PRUDENCE

What right have I to write on Prudence, whereof I have Little, and that

of the negative sort? My prudence consists in avoiding and going

without, not in the inventing of means and methods, not in adroit

steering, not in gentle repairing. I have no skill to make money spend

well, no genius in my economy, and whoever sees my garden discovers

that I must have some other garden. Yet I love facts, and hate

lubricity and people without perception. Then I have the same title to

write on prudence that I have to write on poetry or holiness. We write

from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint

those qualities which we do not possess. The poet admires the man of

energy and tactics; the merchant breeds his son for the church or the

bar; and where a man is not vain and egotistic you shall find what he

has not by his praise. Moreover it would be hardly honest in me not to

balance these fine lyric words of Love and Friendship with words of

coarser sound, and whilst my debt to my senses is real and constant,

not to own it in passing.

Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of appearances.

It is the outmost action of the inward life. It is God taking thought

for oxen. It moves matter after the laws of matter. It is content to

seek health of body by complying with physical conditions, and health

of mind by the laws of the intellect.

The world of the senses is a world of shows; it does not exist for

itself, but has a symbolic character; and a true prudence or law of

shows recognizes the co-presence of other laws and knows that its own

office is subaltern; knows that it is surface and not centre where it

works. Prudence is false when detached. It is legitimate when it is the

Natural History of the soul incarnate, when it unfolds the beauty of

laws within the narrow scope of the senses.

There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the world. It is

sufficient to our present purpose to indicate three. One class live to

the utility of the symbol, esteeming health and wealth a final good.

Another class live above this mark to the beauty of the symbol, as the

poet and artist and the naturalist and man of science. A third class

live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing

signified; these are wise men. The first class have common sense; the

second, taste; and the third, spiritual perception. Once in a long

time, a man traverses the whole scale, and sees and enjoys the symbol

solidly, then also has a clear eye for its beauty, and lastly, whilst

he pitches his tent on this sacred volcanic isle of nature, does not

offer to build houses and barns thereon,—reverencing the splendor of

the God which he sees bursting through each chink and cranny.

The world is filled with the proverbs and acts and winkings of a base

prudence, which is a devotion to matter, as if we possessed no other

faculties than the palate, the nose, the touch, the eye and ear; a

prudence which adores the Rule of Three, which never subscribes, which

never gives, which seldom lends, and asks but one question of any

project,—Will it bake bread? This is a disease like a thickening of the

skin until the vital organs are destroyed. But culture, revealing the

high origin of the apparent world and aiming at the perfection of the

man as the end, degrades every thing else, as health and bodily life,

into means. It sees prudence not to be a several faculty, but a name

for wisdom and virtue conversing with the body and its wants.

Cultivated men always feel and speak so, as if a great fortune, the

achievement of a civil or social measure, great personal influence, a

graceful and commanding address, had their value as proofs of the

energy of the spirit. If a man lose his balance and immerse himself in

any trades or pleasures for their own sake, he may be a good wheel or

pin, but he is not a cultivated man.

The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and

cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature’s joke, and

therefore literature’s. The true prudence limits this sensualism by

admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world. This recognition

once made, the order of the world and the distribution of affairs and

times, being studied with the co-perception of their subordinate place,

will reward any degree of attention. For our existence, thus apparently

attached in nature to the sun and the returning moon and the periods

which they mark,—so susceptible to climate and to country, so alive to

social good and evil, so fond of splendor and so tender to hunger and

cold and debt,—reads all its primary lessons out of these books.

Prudence does not go behind nature and ask whence it is. It takes the

laws of the world whereby man’s being is conditioned, as they are, and

keeps these laws that it may enjoy their proper good. It respects space

and time, climate, want, sleep, the law of polarity, growth and death.

There revolve, to give bound and period to his being on all sides, the

sun and moon, the great formalists in the sky: here lies stubborn

matter, and will not swerve from its chemical routine. Here is a

planted globe, pierced and belted with natural laws and fenced and

distributed externally with civil partitions and properties which

impose new restraints on the young inhabitant.

We eat of the bread which grows in the field. We live by the air which

blows around us and we are poisoned by the air that is too cold or too

hot, too dry or too wet. Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible and

divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A

door is to be painted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood or oil, or

meal or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax, and

an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains, and the

stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word,—these eat

up the hours. Do what we can, summer will have its flies; if we walk in

the woods we must feed mosquitos; if we go a-fishing we must expect a

wet coat. Then climate is a great impediment to idle persons; we often

resolve to give up the care of the weather, but still we regard the

clouds and the rain.

We are instructed by these petty experiences which usurp the hours and

years. The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitant of the

northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the

fixed smile of the tropics. The islander may ramble all day at will. At

night he may sleep on a mat under the moon, and wherever a wild

date-tree grows, nature has, without a prayer even, spread a table for

his morning meal. The northerner is perforce a householder. He must

brew, bake, salt and preserve his food, and pile wood and coal. But as

it happens that not one stroke can labor lay to without some new

acquaintance with nature, and as nature is inexhaustibly significant,

the inhabitants of these climates have always excelled the southerner

in force. Such is the value of these matters that a man who knows other

things can never know too much of these. Let him have accurate

perceptions. Let him, if he have hands, handle; if eyes, measure and

discriminate; let him accept and hive every fact of chemistry, natural

history and economics; the more he has, the less is he willing to spare

any one. Time is always bringing the occasions that disclose their

value. Some wisdom comes out of every natural and innocent action. The

domestic man, who loves no music so well as his kitchen clock and the

airs which the logs sing to him as they burn on the hearth, has solaces

which others never dream of. The application of means to ends insures

victory and the songs of victory not less in a farm or a shop than in

the tactics of party or of war. The good husband finds method as

efficient in the packing of fire-wood in a shed or in the harvesting of

fruits in the cellar, as in Peninsular campaigns or the files of the

Department of State. In the rainy day he builds a work-bench, or gets

his tool-box set in the corner of the barn-chamber, and stored with

nails, gimlet, pincers, screwdriver and chisel. Herein he tastes an old

joy of youth and childhood, the cat-like love of garrets, presses and

corn-chambers, and of the conveniences of long housekeeping. His garden

or his poultry-yard tells him many pleasant anecdotes. One might find

argument for optimism in the abundant flow of this saccharine element

of pleasure in every suburb and extremity of the good world. Let a man

keep the law,—any law,—and his way will be strown with satisfactions.

There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the

amount.

On the other hand, nature punishes any neglect of prudence. If you

think the senses final, obey their law. If you believe in the soul, do

not clutch at sensual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree of

cause and effect. It is vinegar to the eyes to deal with men of loose

and imperfect perception. Dr. Johnson is reported to have said,—“If the

child says he looked out of this window, when he looked out of

that,—whip him.” Our American character is marked by a more than

average delight in accurate perception, which is shown by the currency

of the byword, “No mistake.” But the discomfort of unpunctuality, of

confusion of thought about facts, of inattention to the wants of

to-morrow, is of no nation. The beautiful laws of time and space, once

dislocated by our inaptitude, are holes and dens. If the hive be

disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of honey it will yield us

bees. Our words and actions to be fair must be timely. A gay and

pleasant sound is the whetting of the scythe in the mornings of June,

yet what is more lonesome and sad than the sound of a whetstone or

mower’s rifle when it is too late in the season to make hay?

Scatter-brained and “afternoon” men spoil much more than their own

affair in spoiling the temper of those who deal with them. I have seen

a criticism on some paintings, of which I am reminded when I see the

shiftless and unhappy men who are not true to their senses. The last

Grand Duke of Weimar, a man of superior understanding, said,—“I have

sometimes remarked in the presence of great works of art, and just now

especially in Dresden, how much a certain property contributes to the

effect which gives life to the figures, and to the life an irresistible

truth. This property is the hitting, in all the figures we draw, the

right centre of gravity. I mean the placing the figures firm upon their

feet, making the hands grasp, and fastening the eyes on the spot where

they should look. Even lifeless figures, as vessels and stools—let them

be drawn ever so correctly—lose all effect so soon as they lack the

resting upon their centre of gravity, and have a certain swimming and

oscillating appearance. The Raphael in the Dresden gallery (the only

greatly affecting picture which I have seen) is the quietest and most

passionless piece you can imagine; a couple of saints who worship the

Virgin and Child. Nevertheless, it awakens a deeper impression than the

contortions of ten crucified martyrs. For beside all the resistless

beauty of form, it possesses in the highest degree the property of the

perpendicularity of all the figures.” This perpendicularity we demand

of all the figures in this picture of life. Let them stand on their

feet, and not float and swing. Let us know where to find them. Let them

discriminate between what they remember and what they dreamed, call a

spade a spade, give us facts, and honor their own senses with trust.

But what man shall dare tax another with imprudence? Who is prudent?

The men we call greatest are least in this kingdom. There is a certain

fatal dislocation in our relation to nature, distorting our modes of

living and making every law our enemy, which seems at last to have

aroused all the wit and virtue in the world to ponder the question of

Reform. We must call the highest prudence to counsel, and ask why

health and beauty and genius should now be the exception rather than

the rule of human nature? We do not know the properties of plants and

animals and the laws of nature, through our sympathy with the same; but

this remains the dream of poets. Poetry and prudence should be

coincident. Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric

inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead

the civil code and the day’s work. But now the two things seem

irreconcilably parted. We have violated law upon law until we stand

amidst ruins, and when by chance we espy a coincidence between reason

and the phenomena, we are surprised. Beauty should be the dowry of

every man and woman, as invariably as sensation; but it is rare. Health

or sound organization should be universal. Genius should be the child

of genius and every child should be inspired; but now it is not to be

predicted of any child, and nowhere is it pure. We call partial

half-lights, by courtesy, genius; talent which converts itself to

money; talent which glitters to-day that it may dine and sleep well

to-morrow; and society is officered by _men of parts_, as they are

properly called, and not by divine men. These use their gifts to refine

luxury, not to abolish it. Genius is always ascetic, and piety, and

love. Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and they find

beauty in rites and bounds that resist it.

We have found out fine names to cover our sensuality withal, but no

gifts can raise intemperance. The man of talent affects to call his

transgressions of the laws of the senses trivial and to count them

nothing considered with his devotion to his art. His art never taught

him lewdness, nor the love of wine, nor the wish to reap where he had

not sowed. His art is less for every deduction from his holiness, and

less for every defect of common sense. On him who scorned the world as

he said, the scorned world wreaks its revenge. He that despiseth small

things will perish by little and little. Goethe’s Tasso is very likely

to be a pretty fair historical portrait, and that is true tragedy. It

does not seem to me so genuine grief when some tyrannous Richard the

Third oppresses and slays a score of innocent persons, as when Antonio

and Tasso, both apparently right, wrong each other. One living after

the maxims of this world and consistent and true to them, the other

fired with all divine sentiments, yet grasping also at the pleasures of

sense, without submitting to their law. That is a grief we all feel, a

knot we cannot untie. Tasso’s is no infrequent case in modern

biography. A man of genius, of an ardent temperament, reckless of

physical laws, self-indulgent, becomes presently unfortunate,

querulous, a “discomfortable cousin,” a thorn to himself and to others.

The scholar shames us by his bifold life. Whilst something higher than

prudence is active, he is admirable; when common sense is wanted, he is

an encumbrance. Yesterday, Cæsar was not so great; to-day, the felon at

the gallows’ foot is not more miserable. Yesterday, radiant with the

light of an ideal world in which he lives, the first of men; and now

oppressed by wants and by sickness, for which he must thank himself. He

resembles the pitiful drivellers whom travellers describe as

frequenting the bazaars of Constantinople, who skulk about all day,

yellow, emaciated, ragged, sneaking; and at evening, when the bazaars

are open, slink to the opium-shop, swallow their morsel and become

tranquil and glorified seers. And who has not seen the tragedy of

imprudent genius struggling for years with paltry pecuniary

difficulties, at last sinking, chilled, exhausted and fruitless, like a

giant slaughtered by pins?

Is it not better that a man should accept the first pains and

mortifications of this sort, which nature is not slack in sending him,

as hints that he must expect no other good than the just fruit of his

own labor and self-denial? Health, bread, climate, social position,

have their importance, and he will give them their due. Let him esteem

Nature a perpetual counsellor, and her perfections the exact measure of

our deviations. Let him make the night night, and the day day. Let him

control the habit of expense. Let him see that as much wisdom may be

expended on a private economy as on an empire, and as much wisdom may

be drawn from it. The laws of the world are written out for him on

every piece of money in his hand. There is nothing he will not be the

better for knowing, were it only the wisdom of Poor Richard, or the

State-Street prudence of buying by the acre to sell by the foot; or the

thrift of the agriculturist, to stick a tree between whiles, because it

will grow whilst he sleeps; or the prudence which consists in

husbanding little strokes of the tool, little portions of time,

particles of stock and small gains. The eye of prudence may never shut.

Iron, if kept at the ironmonger’s, will rust; beer, if not brewed in

the right state of the atmosphere, will sour; timber of ships will rot

at sea, or if laid up high and dry, will strain, warp and dry-rot;

money, if kept by us, yields no rent and is liable to loss; if

invested, is liable to depreciation of the particular kind of stock.

Strike, says the smith, the iron is white; keep the rake, says the

haymaker, as nigh the scythe as you can, and the cart as nigh the rake.

Our Yankee trade is reputed to be very much on the extreme of this

prudence. It takes bank-notes, good, bad, clean, ragged, and saves

itself by the speed with which it passes them off. Iron cannot rust,

nor beer sour, nor timber rot, nor calicoes go out of fashion, nor

money stocks depreciate, in the few swift moments in which the Yankee

suffers any one of them to remain in his possession. In skating over

thin ice our safety is in our speed.

Let him learn a prudence of a higher strain. Let him learn that every

thing in nature, even motes and feathers, go by law and not by luck,

and that what he sows he reaps. By diligence and self-command let him

put the bread he eats at his own disposal, that he may not stand in

bitter and false relations to other men; for the best good of wealth is

freedom. Let him practise the minor virtues. How much of human life is

lost in waiting! let him not make his fellow-creatures wait. How many

words and promises are promises of conversation! Let his be words of

fate. When he sees a folded and sealed scrap of paper float round the

globe in a pine ship and come safe to the eye for which it was written,

amidst a swarming population, let him likewise feel the admonition to

integrate his being across all these distracting forces, and keep a

slender human word among the storms, distances and accidents that drive

us hither and thither, and, by persistency, make the paltry force of

one man reappear to redeem its pledge after months and years in the

most distant climates.

We must not try to write the laws of any one virtue, looking at that

only. Human nature loves no contradictions, but is symmetrical. The

prudence which secures an outward well-being is not to be studied by

one set of men, whilst heroism and holiness are studied by another, but

they are reconcilable. Prudence concerns the present time, persons,

property and existing forms. But as every fact hath its roots in the

soul, and if the soul were changed, would cease to be, or would become

some other thing,—the proper administration of outward things will

always rest on a just apprehension of their cause and origin; that is,

the good man will be the wise man, and the single-hearted the politic

man. Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the

liar, but is a stab at the health of human society. On the most

profitable lie the course of events presently lays a destructive tax;

whilst frankness invites frankness, puts the parties on a convenient

footing and makes their business a friendship. Trust men and they will

be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great,

though they make an exception in your favor to all their rules of

trade.

So, in regard to disagreeable and formidable things, prudence does not

consist in evasion or in flight, but in courage. He who wishes to walk

in the most peaceful parts of life with any serenity must screw himself

up to resolution. Let him front the object of his worst apprehension,

and his stoutness will commonly make his fear groundless. The Latin

proverb says, “In battles the eye is first overcome.” Entire

self-possession may make a battle very little more dangerous to life

than a match at foils or at football. Examples are cited by soldiers of

men who have seen the cannon pointed and the fire given to it, and who

have stepped aside from the path of the ball. The terrors of the storm

are chiefly confined to the parlor and the cabin. The drover, the

sailor, buffets it all day, and his health renews itself at as vigorous

a pulse under the sleet as under the sun of June.

In the occurrence of unpleasant things among neighbors, fear comes

readily to heart and magnifies the consequence of the other party; but

it is a bad counsellor. Every man is actually weak and apparently

strong. To himself he seems weak; to others, formidable. You are afraid

of Grim; but Grim also is afraid of you. You are solicitous of the

good-will of the meanest person, uneasy at his ill-will. But the

sturdiest offender of your peace and of the neighborhood, if you rip up

_his_ claims, is as thin and timid as any, and the peace of society is

often kept, because, as children say, one is afraid, and the other

dares not. Far off, men swell, bully and threaten; bring them hand to

hand, and they are a feeble folk.

It is a proverb that ‘courtesy costs nothing’; but calculation might

come to value love for its profit. Love is fabled to be blind, but

kindness is necessary to perception; love is not a hood, but an

eye-water. If you meet a sectary or a hostile partisan, never recognize

the dividing lines, but meet on what common ground remains,—if only

that the sun shines and the rain rains for both; the area will widen

very fast, and ere you know it, the boundary mountains on which the eye

had fastened have melted into air. If they set out to contend, Saint

Paul will lie and Saint John will hate. What low, poor, paltry,

hypocritical people an argument on religion will make of the pure and

chosen souls! They will shuffle and crow, crook and hide, feign to

confess here, only that they may brag and conquer there, and not a

thought has enriched either party, and not an emotion of bravery,

modesty, or hope. So neither should you put yourself in a false

position with your contemporaries by indulging a vein of hostility and

bitterness. Though your views are in straight antagonism to theirs,

assume an identity of sentiment, assume that you are saying precisely

that which all think, and in the flow of wit and love roll out your

paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of a doubt. So at

least shall you get an adequate deliverance. The natural motions of the

soul are so much better than the voluntary ones that you will never do

yourself justice in dispute. The thought is not then taken hold of by

the right handle, does not show itself proportioned and in its true

bearings, but bears extorted, hoarse, and half witness. But assume a

consent and it shall presently be granted, since really and underneath

their external diversities, all men are of one heart and mind.

Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or men on an unfriendly

footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if we waited

for some better sympathy and intimacy to come. But whence and when?

To-morrow will be like to-day. Life wastes itself whilst we are

preparing to live. Our friends and fellow-workers die off from us.

Scarcely can we say we see new men, new women, approaching us. We are

too old to regard fashion, too old to expect patronage of any greater

or more powerful. Let us suck the sweetness of those affections and

consuetudes that grow near us. These old shoes are easy to the feet.

Undoubtedly we can easily pick faults in our company, can easily

whisper names prouder, and that tickle the fancy more. Every man’s

imagination hath its friends; and life would be dearer with such

companions. But if you cannot have them on good mutual terms, you

cannot have them. If not the Deity but our ambition hews and shapes the

new relations, their virtue escapes, as strawberries lose their flavor

in garden-beds.

Thus truth, frankness, courage, love, humility and all the virtues

range themselves on the side of prudence, or the art of securing a

present well-being. I do not know if all matter will be found to be

made of one element, as oxygen or hydrogen, at last, but the world of

manners and actions is wrought of one stuff, and begin where we will we

are pretty sure in a short space to be mumbling our ten commandments.

VIII.

HEROISM

“Paradise is under the shadow of swords.”

_Mahomet._

Ruby wine is drunk by knaves,

Sugar spends to fatten slaves,

Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons;

Thunderclouds are Jove’s festoons,

Drooping oft in wreaths of dread

Lightning-knotted round his head;

The hero is not fed on sweets,

Daily his own heart he eats;

Chambers of the great are jails,

And head-winds right for royal sails.