loves the conditioned, he also loves the unconditioned. We don’t
wish to sin on the other side, and to be purists, nor to check the
invention of wit or the sally of humor. ’Tis very different, this weak
and wearisome lie, from the stimulus to the fancy which is given by
a romancing talker who does not mean to be exactly taken,--like the
gallant skipper who complained to his owners that he had pumped the
Atlantic Ocean three times through his ship on the passage, and ’twas
common to strike seals and porpoises in the hold. Or what was similarly
asserted of the late Lord Jeffrey, at the Scottish bar,--an attentive
auditor declaring on one occasion after an argument of three hours,
that he had spoken the whole English language three times over in his
speech.
The objection to unmeasured speech is its lie. All men like an
impressive fact. The astronomer shows you in his telescope the
nebula of Orion, that you may look on that which is esteemed the
farthest-off land in visible nature. At the Bank of England they put a
scrap of paper that is worth a million pounds sterling into the hands
of the visitor to touch. Our travelling is a sort of search for the
superlatives or summits of art,--much more the real wonders of power in
the human form. The arithmetic of Newton, the memory of Magliabecchi
or Mirandola, the versatility of Julius Cæsar, the concentration of
Bonaparte, the inspiration of Shakspeare, are sure of commanding
interest and awe in every company of men.
The superlative is the excess of expression. We are a garrulous,
demonstrative kind of creatures, and cannot live without much outlet
for all our sense and nonsense. And fit expression is so rare that
mankind have a superstitious value for it, and it would seem the whole
human race agree to value a man precisely in proportion to his power of
expression; and to the most expressive man that has existed, namely,
Shakspeare, they have awarded the highest place.
The expressors are the gods of the world, but the men whom these
expressors revere are the solid, balanced, undemonstrative citizens
who make the reserved guard, the central sense, of the world. For the
luminous object wastes itself by its shining,--is luminous because it
is burning up; and if the powers are disposed for display, there is
all the less left for use and creation. The talent sucks the substance
of the man. Superlatives must be bought by too many positives. Gardens
of roses must be stripped to make a few drops of otto. And these
raptures of fire and frost, which indeed cleanse pedantry out of
conversation and make the speech salt and biting, would cost me the
days of well-being which are now so cheap to me, yet so valued. I like
no deep stakes. I am a coward at gambling. I will bask in the common
sun a while longer.
Children and thoughtless people like exaggerated event and activity;
like to run to a house on fire, to a fight, to an execution; like to
talk of a marriage, of a bankruptcy, of a debt, of a crime. The wise
man shuns all this. I knew a grave man who, being urged to go to a
church where a clergyman was newly ordained, said “he liked him very
well, but he would go when the interesting Sundays were over.”
All rests at last on the simplicity of nature, or real being. Nothing
is for the most part less esteemed. We are fond of dress, of ornament,
of accomplishments, of talents, but distrustful of health, of
soundness, of pure innocence. Yet nature measures her greatness by what
she can spare, by what remains when all superfluity and accessories are
shorn off.
Nor is there in nature itself any swell, any brag, any strain or shock,
but a firm common sense through all her elephants and lions, through
all her ducks and geese; a true proportion between her means and her
performance. _Semper sibi similis._ You shall not catch her in
any anomalies, nor swaggering into any monsters. In all the years
that I have sat in town and forest, I never saw a winged dragon, a
flying man, or a talking fish, but ever the strictest regard to rule,
and an absence of all surprises. No; nature encourages no looseness,
pardons no errors; freezes punctually at 32°, boils punctually at 212°;
crystallizes in water at one invariable angle, in diamond at one, in
granite at one; and if you omit the smallest condition the experiment
will not succeed. Her communication obeys the gospel rule, yea or nay.
She never expatiates, never goes into the reasons. Plant beechmast
and it comes up, or it does not come up. Sow grain, and it does not
come up: put lime into the soil and try again, and this time she says
yea. To every question an abstemious but absolute reply. The like
staidness is in her dealings with us. Nature is always serious,--does
not jest with us. Where we have begun in folly, we are brought quickly
to plain dealing. Life could not be carried on except by fidelity and
good earnest; and she brings the most heartless trifler to determined
purpose presently. The men whom she admits to her confidence, the
simple and great characters, are uniformly marked by absence of
pretension and by understatement. The old and the modern sages of
clearest insight are plain men, who have held themselves hard to the
poverty of nature.
The firmest and noblest ground on which people can live is truth; the
real with the real; a ground on which nothing is assumed, but where
they speak and think and do what they must, because they are so and not
otherwise.
But whilst the basis of character must be simplicity, the expression
of character, it must be remembered, is, in great degree, a matter
of climate. In the temperate climates there is a temperate speech,
in torrid climates an ardent one. Whilst in Western nations the
superlative in conversation is tedious and weak, and in character is a
capital defect, nature delights in showing us that in the East it is
animated, it is pertinent, pleasing, poetic. Whilst she appoints us
to keep within the sharp boundaries of form as the condition of our
strength, she creates in the East the uncontrollable yearning to escape
from limitation into the vast and boundless; to use a freedom of fancy
which plays with all the works of nature, great or minute, galaxy or
grain of dust, as toys and words of the mind; inculcates the tenet
of a beatitude to be found in escape from all organization and all
personality, and makes ecstasy an institution.
Religion and poetry are all the civilization of the Arab. “The ground
of Paradise,” said Mohammed, “is extensive, and the plants of it are
hallelujahs.” Religion and poetry: the religion teaches an inexorable
destiny; it distinguishes only two days in each man’s history, the day
of his lot, and the day of judgment. The religion runs into asceticism
and fate. The costume, the articles in which wealth is displayed, are
in the same extremes. Thus the diamond and the pearl, which are only
accidental and secondary in their use and value to us, are proper to
the oriental world. The diver dives a beggar and rises with the price
of a kingdom in his hand. A bag of sequins, a jewel, a balsam, a single
horse, constitute an estate in countries where insecure institutions
make every one desirous of concealable and convertible property. Shall
I say, further, that the orientals excel in costly arts, in the cutting
of precious stones, in working in gold, in weaving on hand-looms
costly stuffs from silk and wool, in spices, in dyes and drugs,
henna, otto and camphor, and in the training of slaves, elephants and
camels,--things which are the poetry and superlative of commerce.
On the other hand,--and it is a good illustration of the difference
of genius,--the European nations, and, in general, all nations in
proportion to their civilization, understand the manufacture of iron.
One of the meters of the height to which any civility rose is the
skill in the fabric of iron. Universally, the better gold, the worse
man. The political economist defies us to show any gold-mine country
that is traversed by good roads: or a shore where pearls are found
on which good schools are erected. The European civility, or that of
the positive degree, is established by coal-mines, by ventilation, by
irrigation and every skill--in having water cheap and pure, by iron,
by agriculture for bread-stuffs, and manufacture of coarse and family
cloths. Our modern improvements have been in the invention of friction
matches; of India-rubber shoes; of the famous two parallel bars of
iron; then of the air-chamber of Watt, and of the judicious tubing of
the engine, by Stephenson, in order to the construction of locomotives.
Meantime, Nature, who loves crosses and mixtures, makes these two
tendencies necessary each to the other, and delights to re-enforce each
peculiarity by imparting the other. The Northern genius finds itself
singularly refreshed and stimulated by the breadth and luxuriance of
Eastern imagery and modes of thinking, which go to check the pedantry
of our inventions and the excess of our detail. There is no writing
which has more electric power to unbind and animate the torpid
intellect than the bold Eastern muse.
If it come back however to the question of final superiority, it is too
plain that there is no question that the star of empire rolls West:
that the warm sons of the Southeast have bent the neck under the yoke
of the cold temperament and the exact understanding of the Northwestern
races.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 7: Reprinted from the _Century_ of February, 1882.]
THE SOVEREIGNTY OF ETHICS.
THESE rules were writ in human heart
By Him who built the day;
The columns of the universe
Not firmer based than they.
THOU shalt not try
To plant thy shrivelled pedantry
On the shoulders of the sky.
THE SOVEREIGNTY OF ETHICS.[8]
SINCE the discovery of Oersted that galvanism and electricity
and magnetism are only forms of one and the same force, and
convertible each into the other, we have continually suggested to
us a larger generalization: that each of the great departments of
Nature--chemistry, vegetation, the animal life--exhibits the same
laws on a different plane; that the intellectual and moral worlds are
analogous to the material. There is a kind of latent omniscience not
only in every man but in every particle. That convertibility we so
admire in plants and animal structures, whereby the repairs and the
ulterior uses are subserved, when one part is wounded or deficient,
by another; this self-help and self-creation proceed from the same
original power which works remotely in grandest and meanest structures
by the same design,--works in a lobster or a mite-worm as a wise man
would if imprisoned in that poor form. ’Tis the effort of God, of the
Supreme Intellect, in the extremest frontier of his universe.
As this unity exists in the organization of insect, beast and bird,
still ascending to man, and from lower type of man to the highest
yet attained, so it does not less declare itself in the spirit or
intelligence of the brute. In ignorant ages it was common to vaunt the
human superiority by underrating the instinct of other animals; but a
better discernment finds that the difference is only of less and more.
Experiment shows that the bird and the dog reason as the hunter does,
that all the animals show the same good sense in their humble walk that
the man who is their enemy or friend does; and, if it be in smaller
measure, yet it is not diminished, as his often is, by freak and folly.
St. Pierre says of the animals that a moral sentiment seems to have
determined their physical organization.
I see the unity of thought and of morals running through all animated
Nature; there is no difference of quality, but only of more and less.
The animal who is wholly kept down in Nature has no anxieties. By
yielding, as he must do, to it, he is enlarged and reaches his highest
point. The poor grub, in the hole of a tree, by yielding itself to
Nature, goes blameless through its low part and is rewarded at last,
casts its filthy hull, expands into a beautiful form with rainbow
wings, and makes a part of the summer day. The Greeks called it Psyche,
a manifest emblem of the soul. The man down in Nature occupies himself
in guarding, in feeding, in warming and multiplying his body, and,
as long as he knows no more, we justify him; but presently a mystic
change is wrought, a new perception opens, and he is made a citizen
of the world of souls: he feels what is called duty; he is aware that
he owes a higher allegiance to do and live as a good member of this
universe. In the measure in which he has this sense he is a man, rises
to the universal life. The high intellect is absolutely at one with
moral nature. A thought is imbosomed in a sentiment, and the attempt to
detach and blazon the thought is like a show of cut flowers. The moral
is the measure of health, and in the voice of Genius I hear invariably
the moral tone, even when it is disowned in words;--health, melody and
a wider horizon belong to moral sensibility. The finer the sense of
justice, the better poet. The believer says to the skeptic:--
“One avenue was shaded from thine eyes
Through which I wandered to eternal truth.”
Humility is the avenue. To be sure, we exaggerate when we represent
these two elements as disunited; every man shares them both; but it is
true that men generally are marked by a decided predominance of one or
of the other element.
In youth and in age we are moralists, and in mature life the moral
element steadily rises in the regard of all reasonable men.
’Tis a sort of proverbial dying speech of scholars (at least it is
attributed to many) that which Anthony Wood reports of Nathaniel
Carpenter, an Oxford Fellow. “It did repent him,” he said, “that he had
formerly so much courted the maid instead of the mistress” (meaning
philosophy and mathematics to the neglect of divinity). This, in the
language of our time, would be ethics.
And when I say that the world is made up of moral forces, these are not
separate. All forces are found in Nature united with that which they
move: heat is not separate, light is not massed aloof, nor electricity,
nor gravity, but they are always in combination. And so moral powers;
they are thirsts for action, and the more you accumulate the more they
mould and form.
It is in the stomach of plants that development begins, and ends in
the circles of the universe. ’Tis a long scale from the gorilla to
the gentleman--from the gorilla to Plato, Newton, Shakspeare--to the
sanctities of religion, the refinements of legislation, the summits of
science, art and poetry. The beginnings are slow and infirm, but it is
an always-accelerated march. The geologic world is chronicled by the
growing ripeness of the strata from lower to higher, as it becomes the
abode of more highly-organized plants and animals. The civil history
of men might be traced by the successive meliorations as marked in
higher moral generalizations;--virtue meaning physical courage, then
chastity and temperance, then justice and love;--bargains of kings
with peoples of certain rights to certain classes, then of rights to
masses,--then at last came the day when, as the historians rightly
tell, the nerves of the world were electrified by the proclamation that
all men are born free and equal.
Every truth leads in another. The bud extrudes the old leaf, and every
truth brings that which will supplant it. In the court of law the judge
sits over the culprit, but in the court of life in the same hour the
judge also stands as culprit before a true tribunal. Every judge is
a culprit, every law an abuse. Montaigne kills off bigots as cowhage
kills worms; but there is a higher muse there sitting where he durst
not soar, of eye so keen that it can report of a realm in which all the
wit and learning of the Frenchman is no more than the cunning of a fox.
It is the same fact existing as sentiment and as will in the mind,
which works in Nature as irresistible law, exerting influence over
nations, intelligent beings, or down in the kingdoms of brute or
of chemical atoms. Nature is a tropical swamp in sunshine, on
whose purlieus we hear the song of summer birds, and see prismatic
dew-drops--but her interiors are terrific, full of hydras and
crocodiles. In the pre-adamite she bred valor only; by-and-by she gets
on to man, and adds tenderness, and thus raises virtue piecemeal.
When we trace from the beginning, that ferocity has uses; only so
are the conditions of the then world met, and these monsters are the
scavengers, executioners, diggers, pioneers and fertilizers, destroying
what is more destructive than they, and making better life possible. We
see the steady aim of Benefit in view from the first. Melioration is
the law. The cruelest foe is a masked benefactor. The wars which make
history so dreary, have served the cause of truth and virtue. There is
always an instinctive sense of right, an obscure idea which animates
either party and which in long periods vindicates itself at last. Thus
a sublime confidence is fed at the bottom of the heart that, in spite
of appearances, in spite of malignity and blind self-interest living
for the moment, an eternal, beneficent necessity is always bringing
things right; and, though we should fold our arms,--which we cannot
do, for our duty requires us to be the very hands of this guiding
sentiment, and work in the present moment,--the evils we suffer will
at last end themselves through the incessant opposition of Nature to
everything hurtful.
The excellence of men consists in the completeness with which the
lower system is taken up into the higher--a process of much time
and delicacy, but in which no point of the lower should be left
untranslated; so that the warfare of beasts should be renewed in a
finer field, for more excellent victories. Savage war gives place to
that of Turenne and Wellington, which has limitations and a code. This
war again gives place to the finer quarrel of property, where the
victory is wealth and the defeat poverty.
The inevitabilities are always sapping every seeming prosperity built
on a wrong. No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can
never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive. See how these
things look in the page of history. Nations come and go, cities rise
and fall, all the instincts of man, good and bad, work,--and every
wish, appetite, and passion, rushes into act and embodies itself
in usages, protects itself with laws. Some of them are useful and
universally acceptable, hinder none, help all, and these are honored
and perpetuated. Others are noxious. Community of property is tried,
as when a Tartar horde or an Indian tribe roam over a vast tract for
pasturage or hunting; but it is found at last that some establishment
of property, allowing each on some distinct terms to fence and
cultivate a piece of land, is best for all.
“For my part,” said Napoleon, “it is not the mystery of the incarnation
which I discover in religion, but the mystery of social order, which
associates with heaven that idea of equality which prevents the rich
from destroying the poor.”
Shall I say then it were truer to see Necessity calm, beautiful,
passionless, without a smile, covered with ensigns of woe, stretching
her dark warp across the universe? These threads are Nature’s
pernicious elements, her deluges, miasma, disease, poison; her
curdling cold, her hideous reptiles and worse men, cannibals, and the
depravities of civilization; the secrets of the prisons of tyranny, the
slave and his master, the proud man’s scorn, the orphan’s tears, the
vices of men, lust, cruelty and pitiless avarice. These make the gloomy
warp of ages. Humanity sits at the dread loom and throws the shuttle
and fills it with joyful rainbows, until the sable ground is flowered
all over with a woof of human industry and wisdom, virtuous examples,
symbols of useful and generous arts, with beauty and pure love, courage
and the victories of the just and wise over malice and wrong.
Nature is not so helpless but it can rid itself at last of every crime.
An Eastern poet, in describing the golden age, said that God had made
justice so dear to the heart of Nature that, if any injustice lurked
anywhere under the sky, the blue vault would shrivel to a snake-skin
and cast it out by spasms. But the spasms of Nature are years and
centuries, and it will tax the faith of man to wait so long.
Man is always throwing his praise or blame on events, and does not see
that he only is real, and the world his mirror and echo. He imputes
the stroke to fortune, which in reality himself strikes. The student
discovers one day that he lives in enchantment: the house, the works,
the persons, the days, the weathers--all that he calls Nature, all that
he calls institutions, when once his mind is active are visions merely,
wonderful allegories, significant pictures of the laws of the mind; and
through this enchanted gallery he is led by unseen guides to read and
learn the laws of Heaven. This discovery may come early,--sometimes in
the nursery, to a rare child; later in the school, but oftener when
the mind is more mature; and to multitudes of men wanting in mental
activity it never comes--any more than poetry or art. But it ought to
come; it belongs to the human intellect, and is an insight which we
cannot spare.
The idea of right exists in the human mind, and lays itself out in the
equilibrium of Nature, in the equalities and periods of our system, in
the level of seas, in the action and reaction of forces. Nothing is
allowed to exceed or absorb the rest; if it do, it is disease, and
is quickly destroyed. It was an early discovery of the mind,--this
beneficent rule. Strength enters just as much as the moral element
prevails. The strength of the animal to eat and to be luxurious and to
usurp is rudeness and imbecility. The law is: To each shall be rendered
his own. As thou sowest, thou shalt reap. Smite, and thou shalt smart.
Serve, and thou shalt be served. If you love and serve men, you
cannot, by any hiding or stratagem, escape the remuneration. Secret
retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the
Divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and
proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to
heave the bar. Settles for evermore the ponderous equator to its line,
and man and mote and star and sun must range with it, or be pulverized
by the recoil.
It is a doctrine of unspeakable comfort. He that plants his foot here,
passes at once out of the kingdom of illusions. Others may well suffer
in the hideous picture of crime with which earth is filled and the life
of society threatened, but the habit of respecting that great order
which certainly contains and will dispose of our little system, will
take all fear from the heart. It did itself create and distribute all
that is created and distributed, and, trusting to its power, we cease
to care for what it will certainly order well. To good men, as we
call good men, this doctrine of Trust is an unsounded secret. They use
the word, they have accepted the notion of a mechanical supervision
of human life, by which that certain wonderful being whom they call
God does take up their affairs where their intelligence leaves them,
and somehow knits and co-ordinates the issues of them in all that is
beyond the reach of private faculty. They do not see that _He_,
that _It_, is there, next and within; the thought of the thought;
the affair of affairs; that he is existence, and take him from them and
they would not be. They do not see that particulars are sacred to him,
as well as the scope and outline; that these passages of daily life are
his work; that in the moment when they desist from interference, these
particulars take sweetness and grandeur, and become the language of
mighty principles.
A man should be a guest in his own house, and a guest in his own
thought. He is there to speak for truth; but who is he? Some clod the
truth has snatched from the ground, and with fire has fashioned to a
momentary man. Without the truth, he is a clod again. Let him find his
superiority in not wishing superiority; find the riches of love which
possesses that which it adores; the riches of poverty; the height of
lowliness, the immensity of to-day; and, in the passing hour, the age
of ages. Wondrous state of man! never so happy as when he has lost all
private interests and regards, and exists only in obedience and love of
the Author.