Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is
sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his
contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then, he will know how to make us
seniors very unnecessary.
The nonchalance[160] of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would
disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the
healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlor what the pit
is in the playhouse;[161] independent, irresponsible, looking out from
his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences
them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad,
interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never
about consequences about interests; he gives an independent, genuine
verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as
it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has
once acted or spoken with _éclat_[162] he is a committed person,
watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections
must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe[163] for this. Ah,
that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who[164] can thus avoid
all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same
unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always
be formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which
being seen to be not private, but necessary, would sink like darts
into the ear of men, and put them in fear.
These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint
and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in
conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is
a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better
securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty
and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity.
Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators,
but names and customs.
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.[165] He who would gather
immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must
explore if it be goodness.[166] Nothing is at last sacred but the
integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall
have the suffrage[167] of the world. I remember an answer which when
quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont
to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my
saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live
wholly from within? my friend suggested: "But these impulses may be
from below, not from above." I replied: "They do not seem to me to be
such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil."
No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but
names very readily transferable to that or this;[168] the only right
is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A
man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if
everything were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think
how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and
dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and
sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and
speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat
of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this
bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from
Barbadoes,[169] why should I not say to him: "Go love thy infant; love
thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and
never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible
tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is
spite at home." Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth
is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have
some edge to it,--else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be
preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules
and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my
genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post,
_Whim_.[170] I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we
cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I
seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good
man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good
situations. Are they _my_ poor? I tell thee, thou foolish
philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give
to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There
is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought
and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your
miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools;
the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now
stand; alms to sots; and the thousand-fold Relief Societies;--though I
confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a
wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the
rule. There is the man _and_ his virtues. Men do what is called a good
action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a
fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are
done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world,--as
invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances.
I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not
for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so
it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and
unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and
bleeding.[171] I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse
this appeal from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it
makes no difference whether I do or forbear those actions which are
reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I
have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am,
and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows
any secondary testimony.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.
This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may
serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is
the harder, because you will always find those who think they know
what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to
live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after
our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps
with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.[172]
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is,
that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the
impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church,
contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for
the government or against it, spread your table like base
housekeepers,--under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the
precise[173] man you are. And, of course, so much force is withdrawn
from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you.[174] Do
your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what
a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I
anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and
topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I
not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous
word? Do I not know that, with[175] all this ostentation of examining
the grounds of the institution, he will do no such thing? Do I not
know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side,--the
permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a
retained attorney, and these airs of the bench[176] are the emptiest
affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another
handkerchief,[177] and attached themselves to some one of these
communities of opinion.[178] This conformity makes them not false in a
few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars.
Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two,
their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us,
and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is
not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we
adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by
degrees the gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying
experience in particular which does not fail to wreak itself also in
the general history; I mean "the foolish face of praise," the forced
smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in
answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not
spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurping willfulness, grow
tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable
sensation.
For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.[179] And
therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The bystanders
look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlor. If
this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his
own, he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces
of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are
put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs.[180] Yet is
the discontent of the multitude more formidable than that of the
senate and the college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the
world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is
decorous and prudent, for they are timid as being very vulnerable
themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the
people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the
unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made
to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to
treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment.
The other terror[181] that scares us from self-trust is our
consistency;[182] a reverence for our past act or word, because the
eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit[183] than
our past acts, and we are loth to disappoint them.
But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about
this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat[184] you have
stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict
yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on
your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring
the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in
a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the
Deity; yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them
heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color.
Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and
flee.[185]
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by
little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a
great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself
with the shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words,
and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though
it contradict everything you said to-day.--"Ah, so you shall be sure
to be misunderstood."--Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?
Pythagoras[186] was misunderstood, and Socrates,[187] and Jesus, and
Luther,[188] and Copernicus,[189] and Galileo,[190] and Newton,[191]
and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to