and reputations, is the road to mediocrity. The generous soul, on
arriving in a new port, makes instant preparation for a new voyage.
By experiment, by original studies, by secret obedience, he has made
a place for himself in the world; stands there a real, substantial,
unprecedented person, and when the great come by, as always there are
angels walking in the earth, they know him at sight. Effectual service
in his own legitimate fashion distinguishes the true man. For he is
to know that the distinction of a royal nature is a great heart; that
not Louis Quatorze, not Chesterfield, nor Byron, nor Bonaparte is the
model of the Century, but, wherever found, the old renown attaches to
the virtues of simple faith and staunch endurance and clear perception
and plain speech, and that there is a master grace and dignity
communicated by exalted sentiments to a human form, to which utility
and even genius must do homage. And it is the sign and badge of this
nobility, the drawing his counsel from his own breast. For to every
gentleman, grave and dangerous duties are proposed. Justice always
wants champions. The world waits for him as its defender, for he will
find in the well-dressed crowd, yes, in the civility of whole nations,
vulgarity of sentiment. In the best parlors of modern society he
will find the laughing devil, the civil sneer; in English palaces the
London twist, derision, coldness, contempt of the masses, contempt of
Ireland, dislike of the Chartist. The English House of Commons is the
proudest assembly of gentlemen in the world, yet the genius of the
House of Commons, its legitimate expression, is a sneer. In America he
shall find deprecation of purism on all questions touching the morals
of trade and of social customs, and the narrowest contraction of ethics
to the one duty of paying money. Pay that, and you may play the tyrant
at discretion and never look back to the fatal question,--where had you
the money that you paid?
I know the difficulties in the way of the man of honor. The man of
honor is a man of taste and humanity. By tendency, like all magnanimous
men, he is a democrat. But the revolution comes, and does he join
the standard of Chartist and outlaw? No, for these have been dragged
in their ignorance by furious chiefs to the Red Revolution; they
are full of murder, and the student recoils,--and joins the rich.
If he cannot vote with the poor, he should stay by himself. Let him
accept the position of armed neutrality, abhorring the crimes of the
Chartist, abhorring the selfishness of the rich, and say, ‘The time
will come when these poor _enfans perdus_ of revolution will have
instructed their party, if only by their fate, and wiser counsels will
prevail; the music and the dance of liberty will come up to bright and
holy ground and will take me in also. Then I shall not have forfeited
my right to speak and act for mankind.’ Meantime shame to the fop of
learning and philosophy who suffers a vulgarity of speech and habit
to blind him to the grosser vulgarity of pitiless selfishness, and to
hide from him the current of Tendency; who abandons his right position
of being priest and poet of these impious and unpoetic doers of God’s
work. You must, for wisdom, for sanity, have some access to the mind
and heart of the common humanity. The exclusive excludes himself.
No great man has existed who did not rely on the sense and heart of
mankind as represented by the good sense of the people, as correcting
the modes and over-refinements and class-prejudices of the lettered men
of the world.
There are certain conditions in the highest degree favorable to the
tranquillity of spirit and to that magnanimity we so prize. And mainly
the habit of considering large interests, and things in masses, and
not too much in detail. The habit of directing large affairs generates
a nobility of thought in every mind of average ability. For affairs
themselves show the way in which they should be handled; and a good
head soon grows wise, and does not govern too much.
Now I believe in the closest affinity between moral and material power.
Virtue and genius are always on the direct way to the control of the
society in which they are found. It is the interest of society that
good men should govern, and there is always a tendency so to place
them. But, for the day that now is, a man of generous spirit will not
need to administer public offices or to direct large interests of
trade, or war, or politics, or manufacture, but he will use a high
prudence in the conduct of life to guard himself from being dissipated
on many things. There is no need that he should count the pounds of
property or the numbers of agents whom his influence touches; it
suffices that his aims are high, that the interest of intellectual and
moral beings is paramount with him, that he comes into what is called
fine society from higher ground, and he has an elevation of habit which
ministers of empires will be forced to see and to remember.
I do not know whether that word Gentleman, although it signifies
a leading idea in recent civilization, is a sufficiently broad
generalization to convey the deep and grave fact of self-reliance. To
many the word expresses only the outsides of cultivated men,--only
graceful manners, and independence in trifles; but the fountains of
that thought are in the deeps of man, a beauty which reaches through
and through, from the manners to the soul; an honor which is only
a name for sanctity, a self-trust which is a trust in God himself.
Call it man of honor, or call it Man, the American who would serve
his country must learn the beauty and honor of perseverance, he must
reinforce himself by the power of character, and revisit the margin of
that well from which his fathers drew waters of life and enthusiasm,
the fountain I mean of the moral sentiments, the parent fountain from
which this goodly Universe flows as a wave.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 4: First read as a lecture--in England--in 1848; here printed
with additions from other papers.]
PERPETUAL FORCES.
MORE servants wait on man
Than he’ll take notice of.
EVER the Rock of Ages melts
Into the mineral air
To be the quarry whence is built
Thought and its mansions fair.
PERPETUAL FORCES.[5]
THE hero in the fairy tales has a servant who can eat granite rocks,
another who can hear the grass grow, and a third who can run a hundred
leagues in half an hour; so man in nature is surrounded by a gang of
friendly giants who can accept harder stints than these, and help him
in every kind. Each by itself has a certain omnipotence, but all, like
contending kings and emperors, in the presence of each other, are
antagonized and kept polite and own the balance of power.
We cannot afford to miss any advantage. Never was any man too strong
for his proper work. Art is long, and life short, and he must supply
this disproportion by borrowing and applying to his task the energies
of Nature. Reinforce his self-respect, show him his means, his arsenal
of forces, physical, metaphysical, immortal. Show him the riches of
the poor, show him what mighty allies and helpers he has. And though
King David had no good from making his census out of vain-glory, yet I
find it wholesome and invigorating to enumerate the resources we can
command, to look a little into this arsenal, and see how many rounds
of ammunition, what muskets and how many arms better than Springfield
muskets we can bring to bear.
Go out of doors and get the air. Ah, if you knew what was in the air.
See what your robust neighbor, who never feared to live in it, has got
from it; strength, cheerfulness, power to convince, heartiness and
equality to each event.
All the earths are burnt metals. One half the avoirdupois of the
rocks which compose the solid crust of the globe consists of oxygen.
The adamant is always passing into smoke; the marble column, the
brazen statue burn under the daylight, and would soon decompose if
their molecular structure, disturbed by the raging sunlight, were not
restored by the darkness of the night. What agencies of electricity,
gravity, light, affinity combine to make every plant what it is, and in
a manner so quiet that the presence of these tremendous powers is not
ordinarily suspected. Faraday said, “A grain of water is known to have
electric relations equivalent to a very powerful flash of lightning.”
The ripe fruit is dropped at last without violence, but the lightning
fell and the storm raged and strata were deposited and uptorn and bent
back, and Chaos moved from beneath, to create and flavor the fruit on
your table to-day. The winds and the rains come back a thousand and a
thousand times. The coal on your grate gives out in decomposing to-day
exactly the same amount of light and heat which was taken from the
sunshine in its formation in the leaves and boughs of the antediluvian
tree.
Take up a spadeful or a buck-load of loam; who can guess what it holds?
But a gardener knows that it is full of peaches, full of oranges,
and he drops in a few seeds by way of keys to unlock and combine its
virtues; lets it lie in sun and rain, and by and by it has lifted into
the air its full weight in golden fruit.
The earliest hymns of the world were hymns to these natural forces.
The Vedas of India, which have a date older than Homer, are hymns
to the winds, to the clouds, and to fire. They all have certain
properties which adhere to them, such as conservation, persisting to be
themselves, impossibility of being warped. The sun has lost no beams,
the earth no elements; gravity is as adhesive, heat as expansive, light
as joyful, air as virtuous, water as medicinal as on the first day.
There is no loss, only transference. When the heat is less here it is
not lost, but more heat is there. When the rain exceeds on the coast,
there is drought on the prairie. When the continent sinks, the opposite
continent, that is to say, the opposite shore of the ocean, rises.
When life is less here, it spawns there.
These forces are in an ascending series, but seem to leave no room for
the individual; man or atom, he only shares them; he sails the way
these irresistible winds blow. But behind all these are finer elements,
the sources of them, and much more rapid and strong; a new style and
series, the spiritual. Intellect and morals appear only the material
forces on a higher plane. The laws of material nature run up into the
invisible world of the mind, and hereby we acquire a key to those
sublimities which skulk and hide in the caverns of human consciousness.
And in the impenetrable mystery which hides--and hides through absolute
transparency--the mental nature, I await the insight which our
advancing knowledge of material laws shall furnish.
But the laws of force apply to every form of it. The husbandry
learned in the economy of heat or light or steam or muscular fibre
applies precisely to the use of wit. What I have said of the
inexorable persistence of every elemental force to remain itself,
the impossibility of tampering with it or warping it,--the same
rule applies again strictly to this force of intellect; that it is
perception, a seeing, not making, thoughts. The man must bend to the
law, never the law to him.
The brain of man has methods and arrangements corresponding to these
material powers, by which he can use them. See how trivial is the use
of the world by any other of its creatures. Whilst these forces act on
us from the outside and we are not in their counsel, we call them Fate.
The animal instincts guide the animal as gravity governs the stone,
and in man that bias or direction of his constitution is often as
tyrannical as gravity. We call it temperament, and it seems to be the
remains of wolf, ape, and rattlesnake in him. While the reason is yet
dormant, this rules; as the reflective faculties open, this subsides.
We come to reason and knowledge; we see the causes of evils and learn
to parry them and use them as instruments, by knowledge, being inside
of them and dealing with them as the Creator does. It is curious to
see how a creature so feeble and vulnerable as a man, who, unarmed, is
no match for the wild beasts, tiger, or crocodile, none for the frost,
none for the sea, none for a fog, or a damp air, or the feeble fork
of a poor worm,--each of a thousand petty accidents puts him to death
every day,--is yet able to subdue to his will these terrific forces,
and more than these. His whole frame is responsive to the world, part
for part, every sense, every pore to a new element, so that he seems
to have as many talents as there are qualities in nature. No force but
is his force. He does not possess them, he is a pipe through which
their currents flow. If a straw be held still in the direction of the
ocean-current, the sea will pour through it as through Gibraltar. If
he should measure strength with them, if he should fight the sea and
the whirlwind with his ship, he would snap his spars, tear his sails,
and swamp his bark; but by cunningly dividing the force, tapping the
tempest for a little side-wind, he uses the monsters, and they carry
him where he would go. Look at him; you can give no guess at what
power is in him. It never appears directly, but follow him and see his
effects, see his productions. He is a planter, a miner, a shipbuilder,
a machinist, a musician, a steam-engine, a geometer, an astronomer, a
persuader of men, a lawgiver, a builder of towns;--and each of these by
dint of a wonderful method or series that resides in him and enables
him to work on the material elements.
We are surrounded by human thought and labor. Where are the farmer’s
days gone? See, they are hid in that stone-wall, in that excavated
trench, in the harvest grown on what was shingle and pine-barren.
He put his days into carting from the distant swamp the mountain
of muck which has been trundled about until it now makes the cover
of fruitful soil. Labor hides itself in every mode and form. It is
massed and blocked away in that stone house, for five hundred years.
It is twisted and screwed into fragrant hay which fills the barn.
It surprises in the perfect form and condition of trees clean of
caterpillars and borers, rightly pruned, and loaded with grafted fruit.
It is under the house in the well; it is over the house in slates and
copper and water-spout; it grows in the corn; it delights us in the
flower-bed; it keeps the cow out of the garden, the rain out of the
library, the miasma out of the town. It is in dress, in pictures, in
ships, in cannon; in every spectacle, in odors, in flavors, in sweet
sounds, in works of safety, of delight, of wrath, of science.
The thoughts, no man ever saw, but disorder becomes order where he
goes; weakness becomes power; surprising and admirable effects follow
him like a creator. All forces are his; as the wise merchant by truth
in his dealings finds his credit unlimited,--he can use in turn, as he
wants it, all the property in the world,--so a man draws on all the
air for his occasions, as if there were no other breather; on all the
water as if there were no other sailor; he is warmed by the sun, and
so of every element; he walks and works by the aid of gravitation; he
draws on all knowledge as his province, on all beauty for his innocent
delight, and first or last he exhausts by his use all the harvests, all
the powers of the world. For man, the receiver of all, and depositary
of these volumes of power, I am to say that his ability and performance
are according to his reception of these various streams of force.
We define Genius to be a sensibility to all the impressions of the
outer world, a sensibility so equal that it receives accurately all
impressions, and can truly report them without excess or loss as it
received. It must not only receive all, but it must render all. And the
health of man is an equality of inlet and outlet, gathering and giving.
Any hoarding is tumor and disease.
If we were truly to take account of stock before the last Court of
Appeals,--that were an inventory! What are my resources? “Our stock
in life, our real estate, is that amount of thought which we have
had,”--and which we have applied, and so domesticated. The ground we
have thus created is forever a fund for new thoughts. A few moral
maxims confirmed by much experience would stand high on the list,
constituting a supreme prudence. Then the knowledge unutterable of our
private strength, of where it lies, of its accesses and facilitations,
and of its obstructions. My conviction of principles, that is great
part of my possessions. Certain thoughts, certain observations, long
familiar to me in night-watches and daylights, would be my capital
if I removed to Spain or China, or, by stranger translation, to the
planet Jupiter or Mars, or to new spiritual societies. Every valuable
person who joins in an enterprise,--is it a piece of industry, or the
founding of a colony or a college, the reform of some public abuse, or
some effort of patriotism,--what he chiefly brings, all he brings, is
not his land or his money or body’s strength, but his thoughts, his way
of classifying and seeing things, his method. And thus with every one a
new power. In proportion to the depth of the insight is the power and
reach of the kingdom he controls.
It would be easy to awake wonder by sketching the performance of each
of these mental forces; as of the diving-bell of the Memory, which
descends into the deeps of our past and oldest experience and brings
up every lost jewel; or of the Fancy, which sends its gay balloon
aloft into the sky to catch every tint and gleam of romance; of the
Imagination, which turns every dull fact into pictures and poetry, by
making it an emblem of thought. What a power, when, combined with the
analyzing understanding, it makes Eloquence; the art of compelling
belief, the art of making peoples’ hearts dance to his pipe! And not
less, method, patience, self-trust, perseverance, love, desire of
knowledge, the passion for truth. These are the angels that take us
by the hand, these our immortal, invulnerable guardians. By their
strength we are strong, and on the signal occasions in our career
their inspirations flow to us and make the selfish and protected and
tenderly-bred person strong for his duty, wise in counsel, skilful in
action, competent to rule, willing to obey.
I delight in tracing these wonderful powers, the electricity and
gravity of the human world. The power of persistence, of enduring
defeat and of gaining victory by defeats, is one of these forces
which never loses its charm. The power of a man increases steadily
by continuance in one direction. He becomes acquainted with the
resistances, and with his own tools; increases his skill and strength
and learns the favorable moments and favorable accidents. He is his
own apprentice, and more time gives a great addition of power, just
as a falling body acquires momentum with every foot of the fall.
How we prize a good continuer! I knew a manufacturer who found his
property invested in chemical works which were depreciating in value.
He undertook the charge of them himself, began at the beginning,
learned chemistry and acquainted himself with all the conditions of
the manufacture. His friends dissuaded him, advised him to give up the
work, which was not suited to the country. Why throw good money after
bad? But he persisted, and after many years succeeded in his production
of the right article for commerce, brought up the stock of his mills
to par, and then sold out his interest, having accomplished the reform
that was required.
In each the talent is the perception of an order and series in the
department he deals with,--of an order and series which pre-existed in
nature, and which this mind sees and conforms to. The geometer shows us
the true order in figures; the painter in laws of color; the dancer in
grace. Bonaparte, with his celerity of combination, mute, unfathomable,
reads the geography of Europe as if his eyes were telescopes; his will
is an immense battery discharging irresistible volleys of power always
at the right point in the right time.
There was a story in the journals of a poor prisoner in a Western
police-court who was told he might be released if he would pay his
fine. He had no money, he had no friends, but he took his flute out of
his pocket and began to play, to the surprise, and, as it proved, to
the delight of all the company; the jurors waked up, the sheriff forgot
his duty, the judge himself beat time, and the prisoner was by general
consent of court and officers allowed to go his way without any money.
And I suppose, if he could have played loud enough, we here should have
beat time, and the whole population of the globe would beat time, and
consent that he should go without his fine.
I knew a stupid young farmer, churlish, living only for his gains, and
with whom the only intercourse you could have was to buy what he had
to sell. One day I found his little boy of four years dragging about
after him the prettiest little wooden cart, so neatly built, and with
decorations too, and learned that Papa had made it; that hidden deep
in that thick skull was this gentle art and taste which the little
fingers and caresses of his son had the power to draw out into day;
he was no peasant after all. So near to us is the flowering of Fine
Art in the rudest population. See in a circle of school-girls one with
no beauty, no special vivacity,--but she can so recite her adventures
that she is never alone, but at night or at morning wherever she sits
the inevitable circle gathers around her, willing prisoners of that
wonderful memory and fancy and spirit of life. Would you know where
to find her? Listen for the laughter, follow the cheerful hum, see
where is the rapt attention, and a pretty crowd all bright with one
electricity; there in the centre of fellowship and joy is Scheherazade
again.
See how rich life is; rich in private talents, each of which charms us
in turn and seems the best. If we hear music we give up all to that; if
we fall in with a cricket-club and see the game masterly played, the
best player is the first of men; if we go to the regatta, we forget
the bowler for the stroke oar; and when the soldier comes home from
the fight, he fills all eyes. But the soldier has the same admiration
of the great parliamentary debater. And poetry and literature are
disdainful of all these claims beside their own. Like the boy who
thought in turn each one of the four seasons the best, and each of
the three hundred and sixty-five days in the year the crowner. The
sensibility is all.
Every one knows what are the effects of music to put people in gay or
mournful or martial mood. But these are the effects on dull subjects,
and only the hint of its power on a keener sense. It is a stroke on a
loose or tense cord. The story of Orpheus, of Arion, of the Arabian
minstrel, are not fables, but experiments on the same iron at white
heat.
By this wondrous susceptibility to all the impressions of Nature the
man finds himself the receptacle of celestial thoughts, of happy
relations to all men. The imagination enriches him, as if there were
no other; the memory opens all her cabinets and archives; Science
her length and breadth, Poetry her splendor and joy and the august
circles of eternal law. These are means and stairs for new ascensions
of the mind. But they are nowise impoverished for any other mind,
not tarnished, not breathed upon; for the mighty Intellect did not
stoop to him and become property, but he rose to it and followed its
circuits. “It is ours while we use it, it is not ours when we do not
use it.”
And so, one step higher, when he comes into the realm of sentiment
and will. He sees the grandeur of justice, the victory of love, the
eternity that belongs to all moral nature. He does not then invent his
sentiment or his act, but obeys a pre-existing right which he sees. We
arrive at virtue by taking its direction instead of imposing ours.
The last revelation of intellect and of sentiment is that in a manner
it severs the man from all other men; makes known to him that the
spiritual powers are sufficient to him if no other being existed; that
he is to deal absolutely in the world, as if he alone were a system and
a state, and though all should perish could make all anew.
The forces are infinite. Every one has the might of all, for the secret
of the world is that its energies are _solidaires_; that they work
together on a system of mutual aid, all for each and each for all; that
the strain made on one point bears on every arch and foundation of the
structure. But if you wish to avail yourself of their might, and in
like manner if you wish the force of the intellect, the force of the
will, you must take their divine direction, not they yours. Obedience
alone gives the right to command. It is like the village operator
who taps the telegraph-wire and surprises the secrets of empires as
they pass to the capital. So this child of the dust throws himself
by obedience into the circuit of the heavenly wisdom, and shares the
secret of God.
Thus is the world delivered into your hand, but on two conditions,--not
for property, but for use, use according to the noble nature of the
gifts; and not for toys, not for self-indulgence. Things work to their
ends, not to yours, and will certainly defeat any adventurer who fights
against this ordination.