When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at
ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our life is
embosomed in beauty. Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing
forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but
even the tragic and terrible are comely as they take their place in the
pictures of memory. The river-bank, the weed at the water-side, the old
house, the foolish person, however neglected in the passing, have a
grace in the past. Even the corpse that has lain in the chambers has
added a solemn ornament to the house. The soul will not know either
deformity or pain. If in the hours of clear reason we should speak the
severest truth, we should say that we had never made a sacrifice. In
these hours the mind seems so great that nothing can be taken from us
that seems much. All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe
remains to the heart unhurt. Neither vexations nor calamities abate our
trust. No man ever stated his griefs as lightly as he might. Allow for
exaggeration in the most patient and sorely ridden hack that ever was
driven. For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the
infinite lies stretched in smiling repose.
The intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful if man will live
the life of nature and not import into his mind difficulties which are
none of his. No man need be perplexed in his speculations. Let him do
and say what strictly belongs to him, and though very ignorant of
books, his nature shall not yield him any intellectual obstructions and
doubts. Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of
original sin, origin of evil, predestination and the like. These never
presented a practical difficulty to any man,—never darkened across any
man’s road who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the
soul’s mumps and measles and whooping-coughs, and those who have not
caught them cannot describe their health or prescribe the cure. A
simple mind will not know these enemies. It is quite another thing that
he should be able to give account of his faith and expound to another
the theory of his self-union and freedom. This requires rare gifts. Yet
without this self-knowledge there may be a sylvan strength and
integrity in that which he is. “A few strong instincts and a few plain
rules” suffice us.
My will never gave the images in my mind the rank they now take. The
regular course of studies, the years of academical and professional
education have not yielded me better facts than some idle books under
the bench at the Latin School. What we do not call education is more
precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of
receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often
wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this natural
magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.
In like manner our moral nature is vitiated by any interference of our
will. People represent virtue as a struggle, and take to themselves
great airs upon their attainments, and the question is everywhere vexed
when a noble nature is commended, whether the man is not better who
strives with temptation. But there is no merit in the matter. Either
God is there or he is not there. We love characters in proportion as
they are impulsive and spontaneous. The less a man thinks or knows
about his virtues the better we like him. Timoleon’s victories are the
best victories, which ran and flowed like Homer’s verses, Plutarch
said. When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful and
pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are,
and not turn sourly on the angel and say ‘Crump is a better man with
his grunting resistance to all his native devils.’
Not less conspicuous is the preponderance of nature over will in all
practical life. There is less intention in history than we ascribe to
it. We impute deep-laid far-sighted plans to Cæsar and Napoleon; but
the best of their power was in nature, not in them. Men of an
extraordinary success, in their honest moments, have always sung, ‘Not
unto us, not unto us.’ According to the faith of their times they have
built altars to Fortune, or to Destiny, or to St. Julian. Their success
lay in their parallelism to the course of thought, which found in them
an unobstructed channel; and the wonders of which they were the visible
conductors seemed to the eye their deed. Did the wires generate the
galvanism? It is even true that there was less in them on which they
could reflect than in another; as the virtue of a pipe is to be smooth
and hollow. That which externally seemed will and immovableness was
willingness and self-annihilation. Could Shakspeare give a theory of
Shakspeare? Could ever a man of prodigious mathematical genius convey
to others any insight into his methods? If he could communicate that
secret it would instantly lose its exaggerated value, blending with the
daylight and the vital energy the power to stand and to go.
The lesson is forcibly taught by these observations that our life might
be much easier and simpler than we make it; that the world might be a
happier place than it is; that there is no need of struggles,
convulsions, and despairs, of the wringing of the hands and the
gnashing of the teeth; that we miscreate our own evils. We interfere
with the optimism of nature; for whenever we get this vantage-ground of
the past, or of a wiser mind in the present, we are able to discern
that we are begirt with laws which execute themselves.
The face of external nature teaches the same lesson. Nature will not
have us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our
learning much better than she likes our frauds and wars. When we come
out of the caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition-convention, or the
Temperance-meeting, or the Transcendental club into the fields and
woods, she says to us, ‘So hot? my little Sir.’
We are full of mechanical actions. We must needs intermeddle and have
things in our own way, until the sacrifices and virtues of society are
odious. Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our
Sunday-schools and churches and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck.
We pain ourselves to please nobody. There are natural ways of arriving
at the same ends at which these aim, but do not arrive. Why should all
virtue work in one and the same way? Why should all give dollars? It is
very inconvenient to us country folk, and we do not think any good will
come of it. We have not dollars; merchants have; let them give them.
Farmers will give corn; poets will sing; women will sew; laborers will
lend a hand; the children will bring flowers. And why drag this dead
weight of a Sunday-school over the whole Christendom? It is natural and
beautiful that childhood should inquire and maturity should teach; but
it is time enough to answer questions when they are asked. Do not shut
up the young people against their will in a pew and force the children
to ask them questions for an hour against their will.
If we look wider, things are all alike; laws and letters and creeds and
modes of living seem a travesty of truth. Our society is encumbered by
ponderous machinery, which resembles the endless aqueducts which the
Romans built over hill and dale and which are superseded by the
discovery of the law that water rises to the level of its source. It is
a Chinese wall which any nimble Tartar can leap over. It is a standing
army, not so good as a peace. It is a graduated, titled, richly
appointed empire, quite superfluous when town-meetings are found to
answer just as well.
Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways.
When the fruit is ripe, it falls. When the fruit is despatched, the
leaf falls. The circuit of the waters is mere falling. The walking of
man and all animals is a falling forward. All our manual labor and
works of strength, as prying, splitting, digging, rowing and so forth,
are done by dint of continual falling, and the globe, earth, moon,
comet, sun, star, fall for ever and ever.
The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of
a machine. He who sees moral nature out and out and thoroughly knows
how knowledge is acquired and character formed, is a pedant. The
simplicity of nature is not that which may easily be read, but is
inexhaustible. The last analysis can no wise be made. We judge of a
man’s wisdom by his hope, knowing that the perception of the
inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth. The wild fertility of
nature is felt in comparing our rigid names and reputations with our
fluid consciousness. We pass in the world for sects and schools, for
erudition and piety, and we are all the time jejune babes. One sees
very well how Pyrrhonism grew up. Every man sees that he is that middle
point whereof every thing may be affirmed and denied with equal reason.
He is old, he is young, he is very wise, he is altogether ignorant. He
hears and feels what you say of the seraphim, and of the tin-peddler.
There is no permanent wise man except in the figment of the Stoics. We
side with the hero, as we read or paint, against the coward and the
robber; but we have been ourselves that coward and robber, and shall be
again,—not in the low circumstance, but in comparison with the
grandeurs possible to the soul.
A little consideration of what takes place around us every day would
show us that a higher law than that of our will regulates events; that
our painful labors are unnecessary and fruitless; that only in our
easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong, and by contenting
ourselves with obedience we become divine. Belief and love,—a believing
love will relieve us of a vast load of care. O my brothers, God exists.
There is a soul at the centre of nature and over the will of every man,
so that none of us can wrong the universe. It has so infused its strong
enchantment into nature that we prosper when we accept its advice, and
when we struggle to wound its creatures our hands are glued to our
sides, or they beat our own breasts. The whole course of things goes to
teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance for each of us,
and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word. Why need you
choose so painfully your place and occupation and associates and modes
of action and of entertainment? Certainly there is a possible right for
you that precludes the need of balance and wilful election. For you
there is a reality, a fit place and congenial duties. Place yourself in
the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it
floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a
perfect contentment. Then you put all gainsayers in the wrong. Then you
are the world, the measure of right, of truth, of beauty. If we will
not be mar-plots with our miserable interferences, the work, the
society, letters, arts, science, religion of men would go on far better
than now, and the heaven predicted from the beginning of the world, and
still predicted from the bottom of the heart, would organize itself, as
do now the rose and the air and the sun.
I say, _do not choose;_ but that is a figure of speech by which I would
distinguish what is commonly called _choice_ among men, and which is a
partial act, the choice of the hands, of the eyes, of the appetites,
and not a whole act of the man. But that which I call right or
goodness, is the choice of my constitution; and that which I call
heaven, and inwardly aspire after, is the state or circumstance
desirable to my constitution; and the action which I in all my years
tend to do, is the work for my faculties. We must hold a man amenable
to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an
excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade.
What business has he with an evil trade? Has he not a _calling_ in his
character?
Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one
direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently
inviting him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in a river;
he runs against obstructions on every side but one, on that side all
obstruction is taken away and he sweeps serenely over a deepening
channel into an infinite sea. This talent and this call depend on his
organization, or the mode in which the general soul incarnates itself
in him. He inclines to do something which is easy to him and good when
it is done, but which no other man can do. He has no rival. For the
more truly he consults his own powers, the more difference will his
work exhibit from the work of any other. His ambition is exactly
proportioned to his powers. The height of the pinnacle is determined by
the breadth of the base. Every man has this call of the power to do
somewhat unique, and no man has any other call. The pretence that he
has another call, a summons by name and personal election and outward
“signs that mark him extraordinary, and not in the roll of common men,”
is fanaticism, and betrays obtuseness to perceive that there is one
mind in all the individuals, and no respect of persons therein.
By doing his work he makes the need felt which he can supply, and
creates the taste by which he is enjoyed. By doing his own work he
unfolds himself. It is the vice of our public speaking that it has not
abandonment. Somewhere, not only every orator but every man should let
out all the length of all the reins; should find or make a frank and
hearty expression of what force and meaning is in him. The common
experience is that the man fits himself as well as he can to the
customary details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as
a dog turns a spit. Then is he a part of the machine he moves; the man
is lost. Until he can manage to communicate himself to others in his
full stature and proportion, he does not yet find his vocation. He must
find in that an outlet for his character, so that he may justify his
work to their eyes. If the labor is mean, let him by his thinking and
character make it liberal. Whatever he knows and thinks, whatever in
his apprehension is worth doing, that let him communicate, or men will
never know and honor him aright. Foolish, whenever you take the
meanness and formality of that thing you do, instead of converting it
into the obedient spiracle of your character and aims.
We like only such actions as have already long had the praise of men,
and do not perceive that any thing man can do may be divinely done. We
think greatness entailed or organized in some places or duties, in
certain offices or occasions, and do not see that Paganini can extract
rapture from a catgut, and Eulenstein from a jews-harp, and a
nimble-fingered lad out of shreds of paper with his scissors, and
Landseer out of swine, and the hero out of the pitiful habitation and
company in which he was hidden. What we call obscure condition or
vulgar society is that condition and society whose poetry is not yet
written, but which you shall presently make as enviable and renowned as
any. In our estimates let us take a lesson from kings. The parts of
hospitality, the connection of families, the impressiveness of death,
and a thousand other things, royalty makes its own estimate of, and a
royal mind will. To make habitually a new estimate,—that is elevation.
What a man does, that he has. What has he to do with hope or fear? In
himself is his might. Let him regard no good as solid but that which is
in his nature and which must grow out of him as long as he exists. The
goods of fortune may come and go like summer leaves; let him scatter
them on every wind as the momentary signs of his infinite
productiveness.
He may have his own. A man’s genius, the quality that differences him
from every other, the susceptibility to one class of influences, the
selection of what is fit for him, the rejection of what is unfit,
determines for him the character of the universe. A man is a method, a
progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to
him wherever he goes. He takes only his own out of the multiplicity
that sweeps and circles round him. He is like one of those booms which
are set out from the shore on rivers to catch drift-wood, or like the
loadstone amongst splinters of steel. Those facts, words, persons,
which dwell in his memory without his being able to say why, remain
because they have a relation to him not less real for being as yet
unapprehended. They are symbols of value to him as they can interpret
parts of his consciousness which he would vainly seek words for in the
conventional images of books and other minds. What attracts my
attention shall have it, as I will go to the man who knocks at my door,
whilst a thousand persons as worthy go by it, to whom I give no regard.
It is enough that these particulars speak to me. A few anecdotes, a few
traits of character, manners, face, a few incidents, have an emphasis
in your memory out of all proportion to their apparent significance if
you measure them by the ordinary standards. They relate to your gift.
Let them have their weight, and do not reject them and cast about for
illustration and facts more usual in literature. What your heart thinks
great is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.
Over all things that are agreeable to his nature and genius the man has
the highest right. Everywhere he may take what belongs to his spiritual
estate, nor can he take any thing else though all doors were open, nor
can all the force of men hinder him from taking so much. It is vain to
attempt to keep a secret from one who has a right to know it. It will
tell itself. That mood into which a friend can bring us is his dominion
over us. To the thoughts of that state of mind he has a right. All the
secrets of that state of mind he can compel. This is a law which
statesmen use in practice. All the terrors of the French Republic,
which held Austria in awe, were unable to command her diplomacy. But
Napoleon sent to Vienna M. de Narbonne, one of the old noblesse, with
the morals, manners and name of that interest, saying that it was
indispensable to send to the old aristocracy of Europe men of the same
connection, which, in fact, constitutes a sort of free-masonry. M. de
Narbonne in less than a fortnight penetrated all the secrets of the
imperial cabinet.
Nothing seems so easy as to speak and to be understood. Yet a man may
come to find _that_ the strongest of defences and of ties,—that he has
been understood; and he who has received an opinion may come to find it
the most inconvenient of bonds.
If a teacher have any opinion which he wishes to conceal, his pupils
will become as fully indoctrinated into that as into any which he
publishes. If you pour water into a vessel twisted into coils and
angles, it is vain to say, I will pour it only into this or that;—it
will find its level in all. Men feel and act the consequences of your
doctrine without being able to show how they follow. Show us an arc of
the curve, and a good mathematician will find out the whole figure. We
are always reasoning from the seen to the unseen. Hence the perfect
intelligence that subsists between wise men of remote ages. A man
cannot bury his meanings so deep in his book but time and like-minded
men will find them. Plato had a secret doctrine, had he? What secret
can he conceal from the eyes of Bacon? of Montaigne? of Kant?
Therefore, Aristotle said of his works, “They are published and not
published.”
No man can learn what he has not preparation for learning, however near
to his eyes is the object. A chemist may tell his most precious secrets
to a carpenter, and he shall be never the wiser,—the secrets he would
not utter to a chemist for an estate. God screens us evermore from
premature ideas. Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that
stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened;
then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.
Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he sees. The world
is very empty, and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for all
its pride. “Earth fills her lap with splendors” _not_ her own. The vale
of Tempe, Tivoli and Rome are earth and water, rocks and sky. There are
as good earth and water in a thousand places, yet how unaffecting!
People are not the better for the sun and moon, the horizon and the
trees; as it is not observed that the keepers of Roman galleries or the
valets of painters have any elevation of thought, or that librarians
are wiser men than others. There are graces in the demeanor of a
polished and noble person which are lost upon the eye of a churl. These
are like the stars whose light has not yet reached us.
He may see what he maketh. Our dreams are the sequel of our waking
knowledge. The visions of the night bear some proportion to the visions
of the day. Hideous dreams are exaggerations of the sins of the day. We
see our evil affections embodied in bad physiognomies. On the Alps the
traveller sometimes beholds his own shadow magnified to a giant, so
that every gesture of his hand is terrific. “My children,” said an old
man to his boys scared by a figure in the dark entry, “my children, you
will never see any thing worse than yourselves.” As in dreams, so in
the scarcely less fluid events of the world every man sees himself in
colossal, without knowing that it is himself. The good, compared to the
evil which he sees, is as his own good to his own evil. Every quality
of his mind is magnified in some one acquaintance, and every emotion of
his heart in some one. He is like a quincunx of trees, which counts
five,—east, west, north, or south; or an initial, medial, and terminal
acrostic. And why not? He cleaves to one person and avoids another,
according to their likeness or unlikeness to himself, truly seeking
himself in his associates and moreover in his trade and habits and
gestures and meats and drinks, and comes at last to be faithfully
represented by every view you take of his circumstances.
He may read what he writes. What can we see or acquire but what we are?
You have observed a skilful man reading Virgil. Well, that author is a
thousand books to a thousand persons. Take the book into your two hands
and read your eyes out, you will never find what I find. If any
ingenious reader would have a monopoly of the wisdom or delight he
gets, he is as secure now the book is Englished, as if it were
imprisoned in the Pelews’ tongue. It is with a good book as it is with
good company. Introduce a base person among gentlemen, it is all to no
purpose; he is not their fellow. Every society protects itself. The
company is perfectly safe, and he is not one of them, though his body
is in the room.
What avails it to fight with the eternal laws of mind, which adjust the
relation of all persons to each other by the mathematical measure of
their havings and beings? Gertrude is enamored of Guy; how high, how
aristocratic, how Roman his mien and manners! to live with him were
life indeed, and no purchase is too great; and heaven and earth are
moved to that end. Well, Gertrude has Guy; but what now avails how
high, how aristocratic, how Roman his mien and manners, if his heart
and aims are in the senate, in the theatre and in the billiard-room,
and she has no aims, no conversation that can enchant her graceful
lord?
He shall have his own society. We can love nothing but nature. The most
wonderful talents, the most meritorious exertions really avail very
little with us; but nearness or likeness of nature,—how beautiful is
the ease of its victory! Persons approach us, famous for their beauty,
for their accomplishments, worthy of all wonder for their charms and
gifts; they dedicate their whole skill to the hour and the
company,—with very imperfect result. To be sure it would be ungrateful
in us not to praise them loudly. Then, when all is done, a person of
related mind, a brother or sister by nature, comes to us so softly and
easily, so nearly and intimately, as if it were the blood in our proper
veins, that we feel as if some one was gone, instead of another having
come; we are utterly relieved and refreshed; it is a sort of joyful
solitude. We foolishly think in our days of sin that we must court
friends by compliance to the customs of society, to its dress, its
breeding, and its estimates. But only that soul can be my friend which
I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not
decline and which does not decline to me, but, native of the same
celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience. The scholar
forgets himself and apes the customs and costumes of the man of the
world to deserve the smile of beauty, and follows some giddy girl, not
yet taught by religious passion to know the noble woman with all that
is serene, oracular and beautiful in her soul. Let him be great, and
love shall follow him. Nothing is more deeply punished than the neglect
of the affinities by which alone society should be formed, and the
insane levity of choosing associates by others’ eyes.
He may set his own rate. It is a maxim worthy of all acceptation that a
man may have that allowance he takes. Take the place and attitude which
belong to you, and all men acquiesce. The world must be just. It leaves
every man, with profound unconcern, to set his own rate. Hero or
driveller, it meddles not in the matter. It will certainly accept your
own measure of your doing and being, whether you sneak about and deny
your own name, or whether you see your work produced to the concave
sphere of the heavens, one with the revolution of the stars.
The same reality pervades all teaching. The man may teach by doing, and
not otherwise. If he can communicate himself he can teach, but not by
words. He teaches who gives, and he learns who receives. There is no
teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in
which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you and you are he;
then is a teaching, and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he
ever quite lose the benefit. But your propositions run out of one ear
as they ran in at the other. We see it advertised that Mr. Grand will
deliver an oration on the Fourth of July, and Mr. Hand before the
Mechanics’ Association, and we do not go thither, because we know that
these gentlemen will not communicate their own character and experience
to the company. If we had reason to expect such a confidence we should
go through all inconvenience and opposition. The sick would be carried
in litters. But a public oration is an escapade, a non-committal, an
apology, a gag, and not a communication, not a speech, not a man.
A like Nemesis presides over all intellectual works. We have yet to
learn that the thing uttered in words is not therefore affirmed. It
must affirm itself, or no forms of logic or of oath can give it
evidence. The sentence must also contain its own apology for being
spoken.
The effect of any writing on the public mind is mathematically
measurable by its depth of thought. How much water does it draw? If it
awaken you to think, if it lift you from your feet with the great voice
of eloquence, then the effect is to be wide, slow, permanent, over the
minds of men; if the pages instruct you not, they will die like flies
in the hour. The way to speak and write what shall not go out of
fashion is to speak and write sincerely. The argument which has not
power to reach my own practice, I may well doubt will fail to reach
yours. But take Sidney’s maxim:—“Look in thy heart, and write.” He that
writes to himself writes to an eternal public. That statement only is
fit to be made public which you have come at in attempting to satisfy
your own curiosity. The writer who takes his subject from his ear and
not from his heart, should know that he has lost as much as he seems to
have gained, and when the empty book has gathered all its praise, and
half the people say, ‘What poetry! what genius!’ it still needs fuel to
make fire. That only profits which is profitable. Life alone can impart
life; and though we should burst we can only be valued as we make
ourselves valuable. There is no luck in literary reputation. They who
make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy
readers of the hour when it appears, but a court as of angels, a public
not to be bribed, not to be entreated and not to be overawed, decides
upon every man’s title to fame. Only those books come down which
deserve to last. Gilt edges, vellum and morocco, and
presentation-copies to all the libraries will not preserve a book in
circulation beyond its intrinsic date. It must go with all Walpole’s
Noble and Royal Authors to its fate. Blackmore, Kotzebue, or Pollok may
endure for a night, but Moses and Homer stand for ever. There are not
in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and
understand Plato,—never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet
to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few
persons, as if God brought them in his hand. “No book,” said Bentley,
“was ever written down by any but itself.” The permanence of all books
is fixed by no effort, friendly or hostile, but by their own specific
gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant
mind of man. “Do not trouble yourself too much about the light on your
statue,” said Michael Angelo to the young sculptor; “the light of the
public square will test its value.”
In like manner the effect of every action is measured by the depth of
the sentiment from which it proceeds. The great man knew not that he
was great. It took a century or two for that fact to appear. What he
did, he did because he must; it was the most natural thing in the
world, and grew out of the circumstances of the moment. But now, every
thing he did, even to the lifting of his finger or the eating of bread,
looks large, all-related, and is called an institution.
These are the demonstrations in a few particulars of the genius of
nature; they show the direction of the stream. But the stream is blood;
every drop is alive. Truth has not single victories; all things are its
organs,—not only dust and stones, but errors and lies. The laws of
disease, physicians say, are as beautiful as the laws of health. Our
philosophy is affirmative and readily accepts the testimony of negative
facts, as every shadow points to the sun. By a divine necessity every
fact in nature is constrained to offer its testimony.
Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and
word, the mere air of doing a thing, the intimated purpose, expresses
character. If you act you show character; if you sit still, if you
sleep, you show it. You think because you have spoken nothing when
others spoke, and have given no opinion on the times, on the church, on
slavery, on marriage, on socialism, on secret societies, on the
college, on parties and persons, that your verdict is still expected
with curiosity as a reserved wisdom. Far otherwise; your silence
answers very loud. You have no oracle to utter, and your fellow-men
have learned that you cannot help them; for oracles speak. Doth not
Wisdom cry and Understanding put forth her voice?
Dreadful limits are set in nature to the powers of dissimulation. Truth
tyrannizes over the unwilling members of the body. Faces never lie, it
is said. No man need be deceived who will study the changes of
expression. When a man speaks the truth in the spirit of truth, his eye
is as clear as the heavens. When he has base ends and speaks falsely,
the eye is muddy and sometimes asquint.
I have heard an experienced counsellor say that he never feared the
effect upon a jury of a lawyer who does not believe in his heart that
his client ought to have a verdict. If he does not believe it his
unbelief will appear to the jury, despite all his protestations, and
will become their unbelief. This is that law whereby a work of art, of
whatever kind, sets us in the same state of mind wherein the artist was
when he made it. That which we do not believe we cannot adequately say,
though we may repeat the words never so often. It was this conviction
which Swedenborg expressed when he described a group of persons in the
spiritual world endeavoring in vain to articulate a proposition which
they did not believe; but they could not, though they twisted and
folded their lips even to indignation.
A man passes for that he is worth. Very idle is all curiosity
concerning other people’s estimate of us, and all fear of remaining
unknown is not less so. If a man know that he can do any thing,—that he
can do it better than any one else,—he has a pledge of the
acknowledgment of that fact by all persons. The world is full of
judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every
action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped. In every troop of boys
that whoop and run in each yard and square, a new-comer is as well and
accurately weighed in the course of a few days and stamped with his
right number, as if he had undergone a formal trial of his strength,
speed and temper. A stranger comes from a distant school, with better
dress, with trinkets in his pockets, with airs and pretensions; an
older boy says to himself, ‘It’s of no use; we shall find him out
to-morrow.’ ‘What has he done?’ is the divine question which searches
men and transpierces every false reputation. A fop may sit in any chair
of the world nor be distinguished for his hour from Homer and
Washington; but there need never be any doubt concerning the respective
ability of human beings. Pretension may sit still, but cannot act.
Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never
wrote an Iliad, nor drove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor
abolished slavery.
As much virtue as there is, so much appears; as much goodness as there
is, so much reverence it commands. All the devils respect virtue. The
high, the generous, the self-devoted sect will always instruct and
command mankind. Never was a sincere word utterly lost. Never a
magnanimity fell to the ground, but there is some heart to greet and
accept it unexpectedly. A man passes for that he is worth. What he is
engraves itself on his face, on his form, on his fortunes, in letters
of light. Concealment avails him nothing, boasting nothing. There is
confession in the glances of our eyes, in our smiles, in salutations,
and the grasp of hands. His sin bedaubs him, mars all his good
impression. Men know not why they do not trust him, but they do not
trust him. His vice glasses his eye, cuts lines of mean expression in
his cheek, pinches the nose, sets the mark of the beast on the back of
the head, and writes O fool! fool! on the forehead of a king.
If you would not be known to do any thing, never do it. A man may play
the fool in the drifts of a desert, but every grain of sand shall seem
to see. He may be a solitary eater, but he cannot keep his foolish
counsel. A broken complexion, a swinish look, ungenerous acts and the
want of due knowledge,—all blab. Can a cook, a Chiffinch, an Iachimo be
mistaken for Zeno or Paul? Confucius exclaimed,—“How can a man be
concealed? How can a man be concealed?”
On the other hand, the hero fears not that if he withhold the avowal of
a just and brave act it will go unwitnessed and unloved. One knows
it,—himself,—and is pledged by it to sweetness of peace and to
nobleness of aim which will prove in the end a better proclamation of
it than the relating of the incident. Virtue is the adherence in action
to the nature of things, and the nature of things makes it prevalent.
It consists in a perpetual substitution of being for seeming, and with
sublime propriety God is described as saying, I AM.
The lesson which these observations convey is, Be, and not seem. Let us
acquiesce. Let us take our bloated nothingness out of the path of the
divine circuits. Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low
in the Lord’s power and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.
If you visit your friend, why need you apologize for not having visited
him, and waste his time and deface your own act? Visit him now. Let him
feel that the highest love has come to see him, in thee its lowest
organ. Or why need you torment yourself and friend by secret
self-reproaches that you have not assisted him or complimented him with
gifts and salutations heretofore? Be a gift and a benediction. Shine
with real light and not with the borrowed reflection of gifts. Common
men are apologies for men; they bow the head, excuse themselves with
prolix reasons, and accumulate appearances because the substance is
not.
We are full of these superstitions of sense, the worship of magnitude.
We call the poet inactive, because he is not a president, a merchant,
or a porter. We adore an institution, and do not see that it is founded
on a thought which we have. But real action is in silent moments. The
epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a
calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but
in a silent thought by the way-side as we walk; in a thought which
revises our entire manner of life and says,—‘Thus hast thou done, but
it were better thus.’ And all our after years, like menials, serve and
wait on this, and according to their ability execute its will. This
revisal or correction is a constant force, which, as a tendency,
reaches through our lifetime. The object of the man, the aim of these
moments, is to make daylight shine through him, to suffer the law to
traverse his whole being without obstruction, so that on what point
soever of his doing your eye falls it shall report truly of his
character, whether it be his diet, his house, his religious forms, his
society, his mirth, his vote, his opposition. Now he is not
homogeneous, but heterogeneous, and the ray does not traverse; there
are no thorough lights, but the eye of the beholder is puzzled,
detecting many unlike tendencies and a life not yet at one.
Why should we make it a point with our false modesty to disparage that
man we are and that form of being assigned to us? A good man is
contented. I love and honor Epaminondas, but I do not wish to be
Epaminondas. I hold it more just to love the world of this hour than
the world of his hour. Nor can you, if I am true, excite me to the
least uneasiness by saying, ‘He acted and thou sittest still.’ I see
action to be good, when the need is, and sitting still to be also good.
Epaminondas, if he was the man I take him for, would have sat still
with joy and peace, if his lot had been mine. Heaven is large, and
affords space for all modes of love and fortitude. Why should we be
busybodies and superserviceable? Action and inaction are alike to the
true. One piece of the tree is cut for a weathercock and one for the
sleeper of a bridge; the virtue of the wood is apparent in both.
I desire not to disgrace the soul. The fact that I am here certainly
shows me that the soul had need of an organ here. Shall I not assume
the post? Shall I skulk and dodge and duck with my unseasonable
apologies and vain modesty and imagine my being here impertinent? less
pertinent than Epaminondas or Homer being there? and that the soul did
not know its own needs? Besides, without any reasoning on the matter, I
have no discontent. The good soul nourishes me and unlocks new
magazines of power and enjoyment to me every day. I will not meanly
decline the immensity of good, because I have heard that it has come to
others in another shape.
Besides, why should we be cowed by the name of Action? ’Tis a trick of
the senses,—no more. We know that the ancestor of every action is a
thought. The poor mind does not seem to itself to be any thing unless
it have an outside badge,—some Gentoo diet, or Quaker coat, or
Calvinistic prayer-meeting, or philanthropic society, or a great
donation, or a high office, or, any how, some wild contrasting action
to testify that it is somewhat. The rich mind lies in the sun and
sleeps, and is Nature. To think is to act.
Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is
of an infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with
the celestial air until it eclipses the sun and moon. Let us seek one
peace by fidelity. Let me heed my duties. Why need I go gadding into
the scenes and philosophy of Greek and Italian history before I have
justified myself to my benefactors? How dare I read Washington’s
campaigns when I have not answered the letters of my own
correspondents? Is not that a just objection to much of our reading? It
is a pusillanimous desertion of our work to gaze after our neighbors.
It is peeping. Byron says of Jack Bunting,—
“He knew not what to say, and so he swore.”
I may say it of our preposterous use of books,—He knew not what to do,
and so _he read_. I can think of nothing to fill my time with, and I
find the Life of Brant. It is a very extravagant compliment to pay to
Brant, or to General Schuyler, or to General Washington. My time should
be as good as their time,—my facts, my net of relations, as good as
theirs, or either of theirs. Rather let me do my work so well that
other idlers if they choose may compare my texture with the texture of
these and find it identical with the best.
This over-estimate of the possibilities of Paul and Pericles, this
under-estimate of our own, comes from a neglect of the fact of an
identical nature. Bonaparte knew but one merit, and rewarded in one and
the same way the good soldier, the good astronomer, the good poet, the
good player. The poet uses the names of Cæsar, of Tamerlane, of
Bonduca, of Belisarius; the painter uses the conventional story of the
Virgin Mary, of Paul, of Peter. He does not therefore defer to the
nature of these accidental men, of these stock heroes. If the poet
write a true drama, then he is Cæsar, and not the player of Cæsar; then
the selfsame strain of thought, emotion as pure, wit as subtle, motions
as swift, mounting, extravagant, and a heart as great, self-sufficing,
dauntless, which on the waves of its love and hope can uplift all that
is reckoned solid and precious in the world,—palaces, gardens, money,
navies, kingdoms,—marking its own incomparable worth by the slight it
casts on these gauds of men;—these all are his, and by the power of
these he rouses the nations. Let a man believe in God, and not in names
and places and persons. Let the great soul incarnated in some woman’s
form, poor and sad and single, in some Dolly or Joan, go out to
service, and sweep chambers and scour floors, and its effulgent
daybeams cannot be muffled or hid, but to sweep and scour will
instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top and radiance of
human life, and all people will get mops and brooms; until, lo!
suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some other form and
done some other deed, and that is now the flower and head of all living
nature.
We are the photometers, we the irritable goldleaf and tinfoil that
measure the accumulations of the subtle element. We know the authentic
effects of the true fire through every one of its million disguises.
V.
LOVE
“I was as a gem concealed;
Me my burning ray revealed.”
_Koran_.