CONCORD, January 21, 1854.
MR. BLAKE,--My coat is at last done, and my mother and sister allow
that I am _so far_ in a condition to go abroad. I feel as if I had
gone abroad the moment I put it on. It is, as usual, a production
strange to me, the wearer,--invented by some Count D'Orsay; and the
maker of it was not acquainted with any of my real depressions or
elevations. He only measured a peg to hang it on, and might have made
the loop big enough to go over my head. It requires a not quite
innocent indifference, not to say insolence, to wear it. Ah! the
process by which we get our coats is not what it should be. Though the
Church declares it righteous, and its priest pardons me, my own good
genius tells me that it is hasty, and coarse, and false. I expect a
time when, or rather an integrity by which, a man will get his coat as
honestly and as perfectly fitting as a tree its bark. Now our garments
are typical of our conformity to the ways of the world, _i. e._, of
the devil, and to some extent react on us and poison us, like that
shirt which Hercules put on.
I think to come and see you next week, on Monday, if nothing hinders.
I have just returned from court at Cambridge, whither I was called as
a witness, having surveyed a water-privilege, about which there is a
dispute, since you were here.
Ah! what foreign countries there are, greater in extent than the
United States or Russia, and with no more souls to a square mile,
stretching away on every side from every human being with whom you
have no sympathy. Their humanity affects me as simply monstrous.
Rocks, earth, brute beasts, comparatively are not so strange to me.
When I sit in the parlors and kitchens of some with whom my business
brings me--I was going to say in contact--(business, like misery,
makes strange bedfellows), I feel a sort of awe, and as forlorn as if
I were cast away on a desolate shore. I think of Riley's Narrative[50]
and his sufferings. You, who soared like a merlin with your mate
through the realms of æther, in the presence of the unlike, drop at
once to earth, a mere amorphous squab, divested of your air-inflated
pinions. (By the way, excuse this writing, for I am using the stub of
the last feather I chance to possess.) You travel on, however, through
this dark and desert world; you see in the distance an intelligent and
sympathizing lineament; stars come forth in the dark, and oases appear
in the desert.
But (to return to the subject of coats), we are well-nigh smothered
under yet more fatal coats, which do not fit us, our whole lives long.
Consider the cloak that our employment or station is; how rarely men
treat each other for what in their true and naked characters they are;
how we use and tolerate pretension; how the judge is clothed with
dignity which does not belong to him, and the trembling witness with
humility that does not belong to him, and the criminal, perchance,
with shame or impudence which no more belong to him. It does not
matter so much, then, what is the fashion of the cloak with which we
cloak these cloaks. Change the coat; put the judge in the
criminal-box, and the criminal on the bench, and you might think that
you had changed the men.
No doubt the thinnest of all cloaks is conscious deception or lies;
it is sleazy and frays out; it is not close-woven like cloth; but its
meshes are a coarse network. A man can afford to lie only at the
intersection of the threads; but truth puts in the filling, and makes
a consistent stuff.
I mean merely to suggest how much the station affects the demeanor and
self-respectability of the parties, and that the difference between
the judge's coat of cloth and the criminal's is insignificant compared
with, or only partially significant of, the difference between the
coats which their respective stations permit them to wear. What airs
the judge may put on over his coat which the criminal may not! The
judge's opinion (_sententia_) of the criminal _sentences_ him, and is
read by the clerk of the court, and published to the world, and
executed by the sheriff; but the criminal's opinion of the judge has
the weight of a sentence, and is published and executed only in the
supreme court of the universe,--a court not of common pleas. How much
juster is the one than the other? Men are continually _sentencing_
each other; but, whether we be judges or criminals, the sentence is
ineffectual unless we continue ourselves.
I am glad to hear that I do not always limit your vision when you look
this way; that you sometimes see the light through me; that I am here
and there windows, and not all dead wall. Might not the community
sometimes petition a man to remove himself as a nuisance, a darkener
of the day, a too large mote?