Essays — First Series
_Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune._
Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat,
Wintered with the hawk and fox.
Power and speed be hands and feet.
SELF-RELIANCE
I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which
were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition
in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they
instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe
your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private
heart is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent
conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due
time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us
by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind
is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is
that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men,
but what _they_ thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that
gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the
lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without
notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we
recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a
certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting
lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous
impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry
of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with
masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the
time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from
another.
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the
conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he
must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the
wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to
him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given
to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and
none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until
he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes
much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory
is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray
should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half
express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us
represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good
issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work
made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his
heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done
otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not
deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no
invention, no hope.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the
place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your
contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done
so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age,
betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated
at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their
being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same
transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected
corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers
and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing on Chaos and
the Dark.
What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text in the face and
behavior of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel
mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed
the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their
mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in
their faces we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody; all
conform to it; so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the
adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty
and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it
enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand
by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak
to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear
and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries.
Bashful or bold then, he will know how to make us seniors very
unnecessary.
The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as
much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy
attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in the
playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on
such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their
merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting,
silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about
consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine
verdict. You must court him; he does not court you. But the man is as
it were clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once
acted or spoken with _éclat_ he is a committed person, watched by the
sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter
into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass
again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges and, having
observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable,
unaffrighted innocence,—must always be formidable. He would utter
opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not private but
necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men and put them in
fear.
These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and
inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in
conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is
a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better
securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and
culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity.
Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but
names and customs.
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather
immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must
explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity
of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the
suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I
was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me
with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, “What have I
to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?”
my friend suggested,—“But these impulses may be from below, not from
above.” I replied, “They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the
Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.” No law can be sacred
to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily
transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my
constitution; the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry
himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were
titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we
capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead
institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways
me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the
rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of
philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful
cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes,
why should I not say to him, ‘Go love thy infant; love thy
wood-chopper; be good-natured and modest; have that grace; and never
varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible
tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite
at home.’ Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is
handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some
edge to it,—else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached,
as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and
whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius
calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, _Whim_. I hope
it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in
explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude
company. Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my
obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they _my_ poor?
I tell thee thou foolish philanthropist that I grudge the dollar, the
dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I
do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual
affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be;
but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of
fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now
stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies;—though I
confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a
wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the
rule. There is the man _and_ his virtues. Men do what is called a good
action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a
fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are
done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world,—as
invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I
do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for
a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it
be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I
wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask
primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the
man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no difference
whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent. I
cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few
and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own
assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This
rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for
the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder
because you will always find those who think they know what is your
duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the
world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the
great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect
sweetness the independence of solitude.
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is
that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the
impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute
to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the
government or against it, spread your table like base
housekeepers,—under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the
precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your
proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and
you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a