Essays — Second Series
gratifications, and makes politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap.
For when men shall meet as they ought, each a benefactor, a shower
of stars, clothed with thoughts, with deeds, with accomplishments, it
should be the festival of nature which all things announce. Of such
friendship, love in the sexes is the first symbol, as all other things
are symbols of love. Those relations to the best men, which, at one
time, we reckoned the romances of youth, become, in the progress of the
character, the most solid enjoyment.
If it were possible to live in right relations with men!--if we could
abstain from asking anything of them, from asking their praise, or help,
or pity, and content us with compelling them through the virtue of
the eldest laws! Could we not deal with a few persons,--with one
person,--after the unwritten statutes, and make an experiment of their
efficacy? Could we not pay our friend the compliment of truth, of
silence, of forbearing? Need we be so eager to seek him? If we are
related, we shall meet. It was a tradition of the ancient world that no
metamorphosis could hide a god from a god; and there is a Greek verse
which runs,--
"The Gods are to each other not unknown."
Friends also follow the laws of divine necessity; they gravitate to each
other, and cannot otherwise:--
When each the other shall avoid,
Shall each by each be most enjoyed.
Their relation is not made, but allowed. The gods must seat themselves
without seneschal in our Olympus, and as they can instal themselves
by seniority divine. Society is spoiled if pains are taken, if the
associates are brought a mile to meet. And if it be not society, it is a
mischievous, low, degrading jangle, though made up of the best. All the
greatness of each is kept back and every foible in painful activity, as
if the Olympians should meet to exchange snuff-boxes.
Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we are hunted by
some fear or command behind us. But if suddenly we encounter a friend,
we pause; our heat and hurry look foolish enough; now pause, now
possession is required, and the power to swell the moment from the
resources of the heart. The moment is all, in all noble relations.
A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a friend is the hope of the
heart. Our beatitude waits for the fulfilment of these two in one. The
ages are opening this moral force. All force is the shadow or symbol of
that. Poetry is joyful and strong as it draws its inspiration thence.
Men write their names on the world as they are filled with this. History
has been mean; our nations have been mobs; we have never seen a man:
that divine form we do not yet know, but only the dream and prophecy
of such: we do not know the majestic manners which belong to him, which
appease and exalt the beholder. We shall one day see that the most
private is the most public energy, that quality atones for quantity, and
grandeur of character acts in the dark, and succors them who never saw
it. What greatness has yet appeared is beginnings and encouragements
to us in this direction. The history of those gods and saints which the
world has written and then worshipped, are documents of character. The
ages have exulted in the manners of a youth who owed nothing to fortune,
and who was hanged at the Tyburn of his nation, who, by the pure quality
of his nature, shed an epic splendor around the facts of his death which
has transfigured every particular into an universal symbol for the eyes
of mankind. This great defeat is hitherto our highest fact. But the
mind requires a victory to the senses; a force of character which will
convert judge, jury, soldier, and king; which will rule animal and
mineral virtues, and blend with the courses of sap, of rivers, of winds,
of stars, and of moral agents.
If we cannot attain at a bound to these grandeurs, at least let us do
them homage. In society, high advantages are set down to the possessor
as disadvantages. It requires the more wariness in our private
estimates. I do not forgive in my friends the failure to know a fine
character and to entertain it with thankful hospitality. When at last
that which we have always longed for is arrived and shines on us with
glad rays out of that far celestial land, then to be coarse, then to be
critical and treat such a visitant with the jabber and suspicion of the
streets, argues a vulgarity that seems to shut the doors of heaven. This
is confusion, this the right insanity, when the soul no longer knows
its own, nor where its allegiance, its religion, are due. Is there any
religion but this, to know that wherever in the wide desert of being the
holy sentiment we cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms for me? if
none sees it, I see it; I am aware, if I alone, of the greatness of the
fact. Whilst it blooms, I will keep sabbath or holy time, and suspend my
gloom and my folly and jokes. Nature is indulged by the presence of this
guest. There are many eyes that can detect and honor the prudent and
household virtues; there are many that can discern Genius on his
starry track, though the mob is incapable; but when that love which is
all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring, which has vowed to itself
that it will be a wretch and also a fool in this world sooner than
soil its white hands by any compliances, comes into our streets and
houses,--only the pure and aspiring can know its face, and the only
compliment they can pay it is to own it.
*****
MANNERS.
"HOW near to good is what is fair!
Which we no sooner see,
But with the lines and outward air
Our senses taken be.
Again yourselves compose,
And now put all the aptness on
Of Figure, that Proportion
Or Color can disclose;
That if those silent arts were lost,
Design and Picture, they might boast
From you a newer ground,
Instructed by the heightening sense
Of dignity and reverence
In their true motions found."
BEN JONSON
IV. MANNERS.
HALF the world, it is said, knows not how the other half live. Our
Exploring Expedition saw the Feejee islanders getting their dinner off
human bones; and they are said to eat their own wives and children. The
husbandry of the modern inhabitants of Gournou (west of old Thebes)
is philosophical to a fault. To set up their housekeeping nothing is
requisite but two or three earthen pots, a stone to grind meal, and a
mat which is the bed. The house, namely a tomb, is ready without rent
or taxes. No rain can pass through the roof, and there is no door, for
there is no want of one, as there is nothing to lose. If the house do
not please them, they walk out and enter another, as there are several
hundreds at their command. "It is somewhat singular," adds Belzoni, to
whom we owe this account, "to talk of happiness among people who live in
sepulchres, among the corpses and rags of an ancient nation which they
know nothing of." In the deserts of Borgoo the rock-Tibboos still dwell
in caves, like cliff-swallows, and the language of these negroes
is compared by their neighbors to the shrieking of bats and to the
whistling of birds. Again, the Bornoos have no proper names; individuals
are called after their height, thickness, or other accidental quality,
and have nicknames merely. But the salt, the dates, the ivory, and the
gold, for which these horrible regions are visited, find their way into
countries where the purchaser and consumer can hardly be ranked in one
race with these cannibals and man-stealers; countries where man serves
himself with metals, wood, stone, glass, gum, cotton, silk, and wool;
honors himself with architecture; writes laws, and contrives to execute
his will through the hands of many nations; and, especially, establishes
a select society, running through all the countries of intelligent
men, a self-constituted aristocracy, or fraternity of the best, which,
without written law or exact usage of any kind, perpetuates itself,
colonizes every new-planted island and adopts and makes its own whatever
personal beauty or extraordinary native endowment anywhere appears.
What fact more conspicuous in modern history than the creation of
the gentleman? Chivalry is that, and loyalty is that, and, in English
literature, half the drama, and all the novels, from Sir Philip Sidney
to Sir Walter Scott, paint this figure. The word gentleman, which, like
the word Christian, must hereafter characterize the present and the few
preceding centuries by the importance attached to it, is a homage
to personal and incommunicable properties. Frivolous and fantastic
additions have got associated with the name, but the steady interest
of mankind in it must be attributed to the valuable properties which
it designates. An element which unites all the most forcible persons of
every country; makes them intelligible and agreeable to each other, and
is somewhat so precise that it is at once felt if an individual lack
the masonic sign,--cannot be any casual product, but must be an average
result of the character and faculties universally found in men. It
seems a certain permanent average; as the atmosphere is a permanent
composition, whilst so many gases are combined only to be decompounded.
Comme il faut, is the Frenchman's description of good Society: as we
must be. It is a spontaneous fruit of talents and feelings of precisely
that class who have most vigor, who take the lead in the world of this
hour, and though far from pure, far from constituting the gladdest and
highest tone of human feeling, is as good as the whole society permits
it to be. It is made of the spirit, more than of the talent of men,
and is a compound result into which every great force enters as an
ingredient, namely virtue, wit, beauty, wealth, and power.
There is something equivocal in all the words in use to express the
excellence of manners and social cultivation, because the quantities are
fluxional, and the last effect is assumed by the senses as the cause.
The word gentleman has not any correlative abstract to express the
quality. Gentility is mean, and gentilesse is obsolete. But we must
keep alive in the vernacular the distinction between fashion, a word of
narrow and often sinister meaning, and the heroic character which the
gentleman imports. The usual words, however, must be respected;
they will be found to contain the root of the matter. The point of
distinction in all this class of names, as courtesy, chivalry, fashion,
and the like, is that the flower and fruit, not the grain of the tree,
are contemplated. It is beauty which is the aim this time, and not
worth. The result is now in question, although our words intimate well
enough the popular feeling that the appearance supposes a substance.
The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing
that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile,
either on persons, or opinions, or possessions. Beyond this fact of
truth and real force, the word denotes good-nature or benevolence:
manhood first, and then gentleness. The popular notion certainly adds a
condition of ease and fortune; but that is a natural result of personal
force and love, that they should possess and dispense the goods of the
world. In times of violence, every eminent person must fall in with many
opportunities to approve his stoutness and worth; therefore every man's
name that emerged at all from the mass in the feudal ages, rattles in
our ear like a flourish of trumpets. But personal force never goes out
of fashion. That is still paramount to-day, and in the moving crowd of
good society the men of valor and reality are known and rise to their
natural place. The competition is transferred from war to politics