One’s search after the truth in subjective matters is more or
less a search after one’s self, after what is agreeable to one’s
constitutional bias or innate partialities. We do not see the thing
as it is in itself so much as we see it as it stands related to our
individual fragment of existence. The lesson we are slowest to learn
and to act upon is the relativity of truth in all these matters, or
that it is what we make it. It is a product of the mind, as the apple
is of the tree. We get one kind of truth from Renan, another from
Taine, still another from Ruskin or Carlyle or Arnold. The quality
differs according as the minds or spirits differ whence the truth
proceeds. Do we expect all the apples in the orchard to be alike? In
general qualities, but not in particular flavors; and in literature
it is the particular flavor that is most precious. It is the quality
imparted to the truth by the conceiving mind that we prize.
It is a long while before we rise to the perception that opposites
are true, that contrary types equally serve. “One supreme does
not contradict another supreme,” says Whitman, “any more than one
eyesight contravenes another eyesight, or one hearing contravenes
another hearing.” Great men have been radical and great men have
been conservative; great men have been orthodox and they have been
heterodox; they have been forces of expansion and they have been
forces of contraction. In literature, it is good to be a realist, and
it is good to be a romanticist; it is good to be a Dumas, and it is
good to be a Zola; it is good to be a Carlyle, and it is good to be a
Mazzini,--always provided that one is so from the inside and not from
without, from original conviction and not from hearsay or conformity.
A man makes his way in the world amid opposing forces; he becomes
something only by overcoming something; there is always a struggle for
survival, and always merit in that which survives. Let each be perfect
after its kind. We do not object to the Gothic type of mind because
it is not the classic, nor to the Englishman because he is not the
Frenchman. We look for the measure of nature or natural force and
authority in these types. Nature is of all types; she is of to-day
as well as of yesterday; she is of this century as well as of the
first; she was with Burns as well as with Pindar. Because the Greek
was natural, shall we say therefore nature is Greek? She is Asiatic,
Icelandic, Saxon, Celtic, American, as well. She is all things to all
men; and without her nothing is that is.