Essays — First Series
night. Our thinking is a pious reception. Our truth of thought is
therefore vitiated as much by too violent direction given by our will,
as by too great negligence. We do not determine what we will think. We
only open our senses, clear away as we can all obstruction from the
fact, and suffer the intellect to see. We have little control over our
thoughts. We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments
into their heaven and so fully engage us that we take no thought for
the morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own.
By and by we fall out of that rapture, bethink us where we have been,
what we have seen, and repeat as truly as we can what we have beheld.
As far as we can recall these ecstasies we carry away in the
ineffaceable memory the result, and all men and all the ages confirm
it. It is called Truth. But the moment we cease to report and attempt
to correct and contrive, it is not truth.
If we consider what persons have stimulated and profited us, we shall
perceive the superiority of the spontaneous or intuitive principle over
the arithmetical or logical. The first contains the second, but virtual
and latent. We want in every man a long logic; we cannot pardon the
absence of it, but it must not be spoken. Logic is the procession or
proportionate unfolding of the intuition; but its virtue is as silent
method; the moment it would appear as propositions and have a separate
value it is worthless.
In every man’s mind, some images, words and facts remain, without
effort on his part to imprint them, which others forget, and afterwards
these illustrate to him important laws. All our progress is an
unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an
opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud and fruit. Trust
the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain to
hurry it. By trusting it to the end, it shall ripen into truth and you
shall know why you believe.
Each mind has its own method. A true man never acquires after college
rules. What you have aggregated in a natural manner surprises and
delights when it is produced. For we cannot oversee each other’s
secret. And hence the differences between men in natural endowment are
insignificant in comparison with their common wealth. Do you think the
porter and the cook have no anecdotes, no experiences, no wonders for
you? Every body knows as much as the savant. The walls of rude minds
are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day
bring a lantern and read the inscriptions. Every man, in the degree in
which he has wit and culture, finds his curiosity inflamed concerning
the modes of living and thinking of other men, and especially of those
classes whose minds have not been subdued by the drill of school
education.
This instinctive action never ceases in a healthy mind, but becomes
richer and more frequent in its informations through all states of
culture. At last comes the era of reflection, when we not only observe,
but take pains to observe; when we of set purpose sit down to consider
an abstract truth; when we keep the mind’s eye open whilst we converse,
whilst we read, whilst we act, intent to learn the secret law of some
class of facts.
What is the hardest task in the world? To think. I would put myself in
the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I
blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he
meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live. For example,
a man explores the basis of civil government. Let him intend his mind
without respite, without rest, in one direction. His best heed long
time avails him nothing. Yet thoughts are flitting before him. We all
but apprehend, we dimly forebode the truth. We say I will walk abroad,
and the truth will take form and clearness to me. We go forth, but
cannot find it. It seems as if we needed only the stillness and
composed attitude of the library to seize the thought. But we come in,
and are as far from it as at first. Then, in a moment, and unannounced,
the truth appears. A certain wandering light appears, and is the
distinction, the principle, we wanted. But the oracle comes because we
had previously laid siege to the shrine. It seems as if the law of the
intellect resembled that law of nature by which we now inspire, now
expire the breath; by which the heart now draws in, then hurls out the
blood,—the law of undulation. So now you must labor with your brains,
and now you must forbear your activity and see what the great Soul
showeth.
The immortality of man is as legitimately preached from the
intellections as from the moral volitions. Every intellection is mainly
prospective. Its present value is its least. Inspect what delights you
in Plutarch, in Shakspeare, in Cervantes. Each truth that a writer
acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and thoughts
lay already in his mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had
littered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his private
biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the
day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm. Men say, Where
did he get this? and think there was something divine in his life. But
no; they have myriads of facts just as good, would they only get a lamp
to ransack their attics withal.
We are all wise. The difference between persons is not in wisdom but in
art. I knew, in an academical club, a person who always deferred to me;
who, seeing my whim for writing, fancied that my experiences had
somewhat superior; whilst I saw that his experiences were as good as
mine. Give them to me and I would make the same use of them. He held
the old; he holds the new; I had the habit of tacking together the old
and the new which he did not use to exercise. This may hold in the
great examples. Perhaps if we should meet Shakspeare we should not be
conscious of any steep inferiority; no, but of a great equality,—only
that he possessed a strange skill of using, of classifying, his facts,
which we lacked. For notwithstanding our utter incapacity to produce
anything like Hamlet and Othello, see the perfect reception this wit
and immense knowledge of life and liquid eloquence find in us all.
If you gather apples in the sunshine, or make hay, or hoe corn, and
then retire within doors and shut your eyes and press them with your
hand, you shall still see apples hanging in the bright light with
boughs and leaves thereto, or the tasselled grass, or the corn-flags,
and this for five or six hours afterwards. There lie the impressions on
the retentive organ, though you knew it not. So lies the whole series
of natural images with which your life has made you acquainted, in your
memory, though you know it not; and a thrill of passion flashes light
on their dark chamber, and the active power seizes instantly the fit
image, as the word of its momentary thought.
It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure,
is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our
wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood,
and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond;
until by and by we begin to suspect that the biography of the one
foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature
paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.
In the intellect constructive, which we popularly designate by the word
Genius, we observe the same balance of two elements as in intellect
receptive. The constructive intellect produces thoughts, sentences,
poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the
marriage of thought with nature. To genius must always go two gifts,
the thought and the publication. The first is revelation, always a
miracle, which no frequency of occurrence or incessant study can ever
familiarize, but which must always leave the inquirer stupid with
wonder. It is the advent of truth into the world, a form of thought now
for the first time bursting into the universe, a child of the old
eternal soul, a piece of genuine and immeasurable greatness. It seems,
for the time, to inherit all that has yet existed and to dictate to the
unborn. It affects every thought of man and goes to fashion every
institution. But to make it available it needs a vehicle or art by
which it is conveyed to men. To be communicable it must become picture
or sensible object. We must learn the language of facts. The most
wonderful inspirations die with their subject if he has no hand to
paint them to the senses. The ray of light passes invisible through
space and only when it falls on an object is it seen. When the
spiritual energy is directed on something outward, then it is a
thought. The relation between it and you first makes you, the value of
you, apparent to me. The rich inventive genius of the painter must be
smothered and lost for want of the power of drawing, and in our happy
hours we should be inexhaustible poets if once we could break through
the silence into adequate rhyme. As all men have some access to primary
truth, so all have some art or power of communication in their head,
but only in the artist does it descend into the hand. There is an
inequality, whose laws we do not yet know, between two men and between
two moments of the same man, in respect to this faculty. In common
hours we have the same facts as in the uncommon or inspired, but they
do not sit for their portraits; they are not detached, but lie in a
web. The thought of genius is spontaneous; but the power of picture or
expression, in the most enriched and flowing nature, implies a mixture
of will, a certain control over the spontaneous states, without which
no production is possible. It is a conversion of all nature into the
rhetoric of thought, under the eye of judgment, with a strenuous
exercise of choice. And yet the imaginative vocabulary seems to be
spontaneous also. It does not flow from experience only or mainly, but
from a richer source. Not by any conscious imitation of particular
forms are the grand strokes of the painter executed, but by repairing
to the fountain-head of all forms in his mind. Who is the first
drawing-master? Without instruction we know very well the ideal of the
human form. A child knows if an arm or a leg be distorted in a picture;
if the attitude be natural or grand or mean; though he has never
received any instruction in drawing or heard any conversation on the
subject, nor can himself draw with correctness a single feature. A good
form strikes all eyes pleasantly, long before they have any science on
the subject, and a beautiful face sets twenty hearts in palpitation,
prior to all consideration of the mechanical proportions of the
features and head. We may owe to dreams some light on the fountain of
this skill; for as soon as we let our will go and let the unconscious
states ensue, see what cunning draughtsmen we are! We entertain
ourselves with wonderful forms of men, of women, of animals, of
gardens, of woods and of monsters, and the mystic pencil wherewith we
then draw has no awkwardness or inexperience, no meagreness or poverty;
it can design well and group well; its composition is full of art, its
colors are well laid on and the whole canvas which it paints is
lifelike and apt to touch us with terror, with tenderness, with desire
and with grief. Neither are the artist’s copies from experience ever
mere copies, but always touched and softened by tints from this ideal
domain.
The conditions essential to a constructive mind do not appear to be so
often combined but that a good sentence or verse remains fresh and
memorable for a long time. Yet when we write with ease and come out