|
Part II
Part II
If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let
us at least resist our temptations, let us enter into the state of war and
wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to
be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying
hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these
deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, O father, O
mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances
hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth`s. Be it known unto you that
henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants
but proximities. I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, to support my family,
to be the chaste husband of one wife, - but these relations I must fill after
a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I
cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I
am, we shall be happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you
should. I must be myself. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so
trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and
moon whatever inly rejoices me and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I
will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical
attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your
companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly but humbly and truly.
It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men`s, however long we have dwelt
in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love
what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and if we follow the truth it
will bring us out safe at last. - But so may you give these friends pain. Yes,
but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility. Besides,
all persons have their moments of reason, when they look out into the region
of absolute truth; then will they justify me and do the same thing.
The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a
rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist
will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of
consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one or the other of
which we must be shriven. You may fulfil your round of duties by clearing
yourself in the direct, or in the reflex way. Consider whether you have
satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, neighbor, town, cat and
dog; whether any of these can upbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex
standard and absolve me to myself. I have my own stern claims and perfect
circle. It denies the name of duty to many offices that are called duties. But
if I can discharge its debts it enables me to dispense with the popular code.
If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one
day.
And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common
motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a task-master.
High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good
earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to
him as strong as iron necessity is to others.
If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction
society, he will see the need of these ethics, The sinew and heart of man seem
to be drawn out, and we are become timorous desponding whimperers. We are
afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.
Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall
renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are
insolvent; cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all
proportion to their practical force, and so do lean and beg day and night
continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our
marriages, our religion we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We
are parlor soldiers. The rugged battle of fate, where strength is born, we
shun.
If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they lose all heart.
If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius
studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one
year afterwards, in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to
his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened and in
complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hamsphire or Vermont,
who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps
a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and
so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is
worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels
no shame in not "studying a profession," for he does not postpone his life,
but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. Let a stoic
arise who shall reveal the resources of man and tell men they are not leaning
willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self -
trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to
shed healing to the nations, that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and
that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries
and customs out of the window, - we pity him no more but thank and revere him;
- and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor and make his name
dear to all History.
It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance - a new respect for the
divinity in man - must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of
men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of
living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.
1. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy
office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for
some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in
endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous.
Prayer that craves a particular commodity - anything less than all good, is
vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest
point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the
spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a
private end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature
and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He
will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his
field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar,
are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach, in
Fletcher`s Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind of the god Audate,
replies:
His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors;
Our valors are our best gods.
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of
self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities if you can thereby
help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work and already the evil begins to
be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly
and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and
health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with
the soul. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods
and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide. Him all
tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes
out to him and embraces him because he did not need it. We solicitously and
apologetically caress and celebrate him because he held on his way and scorned
our disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated him. "To the
persevering mortal," said Zoroaster, "the blessed Immortals are swift."
As men`s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease
of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, "Let not God speak
to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we will obey."
Everywhere I am bereaved of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his
own temple doors and recites fables merely of his brother`s, or his brother`s
brother`s God. Every new mind is a new classification. If it prove a mind of
uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a
Spurzheim, it imposes its classification on other men, and lo! a new system.
In proportion always to the depth of the thought, and so to the number of the
objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his complacency.
But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which are also
classifications of some powerful mind acting on the great elemental thought of
Duty and man`s relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism, Quakerism,
Swedenborgianism. The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating every
thing to the new terminology that a girl does who has just learned botany in
seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time that the
pupil will feel a real debt to the teacher - will find his intellectual power
has grown by the study of his writings. This will continue until he has
exhausted his master`s mind. But in all unbalanced minds the classification is
idolized, passes for the end and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that
the walls of the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the
walls of the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch
their master built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to see -
how you can see: "It must be somehow that you stole the light from us." They
do not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any
cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call it their own. If they
are honest and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will be too strait
and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal light,
all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam over the
universe as on the first morning.
2. It is for want of self-culture that the idol of Travelling, the idol
of Italy, of England, of Egypt, remains for all educated Americans. They who
made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination, did so not by
rambling round creation as a moth round a lamp, but by sticking fast where
they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours we feel that duty is our
place and that the merry men of circumstance should follow as they may. The
soul is no traveller: the wise man stays at home with the soul, and when his
necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into
foreign lands, he is at home still and is not gadding abroad from himself, and
shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance that he goes, the
missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign
and not like an interloper or a valet.
I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe for the
purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first
domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater
than he knows. He who travels to be amused or to get somewhat which he does
not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old
things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and
dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.
Travelling is a fool`s paradise. We owe to our first journeys the
discovery that place is nothing. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I
can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace
my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside
me is the stern Fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and
suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
3. But the rage of travelling is itself only a symptom of a deeper
unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is
vagabond, and the universal system of education fosters restlessness. Our
minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what
is imitation but the travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign
taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our
tastes, our whole minds, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant, as the
eyes of a maid follow her mistress. The soul created the arts wherever they
have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It
was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the
conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model?
Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought and quaint expression are as near to
us to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the
precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length
of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he
will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste
and sentiment will be satisfied also.
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every
moment with the cumulative force of a whole life`s cultivation; but of the
adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.
That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet
knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the
master who could have taught Shakspeare? Where is the master who could have
instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is an
unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow.
If anybody will tell me whom the great man imitates in the original crisis
when he performs a great act, I will tell him who else than himself can teach
him. Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which
is assigned thee and thou canst not hope too much or dare too much. There is
at this moment, there is for me an utterance bare and grand as that of the
colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or
Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul, all rich, all
eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if I can
hear what these patriarchs say, surely I can reply to them in the same pitch
of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature. Dwell up
there in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart and thou
shalt reproduce the Foreworld again.
4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our
spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and
no man improves.
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the
other. Its progress is only apparent like the workers of a treadmill. It
undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is
christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not
amelioration. For every thing that is given something is taken. Society
acquires new arts and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well -
clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil and a bill
of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a
club, a spear, a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under. But
compare the health of the two men and you see that his aboriginal strength,
the white man has lost. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with
a broad axe and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you
struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white man to
his grave.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He
is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has got a
fine Geneva watch, but he has lost the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A
Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when
he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The
solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole
bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books
impair his memory: his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office
increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery
does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a
christianity entrenched in establishments and forms some vigor of wild virtue.
For every stoic was a stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?
There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard of
height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A singular equality may
be observed between the great men of the first and of the last ages; nor can
all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail
to educate greater men than Plutarch`s heroes, three or four and twenty
centuries ago. Not in time is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates,
Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class. He who is really
of their class will not be called by their name, but be wholly his own man,
and in his turn the founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period
are only its costume and do not invigorate men. The harm of the improved
machinery may compensate its good. Hudson and Behring accomplished so much in
their fishing-boats as to astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment
exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass,
discovered a more splendid series of facts than any one since. Columbus found
the New World in an undecked boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse
and perishing of means and machinery which were introduced with loud laudation
a few years or centuries before. The great genius returns to essential man. We
reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of science, and
yet Napoleon conquered Europe by the Bivouac, which consisted of falling back
on naked valor and disencumbering it of all aids. The Emperor held it
impossible to make a perfect army, says Las Cases, "without abolishing our
arms, magazines, commissaries and carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman
custom, the soldier should receive his supply of corn, grind it in his hand -
mill and bake his bread himself."
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is
composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the
ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to -
day, die, and their experience with them.
And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments
which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from
themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem what they call
the soul`s progress, namely, the religious, learned and civil institutions as
guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel
them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by
what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed
of his property, ashamed of what he has, out of new respect for his being.
Especially he hates what he has if he sees that it is accidental, - came to
him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it
does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there because no
revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is, does always by
necessity acquire, and what the man acquires, is permanent and living
property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or
fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the
man is put. "Thy lot or portion of life," said the Caliph Ali, "is seeking
after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after if." Our dependence on
these foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers. The political
parties meet in numerous conventions; the greater the concourse and with each
new uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex! The Democrats from New
Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! the young patriot feels himself stronger than
before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like manner the reformers summon
conventions and vote and resolve in multitude. But not so O friends! will the
God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method precisely the reverse. It
is only as a man puts off from himself all external support and stands alone
that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to
his banner. Is not a man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and, in the
endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder of
all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power is in the soul, that he is
weak only because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and, so
perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights
himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles;
just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his
head.
So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain
all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these
winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will
work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt always
drag her after thee. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of
your sick or the return of your absent friend, or some other quite external
event raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do
not believe it. It can never be so. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
|
