HISTORY

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet

to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the

right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has

thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any

time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this

universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is

the only and sovereign agent.

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is

illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing

less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human

spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every

thought, every emotion, which belongs to it, in appropriate events. But

the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history

preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances

predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time.

A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand

forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain,

America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp,

kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his

manifold spirit to the manifold world.

This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must

solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all

to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between

the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe

is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book

is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise

of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal

forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages

explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is

one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact

in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men

have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every

revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind, and when the same

thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform

was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion

again it will solve the problem of the age. The fact narrated must

correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We, as we

read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and

executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret

experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or

Cæsar Borgia is as much an illustration of the mind’s powers and

depravations as what has befallen us. Each new law and political

movement has meaning for you. Stand before each of its tablets and say,

‘Under this mask did my Proteus nature hide itself.’ This remedies the

defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our actions

into perspective; and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance and the

waterpot lose their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can

see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon,

Alcibiades, and Catiline.

It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men and

things. Human life, as containing this, is mysterious and inviolable,

and we hedge it round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence

their ultimate reason; all express more or less distinctly some command

of this supreme, illimitable essence. Property also holds of the soul,

covers great spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold to it

with swords and laws and wide and complex combinations. The obscure

consciousness of this fact is the light of all our day, the claim of

claims; the plea for education, for justice, for charity; the

foundation of friendship and love and of the heroism and grandeur which

belong to acts of self-reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily we

always read as superior beings. Universal history, the poets, the

romancers, do not in their stateliest pictures,—in the sacerdotal, the

imperial palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius,—anywhere lose

our ear, anywhere make us feel that we intrude, that this is for better

men; but rather is it true that in their grandest strokes we feel most

at home. All that Shakspeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy

that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathize in

the great moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great

resistances, the great prosperities of men;—because there law was

enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was

struck, _for us_, as we ourselves in that place would have done or

applauded.

We have the same interest in condition and character. We honor the rich

because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace which we

feel to be proper to man, proper to us. So all that is said of the wise

man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader

his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self. All

literature writes the character of the wise man. Books, monuments,

pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he finds the lineaments

he is forming. The silent and the eloquent praise him and accost him,

and he is stimulated wherever he moves, as by personal allusions. A

true aspirant therefore never needs look for allusions personal and

laudatory in discourse. He hears the commendation, not of himself, but,

more sweet, of that character he seeks, in every word that is said

concerning character, yea further in every fact and circumstance,—in

the running river and the rustling corn. Praise is looked, homage

tendered, love flows, from mute nature, from the mountains and the

lights of the firmament.

These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us use in

broad day. The student is to read history actively and not passively;

to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus

compelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles, as never to those

who do not respect themselves. I have no expectation that any man will

read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by

men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he

is doing to-day.

The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or

state of society or mode of action in history to which there is not

somewhat corresponding in his life. Every thing tends in a wonderful

manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should

see that he can live all history in his own person. He must sit solidly

at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but

know that he is greater than all the geography and all the government

of the world; he must transfer the point of view from which history is

commonly read, from Rome and Athens and London, to himself, and not

deny his conviction that he is the court, and if England or Egypt have

any thing to say to him he will try the case; if not, let them for ever

be silent. He must attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts

yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike. The instinct

of the mind, the purpose of nature, betrays itself in the use we make

of the signal narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether

the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to

keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome

are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing

still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what

the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven

an immortal sign? London and Paris and New York must go the same way.

“What is history,” said Napoleon, “but a fable agreed upon?” This life

of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War,

Colonization, Church, Court and Commerce, as with so many flowers and

wild ornaments grave and gay. I will not make more account of them. I

believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain and the

Islands,—the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras, in

my own mind.

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our

private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes

subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only

biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,—must go

over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it

will not know. What the former age has epitomized into a formula or

rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good of verifying

for itself, by means of the wall of that rule. Somewhere, sometime, it

will demand and find compensation for that loss, by doing the work

itself. Ferguson discovered many things in astronomy which had long

been known. The better for him.

History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts

indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see

the necessary reason of every fact,—see how it could and must be. So

stand before every public and private work; before an oration of Burke,

before a victory of Napoleon, before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of

Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson; before a French Reign of Terror, and a

Salem hanging of witches; before a fanatic Revival and the Animal

Magnetism in Paris, or in Providence. We assume that we under like

influence should be alike affected, and should achieve the like; and we

aim to master intellectually the steps and reach the same height or the

same degradation that our fellow, our proxy has done.

All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the

excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis,—is the

desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There or Then,

and introduce in its place the Here and the Now. Belzoni digs and

measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes, until he can see the

end of the difference between the monstrous work and himself. When he

has satisfied himself, in general and in detail, that it was made by

such a person as he, so armed and so motived, and to ends to which he

himself should also have worked, the problem is solved; his thought

lives along the whole line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs,

passes through them all with satisfaction, and they live again to the

mind, or are now.

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and not done by us.

Surely it was by man, but we find it not in our man. But we apply

ourselves to the history of its production. We put ourselves into the

place and state of the builder. We remember the forest-dwellers, the

first temples, the adherence to the first type, and the decoration of

it as the wealth of the nation increased; the value which is given to

wood by carving led to the carving over the whole mountain of stone of

a cathedral. When we have gone through this process, and added thereto

the Catholic Church, its cross, its music, its processions, its Saints’

days and image-worship, we have as it were been the man that made the

minster; we have seen how it could and must be. We have the sufficient

reason.

The difference between men is in their principle of association. Some

men classify objects by color and size and other accidents of

appearance; others by intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause

and effect. The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of

causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poet, to the

philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all

events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the eye is

fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance. Every chemical

substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity

of cause, the variety of appearance.

Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating nature, soft and

fluid as a cloud or the air, why should we be such hard pedants, and

magnify a few forms? Why should we make account of time, or of

magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows them not, and genius, obeying

its law, knows how to play with them as a young child plays with

graybeards and in churches. Genius studies the causal thought, and far

back in the womb of things sees the rays parting from one orb, that

diverge, ere they fall, by infinite diameters. Genius watches the monad

through all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature.

Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the

grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through countless

individuals the fixed species; through many species the genus; through

all genera the steadfast type; through all the kingdoms of organized

life the eternal unity. Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and

never the same. She casts the same thought into troops of forms, as a

poet makes twenty fables with one moral. Through the bruteness and

toughness of matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own will.

The adamant streams into soft but precise form before it, and whilst I

look at it its outline and texture are changed again. Nothing is so

fleeting as form; yet never does it quite deny itself. In man we still

trace the remains or hints of all that we esteem badges of servitude in

the lower races; yet in him they enhance his nobleness and grace; as

Io, in Æschylus, transformed to a cow, offends the imagination; but how

changed when as Isis in Egypt she meets Osiris-Jove, a beautiful woman

with nothing of the metamorphosis left but the lunar horns as the

splendid ornament of her brows!

The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity equally

obvious. There is, at the surface, infinite variety of things; at the

centre there is simplicity of cause. How many are the acts of one man

in which we recognize the same character! Observe the sources of our

information in respect to the Greek genius. We have the _civil history_

of that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have

given it; a very sufficient account of what manner of persons they were

and what they did. We have the same national mind expressed for us

again in their _literature_, in epic and lyric poems, drama, and

philosophy; a very complete form. Then we have it once more in their

_architecture_, a beauty as of temperance itself, limited to the

straight line and the square,—a builded geometry. Then we have it once

again in _sculpture_, the “tongue on the balance of expression,” a

multitude of forms in the utmost freedom of action and never

transgressing the ideal serenity; like votaries performing some

religious dance before the gods, and, though in convulsive pain or

mortal combat, never daring to break the figure and decorum of their

dance. Thus of the genius of one remarkable people we have a fourfold

representation: and to the senses what more unlike than an ode of

Pindar, a marble centaur, the peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last

actions of Phocion?

Every one must have observed faces and forms which, without any

resembling feature, make a like impression on the beholder. A

particular picture or copy of verses, if it do not awaken the same

train of images, will yet superinduce the same sentiment as some wild

mountain walk, although the resemblance is nowise obvious to the

senses, but is occult and out of the reach of the understanding. Nature

is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums

the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her works, and

delights in startling us with resemblances in the most unexpected

quarters. I have seen the head of an old sachem of the forest which at

once reminded the eye of a bald mountain summit, and the furrows of the

brow suggested the strata of the rock. There are men whose manners have

the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the

friezes of the Parthenon and the remains of the earliest Greek art. And

there are compositions of the same strain to be found in the books of

all ages. What is Guido’s Rospigliosi Aurora but a morning thought, as

the horses in it are only a morning cloud? If any one will but take

pains to observe the variety of actions to which he is equally inclined

in certain moods of mind, and those to which he is averse, he will see

how deep is the chain of affinity.

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort

becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form

merely,—but, by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter

enters into his nature and can then draw him at will in every attitude.

So Roos “entered into the inmost nature of a sheep.” I knew a

draughtsman employed in a public survey who found that he could not

sketch the rocks until their geological structure was first explained

to him. In a certain state of thought is the common origin of very

diverse works. It is the spirit and not the fact that is identical. By

a deeper apprehension, and not primarily by a painful acquisition of

many manual skills, the artist attains the power of awakening other

souls to a given activity.

It has been said that “common souls pay with what they do, nobler souls

with that which they are.” And why? Because a profound nature awakens

in us by its actions and words, by its very looks and manners, the same

power and beauty that a gallery of sculpture or of pictures addresses.

Civil and natural history, the history of art and of literature, must

be explained from individual history, or must remain words. There is

nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest

us,—kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron shoe,—the roots of all

things are in man. Santa Croce and the Dome of St. Peter’s are lame

copies after a divine model. Strasburg Cathedral is a material

counterpart of the soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true poem is the

poet’s mind; the true ship is the ship-builder. In the man, could we

lay him open, we should see the reason for the last flourish and

tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the sea-shell preexists

in the secreting organs of the fish. The whole of heraldry and of

chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall pronounce your

name with all the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add.

The trivial experience of every day is always verifying some old

prediction to us and converting into things the words and signs which

we had heard and seen without heed. A lady with whom I was riding in

the forest said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as

if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer

had passed onward; a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance

of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet. The man

who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has

been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the

world. I remember one summer day in the fields my companion pointed out

to me a broad cloud, which might extend a quarter of a mile parallel to

the horizon, quite accurately in the form of a cherub as painted over

churches,—a round block in the centre, which it was easy to animate

with eyes and mouth, supported on either side by wide-stretched

symmetrical wings. What appears once in the atmosphere may appear

often, and it was undoubtedly the archetype of that familiar ornament.

I have seen in the sky a chain of summer lightning which at once showed

to me that the Greeks drew from nature when they painted the

thunderbolt in the hand of Jove. I have seen a snow-drift along the

sides of the stone wall which obviously gave the idea of the common

architectural scroll to abut a tower.

By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances we invent anew

the orders and the ornaments of architecture, as we see how each people

merely decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric temple preserves the

semblance of the wooden cabin in which the Dorian dwelt. The Chinese

pagoda is plainly a Tartar tent. The Indian and Egyptian temples still

betray the mounds and subterranean houses of their forefathers. “The

custom of making houses and tombs in the living rock,” says Heeren in

his Researches on the Ethiopians, “determined very naturally the

principal character of the Nubian Egyptian architecture to the colossal

form which it assumed. In these caverns, already prepared by nature,

the eye was accustomed to dwell on huge shapes and masses, so that when

art came to the assistance of nature it could not move on a small scale

without degrading itself. What would statues of the usual size, or neat

porches and wings have been, associated with those gigantic halls

before which only Colossi could sit as watchmen or lean on the pillars

of the interior?”

The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation of the forest

trees, with all their boughs, to a festal or solemn arcade; as the

bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the green withes that tied

them. No one can walk in a road cut through pine woods, without being

struck with the architectural appearance of the grove, especially in

winter, when the barrenness of all other trees shows the low arch of

the Saxons. In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily

the origin of the stained glass window, with which the Gothic

cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through

the bare and crossing branches of the forest. Nor can any lover of

nature enter the old piles of Oxford and the English cathedrals,

without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder,

and that his chisel, his saw and plane still reproduced its ferns, its

spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, oak, pine, fir and spruce.

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable

demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an

eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the

aerial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty.

In like manner all public facts are to be individualized, all private

facts are to be generalized. Then at once History becomes fluid and

true, and Biography deep and sublime. As the Persian imitated in the

slender shafts and capitals of his architecture the stem and flower of

the lotus and palm, so the Persian court in its magnificent era never

gave over the nomadism of its barbarous tribes, but travelled from

Ecbatana, where the spring was spent, to Susa in summer and to Babylon

for the winter.

In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and Agriculture are

the two antagonist facts. The geography of Asia and of Africa

necessitated a nomadic life. But the nomads were the terror of all

those whom the soil or the advantages of a market had induced to build

towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the

perils of the state from nomadism. And in these late and civil

countries of England and America these propensities still fight out the

old battle, in the nation and in the individual. The nomads of Africa

were constrained to wander, by the attacks of the gad-fly, which drives

the cattle mad, and so compels the tribe to emigrate in the rainy

season and to drive off the cattle to the higher sandy regions. The

nomads of Asia follow the pasturage from month to month. In America and

Europe the nomadism is of trade and curiosity; a progress, certainly,

from the gad-fly of Astaboras to the Anglo and Italo-mania of Boston

Bay. Sacred cities, to which a periodical religious pilgrimage was

enjoined, or stringent laws and customs, tending to invigorate the

national bond, were the check on the old rovers; and the cumulative

values of long residence are the restraints on the itineracy of the

present day. The antagonism of the two tendencies is not less active in

individuals, as the love of adventure or the love of repose happens to

predominate. A man of rude health and flowing spirits has the faculty

of rapid domestication, lives in his wagon and roams through all

latitudes as easily as a Calmuc. At sea, or in the forest, or in the

snow, he sleeps as warm, dines with as good appetite, and associates as

happily as beside his own chimneys. Or perhaps his facility is deeper

seated, in the increased range of his faculties of observation, which

yield him points of interest wherever fresh objects meet his eyes. The

pastoral nations were needy and hungry to desperation; and this

intellectual nomadism, in its excess, bankrupts the mind through the

dissipation of power on a miscellany of objects. The home-keeping wit,

on the other hand, is that continence or content which finds all the

elements of life in its own soil; and which has its own perils of

monotony and deterioration, if not stimulated by foreign infusions.

Every thing the individual sees without him corresponds to his states

of mind, and every thing is in turn intelligible to him, as his onward

thinking leads him into the truth to which that fact or series belongs.

The primeval world,—the Fore-World, as the Germans say,—I can dive to

it in myself as well as grope for it with researching fingers in

catacombs, libraries, and the broken reliefs and torsos of ruined

villas.

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history,

letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic or Homeric

age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or

five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally

through a Grecian period. The Grecian state is the era of the bodily

nature, the perfection of the senses,—of the spiritual nature unfolded

in strict unity with the body. In it existed those human forms which

supplied the sculptor with his models of Hercules, Phœbus, and Jove;

not like the forms abounding in the streets of modern cities, wherein

the face is a confused blur of features, but composed of incorrupt,

sharply defined and symmetrical features, whose eye-sockets are so

formed that it would be impossible for such eyes to squint and take

furtive glances on this side and on that, but they must turn the whole

head. The manners of that period are plain and fierce. The reverence

exhibited is for personal qualities; courage, address, self-command,

justice, strength, swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest. Luxury and

elegance are not known. A sparse population and want make every man his

own valet, cook, butcher and soldier, and the habit of supplying his

own needs educates the body to wonderful performances. Such are the

Agamemnon and Diomed of Homer, and not far different is the picture

Xenophon gives of himself and his compatriots in the Retreat of the Ten

Thousand. “After the army had crossed the river Teleboas in Armenia,

there fell much snow, and the troops lay miserably on the ground

covered with it. But Xenophon arose naked, and taking an axe, began to

split wood; whereupon others rose and did the like.” Throughout his

army exists a boundless liberty of speech. They quarrel for plunder,

they wrangle with the generals on each new order, and Xenophon is as

sharp-tongued as any and sharper-tongued than most, and so gives as

good as he gets. Who does not see that this is a gang of great boys,

with such a code of honor and such lax discipline as great boys have?

The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, and indeed of all the old

literature, is that the persons speak simply,—speak as persons who have

great good sense without knowing it, before yet the reflective habit

has become the predominant habit of the mind. Our admiration of the

antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural. The Greeks

are not reflective, but perfect in their senses and in their health,

with the finest physical organization in the world. Adults acted with

the simplicity and grace of children. They made vases, tragedies, and

statues, such as healthy senses should,—that is, in good taste. Such

things have continued to be made in all ages, and are now, wherever a

healthy physique exists; but, as a class, from their superior

organization, they have surpassed all. They combine the energy of

manhood with the engaging unconsciousness of childhood. The attraction

of these manners is that they belong to man, and are known to every man

in virtue of his being once a child; besides that there are always

individuals who retain these characteristics. A person of childlike

genius and inborn energy is still a Greek, and revives our love of the

Muse of Hellas. I admire the love of nature in the Philoctetes. In

reading those fine apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, mountains

and waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I feel the

eternity of man, the identity of his thought. The Greek had it seems

the same fellow-beings as I. The sun and moon, water and fire, met his

heart precisely as they meet mine. Then the vaunted distinction between

Greek and English, between Classic and Romantic schools, seems

superficial and pedantic. When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to

me,—when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no

more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls

are tinged with the same hue, and do as it were run into one, why

should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian

years?

The student interprets the age of chivalry by his own age of chivalry,

and the days of maritime adventure and circumnavigation by quite

parallel miniature experiences of his own. To the sacred history of the

world he has the same key. When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps

of antiquity merely echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer

of his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of

tradition and the caricature of institutions.

Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us

new facts in nature. I see that men of God have from time to time

walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart and soul

of the commonest hearer. Hence evidently the tripod, the priest, the

priestess inspired by the divine afflatus.

Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They cannot unite him

to history, or reconcile him with themselves. As they come to revere

their intuitions and aspire to live holily, their own piety explains

every fact, every word.

How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Menu, of

Socrates, domesticate themselves in the mind. I cannot find any

antiquity in them. They are mine as much as theirs.

I have seen the first monks and anchorets, without crossing seas or

centuries. More than once some individual has appeared to me with such

negligence of labor and such commanding contemplation, a haughty

beneficiary begging in the name of God, as made good to the nineteenth

century Simeon the Stylite, the Thebais, and the first Capuchins.

The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian, Brahmin, Druid,

and Inca, is expounded in the individual’s private life. The cramping

influence of a hard formalist on a young child, in repressing his

spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that without

producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even much

sympathy with the tyranny,—is a familiar fact, explained to the child

when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth

is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and words and forms

of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth. The fact

teaches him how Belus was worshipped and how the Pyramids were built,

better than the discovery by Champollion of the names of all the

workmen and the cost of every tile. He finds Assyria and the Mounds of

Cholula at his door, and himself has laid the courses.

Again, in that protest which each considerate person makes against the

superstition of his times, he repeats step for step the part of old

reformers, and in the search after truth finds, like them, new perils

to virtue. He learns again what moral vigor is needed to supply the

girdle of a superstition. A great licentiousness treads on the heels of

a reformation. How many times in the history of the world has the

Luther of the day had to lament the decay of piety in his own

household! “Doctor,” said his wife to Martin Luther, one day, “how is

it that whilst subject to papacy we prayed so often and with such

fervor, whilst now we pray with the utmost coldness and very seldom?”

The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has in

literature,—in all fable as well as in all history. He finds that the

poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible situations,

but that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true for one and

true for all. His own secret biography he finds in lines wonderfully

intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born. One after another

he comes up in his private adventures with every fable of Æsop, of

Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and verifies them

with his own head and hands.

The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper creations of the

imagination and not of the fancy, are universal verities. What a range

of meanings and what perpetual pertinence has the story of Prometheus!

Beside its primary value as the first chapter of the history of Europe,

(the mythology thinly veiling authentic facts, the invention of the

mechanic arts and the migration of colonies,) it gives the history of

religion, with some closeness to the faith of later ages. Prometheus is

the Jesus of the old mythology. He is the friend of man; stands between

the unjust “justice” of the Eternal Father and the race of mortals, and

readily suffers all things on their account. But where it departs from

the Calvinistic Christianity and exhibits him as the defier of Jove, it

represents a state of mind which readily appears wherever the doctrine

of Theism is taught in a crude, objective form, and which seems the

self-defence of man against this untruth, namely a discontent with the

believed fact that a God exists, and a feeling that the obligation of

reverence is onerous. It would steal if it could the fire of the

Creator, and live apart from him and independent of him. The Prometheus

Vinctus is the romance of skepticism. Not less true to all time are the

details of that stately apologue. Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus,

said the poets. When the gods come among men, they are not known. Jesus

was not; Socrates and Shakspeare were not. Antaeus was suffocated by

the gripe of Hercules, but every time he touched his mother earth his

strength was renewed. Man is the broken giant, and in all his weakness

both his body and his mind are invigorated by habits of conversation

with nature. The power of music, the power of poetry, to unfix and as

it were clap wings to solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus.

The philosophical perception of identity through endless mutations of

form makes him know the Proteus. What else am I who laughed or wept

yesterday, who slept last night like a corpse, and this morning stood

and ran? And what see I on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus?

I can symbolize my thought by using the name of any creature, of any

fact, because every creature is man agent or patient. Tantalus is but a

name for you and me. Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking the

waters of thought which are always gleaming and waving within sight of

the soul. The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were; but

men and women are only half human. Every animal of the barn-yard, the

field and the forest, of the earth and of the waters that are under the

earth, has contrived to get a footing and to leave the print of its

features and form in some one or other of these upright, heaven-facing

speakers. Ah! brother, stop the ebb of thy soul,—ebbing downward into

the forms into whose habits thou hast now for many years slid. As near

and proper to us is also that old fable of the Sphinx, who was said to

sit in the road-side and put riddles to every passenger. If the man

could not answer, she swallowed him alive. If he could solve the

riddle, the Sphinx was slain. What is our life but an endless flight of

winged facts or events? In splendid variety these changes come, all

putting questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a

superior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts

encumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine, the

men of _sense_, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished

every spark of that light by which man is truly man. But if the man is

true to his better instincts or sentiments, and refuses the dominion of

facts, as one that comes of a higher race; remains fast by the soul and

sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly and supple into their

places; they know their master, and the meanest of them glorifies him.

See in Goethe’s Helena the same desire that every word should be a

thing. These figures, he would say, these Chirons, Griffins, Phorkyas,

Helen and Leda, are somewhat, and do exert a specific influence on the

mind. So far then are they eternal entities, as real to-day as in the

first Olympiad. Much revolving them he writes out freely his humor, and

gives them body to his own imagination. And although that poem be as

vague and fantastic as a dream, yet is it much more attractive than the

more regular dramatic pieces of the same author, for the reason that it

operates a wonderful relief to the mind from the routine of customary

images,—awakens the reader’s invention and fancy by the wild freedom of

the design, and by the unceasing succession of brisk shocks of

surprise.

The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of the bard, sits

on his neck and writes through his hand; so that when he seems to vent

a mere caprice and wild romance, the issue is an exact allegory. Hence

Plato said that “poets utter great and wise things which they do not

themselves understand.” All the fictions of the Middle Age explain

themselves as a masked or frolic expression of that which in grave

earnest the mind of that period toiled to achieve. Magic and all that

is ascribed to it is a deep presentiment of the powers of science. The

shoes of swiftness, the sword of sharpness, the power of subduing the

elements, of using the secret virtues of minerals, of understanding the

voices of birds, are the obscure efforts of the mind in a right

direction. The preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual

youth, and the like, are alike the endeavour of the human spirit “to

bend the shows of things to the desires of the mind.”

In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul a garland and a rose bloom on the

head of her who is faithful, and fade on the brow of the inconstant. In

the story of the Boy and the Mantle even a mature reader may be

surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the triumph of the gentle

Venelas; and indeed all the postulates of elfin annals,—that the

fairies do not like to be named; that their gifts are capricious and

not to be trusted; that who seeks a treasure must not speak; and the

like,—I find true in Concord, however they might be in Cornwall or

Bretagne.

Is it otherwise in the newest romance? I read the Bride of Lammermoor.

Sir William Ashton is a mask for a vulgar temptation, Ravenswood Castle

a fine name for proud poverty, and the foreign mission of state only a

Bunyan disguise for honest industry. We may all shoot a wild bull that

would toss the good and beautiful, by fighting down the unjust and

sensual. Lucy Ashton is another name for fidelity, which is always

beautiful and always liable to calamity in this world.

But along with the civil and metaphysical history of man, another

history goes daily forward,—that of the external world,—in which he is

not less strictly implicated. He is the compend of time; he is also the

correlative of nature. His power consists in the multitude of his

affinities, in the fact that his life is intertwined with the whole

chain of organic and inorganic being. In old Rome the public roads

beginning at the Forum proceeded north, south, east, west, to the

centre of every province of the empire, making each market-town of

Persia, Spain and Britain pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so

out of the human heart go as it were highways to the heart of every

object in nature, to reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a

bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the

world. His faculties refer to natures out of him and predict the world

he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists,

or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live

without a world. Put Napoleon in an island prison, let his faculties

find no men to act on, no Alps to climb, no stake to play for, and he

would beat the air, and appear stupid. Transport him to large

countries, dense population, complex interests and antagonist power,

and you shall see that the man Napoleon, bounded that is by such a

profile and outline, is not the virtual Napoleon. This is but Talbot’s

shadow;—

“His substance is not here.

For what you see is but the smallest part

And least proportion of humanity;

But were the whole frame here,

It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch,

Your roof were not sufficient to contain it.”

—Henry VI.

Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon. Newton and Laplace

need myriads of age and thick-strewn celestial areas. One may say a

gravitating solar system is already prophesied in the nature of

Newton’s mind. Not less does the brain of Davy or of Gay-Lussac, from

childhood exploring the affinities and repulsions of particles,

anticipate the laws of organization. Does not the eye of the human

embryo predict the light? the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of

harmonic sound? Do not the constructive fingers of Watt, Fulton,

Whittemore, Arkwright, predict the fusible, hard, and temperable

texture of metals, the properties of stone, water, and wood? Do not the

lovely attributes of the maiden child predict the refinements and

decorations of civil society? Here also we are reminded of the action

of man on man. A mind might ponder its thought for ages and not gain so

much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day. Who

knows himself before he has been thrilled with indignation at an

outrage, or has heard an eloquent tongue, or has shared the throb of

thousands in a national exultation or alarm? No man can antedate his

experience, or guess what faculty or feeling a new object shall unlock,

any more than he can draw to-day the face of a person whom he shall see

to-morrow for the first time.

I will not now go behind the general statement to explore the reason of

this correspondency. Let it suffice that in the light of these two

facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its

correlative, history is to be read and written.

Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and reproduce its treasures

for each pupil. He too shall pass through the whole cycle of

experience. He shall collect into a focus the rays of nature. History

no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just

and wise man. You shall not tell me by languages and titles a catalogue

of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you

have lived. A man shall be the Temple of Fame. He shall walk, as the

poets have described that goddess, in a robe painted all over with

wonderful events and experiences;—his own form and features by their

exalted intelligence shall be that variegated vest. I shall find in him

the Foreworld; in his childhood the Age of Gold, the Apples of

Knowledge, the Argonautic Expedition, the calling of Abraham, the

building of the Temple, the Advent of Christ, Dark Ages, the Revival of

Letters, the Reformation, the discovery of new lands, the opening of

new sciences and new regions in man. He shall be the priest of Pan, and

bring with him into humble cottages the blessing of the morning stars,

and all the recorded benefits of heaven and earth.

Is there somewhat overweening in this claim? Then I reject all I have

written, for what is the use of pretending to know what we know not?

But it is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one

fact without seeming to belie some other. I hold our actual knowledge

very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the

fungus under foot, the lichen on the log. What do I know

sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of life? As old as

the Caucasian man,—perhaps older,—these creatures have kept their

counsel beside him, and there is no record of any word or sign that has

passed from one to the other. What connection do the books show between

the fifty or sixty chemical elements and the historical eras? Nay, what

does history yet record of the metaphysical annals of man? What light

does it shed on those mysteries which we hide under the names Death and

Immortality? Yet every history should be written in a wisdom which

divined the range of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols. I

am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is.

How many times we must say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What

does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to

these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or

succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kanaka in his

canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?

Broader and deeper we must write our annals,—from an ethical

reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative

conscience,—if we would trulier express our central and wide-related

nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to

which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us,

shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science and of letters is

not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child and

unschooled farmer’s boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to

be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.

II.

SELF-RELIANCE

“Ne te quæsiveris extra.”

“Man is his own star; and the soul that can

Render an honest and a perfect man,

Commands all light, all influence, all fate;

Nothing to him falls early or too late.

Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,

Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”

_Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune._

Cast the bantling on the rocks,

Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat,

Wintered with the hawk and fox.

Power and speed be hands and feet.