Essays — First Series
into the free air of thought, we seem to be assured that nothing is
easier than to continue this communication at pleasure. Up, down,
around, the kingdom of thought has no inclosures, but the Muse makes us
free of her city. Well, the world has a million writers. One would
think then that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and
the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all
our good books; nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.
It is true that the discerning intellect of the world is always much in
advance of the creative, so that there are many competent judges of the
best book, and few writers of the best books. But some of the
conditions of intellectual construction are of rare occurrence. The
intellect is a whole and demands integrity in every work. This is
resisted equally by a man’s devotion to a single thought and by his
ambition to combine too many.
Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten his attention on a
single aspect of truth and apply himself to that alone for a long time,
the truth becomes distorted and not itself but falsehood; herein
resembling the air, which is our natural element, and the breath of our
nostrils, but if a stream of the same be directed on the body for a
time, it causes cold, fever, and even death. How wearisome the
grammarian, the phrenologist, the political or religious fanatic, or
indeed any possessed mortal whose balance is lost by the exaggeration
of a single topic. It is incipient insanity. Every thought is a prison
also. I cannot see what you see, because I am caught up by a strong
wind and blown so far in one direction that I am out of the hoop of
your horizon.
Is it any better if the student, to avoid this offence, and to
liberalize himself, aims to make a mechanical whole of history, or
science, or philosophy, by a numerical addition of all the facts that
fall within his vision? The world refuses to be analyzed by addition
and subtraction. When we are young we spend much time and pains in
filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry,
Politics, Art, in the hope that in the course of a few years we shall
have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories
at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get
no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola,
whose arcs will never meet.
Neither by detachment neither by aggregation is the integrity of the
intellect transmitted to its works, but by a vigilance which brings the
intellect in its greatness and best state to operate every moment. It
must have the same wholeness which nature has. Although no diligence
can rebuild the universe in a model by the best accumulation or
disposition of details, yet does the world reappear in miniature in
every event, so that all the laws of nature may be read in the smallest
fact. The intellect must have the like perfection in its apprehension
and in its works. For this reason, an index or mercury of intellectual
proficiency is the perception of identity. We talk with accomplished
persons who appear to be strangers in nature. The cloud, the tree, the
turf, the bird are not theirs, have nothing of them; the world is only
their lodging and table. But the poet, whose verses are to be spheral
and complete, is one whom Nature cannot deceive, whatsoever face of
strangeness she may put on. He feels a strict consanguinity, and
detects more likeness than variety in all her changes. We are stung by
the desire for new thought; but when we receive a new thought it is
only the old thought with a new face, and though we make it our own we
instantly crave another; we are not really enriched. For the truth was
in us before it was reflected to us from natural objects; and the
profound genius will cast the likeness of all creatures into every
product of his wit.
But if the constructive powers are rare and it is given to few men to
be poets, yet every man is a receiver of this descending holy ghost,
and may well study the laws of its influx. Exactly parallel is the
whole rule of intellectual duty to the rule of moral duty. A
self-denial no less austere than the saint’s is demanded of the
scholar. He must worship truth, and forego all things for that, and
choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure in thought is thereby
augmented.
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take
which you please,—you can never have both. Between these, as a
pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom the love of repose predominates
will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political
party he meets,—most likely his father’s. He gets rest, commodity, and
reputation; but he shuts the door of truth. He in whom the love of
truth predominates will keep himself aloof from all moorings, and
afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite
negations between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to
the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion, but he is a
candidate for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law
of his being.
The circle of the green earth he must measure with his shoes to find
the man who can yield him truth. He shall then know that there is
somewhat more blessed and great in hearing than in speaking. Happy is
the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man. As long as I hear truth I am
bathed by a beautiful element and am not conscious of any limits to my
nature. The suggestions are thousandfold that I hear and see. The
waters of the great deep have ingress and egress to the soul. But if I
speak, I define, I confine and am less. When Socrates speaks, Lysis and
Menexenus are afflicted by no shame that they do not speak. They also
are good. He likewise defers to them, loves them, whilst he speaks.
Because a true and natural man contains and is the same truth which an
eloquent man articulates; but in the eloquent man, because he can
articulate it, it seems something the less to reside, and he turns to
these silent beautiful with the more inclination and respect. The
ancient sentence said, Let us be silent, for so are the gods. Silence
is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great
and universal. Every man’s progress is through a succession of
teachers, each of whom seems at the time to have a superlative
influence, but it at last gives place to a new. Frankly let him accept
it all. Jesus says, Leave father, mother, house and lands, and follow
me. Who leaves all, receives more. This is as true intellectually as
morally. Each new mind we approach seems to require an abdication of
all our past and present possessions. A new doctrine seems at first a
subversion of all our opinions, tastes, and manner of living. Such has
Swedenborg, such has Kant, such has Coleridge, such has Hegel or his
interpreter Cousin seemed to many young men in this country. Take
thankfully and heartily all they can give. Exhaust them, wrestle with
them, let them not go until their blessing be won, and after a short
season the dismay will be overpast, the excess of influence withdrawn,
and they will be no longer an alarming meteor, but one more bright star
shining serenely in your heaven and blending its light with all your
day.
But whilst he gives himself up unreservedly to that which draws him,
because that is his own, he is to refuse himself to that which draws
him not, whatsoever fame and authority may attend it, because it is not
his own. Entire self-reliance belongs to the intellect. One soul is a
counterpoise of all souls, as a capillary column of water is a balance
for the sea. It must treat things and books and sovereign genius as
itself also a sovereign. If Æschylus be that man he is taken for, he
has not yet done his office when he has educated the learned of Europe
for a thousand years. He is now to approve himself a master of delight
to me also. If he cannot do that, all his fame shall avail him nothing
with me. I were a fool not to sacrifice a thousand Æschyluses to my
intellectual integrity. Especially take the same ground in regard to
abstract truth, the science of the mind. The Bacon, the Spinoza, the
Hume, Schelling, Kant, or whosoever propounds to you a philosophy of
the mind, is only a more or less awkward translator of things in your
consciousness which you have also your way of seeing, perhaps of
denominating. Say then, instead of too timidly poring into his obscure
sense, that he has not succeeded in rendering back to you your
consciousness. He has not succeeded; now let another try. If Plato
cannot, perhaps Spinoza will. If Spinoza cannot, then perhaps Kant.
Anyhow, when at last it is done, you will find it is no recondite, but
a simple, natural, common state which the writer restores to you.
But let us end these didactics. I will not, though the subject might
provoke it, speak to the open question between Truth and Love. I shall
not presume to interfere in the old politics of the skies;—“The
cherubim know most; the seraphim love most.” The gods shall settle
their own quarrels. But I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the
intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men
who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure
reason, the _Trismegisti_, the expounders of the principles of thought
from age to age. When at long intervals we turn over their abstruse
pages, wonderful seems the calm and grand air of these few, these great
spiritual lords who have walked in the world,—these of the old
religion,—dwelling in a worship which makes the sanctities of
Christianity look _parvenues_ and popular; for “persuasion is in soul,
but necessity is in intellect.” This band of grandees, Hermes,
Heraclitus, Empedocles, Plato, Plotinus, Olympiodorus, Proclus,
Synesius and the rest, have somewhat so vast in their logic, so primary
in their thinking, that it seems antecedent to all the ordinary
distinctions of rhetoric and literature, and to be at once poetry and
music and dancing and astronomy and mathematics. I am present at the
sowing of the seed of the world. With a geometry of sunbeams the soul
lays the foundations of nature. The truth and grandeur of their thought
is proved by its scope and applicability, for it commands the entire
schedule and inventory of things for its illustration. But what marks
its elevation and has even a comic look to us, is the innocent serenity
with which these babe-like Jupiters sit in their clouds, and from age
to age prattle to each other and to no contemporary. Well assured that
their speech is intelligible and the most natural thing in the world,
they add thesis to thesis, without a moment’s heed of the universal
astonishment of the human race below, who do not comprehend their
plainest argument; nor do they ever relent so much as to insert a
popular or explaining sentence, nor testify the least displeasure or
petulance at the dulness of their amazed auditory. The angels are so
enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not
distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but
speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.
XII.
ART
Give to barrows trays and pans
Grace and glimmer of romance,
Bring the moonlight into noon
Hid in gleaming piles of stone;
On the city’s paved street
Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet,
Let spouting fountains cool the air,
Singing in the sun-baked square.
Let statue, picture, park and hall,
Ballad, flag and festival,
The past restore, the day adorn
And make each morrow a new morn
So shall the drudge in dusty frock
Spy behind the city clock
Retinues of airy kings,
Skirts of angels, starry wings,
His fathers shining in bright fables,
His children fed at heavenly tables.