Essays — First Series
inequalities vanish. Love reduces them as the sun melts the iceberg in
the sea. The heart and soul of all men being one, this bitterness of
_His_ and _Mine_ ceases. His is mine. I am my brother and my brother is
me. If I feel overshadowed and outdone by great neighbors, I can yet
love; I can still receive; and he that loveth maketh his own the
grandeur he loves. Thereby I make the discovery that my brother is my
guardian, acting for me with the friendliest designs, and the estate I
so admired and envied is my own. It is the nature of the soul to
appropriate all things. Jesus and Shakspeare are fragments of the soul,
and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain.
His virtue,—is not that mine? His wit,—if it cannot be made mine, it is
not wit.
Such also is the natural history of calamity. The changes which break
up at short intervals the prosperity of men are advertisements of a
nature whose law is growth. Every soul is by this intrinsic necessity
quitting its whole system of things, its friends and home and laws and
faith, as the shell-fish crawls out of its beautiful but stony case,
because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new
house. In proportion to the vigor of the individual these revolutions
are frequent, until in some happier mind they are incessant and all
worldly relations hang very loosely about him, becoming as it were a
transparent fluid membrane through which the living form is seen, and
not, as in most men, an indurated heterogeneous fabric of many dates
and of no settled character, in which the man is imprisoned. Then there
can be enlargement, and the man of to-day scarcely recognizes the man
of yesterday. And such should be the outward biography of man in time,
a putting off of dead circumstances day by day, as he renews his
raiment day by day. But to us, in our lapsed estate, resting, not
advancing, resisting, not cooperating with the divine expansion, this
growth comes by shocks.
We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go. We do not
see that they only go out that archangels may come in. We are idolaters
of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in its proper
eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe there is any force in
to-day to rival or recreate that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the
ruins of the old tent where once we had bread and shelter and organs,
nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover, and nerve us again. We
cannot again find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful. But we sit and
weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty saith, ‘Up and onward for
evermore!’ We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither will we rely on the
new; and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, like those monsters who
look backwards.
And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the
understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a
mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of
friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure
years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The
death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but
privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for
it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an
epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up
a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the
formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It
permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances and the
reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the
next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny
garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its
head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener is
made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide
neighborhoods of men.
IV.
SPIRITUAL LAWS
The living Heaven thy prayers respect,
House at once and architect,
Quarrying man’s rejected hours,
Builds therewith eternal towers;
Sole and self-commanded works,
Fears not undermining days,
Grows by decays,
And, by the famous might that lurks
In reaction and recoil,
Makes flame to freeze, and ice to boil;
Forging, through swart arms of Offence,
The silver seat of Innocence.
SPIRITUAL LAWS
When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at
ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our life is
embosomed in beauty. Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing
forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but
even the tragic and terrible are comely as they take their place in the
pictures of memory. The river-bank, the weed at the water-side, the old
house, the foolish person, however neglected in the passing, have a
grace in the past. Even the corpse that has lain in the chambers has
added a solemn ornament to the house. The soul will not know either
deformity or pain. If in the hours of clear reason we should speak the
severest truth, we should say that we had never made a sacrifice. In
these hours the mind seems so great that nothing can be taken from us
that seems much. All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe
remains to the heart unhurt. Neither vexations nor calamities abate our
trust. No man ever stated his griefs as lightly as he might. Allow for
exaggeration in the most patient and sorely ridden hack that ever was
driven. For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the
infinite lies stretched in smiling repose.
The intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful if man will live
the life of nature and not import into his mind difficulties which are
none of his. No man need be perplexed in his speculations. Let him do
and say what strictly belongs to him, and though very ignorant of
books, his nature shall not yield him any intellectual obstructions and
doubts. Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of
original sin, origin of evil, predestination and the like. These never
presented a practical difficulty to any man,—never darkened across any
man’s road who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the
soul’s mumps and measles and whooping-coughs, and those who have not
caught them cannot describe their health or prescribe the cure. A
simple mind will not know these enemies. It is quite another thing that
he should be able to give account of his faith and expound to another
the theory of his self-union and freedom. This requires rare gifts. Yet
without this self-knowledge there may be a sylvan strength and
integrity in that which he is. “A few strong instincts and a few plain
rules” suffice us.
My will never gave the images in my mind the rank they now take. The
regular course of studies, the years of academical and professional
education have not yielded me better facts than some idle books under
the bench at the Latin School. What we do not call education is more
precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of
receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often
wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this natural
magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.
In like manner our moral nature is vitiated by any interference of our
will. People represent virtue as a struggle, and take to themselves
great airs upon their attainments, and the question is everywhere vexed
when a noble nature is commended, whether the man is not better who
strives with temptation. But there is no merit in the matter. Either
God is there or he is not there. We love characters in proportion as
they are impulsive and spontaneous. The less a man thinks or knows
about his virtues the better we like him. Timoleon’s victories are the
best victories, which ran and flowed like Homer’s verses, Plutarch
said. When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful and
pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are,
and not turn sourly on the angel and say ‘Crump is a better man with
his grunting resistance to all his native devils.’
Not less conspicuous is the preponderance of nature over will in all
practical life. There is less intention in history than we ascribe to
it. We impute deep-laid far-sighted plans to Cæsar and Napoleon; but
the best of their power was in nature, not in them. Men of an
extraordinary success, in their honest moments, have always sung, ‘Not
unto us, not unto us.’ According to the faith of their times they have
built altars to Fortune, or to Destiny, or to St. Julian. Their success
lay in their parallelism to the course of thought, which found in them
an unobstructed channel; and the wonders of which they were the visible
conductors seemed to the eye their deed. Did the wires generate the
galvanism? It is even true that there was less in them on which they
could reflect than in another; as the virtue of a pipe is to be smooth
and hollow. That which externally seemed will and immovableness was
willingness and self-annihilation. Could Shakspeare give a theory of
Shakspeare? Could ever a man of prodigious mathematical genius convey
to others any insight into his methods? If he could communicate that
secret it would instantly lose its exaggerated value, blending with the
daylight and the vital energy the power to stand and to go.
The lesson is forcibly taught by these observations that our life might
be much easier and simpler than we make it; that the world might be a
happier place than it is; that there is no need of struggles,
convulsions, and despairs, of the wringing of the hands and the
gnashing of the teeth; that we miscreate our own evils. We interfere
with the optimism of nature; for whenever we get this vantage-ground of
the past, or of a wiser mind in the present, we are able to discern
that we are begirt with laws which execute themselves.
The face of external nature teaches the same lesson. Nature will not
have us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our
learning much better than she likes our frauds and wars. When we come
out of the caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition-convention, or the
Temperance-meeting, or the Transcendental club into the fields and
woods, she says to us, ‘So hot? my little Sir.’
We are full of mechanical actions. We must needs intermeddle and have
things in our own way, until the sacrifices and virtues of society are
odious. Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our
Sunday-schools and churches and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck.
We pain ourselves to please nobody. There are natural ways of arriving
at the same ends at which these aim, but do not arrive. Why should all
virtue work in one and the same way? Why should all give dollars? It is
very inconvenient to us country folk, and we do not think any good will
come of it. We have not dollars; merchants have; let them give them.
Farmers will give corn; poets will sing; women will sew; laborers will
lend a hand; the children will bring flowers. And why drag this dead
weight of a Sunday-school over the whole Christendom? It is natural and
beautiful that childhood should inquire and maturity should teach; but
it is time enough to answer questions when they are asked. Do not shut
up the young people against their will in a pew and force the children
to ask them questions for an hour against their will.
If we look wider, things are all alike; laws and letters and creeds and
modes of living seem a travesty of truth. Our society is encumbered by
ponderous machinery, which resembles the endless aqueducts which the
Romans built over hill and dale and which are superseded by the
discovery of the law that water rises to the level of its source. It is