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_ EXPERIENCE.
THE lords of life, the lords of life,--
I saw them pass,
In their own guise,
Like and unlike,
Portly and grim,
Use and Surprise,
Surface and Dream,
Succession swift, and spectral Wrong,
Temperament without a tongue,
And the inventor of the game
Omnipresent without name;--
Some to see, some to be guessed,
They marched from east to west:
Little man, least of all,
Among the legs of his guardians tall,
Walked about with puzzled look:--
Him by the hand dear Nature took;
Dearest Nature, strong and kind,
Whispered, 'Darling, never mind!
Tomorrow they will wear another face,
The founder thou! these are thy race!'
II. EXPERIENCE.
WHERE do we find ourselves? In a series of which
we do not know the extremes, and believe that it
has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair;
there are stairs below us, which we seem to have
ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one,
which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius
which according to the old belief stands at the
door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to
drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup
too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy
now at noonday. Sleep lingers all our lifetime
about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the
boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter.
Our life is not so much threatened as our perception.
Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not
know our place again. Did our birth fall in some
fit of indigence and frugality in nature, that she
was so sparing of her fire and so liberal of her
earth that it appears to us that we lack the
affirmative principle, and though we have health
and reason, yet we have no superfluity of spirit
for new creation? We have enough to live and bring
the year about, but not an ounce to impart or to
invest. Ah that our Genius were a little more of a
genius! We are like millers on the lower levels of
a stream, when the factories above them have
exhausted the water. We too fancy that the upper
people must have raised their dams.
If any of us knew what we were doing, or where we
are going, then when we think we best know! We do
not know to-day whether we are busy or idle. In
times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have
afterwards discovered that much was accomplished,
and much was begun in us. All our days are so
unprofitable while they pass, that 'tis wonderful
where or when we ever got anything of this which
we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on
any dated calendar day. Some heavenly days must have
been intercalated somewhere, like those that Hermes
won with dice of the Moon, that Osiris might be born.
It is said all martyrdoms looked mean when they were
suffered. Every ship is a romantic object, except
that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our
vessel and hangs on every other sail in the horizon.
Our life looks trivial, and we shun to record it. Men
seem to have learned of the horizon the art of
perpetual retreating and reference. 'Yonder uplands
are rich pasturage, and my neighbor has fertile
meadow, but my field,' says the querulous farmer,
'only holds the world together.' I quote another man's
saying; unluckily that other withdraws himself in the
same way, and quotes me. 'Tis the trick of nature
thus to degrade to-day; a good deal of buzz, and
somewhere a result slipped magically in. Every roof is
agreeable to the eye until it is lifted; then we find
tragedy and moaning women and hard-eyed husbands and
deluges of lethe, and the men ask, 'What's the news?'
as if the old were so bad. How many individuals can we
count in society? how many actions? how many opinions?
So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine,
and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man's
genius contracts itself to a very few hours. The history
of literature--take the net result of Tiraboschi, Warton,
or Schlegel,--is a sum of very few ideas and of very few
original tales; all the rest being variation of these.
So in this great society wide lying around us, a critical
analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is
almost all custom and gross sense. There are even few
opinions, and these seem organic in the speakers, and do
not disturb the universal necessity.
What opium is instilled into all disaster! It shows
formidable as we approach it, but there is at last no
rough rasping friction, but the most slippery sliding
surfaces. We fall soft on a thought; Ate Dea is gentle,--
"Over men's heads walking aloft,
With tender feet treading so soft."
People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not
half so bad with them as they say. There are moods
in which we court suffering, in the hope that here
at least we shall find reality, sharp peaks and
edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting
and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me
is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest,
plays about the surface, and never introduces me into
the reality, for contact with which we would even pay
the costly price of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich
who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well,
souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea
washes with silent waves between us and the things we
aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us
idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two
years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,--no
more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If to-morrow I
should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal
debtors, the loss of my property would be a great
inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it
would leave me as it found me,--neither better nor
worse. So is it with this calamity: it does not touch
me; something which I fancied was a part of me, which
could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged
without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no
scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach
me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.
The Indian who was laid under a curse that the wind
should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor
fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events
are summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every
drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that
with a grim satisfaction, saying There at least is
reality that will not dodge us.
I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects,
which lets them slip through our fingers then when
we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of
our condition. Nature does not like to be observed,
and likes that we should be her fools and playmates.
We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not
a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never
gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our
hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are
oblique and casual.
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to
illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of
beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be
many-colored lenses which paint the world their own
hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From
the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we
can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books
belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the
mood of the man whether he shall see the sunset or the
fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is
always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we
can relish nature or criticism. The more or less
depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the
iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is
fortune or talent to a cold and defective nature? Who
cares what sensibility or discrimination a man has at
some time shown, if he falls asleep in his chair? or if
he laugh and giggle? or if he apologize? or is infected
with egotism? or thinks of his dollar? or cannot go by
food? or has gotten a child in his boyhood? Of what use
is genius, if the organ is too convex or too concave
and cannot find a focal distance within the actual
horizon of human life? Of what use, if the brain is too
cold or too hot, and the man does not care enough for
results to stimulate him to experiment, and hold him up
in it? or if the web is too finely woven, too irritable
by pleasure and pain, so that life stagnates from too
much reception without due outlet? Of what use to make
heroic vows of amendment, if the same old law-breaker
is to keep them? What cheer can the religious sentiment
yield, when that is suspected to be secretly dependent
on the seasons of the year and the state of the blood?
I knew a witty physician who found the creed in the
biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was
disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and
if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian. Very
mortifying is the reluctant experience that some
unfriendly excess or imbecility neutralizes the promise
of genius. We see young men who owe us a new world, so
readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit
the debt; they die young and dodge the account; or if
they live they lose themselves in the crowd.
Temperament also enters fully into the system of
illusions and shuts us in a prison of glass which
we cannot see. There is an optical illusion about
every person we meet. In truth they are all
creatures of given temperament, which will appear
in a given character, whose boundaries they will
never pass: but we look at them, they seem alive,
and we presume there is impulse in them. In the
moment it seems impulse; in the year, in the lifetime,
it turns out to be a certain uniform tune which the
revolving barrel of the music-box must play. Men
resist the conclusion in the morning, but adopt it
as the evening wears on, that temper prevails over
everything of time, place, and condition, and is
inconsumable in the flames of religion. Some
modifications the moral sentiment avails to impose,
but the individual texture holds its dominion, if not
to bias the moral judgments, yet to fix the measure
of activity and of enjoyment.
I thus express the law as it is read from the
platform of ordinary life, but must not leave
it without noticing the capital exception. For
temperament is a power which no man willingly
hears any one praise but himself. On the platform
of physics we cannot resist the contracting
influences of so-called science. Temperament puts
all divinity to rout. I know the mental proclivity
of physicians. I hear the chuckle of the phrenologists.
Theoretic kidnappers and slave-drivers, they esteem
each man the victim of another, who winds him round
his finger by knowing the law of his being; and by
such cheap signboards as the color of his beard or
the slope of his occiput, reads the inventory of his
fortunes and character. The grossest ignorance does
not disgust like this impudent knowingness. The
physicians say they are not materialists; but they
are:--Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness:
O so thin!--But the definition of spiritual should be,
that which is its own evidence. What notions do they
attach to love! what to religion! One would not
willingly pronounce these words in their hearing,
and give them the occasion to profane them. I saw a
gracious gentleman who adapts his conversation to the
form of the head of the man he talks with! I had
fancied that the value of life lay in its inscrutable
possibilities; in the fact that I never know, in
addressing myself to a new individual, what may befall
me. I carry the keys of my castle in my hand, ready to
throw them at the feet of my lord, whenever and in what
disguise soever he shall appear. I know he is in the
neighborhood hidden among vagabonds. Shall I preclude
my future by taking a high seat and kindly adapting my
conversation to the shape of heads? When I come to that,
the doctors shall buy me for a cent.--'But, sir, medical
history; the report to the Institute; the proven facts!'
--I distrust the facts and the inferences. Temperament
is the veto or limitation-power in the constitution,
very justly applied to restrain an opposite excess in
the constitution, but absurdly offered as a bar to
original equity. When virtue is in presence, all
subordinate powers sleep. On its own level, or in
view of nature, temperament is final. I see not, if
one be once caught in this trap of so-called sciences,
any escape for the man from the links of the chain of
physical necessity. Given such an embryo, such a
history must follow. On this platform one lives in a
sty of sensualism, and would soon come to suicide.
But it is impossible that the creative power should
exclude itself. Into every intelligence there is a door
which is never closed, through which the creator passes.
The intellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart,
lover of absolute good, intervenes for our succor, and
at one whisper of these high powers we awake from
ineffectual struggles with this nightmare. We hurl it
into its own hell, and cannot again contract ourselves
to so base a state.
The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity
of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would
anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. This onward
trick of nature is too strong for us: Pero si muove.
When at night I look at the moon and stars, I seem
stationary, and they to hurry. Our love of the real
draws us to permanence, but health of body consists
in circulation, and sanity of mind in variety or
facility of association. We need change of objects.
Dedication to one thought is quickly odious. We house
with the insane, and must humor them; then conversation
dies out. Once I took such delight in Montaigne, that
I thought I should not need any other book; before that,
in Shakspeare; then in Plutarch; then in Plotinus; at
one time in Bacon; afterwards in Goethe; even in Bettine;
but now I turn the pages of either of them languidly,
whilst I still cherish their genius. So with pictures;
each will bear an emphasis of attention once, which it
cannot retain, though we fain would continue to be
pleased in that manner. How strongly I have felt of
pictures that when you have seen one well, you must
take your leave of it; you shall never see it again.
I have had good lessons from pictures which I have
since seen without emotion or remark. A deduction must
be made from the opinion which even the wise express
of a new book or occurrence. Their opinion gives me
tidings of their mood, and some vague guess at the
new fact, but is nowise to be trusted as the lasting
relation between that intellect and that thing. The
child asks, 'Mamma, why don't I like the story as well
as when you told it me yesterday?' Alas! child it is
even so with the oldest cherubim of knowledge. But
will it answer thy question to say, Because thou wert
born to a whole and this story is a particular? The
reason of the pain this discovery causes us (and we
make it late in respect to works of art and intellect),
is the plaint of tragedy which murmurs from it in regard
to persons, to friendship and love.
That immobility and absence of elasticity which
we find in the arts, we find with more pain in the
artist. There is no power of expansion in men. Our
friends early appear to us as representatives of
certain ideas which they never pass or exceed. They
stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and power,
but they never take the single step that would bring
them there. A man is like a bit of Labrador spar,
which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand until
you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep
and beautiful colors. There is no adaptation or
universal applicability in men, but each has his
special talent, and the mastery of successful men
consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and
when that turn shall be oftenest to be practised.
We do what we must, and call it by the best names
we can, and would fain have the praise of having
intended the result which ensues. I cannot recall
any form of man who is not superfluous sometimes.
But is not this pitiful? Life is not worth the
taking, to do tricks in.
Of course it needs the whole society to give the
symmetry we seek. The party-colored wheel must
revolve very fast to appear white. Something is
earned too by conversing with so much folly and
defect. In fine, whoever loses, we are always of
the gaining party. Divinity is behind our failures
and follies also. The plays of children are nonsense,
but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest
and solemnest things, with commerce, government,
church, marriage, and so with the history of every
man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by
it. Like a bird which alights nowhere, but hops
perpetually from bough to bough, is the Power which
abides in no man and in no woman, but for a moment
speaks from this one, and for another moment from
that one.
But what help from these fineries or pedantries?
What help from thought? Life is not dialectics.
We, I think, in these times, have had lessons
enough of the futility of criticism. Our young
people have thought and written much on labor and
reform, and for all that they have written, neither
the world nor themselves have got on a step.
Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede
muscular activity. If a man should consider the
nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his
throat, he would starve. At Education-Farm, the
noblest theory of life sat on the noblest figures
of young men and maidens, quite powerless and
melancholy. It would not rake or pitch a ton of hay;
it would not rub down a horse; and the men and
maidens it left pale and hungry. A political orator
wittily compared our party promises to western roads,
which opened stately enough, with planted trees on
either side to tempt the traveller, but soon became
narrow and narrower and ended in a squirrel-track
and ran up a tree. So does culture with us; it ends
in headache. Unspeakably sad and barren does life
look to those who a few months ago were dazzled with
the splendor of the promise of the times. "There is
now no longer any right course of action nor any
self-devotion left among the Iranis." Objections and
criticism we have had our fill of. There are objections
to every course of life and action, and the practical
wisdom infers an indifferency, from the omnipresence
of objection. The whole frame of things preaches
indifferency. Do not craze yourself with thinking, but
go about your business anywhere. Life is not intellectual
or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed
people who can enjoy what they find, without question.
Nature hates peeping, and our mothers speak her very
sense when they say, "Children, eat your victuals, and
say no more of it." To fill the hour,--that is happiness;
to fill the hour and leave no crevice for a repentance
or an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art
of life is to skate well on them. Under the oldest
mouldiest conventions a man of native force prospers
just as well as in the newest world, and that by skill
of handling and treatment. He can take hold anywhere.
Life itself is a mixture of power and form, and will
not bear the least excess of either. To finish the
moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the
road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is
wisdom. It is not the part of men, but of fanatics,
or of mathematicians if you will, to say that the
shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring
whether for so short a duration we were sprawling in
want or sitting high. Since our office is with moments,
let us husband them. Five minutes of today are worth
as much to me as five minutes in the next millennium.
Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us
treat the men and women well; treat them as if they
were real; perhaps they are. Men live in their fancy,
like drunkards whose hands are too soft and tremulous
for successful labor. It is a tempest of fancies, and
the only ballast I know is a respect to the present
hour. Without any shadow of doubt, amidst this vertigo
of shows and politics, I settle myself ever the firmer
in the creed that we should not postpone and refer and
wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever
we deal with, accepting our actual companions and
circumstances, however humble or odious as the mystic
officials to whom the universe has delegated its
whole pleasure for us. If these are mean and malignant,
their contentment, which is the last victory of justice,
is a more satisfying echo to the heart than the voice
of poets and the casual sympathy of admirable persons.
I think that however a thoughtful man may suffer from
the defects and absurdities of his company, he cannot
without affectation deny to any set of men and women
a sensibility to extraordinary merit. The coarse and
frivolous have an instinct of superiority, if they have
not a sympathy, and honor it in their blind capricious
way with sincere homage.
The fine young people despise life, but in me,
and in such as with me are free from dyspepsia,
and to whom a day is a sound and solid good, it
is a great excess of politeness to look scornful
and to cry for company. I am grown by sympathy a
little eager and sentimental, but leave me alone
and I should relish every hour and what it brought
me, the potluck of the day, as heartily as the oldest
gossip in the bar-room. I am thankful for small
mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends
who expects everything of the universe and is
disappointed when anything is less than the best,
and I found that I begin at the other extreme,
expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for
moderate goods. I accept the clangor and jangle of
contrary tendencies. I find my account in sots and
bores also. They give a reality to the circumjacent
picture which such a vanishing meteorous appearance
can ill spare. In the morning I awake and find the
old world, wife, babes, and mother, Concord and
Boston, the dear old spiritual world and even the
dear old devil not far off. If we will take the good
we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping
measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis.
Everything good is on the highway. The middle region
of our being is the temperate zone. We may climb
into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and
lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation.
Between these extremes is the equator of life, of
thought, of spirit, of poetry,--a narrow belt.
Moreover, in popular experience everything good is
on the highway. A collector peeps into all the
picture-shops of Europe for a landscape of Poussin,
a crayon-sketch of Salvator; but the Transfiguration,
the Last Judgment, the Communion of St. Jerome, and
what are as transcendent as these, are on the walls
of the Vatican, the Uffizii, or the Louvre, where
every footman may see them; to say nothing of Nature's
pictures in every street, of sunsets and sunrises
every day, and the sculpture of the human body never
absent. A collector recently bought at public auction,
in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas,
an autograph of Shakspeare; but for nothing a school-boy
can read Hamlet and can detect secrets of highest
concernment yet unpublished therein. I think I will
never read any but the commonest books,--the Bible,
Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton. Then we are
impatient of so public a life and planet, and run
hither and thither for nooks and secrets. The
imagination delights in the woodcraft of Indians,
trappers, and bee-hunters. We fancy that we are
strangers, and not so intimately domesticated in the
planet as the wild man and the wild beast and bird.
But the exclusion reaches them also; reaches the
climbing, flying, gliding, feathered and four-footed
man. Fox and woodchuck, hawk and snipe and bittern,
when nearly seen, have no more root in the deep world
than man, and are just such superficial tenants of the
globe. Then the new molecular philosophy shows
astronomical interspaces betwixt atom and atom, shows
that the world is all outside; it has no inside.
The mid-world is best. Nature, as we know her, is
no saint. The lights of the church, the ascetics,
Gentoos, and corn-eaters, she does not distinguish
by any favor. She comes eating and drinking and
sinning. Her darlings, the great, the strong, the
beautiful, are not children of our law; do not come
out of the Sunday School, nor weigh their food, nor
punctually keep the commandments. If we will be
strong with her strength we must not harbor such
disconsolate consciences, borrowed too from the
consciences of other nations. We must set up the
strong present tense against all the rumors of
wrath, past or to come. So many things are unsettled
which it is of the first importance to settle;--and,
pending their settlement, we will do as we do. Whilst
the debate goes forward on the equity of commerce,
and will not be closed for a century or two, New and
Old England may keep shop. Law of copyright and
international copyright is to be discussed, and in
the interim we will sell our books for the most we
can. Expediency of literature, reason of literature,
lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned;
much is to say on both sides, and, while the fight
waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy
foolish task, add a line every hour, and between
whiles add a line. Right to hold land, right of
property, is disputed, and the conventions convene,
and before the vote is taken, dig away in your garden,
and spend your earnings as a waif or godsend to all
serene and beautiful purposes. Life itself is a bubble
and a skepticism, and a sleep within a sleep. Grant it,
and as much more as they will,--but thou, God's darling!
heed thy private dream; thou wilt not be missed in the
scorning and skepticism; there are enough of them;
stay there in thy closet and toil until the rest are
agreed what to do about it. Thy sickness, they say,
and thy puny habit require that thou do this or avoid
that, but know that thy life is a flitting state, a
tent for a night, and do thou, sick or well, finish
that stint. Thou art sick, but shalt not be worse,
and the universe, which holds thee dear, shall be the
better.
Human life is made up of the two elements, power
and form, and the proportion must be invariably
kept if we would have it sweet and sound. Each
of these elements in excess makes a mischief as
hurtful as its defect. Everything runs to excess;
every good quality is noxious if unmixed, and, to
carry the danger to the edge of ruin, nature
causes each man's peculiarity to superabound. Here,
among the farms, we adduce the scholars as examples
of this treachery. They are nature's victims of
expression. You who see the artist, the orator,
the poet, too near, and find their life no more
excellent than that of mechanics or farmers, and
themselves victims of partiality, very hollow and
haggard, and pronounce them failures, not heroes,
but quacks,--conclude very reasonably that these
arts are not for man, but are disease. Yet nature
will not bear you out. Irresistible nature made
men such, and makes legions more of such, every
day. You love the boy reading in a book, gazing
at a drawing, or a cast; yet what are these millions
who read and behold, but incipient writers and
sculptors? Add a little more of that quality which
now reads and sees, and they will seize the pen and
chisel. And if one remembers how innocently he began
to be an artist, he perceives that nature joined with
his enemy. A man is a golden impossibility. The line
he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through
excess of wisdom is made a fool.
How easily, if fate would suffer it, we might
keep forever these beautiful limits, and adjust
ourselves, once for all, to the perfect calculation
of the kingdom of known cause and effect. In the
street and in the newspapers, life appears so plain
a business that manly resolution and adherence to
the multiplication-table through all weathers will
insure success. But ah! presently comes a day, or
is it only a half-hour, with its angel-whispering,
--which discomfits the conclusions of nations and
of years! Tomorrow again everything looks real and
angular, the habitual standards are reinstated,
common sense is as rare as genius,--is the basis of
genius, and experience is hands and feet to every
enterprise;--and yet, he who should do his business
on this understanding would be quickly bankrupt.
Power keeps quite another road than the turnpikes
of choice and will; namely the subterranean and
invisible tunnels and channels of life. It is
ridiculous that we are diplomatists, and doctors,
and considerate people: there are no dupes like
these. Life is a series of surprises, and would not
be worth taking or keeping if it were not. God
delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us
the past and the future. We would look about us,
but with grand politeness he draws down before us
an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another
behind us of purest sky. 'You will not remember,'
he seems to say, `and you will not expect.' All
good conversation, manners, and action, come from
a spontaneity which forgets usages and makes the
moment great. Nature hates calculators; her methods
are saltatory and impulsive. Man lives by pulses;
our organic movements are such; and the chemical
and ethereal agents are undulatory and alternate;
and the mind goes antagonizing on, and never
prospers but by fits. We thrive by casualties. Our
chief experiences have been casual. The most
attractive class of people are those who are
powerful obliquely and not by the direct stroke;
men of genius, but not yet accredited; one gets the
cheer of their light without paying too great a tax.
Theirs is the beauty of the bird or the morning
light, and not of art. In the thought of genius
there is always a surprise; and the moral sentiment
is well called "the newness," for it is never other;
as new to the oldest intelligence as to the young
child;--"the kingdom that cometh without observation."
In like manner, for practical success, there must not
be too much design. A man will not be observed in
doing that which he can do best. There is a certain
magic about his properest action which stupefies
your powers of observation, so that though it is done
before you, you wist not of it. The art of life has a
pudency, and will not be exposed. Every man is an
impossibility until he is born; every thing impossible
until we see a success. The ardors of piety agree at
last with the coldest skepticism,--that nothing is of
us or our works,--that all is of God. Nature will not
spare us the smallest leaf of laurel. All writing
comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having.
I would gladly be moral and keep due metes and bounds,
which I dearly love, and allow the most to the will of
man; but I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter,
and I can see nothing at last, in success or failure,
than more or less of vital force supplied from the
Eternal. The results of life are uncalculated and
uncalculable. The years teach much which the days
never know. The persons who compose our company,
converse, and come and go, and design and execute
many things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an
unlooked-for result. The individual is always mistaken.
He designed many things, and drew in other persons as
coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much,
and something is done; all are a little advanced, but
the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat
new and very unlike what he promised himself.
The ancients, struck with this irreducibleness of
the elements of human life to calculation, exalted
Chance into a divinity; but that is to stay too
long at the spark, which glitters truly at one
point, but the universe is warm with the latency
of the same fire. The miracle of life which will
not be expounded but will remain a miracle,
introduces a new element. In the growth of the
embryo, Sir Everard Home I think noticed that the
evolution was not from one central point, but
coactive from three or more points. Life has no
memory. That which proceeds in succession might be
remembered, but that which is coexistent, or
ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from
being conscious, knows not its own tendency. So is
it with us, now skeptical or without unity, because
immersed in forms and effects all seeming to be of
equal yet hostile value, and now religious, whilst
in the reception of spiritual law. Bear with these
distractions, with this coetaneous growth of the
parts; they will one day be members, and obey one
will. On that one will, on that secret cause, they
nail our attention and hope. Life is hereby melted
into an expectation or a religion. Underneath the
inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical
perfection; the Ideal journeying always with us, the
heaven without rent or seam. Do but observe the mode
of our illumination. When I converse with a profound
mind, or if at any time being alone I have good
thoughts, I do not at once arrive at satisfactions,
as when, being thirsty, I drink water; or go to the
fire, being cold; no! but I am at first apprised of
my vicinity to a new and excellent region of life.
By persisting to read or to think, this region gives
further sign of itself, as it were in flashes of light,
in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and repose,
as if the clouds that covered it parted at intervals
and showed the approaching traveller the inland
mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows spread at
their base, whereon flocks graze and shepherds pipe and
dance. But every insight from this realm of thought is
felt as initial, and promises a sequel. I do not make
it; I arrive there, and behold what was there already.
I make! O no! I clap my hands in infantine joy and
amazement before the first opening to me of this august
magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable
ages, young with the life of life, the sunbright Mecca
of the desert. And what a future it opens! I feel a new
heart beating with the love of the new beauty. I am
ready to die out of nature and be born again into this
new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West:--
"Since neither now nor yesterday began
These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can
A man be found who their first entrance knew."
If I have described life as a flux of moods, I must
now add that there is that in us which changes not
and which ranks all sensations and states of mind.
The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale,
which identifies him now with the First Cause, and
now with the flesh of his body; life above life, in
infinite degrees. The sentiment from which it sprung
determines the dignity of any deed, and the question
ever is, not what you have done or forborne, but at
whose command you have done or forborne it.
Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost,--these are
quaint names, too narrow to cover this unbounded
substance. The baffled intellect must still kneel
before this cause, which refuses to be named,--
ineffable cause, which every fine genius has essayed
to represent by some emphatic symbol, as, Thales by
water, Anaximenes by air, Anaxagoras by (Nous)
thought, Zoroaster by fire, Jesus and the moderns by
love; and the metaphor of each has become a national
religion. The Chinese Mencius has not been the least
successful in his generalization. "I fully understand
language," he said, "and nourish well my vast-flowing
vigor."--"I beg to ask what you call vast-flowing
vigor?"--said his companion. "The explanation," replied
Mencius, "is difficult. This vigor is supremely great,
and in the highest degree unbending. Nourish it
correctly and do it no injury, and it will fill up
the vacancy between heaven and earth. This vigor
accords with and assists justice and reason, and
leaves no hunger."--In our more correct writing we
give to this generalization the name of Being, and
thereby confess that we have arrived as far as we can
go. Suffice it for the joy of the universe that we
have not arrived at a wall, but at interminable oceans.
Our life seems not present so much as prospective; not
for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint
of this vast-flowing vigor. Most of life seems to be
mere advertisement of faculty; information is given us
not to sell ourselves cheap; that we are very great. So,
in particulars, our greatness is always in a tendency
or direction, not in an action. It is for us to believe
in the rule, not in the exception. The noble are thus
known from the ignoble. So in accepting the leading of
the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the
immortality of the soul or the like, but the universal
impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance
and is the principal fact in the history of the globe.
Shall we describe this cause as that which works
directly? The spirit is not helpless or needful of
mediate organs. It has plentiful powers and direct
effects. I am explained without explaining, I am felt
without acting, and where I am not. Therefore all just
persons are satisfied with their own praise. They refuse
to explain themselves, and are content that new actions
should do them that office. They believe that we
communicate without speech and above speech, and that
no right action of ours is quite unaffecting to our
friends, at whatever distance; for the influence of
action is not to be measured by miles. Why should I
fret myself because a circumstance has occurred which
hinders my presence where I was expected? If I am not
at the meeting, my presence where I am should be as
useful to the commonwealth of friendship and wisdom,
as would be my presence in that place. I exert the
same quality of power in all places. Thus journeys
the mighty Ideal before us; it never was known to fall
into the rear. No man ever came to an experience which
was satiating, but his good is tidings of a better.
Onward and onward! In liberated moments we know that
a new picture of life and duty is already possible;
the elements already exist in many minds around you
of a doctrine of life which shall transcend any
written record we have. The new statement will comprise
the skepticisms as well as the faiths of society, and
out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For skepticisms
are not gratuitous or lawless, but are limitations of the
affirmative statement, and the new philosophy must take
them in and make affirmations outside of them, just as
much as it must include the oldest beliefs.
It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped,
the discovery we have made that we exist. That
discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards
we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we
do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have
no means of correcting these colored and distorting
lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of
their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a
creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once
we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of
this new power, which threatens to absorb all things,
engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions,
objects, successively tumble in, and God is but one
of its ideas. Nature and literature are subjective
phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow
which we cast. The street is full of humiliations to
the proud. As the fop contrived to dress his bailiffs
in his livery and make them wait on his guests at
table, so the chagrins which the bad heart gives off
as bubbles, at once take form as ladies and gentlemen
in the street, shopmen or bar-keepers in hotels, and
threaten or insult whatever is threatenable and
insultable in us. 'Tis the same with our idolatries.
People forget that it is the eye which makes the
horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes this
or that man a type or representative of humanity, with
the name of hero or saint. Jesus, the "providential
man," is a good man on whom many people are agreed that
these optical laws shall take effect. By love on one
part and by forbearance to press objection on the other
part, it is for a time settled, that we will look at
him in the centre of the horizon, and ascribe to him
the properties that will attach to any man so seen. But
the longest love or aversion has a speedy term. The great
and crescive self, rooted in absolute nature, supplants
all relative existence and ruins the kingdom of mortal
friendship and love. Marriage (in what is called the
spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequality
between every subject and every object. The subject is
the receiver of Godhead, and at every comparison must
feel his being enhanced by that cryptic might. Though not
in energy, yet by presence, this magazine of substance
cannot be otherwise than felt; nor can any force of
intellect attribute to the object the proper deity which
sleeps or wakes forever in every subject. Never can love
make consciousness and ascription equal in force. There
will be the same gulf between every me and thee as
between the original and the picture. The universe is
the bride of the soul. All private sympathy is partial.
Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only
in a point, and whilst they remain in contact, all other
points of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must
also come, and the longer a particular union lasts the
more energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire.
Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor
doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be chaos.
The soul is not twin-born but the only begotten,
and though revealing itself as child in time, child
in appearance, is of a fatal and universal power,
admitting no co-life. Every day, every act betrays
the ill-concealed deity. We believe in ourselves as
we do not believe in others. We permit all things to
ourselves, and that which we call sin in others is
experiment for us. It is an instance of our faith in
ourselves that men never speak of crime as lightly
as they think; or every man thinks a latitude safe
for himself which is nowise to be indulged to another.
The act looks very differently on the inside and on
the outside; in its quality and in its consequences.
Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as
poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle
him or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles;
it is an act quite easy to be contemplated; but in
its sequel it turns out to be a horrible jangle and
confounding of all relations. Especially the crimes
that spring from love seem right and fair from the
actor's point of view, but when acted are found
destructive of society. No man at last believes that
he can be lost, nor that the crime in him is as black
as in the felon. Because the intellect qualifies in
our own case the moral judgments. For there is no
crime to the intellect. That is antinomian or hypernomian,
and judges law as well as fact. "It is worse than a
crime, it is a blunder," said Napoleon, speaking the
language of the intellect. To it, the world is a problem
in mathematics or the science of quantity, and it
leaves out praise and blame and all weak emotions. All
stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes,
pray who does not steal? Saints are sad, because they
behold sin (even when they speculate), from the point
of view of the conscience, and not of the intellect;
a confusion of thought. Sin, seen from the thought,
is a diminution, or less: seen from the conscience or
will, it is pravity or bad. The intellect names it
shade, absence of light, and no essence. The conscience
must feel it as essence, essential evil. This it is
not; it has an objective existence, but no subjective.
Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color,
and every object fall successively into the subject
itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges;
all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am,
so I see; use what language we will, we can never
say anything but what we are; Hermes, Cadmus, Columbus,
Newton, Bonaparte, are the mind's ministers. Instead
of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man,
let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist
who passes through our estate and shows us good slate,
or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture.
The partial action of each strong mind in one direction
is a telescope for the objects on which it is pointed.
But every other part of knowledge is to be pushed to
the same extravagance, ere the soul attains her due
sphericity. Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily
her own tail? If you could look with her eyes you
might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures
performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic
issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups
and downs of fate,--and meantime it is only puss and
her tail. How long before our masquerade will end its
noise of tambourines, laughter, and shouting, and we
shall find it was a solitary performance? A subject
and an object,--it takes so much to make the galvanic
circuit complete, but magnitude adds nothing. What
imports it whether it is Kepler and the sphere, Columbus
and America, a reader and his book, or puss with her tail?
It is true that all the muses and love and religion
hate these developments, and will find a way to
punish the chemist who publishes in the parlor the
secrets of the laboratory. And we cannot say too
little of our constitutional necessity of seeing
things under private aspects, or saturated with our
humors. And yet is the God the native of these bleak
rocks. That need makes in morals the capital virtue
of self-trust. We must hold hard to this poverty,
however scandalous, and by more vigorous self-recoveries,
after the sallies of action, possess our axis more
firmly. The life of truth is cold and so far mournful;
but it is not the slave of tears, contritions and
perturbations. It does not attempt another's work,
nor adopt another's facts. It is a main lesson of
wisdom to know your own from another's. I have learned
that I cannot dispose of other people's facts; but I
possess such a key to my own as persuades me, against
all their denials, that they also have a key to theirs.
A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a
swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and
if he give so much as a leg or a finger they will drown
him. They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their
vices, but not from their vices. Charity would be
wasted on this poor waiting on the symptoms. A wise and
hardy physician will say, Come out of that, as the first
condition of advice.
In this our talking America we are ruined by our good
nature and listening on all sides. This compliance
takes away the power of being greatly useful. A man
should not be able to look other than directly and
forthright. A preoccupied attention is the only answer
to the importunate frivolity of other people; an
attention, and to an aim which makes their wants
frivolous. This is a divine answer, and leaves no
appeal and no hard thoughts. In Flaxman's drawing
of the Eumenides of Aeschylus, Orestes supplicates
Apollo, whilst the Furies sleep on the threshold.
The face of the god expresses a shade of regret and
compassion, but is calm with the conviction of the
irreconcilableness of the two spheres. He is born
into other politics, into the eternal and beautiful.
The man at his feet asks for his interest in turmoils
of the earth, into which his nature cannot enter. And
the Eumenides there lying express pictorially this
disparity. The god is surcharged with his divine destiny.
Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise,
Reality, Subjectiveness,--these are threads on the
loom of time, these are the lords of life. I dare not
assume to give their order, but I name them as I find
them in my way. I know better than to claim any
completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, and this
is a fragment of me. I can very confidently announce
one or another law, which throws itself into relief
and form, but I am too young yet by some ages to
compile a code. I gossip for my hour concerning the
eternal politics. I have seen many fair pictures not
in vain. A wonderful time I have lived in. I am not
the novice I was fourteen, nor yet seven years ago.
Let who will ask Where is the fruit? I find a private
fruit sufficient. This is a fruit,--that I should not
ask for a rash effect from meditations, counsels and
the hiving of truths. I should feel it pitiful to
demand a result on this town and county, an overt
effect on the instant month and year. The effect is
deep and secular as the cause. It works on periods in
which mortal lifetime is lost. All I know is reception;
I am and I have: but I do not get, and when I have
fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did not. I
worship with wonder the great Fortune. My reception has
been so large, that I am not annoyed by receiving this
or that superabundantly. I say to the Genius, if he will
pardon the proverb, In for a mill, in for a million. When
I receive a new gift, I do not macerate my body to make
the account square, for if I should die I could not make
the account square. The benefit overran the merit the
first day, and has overrun the merit ever since. The
merit itself, so-called, I reckon part of the receiving.
Also that hankering after an overt or practical
effect seems to me an apostasy. In good earnest
I am willing to spare this most unnecessary deal
of doing. Life wears to me a visionary face.
Hardest roughest action is visionary also. It is
but a choice between soft and turbulent dreams.
People disparage knowing and the intellectual life,
and urge doing. I am very content with knowing, if
only I could know. That is an august entertainment,
and would suffice me a great while. To know a little
would be worth the expense of this world. I hear
always the law of Adrastia, "that every soul which
had acquired any truth, should be safe from harm
until another period."
I know that the world I converse with in the city
and in the farms, is not the world I think. I observe
that difference, and shall observe it. One day I shall
know the value and law of this discrepance. But I have
not found that much was gained by manipular attempts
to realize the world of thought. Many eager persons
successively make an experiment in this way, and make
themselves ridiculous. They acquire democratic manners,
they foam at the mouth, they hate and deny. Worse, I
observe that in the history of mankind there is never
a solitary example of success,--taking their own tests
of success. I say this polemically, or in reply to the
inquiry, Why not realize your world? But far be from
me the despair which prejudges the law by a paltry
empiricism;--since there never was a right endeavor
but it succeeded. Patience and patience, we shall win
at the last. We must be very suspicious of the deceptions
of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to
eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dollars, and a
very little time to entertain a hope and an insight
which becomes the light of our life. We dress our garden,
eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives,
and these things make no impression, are forgotten next
week; but, in the solitude to which every man is always
returning, he has a sanity and revelations which in his
passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never
mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat; up again, old
heart!--it seems to say,--there is victory yet for all
justice; and the true romance which the world exists to
realize will be the transformation of genius into
practical power. _
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