CONCORD, December 19, 1853.
MR. BLAKE,--My debt has accumulated so that I should have answered
your last letter at once, if I had not been the subject of what is
called a press of engagements, having a lecture to write for last
Wednesday, and surveying more than usual besides. It has been a kind
of running fight with me,--the enemy not always behind me I trust.
True, a man cannot lift himself by his own waistbands, because he
cannot get out of himself; but he can expand himself (which is better,
there being no up nor down in nature), and so split his waistbands,
being already within himself.
You speak of doing and being, and the vanity, real or apparent, of
much doing. The suckers--I think it is they--make nests in our river
in the spring of more than a cart-load of small stones, amid which to
deposit their ova. The other day I opened a muskrat's house. It was
made of weeds, five feet broad at base, and three feet high, and far
and low within it was a little cavity, only a foot in diameter, where
the rat dwelt. It may seem trivial, this piling up of weeds, but so
the race of muskrats is preserved. We must heap up a great pile of
doing, for a small diameter of being. Is it not imperative on us that
we _do_ something, if we only work in a treadmill? And, indeed, some
sort of revolving is necessary to produce a centre and nucleus of
being. What exercise is to the body, employment is to the mind and
morals. Consider what an amount of drudgery must be performed,--how
much humdrum and prosaic labor goes to any work of the least value.
There are so many layers of mere white lime in every shell to that
thin inner one so beautifully tinted. Let not the shellfish think to
build his house of that alone; and pray, what are its tints to him? Is
it not his smooth, close-fitting shirt merely, whose tints _are not_
to him, being in the dark, but only when he is gone or dead, and his
shell is heaved up to light, a wreck upon the beach, do they appear.
With him, too, it is a Song of the Shirt, "Work,--work,--work!" And
the work is not merely a police in the gross sense, but in the higher
sense a discipline. If it is surely the means to the highest end we
know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be
elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?
How admirably the artist is made to accomplish his self-culture by
devotion to his art! The wood-sawyer, through his effort to do his
work well, becomes not merely a better wood-sawyer, but measurably a
better _man_. Few are the men that can work on their navels,--only
some Brahmins that I have heard of. To the painter is given some paint
and canvas instead; to the Irishman a hog, typical of himself. In a
thousand apparently humble ways men busy themselves to make some right
take the place of some wrong,--if it is only to make a better paste
blacking,--and they are themselves _so much_ the better morally for
it.
You say that you do not succeed much. Does it concern you enough that
you do not? Do you work hard enough at it? Do you get the benefit of
discipline out of it? If so, persevere. Is it a more serious thing
than to walk a thousand miles in a thousand successive hours? Do you
get any corns by it? Do you ever think of hanging yourself on account
of failure?
If you are going into that line,--going to besiege the city of
God,--you must not only be strong in engines, but prepared with
provisions to starve out the garrison. An Irishman came to see me
to-day, who is endeavoring to get his family out to this New World. He
rises at half past four, milks twenty-eight cows (which has swollen
the joints of his fingers), and eats his breakfast, without any milk
in his tea or coffee, before six; and so on, day after day, for six
and a half dollars a month; and thus he keeps his virtue in him, if he
does not add to it; and he regards me as a gentleman able to assist
him; but if I ever get to be a gentleman, it will be by working after
my fashion harder than he does. If my joints are not swollen, it must
be because I deal with the teats of celestial cows before breakfast
(and the milker in this case is always allowed some of the milk for
his breakfast), to say nothing of the flocks and herds of Admetus
afterward.
It is the art of mankind to polish the world, and every one who works
is scrubbing in some part.
If the work is high and far,
You must not only aim aright,
But draw the bow with all your might.
You must qualify yourself to use a bow which no humbler archer can
bend.
"Work,--work,--work!"
Who shall know it for a bow? It is not of yew tree. It is straighter
than a ray of light; flexibility is not known for one of its
qualities.
December 22.
So far I had got when I was called off to survey. Pray read the life
of Haydon the painter, if you have not. It is a small revelation for
these latter days; a great satisfaction to know that he has lived,
though he is now dead. Have you met with the letter of a Turkish cadi
at the end of Layard's "Ancient Babylon"? that also is refreshing, and
a capital comment on the whole book which precedes it,--the Oriental
genius speaking through him.
Those Brahmins "put it through." They come off, or rather stand still,
conquerors, with some withered arms or legs at least to show; and they
are said to have cultivated the faculty of abstraction to a degree
unknown to Europeans. If we cannot sing of faith and triumph, we will
sing our despair. We will be that kind of bird. There are day owls,
and there are night owls, and each is beautiful and even musical while
about its business.
Might you not find some positive work to do with your back to Church
and State, letting your back do all the rejection of them? Can you not
_go_ upon your pilgrimage, Peter, along the winding mountain path
whither you face? A step more will make those funereal church bells
over your shoulder sound far and sweet as a natural sound.
"Work,--work,--work!"
Why not make a _very large_ mud pie and bake it in the sun! Only put
no Church nor State into it, nor upset any other pepper-box that way.
Dig out a woodchuck,--for that has nothing to do with rotting
institutions. Go ahead.
Whether a man spends his day in an ecstasy or despondency, he must do
some work to show for it, even as there are flesh and bones to show
for him. We are superior to the joy we experience.
Your last two letters, methinks, have more nerve and will in them than
usual, as if you had erected yourself more. Why are not they good
work, if you only had a hundred correspondents to tax you?
Make your failure tragical by the earnestness and steadfastness of
your endeavor, and then it will not differ from success. Prove it to
be the inevitable fate of mortals,--of one mortal,--if you can.
You said that you were writing on Immortality. I wish you would
communicate to me what you know about that. You are sure to live while
that is your theme.
Thus I write on some text which a sentence of your letters may have
furnished.
I think of coming to see you as soon as I get a new coat, if I have
money enough left. I will write to you again about it.