Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
St. Michael's Square,[434] being steeped in Cologne water,[435] and
perfumed, and dined, and introduced, and properly grounded in all the
biography, and politics, and anecdotes of the boudoirs.
18. Yet these fineries may have grace and wit. Let there be grotesque
sculpture about the gates and offices of temples. Let the creed and
commandments even have the saucy homage of parody. The forms of
politeness universally express benevolence in superlative degrees.
What if they are in the mouths of selfish men, and used as means of
selfishness? What if the false gentleman almost bows the true out of
the world? What if the false gentleman contrives so to address his
companion, as civilly to exclude all others from his discourse, and
also to make them feel excluded? Real service will not lose its
nobleness. All generosity is not merely French and sentimental; nor is
it to be concealed, that living blood and a passion of kindness does
at last distinguish God's gentleman from Fashion's. The epitaph of Sir
Jenkin Grout is not wholly unintelligible to the present age. "Here
lies Sir Jenkin Grout, who loved his friend, and persuaded his enemy:
what his mouth ate, his hand paid for: what his servants robbed, he
restored: if a woman gave him pleasure, he supported her in pain: he
never forgot his children: and whoso touched his finger, drew after it
his whole body." Even the line of heroes is not utterly extinct. There
is still ever some admirable person in plain clothes, standing on the
wharf, who jumps in to rescue a drowning man; there is still some
absurd inventor of charities; some guide and comforter of runaway
slaves; some friend of Poland;[436] some Philhellene;[437] some
fanatic who plants shade-trees for the second and third generation,
and orchards when he is grown old; some well-concealed piety; some
just man happy in an ill-fame; some youth ashamed of the favors of
fortune, and impatiently casting them on other shoulders. And these
are the centers of society, on which it returns for fresh impulses.
These are the creators of Fashion, which is an attempt to organize
beauty of behavior. The beautiful and the generous are in the theory,
the doctors and apostles of this church: Scipio, and the Cid, and Sir
Philip Sidney, and Washington, and every pure and valiant heart, who
worshiped Beauty by word and by deed. The persons who constitute the
natural aristocracy, are not found in the actual aristocracy, or only
on its edge; as the chemical energy of the spectrum is found to be
greatest just outside of the spectrum. Yet that is the infirmity of
the seneschals, who do not know their sovereign, when he appears. The
theory of society supposes the existence and sovereignty of these. It
divines afar off their coming. It says with the elder gods,--
"As Heaven and Earth are fairer far[438]
Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;
And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth,
In form and shape compact and beautiful;
So, on our heels a fresh perfection treads;
A power, more strong in beauty, born of us,
And fated to excel us, as we pass
In glory that old Darkness:
... for, 'tis the eternal law,
That first in beauty shall be first in might."
19. Therefore, within the ethnical circle of good society, there is a
narrower and higher circle, concentration of its light, and flower of
courtesy, to which there is always a tacit appeal of pride and
reference, as to its inner and imperial court, the parliament of love
and chivalry. And this is constituted of those persons in whom heroic
dispositions are native, with the love of beauty, the delight in
society, and the power to embellish the passing day. If the
individuals who compose the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe,
the guarded blood of centuries, should pass in review, in such manner
as that we could, leisurely and critically, inspect their behavior, we
might find no gentleman, and no lady; for although excellent specimens
of courtesy and high-breeding would gratify us in the assemblage, in
the particulars, we should detect offense. Because, elegance comes of
no breeding, but of birth. There must be romance of character, or the
most fastidious exclusion of impertinencies will not avail. It must be
genius which takes that direction: it must be not courteous, but
courtesy. High behavior is as rare in fiction as it is in fact. Scott
is praised for the fidelity with which he painted the demeanor and
conversation of the superior classes. Certainly, kings and queens,
nobles and great ladies, had some right to complain of the absurdity
that had been put in their mouths, before the days of Waverley;[439]
but neither does Scott's dialogue bear criticism. His lords brave each
other in smart epigrammatic speeches, but the dialogue is in costume,
and does not please on the second reading; it is not warm with life.
In Shakespeare alone, the speakers do not strut and bridle, the
dialogue is easily great, and he adds to so many titles that of being
the best-bred man in England, and in Christendom. Once or twice in a
lifetime we are permitted to enjoy the charm of noble manners, in the
presence of a man or woman who have no bar in their nature, but whose
character emanates freely in their word and gesture. A beautiful form
is better than a beautiful face: a beautiful behavior is better than a
beautiful form: it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures;
it is the finest of the fine arts. A man is but a little thing in the
midst of the objects of nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating
from his countenance, he may abolish all considerations of magnitude,
and in his manners equal the majesty of the world. I have seen an
individual whose manners though wholly within the conventions of
elegant society, were never learned there, but were original and
commanding, and held out protection and prosperity; one who did not
need the aid of a court-suit, but carried the holiday in his eye; who
exhilarated the fancy by flinging wide the doors of new modes of
existence; who shook off the captivity of etiquette, with happy,
spirited bearing, good-natured and free as Robin Hood;[440] yet with
the port of an emperor,--if need be, calm, serious, and fit to stand
the gaze of millions.
20. The open air and the fields, the street and public chambers, are
the places where Man executes his will; let him yield or divide the
scepter at the door of the house. Woman, with her instinct of
behavior, instantly detects in man a love of trifles, any coldness or
imbecility, or, in short, any want of that large, flowing, and
magnanimous deportment, which is indispensable as an exterior in the
hall. Our American institutions have been friendly to her, and at this
moment I esteem it a chief felicity of this country, that it excels in
women. A certain awkward consciousness of inferiority in the men, may
give rise to the new chivalry in behalf of Woman's Rights. Certainly,
let her be as much better placed in the laws and in social forms, as
the most zealous reformer can ask, but I confide so entirely in her
inspiring and musical nature, that I believe only herself can show us
how she shall be served. The wonderful generosity of her sentiments
raises her at times into heroical and godlike regions, and verifies
the pictures of Minerva,[441] Juno,[442] or Polymnia;[443] and, by the
firmness with which she treads her upward path, she convinces the
coarsest calculators that another road exists than that which their
feet know. But besides those who make good in our imagination the
place of muses and of Delphic Sibyls,[444] are there not women who
fill our vase with wine and roses to the brim, so that the wine runs
over and fills the house with perfume; who inspire us with courtesy;
who unloose our tongues, and we speak; who anoint our eyes, and we
see? We say things we never thought to have said; for once, our walls
of habitual reserve vanished, and left us at large; we were children
playing with children in a wide field of flowers. Steep us, we cried,
in these influences, for days, for weeks, and we shall be sunny poets,
and will write out in many-colored words the romance that you are. Was
it Hafiz[445] or Firdousi[446] that said of his Persian Lilla, "She
was an elemental force, and astonished me by her amount of life, when
I saw her day after day radiating, every instant, redundant joy and
grace on all around her.[447] She was a solvent powerful to reconcile
all heterogeneous persons into one society; like air or water, an
element of such a great range of affinities, that it combines readily
with a thousand substances. Where she is present, all others will be
more than they are wont. She was a unit and whole, so that whatsoever
she did, became her. She had too much sympathy and desire to please,
than that you could say, her manners were marked with dignity, yet no
princess could surpass her clear and erect demeanor on each occasion.
She did not study the Persian grammar, nor the books of the seven
poets, but all the poems of the seven seemed to be written upon her.
For, though the bias of her nature was not to thought, but to
sympathy, yet was she so perfect in her own nature, as to meet
intellectual persons by the fullness of her heart, warming them by her
sentiments; believing, as she did, that by dealing nobly with all, all
would show themselves noble."
21. I know that this Byzantine[448] pile of chivalry of Fashion, which
seems so fair and picturesque to those who look at the contemporary
facts for science or for entertainment, is not equally pleasant to all
spectators. The constitution of our society makes it a giant's castle
to the ambitious youth who have not found their names enrolled in its
Golden Book,[449] and whom it has excluded from its coveted honors and
privileges. They have yet to learn that its seeming grandeur is
shadowy and relative: it is great by their allowance: its proudest
gates will fly open at the approach of their courage and virtue. For
the present distress, however, of those who are predisposed to suffer
from the tyrannies of this caprice, there are easy remedies. To remove
your residence a couple of miles, or at most four, will commonly
relieve the most extreme susceptibility. For, the advantages which
fashion values are plants which thrive in very confined localities,
in a few streets, namely. Out of this precinct, they go for nothing;
are of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the market, in war, in
the nuptial society, in the literary or scientific circle, at sea, in
friendship, in the heaven of thought or virtue.
22. But we have lingered long enough in these painted courts. The
worth of the thing signified must vindicate our taste for the emblem.
Everything that is called fashion and courtesy humbles itself before
the cause and fountain of honor, creator of titles and dignities,
namely, the heart of love. This is the royal blood, this the fire,
which, in all countries and contingencies, will work after its kind
and conquer ind expand all that approaches it. This gives new meanings
to every fact. This impoverishes the rich, suffering no grandeur but
its own. What _is_ rich? Are you rich enough to help anybody? to
succor the unfashionable and the eccentric? rich enough to make the
Canadian in his wagon, the itinerant with his consul's paper which
commends him "To the charitable," the swarthy Italian with his few
broken words of English, the lame pauper hunted by overseers from town
to town, even the poor insane or besotted wreck of man or woman, feel
the noble exception of your presence and your house, from the general
bleakness and stoniness; to make such feel that they were greeted with
a voice which made them both remember and hope? What is vulgar, but to