Essays — First Series
college, on parties and persons, that your verdict is still expected
with curiosity as a reserved wisdom. Far otherwise; your silence
answers very loud. You have no oracle to utter, and your fellow-men
have learned that you cannot help them; for oracles speak. Doth not
Wisdom cry and Understanding put forth her voice?
Dreadful limits are set in nature to the powers of dissimulation. Truth
tyrannizes over the unwilling members of the body. Faces never lie, it
is said. No man need be deceived who will study the changes of
expression. When a man speaks the truth in the spirit of truth, his eye
is as clear as the heavens. When he has base ends and speaks falsely,
the eye is muddy and sometimes asquint.
I have heard an experienced counsellor say that he never feared the
effect upon a jury of a lawyer who does not believe in his heart that
his client ought to have a verdict. If he does not believe it his
unbelief will appear to the jury, despite all his protestations, and
will become their unbelief. This is that law whereby a work of art, of
whatever kind, sets us in the same state of mind wherein the artist was
when he made it. That which we do not believe we cannot adequately say,
though we may repeat the words never so often. It was this conviction
which Swedenborg expressed when he described a group of persons in the
spiritual world endeavoring in vain to articulate a proposition which
they did not believe; but they could not, though they twisted and
folded their lips even to indignation.
A man passes for that he is worth. Very idle is all curiosity
concerning other people’s estimate of us, and all fear of remaining
unknown is not less so. If a man know that he can do any thing,—that he
can do it better than any one else,—he has a pledge of the
acknowledgment of that fact by all persons. The world is full of
judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every
action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped. In every troop of boys
that whoop and run in each yard and square, a new-comer is as well and
accurately weighed in the course of a few days and stamped with his
right number, as if he had undergone a formal trial of his strength,
speed and temper. A stranger comes from a distant school, with better
dress, with trinkets in his pockets, with airs and pretensions; an
older boy says to himself, ‘It’s of no use; we shall find him out
to-morrow.’ ‘What has he done?’ is the divine question which searches
men and transpierces every false reputation. A fop may sit in any chair
of the world nor be distinguished for his hour from Homer and
Washington; but there need never be any doubt concerning the respective
ability of human beings. Pretension may sit still, but cannot act.
Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never
wrote an Iliad, nor drove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor
abolished slavery.
As much virtue as there is, so much appears; as much goodness as there
is, so much reverence it commands. All the devils respect virtue. The
high, the generous, the self-devoted sect will always instruct and
command mankind. Never was a sincere word utterly lost. Never a
magnanimity fell to the ground, but there is some heart to greet and
accept it unexpectedly. A man passes for that he is worth. What he is
engraves itself on his face, on his form, on his fortunes, in letters
of light. Concealment avails him nothing, boasting nothing. There is
confession in the glances of our eyes, in our smiles, in salutations,
and the grasp of hands. His sin bedaubs him, mars all his good
impression. Men know not why they do not trust him, but they do not
trust him. His vice glasses his eye, cuts lines of mean expression in
his cheek, pinches the nose, sets the mark of the beast on the back of
the head, and writes O fool! fool! on the forehead of a king.
If you would not be known to do any thing, never do it. A man may play
the fool in the drifts of a desert, but every grain of sand shall seem
to see. He may be a solitary eater, but he cannot keep his foolish
counsel. A broken complexion, a swinish look, ungenerous acts and the
want of due knowledge,—all blab. Can a cook, a Chiffinch, an Iachimo be
mistaken for Zeno or Paul? Confucius exclaimed,—“How can a man be
concealed? How can a man be concealed?”
On the other hand, the hero fears not that if he withhold the avowal of
a just and brave act it will go unwitnessed and unloved. One knows
it,—himself,—and is pledged by it to sweetness of peace and to
nobleness of aim which will prove in the end a better proclamation of
it than the relating of the incident. Virtue is the adherence in action
to the nature of things, and the nature of things makes it prevalent.
It consists in a perpetual substitution of being for seeming, and with
sublime propriety God is described as saying, I AM.
The lesson which these observations convey is, Be, and not seem. Let us
acquiesce. Let us take our bloated nothingness out of the path of the
divine circuits. Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low
in the Lord’s power and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.
If you visit your friend, why need you apologize for not having visited
him, and waste his time and deface your own act? Visit him now. Let him
feel that the highest love has come to see him, in thee its lowest
organ. Or why need you torment yourself and friend by secret
self-reproaches that you have not assisted him or complimented him with
gifts and salutations heretofore? Be a gift and a benediction. Shine
with real light and not with the borrowed reflection of gifts. Common
men are apologies for men; they bow the head, excuse themselves with
prolix reasons, and accumulate appearances because the substance is
not.
We are full of these superstitions of sense, the worship of magnitude.
We call the poet inactive, because he is not a president, a merchant,
or a porter. We adore an institution, and do not see that it is founded
on a thought which we have. But real action is in silent moments. The
epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a
calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but
in a silent thought by the way-side as we walk; in a thought which
revises our entire manner of life and says,—‘Thus hast thou done, but
it were better thus.’ And all our after years, like menials, serve and
wait on this, and according to their ability execute its will. This
revisal or correction is a constant force, which, as a tendency,
reaches through our lifetime. The object of the man, the aim of these
moments, is to make daylight shine through him, to suffer the law to
traverse his whole being without obstruction, so that on what point
soever of his doing your eye falls it shall report truly of his
character, whether it be his diet, his house, his religious forms, his
society, his mirth, his vote, his opposition. Now he is not
homogeneous, but heterogeneous, and the ray does not traverse; there
are no thorough lights, but the eye of the beholder is puzzled,
detecting many unlike tendencies and a life not yet at one.
Why should we make it a point with our false modesty to disparage that
man we are and that form of being assigned to us? A good man is
contented. I love and honor Epaminondas, but I do not wish to be
Epaminondas. I hold it more just to love the world of this hour than
the world of his hour. Nor can you, if I am true, excite me to the
least uneasiness by saying, ‘He acted and thou sittest still.’ I see
action to be good, when the need is, and sitting still to be also good.
Epaminondas, if he was the man I take him for, would have sat still
with joy and peace, if his lot had been mine. Heaven is large, and
affords space for all modes of love and fortitude. Why should we be
busybodies and superserviceable? Action and inaction are alike to the
true. One piece of the tree is cut for a weathercock and one for the
sleeper of a bridge; the virtue of the wood is apparent in both.
I desire not to disgrace the soul. The fact that I am here certainly
shows me that the soul had need of an organ here. Shall I not assume
the post? Shall I skulk and dodge and duck with my unseasonable
apologies and vain modesty and imagine my being here impertinent? less
pertinent than Epaminondas or Homer being there? and that the soul did
not know its own needs? Besides, without any reasoning on the matter, I
have no discontent. The good soul nourishes me and unlocks new
magazines of power and enjoyment to me every day. I will not meanly
decline the immensity of good, because I have heard that it has come to
others in another shape.
Besides, why should we be cowed by the name of Action? ’Tis a trick of
the senses,—no more. We know that the ancestor of every action is a
thought. The poor mind does not seem to itself to be any thing unless
it have an outside badge,—some Gentoo diet, or Quaker coat, or
Calvinistic prayer-meeting, or philanthropic society, or a great
donation, or a high office, or, any how, some wild contrasting action
to testify that it is somewhat. The rich mind lies in the sun and
sleeps, and is Nature. To think is to act.
Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is
of an infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with
the celestial air until it eclipses the sun and moon. Let us seek one
peace by fidelity. Let me heed my duties. Why need I go gadding into
the scenes and philosophy of Greek and Italian history before I have
justified myself to my benefactors? How dare I read Washington’s
campaigns when I have not answered the letters of my own
correspondents? Is not that a just objection to much of our reading? It
is a pusillanimous desertion of our work to gaze after our neighbors.
It is peeping. Byron says of Jack Bunting,—
“He knew not what to say, and so he swore.”
I may say it of our preposterous use of books,—He knew not what to do,
and so _he read_. I can think of nothing to fill my time with, and I
find the Life of Brant. It is a very extravagant compliment to pay to
Brant, or to General Schuyler, or to General Washington. My time should
be as good as their time,—my facts, my net of relations, as good as
theirs, or either of theirs. Rather let me do my work so well that
other idlers if they choose may compare my texture with the texture of
these and find it identical with the best.
This over-estimate of the possibilities of Paul and Pericles, this
under-estimate of our own, comes from a neglect of the fact of an
identical nature. Bonaparte knew but one merit, and rewarded in one and
the same way the good soldier, the good astronomer, the good poet, the
good player. The poet uses the names of Cæsar, of Tamerlane, of
Bonduca, of Belisarius; the painter uses the conventional story of the
Virgin Mary, of Paul, of Peter. He does not therefore defer to the
nature of these accidental men, of these stock heroes. If the poet
write a true drama, then he is Cæsar, and not the player of Cæsar; then
the selfsame strain of thought, emotion as pure, wit as subtle, motions
as swift, mounting, extravagant, and a heart as great, self-sufficing,
dauntless, which on the waves of its love and hope can uplift all that
is reckoned solid and precious in the world,—palaces, gardens, money,
navies, kingdoms,—marking its own incomparable worth by the slight it
casts on these gauds of men;—these all are his, and by the power of
these he rouses the nations. Let a man believe in God, and not in names
and places and persons. Let the great soul incarnated in some woman’s
form, poor and sad and single, in some Dolly or Joan, go out to
service, and sweep chambers and scour floors, and its effulgent
daybeams cannot be muffled or hid, but to sweep and scour will