Essays — First Series
both his body and his mind are invigorated by habits of conversation
with nature. The power of music, the power of poetry, to unfix and as
it were clap wings to solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus.
The philosophical perception of identity through endless mutations of
form makes him know the Proteus. What else am I who laughed or wept
yesterday, who slept last night like a corpse, and this morning stood
and ran? And what see I on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus?
I can symbolize my thought by using the name of any creature, of any
fact, because every creature is man agent or patient. Tantalus is but a
name for you and me. Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking the
waters of thought which are always gleaming and waving within sight of
the soul. The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were; but
men and women are only half human. Every animal of the barn-yard, the
field and the forest, of the earth and of the waters that are under the
earth, has contrived to get a footing and to leave the print of its
features and form in some one or other of these upright, heaven-facing
speakers. Ah! brother, stop the ebb of thy soul,—ebbing downward into
the forms into whose habits thou hast now for many years slid. As near
and proper to us is also that old fable of the Sphinx, who was said to
sit in the road-side and put riddles to every passenger. If the man
could not answer, she swallowed him alive. If he could solve the
riddle, the Sphinx was slain. What is our life but an endless flight of
winged facts or events? In splendid variety these changes come, all
putting questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a
superior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts
encumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine, the
men of _sense_, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished
every spark of that light by which man is truly man. But if the man is
true to his better instincts or sentiments, and refuses the dominion of
facts, as one that comes of a higher race; remains fast by the soul and
sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly and supple into their
places; they know their master, and the meanest of them glorifies him.
See in Goethe’s Helena the same desire that every word should be a
thing. These figures, he would say, these Chirons, Griffins, Phorkyas,
Helen and Leda, are somewhat, and do exert a specific influence on the
mind. So far then are they eternal entities, as real to-day as in the
first Olympiad. Much revolving them he writes out freely his humor, and
gives them body to his own imagination. And although that poem be as
vague and fantastic as a dream, yet is it much more attractive than the
more regular dramatic pieces of the same author, for the reason that it
operates a wonderful relief to the mind from the routine of customary
images,—awakens the reader’s invention and fancy by the wild freedom of
the design, and by the unceasing succession of brisk shocks of
surprise.
The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of the bard, sits
on his neck and writes through his hand; so that when he seems to vent
a mere caprice and wild romance, the issue is an exact allegory. Hence
Plato said that “poets utter great and wise things which they do not
themselves understand.” All the fictions of the Middle Age explain
themselves as a masked or frolic expression of that which in grave
earnest the mind of that period toiled to achieve. Magic and all that
is ascribed to it is a deep presentiment of the powers of science. The
shoes of swiftness, the sword of sharpness, the power of subduing the
elements, of using the secret virtues of minerals, of understanding the
voices of birds, are the obscure efforts of the mind in a right
direction. The preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual
youth, and the like, are alike the endeavour of the human spirit “to
bend the shows of things to the desires of the mind.”
In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul a garland and a rose bloom on the
head of her who is faithful, and fade on the brow of the inconstant. In
the story of the Boy and the Mantle even a mature reader may be
surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the triumph of the gentle
Venelas; and indeed all the postulates of elfin annals,—that the
fairies do not like to be named; that their gifts are capricious and
not to be trusted; that who seeks a treasure must not speak; and the
like,—I find true in Concord, however they might be in Cornwall or
Bretagne.
Is it otherwise in the newest romance? I read the Bride of Lammermoor.
Sir William Ashton is a mask for a vulgar temptation, Ravenswood Castle
a fine name for proud poverty, and the foreign mission of state only a
Bunyan disguise for honest industry. We may all shoot a wild bull that
would toss the good and beautiful, by fighting down the unjust and
sensual. Lucy Ashton is another name for fidelity, which is always
beautiful and always liable to calamity in this world.
But along with the civil and metaphysical history of man, another
history goes daily forward,—that of the external world,—in which he is
not less strictly implicated. He is the compend of time; he is also the
correlative of nature. His power consists in the multitude of his
affinities, in the fact that his life is intertwined with the whole
chain of organic and inorganic being. In old Rome the public roads
beginning at the Forum proceeded north, south, east, west, to the
centre of every province of the empire, making each market-town of
Persia, Spain and Britain pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so
out of the human heart go as it were highways to the heart of every
object in nature, to reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a
bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the
world. His faculties refer to natures out of him and predict the world
he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists,
or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live
without a world. Put Napoleon in an island prison, let his faculties
find no men to act on, no Alps to climb, no stake to play for, and he
would beat the air, and appear stupid. Transport him to large
countries, dense population, complex interests and antagonist power,
and you shall see that the man Napoleon, bounded that is by such a
profile and outline, is not the virtual Napoleon. This is but Talbot’s
shadow;—
“His substance is not here.
For what you see is but the smallest part
And least proportion of humanity;
But were the whole frame here,
It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch,
Your roof were not sufficient to contain it.”
—Henry VI.
Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon. Newton and Laplace
need myriads of age and thick-strewn celestial areas. One may say a
gravitating solar system is already prophesied in the nature of
Newton’s mind. Not less does the brain of Davy or of Gay-Lussac, from
childhood exploring the affinities and repulsions of particles,
anticipate the laws of organization. Does not the eye of the human
embryo predict the light? the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of
harmonic sound? Do not the constructive fingers of Watt, Fulton,
Whittemore, Arkwright, predict the fusible, hard, and temperable
texture of metals, the properties of stone, water, and wood? Do not the
lovely attributes of the maiden child predict the refinements and
decorations of civil society? Here also we are reminded of the action
of man on man. A mind might ponder its thought for ages and not gain so
much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day. Who
knows himself before he has been thrilled with indignation at an
outrage, or has heard an eloquent tongue, or has shared the throb of
thousands in a national exultation or alarm? No man can antedate his
experience, or guess what faculty or feeling a new object shall unlock,
any more than he can draw to-day the face of a person whom he shall see
to-morrow for the first time.
I will not now go behind the general statement to explore the reason of
this correspondency. Let it suffice that in the light of these two
facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its
correlative, history is to be read and written.
Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and reproduce its treasures
for each pupil. He too shall pass through the whole cycle of
experience. He shall collect into a focus the rays of nature. History
no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just
and wise man. You shall not tell me by languages and titles a catalogue
of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you
have lived. A man shall be the Temple of Fame. He shall walk, as the
poets have described that goddess, in a robe painted all over with
wonderful events and experiences;—his own form and features by their
exalted intelligence shall be that variegated vest. I shall find in him
the Foreworld; in his childhood the Age of Gold, the Apples of
Knowledge, the Argonautic Expedition, the calling of Abraham, the
building of the Temple, the Advent of Christ, Dark Ages, the Revival of
Letters, the Reformation, the discovery of new lands, the opening of
new sciences and new regions in man. He shall be the priest of Pan, and
bring with him into humble cottages the blessing of the morning stars,
and all the recorded benefits of heaven and earth.
Is there somewhat overweening in this claim? Then I reject all I have
written, for what is the use of pretending to know what we know not?
But it is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one
fact without seeming to belie some other. I hold our actual knowledge
very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the
fungus under foot, the lichen on the log. What do I know
sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of life? As old as
the Caucasian man,—perhaps older,—these creatures have kept their
counsel beside him, and there is no record of any word or sign that has
passed from one to the other. What connection do the books show between
the fifty or sixty chemical elements and the historical eras? Nay, what
does history yet record of the metaphysical annals of man? What light
does it shed on those mysteries which we hide under the names Death and
Immortality? Yet every history should be written in a wisdom which
divined the range of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols. I
am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is.
How many times we must say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What
does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to
these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or
succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kanaka in his
canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?
Broader and deeper we must write our annals,—from an ethical
reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative
conscience,—if we would trulier express our central and wide-related
nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to
which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us,
shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science and of letters is
not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child and
unschooled farmer’s boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to
be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.
II.
SELF-RELIANCE
“Ne te quæsiveris extra.”
“Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”