Essays — First Series
blindman’s-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I
anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and
topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not
know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous
word? Do I not know that with all this ostentation of examining the
grounds of the institution he will do no such thing? Do I not know that
he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, the permitted
side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained
attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation.
Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief,
and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion.
This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a
few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite
true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so
that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to
set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the
prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut
of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine
expression. There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does
not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean “the
foolish face of praise,” the forced smile which we put on in company
where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not
interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved but moved by a low
usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the
most disagreeable sensation.
For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And
therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The by-standers
look askance on him in the public street or in the friend’s parlor. If
this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own
he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the
multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on
and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is the
discontent of the multitude more formidable than that of the senate and
the college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the world to
brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and
prudent, for they are timid, as being very vulnerable themselves. But
when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added,
when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent
brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and
mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike
as a trifle of no concernment.
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a
reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no
other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath
to disappoint them.
But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about
this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have
stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict
yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on
your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring
the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in
a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the
Deity, yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them
heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color.
Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and
flee.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by
little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great
soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his
shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and
to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it
contradict every thing you said to-day.—‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be
misunderstood.’—Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was
misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and
Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took
flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will
are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes
and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it
matter how you gauge and try him. A character is like an acrostic or
Alexandrian stanza;—read it forward, backward, or across, it still
spells the same thing. In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God
allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect
or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical,
though I mean it not and see it not. My book should smell of pines and
resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should
interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web
also. We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men
imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt
actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.
There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be
each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions
will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost
sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One
tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line
of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it
straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will
explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Your
conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done
singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can
be firm enough to-day to do right and scorn eyes, I must have done so
much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now.
Always scorn appearances and you always may. The force of character is
cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into
this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field,
which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great
days and victories behind. They shed an united light on the advancing
actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels. That is it
which throws thunder into Chatham’s voice, and dignity into
Washington’s port, and America into Adams’s eye. Honor is venerable to
us because it is no ephemera. It is always ancient virtue. We worship
it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it and pay it homage
because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is
self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate
pedigree, even if shown in a young person.
I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and
consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.
Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan
fife. Let us never bow and apologize more. A great man is coming to eat
at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to
please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it
kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth
mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face
of custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all
history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working
wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or
place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He
measures you and all men and all events. Ordinarily, every body in
society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other person.
Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the
whole creation. The man must be so much that he must make all
circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an
age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish
his design;—and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of
clients. A man Cæsar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman
Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his
genius that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An
institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the
Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox;
Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called
“the height of Rome”; and all history resolves itself very easily into
the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.
Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him
not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy,
a bastard, or an interloper in the world which exists for him. But the
man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the
force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when
he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an
alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say
like that, ‘Who are you, Sir?’ Yet they all are his, suitors for his
notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take
possession. The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me,
but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular fable of the sot
who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s
house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his
waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured
that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it
symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot,
but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a
true prince.
Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history our imagination
plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier
vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common
day’s work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total
of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred and Scanderbeg
and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue? As
great a stake depends on your private act to-day, as followed their
public and renowned steps. When private men shall act with original
views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to
those of gentlemen.
The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized the
eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual
reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful loyalty with which
men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, or the great
proprietor to walk among them by a law of his own, make his own scale
of men and things and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money
but with honor, and represent the law in his person, was the
hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified their consciousness of
their own right and comeliness, the right of every man.
The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we
inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the
aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is
the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax,
without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into
trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear?
The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of
virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote