Essays — First Series
This dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted. Up to this day it
must be owned no projector has had the smallest success. The parted
water reunites behind our hand. Pleasure is taken out of pleasant
things, profit out of profitable things, power out of strong things, as
soon as we seek to separate them from the whole. We can no more halve
things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get an inside
that shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow. “Drive out
Nature with a fork, she comes running back.”
Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek
to dodge, which one and another brags that he does not know, that they
do not touch him;—but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in
his soul. If he escapes them in one part they attack him in another
more vital part. If he has escaped them in form and in the appearance,
it is because he has resisted his life and fled from himself, and the
retribution is so much death. So signal is the failure of all attempts
to make this separation of the good from the tax, that the experiment
would not be tried,—since to try it is to be mad,—but for the
circumstance, that when the disease began in the will, of rebellion and
separation, the intellect is at once infected, so that the man ceases
to see God whole in each object, but is able to see the sensual
allurement of an object and not see the sensual hurt; he sees the
mermaid’s head but not the dragon’s tail, and thinks he can cut off
that which he would have from that which he would not have. “How secret
art thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in silence, O thou only
great God, sprinkling with an unwearied providence certain penal
blindnesses upon such as have unbridled desires!”[1]
[1] St. Augustine, Confessions, B. I.
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 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
Tithonus is immortal, he is old. Achilles is not quite invulnerable;
the sacred waters did not wash the heel by which Thetis held him.
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 must be. There is a crack in
every thing God has made. It would seem there is always 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 Theagenes, 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 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, embarrass 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 Shakspeare, 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 qualification. 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
workshops 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 eat.—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 of 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 hurled 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 ninepins 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, universal 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 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 it.”
A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of life, and know that
it is 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, say 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,