Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
street serenade, or the breath of a cigar? One remembers again the
trumpet-text in the Koran,[649]--"The heavens and the earth, and all
that is between them, think ye we have created them in jest?" As long
as the question is of talent and mental power, the world of men has
not his equal to show. But when the question is to life, and its
materials, and its auxiliaries, how does he profit me? What does it
signify? It is but a Twelfth Night,[650] or Midsummer Night's Dream,
or a Winter Evening's Tale: what signifies another picture more or
less? The Egyptian verdict[651] of the Shakspeare Societies comes to
mind, that he was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this
fact to his verse. Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of
keeping with their thought; but this man, in wide contrast. Had he
been less, had he reached only the common measure of great authors, of
Bacon, Milton, Tasso,[652] Cervantes,[653] we might leave the fact in
the twilight of human fate: but, that this man of men, he who gave to
the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed,
and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs forward into
Chaos,--that he should not be wise for himself,--it must even go into
the world's history, that the best poet led an obscure and profane
life, using his genius for the public amusement.
28. Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite,[654] German,[655]
and Swede,[656] beheld the same objects: they also saw through them
that which was contained. And to what purpose? The beauty straightway
vanished; they read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an
obligation, a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life
became ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim's progress,[657] a probation,
beleaguered round with doleful histories, of Adam's fall[658] and
curse, behind us; with doomsdays and purgatorial[659] and penal fires
before us; and the heart of the seer and the heart of the listener
sank in them.
29. It must be conceded that these are half-views of half-men. The
world still wants its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle
with Shakspeare the player, nor shall grope in graves with Swedenborg
the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act, with equal
inspiration. For knowledge will brighten the sunshine; right is more
beautiful than private affection; and love is compatible with
universal wisdom.
PRUDENCE.[660]
What right have I to write on Prudence, whereof I have little, and
that of the negative sort? My prudence consists in avoiding and going
without, not in the inventing of means and methods, not in adroit
steering, not in gentle repairing. I have no skill to make money spend
well, no genius in my economy, and whoever sees my garden discovers
that I must have some other garden. Yet I love facts, and hate
lubricity[661] and people without perception. Then I have the same
title to write on prudence that I have to write on poetry or holiness.
We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience.
We paint those qualities which we do not possess. The poet admires the
man of energy and tactics; the merchant breeds his son for the church
or the bar; and where a man is not vain and egotistic you shall find
what he has not by his praise. Moreover it would be hardly honest in
me not to balance these fine lyric words of Love and Friendship[662]
with words of coarser sound, and whilst my debt to my senses is real
and constant, not to own it in passing.
Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of
appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life. It is God
taking thought for oxen. It moves matter after the laws of matter. It
is content to seek health of body by complying with physical
conditions, and health of mind by the laws of the intellect.
The world of the senses is a world of shows; it does not exist for
itself, but has a symbolic character; and a true prudence or law of
shows recognizes the co-presence of other laws and knows that its own
office is subaltern; knows that it is surface and not centre where it
works. Prudence is false when detached. It is legitimate when it is
the Natural History of the soul incarnate, when it unfolds the beauty
of laws within the narrow scope of the senses.
There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the world. It is
sufficient to our present purpose to indicate three. One class lives
to the utility of the symbol, esteeming health and wealth a final
good. Another class live above this mark of the beauty of the symbol,
as the poet and artist and the naturalist and man of science. A third
class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing
signified; these are wise men. The first class have common sense; the
second, taste; and the third, spiritual perception. Once in a long
time, a man traverses the whole scale, and sees and enjoys the symbol
solidly, then also has a clear eye for its beauty, and lastly, whilst
he pitches his tent on this sacred volcanic isle of nature, does not
offer to build houses and barns thereon reverencing the splendor of
the God which he sees bursting through each chink and cranny.
The world is filled with the proverbs[663] and acts and winkings of a
base prudence, which is a devotion to matter, as if we possessed no
other faculties than the palate, the nose, the touch, the eye and ear;
a prudence which adores the Rule of Three, which never subscribes,
which gives never, which seldom lends, and asks but one question of
any project,--Will it bake bread? This is a disease like a thickening
of the skin until the vital organs are destroyed. But culture,
revealing the high origin of the apparent world and aiming at the
perfection of the man as the end, degrades everything else, as health
and bodily life, into means. It sees prudence not to be a several
faculty, but a name for wisdom and virtue conversing with the body and
its wants. Cultivated men always feel and speak so as if a great
fortune, the achievement of a civil or social measure, great personal
influence, a graceful and commanding address, had their value as
proofs of the energy of the spirit. If a man lose his balance and
immerse himself in any trades or pleasures for their own sake, he may
be a good wheel or pin,[664] but he is not a cultivated man.
The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and
cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and
therefore literature's. The true prudence limits this sensualism by
admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world. This
recognition once made,--the order of the world and the distribution
of affairs and times being studied with the co-perception of their
subordinate place, will reward any degree of attention. For, our
existence, thus apparently attached in nature to the sun and the
returning moon and the periods which they mark; so susceptible to
climate and to country, so alive to social good and evil, so fond of
splendor and so tender to hunger and cold and debt,--reads all its
primary lessons out of these books.
Prudence does not go behind nature and ask whence it is? It takes the
laws of the world whereby man's being is conditioned, as they are, and
keeps these laws that it may enjoy their proper good. It respects
space and time, climate, want, sleep, the law of polarity,[665] growth
and death. There revolve, to give bound and period to his being on all
sides, the sun and moon, the great formalists in the sky: here lies
stubborn matter, and will not swerve from its chemical routine. Here
is a planted globe, pierced and belted with natural laws and fenced
and distributed externally with civil partitions and properties which
impose new restraints on the young inhabitant.
We eat of the bread which grows in the field. We live by the air which
blows around us and we are poisoned by the air that is too cold or too
hot, too dry or too wet. Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible and
divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A
door is to be painted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood or oil, or
meal, or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax;
and an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains, and
the stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word,--these
eat up the hours. Do what we can, summer will have its flies.[666] If
we walk in the woods we must feed mosquitoes. If we go a-fishing we
must expect a wet coat. Then climate is a great impediment to idle
persons. We often resolve to give up the care of the weather, but
still we regard the clouds and the rain.
We are instructed by these petty experiences which usurp the hours and
years. The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitant of the
northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the
fixed smile of the tropics. The islander may ramble all day at will. At
night he may sleep on a mat under the moon, and wherever a wild
date-tree grows, nature has, without a prayer even, spread a table for
his morning meal. The northerner is perforce a householder. He must
brew, bake, salt and preserve his food. He must pile wood and coal. But
as it happens that not one stroke can labor lay to without some new
acquaintance with nature; and as nature is inexhaustibly significant,
the inhabitants of these climates[667] have always excelled the
southerner in force. Such is the value of these matters that a man who
knows other things can never know too much of these. Let him have
accurate perceptions. Let him, if he have hands, handle; if eyes,
measure and discriminate; let him accept and hive every fact of
chemistry, natural history and economics; the more he has, the less is
he willing to spare any one. Time is always bringing the occasions that
disclose their value. Some wisdom comes out of every natural and
innocent action. The domestic man, who loves no music so well as his
kitchen clock and the airs which the logs sing to him as they burn on
the hearth, has solaces which others never dream of. The application of
means to ends ensures victory and the songs of victory not less in a
farm or a shop than in the tactics of party or of war. The good husband
finds method as efficient in the packing of fire-wood in a shed or in
the harvesting of fruits in the cellar, as in Peninsular campaigns[668]
or the files of the Department of State. In the rainy day he builds a
work-bench, or gets his tool-box set in the corner of the barn-chamber,
and stored with nails, gimlet, pincers, screwdriver and chisel. Herein
he tastes an old joy of youth and childhood, the cat-like love of
garrets, presses and corn-chambers, and of the conveniences of long
housekeeping. His garden or his poultry-yard--very paltry places it may
be--tells him many pleasant anecdotes. One might find argument for
optimism in the abundant flow of this saccharine element of pleasure in
every suburb and extremity of the good world. Let a man keep the
law--any law,--and his way will be strown with satisfactions. There is
more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.
On the other hand, nature punishes any neglect of prudence. If you
think the senses final, obey their law. If you believe in the soul, do
not clutch at sensual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree of
cause and effect. It is vinegar to the eyes to deal with men of loose
and imperfect perception. Dr. Johnson is reported to have
said,[669]--"If the child says he looked out of this window, when he
looked out of that,--whip him." Our American character is marked by a
more than average delight in accurate perception, which is shown by
the currency of the by-word, "No mistake."
But the discomfort of unpunctuality, of confusion of thought about