Essays — First Series
him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has
exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakspeare?
Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington,
or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of
Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakspeare will
never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned
you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this
moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal
chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or
Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul, all
rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat
itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can
reply to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue
are two organs of one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of
thy life, obey thy heart and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again.
4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our
spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of
society, and no man improves.
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on
the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is
civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this
change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given something is
taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts. What a
contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American,
with a watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the
naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an
undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of
the two men and you shall see that the white man has lost his
aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage
with a broad axe and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as
if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send
the white to his grave.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He
has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by
the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the
information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a
star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows
as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial
in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload
his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it
may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have
not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in
establishments and forms some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was
a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?
There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard
of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A singular
equality may be observed between the great men of the first and of the
last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of
the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than Plutarch’s
heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race
progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men,
but they leave no class. He who is really of their class will not be
called by their name, but will be his own man, and in his turn the
founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period are only its
costume and do not invigorate men. The harm of the improved machinery
may compensate its good. Hudson and Behring accomplished so much in
their fishing-boats as to astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment
exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an
opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena
than any one since. Columbus found the New World in an undecked boat.
It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and
machinery which were introduced with loud laudation a few years or
centuries before. The great genius returns to essential man. We
reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of
science, and yet Napoleon conquered Europe by the bivouac, which
consisted of falling back on naked valor and disencumbering it of all
aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Las
Cases, “without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries and
carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should
receive his supply of corn, grind it in his hand-mill, and bake his
bread himself.”
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is
composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to
the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a
nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.
And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments
which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away
from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the
religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and
they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults
on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has,
and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his
property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what
he has if he see that it is accidental,—came to him by inheritance, or
gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong
to him, has no root in him and merely lies there because no revolution
or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is, does always by
necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property, which
does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or
storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man
breathes. “Thy lot or portion of life,” said the Caliph Ali, “is
seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.” Our
dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for
numbers. The political parties meet in numerous conventions; the
greater the concourse and with each new uproar of announcement, The
delegation from Essex! The Democrats from New Hampshire! The Whigs of
Maine! the young patriot feels himself stronger than before by a new
thousand of eyes and arms. In like manner the reformers summon
conventions and vote and resolve in multitude. Not so, O friends! will
the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method precisely the
reverse. It is only as a man puts off all foreign support and stands
alone that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every
recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a town? Ask nothing of
men, and, in the endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently
appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power
is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him
and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his
thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position,
commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his
feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.
So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain
all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful
these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God.
In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of
Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A
political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the
return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your
spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe
it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you
peace but the triumph of principles.
III.
COMPENSATION
The wings of Time are black and white,
Pied with morning and with night.
Mountain tall and ocean deep
Trembling balance duly keep.
In changing moon, in tidal wave,
Glows the feud of Want and Have.
Gauge of more and less through space
Electric star and pencil plays.
The lonely Earth amid the balls
That hurry through the eternal halls,
A makeweight flying to the void,
Supplemental asteroid,
Or compensatory spark,
Shoots across the neutral Dark.
Man’s the elm, and Wealth the vine,
Stanch and strong the tendrils twine:
Though the frail ringlets thee deceive,
None from its stock that vine can reave.
Fear not, then, thou child infirm,
There’s no god dare wrong a worm.
Laurel crowns cleave to deserts
And power to him who power exerts;
Hast not thy share? On winged feet,
Lo! it rushes thee to meet;
And all that Nature made thy own,
Floating in air or pent in stone,
Will rive the hills and swim the sea
And, like thy shadow, follow thee.
COMPENSATION
Ever since I was a boy I have wished to write a discourse on
Compensation; for it seemed to me when very young that on this subject
life was ahead of theology and the people knew more than the preachers
taught. The documents too from which the doctrine is to be drawn,
charmed my fancy by their endless variety, and lay always before me,
even in sleep; for they are the tools in our hands, the bread in our
basket, the transactions of the street, the farm and the
dwelling-house; greetings, relations, debts and credits, the influence
of character, the nature and endowment of all men. It seemed to me also
that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the present action of
the soul of this world, clean from all vestige of tradition; and so the
heart of man might be bathed by an inundation of eternal love,
conversing with that which he knows was always and always must be,
because it really is now. It appeared moreover that if this doctrine
could be stated in terms with any resemblance to those bright
intuitions in which this truth is sometimes revealed to us, it would be
a star in many dark hours and crooked passages in our journey, that
would not suffer us to lose our way.
I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon at church.
The preacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy, unfolded in the
ordinary manner the doctrine of the Last Judgment. He assumed that
judgment is not executed in this world; that the wicked are successful;
that the good are miserable; and then urged from reason and from
Scripture a compensation to be made to both parties in the next life.
No offence appeared to be taken by the congregation at this doctrine.
As far as I could observe when the meeting broke up they separated
without remark on the sermon.
Yet what was the import of this teaching? What did the preacher mean by
saying that the good are miserable in the present life? Was it that
houses and lands, offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are had by
unprincipled men, whilst the saints are poor and despised; and that a
compensation is to be made to these last hereafter, by giving them the
like gratifications another day,—bank-stock and doubloons, venison and
champagne? This must be the compensation intended; for what else? Is it
that they are to have leave to pray and praise? to love and serve men?
Why, that they can do now. The legitimate inference the disciple would
draw was,—‘We are to have _such_ a good time as the sinners have
now’;—or, to push it to its extreme import,—‘You sin now; we shall sin
by and by; we would sin now, if we could; not being successful, we
expect our revenge to-morrow.’