Essays — First Series
mine, and all men’s, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in
truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what is
dictated by your nature as well as mine, and if we follow the truth it
will bring us out safe at last.’—But so may you give these friends
pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their
sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when
they look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they justify
me and do the same thing.
The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a
rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold
sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the
law of consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one or the
other of which we must be shriven. You may fulfil your round of duties
by clearing yourself in the _direct_, or in the _reflex_ way. Consider
whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin,
neighbor, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these can upbraid you. But
I may also neglect this reflex standard and absolve me to myself. I
have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of duty
to many offices that are called duties. But if I can discharge its
debts it enables me to dispense with the popular code. If any one
imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.
And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the
common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a
taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that
he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a
simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others!
If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by
distinction _society_, he will see the need of these ethics. The sinew
and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous,
desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune,
afraid of death and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and
perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our
social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot
satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to
their practical force and do lean and beg day and night continually.
Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our
marriages, our religion we have not chosen, but society has chosen for
us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where
strength is born.
If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they lose all
heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is _ruined_. If the
finest genius studies at one of our colleges and is not installed in an
office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or
New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in
being disheartened and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy
lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the
professions, who _teams it, farms it, peddles_, keeps a school,
preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so
forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is
worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and
feels no shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone
his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred
chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of man and tell men they are
not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the
exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the word
made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations; that he should be
ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself,
tossing the laws, the books, idolatries and customs out of the window,
we pity him no more but thank and revere him;—and that teacher shall
restore the life of man to splendor and make his name dear to all
history.
It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution
in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their
education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association;
in their property; in their speculative views.
1. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy
office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks
for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and
loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and
mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular commodity,
any thing less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation
of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the
soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God
pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private
end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature
and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not
beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer
kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with
the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though
for cheap ends. Caratach, in Fletcher’s Bonduca, when admonished to
inquire the mind of the god Audate, replies,—
“His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors;
Our valors are our best gods.”
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want
of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities if you can
thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work and already the
evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to
them who weep foolishly and sit down and cry for company, instead of
imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting
them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of
fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the
self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide; him all tongues
greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out
to him and embraces him because he did not need it. We solicitously and
apologetically caress and celebrate him because he held on his way and
scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated him.
“To the persevering mortal,” said Zoroaster, “the blessed Immortals are
swift.”
As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a
disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, ‘Let
not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us,
and we will obey.’ Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my
brother, because he has shut his own temple doors and recites fables
merely of his brother’s, or his brother’s brother’s God. Every new mind
is a new classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and
power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, it imposes
its classification on other men, and lo! a new system. In proportion to
the depth of the thought, and so to the number of the objects it
touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his complacency. But
chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which are also
classifications of some powerful mind acting on the elemental thought
of duty, and man’s relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism,
Quakerism, Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same delight in
subordinating every thing to the new terminology as a girl who has just
learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will
happen for a time that the pupil will find his intellectual power has
grown by the study of his master’s mind. But in all unbalanced minds
the classification is idolized, passes for the end and not for a
speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to
their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe; the
luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built.
They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to see,—how you can
see; ‘It must be somehow that you stole the light from us.’ They do not
yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any
cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call it their own.
If they are honest and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will
be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and
the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed,
million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the first morning.
2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling,
whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all
educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable
in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an
axis of the earth. In manly hours we feel that duty is our place. The
soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his
necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or
into foreign lands, he is at home still and shall make men sensible by
the expression of his countenance that he goes, the missionary of
wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign and not
like an interloper or a valet.
I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe for
the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is
first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding
somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get
somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows
old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and
mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to
ruins.
Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the
indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can
be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk,
embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples,
and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting,
identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I
affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not
intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness
affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and
our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our
bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation
but the travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign
taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions,
our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant.
The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his
own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his
own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed.
And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty,
convenience, grandeur of thought and quaint expression are as near to
us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love
the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil,
the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of
the government, he will create a house in which all these will find
themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every
moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of
the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half
possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach