Essays — First Series
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 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 live to
the utility of the symbol, esteeming health and wealth a final good.
Another class live above this mark to 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 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
never gives, 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 every thing 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, 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, 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; if we walk in
the woods we must feed mosquitos; 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, and 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 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 insures
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 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 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,—“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 byword, “No mistake.” But the discomfort of unpunctuality, of
confusion of thought about facts, of inattention to the wants of
to-morrow, is of no nation. The beautiful laws of time and space, once
dislocated by our inaptitude, are holes and dens. If the hive be
disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of honey it will yield us
bees. Our words and actions to be fair must be timely. A gay and
pleasant sound is the whetting of the scythe in the mornings of June,
yet what is more lonesome and sad than the sound of a whetstone or
mower’s rifle when it is too late in the season to make hay?
Scatter-brained and “afternoon” men spoil much more than their own
affair in spoiling the temper of those who deal with them. I have seen
a criticism on some paintings, of which I am reminded when I see the
shiftless and unhappy men who are not true to their senses. The last
Grand Duke of Weimar, a man of superior understanding, said,—“I have
sometimes remarked in the presence of great works of art, and just now
especially in Dresden, how much a certain property contributes to the
effect which gives life to the figures, and to the life an irresistible
truth. This property is the hitting, in all the figures we draw, the
right centre of gravity. I mean the placing the figures firm upon their
feet, making the hands grasp, and fastening the eyes on the spot where
they should look. Even lifeless figures, as vessels and stools—let them
be drawn ever so correctly—lose all effect so soon as they lack the
resting upon their centre of gravity, and have a certain swimming and
oscillating appearance. The Raphael in the Dresden gallery (the only
greatly affecting picture which I have seen) is the quietest and most
passionless piece you can imagine; a couple of saints who worship the
Virgin and Child. Nevertheless, it awakens a deeper impression than the
contortions of ten crucified martyrs. For beside all the resistless
beauty of form, it possesses in the highest degree the property of the
perpendicularity of all the figures.” This perpendicularity we demand
of all the figures in this picture of life. Let them stand on their
feet, and not float and swing. Let us know where to find them. Let them
discriminate between what they remember and what they dreamed, call a
spade a spade, give us facts, and honor their own senses with trust.
But what man shall dare tax another with imprudence? Who is prudent?
The men we call greatest are least in this kingdom. There is a certain
fatal dislocation in our relation to nature, distorting our modes of
living and making every law our enemy, which seems at last to have
aroused all the wit and virtue in the world to ponder the question of
Reform. We must call the highest prudence to counsel, and ask why
health and beauty and genius should now be the exception rather than
the rule of human nature? We do not know the properties of plants and
animals and the laws of nature, through our sympathy with the same; but
this remains the dream of poets. Poetry and prudence should be
coincident. Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric
inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead