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_ NOMINALIST AND REALIST.
In countless upward-striving waves
The moon-drawn tide-wave strives:
In thousand far-transplanted grafts
The parent fruit survives;
So, in the new-born millions,
The perfect Adam lives.
Not less are summer-mornings dear
To every child they wake,
And each with novel life his sphere
Fills for his proper sake.
VIII. NONIMALIST AND REALIST.
I CANNOT often enough say that a man is only a
relative and representative nature. Each is a hint
of the truth, but far enough from being that truth
which yet he quite newly and inevitably suggests
to us. If I seek it in him I shall not find it.
Could any man conduct into me the pure stream of
that which he pretends to be! Long afterwards I
find that quality elsewhere which he promised me.
The genius of the Platonists is intoxicating to the
student, yet how few particulars of it can I detach
from all their books. The man momentarily stands
for the thought, but will not bear examination; and
a society of men will cursorily represent well enough
a certain quality and culture, for example, chivalry
or beauty of manners; but separate them and there is
no gentleman and no lady in the group. The least hint
sets us on the pursuit of a character which no man
realizes. We have such exorbitant eyes that on seeing
the smallest arc we complete the curve, and when the
curtain is lifted from the diagram which it seemed to
veil, we are vexed to find that no more was drawn than
just that fragment of an arc which we first beheld. We
are greatly too liberal in our construction of each
other's faculty and promise. Exactly what the parties
have already done they shall do again; but that which
we inferred from their nature and inception, they will
not do. That is in nature, but not in them. That happens
in the world, which we often witness in a public debate.
Each of the speakers expresses himself imperfectly; no
one of them hears much that another says, such is the
preoccupation of mind of each; and the audience, who
have only to hear and not to speak, judge very wisely
and superiorly how wrongheaded and unskilful is each of
the debaters to his own affair. Great men or men of great
gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.
When I meet a pure intellectual force or a generosity of
affection, I believe here then is man; and am presently
mortified by the discovery that this individual is no
more available to his own or to the general ends than
his companions; because the power which drew my respect
is not supported by the total symphony of his talents.
All persons exist to society by some shining trait of
beauty or utility which they have. We borrow the
proportions of the man from that one fine feature, and
finish the portrait symmetrically; which is false, for
the rest of his body is small or deformed. I observe a
person who makes a good public appearance, and conclude
thence the perfection of his private character, on which
this is based; but he has no private character. He is a
graceful cloak or lay-figure for holidays. All our poets,
heroes, and saints, fail utterly in some one or in many
parts to satisfy our idea, fail to draw our spontaneous
interest, and so leave us without any hope of realization
but in our own future. Our exaggeration of all fine
characters arises from the fact that we identify each in
turn with the soul. But there are no such men as we fable;
no Jesus, nor Pericles, nor Caesar, nor Angelo, nor
Washington, such as we have made. We consecrate a great
deal of nonsense because it was allowed by great men.
There is none without his foible. I verily believe if an
angel should come to chant the chorus of the moral law,
he would eat too much gingerbread, or take liberties with
private letters, or do some precious atrocity. It is bad
enough that our geniuses cannot do anything useful, but
it is worse that no man is fit for society who has fine
traits. He is admired at a distance, but he cannot come
near without appearing a cripple. The men of fine parts
protect themselves by solitude, or by courtesy, or by
satire, or by an acid worldly manner, each concealing as
he best can his incapacity for useful association, but
they want either love or self-reliance.
Our native love of reality joins with this experience
to teach us a little reserve, and to dissuade a too
sudden surrender to the brilliant qualities of persons.
Young people admire talents or particular excellences;
as we grow older we value total powers and effects, as
the impression, the quality, the spirit of men and
things. The genius is all. The man,--it is his system:
we do not try a solitary word or act, but his habit.
The acts which you praise, I praise not, since they are
departures from his faith, and are mere compliances.
The magnetism which arranges tribes and races in one
polarity is alone to be respected; the men are steel-
filings. Yet we unjustly select a particle, and say,
'O steel-filing number one! what heart-drawings I feel
to thee! what prodigious virtues are these of thine! how
constitutional to thee, and incommunicable.' Whilst we
speak the loadstone is withdrawn; down falls our filing
in a heap with the rest, and we continue our mummery to
the wretched shaving. Let us go for universals; for the
magnetism, not for the needles. Human life and its
persons are poor empirical pretensions. A personal
influence is an ignis fatuus. If they say it is great,
it is great; if they say it is small, it is small; you
see it, and you see it not, by turns; it borrows all its
size from the momentary estimation of the speakers: the
Will-of-the-wisp vanishes if you go too near, vanishes
if you go too far, and only blazes at one angle. Who
can tell if Washington be a great man or no? Who can
tell if Franklin be? Yes, or any but the twelve, or six,
or three great gods of fame? And they too loom and fade
before the eternal.
We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two
elements, having two sets of faculties, the particular
and the catholic. We adjust our instrument for general
observation, and sweep the heavens as easily as we
pick out a single figure in the terrestrial landscape.
We are practically skilful in detecting elements for
which we have no place in our theory, and no name. Thus
we are very sensible of an atmospheric influence in men
and in bodies of men, not accounted for in an arithmetical
addition of all their measurable properties. There is a
genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the
numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society.
England, strong, punctual, practical, well-spoken England
I should not find if I should go to the island to seek it.
In the parliament, in the play-house, at dinner-tables, I
might see a great number of rich, ignorant, book-read,
conventional, proud men,--many old women,--and not anywhere
the Englishman who made the good speeches, combined the
accurate engines, and did the bold and nervous deeds. It
is even worse in America, where, from the intellectual
quickness of the race, the genius of the country is more
splendid in its promise and more slight in its performance.
Webster cannot do the work of Webster. We conceive distinctly
enough the French, the Spanish, the German genius, and it
is not the less real that perhaps we should not meet in
either of those nations a single individual who corresponded
with the type. We infer the spirit of the nation in great
measure from the language, which is a sort of monument to
which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred
years has contributed a stone. And, universally, a good
example of this social force is the veracity of language,
which cannot be debauched. In any controversy concerning
morals, an appeal may be made with safety to the sentiments
which the language of the people expresses. Proverbs, words,
and grammar-inflections convey the public sense with more
purity and precision than the wisest individual.
In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the
Realists had a good deal of reason. General ideas
are essences. They are our gods: they round and
ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living.
Our proclivity to details cannot quite degrade our
life and divest it of poetry. The day-laborer is
reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale,
yet he is saturated with the laws of the world. His
measures are the hours; morning and night, solstice
and equinox, geometry, astronomy and all the lovely
accidents of nature play through his mind. Money,
which represents the prose of life, and which is
hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is,
in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
Property keeps the accounts of the world, and is
always moral. The property will be found where the
labor, the wisdom, and the virtue have been in nations,
in classes, and (the whole life-time considered, with
the compensations) in the individual also. How wise
the world appears, when the laws and usages of nations
are largely detailed, and the completeness of the
municipal system is considered! Nothing is left out.
If you go into the markets and the custom-houses, the
insurers' and notaries' offices, the offices of sealers
of weights and measures, of inspection of provisions,--
it will appear as if one man had made it all. Wherever
you go, a wit like your own has been before you, and
has realized its thought. The Eleusinian mysteries, the
Egyptian architecture, the Indian astronomy, the Greek
sculpture, show that there always were seeing and knowing
men in the planet. The world is full of masonic ties, of
guilds, of secret and public legions of honor; that of
scholars, for example; and that of gentlemen, fraternizing
with the upper class of every country and every culture.
I am very much struck in literature by the appearance
that one person wrote all the books; as if the editor
of a journal planted his body of reporters in different
parts of the field of action, and relieved some by
others from time to time; but there is such equality
and identity both of judgment and point of view in
the narrative that it is plainly the work of one all-
seeing, all-hearing gentleman. I looked into Pope's
Odyssey yesterday: it is as correct and elegant after
our canon of to-day as if it were newly written. The
modernness of all good books seems to give me an
existence as wide as man. What is well done I feel as
if I did; what is ill done I reck not of. Shakspeare's
passages of passion (for example, in Lear and Hamlet)
are in the very dialect of the present year. I am
faithful again to the whole over the members in my
use of books. I find the most pleasure in reading a
book in a manner least flattering to the author. I
read Proclus, and sometimes Plato, as I might read a
dictionary, for a mechanical help to the fancy and
the imagination. I read for the lustres, as if one
should use a fine picture in a chromatic experiment,
for its rich colors. 'Tis not Proclus, but a piece
of nature and fate that I explore. It is a greater
joy to see the author's author, than himself. A higher
pleasure of the same kind I found lately at a concert,
where I went to hear Handel's Messiah. As the master
overpowered the littleness and incapableness of the
performers and made them conductors of his electricity,
so it was easy to observe what efforts nature was
making, through so many hoarse, wooden, and imperfect
persons, to produce beautiful voices, fluid and soul-
guided men and women. The genius of nature was paramount
at the oratorio.
This preference of the genius to the parts is the
secret of that deification of art, which is found
in all superior minds. Art, in the artist, is
proportion, or a habitual respect to the whole by
an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and
charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes.
Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There
is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation,
men are encumbered with personality, and talk too much.
In modern sculpture, picture, and poetry, the beauty is
miscellaneous; the artist works here and there and at
all points, adding and adding, instead of unfolding
the unit of his thought. Beautiful details we must have,
or no artist; but they must be means and never other.
The eye must not lose sight for a moment of the purpose.
Lively boys write to their ear and eye, and the cool
reader finds nothing but sweet jingles in it. When they
grow older, they respect the argument.
We obey the same intellectual integrity when we
study in exceptions the law of the world. Anomalous
facts, as the never quite obsolete rumors of magic
and demonology, and the new allegations of phrenologists
and neurologists, are of ideal use. They are good
indications. Homoeopathy is insignificant as an art
of healing, but of great value as criticism on the
hygeia or medical practice of the time. So with
Mesmerism, Swedenborgism, Fourierism, and the Millennial
Church; they are poor pretensions enough, but good
criticism on the science, philosophy, and preaching
of the day. For these abnormal insights of the adepts
ought to be normal, and things of course.
All things show us that on every side we are very
near to the best. It seems not worth while to execute
with too much pains some one intellectual, or
aesthetical, or civil feat, when presently the dream
will scatter, and we shall burst into universal power.
The reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring
of our hopes. Whilst we are waiting we beguile the
time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes.
Thus we settle it in our cool libraries, that all
the agents with which we deal are subalterns, which
we can well afford to let pass, and life will be
simpler when we live at the centre and flout the
surfaces. I wish to speak with all respect of
persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep
awake and preserve the due decorum. They melt so
fast into each other that they are like grass and
trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as
individuals. Though the uninspired man certainly
finds persons a conveniency in household matters,
the divine man does not respect them; he sees them
as a rack of clouds, or a fleet of ripples which
the wind drives over the surface of the water. But
this is flat rebellion. Nature will not be Buddhist:
she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher
in every moment with a million of fresh particulars.
It is all idle talking: as much as a man is a whole,
so is he also a part; and it were partial not to
see it. What you say in your pompous distribution
only distributes you into your class and section. You
have not got rid of parts by denying them, but are the
more partial. You are one thing, but Nature is one
thing and the other thing, in the same moment. She will
not remain orbed in a thought, but rushes into persons;
and when each person, inflamed to a fury of personality,
would conquer all things to his poor crotchet, she
raises up against him another person, and by many persons
incarnates again a sort of whole. She will have all. Nick
Bottom cannot play all the parts, work it how he may;
there will be somebody else, and the world will be round.
Everything must have its flower or effort at the beautiful,
coarser or finer according to its stuff. They relieve and
recommend each other, and the sanity of society is a
balance of a thousand insanities. She punishes
abstractionists, and will only forgive an induction which
is rare and casual. We like to come to a height of land
and see the landscape, just as we value a general remark
in conversation. But it is not the intention of Nature
that we should live by general views. We fetch fire and
water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and
get our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are the
victims of these details; and once in a fortnight we arrive
perhaps at a rational moment. If we were not thus infatuated,
if we saw the real from hour to hour, we should not be here
to write and to read, but should have been burned or frozen
long ago. She would never get anything done, if she suffered
admirable Crichtons and universal geniuses. She loves better
a wheelwright who dreams all night of wheels, and a groom
who is part of his horse; for she is full of work, and these
are her hands. As the frugal farmer takes care that his
cattle shall eat down the rowen, and swine shall eat the
waste of his house, and poultry shall pick the crumbs,--so
our economical mother dispatches a new genius and habit of
mind into every district and condition of existence, plants
an eye wherever a new ray of light can fall, and gathering
up into some man every property in the universe, establishes
thousandfold occult mutual attractions among her offspring,
that all this wash and waste of power may be imparted and
exchanged.
Great dangers undoubtedly accrue from this incarnation
and distribution of the godhead, and hence Nature has
her maligners, as if she were Circe; and Alphonso of
Castille fancied he could have given useful advice.
But she does not go unprovided; she has hellebore at
the bottom of the cup. Solitude would ripen a plentiful
crop of despots. The recluse thinks of men as having
his manner, or as not having his manner; and as having
degrees of it, more and less. But when he comes into a
public assembly he sees that men have very different
manners from his own, and in their way admirable. In
his childhood and youth he has had many checks and
censures, and thinks modestly enough of his own endowment.
When afterwards he comes to unfold it in propitious
circumstance, it seems the only talent; he is delighted
with his success, and accounts himself already the fellow
of the great. But he goes into a mob, into a banking
house, into a mechanic's shop, into a mill, into a
laboratory, into a ship, into a camp, and in each new
place he is no better than an idiot; other talents take
place, and rule the hour. The rotation which whirls every
leaf and pebble to the meridian, reaches to every gift of
man, and we all take turns at the top.
For Nature, who abhors mannerism, has set her heart
on breaking up all styles and tricks, and it is so
much easier to do what one has done before than to
do a new thing, that there is a perpetual tendency
to a set mode. In every conversation, even the highest,
there is a certain trick, which may be soon learned
by an acute person and then that particular style
continued indefinitely. Each man too is a tyrant in
tendency, because he would impose his idea on others;
and their trick is their natural defence. Jesus would
absorb the race; but Tom Paine or the coarsest
blasphemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance
of power. Hence the immense benefit of party in politics,
as it reveals faults of character in a chief, which the
intellectual force of the persons, with ordinary
opportunity and not hurled into aphelion by hatred,
could not have seen. Since we are all so stupid, what
benefit that there should be two stupidities! It is
like that brute advantage so essential to astronomy,
of having the diameter of the earth's orbit for a base
of its triangles. Democracy is morose, and runs to
anarchy, but in the State and in the schools it is
indispensable to resist the consolidation of all men
into a few men. If John was perfect, why are you and
I alive? As long as any man exists, there is some need
of him; let him fight for his own. A new poet has
appeared; a new character approached us; why should we
refuse to eat bread until we have found his regiment
and section in our old army-files? Why not a new man?
Here is a new enterprise of Brook Farm, of Skeneateles,
of Northampton: why so impatient to baptize them Essenes,
or Port-Royalists, or Shakers, or by any known and effete
name? Let it be a new way of living. Why have only two
or three ways of life, and not thousands? Every man is
wanted, and no man is wanted much. We came this time
for condiments, not for corn. We want the great genius
only for joy; for one star more in our constellation,
for one tree more in our grove. But he thinks we wish
to belong to him, as he wishes to occupy us. He greatly
mistakes us. I think I have done well if I have acquired
a new word from a good author; and my business with him
is to find my own, though it were only to melt him down
into an epithet or an image for daily use:--
"Into paint will I grind thee, my bride!"
To embroil the confusion, and make it impossible
to arrive at any general statement,--when we have
insisted on the imperfection of individuals, our
affections and our experience urge that every
individual is entitled to honor, and a very generous
treatment is sure to be repaid. A recluse sees only
two or three persons, and allows them all their room;
they spread themselves at large. The statesman looks
at many, and compares the few habitually with others,
and these look less. Yet are they not entitled to this
generosity of reception? and is not munificence the
means of insight? For though gamesters say that the
cards beat all the players, though they were never so
skilful, yet in the contest we are now considering,
the players are also the game, and share the power of
the cards. If you criticise a fine genius, the odds
are that you are out of your reckoning, and instead
of the poet, are censuring your own caricature of
him. For there is somewhat spheral and infinite in
every man, especially in every genius, which, if you
can come very near him, sports with all your
limitations. For rightly every man is a channel through
which heaven floweth, and whilst I fancied I was
criticising him, I was censuring or rather terminating
my own soul. After taxing Goethe as a courtier,
artificial, unbelieving, worldly,--I took up this book
of Helena, and found him an Indian of the wilderness,
a piece of pure nature like an apple or an oak, large
as morning or night, and virtuous as a brier-rose.
But care is taken that the whole tune shall be
played. If we were not kept among surfaces, every
thing would be large and universal; now the excluded
attributes burst in on us with the more brightness
that they have been excluded. "Your turn now, my
turn next," is the rule of the game. The universality
being hindered in its primary form, comes in the
secondary form of all sides; the points come in
succession to the meridian, and by the speed of
rotation a new whole is formed. Nature keeps herself
whole and her representation complete in the experience
of each mind. She suffers no seat to be vacant in her
college. It is the secret of the world that all things
subsist and do not die but only retire a little from
sight and afterwards return again. Whatever does not
concern us is concealed from us. As soon as a person
is no longer related to our present well-being, he is
concealed, or dies, as we say. Really, all things and
persons are related to us, but according to our nature
they act on us not at once but in succession, and we
are made aware of their presence one at a time. All
persons, all things which we have known, are here
present, and many more than we see; the world is full.
As the ancient said, the world is a plenum or solid;
and if we saw all things that really surround us we
should be imprisoned and unable to move. For though
nothing is impassable to the soul, but all things are
pervious to it and like highways, yet this is only
whilst the soul does not see them. As soon as the soul
sees any object, it stops before that object. Therefore,
the divine Providence which keeps the universe open in
every direction to the soul, conceals all the furniture
and all the persons that do not concern a particular
soul, from the senses of that individual. Through
solidest eternal things the man finds his road as if
they did not subsist, and does not once suspect their
being. As soon as he needs a new object, suddenly he
beholds it, and no longer attempts to pass through it,
but takes another way. When he has exhausted for the
time the nourishment to be drawn from any one person
or thing, that object is withdrawn from his observation,
and though still in his immediate neighborhood, he does
not suspect its presence. Nothing is dead: men feign
themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful
obituaries, and there they stand looking out of the
window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise.
Jesus is not dead; he is very well alive: nor John, nor
Paul, nor Mahomet, nor Aristotle; at times we believe
we have seen them all, and could easily tell the names
under which they go.
If we cannot make voluntary and conscious steps
in the admirable science of universals, let us see
the parts wisely, and infer the genius of nature
from the best particulars with a becoming charity.
What is best in each kind is an index of what
should be the average of that thing. Love shows me
the opulence of nature, by disclosing to me in my
friend a hidden wealth, and I infer an equal depth
of good in every other direction. It is commonly
said by farmers that a good pear or apple costs no
more time or pains to rear than a poor one; so I
would have no work of art, no speech, or action, or
thought, or friend, but the best.
The end and the means, the gamester and the game,
--life is made up of the intermixture and reaction
of these two amicable powers, whose marriage appears
beforehand monstrous, as each denies and tends to
abolish the other. We must reconcile the contradictions
as we can, but their discord and their concord
introduce wild absurdities into our thinking and speech.
No sentence will hold the whole truth, and the only way
in which we can be just, is by giving ourselves the lie;
Speech is better than silence; silence is better than
speech;--All things are in contact; every atom has a
sphere of repulsion;--Things are, and are not, at the
same time;--and the like. All the universe over, there
is but one thing, this old Two-Face, creator-creature,
mind-matter, right-wrong, of which any proposition may
be affirmed or denied. Very fitly therefore I assert
that every man is a partialist, that nature secures him
as an instrument by self-conceit, preventing the
tendencies to religion and science; and now further
assert, that, each man's genius being nearly and
affectionately explored, he is justified in his
individuality, as his nature is found to be immense;
and now I add that every man is a universalist also,
and, as our earth, whilst it spins on its own axis,
spins all the time around the sun through the celestial
spaces, so the least of its rational children, the most
dedicated to his private affair, works out, though as it
were under a disguise, the universal problem. We fancy
men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pumpkin
in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history.
The rabid democrat, as soon as he is senator and rich man,
has ripened beyond possibility of sincere radicalism, and
unless he can resist the sun, he must be conservative the
remainder of his days. Lord Eldon said in his old age that
"if he were to begin life again, he would be damned but he
would begin as agitator."
We hide this universality if we can, but it appears
at all points. We are as ungrateful as children.
There is nothing we cherish and strive to draw to us
but in some hour we turn and rend it. We keep a running
fire of sarcasm at ignorance and the life of the senses;
then goes by, perchance, a fair girl, a piece of life,
gay and happy, and making the commonest offices beautiful
by the energy and heart with which she does them; and
seeing this we admire and love her and them, and say,
'Lo! a genuine creature of the fair earth, not dissipated
or too early ripened by books, philosophy, religion,
society, or care!' insinuating a treachery and contempt
for all we had so long loved and wrought in ourselves
and others.
If we could have any security against moods! If
the profoundest prophet could be holden to his
words, and the hearer who is ready to sell all
and join the crusade could have any certificate
that tomorrow his prophet shall not unsay his
testimony! But the Truth sits veiled there on the
Bench, and never interposes an adamantine syllable;
and the most sincere and revolutionary doctrine,
put as if the ark of God were carried forward some
furlongs, and planted there for the succor of the
world, shall in a few weeks be coldly set aside by
the same speaker, as morbid; "I thought I was right,
but I was not,"--and the same immeasurable credulity
demanded for new audacities. If we were not of all
opinions! if we did not in any moment shift the
platform on which we stand, and look and speak from
another! if there could be any regulation, any 'one-
hour-rule,' that a man should never leave his point
of view without sound of trumpet. I am always insincere,
as always knowing there are other moods.
How sincere and confidential we can be, saying
all that lies in the mind, and yet go away feeling
that all is yet unsaid, from the incapacity of the
parties to know each other, although they use the
same words! My companion assumes to know my mood
and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation
to explanation until all is said which words can,
and we leave matters just as they were at first,
because of that vicious assumption. Is it that every
man believes every other to be an incurable partialist,
and himself a universalist? I talked yesterday with a
pair of philosophers; I endeavored to show my good
men that I love everything by turns and nothing long;
that I loved the centre, but doated on the superficies;
that I loved man, if men seemed to me mice and rats;
that I revered saints, but woke up glad that the old
pagan world stood its ground and died hard; that I was
glad of men of every gift and nobility, but would not
live in their arms. Could they but once understand
that I loved to know that they existed, and heartily
wished them God-speed, yet, out of my poverty of life
and thought, had no word or welcome for them when they
came to see me, and could well consent to their living
in Oregon, for any claim I felt on them,--it would be
a great satisfaction. _
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