief to the suspected and reviled Intellect, to the
Understanding, the Mephistopheles, to the gymnastics of latent."
This is hobgoblin the first; and, though it has been the subject of
much elegy, in our nineteenth century, from Byron, Goethe, and other
poets of less fame, not to mention many distinguished private
observers,--I confess it is not very affecting to my imagination; for
it seems to concern the shattering of baby-houses and crockery-shops.
What flutters the church of Rome, or of England, or of Geneva, or of
Boston, may yet be very far from touching any principle of faith. I
think that the intellect and moral sentiment are unanimous; and that,
though philosophy extirpates bugbears, yet it supplies the natural
checks of vice, and polarity to the soul. I think that the wiser a man
is, the more stupendous he finds the natural and moral economy, and
lifts himself to a more absolute reliance.
There is the power of moods, each setting at nought all but its own
tissue of facts and beliefs. There is the power of complexions,
obviously modifying the dispositions and sentiments. The beliefs and
unbeliefs appear to be structural; and, as soon as each man attains
the poise and vivacity which allow the whole machinery to play, he
will not need extreme examples, but will rapidly alternate all opinions
in his own life. Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one
hour. We go forth austere, dedicated, believing in the iron links of
Destiny, and will not turn on our heel to save our life; but a book,
or a bust, or only the sound of a name, shoots a spark through the
nerves, and we suddenly believe in will: my finger-ring shall be the
seal of Solomon: fate is for imbeciles: all is possible to the resolved
mind. Presently, a new experience gives a new turn to our thoughts:
common sense resumes its tyranny: we say, "Well, the army, after all,
is the gate to fame, manners, and poetry: and, look you,--on the whole,
selfishness plants best, prunes best, makes the best commerce, and the
best citizen." Are the opinions of a man on right and wrong, on fate
and causation, at the mercy of a broken sleep or an indigestion? Is
his belief in God and Duty no deeper than a stomach evidence? And what
guaranty for the permanence of his opinions? I like not the French
celerity,--a new church and state once a week.--This is the second
negation; and I shall let it pass for what it will. As far as it asserts
rotation of states of mind, I suppose it suggests its own remedy,
namely, in the record of larger periods. What is the mean of many
states; of all the states? Does the general voice of ages affirm any
principle, or is no community of sentiment discoverable in distant
times and places? And when it shows the power of self-interest, I
accept that as a part of the divine law, and must reconcile it with
aspiration the best I can.
The word Fate, or Destiny, expresses the sense of mankind, in all
ages,--that the laws of the world do not always befriend, but often
hurt and crush us. Fate, in the shape of Kinde or nature, grows over
us like grass. We paint Time with a scythe; Love and Fortune, blind;
and Destiny, deaf. We have too little power of resistance against this
ferocity which champs us up. What front can we make against these
unavoidable, victorious, maleficent forces? What can I do against the
influence of Race, in my history? What can I do against hereditary and
constitutional habits, against scrofula, lymph, impotence? against
climate, against barbarism, in my country? I can reason down or deny
everything, except this perpetual Belly; feed he must and will, and
I cannot make him respectable.
But the main resistance which the affirmative impulse finds, and one
including all others, is in the doctrine of the Illusionists. There
is a painful rumor in circulation, that we have been practiced upon
in all the principal performances of life, and free agency is the
emptiest name. We have been sopped and drugged with the air, with food,
with woman, with children, with sciences, with events which leave us
exactly where they found us. The mathematics, 'tis complained, leave
the mind where they find it: so do all sciences; and so do all events
and actions. I find a man who has passed through all the sciences, the
churl he was; and, through all the offices, learned, civil, and social,
can detect the child. We are not the less necessitated to dedicate
life to them. In fact, we may come to accept it as the fixed rule and
theory of our state of education, that God is a substance, and his
method is illusion. The eastern sages owned the goddess Yoganidra, the
great illusory energy of Vishnu, by whom, as utter ignorance, the whole
world is beguiled.
Or, shall I state it thus?--The astonishment of life, is, the absence
of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and practice
of life. Reason, the prized reality, the Law, is apprehended, now and
then, for a serene and profound moment, amidst the hubbub of cares and
works which have no direct bearing on it;--is then lost, for months
or years, and again found, for an interval, to be lost again. If we
compute it in time, we may, in fifty years, have half a dozen reasonable
hours. But what are these cares and works the better? A method in the
world we do not see, but this parallelism of great and little, which
never react on each other, nor discover the smallest tendency to
converge. Experiences, fortunes, governings, readings, writings are
nothing to the purpose; as when a man comes into the room, it does not
appear whether he has been fed on yams or buffalo,--he has contrived
to get so much bone and fibre as he wants, out of rice or out of snow.
So vast is the disproportion between the sky of law and the pismire
of performance under it, that, whether he is a man of worth or a sot,
is not so great a matter as we say. Shall I add, as one juggle of this
enchantment, the stunning non-intercourse law which makes cooperation
impossible? The young spirit pants to enter society. But all the ways
of culture and greatness lead to solitary imprisonment. He has been
often baulked. He did not expect a sympathy with his thought from the
village, but he went with it to the chosen and intelligent, and found
no entertainment for it, but mere misapprehension, distaste, and
scoffing. Men are strangely mistimed and misapplied; and the excellence
of each is an inflamed individualism which separates him more.
There are these, and more than these diseases of thought, which our
ordinary teachers do not attempt to remove. Now shall we, because a
good nature inclines us to virtue's side, say, There are no doubts,--and
lie for the right? Is life to be led in a brave or in a cowardly manner?
and is not the satisfaction of the doubts essential to all manliness?
Is the name of virtue to be a barrier to that which is virtue? Can you
not believe that a man of earnest and burly habit may find small good
in tea, essays, and catechism, and want a rougher instruction, want
men, labor, trade, farming, war, hunger, plenty, love, hatred, doubt,
and terror, to make things plain to him; and has he not a right to
insist on being convinced in his own way? When he is convinced, he
will be worth the pains.
Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief
in denying them. Some minds are incapable of skepticism. The doubts
they profess to entertain are rather a civility or accommodation to
the common discourse of their company. They may well give themselves
leave to speculate, for they are secure of a return. Once admitted to
the heaven of thought, they see no relapse into night, but infinite
invitation on the other side. Heaven is within heaven, and sky over
sky, and they are encompassed with divinities. Others there are, to
whom the heaven is brass, and it shuts down to the surface of the
earth. It is a question of temperament, or of more or less immersion
in nature. The last class must needs have a reflex or parasite faith;
not a sight of realities, but an instinctive reliance on the seers and
believers of realities. The manners and thoughts of believers astonish
them, and convince them that these have seen something which is hid
from themselves. But their sensual habit would fix the believer to his
last position, whilst he as inevitably advances; and presently the
unbeliever, for love of belief, burns the believer.
Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic,
atheistic, and really men of no account. The spiritualist finds himself
driven to express his faith by a series of skepticisms. Charitable
souls come with their projects, and ask his cooperation. How can he
hesitate? It is the rule of mere comity and courtesy to agree where
you can, and to turn your sentence with something auspicious, and not
freezing and sinister. But he is forced to say, "O, these things will
be as they must be: what can you do? These particular griefs and crimes
are the foliage and fruit of such trees as we see growing. It is vain
to complain of the leaf or the berry: cut it off; it will bear another
just as bad. You must begin your cure lower down." The generosities
of the day prove an intractable element for him. The people's questions
are not his; their methods are not his; and, against all the dictates
of good nature, he is driven to say, he has no pleasure in them.
Even the doctrines dear to the hope of man, of the divine Providence,
and of the immortality of the soul, his neighbors cannot put the
statement so that he shall affirm it. But he denies out of more faith,
and not less. He denies out of honesty. He had rather stand charged
with the imbecility of skepticism, than with untruth. I believe, he
says, in the moral design of the universe; it exists hospitably for
the weal of the souls; but your dogmas seem to me caricatures; why
should I make believe them? Will any say, this is cold and infidel?
The wise and magnanimous will not say so. They will exult in his
far-sighted good-will, that can abandon to the adversary all the ground
of tradition and common belief, without losing a jot of strength. It
sees to the end of all transgression. George Fox saw "that there was
an ocean of darkness and death; but withal, an infinite ocean of light
and love which flowed over that of darkness."
The final solution in which skepticism is lost is in the moral
sentiment, which never forfeits its supremacy. All moods may be safely
tried, and their weight allowed to all objections: the moral sentiment
as easily outweighs them all, as any one. This is the drop which
balances the sea. I play with the miscellany of facts, and take those
superficial views which we call skepticism; but I know that they will
presently appear to me in that order which makes skepticism impossible.
A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of the universe,
that the masses of nature do undulate and flow.
This faith avails to the whole emergency of life and objects. The world
is saturated with deity and with law. He is content with just and
unjust, with sots and fools, with the triumph of folly and fraud. He
can behold with serenity the yawning gulf between the ambition of man
and his power of performance, between the demand and supply of power,
which makes the tragedy of all souls.
Charles Fourier announced that "the attractions of man are proportioned
to his destinies;" in other words, that every desire predicts its own
satisfaction. Yet, all experience exhibits the reverse of this; the
incompetency of power is the universal grief of young and ardent minds.
They accuse the divine Providence of a certain parsimony. It has shown
the heaven and earth to every child, and filled him with a desire for
the whole; a desire raging, infinite; a hunger, as of space to be
filled with planets; a cry of famine, as of devils for souls. Then for
the satisfaction,--to each man is administered a single drop, a bead
of dew of vital power per day,--a cup as large as space, and one drop
of the water of life in it. Each man woke in the morning, with an
appetite that could eat the solar system like a cake; a spirit for
action and passion without bounds; he could lay his hand on the morning
star; he could try conclusions with gravitation or chemistry; but, on
the first motion to prove his strength--hands, feet, senses, gave way,
and would not serve him. He was an emperor deserted by his states, and
left to whistle by himself, or thrust into a mob of emperors, all
whistling: and still the sirens sang, "The attractions are proportioned
to the destinies." In every house, in the heart of each maiden, and
of each boy, in the soul of the soaring saint, this chasm is found,--
between the largest promise of ideal power, and the shabby experience.
The expansive nature of truth comes to our succor, elastic, not to be
surrounded. Man helps himself by larger generalizations. The lesson
of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and
the centuries say against the hours; to resist the usurpation of
particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense. Things seem to say
one thing, and say the reverse. The appearance is immoral; the result
is moral. Things seem to tend downward, to justify despondency, to
promote rogues, to defeat the just; and, by knaves, as by martyrs, the
just cause is carried forward. Although knaves win in every political
struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands
of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals,
as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization
is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered. We
see, now, events forced on, which seem to retard or retrograde the
civility of ages. But the world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms
and waves cannot drown him. He snaps his finger at laws; and so,
throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through
the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and
atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.
Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting;
let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to
reverence, without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here,
not to work, but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under
abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the
Eternal cause.--
"If my bark sink, 'tis to another sea."
V. SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET.
Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by
originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving,
like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and
making bricks and building the house, no great men are original. Nor
does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero
is in the press of knights, and the thick of events; and, seeing what
men want, and sharing their desire, he adds the needful length of sight
and of arm, to come at the desired point. The greatest genius is the
most indebted man. A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes
uppermost, and, because he says everything, saying, at last, something
good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is nothing
whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest,
freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with the most
determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.
The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not have
any individual great, except through the general. There is no choice
to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning, and say,
"I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic continent:
to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and find a new
food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a new
mechanic power;" no, but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts
and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his
contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and
their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. The
church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out the
advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by her
chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him by
trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two
counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of
production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad.
Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in
his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he
wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the
shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him
thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the
hills, filled the hollows, and bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets,
artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into their
labors. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out of
the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do for
himself: his powers would be expended in the first preparations. Great
genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at
all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and
suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.
Shakspeare's youth fell in a time when the English people were
importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily
at political allusions, and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans,
a growing and energetic party, and the religious among the Anglican
church, would suppress them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards,
houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs,
were the ready theatres of strolling players. The people had tasted
this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress newspapers now,--no,
not by the strongest party,--neither then could king, prelate, or
puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ, which was ballad, epic,
newspaper, caucus, lecture, punch, and library, at the same time.
Probably king, prelate and puritan, all found their own account in it.
It had become, by all causes, a national interest,--by no means
conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of treating
it in an English history,--but not a whit less considerable, because
it was cheap, and of no account, like a baker's-shop. The best proof
of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this
field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene, Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood,
Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont, and Fletcher.