which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not
the sword and the lance, but the bush-whack, the turf cutter, the
spade, and the bog-hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and
begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought field. The very winds blew
the Indian's corn-field into the meadow, and pointed out the way which
he had not the skill to follow. He had no better implement with which
to intrench himself in the land than a clamshell. But the farmer is
armed with plough and spade.
In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is
but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilised free and wild
thinking in _Hamlet_ and the _Iliad_, in all the Scriptures and
Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild
duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild--the
mallard--thought, which 'mid falling dews wings its way above the
fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly
and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the
prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light
which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which
perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,--and not a taper
lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light
of common day.
English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake
Poets--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare,
included--breathes no quite fresh and in this sense wild strain. It is
an essentially tame and civilised literature, reflecting Greece and
Rome. Her wilderness is a green wood,--her wild man a Robin Hood. There
is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself.
Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild
man in her, became extinct.
The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The
poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the
accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.
Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a
poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak
for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive
down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his
words as often as he used them--transplanted them to his page with
earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and
natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach
of spring, though they lay half-smothered between two musty leaves
in a library,--ay, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind,
annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature.
I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this
yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is
tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern,
any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I am
acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan
nor Elizabethan age, which no _culture_, in short, can give. Mythology
comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at
least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature.
Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was
exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight;
and, which it still bears, whenever its pristine vigour is unabated.
All other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our
houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, as
old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will endure as long; for
the decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives.
The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The
valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine, having yielded their
crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate,
the Orinoco, the St Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce.
Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become
a fiction of the past--as it is to some extent a fiction of the
present--the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.
The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though
they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common
among Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is not every truth that
recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the
wild clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth
are reminiscent,--others merely _sensible_, as the phrase is,--others
prophetic. Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health.
The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins,
flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have
their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct
before man was created, and hence "indicate a faint and shadowy
knowledge of a previous state of organic existence." The Hindoos
dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on
a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an
unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state
that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large enough
to support an elephant. I confess that I am partial to these wild
fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They are
the sublimest recreation of the intellect. The partridge loves peas,
but not those that go with her into the pot.
In short, all good things are wild and free There is something
in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the
human voice,--take the sound of a bugle in a summer night for
instance,--which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me
of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so
much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and
neighbours wild men, not tame ones. The wilderness of the savage is but
a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.
I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native
rights,--any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original
wild habits and vigour; as when my neighbour's cow breaks out of her
pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, grey
tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow.
It is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi. This exploit confers
some dignity on the herd of my eyes--already dignified. The seeds of
instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like
seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.
Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of a
dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy sport,
like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised
their tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their
horns, as well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe.
But, alas! a sudden loud _Whoa!_ would have damped their ardour at
once, reduced them from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and
sinews like the locomotive. Who but the Evil One has cried, "Whoa!"
to mankind? Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but
a sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his
machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half way. Whatever part the
whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think of a
_side_ of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a _side_ of beef?
I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be
made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats
still left to sow before they become submissive members of society.
Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilisation;
and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited
disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures
broken that they may be reduced to the same level. Men are in the main
alike, but they were made several in order that they might be various.
If a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite as well
as another; if a high one, individual excellence is to be regarded.
Any man can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other man could
serve so rare a use as the author of this illustration did. Confucius
says--"The skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned,
are as the skins of the dog and the sheep tanned." But it is not the
part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make
sheep ferocious; and tanning their skins for shoes is not the best use
to which they can be put.
When looking over a list of men's names in a foreign language, as of
military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular
subject, I am reminded once more that there is nothing in a name. The
name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more
human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of
the Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if
they had been named by the child's rigmarole--_Iery wiery ichery van,
tittle-tol-tan_. I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming
over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous
sound in his own dialect. The names of men are of course as cheap and
as meaningless as _Bose_ and _Tray_, the names of dogs.
Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy if men were named
merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only
to know the genus, and perhaps the race or variety, to know the
individual. We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier
in a Roman army had a name of his own, because we have not supposed
that he had a character of his own. At present, our only true names
are nicknames. I knew a boy who, from his peculiar energy, was called
"Buster" by his playmates, and this rightly supplanted his Christian
name. Some travellers tell us that an Indian had no name given him at
first, but earned it, and his name was his fame; and among some tribes
he acquired a new name with every new exploit. It is pitiful when a man
bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor
fame.
I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still
see men in herds for all them. A familiar name cannot make a man less
strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his
own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and
a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours. I see that my
neighbour, who bears the familiar epithet William, or Edwin, takes
it off with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when asleep or
in anger, or aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear
pronounced by some of his kin at such a time his original wild name in
some jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue.
Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all
around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the
leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society,
to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man--a
sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English
nobility, a civilisation destined to have a speedy limit.
In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a
certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are
already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the
meadows, and deepens the soil--not that which trusts to heating manures
and improved implements and modes of culture only.
Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster,
both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very
late, he honestly slumbered a fool's allowance.
There may be an excess even of informing light. NiÈpce, a Frenchman,
discovered "actinism," that power in the sun's rays which produces
a chemical effect,--that granite rocks, and stone structures, and
statues of metal, "are all alike destructively acted upon during the
hours of sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful,
would soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the
agencies of the universe." But he observed that "those bodies which
underwent this change during the daylight possessed the power of
restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of
night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them." Hence it
has been inferred that "the hours of darkness are as necessary to the
creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom." Not
even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to darkness.
I would not have every man nor every part of man cultivated, any more
than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage,
but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an
immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the
annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.
There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus
invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky
knowledge,--_Gram·tica parda_, tawny grammar,--a kind of mother-wit
derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.
We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It
is said that knowledge is power; and the like. Methinks there is equal
need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will
call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for
what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we
know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?
What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our
negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of
the newspapers--for what are the libraries of science but files of
newspapers?--a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his
memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad
into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like
a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say
to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes,--Go
to grass. You have-eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with
its green crop. The very cows are driven to their country pastures
before the end of May; though I have heard of one unnatural farmer who
kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all the year round. So,
frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge treats
its cattle.
A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful,--while
his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides
being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with--he who knows nothing
about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows
nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he
knows all?
My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my
head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The
highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with
Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to
anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden
revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge
before--a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than
are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist
by the sun. Man cannot _know_ in any higher sense than this, any more
than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun:
[Greek: HÙs ti noÙn ny keinon noÍseis],--"You will not perceive that,
as perceiving a particular thing," say the Chaldean Oracles.
There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we
may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience,
but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate discovery
certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before
that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist,--and with respect
to knowledge we are all children of the mist. The man who takes the
liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation
to the law-maker. "That is active duty," says the Vishnu Purana, "which
is not for our bondage; that is knowledge which is for our liberation:
all other duty is good only unto weariness; all other knowledge is only
the cleverness of an artist."
It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories;
how little exercised we have been in our minds; how few experiences we
have had. I would fain be assured that I am growing apace and rankly,
though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity,--though it be with
struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It
would be well if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of
this trivial comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others, appear to
have been exercised in their minds more than we: they were subjected
to a kind of culture such as our district schools and colleges do not
contemplate. Even Mahomet, though many may scream at his name, had a
good deal more to live for, ay, and to die for, than they have commonly.
When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is
walking on a railroad, then indeed the cars go by without his hearing
them. But soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and the cars
return.
"Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,
And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,
Traveller of the windy glens,
Why hast thou left my ear so soon?"
While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few
are attracted strongly to Nature. In their relation to Nature men
appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than
the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of
the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape
there is among us! We shall have to be told that the Greeks called the
world [Greek: Kosmos], Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why
they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.
For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of
border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional
and transitional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and
allegiance to the State into whose territories I seem to retreat
are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I
would gladly follow even a will-o'-the wisp through bogs and sloughs
unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the causeway to it.
Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen
one of her features. The walker in the familiar fields which stretch
around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is
described in their owners' deeds, as it were in some far-away field
on the confines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases,
and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested.
These farms which I have myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set
up, appear dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry
to fix them; they fade from the surface of the glass; and the picture
which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with
which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no
anniversary.
I took a walk on Spaulding's Farm the other afternoon. I saw the
setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its
golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble
hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable
and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called
Concord, unknown to me,--to whom the sun was servant,--who had not gone
into society in the village,--who had not been called on. I saw their
park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding's
cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew.
Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew through it.
I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity
or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and
daughters. They are quite well. The farmer's cart-path, which leads
directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out,--as
the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected
skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their
neighbour,--notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team
through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives.
Their coat of arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines
and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no
politics. There was no noise of labour. I did not perceive that they
were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and
hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum,--as of
a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking.
They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for
their industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.
But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out
of my mind even now while I speak and endeavour to recall them,
and recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort
to recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their
cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should
move out of Concord.
We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons
visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would
seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year,
for the grove in our minds is laid waste,--sold feed unnecessary fires
of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for
them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more
genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of
the mind, cast by the _wings_ of some thought in its vernal or autumnal
migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of
the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They
no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China
grandeur. Those _gra-a-ate thoughts_, those _gra-a-ate men_ you hear of!
We hug the earth--how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate
ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my
account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the
top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for
it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never
seen before,--so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might
have walked about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten,
and yet I certainly should never have seen them. But, above all, I
discovered around me,--it was near the end of June,--on the ends of
the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red cone-like
blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward. I
carried straightway to the village the topmost spire, and showed it to
stranger jurymen who walked the streets,--for it was court-week,--and
to farmers and lumber-dealers and wood-choppers and hunters, and not
one had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star
dropped down. Tell of ancient architects finishing their works on the
tops of columns as perfectly as on the lower and more visible parts!
Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest
only toward the heavens, above men's heads and unobserved by them. We
see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows. The pines
have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood
every summer for ages, as well over the heads of Nature's red children
as of her white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has
ever seen them.