Essays — Second Series
departures from his faith, and are mere compliances. The magnetism which
arranges tribes and races in one polarity is alone to be respected; the
men are steel-filings. Yet we unjustly select a particle, and say,
'O steel-filing number one! what heart-drawings I feel to thee! what
prodigious virtues are these of thine! how constitutional to thee, and
incommunicable.' Whilst we speak the loadstone is withdrawn; down falls
our filing in a heap with the rest, and we continue our mummery to the
wretched shaving. Let us go for universals; for the magnetism, not for
the needles. Human life and its persons are poor empirical pretensions.
A personal influence is an ignis fatuus. If they say it is great, it is
great; if they say it is small, it is small; you see it, and you see it
not, by turns; it borrows all its size from the momentary estimation of
the speakers: the Will-of-the-wisp vanishes if you go too near, vanishes
if you go too far, and only blazes at one angle. Who can tell if
Washington be a great man or no? Who can tell if Franklin be? Yes, or
any but the twelve, or six, or three great gods of fame? And they too
loom and fade before the eternal.
We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets
of faculties, the particular and the catholic. We adjust our instrument
for general observation, and sweep the heavens as easily as we pick out
a single figure in the terrestrial landscape. We are practically skilful
in detecting elements for which we have no place in our theory, and no
name. Thus we are very sensible of an atmospheric influence in men and
in bodies of men, not accounted for in an arithmetical addition of all
their measurable properties. There is a genius of a nation, which is
not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the
society. England, strong, punctual, practical, well-spoken England
I should not find if I should go to the island to seek it. In the
parliament, in the play-house, at dinner-tables, I might see a great
number of rich, ignorant, book-read, conventional, proud men,--many
old women,--and not anywhere the Englishman who made the good speeches,
combined the accurate engines, and did the bold and nervous deeds. It
is even worse in America, where, from the intellectual quickness of the
race, the genius of the country is more splendid in its promise and more
slight in its performance. Webster cannot do the work of Webster. We
conceive distinctly enough the French, the Spanish, the German genius,
and it is not the less real that perhaps we should not meet in either
of those nations a single individual who corresponded with the type. We
infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which
is a sort of monument to which each forcible individual in a course of
many hundred years has contributed a stone. And, universally, a good
example of this social force is the veracity of language, which cannot
be debauched. In any controversy concerning morals, an appeal may be
made with safety to the sentiments which the language of the people
expresses. Proverbs, words, and grammar-inflections convey the public
sense with more purity and precision than the wisest individual.
In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the Realists had a good deal
of reason. General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they round
and ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living. Our proclivity
to details cannot quite degrade our life and divest it of poetry. The
day-laborer is reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale, yet
he is saturated with the laws of the world. His measures are the hours;
morning and night, solstice and equinox, geometry, astronomy and all
the lovely accidents of nature play through his mind. Money, which
represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors
without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
Property keeps the accounts of the world, and is always moral. The
property will be found where the labor, the wisdom, and the virtue have
been in nations, in classes, and (the whole life-time considered, with
the compensations) in the individual also. How wise the world appears,
when the laws and usages of nations are largely detailed, and the
completeness of the municipal system is considered! Nothing is left
out. If you go into the markets and the custom-houses, the insurers' and
notaries' offices, the offices of sealers of weights and measures, of
inspection of provisions,--it will appear as if one man had made it
all. Wherever you go, a wit like your own has been before you, and
has realized its thought. The Eleusinian mysteries, the Egyptian
architecture, the Indian astronomy, the Greek sculpture, show that there
always were seeing and knowing men in the planet. The world is full of
masonic ties, of guilds, of secret and public legions of honor; that
of scholars, for example; and that of gentlemen, fraternizing with the
upper class of every country and every culture.
I am very much struck in literature by the appearance that one person
wrote all the books; as if the editor of a journal planted his body of
reporters in different parts of the field of action, and relieved some
by others from time to time; but there is such equality and identity
both of judgment and point of view in the narrative that it is plainly
the work of one all-seeing, all-hearing gentleman. I looked into Pope's
Odyssey yesterday: it is as correct and elegant after our canon of
to-day as if it were newly written. The modernness of all good books
seems to give me an existence as wide as man. What is well done I feel
as if I did; what is ill done I reck not of. Shakspeare's passages of
passion (for example, in Lear and Hamlet) are in the very dialect of the
present year. I am faithful again to the whole over the members in my
use of books. I find the most pleasure in reading a book in a manner
least flattering to the author. I read Proclus, and sometimes Plato, as
I might read a dictionary, for a mechanical help to the fancy and the
imagination. I read for the lustres, as if one should use a fine picture
in a chromatic experiment, for its rich colors. 'Tis not Proclus, but a
piece of nature and fate that I explore. It is a greater joy to see
the author's author, than himself. A higher pleasure of the same kind I
found lately at a concert, where I went to hear Handel's Messiah. As the
master overpowered the littleness and incapableness of the performers
and made them conductors of his electricity, so it was easy to observe
what efforts nature was making, through so many hoarse, wooden, and
imperfect persons, to produce beautiful voices, fluid and soul-guided
men and women. The genius of nature was paramount at the oratorio.
This preference of the genius to the parts is the secret of that
deification of art, which is found in all superior minds. Art, in the
artist, is proportion, or a habitual respect to the whole by an eye
loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity
in insanity which it denotes. Proportion is almost impossible to human
beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men
are encumbered with personality, and talk too much. In modern sculpture,
picture, and poetry, the beauty is miscellaneous; the artist works here
and there and at all points, adding and adding, instead of unfolding the
unit of his thought. Beautiful details we must have, or no artist; but
they must be means and never other. The eye must not lose sight for a
moment of the purpose. Lively boys write to their ear and eye, and the
cool reader finds nothing but sweet jingles in it. When they grow older,
they respect the argument.
We obey the same intellectual integrity when we study in exceptions the
law of the world. Anomalous facts, as the never quite obsolete rumors
of magic and demonology, and the new allegations of phrenologists and
neurologists, are of ideal use. They are good indications. Homoeopathy
is insignificant as an art of healing, but of great value as criticism
on the hygeia or medical practice of the time. So with Mesmerism,
Swedenborgism, Fourierism, and the Millennial Church; they are poor
pretensions enough, but good criticism on the science, philosophy, and
preaching of the day. For these abnormal insights of the adepts ought to
be normal, and things of course.
All things show us that on every side we are very near to the best.
It seems not worth while to execute with too much pains some one
intellectual, or aesthetical, or civil feat, when presently the dream
will scatter, and we shall burst into universal power. The reason of
idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes. Whilst we are
waiting we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and
with crimes.
Thus we settle it in our cool libraries, that all the agents with which
we deal are subalterns, which we can well afford to let pass, and life
will be simpler when we live at the centre and flout the surfaces. I
wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch
myself to keep awake and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast
into each other that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an
effort to treat them as individuals. Though the uninspired man certainly
finds persons a conveniency in household matters, the divine man does
not respect them; he sees them as a rack of clouds, or a fleet of
ripples which the wind drives over the surface of the water. But this is
flat rebellion. Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing,
and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million of fresh
particulars. It is all idle talking: as much as a man is a whole, so is
he also a part; and it were partial not to see it. What you say in your
pompous distribution only distributes you into your class and section.
You have not got rid of parts by denying them, but are the more partial.
You are one thing, but Nature is one thing and the other thing, in the
same moment. She will not remain orbed in a thought, but rushes into
persons; and when each person, inflamed to a fury of personality, would
conquer all things to his poor crotchet, she raises up against him
another person, and by many persons incarnates again a sort of whole.
She will have all. Nick Bottom cannot play all the parts, work it how
he may; there will be somebody else, and the world will be round.
Everything must have its flower or effort at the beautiful, coarser or
finer according to its stuff. They relieve and recommend each other,
and the sanity of society is a balance of a thousand insanities. She
punishes abstractionists, and will only forgive an induction which
is rare and casual. We like to come to a height of land and see the
landscape, just as we value a general remark in conversation. But it
is not the intention of Nature that we should live by general views. We
fetch fire and water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and
get our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are the victims of these
details; and once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational moment.
If we were not thus infatuated, if we saw the real from hour to hour, we
should not be here to write and to read, but should have been burned
or frozen long ago. She would never get anything done, if she suffered
admirable Crichtons and universal geniuses. She loves better a
wheelwright who dreams all night of wheels, and a groom who is part
of his horse; for she is full of work, and these are her hands. As the
frugal farmer takes care that his cattle shall eat down the rowen,
and swine shall eat the waste of his house, and poultry shall pick the
crumbs,--so our economical mother dispatches a new genius and habit
of mind into every district and condition of existence, plants an eye