Essays — First Series
good sense applied to accounts and affairs. So do you multiply your
presence, or spread yourself throughout your estate. But because of the
dual constitution of things, in labor as in life there can be no
cheating. The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself.
For the real price of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and
credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited
or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue,
cannot be counterfeited or stolen. These ends of labor cannot be
answered but by real exertions of the mind, and in obedience to pure
motives. The cheat, the defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the
knowledge of material and moral nature which his honest care and pains
yield to the operative. The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you
shall have the Power; but they who do not the thing have not the power.
Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a stake to
the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of
the perfect compensation of the universe. The absolute balance of Give
and Take, the doctrine that every thing has its price,—and if that
price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained, and
that it is impossible to get any thing without its price,—is not less
sublime in the columns of a leger than in the budgets of states, in the
laws of light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of nature. I
cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees implicated in those
processes with which he is conversant, the stern ethics which sparkle
on his chisel-edge, which are measured out by his plumb and foot-rule,
which stand as manifest in the footing of the shop-bill as in the
history of a state,—do recommend to him his trade, and though seldom
named, exalt his business to his imagination.
The league between virtue and nature engages all things to assume a
hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and substances of the world
persecute and whip the traitor. He finds that things are arranged for
truth and benefit, but there is no den in the wide world to hide a
rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime,
and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals
in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and
mole. You cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the
foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or
clew. Some damning circumstance always transpires. The laws and
substances of nature,—water, snow, wind, gravitation,—become penalties
to the thief.
On the other hand the law holds with equal sureness for all right
action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just,
as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation. The good man has
absolute good, which like fire turns every thing to its own nature, so
that you cannot do him any harm; but as the royal armies sent against
Napoleon, when he approached cast down their colors and from enemies
became friends, so disasters of all kinds, as sickness, offence,
poverty, prove benefactors:—
“Winds blow and waters roll
Strength to the brave, and power and deity,
Yet in themselves are nothing.”
The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As no man had ever
a point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had ever a
defect that was not somewhere made useful to him. The stag in the fable
admired his horns and blamed his feet, but when the hunter came, his
feet saved him, and afterwards, caught in the thicket, his horns
destroyed him. Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults. As
no man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against
it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with the hindrances or
talents of men until he has suffered from the one and seen the triumph
of the other over his own want of the same. Has he a defect of temper
that unfits him to live in society? Thereby he is driven to entertain
himself alone and acquire habits of self-help; and thus, like the
wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.
Our strength grows out of our weakness. The indignation which arms
itself with secret forces does not awaken until we are pricked and
stung and sorely assailed. A great man is always willing to be little.
Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he
is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he
has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns
his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation
and real skill. The wise man throws himself on the side of his
assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak
point. The wound cicatrizes and falls off from him like a dead skin and
when they would triumph, lo! he has passed on invulnerable. Blame is
safer than praise. I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as all
that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success.
But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me I feel as one
that lies unprotected before his enemies. In general, every evil to
which we do not succumb is a benefactor. As the Sandwich Islander
believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into
himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
The same guards which protect us from disaster, defect, and enmity,
defend us, if we will, from selfishness and fraud. Bolts and bars are
not the best of our institutions, nor is shrewdness in trade a mark of
wisdom. Men suffer all their life long under the foolish superstition
that they can be cheated. But it is as impossible for a man to be
cheated by any one but himself, as for a thing to be and not to be at
the same time. There is a third silent party to all our bargains. The
nature and soul of things takes on itself the guaranty of the
fulfilment of every contract, so that honest service cannot come to
loss. If you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God in
your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer The payment is
withholden, the better for you; for compound interest on compound
interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.
The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature,
to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no
difference whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A mob
is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason and
traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending to the
nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are
insane like its whole constitution. It persecutes a principle; it would
whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire and
outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these. It
resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to put out the
ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The inviolate spirit turns their
spite against the wrongdoers. The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every
lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison, a more illustrious
abode; every burned book or house enlightens the world; every
suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to
side. Hours of sanity and consideration are always arriving to
communities, as to individuals, when the truth is seen and the martyrs
are justified.
Thus do all things preach the indifferency of circumstances. The man is
all. Every thing has two sides, a good and an evil. Every advantage has
its tax. I learn to be content. But the doctrine of compensation is not
the doctrine of indifferency. The thoughtless say, on hearing these
representations,—What boots it to do well? there is one event to good
and evil; if I gain any good I must pay for it; if I lose any good I
gain some other; all actions are indifferent.
There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, its own
nature. The soul is not a compensation, but a life. The soul _is_.
Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow
with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Essence,
or God, is not a relation or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast
affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all
relations, parts and times within itself. Nature, truth, virtue, are
the influx from thence. Vice is the absence or departure of the same.
Nothing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the great Night or shade on
which as a background the living universe paints itself forth, but no
fact is begotten by it; it cannot work, for it is not. It cannot work
any good; it cannot work any harm. It is harm inasmuch as it is worse
not to be than to be.
We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil acts, because the
criminal adheres to his vice and contumacy and does not come to a
crisis or judgment anywhere in visible nature. There is no stunning
confutation of his nonsense before men and angels. Has he therefore
outwitted the law? Inasmuch as he carries the malignity and the lie
with him he so far deceases from nature. In some manner there will be a
demonstration of the wrong to the understanding also; but, should we
not see it, this deadly deduction makes square the eternal account.
Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of rectitude
must be bought by any loss. There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty
to wisdom; they are proper additions of being. In a virtuous action I
properly _am;_ in a virtuous act I add to the world; I plant into
deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing and see the darkness receding
on the limits of the horizon. There can be no excess to love, none to
knowledge, none to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the
purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism,
never a Pessimism.
His life is a progress, and not a station. His instinct is trust. Our
instinct uses “more” and “less” in application to man, of the _presence
of the soul_, and not of its absence, the brave man is greater than the
coward; the true, the benevolent, the wise, is more a man and not less,
than the fool and knave. There is no tax on the good of virtue, for
that is the incoming of God himself, or absolute existence, without any
comparative. Material good has its tax, and if it came without desert
or sweat, has no root in me, and the next wind will blow it away. But
all the good of nature is the soul’s, and may be had if paid for in
nature’s lawful coin, that is, by labor which the heart and the head
allow. I no longer wish to meet a good I do not earn, for example to
find a pot of buried gold, knowing that it brings with it new burdens.
I do not wish more external goods,—neither possessions, nor honors, nor
powers, nor persons. The gain is apparent; the tax is certain. But
there is no tax on the knowledge that the compensation exists and that
it is not desirable to dig up treasure. Herein I rejoice with a serene
eternal peace. I contract the boundaries of possible mischief. I learn
the wisdom of St. Bernard,—“Nothing can work me damage except myself;
the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real
sufferer but by my own fault.”
In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequalities of
condition. The radical tragedy of nature seems to be the distinction of
More and Less. How can Less not feel the pain; how not feel indignation
or malevolence towards More? Look at those who have less faculty, and
one feels sad and knows not well what to make of it. He almost shuns
their eye; he fears they will upbraid God. What should they do? It
seems a great injustice. But see the facts nearly and these mountainous