across the gulfs of space in every direction. To every soul that
is created is its path, invisible to all but itself. Each soul,
therefore, walking in its own path walks firmly; and to the
astonishment of all other souls, who see not its path, it goes as
softly and playfully on its way as if, instead of being a line,
narrow as the edge of a sword, over terrific pits right and left, it
were a wide prairie.
Genius is a delicate sensibility to the laws of the world, adding the
power to express them again in some new form. The highest measure of
poetic power is such insight and faculty to fuse the circumstances of
to-day as shall make transparent the whole web of circumstance and
opinion in which the man finds himself, so that he releases himself
from the traditions in which he grew,—no longer looks back to Hebrew
or Greek or English use or tradition in religion, laws, or life, but
sees so truly the omnipresence of eternal cause that he can convert
the daily and hourly event of New York, of Boston, into universal
symbols. I owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain
from the common and showing me that gods are sitting disguised in
every company.
The conduct of Intellect must respect nothing so much as preserving
the sensibility. My measure for all subjects of science as of events
is their impression on the soul. That mind is best which is most
impressionable. There are times when the cawing of a crow, a weed, a
snow-flake, a boy’s willow whistle, or a farmer planting in his field
is more suggestive to the mind than the Yosemite gorge or the Vatican
would be in another hour. In like mood an old verse, or certain
words, gleam with rare significance.
But sensibility does not exhaust our idea of it. That is only half.
Genius is not a lazy angel contemplating itself and things. It is
insatiable for expression. Thought must take the stupendous step
of passing into realization. A master can formulate his thought.
Our thoughts at first possess us. Later, if we have good heads, we
come to possess them. We believe that certain persons add to the
common vision a certain degree of control over these states of mind;
that the true scholar is one who has the power to stand beside his
thoughts or to hold off his thoughts at arm’s length and give them
perspective.
* * * * *
It is not to be concealed that the gods have guarded this privilege
with costly penalty. This slight discontinuity which perception
effects between the mind and the object paralyzes the will. If you
cut or break in two a block or stone and press the two parts closely
together, you can indeed bring the particles very near, but never
again so near that they shall attract each other so that you can take
up the block as one. That indescribably small interval is as good as
a thousand miles, and has forever severed the practical unity. Such
is the immense deduction from power by discontinuity.
The intellect that sees the interval partakes of it, and the fact of
intellectual perception severs once for all the man from the things
with which he converses. Affection blends, intellect disjoins subject
and object. For weal or woe we clear ourselves from the thing we
contemplate. We grieve but are not the grief; we love but are not
love. If we converse with low things, with crimes, with mischances,
we are not compromised. And if with high things, with heroic actions,
with virtues, the interval becomes a gulf and we cannot enter into
the highest good. Artist natures do not weep. Goethe, the surpassing
intellect of modern times, apprehends the spiritual but is not
spiritual.
There is indeed this vice about men of thought, that you cannot quite
trust them; not as much as other men of the same natural probity,
without intellect; because they have a hankering to play Providence
and make a distinction in favor of themselves from the rules they
apply to the human race.
* * * * *
The primary rule for the conduct of Intellect is to have control of
the thoughts without losing their natural attitudes and action. They
are the oracle; we are not to poke and drill and force, but to follow
them. Yet the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets.
You must formulate your thought or ’tis all sky and no stars. There
are men of great apprehension, discursive minds, who easily entertain
ideas, but are not exact, severe with themselves, cannot connect or
arrange their thoughts so as effectively to report them. A blending
of these two—the intellectual perception of truth and the moral
sentiment of right—is wisdom. All thought is practical. Wishing is
one thing; will another. Wishing is castle-building; the dreaming
about things agreeable to the senses, but to which we have no right.
Will is the advance to that which rightly belongs to us, to which
the inward magnet ever points, and which we dare to make ours. The
revelation of thought takes us out of servitude into freedom. So does
the sense of right.
Will is the measure of power. To a great genius there must be a great
will. If the thought is not a lamp to the will, does not proceed to
an act, the wise are imbecile. He alone is strong and happy who has a
will. The rest are herds. He uses; they are used. He is of the Maker;
they are of the Made.
Will is always miraculous, being the presence of God to men. When
it appears in a man he is a hero, and all metaphysics are at fault.
Heaven is the exercise of the faculties, the added sense of power.
All men know the truth, but what of that? It is rare to find one who
knows how to speak it. A man tries to speak it and his voice is like
the hiss of a snake, or rude and chiding. The truth is not spoken
but injured. The same thing happens in power to do the right. His
rectitude is ridiculous. His organs do not play him true.
There is a meter which determines the constructive power of
man,—this, namely, the question whether the mind possesses the
control of its thoughts, or they of it. The new sect stands for
certain thoughts. We go to individual members for an exposition of
them. Vain expectation. They are possessed by the ideas but do not
possess them. One meets contemplative men who dwell in a certain
feeling and delight which are intellectual but wholly above their
expression. They cannot formulate. They impress those who know
them by their loyalty to the truth they worship but cannot impart.
Sometimes the patience and love are rewarded by the chamber of power
being at last opened; but sometimes they pass away dumb, to find it
where all obstruction is removed.
By and by comes a facility; some one that can move the mountain
and build of it a causeway through the Dismal Swamp, as easily as
he carries the hair on his head. Talent is habitual facility of
execution. We like people who can do things. The various talents are
organic, or each related to that part of nature it is to explore and
utilize. Somewhat is to come to the light, and one was created to
fetch it,—a vessel of honor or of dishonor. ’Tis of instant use in
the economy of the Cosmos, and the more armed and biassed for the
work the better.
Each of these talents is born to be unfolded and set at work for the
use and delight of men, and, in the last result, the man with the
talent is the need of mankind; the whole ponderous machinery of the
state has really for its aim just to place this skill of each.
But idea and execution are not often entrusted to the same head.
There is some incompatibility of good speculation and practice, for
example, the failure of monasteries and Brook Farms. To hammer out
phalanxes must be done by smiths; as soon as the scholar attempts it
he is half a charlatan.
The grasp is the main thing. Most men’s minds do not grasp anything.
All slips through their fingers, like the paltry brass grooves that
in most country houses are used to raise or drop the curtain, but are
made to sell, and will not hold any curtain but cobwebs. I have heard
that idiot children are known from their birth by the circumstance
that their hands do not close round anything. Webster naturally and
always grasps, and therefore retains something from every company and
circumstance.
As a talent Dante’s imagination is the nearest to hands and feet
that we have seen. He clasps the thought as if it were a tree or a
stone, and describes as mathematically. I once found Page the painter
modelling his figures in clay, Ruth and Naomi, before he painted them
on canvas. Dante, one would say, did the same thing before he wrote
the verses.
* * * * *
I have spoken of Intellect constructive. But it is in degrees. How it
moves when its pace is accelerated! The pace of Nature is so slow.
Why not from strength to strength, from miracle to miracle, and not
as now with this retardation—as if Nature had sprained her foot—and
plenteous stopping at little stations?
The difference is obvious enough in Talent between the speed of one
man’s action above another’s. In debate, in legislature, not less
in action; in war or in affairs, alike daring and effective. But I
speak of it in quite another sense, namely, in the habitual speed of
combination of thought.
The same functions which are perfect in our quadrupeds are seen
slower performed in palæontology. Many races it cost them to achieve
the completion that is now in the life of one. Life had not yet so
fierce a glow.
Shakespeare astonishes by his equality in every play, act, scene or
line. One would say he must have been a thousand years old when he
wrote his first line, so thoroughly is his thought familiar to him,
and has such scope and so solidly worded, as if it were already a
proverb and not hereafter to become one. Well, that millennium in
effect is really only a little acceleration in his process of thought.
But each power is commonly at the expense of some other. When pace is
increased it will happen that the control is in a degree lost. Reason
does not keep her firm seat. The Delphian prophetess, when the spirit
possesses her, is herself a victim. The excess of individualism, when
it is not corrected or subordinated to the Supreme Reason, makes
that vice which we stigmatize as monotones, men of one idea, or, as
the French say, _enfant perdu d’une conviction isolée_, which give
such a comic tinge to all society. Every man has his theory, true,
but ridiculously overstated. We are forced to treat a great part of
mankind as if they were a little deranged. We detect their mania and
humor it, so that conversation soon becomes a tiresome effort.
You laugh at the monotones, at the men of one idea, but if we look
nearly at heroes we may find the same poverty; and perhaps it is not
poverty, but power. The secret of power, intellectual or physical, is
concentration, and all concentration involves of necessity a certain
narrowness. It is a law of nature that he who looks at one thing must
turn his eyes from every other thing in the universe. The horse goes
better with blinders, and the man for dedication to his task. If you
ask what compensation is made for the inevitable narrowness, why,
this, that in learning one thing well you learn all things.
Immense is the patience of Nature. You say thought is a penurious
rill. Well, we can wait. Nature is immortal, and can wait. Nature
having for capital this rill, drop by drop, as it trickles from the
rock of ages,—this rill and her patience,—she husbands and hives,
she forms reservoirs, were it only a phial or a hair-tube that
will hold as it were a drop of attar. Not having enough to support
all the powers of a race, she thins her stock and raises a few
individuals, or only a pair. Not sufficing to feed all the faculties
synchronously, she feeds one faculty and starves all the rest. I am
familiar with cases, we meet them daily, wherein the vital force
being insufficient for the constitution, everything is neglected
that can be spared; some one power fed, all the rest pine. ’Tis like
a withered hand or leg on a Hercules. It makes inconvenience in
society, for we presume symmetry, and because they know one thing we
defer to them in another, and find them really contemptible. We can’t
make half a bow and say, I honor and despise you. But Nature can; she
whistles with all her winds, and does as she pleases.
* * * * *
It is much to write sentences; it is more to add method and write
out the spirit of your life symmetrically. But to arrange general
reflections in their natural order, so that I shall have one
homogeneous piece,—a Lycidas, an Allegro, a Hamlet, a Midsummer
Night’s Dream,—this continuity is for the great. The wonderful men
are wonderful hereby. Such concentration of experiences is in every
great work, which, though successive in the mind of the master, were
primarily combined in his piece.
But what we want is consecutiveness. ’Tis with us a flash of light,
then a long darkness, then a flash again. Ah! could we turn these
fugitive sparkles into an astronomy of Copernican worlds.
* * * * *
I must think this keen sympathy, this thrill of awe with which we
watch the performance of genius, a sign of our own readiness to
exert the like power. I must think we are entitled to powers far
transcending any that we possess; that we have in the race the sketch
of a man which no individual comes up to.
Every sincere man is right, or, to make him right, only needs a
little larger dose of his own personality. Excellent in his own way
by means of not apprehending the gift of another. When he speaks out
of another’s mind, we detect it. He can’t make any paint stick but
his own. No man passes for that with another which he passes for
with himself. The respect and the censure of his brother are alike
injurious and irrelevant. We see ourselves; we lack organs to see
others, and only squint at them.
Don’t fear to push these individualities to their farthest
divergence. Characters and talents are complemental and suppletory.
The world stands by balanced antagonisms. The more the peculiarities
are pressed the better the result. The air would rot without
lightning; and without the violence of direction that men have,
without bigots, without men of fixed idea, no excitement, no
efficiency.
The novelist should not make any character act absurdly, but only
absurdly as seen by others. For it is so in life. Nonsense will not
keep its unreason if you come into the humorist’s point of view, but
unhappily we find it is fast becoming sense, and we must flee again
into the distance if we would laugh.
What strength belongs to every plant and animal in nature. The tree
or the brook has no duplicity, no pretentiousness, no show. It is,
with all its might and main, what it is, and makes one and the same
impression and effect at all times. All the thoughts of a turtle are
turtles, and of a rabbit, rabbits. But a man is broken and dissipated
by the giddiness of his will; he does not throw himself into his
judgments; his genius leads him one way but ’tis likely his trade or
politics in quite another. He rows with one hand and with the other
backs water, and does not give to any manner of life the strength
of his constitution. Hence the perpetual loss of power and waste of
human life.
The natural remedy against this miscellany of knowledge and aim, this
desultory universality of ours, this immense ground-juniper falling
abroad and not gathered up into any columnar tree, is to substitute
realism for sentimentalism; a certain recognition of the simple and
terrible laws which, seen or unseen, pervade and govern.
You will say this is quite axiomatic and a little too true. I do
not find it an agreed point. Literary men for the most part have a
settled despair as to the realization of ideas in their own time.
There is in all students a distrust of truth, a timidity about
affirming it; a wish to patronize Providence.
We disown our debt to moral evil. To science there is no poison; to
botany no weed; to chemistry no dirt. The curses of malignity and
despair are important criticism, which must be heeded until he can
explain and rightly silence them.
“_Croyez moi, l’erreur aussi a son mérite_,” said Voltaire. We see
those who surmount by dint of egotism or infatuation obstacles from
which the prudent recoil. The right partisan is a heady man, who,
because he does not see many things, sees some one thing with heat
and exaggeration; and if he falls among other narrow men, or objects
which have a brief importance, prefers it to the universe, and seems
inspired and a godsend to those who wish to magnify the matter and
carry a point. ’Tis the difference between progress by railroad and
by walking across the broken country. Immense speed, but only in one
direction.
* * * * *
There are two theories of life; one for the demonstration of our
talent, the other for the education of the man. One is activity, the
busy-body, the following of that practical talent which we have,
in the belief that what is so natural, easy and pleasant to us and
desirable to others will surely lead us out safely; in this direction
lie usefulness, comfort, society, low power of all sorts. The other
is trust, religion, consent to be nothing for eternity, entranced
waiting, the worship of ideas. This is solitary, grand, secular. They
are in perpetual balance and strife. One is talent, the other genius.
One is skill, the other character.
We are continually tempted to sacrifice genius to talent, the hope
and promise of insight to the lust of a freer demonstration of those
gifts we have; and we buy this freedom to glitter by the loss of
general health.
It is the levity of this country to forgive everything to talent. If
a man show cleverness, rhetorical skill, bold front in the forum or
the senate, people clap their hands without asking more. We have a
juvenile love of smartness, of showy speech. We like faculty that can
rapidly be coined into money, and society seems to be in conspiracy
to utilize every gift prematurely, and pull down genius to lucrative
talent. Every kind of meanness and mischief is forgiven to intellect.
All is condoned if I can write a good song or novel.
Wide is the gulf between genius and talent. The men we know, poets,
wits, writers, deal with their thoughts as jewellers with jewels,
which they sell but must not wear. Like the carpenter, who gives up
the key of the fine house he has built, and never enters it again.
There is a conflict between a man’s private dexterity or talent and
his access to the free air and light which wisdom is; between wisdom
and the habit and necessity of repeating itself which belongs to
every mind. Peter is the mould into which everything is poured like
warm wax, and be it astronomy or railroads or French revolution or
theology or botany, it comes out Peter. But there are quick limits
to our interest in the personality of people. They are as much alike
as their barns and pantries, and are as soon musty and dreary. They
entertain us for a time, but at the second or third encounter we have
nothing more to learn.
* * * * *
The daily history of the Intellect is this alternating of expansions
and concentrations. The expansions are the invitations from heaven
to try a larger sweep, a higher pitch than we have yet climbed, and
to leave all our past for this enlarged scope. Present power, on the
other hand, requires concentration on the moment and the thing to be
done.
The condition of sanity is to respect the order of the intellectual
world; to keep down talent in its place, to enthrone the instinct.
There must be perpetual rallying and self-recovery. Each talent is
ambitious and self-asserting; it works for show and for the shop, and
the greater it grows the more is the mischief and the misleading, so
that presently all is wrong.
* * * * *
No wonder the children love masks and costumes, and play horse, play
soldier, play school, play bear, and delight in theatricals. The
children have only the instinct of the universe, in which becoming
somewhat else is the perpetual game of nature, and death the penalty
of standing still. ’Tis not less in thought. I cannot conceive
any good in a thought which confines and stagnates. The universe
exists only in transit, or we behold it shooting the gulf from the
past to the future. We are passing into new heavens in fact by the
movement of our solar system, and in thought by our better knowledge.
Transition is the attitude of power. A fact is only a fulcrum of the
spirit. It is the terminus of a past thought, but only a means now to
new sallies of the imagination and new progress of wisdom. The habit
of saliency, of not pausing but proceeding, is a sort of importation
and domestication of the divine effort into a man. Routine, the rut,
is the path of indolence, of cows, of sluggish animal life; as near
gravitation as it can go. But wit sees the short way, puts together
what belongs together, custom or no custom; in that is organization.
Inspiration is the continuation of the divine effort that built the
man. The same course continues itself in the mind which we have
witnessed in nature, namely, the carrying-on and completion of the
metamorphosis from grub to worm, from worm to fly. In human thought
this process is often arrested for years and ages. The history of
mankind is the history of arrested growth. This premature stop, I
know not how, befalls most of us in early youth; as if the growth of
high powers, the access to rare truths, closed at two or three years
in the child, while all the pagan faculties went ripening on to sixty.
So long as you are capable of advance, so long you have not abdicated
the hope and future of a divine soul. That wonderful oracle will
reply when it is consulted, and there is no history or tradition, no
rule of life or art or science, on which it is not a competent and
the only competent judge.
Man was made for conflict, not for rest. In action is his power;
not in his goals but in his transitions man is great. Instantly he
is dwarfed by self-indulgence. The truest state of mind rested in
becomes false.
The spiritual power of man is twofold, mind and heart, Intellect and
morals; one respecting truth, the other the will. One is the man,
the other the woman in spiritual nature. One is power, the other is
love. These elements always coexist in every normal individual, but
one predominates. And as each is easily exalted in our thoughts till
it serves to fill the universe and become the synonym of God, the
soul in which one predominates is ever watchful and jealous when such
immense claims are made for one as seem injurious to the other. Ideal
and practical, like ecliptic and equator, are never parallel. Each
has its vices, its proper dangers, obvious enough when the opposite
element is deficient.
Intellect is skeptical, runs down into talent, selfish working for
private ends, conceited, ostentatious and malignant. On the other
side the clear-headed thinker complains of souls led hither and
thither by affections which, alone, are blind guides and thriftless
workmen, and in the confusion asks the polarity of intellect. But all
great minds and all great hearts have mutually allowed the absolute
necessity of the twain.
If the first rule is to obey your genius, in the second place the
good mind is known by the choice of what is positive, of what is
advancing. We must embrace the affirmative. But the affirmative of
affirmatives is love. _Quantus amor tantus animus._ Strength enters
as the moral element enters. Lovers of men are as safe as the sun.
Goodwill makes insight. Sensibility is the secret readiness to
believe in all kinds of power, and the contempt of any experience we
have not is the opposite pole. The measure of mental health is the
disposition to find good everywhere, good and order, analogy, health
and benefit,—the love of truth, tendency to be in the right, no
fighter for victory, no cockerel.
We have all of us by nature a certain divination and parturient
vaticination in our minds of some higher good and perfection than
either power or knowledge. Knowledge is plainly to be preferred
before power, as being that which guides and directs its blind force
and impetus; but Aristotle declares that the origin of reason is not
reason but something better.