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Part II
Part II
The human soul is true to these facts in the painting of fable, of
history, of law, of proverbs, of conversation. It finds a tongue in literature
unawares. Thus the Greeks called Jupiter, Supreme Mind; but having
traditionally ascribed to him many base actions, they involuntarily made
amends to Reason by tying up the hands of so bad a god. He is made as helpless
as a king of England. Prometheus knows one secret which Jove must bargain for;
Minerva, another. He cannot get his own thunders; Minerva keeps the key of
them:
Of all the gods, I only know the keys
That ope the solid doors within whose vaults
His thunders sleep.
A plain confession of the in-working of the All and of its moral aim.
The Indian mythology ends in the same ethics; and indeed it would seem
impossible for any fable to be invented and get any currency which was not
moral. Aurora forgot to ask youth for her lover, and though so Tithonus is
immortal, he is old. Achilles is not quite invulnerable; for Thetis held him
by the heel when she dipped him in the Styx and the sacred waters did not wash
that part. Siegfried, in the Nibelungen, is not quite immortal, for a leaf
fell on his back whilst he was bathing in the Dragon`s blood, and that spot
which it covered is mortal. And so it always is. There is a crack in every
thing God has made. Always it would seem there is this vindictive circumstance
stealing in at unawares even into the wild poesy in which the human fancy
attempted to make bold holiday and to shake itself free of the old laws, -
this back-stroke, this kick of the gun, certifying that the law is fatal;
that in nature nothing can be given, all things are sold.
This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps watch in the Universe
and lets no offence go unchastised. The Furies they said are attendants on
Justice, and if the sun in heaven should transgress his path they would punish
him. The poets related that stone walls and iron swords and leathern thongs
had an occult sympathy with the wrongs of their owners; that the belt which
Ajax gave Hector dragged the Trojan hero over the field at the wheels of the
car of Achilles, and the sword which Hector gave Ajax was that on whose point
Ajax fell. They recorded that when the Thasians erected a statue to Theogenes,
a victor in the games, one of his rivals went to it by night and endeavored to
throw it down by repeated blows, until at last he moved it from its pedestal
and was crushed to death beneath its fall.
This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It came from thought above
the will of the writer. That is the best part of each writer which has nothing
private in it; that is the best part of each which he does not know; that
which flowed out of his constitution and not from his too active invention;
that which in the study of a single artist you might not easily find, but in
the study of many you would abstract as the spirit of them all. Phidias it is
not, but the work of man in that early Hellenic world that I would know. The
name and circumstance of Phidias, however convenient for history, embarrasses
when we come to the highest criticism. We are to see that which man was
tending to do in a given period, and was hindered, or, if you will, modified
in doing, by the interfering volitions of Phidias, of Dante, of Shakespeare,
the organ whereby man at the moment wrought.
Still more striking is the expression of this fact in the proverbs of all
nations, which are always the literature of Reason, or the statements of an
absolute truth without qualifications. Proverbs, like the sacred books of each
nation, are the sanctuary of the Intuitions. That which the droning world,
chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it
will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction. And this law of
laws, which the pulpit, the senate and the college deny, is hourly preached in
all markets and all languages by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as
true and as omnipresent as that of birds and flies.
All things are double, one against another. - Tit for tat; an eye for an
eye; a tooth for a tooth; blood for blood; measure for measure; love for love.
- Give, and it shall be given you. - He that watereth shall be watered
himself. - What will you have? quoth God; pay for it and take it. - Nothing
venture, nothing have. - Thou shalt be paid exactly for what thou hast done,
no more, no less. - Who doth not work shall not ear. - Harm watch, harm catch.
- Curses always recoil on the head of him who imprecates them. - If you put a
chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your
own. - Bad counsel confounds the adviser. - The devil is an ass.
It is thus written, because it is thus in life. Our action is
overmastered and characterized above our will by the law of nature. We aim at
a petty end quite aside from the public good, but our act arranges itself by
irresistible magnetism in a line with the poles of the world.
A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his
will he draws his portrait to the eye his companions by every word. Every
opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a thread-ball thrown at a mark,
but the other end remains in the thrower`s bag. Or, rather, it is a harpoon
thrown at the whale, unwinding, as it flies, a coil of cord in the boat, and,
if the harpoon is not good, or not well thrown, it will go nigh to cut the
steersman in twain or to sink the boat.
You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. "No man had ever a point of
pride that was not injurious to him," said Burke. The exclusive in fashionable
life does not see that he excludes himself from enjoyment, in the attempt to
appropriate it. The exclusionist in religion does not see that he shuts the
door of heaven on himself, in striving to shut out others. Treat men as pawns
and nine-pins and you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave out their
heart, you shall lose your own. The senses would make things of all persons;
of women, of children, of the poor. The vulgar proverb, "I will get it from
his purse or get it from his skin," is sound philosophy.
All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are speedily
punished. They are punished by Fear. Whilst I stand in simple relations to my
fellow-man, I have no displeasure in meeting him. We meet as water meets
water, or as two currents of air mix, with perfect diffusion and
interpenetration of nature. But as soon as there is any departure from
simplicity and attempt at halfness, or good for me that is not good for him,
my neighbor feels the wrong; he shrinks from me as far as I have shrunk from
him; his eyes no longer seek mine; there is war between us; there is hate in
him and fear in me.
All the old abuses in society, the great and universal and the petty and
particular, all unjust accumulations of property and power, are avenged in the
same manner. Fear is an instructor of great sagacity and the herald of all
revolutions. One thing he always teaches, that there is rottenness where he
appears. He is a carrion crow, and though you see not well what he hovers for,
there is death somewhere. Our property is timid, our laws are timid, our
cultivated classes are timid. Fear for ages has boded and mowed and gibbered
over government and property. That obscene bird is not there for nothing. He
indicates great wrongs which must be revised.
Of the like nature is that expectation of change which instantly follows
the suspension of our voluntary activity. The terror of cloudless noon, the
emerald of Polycrates, the awe of prosperity, the instinct which leads every
generous soul to impose on itself tasks of a noble asceticism and vicarious
virtue, are the tremblings of the balance of justice through the heart and
mind of man.
Experienced men of the world know very well that it is best to pay scot
and lot as they go along, and that a man often pays dear for a small
frugality. The borrower runs in his own debt. Has a man gained any thing who
has received a hundred favors and rendered none? Has he gained by borrowing,
through indolence or cunning, his neighbor`s wares, or horses, or money? There
arises on the deed the instant acknowledgment of benefit on the one part and
of debt on the other; that is, of superiority and inferiority. The transaction
remains in the memory of himself and his neighbor; and every new transaction
alters according to its nature their relation to each other. He may soon come
to see that he had better have broken his own bones than to have ridden in his
neighbor`s coach, and that "the highest price he can pay for a thing is to ask
for in."
A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of life, and know that it
is always the part of prudence to face every claimant and pay every just
demand on your time, your talents, or your heart. Always pay; for first or
last you must pay your entire debt. Persons and events may stand for a time
between you and justice, but it is only a postponement. You must pay at last
your own debt. If you are wise you will dread a prosperity which only loads
you with more. Benefit is the end of nature. But for every benefit which you
receive, a tax is levied. He is great who confers the most benefits. He is
base, - and that is the one base thing in the universe, - to receive favors
and render none. In the order of nature we cannot render benefits to those
from whom we receive them, or only seldom. But the benefit we receive must be
rendered again, line for line, deed for deed, cent for cent, to somebody.
Beware of too much good staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm
worms. Pay it away quickly in some sort.
Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws. Cheapest, says the
prudent, is the dearest labor. What we buy in a broom, a mat, a wagon, a
knife, is some application of good sense to a common want. It is best to pay
in your land a skilful gardener, or to buy good sense applied to gardening; in
your sailor, good sense applied to navigation; in the house, good sense
applied to cooking, sewing, serving; in your agent, good sense applied to
accounts and affairs. So do you multiply your presence, or spread yourself
throughout your estate. But because of the dual constitution of things, in
labor as in life there can be no cheating. The thief steals from himself. The
swindler swindles himself. For the real price of labor is knowledge and
virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like paper money,
may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely,
knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen. These ends of labor
cannot be answered but by real exertions of the mind; and in obedience to pure
motives. The cheat, the defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the benefit,
cannot extort the knowledge of material and moral nature which his honest care
and pains yield to the operative. The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you
shall have the power; but they who do not the thing have not the power.
Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a stake to the
construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of the perfect
compensation of the universe. Everywhere and always this law is sublime. The
absolute balance of Give and Take, the doctrine that every thing has its
price, and if that price is not paid, not that thing but something else is
obtained, and that it is impossible to get anything without its price, is not
less sublime in the columns of a ledger than in the budgets of states, in the
laws of light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of nature. I cannot
doubt that the high laws which each man sees ever implicated in those
processes with which he is conversant, the stern ethics which sparkle on his
chisel-edge, which are measured out by his plumb and foot-rule, which stand as
manifest in the footing of the shop-bill as in the history of a state, - do
recommend to him his trade, and though seldom named, exalt his business to his
imagination.
The league between virtue and nature engages all things to assume a
hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and substances of the world
persecute and whip the traitor. He finds that things are arranged for truth
and benefit, but there is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a
crime, and the earth is made of glass. There is no such thing as concealment.
Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as
reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and
mole. You cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the foot-track,
you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clew. Always some
damning circumstances transpires. The laws and substances of nature, water,
snow, wind, gravitation, become penalties to the thief.
On the other hand the law holds with equal sureness for all right action.
Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the
two sides of an algebraic equation. The good man has absolute good, which like
fire turns every thing to its own nature, so that you cannot do him any harm;
but as the royal armies sent against Napoleon, when he approached cast down
their colors and from enemies became friends, so do disasters of all kinds, as
sickness, offence, poverty, prove benefactors.
Winds blow and waters roll
Strength to the brave and power and deity,
Yet in themselves are nothing.
The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As no man had ever a
point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had ever a defect that
was not somewhere made useful to him. The stag in the fable admired his horns
and blamed his feet, but when the hunter came, his feet saved him, and
afterwards, caught in the thicket, his horns destroyed him. Every man in his
lifetime needs to thank his faults. As no man thoroughly understands a truth
until first he has contended against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance
with the hindrances or talents of men until he has suffered from the one and
seen the triumph of the other over his own want of the same. Has he a defect
of temper that unfits him to live in society? Thereby he is driven to
entertain himself alone and acquire habits of self-help; and thus, like the
wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.
Our strength grows out of our weakness. Not until we are pricked and
stung and sorely shot at, awakens the indignation which arms itself with
secret forces. A great man is always willing to be little. Whilst he sits on
the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he is pushed, tormented,
defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits, on
his manhood; he has gained facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of the
insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill. The wise man always
throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it
is theirs to find his weak point. The wound cicatrizes and falls off from him
like a dead skin and when they would triumph, lo! he has passed on
invulnerable. Blame is safer than praise. I hate to be defended in a
newspaper. As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain
assurance of success. But as soon as honied words of praise are spoken for me
I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies. In general, every evil
to which we do not succumb is a benefactor. As the Sandwich Islander believes
that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we
gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
The same guards which protect us from disaster, defect and enmity, defend
us, if we will, from selfishness and fraud. Bolts and bars are not the best of
our institutions, nor is shrewdness in trade a mark of wisdom. Men suffer all
their life long under the foolish superstition that they can be cheated. But
it is as impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but himself, as for a
thing to be and not to be at the same time. There is a third silent party to
all our bargains. The nature and soul of things takes on itself the guaranty
of the fulfillment of every contract, so that honest service cannot come to
loss. If you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God in your
debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer the payment is withholden, the
better for you; for compound interest on compound interest is the rate and
usage of this exchequer.
The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to
make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no difference
whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A mob is a society of
bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason and traversing its work. The
mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of
activity is night. Its actions are insane, like its whole constitution. It
persecutes a principle; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather
justice, by inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those
who have these. It resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to
put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The inviolate spirit turns
their spite against the wrongdoers. The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every
lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode;
every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged
word reverberates through the earth from side to side. The minds of men are at
last aroused; reason looks out and justifies her own and malice finds all her
work in vain. It is the whipper who is whipped and the tyrant who is undone.
Thus do all things preach the indifferency of circumstances. The man is
all. Every thing has two sides, a good and an evil. Every advantage has its
tax. I learn to be content. But the doctrine of compensation is not the
doctrine of indifferency. The thoughtless say, on hearing these
representations, - What boots it to do well? there is one event to good and
evil; if I gain any good I must pay for it; if I lose any good I gain some
other; all actions are indifferent.
There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, its own
nature. The soul is not a compensation, but a life. The soul is. Under all
this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect
balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Existence, or God, is not
relation or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative, excluding
negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations, parts and times
within itself. Nature, truth, virtue, are the influx from thence. Vice is the
absence or departure of the same. Nothing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the
great Night or shade on which as a background the living universe paints
itself forth; but no fact is begotten by it; it cannot work, for it is not. It
cannot work any good; it cannot work any harm. It is harm inasmuch as it is
worse not to be than to be.
We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil acts, because the
criminal adheres to his vice and contumacy and does not come to a crisis or
judgment anywhere in visible nature. There is no stunning confutation of his
nonsense before men and angels. Has he therefore outwitted the law? Inasmuch
as he carries he malignity and the lie with him he so far decreases from
nature. In some manner there will be a demonstration of the wrong to the
understanding also; but, should we not see it, this deadly deduction makes
square the eternal account.
Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of rectitude
must be bought by any loss. There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty to
wisdom; they are proper additions of being. In a virtuous action I properly
am; in a virtuous act I add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from
Chaos and Nothing and see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon.
There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty, when these
attributes are considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses all limits. It
affirms in man always an Optimism, never a Pessimism.
His life is a progress, and not a station. His instinct is trust. Our
instinct uses "more" and "less" in application to man, always of the presence
of the soul, and not of its absence; the brave man is greater than the coward;
the true, the benevolent, the wise, is more a man and not less, than the fool
and knave. There is therefore no tax on the good of virtue, for that is the
incoming of God himself, or absolute existence, without any comparative. All
external good has its tax, and if it came without desert or sweat, has no root
in me, and the next wind will blow it away. But all the good of nature is the
soul`s, and may be had if paid for in nature`s lawful coin, that is, by labor
which the heart and the head allow. I no longer wish to meet a good I do not
earn, for example to find a pot of buried gold, knowing that it brings with it
new responsibility. I do not wish more external goods, - neither possessions,
nor honors, nor powers, nor persons. The gain is apparent; the tax is certain.
But there is no tax on the knowledge that the compensation exists and that it
is not desirable to dig up treasure. Herein I rejoice with a serene eternal
peace. I contract the boundaries of possible mischief. I learn the wisdom of
St. Bernard, "Nothing can work me damage except myself; the harm that I
sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer but by my own
fault."
In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequalities of
condition. The radical tragedy of nature seems to be the distinction of More
and Less. How can Less not feel the pain; how not feel indignation or
malevolence towards More? Look at those who have less faculty, and one feels
sad and knows not well what to make of it. Almost he shuns their eye; he fears
they will upbraid God. What should they do? It seems a great injustice. But
see the facts nearly and these mountainous inequalities vanish. Love reduces
them as the sun melts the iceberg in the sea. The heart and soul of all men
being one, this bitterness of His and Mine ceases. His is mine. I am my
brother and my brother is me. If I feel overshadowed and outdone by great
neighbors, I can get love; I can still receive; and he that loveth maketh his
own the grandeur he loves. Thereby I make the discovery that my brother is my
guardian, acting for me with the friendliest designs, and the estate I so
admired and envied is my own. It is the eternal nature of the soul to
appropriate and make all things its own. Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments
of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious
domain. His virtue, - is not that mine? His wit, - if it cannot be made mine,
it is not wit.
Such also is the natural history of calamity. The changes which break up
at short intervals the prosperity of men are advertisements of a nature whose
law is growth. Evermore it is the order of nature to grow, and every soul is
by this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole system of things, its friends
and home and laws and faith, as the shellfish crawls out of its beautiful but
stony case, because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new
house. In proportion to the vigor of the individual these revolutions are
frequent, until in some happier mind they are incessant and all worldly
relations hang very loosely about him, becoming as it were a transparent fluid
membrane through which the living form is always seen, and not, as in most
men, an indurated heterogeneous fabric of many dates and of no settled
character, in which the man is imprisoned. Then there can be enlargement, and
the man of to-day scarcely recognizes the man of yesterday. And such should
be the outward biography of man in time, a putting off of dead circumstances
day by day, as he renews his raiment day by day. But to us, in our lapsed
estate, resting, not advancing, resisting, not cooperating with the divine
expansion, this growth comes by shocks.
We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go. We do not
see that they only go out that archangels may come in. We are idolators of the
old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in its proper eternity and
omnipresence. We do not believe there is any force in to-day to rival or
re-create that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the ruins of the old tent
where once we had bread and shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit
can feed, cover, and nerve us again. We cannot again find aught so dear, so
sweet, so graceful. But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty
saith, "Up and onward forevermore!" We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither
will we rely on the New; and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, like those
monsters, who look backwards.
And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the
understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a
cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment
unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force
that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover,
which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a
guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life,
terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed,
breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows
the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It permits
or constrains the formation of new acquaintances and the reception of new
influences that prove of the first importance to the next years; and the man
or woman who would have remained a sunny garden-flower, with no room for its
roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the
neglect of the gardener is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and
fruit to wide neighborhoods of men.
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