Essays — Second Series
must have a good reason. A dilettantism in nature is barren and
unworthy. The fop of fields is no better than his brother of Broadway.
Men are naturally hunters and inquisitive of wood-craft, and I suppose
that such a gazetteer as wood-cutters and Indians should furnish facts
for, would take place in the most sumptuous drawing-rooms of all the
"Wreaths" and "Flora's chaplets" of the bookshops; yet ordinarily,
whether we are too clumsy for so subtle a topic, or from whatever
cause, as soon as men begin to write on nature, they fall into euphuism.
Frivolity is a most unfit tribute to Pan, who ought to be represented
in the mythology as the most continent of gods. I would not be frivolous
before the admirable reserve and prudence of time, yet I cannot renounce
the right of returning often to this old topic. The multitude of false
churches accredits the true religion. Literature, poetry, science are
the homage of man to this unfathomed secret, concerning which no sane
man can affect an indifference or incuriosity. Nature is loved by what
is best in us. It is loved as the city of God, although, or rather
because there is no citizen. The sunset is unlike anything that is
underneath it: it wants men. And the beauty of nature must always seem
unreal and mocking, until the landscape has human figures that are
as good as itself. If there were good men, there would never be this
rapture in nature. If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the
walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and
gazers, that we turn from the people to find relief in the majestic men
that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture. The critics who
complain of the sickly separation of the beauty of nature from the
thing to be done, must consider that our hunting of the picturesque
is inseparable from our protest against false society. Man is fallen;
nature is erect, and serves as a differential thermometer, detecting
the presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man. By fault of our
dulness and selfishness we are looking up to nature, but when we are
convalescent, nature will look up to us. We see the foaming brook with
compunction: if our own life flowed with the right energy, we should
shame the brook. The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, and not
with reflex rays of sun and moon. Nature may be as selfishly studied as
trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology; psychology, mesmerism
(with intent to show where our spoons are gone); and anatomy and
physiology become phrenology and palmistry.
But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on this
topic, let us not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, natura
naturans, the quick cause before which all forms flee as the driven
snows; itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and
multitudes, (as the ancient represented nature by Proteus, a shepherd,)
and in undescribable variety. It publishes itself in creatures, reaching
from particles and spiculae through transformation on transformation to
the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate results without a
shock or a leap. A little heat, that is a little motion, is all that
differences the bald, dazzling white and deadly cold poles of the earth
from the prolific tropical climates. All changes pass without violence,
by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space and
boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the secularity of nature,
and taught us to disuse our dame-school measures, and exchange our
Mosaic and Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. We knew nothing
rightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn what patient periods
must round themselves before the rock is formed; then before the rock
is broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest
external plate into soil, and opened the door for the remote Flora,
Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite!
how far the quadruped! how inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive,
and then race after race of men. It is a long way from granite to the
oyster; farther yet to Plato and the preaching of the immortality of the
soul. Yet all must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides.
Motion or change and identity or rest are the first and second secrets
of nature:--Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written
on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring. The whirling bubble on the
surface of a brook admits us to the secret of the mechanics of the sky.
Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A little water made to rotate
in a cup explains the formation of the simpler shells; the addition of
matter from year to year, arrives at last at the most complex forms; and
yet so poor is nature with all her craft, that from the beginning to the
end of the universe she has but one stuff,--but one stuff with its two
ends, to serve up all her dream-like variety. Compound it how she will,
star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays
the same properties.
Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own
laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms and
equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and at the
same time she arms and equips another animal to destroy it. Space exists
to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird with a few
feathers she gives him a petty omnipresence. The direction is forever
onward, but the artist still goes back for materials and begins again
with the first elements on the most advanced stage: otherwise all goes
to ruin. If we look at her work, we seem to catch a glance of a system
in transition. Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and
vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are
imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the
ground. The animal is the novice and probationer of a more advanced
order. The men, though young, having tasted the first drop from the
cup of thought, are already dissipated: the maples and ferns are still
uncorrupt; yet no doubt when they come to consciousness they too will
curse and swear. Flowers so strictly belong to youth that we adult men
soon come to feel that their beautiful generations concern not us: we
have had our day; now let the children have theirs. The flowers jilt us,
and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness.
Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the
eye, from any one object the parts and properties of any other may be
predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wall
would certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as readily as
the city. That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great
intervals on our customary scale. We talk of deviations from natural
life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest curled
courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and
aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is
directly related, there amid essences and billetsdoux, to Himmaleh
mountain-chains and the axis of the globe. If we consider how much
we are nature's, we need not be superstitious about towns, as if that
terrific or benefic force did not find us there also, and fashion
cities. Nature, who made the mason, made the house. We may easily hear
too much of rural influences. The cool disengaged air of natural objects
makes them enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures with red
faces, and we think we shall be as grand as they if we camp out and eat
roots; but let us be men instead of woodchucks and the oak and the elm
shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets of
silk.
This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts of
the piece, and characterizes every law. Man carries the world in his
head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because
the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore is he
the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in natural
science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was
actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing laws
which bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas, crystal,
are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its own, and
recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment. The common
sense of Franklin, Dalton, Davy and Black, is the same common sense
which made the arrangements which now it discovers.
If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter action runs also
into organization. The astronomers said, 'Give us matter and a little
motion and we will construct the universe. It is not enough that we
should have matter, we must also have a single impulse, one shove
to launch the mass and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and
centripetal forces. Once heave the ball from the hand, and we can show
how all this mighty order grew.'--'A very unreasonable postulate,' said
the metaphysicians, 'and a plain begging of the question. Could you not
prevail to know the genesis of projection, as well as the continuation
of it?' Nature, meanwhile, had not waited for the discussion, but, right
or wrong, bestowed the impulse, and the balls rolled. It was no great
affair, a mere push, but the astronomers were right in making much of
it, for there is no end to the consequences of the act. That famous
aboriginal push propagates itself through all the balls of the
system, and through every atom of every ball; through all the races of
creatures, and through the history and performances of every individual.
Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no
man into the world without adding a small excess of his proper quality.
Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so to every
creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path,
a shove to put it on its way; in every instance a slight generosity, a
drop too much. Without electricity the air would rot, and without this
violence of direction which men and women have, without a spice of bigot
and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We aim above the mark to hit
the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it. And when
now and then comes along some sad, sharp-eyed man, who sees how paltry a
game is played, and refuses to play, but blabs the secret;--how then? Is
the bird flown? O no, the wary Nature sends a new troop of fairer forms,
of lordlier youths, with a little more excess of direction to hold
them fast to their several aim; makes them a little wrongheaded in that
direction in which they are rightest, and on goes the game again with
new whirl, for a generation or two more. The child with his sweet
pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound,
without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to
a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon or a gingerbread-dog,
individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every
new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue which this day
of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her
purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty,
and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame by all these
attitudes and exertions,--an end of the first importance, which could
not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own. This glitter, this
opaline lustre plays round the top of every toy to his eye to insure
his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We are made alive and kept
alive by the same arts. Let the stoics say what they please, we do
not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and