which are beneath should be closed when the pair that are above them
perceive; and that when the pair above are closed, those which are
beneath are opened.” The lower eyes see only surfaces and effects, the
upper eyes behold causes and the connection of things. And when we go
alone, or come into the house of thought and worship, we come with
purpose to be disabused of appearances, to see realities, the great
lines of our destiny, to see that life has no caprice or fortune, is
no hopping squib, but a growth after immutable laws under beneficent
influences the most immense. The Church is open to great and small in
all nations; and how rare and lofty, how unattainable, are the aims it
labors to set before men! We come to educate, come to isolate, to be
abstractionists; in fine, to open the upper eyes to the deep mystery of
cause and effect, to know that though ministers of justice and power
fail, Justice and Power fail never. The open secret of the world is the
art of subliming a private soul with inspirations from the great and
public and divine Soul from which we live.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 9: Originally written as a parlor lecture to some Divinity
students, in 1867; afterwards enlarged from earlier writings, and read
in its present form at the Divinity Chapel, Cambridge, May 5th, 1879.
Reprinted from the _Unitarian Review_ for January, 1880.]
THE MAN OF LETTERS.
ON bravely through the sunshine and the showers,
Time hath his work to do, and we have ours.
SO nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man;
When Duty whispers low ‘Thou must,’
The youth replies, ‘I can.’
THE MAN OF LETTERS.
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE LITERARY SOCIETIES OF WATERVILLE
COLLEGE, 1863.
GENTLEMEN OF THE LITERARY SOCIETIES:--
Some of you are to-day saying your farewells to each other, and
to-morrow will receive the parting honors of the College. You go to
be teachers, to become physicians, lawyers, divines; in due course,
statesmen, naturalists, philanthropists; I hope, some of you, to be the
men of letters, critics, philosophers; perhaps the rare gift of poetry
already sparkles, and may yet burn. At all events, before the shadows
of these times darken over your youthful sensibility and candor, let
me use the occasion which your kind request gives me, to offer you
some counsels which an old scholar may without pretension bring to
youth, in regard to the career of letters,--the power and joy that
belong to it, and its high office in evil times. I offer perpetual
congratulation to the scholar; he has drawn the white lot in life. The
very disadvantages of his condition point at superiorities. He is too
good for the world; he is in advance of his race; his function is
prophetic. He belongs to a superior society, and is born one or two
centuries too early for the rough and sensual population into which he
is thrown. But the Heaven which sent him hither knew that well enough,
and sent him as a leader to lead. Are men perplexed with evil times?
The inviolate soul is in perpetual telegraphic communication with the
source of events. He has earlier information, a private despatch which
relieves him of the terror which presses on the rest of the community.
He is a learner of the laws of nature and the experiences of history; a
prophet surrendered with self-abandoning sincerity to the Heaven which
pours through him its will to mankind. This is the theory, but you know
how far this is from the fact, that nothing has been able to resist the
tide with which the material prosperity of America in years past has
beat down the hope of youth, the piety of learning. The country was
full of activity, with its wheat, coal, iron, cotton; the wealth of the
globe was here, too much work and not men enough to do it. Britain,
France, Germany, Scandinavia sent millions of laborers; still the need
was more. Every kind of skill was in demand, and the bribe came to men
of intellectual culture,--Come, drudge in our mill. America at large
exhibited such a confusion as California showed in 1849, when the cry
of gold was first raised. All the distinctions of profession and habit
ended at the mines. All the world took off their coats and worked in
shirt-sleeves. Lawyers went and came with pick and wheelbarrow; doctors
of medicine turned teamsters; stray clergymen kept the bar in saloons;
professors of colleges sold cigars, mince-pies, matches, and so on. It
is the perpetual tendency of wealth to draw on the spiritual class, not
in this coarse way, but in plausible and covert ways. It is charged
that all vigorous nations, except our own, have balanced their labor by
mental activity, and especially by the imagination,--the cardinal human
power, the angel of earnest and believing ages. The subtle Hindoo, who
carried religion to ecstasy and philosophy to idealism, produced the
wonderful epics of which, in the present century, the translations have
added new regions to thought. The Egyptian built Thebes and Karnak on
a scale which dwarfs our art, and by the paintings on their interior
walls invited us into the secret of the religious belief whence he drew
such power. The Greek was so perfect in action and in imagination, his
poems, from Homer to Euripides, so charming in form and so true to
the human mind, that we cannot forget or outgrow their mythology. The
Hebrew nation compensated for the insignificance of its members and
territory by its religious genius, its tenacious belief; its poems and
histories cling to the soil of this globe like the primitive rocks.
On the south and east shores of the Mediterranean Mahomet impressed
his fierce genius how deeply into the manners, language and poetry of
Arabia and Persia! See the activity of the imagination in the Crusades:
the front of morn was full of fiery shapes; the chasm was bridged over;
heaven walked on earth, and Earth could see with eyes the Paradise
and the Inferno. Dramatic “mysteries” were the entertainment of the
people. Parliaments of Love and Poesy served them, instead of the
House of Commons, Congress and the newspapers. In Puritanism, how the
whole Jewish history became flesh and blood in those men, let Bunyan
show. Now it is agreed that we are utilitarian; that we are skeptical,
frivolous; that with universal cheap education we have stringent
theology, but religion is low. There is much criticism, not on deep
grounds, but an affirmative philosophy is wanting. Our profoundest
philosophy (if it were not contradiction in terms) is skepticism.
The great poem of the age is the disagreeable poem of “Faust,”--of
which the “Festus” of Bailey and the “Paracelsus” of Browning are
English variations. We have superficial sciences, restless, gossiping,
aimless activity. We run to Paris, to London, to Rome, to Mesmerism,
Spiritualism, to Pusey, to the Catholic Church, as if for the want of
thought, and those who would check and guide have a dreary feeling
that in the change and decay of the old creeds and motives there was no
offset to supply their place. Our industrial skill, arts ministering to
convenience and luxury, have made life expensive, and therefore greedy,
careful, anxious; have turned the eyes downward to the earth, not
upward to thought.
Ernest Renan finds that Europe has thrice assembled for exhibitions of
industry, and not a poem graced the occasion; and nobody remarked the
defect. A French prophet of our age, Fourier, predicted that one day,
instead of by battles and Œcumenical Councils, the rival portions of
humanity would dispute each other’s excellence in the manufacture of
little cakes.
“In my youth,” said a Scotch mountaineer, “a Highland gentleman
measured his importance by the number of men his domain could support.
After some time the question was, to know how many great cattle it
would feed. To-day we are come to count the number of sheep. I suppose
posterity will ask how many rats and mice it will feed.”
Dickens complained that in America, as soon as he arrived in any of the
Western towns, a committee waited on him and invited him to deliver a
temperance lecture. Bowditch translated Laplace, and when he removed to
Boston, the Hospital Life Assurance Company insisted that he should
make their tables of annuities. Napoleon knows the art of war, but
should not be put on picket duty. Linnæus or Robert Brown must not
be set to raise gooseberries and cucumbers, though they be excellent
botanists. A shrewd broker out of State Street visited a quiet
countryman possessed of all the virtues, and in his glib talk said,
“With your character now I could raise all this money at once, and make
an excellent thing of it.”
There is an oracle current in the world, that nations die by suicide.
The sign of it is the decay of thought. Niebuhr has given striking
examples of that fatal portent; as in the loss of power of thought that
followed the disasters of the Athenians in Sicily.
I cannot forgive a scholar his homeless despondency. He represents
intellectual or spiritual force. I wish him to rely on the spiritual
arm; to live by his strength, not by his weakness. A scholar defending
the cause of slavery, of arbitrary government, of monopoly, of the
oppressor, is a traitor to his profession. He has ceased to be a
scholar. He is not company for clean people. The worst times only show
him how independent he is of times; only relieve and bring out the
splendor of his privilege. Disease alarms the family, but the physician
sees in it a temporary mischief, which he can check and expel. The
fears and agitations of men who watch the markets, the crops, the
plenty or scarcity of money, or other superficial events, are not
for him. He knows that the world is always equal to itself; that the
forces which uphold and pervade it are eternal. Air, water, fire, iron,
gold, wheat, electricity, animal fibre, have not lost a particle of
power, and no decay has crept over the spiritual force which gives
bias and period to boundless nature. Bad times,--what are bad times?
Nature is rich, exuberant, and mocks at the puny forces of destruction.
Man makes no more impression on her wealth than the caterpillar or
the cankerworm whose petty ravage, though noticed in an orchard or a
village, is insignificant in the vast exuberance of the summer. There
is no unemployed force in Nature. All decomposition is recomposition.
War disorganizes, but it is to reorganize. Weeks, months pass--a new
harvest; trade springs up, and there stand new cities, new homes, all
rebuilt and sleepy with permanence. Italy, France--a hundred times
those countries have been trampled with armies and burned over: a few
summers, and they smile with plenty and yield new men and new revenues.
If churches are effete, it is because the new Heaven forms. You are
here as the carriers of the power of Nature,--as Roger Bacon, with his
secret of gunpowder, with his secret of the balloon and of steam; as
Copernicus, with his secret of the true astronomy; as Columbus, with
America in his log-book; as Newton, with his gravity; Harvey, with his
circulation; Smith, with his law of trade; Franklin, with lightning;
Adams, with Independence; Kant, with pure reason; Swedenborg, with his
spiritual world. You are the carriers of ideas which are to fashion the
mind and so the history of this breathing world, so as they shall be,
and not otherwise.
Every man is a scholar potentially, and does not need any one good so
much as this of right thought.
“Calm pleasures here abide, majestic pains.”
Coleridge traces “three silent revolutions,” of which the first was
“when the clergy fell from the Church.” A scholar was once a priest.
But the Church clung to ritual, and the scholar clung to joy, low
as well as high, and thus the separation was a mutual fault. But I
think it is a schism which must be healed. The true scholar is the
Church. Only the duties of Intellect must be owned. Down with these
dapper trimmers and sycophants! let us have masculine and divine men,
formidable lawgivers, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, who warp the
churches of the world from their traditions, and penetrate them through
and through with original perception. The intellectual man lives in
perpetual victory. As certainly as water falls in rain on the tops of
mountains and runs down into valleys, plains and pits, so does thought
fall first on the best minds, and run down, from class to class, until
it reaches the masses, and works revolutions.
Nature says to the American: “I understand mensuration and numbers;
I compute the ellipse of the moon, the ebb and flow of waters, the
curve and the errors of planets, the balance of attraction and recoil.
I have measured out to you by weight and tally the powers you need.
I give you the land and sea, the forest and the mine, the elemental
forces, nervous energy. When I add difficulty, I add brain. See to it
that you hold and administer the continent for mankind. One thing you
have rightly done. You have offered a patch of land in the wilderness
to every son of Adam who will till it. Other things you have begun to
do,--to strike off the chains which snuffling hypocrites had bound
on the weaker race.” You are to imperil your lives and fortunes for
a principle. The ambassador is held to maintain the dignity of the
Republic which he represents. But what does the scholar represent?
The organ of ideas, the subtle force which creates Nature and men and
states;--consoler, upholder, imparting pulses of light and shocks of
electricity, guidance and courage. So let his habits be formed, and
all his economies heroic; no spoiled child, no drone, no epicure, but
a stoic, formidable, athletic, knowing how to be poor, loving labor,
and not flogging his youthful wit with tobacco and wine; treasuring his
youth. I wish the youth to be an armed and complete man; no helpless
angel to be slapped in the face, but a man dipped in the Styx of human
experience, and made invulnerable so,--self-helping. A redeeming trait
of the Sophists of Athens, Hippias and Gorgias, is that they made their
own clothes and shoes. Learn to harness a horse, to row a boat, to camp
down in the woods, to cook your supper. I chanced lately to be at West
Point, and, after attending the examination in scientific classes, I
went into the barracks. The chamber was in perfect order; the mattress
on the iron camp-bed rolled up, as if ready for removal. I asked the
first Cadet, “Who makes your bed?” “I do.” “Who fetches your water?” “I
do.” “Who blacks your shoes?” “I do.” It was so in every room. These
are first steps to power. Learn of Samuel Johnson or David Hume, that
it is a primary duty of the man of letters to secure his independence.
Stand by your order. ’Tis some thirty years since the days of the
Reform Bill in England, when on the walls in London you read everywhere
placards, “Down with the Lords.” At that time, Earl Grey, who was
leader of Reform, was asked, in Parliament, his policy on the measures
of the Radicals. He replied, “I shall stand by my order.” Where there
is no vision, the people perish. The fault lies with the educated
class, the men of study and thought. There is a very low feeling of
duty: the merchant is true to the merchant, the noble in England and
Europe stands by his order, the politician believes in his arts and
combinations; but the scholar does not stand by his order, but defers
to the men of this world.
Gentlemen, I am here to commend to you your art and profession as
thinkers. It is real. It is the secret of power. It is the art of
command. All superiority is this, or related to this. “All that the
world admires comes from within.” Thought makes us men; ranks us;
distributes society; distributes the work of the world; is the prolific
source of all arts, of all wealth, of all delight, of all grandeur. Men
are as they believe. Men are as they think, and the man who knows any
truth not yet discerned by other men, is master of all other men so far
as that truth and its wide relations are concerned.
Intellect measures itself by its counteraction to any accumulation of
material force. There is no mass which it cannot surmount and dispose
of. The exertions of this force are the eminent experiences,--out of
a long life all that is worth remembering. These are the moments that
balance years. Does any one doubt between the strength of a thought
and that of an institution? Does any one doubt that a good general is
better than a park of artillery? See a political revolution dogging a
book. See armies, institutions, literatures, appearing in the train of
some wild Arabian’s dream.
There is a proverb that Napoleon, when the Mameluke cavalry approached
the French lines, ordered the grenadiers to the front, and the asses
and the _savans_ to fall into the hollow square. It made a good
story, and circulated in that day. But how stands it now? The military
expedition was a failure. Bonaparte himself deserted, and the army got
home as it could, all fruitless; not a trace of it remains. All that is
left of it is the researches of those _savans_ on the antiquities
of Egypt, including the great work of Denon, which led the way to all
the subsequent studies of the English and German scholars on that
foundation. Pytheas of Ægina was victor in the Pancratium of the boys,
at the Isthmian games. He came to the poet Pindar and wished him to
write an ode in his praise, and inquired what was the price of a poem.
Pindar replied that he should give him one talent, about a thousand
dollars of our money. “A talent!” cried Pytheas; “why, for so much
money I can erect a statue of bronze in the temple.” “Very likely.”
On second thoughts, he returned and paid for the poem. And now not
only all the statues of bronze in the temples of Ægina are destroyed,
but the temples themselves, and the very walls of the city are utterly
gone, whilst the ode of Pindar, in praise of Pytheas, remains entire.
The treachery of scholars! They are idealists, and should stand for
freedom, justice, and public good. The scholar is bound to stand for
all the virtues and all the liberties,--liberty of trade, liberty of
the press, liberty of religion,--and he should open all the prizes of
success and all the roads of Nature to free competition.
The country complains loudly of the inefficiency of the army. It was
badly led. But, before this, it was not the army alone, it was the
population that was badly led. The clerisy, the spiritual guides, the
scholars, the seers have been false to their trust.
Rely on yourself. There is respect due to your teachers, but every age
is new, and has problems to solve, insoluble by the last age. Men over
forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit. Neither your
teachers, nor the universal teachers, the laws, the customs or dogmas
of nations, neither saint nor sage, can compare with that counsel which
is open to you. No, it is not nations, no, nor even masters, not at
last a few individuals or any heroes, but himself only, the large
equality to truth of a single mind,--as if, in the narrow walls of a
human heart, the wide realm of truth, the world of morals, the tribunal
by which the universe is judged, found room to exist.
Our people have this levity and complaisance,--they fear to offend,
do not wish to be misunderstood; do not wish, of all things, to be in
the minority. God and Nature are altogether sincere, and Art should
be as sincere. It is not enough that the work should show a skilful
hand, ingenious contrivance and admirable polish and finish; it should
have a commanding motive in the time and condition in which it was
made. We should see in it the great belief of the artist, which caused
him to make it so as he did, and not otherwise; nothing frivolous,
nothing that he might do or not do, as he chose, but somewhat that
must be done then and there by him; he could not take his neck out
of that yoke, and save his soul. And this design must shine through
the whole performance. Sincerity is, in dangerous times, discovered
to be an immeasurable advantage. I distrust all the legends of great
accomplishments or performance of unprincipled men. Very little
reliance must be put on the common stories that circulate of this
great senator’s or that great barrister’s learning, their Greek, their
varied literature. That ice won’t bear. Reading!--do you mean that
this senator or this lawyer, who stood by and allowed the passage of
infamous laws, was a reader of Greek books? That is not the question;
but to what purpose did they read? I allow them the merit of that
reading which appears in their opinions, tastes, beliefs, and practice.
They read that they might know, did they not? Well, these men did
not know. They blundered; they were utterly ignorant of that which
every boy or girl of fifteen knows perfectly,--the rights of men and
women. And this big-mouthed talker, among his dictionaries and Leipzic
editions of Lysias, had lost his knowledge. But the President of the
Bank nods to the President of the Insurance Office, and relates that
at Virginia Springs this idol of the forum exhausted a trunkful of
classic authors. There is always the previous question, How came you on
that side? You are a very elegant writer, but you can’t write up what
gravitates down.
It is impossible to extricate oneself from the questions in which our
age is involved. All of us have shared the new enthusiasm of country
and of liberty which swept like a whirlwind through all souls at the
outbreak of war, and brought, by ennobling us, an offset for its
calamity.
War, seeking for the roots of strength, comes upon the moral aspects at
once. In quiet times, custom stifles this discussion as sentimental,
and brings in the brazen devil, as by immemorial right. The war
uplifted us into generous sentiments. War ennobles the age. We do not
often have a moment of grandeur in these hurried, slipshod lives, but
the behavior of the young men has taught us much. We will not again
disparage America, now that we have seen what men it will bear. Battle,
with the sword, has cut many a Gordian knot in twain which all the wit
of East and West, of Northern and Border statesmen could not untie.
I learn with joy and with deep respect that this college has sent its
full quota to the field. I learn with grief, but with honoring pain,
that you have had your sufferers in the battle, and that the noble
youth have returned wounded and maimed. The times are dark, but heroic.
The times develop the strength they need. Boys are heroes. Women have
shown a tender patriotism and inexhaustible charity. And on each new
threat of faction, the ballot of the people has been unexpectedly
right. But the issues already appearing overpay the cost. Slavery
is broken, and, if we use our advantage, irretrievably. For such a
gain, to end once for all that pest of all our free institutions,
one generation might well be sacrificed; perhaps it will; that this
continent be purged and a new era of equal rights dawn on the universe.
Who would not, if it could be made certain that the new morning of
universal liberty should rise on our race by the perishing of one
generation,--who would not consent to die?
THE SCHOLAR.
FOR thought, and not praise,
Thought is the wages
For which I sell days,
Will gladly sell ages
And willing grow old,
Deaf and dumb, blind and cold,
Melting matter into dreams,
Panoramas which I saw,
And whatever glows or seems
Into substance, into Law.
THE sun and moon shall fall amain
Like sowers’ seeds into his brain,
There quickened to be born again.
THE SCHOLAR.
AN ORATION DELIVERED BEFORE THE WASHINGTON AND JEFFERSON SOCIETIES AT
THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA, 28TH JUNE, 1876.
GENTLEMEN: