Essays — First Series
the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow;
for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause
and effect. By this veil which curtains events it instructs the
children of men to live in to-day. The only mode of obtaining an answer
to these questions of the senses is to forego all low curiosity, and,
accepting the tide of being which floats us into the secret of nature,
work and live, work and live, and all unawares the advancing soul has
built and forged for itself a new condition, and the question and the
answer are one.
By the same fire, vital, consecrating, celestial, which burns until it
shall dissolve all things into the waves and surges of an ocean of
light, we see and know each other, and what spirit each is of. Who can
tell the grounds of his knowledge of the character of the several
individuals in his circle of friends? No man. Yet their acts and words
do not disappoint him. In that man, though he knew no ill of him, he
put no trust. In that other, though they had seldom met, authentic
signs had yet passed, to signify that he might be trusted as one who
had an interest in his own character. We know each other very
well,—which of us has been just to himself and whether that which we
teach or behold is only an aspiration or is our honest effort also.
We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis lies aloft in our life
or unconscious power. The intercourse of society, its trade, its
religion, its friendships, its quarrels, is one wide, judicial
investigation of character. In full court, or in small committee, or
confronted face to face, accuser and accused, men offer themselves to
be judged. Against their will they exhibit those decisive trifles by
which character is read. But who judges? and what? Not our
understanding. We do not read them by learning or craft. No; the wisdom
of the wise man consists herein, that he does not judge them; he lets
them judge themselves and merely reads and records their own verdict.
By virtue of this inevitable nature, private will is overpowered, and,
maugre our efforts or our imperfections, your genius will speak from
you, and mine from me. That which we are, we shall teach, not
voluntarily but involuntarily. Thoughts come into our minds by avenues
which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through
avenues which we never voluntarily opened. Character teaches over our
head. The infallible index of true progress is found in the tone the
man takes. Neither his age, nor his breeding, nor company, nor books,
nor actions, nor talents, nor all together can hinder him from being
deferential to a higher spirit than his own. If he have not found his
home in God, his manners, his forms of speech, the turn of his
sentences, the build, shall I say, of all his opinions will
involuntarily confess it, let him brave it out how he will. If he have
found his centre, the Deity will shine through him, through all the
disguises of ignorance, of ungenial temperament, of unfavorable
circumstance. The tone of seeking is one, and the tone of having is
another.
The great distinction between teachers sacred or literary,—between
poets like Herbert, and poets like Pope,—between philosophers like
Spinoza, Kant and Coleridge, and philosophers like Locke, Paley,
Mackintosh and Stewart,—between men of the world who are reckoned
accomplished talkers, and here and there a fervent mystic, prophesying
half insane under the infinitude of his thought,—is that one class
speak _from within_, or from experience, as parties and possessors of
the fact; and the other class _from without_, as spectators merely, or
perhaps as acquainted with the fact on the evidence of third persons.
It is of no use to preach to me from without. I can do that too easily
myself. Jesus speaks always from within, and in a degree that
transcends all others. In that is the miracle. I believe beforehand
that it ought so to be. All men stand continually in the expectation of
the appearance of such a teacher. But if a man do not speak from within
the veil, where the word is one with that it tells of, let him lowly
confess it.
The same Omniscience flows into the intellect, and makes what we call
genius. Much of the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and the most
illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and
are not writers. Among the multitude of scholars and authors, we feel
no hallowing presence; we are sensible of a knack and skill rather than
of inspiration; they have a light and know not whence it comes and call
it their own; their talent is some exaggerated faculty, some overgrown
member, so that their strength is a disease. In these instances the
intellectual gifts do not make the impression of virtue, but almost of
vice; and we feel that a man’s talents stand in the way of his
advancement in truth. But genius is religious. It is a larger imbibing
of the common heart. It is not anomalous, but more like and not less
like other men. There is in all great poets a wisdom of humanity which
is superior to any talents they exercise. The author, the wit, the
partisan, the fine gentleman, does not take place of the man. Humanity
shines in Homer, in Chaucer, in Spenser, in Shakspeare, in Milton. They
are content with truth. They use the positive degree. They seem frigid
and phlegmatic to those who have been spiced with the frantic passion
and violent coloring of inferior but popular writers. For they are
poets by the free course which they allow to the informing soul, which
through their eyes beholds again and blesses the things which it hath
made. The soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser than any of its
works. The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we think
less of his compositions. His best communication to our mind is to
teach us to despise all he has done. Shakspeare carries us to such a
lofty strain of intelligent activity as to suggest a wealth which
beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has
created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent
poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a
passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in
Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day for ever.
Why then should I make account of Hamlet and Lear, as if we had not the
soul from which they fell as syllables from the tongue?
This energy does not descend into individual life on any other
condition than entire possession. It comes to the lowly and simple; it
comes to whomsoever will put off what is foreign and proud; it comes as
insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur. When we see those whom it
inhabits, we are apprised of new degrees of greatness. From that
inspiration the man comes back with a changed tone. He does not talk
with men with an eye to their opinion. He tries them. It requires of us
to be plain and true. The vain traveller attempts to embellish his life
by quoting my lord and the prince and the countess, who thus said or
did to _him_. The ambitious vulgar show you their spoons and brooches
and rings, and preserve their cards and compliments. The more
cultivated, in their account of their own experience, cull out the
pleasing, poetic circumstance,—the visit to Rome, the man of genius
they saw, the brilliant friend They know; still further on perhaps the
gorgeous landscape, the mountain lights, the mountain thoughts they
enjoyed yesterday,—and so seek to throw a romantic color over their
life. But the soul that ascends to worship the great God is plain and
true; has no rose-color, no fine friends, no chivalry, no adventures;
does not want admiration; dwells in the hour that now is, in the
earnest experience of the common day,—by reason of the present moment
and the mere trifle having become porous to thought and bibulous of the
sea of light.
Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like
word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet
are they so cheap and so things of course, that in the infinite riches
of the soul it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or
bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole
atmosphere are ours. Nothing can pass there, or make you one of the
circle, but the casting aside your trappings, and dealing man to man in
naked truth, plain confession, and omniscient affirmation.
Souls such as these treat you as gods would, walk as gods in the earth,
accepting without any admiration your wit, your bounty, your virtue
even,—say rather your act of duty, for your virtue they own as their
proper blood, royal as themselves, and over-royal, and the father of
the gods. But what rebuke their plain fraternal bearing casts on the
mutual flattery with which authors solace each other and wound
themselves! These flatter not. I do not wonder that these men go to see
Cromwell and Christina and Charles the Second and James the First and
the Grand Turk. For they are, in their own elevation, the fellows of
kings, and must feel the servile tone of conversation in the world.
They must always be a godsend to princes, for they confront them, a
king to a king, without ducking or concession, and give a high nature
the refreshment and satisfaction of resistance, of plain humanity, of
even companionship and of new ideas. They leave them wiser and superior
men. Souls like these make us feel that sincerity is more excellent
than flattery. Deal so plainly with man and woman as to constrain the
utmost sincerity and destroy all hope of trifling with you. It is the
highest compliment you can pay. Their “highest praising,” said Milton,
“is not flattery, and their plainest advice is a kind of praising.”
Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The
simplest person who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for
ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and
unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing
to man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the
scars of our mistakes and disappointments! When we have broken our god
of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the
heart with his presence. It is the doubling of the heart itself, nay,
the infinite enlargement of the heart with a power of growth to a new
infinity on every side. It inspires in man an infallible trust. He has
not the conviction, but the sight, that the best is the true, and may
in that thought easily dismiss all particular uncertainties and fears,
and adjourn to the sure revelation of time the solution of his private
riddles. He is sure that his welfare is dear to the heart of being. In
the presence of law to his mind he is overflowed with a reliance so
universal that it sweeps away all cherished hopes and the most stable
projects of mortal condition in its flood. He believes that he cannot
escape from his good. The things that are really for thee gravitate to
thee. You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your
mind need not. If you do not find him, will you not acquiesce that it
is best you should not find him? for there is a power, which, as it is
in you, is in him also, and could therefore very well bring you
together, if it were for the best. You are preparing with eagerness to
go and render a service to which your talent and your taste invite you,
the love of men and the hope of fame. Has it not occurred to you that
you have no right to go, unless you are equally willing to be prevented
from going? O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken
over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on
thine ear! Every proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to thee