Essays — Second Series
wherever a new ray of light can fall, and gathering up into some man
every property in the universe, establishes thousandfold occult mutual
attractions among her offspring, that all this wash and waste of power
may be imparted and exchanged.
Great dangers undoubtedly accrue from this incarnation and distribution
of the godhead, and hence Nature has her maligners, as if she were
Circe; and Alphonso of Castille fancied he could have given useful
advice. But she does not go unprovided; she has hellebore at the bottom
of the cup. Solitude would ripen a plentiful crop of despots. The
recluse thinks of men as having his manner, or as not having his manner;
and as having degrees of it, more and less. But when he comes into a
public assembly he sees that men have very different manners from his
own, and in their way admirable. In his childhood and youth he has
had many checks and censures, and thinks modestly enough of his
own endowment. When afterwards he comes to unfold it in propitious
circumstance, it seems the only talent; he is delighted with his
success, and accounts himself already the fellow of the great. But he
goes into a mob, into a banking house, into a mechanic's shop, into a
mill, into a laboratory, into a ship, into a camp, and in each new place
he is no better than an idiot; other talents take place, and rule the
hour. The rotation which whirls every leaf and pebble to the meridian,
reaches to every gift of man, and we all take turns at the top.
For Nature, who abhors mannerism, has set her heart on breaking up all
styles and tricks, and it is so much easier to do what one has done
before than to do a new thing, that there is a perpetual tendency to a
set mode. In every conversation, even the highest, there is a certain
trick, which may be soon learned by an acute person and then that
particular style continued indefinitely. Each man too is a tyrant in
tendency, because he would impose his idea on others; and their trick is
their natural defence. Jesus would absorb the race; but Tom Paine or
the coarsest blasphemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of
power. Hence the immense benefit of party in politics, as it reveals
faults of character in a chief, which the intellectual force of the
persons, with ordinary opportunity and not hurled into aphelion by
hatred, could not have seen. Since we are all so stupid, what benefit
that there should be two stupidities! It is like that brute advantage so
essential to astronomy, of having the diameter of the earth's orbit for
a base of its triangles. Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy,
but in the State and in the schools it is indispensable to resist the
consolidation of all men into a few men. If John was perfect, why are
you and I alive? As long as any man exists, there is some need of him;
let him fight for his own. A new poet has appeared; a new character
approached us; why should we refuse to eat bread until we have found his
regiment and section in our old army-files? Why not a new man? Here is
a new enterprise of Brook Farm, of Skeneateles, of Northampton: why so
impatient to baptize them Essenes, or Port-Royalists, or Shakers, or by
any known and effete name? Let it be a new way of living. Why have only
two or three ways of life, and not thousands? Every man is wanted, and
no man is wanted much. We came this time for condiments, not for
corn. We want the great genius only for joy; for one star more in our
constellation, for one tree more in our grove. But he thinks we wish
to belong to him, as he wishes to occupy us. He greatly mistakes us. I
think I have done well if I have acquired a new word from a good author;
and my business with him is to find my own, though it were only to melt
him down into an epithet or an image for daily use:--
"Into paint will I grind thee, my bride!"
To embroil the confusion, and make it impossible to arrive at any
general statement,--when we have insisted on the imperfection of
individuals, our affections and our experience urge that every
individual is entitled to honor, and a very generous treatment is sure
to be repaid. A recluse sees only two or three persons, and allows them
all their room; they spread themselves at large. The statesman looks at
many, and compares the few habitually with others, and these look less.
Yet are they not entitled to this generosity of reception? and is not
munificence the means of insight? For though gamesters say that the
cards beat all the players, though they were never so skilful, yet in
the contest we are now considering, the players are also the game, and
share the power of the cards. If you criticise a fine genius, the odds
are that you are out of your reckoning, and instead of the poet, are
censuring your own caricature of him. For there is somewhat spheral and
infinite in every man, especially in every genius, which, if you can
come very near him, sports with all your limitations. For rightly every
man is a channel through which heaven floweth, and whilst I fancied I
was criticising him, I was censuring or rather terminating my own soul.
After taxing Goethe as a courtier, artificial, unbelieving, worldly,--I
took up this book of Helena, and found him an Indian of the wilderness,
a piece of pure nature like an apple or an oak, large as morning or
night, and virtuous as a brier-rose.
But care is taken that the whole tune shall be played. If we were not
kept among surfaces, every thing would be large and universal; now the
excluded attributes burst in on us with the more brightness that they
have been excluded. "Your turn now, my turn next," is the rule of the
game. The universality being hindered in its primary form, comes in
the secondary form of all sides; the points come in succession to the
meridian, and by the speed of rotation a new whole is formed. Nature
keeps herself whole and her representation complete in the experience
of each mind. She suffers no seat to be vacant in her college. It is
the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die but only
retire a little from sight and afterwards return again. Whatever does
not concern us is concealed from us. As soon as a person is no longer
related to our present well-being, he is concealed, or dies, as we say.
Really, all things and persons are related to us, but according to our
nature they act on us not at once but in succession, and we are made
aware of their presence one at a time. All persons, all things which we
have known, are here present, and many more than we see; the world is
full. As the ancient said, the world is a plenum or solid; and if we saw
all things that really surround us we should be imprisoned and unable to
move. For though nothing is impassable to the soul, but all things are
pervious to it and like highways, yet this is only whilst the soul does
not see them. As soon as the soul sees any object, it stops before that
object. Therefore, the divine Providence which keeps the universe open
in every direction to the soul, conceals all the furniture and all the
persons that do not concern a particular soul, from the senses of that
individual. Through solidest eternal things the man finds his road as if
they did not subsist, and does not once suspect their being. As soon as
he needs a new object, suddenly he beholds it, and no longer attempts
to pass through it, but takes another way. When he has exhausted for
the time the nourishment to be drawn from any one person or thing,
that object is withdrawn from his observation, and though still in his
immediate neighborhood, he does not suspect its presence. Nothing is
dead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful
obituaries, and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and
well, in some new and strange disguise. Jesus is not dead; he is very
well alive: nor John, nor Paul, nor Mahomet, nor Aristotle; at times
we believe we have seen them all, and could easily tell the names under
which they go.
If we cannot make voluntary and conscious steps in the admirable science
of universals, let us see the parts wisely, and infer the genius of
nature from the best particulars with a becoming charity. What is best
in each kind is an index of what should be the average of that thing.
Love shows me the opulence of nature, by disclosing to me in my friend
a hidden wealth, and I infer an equal depth of good in every other
direction. It is commonly said by farmers that a good pear or apple
costs no more time or pains to rear than a poor one; so I would have no
work of art, no speech, or action, or thought, or friend, but the best.
The end and the means, the gamester and the game,--life is made up
of the intermixture and reaction of these two amicable powers, whose
marriage appears beforehand monstrous, as each denies and tends to
abolish the other. We must reconcile the contradictions as we can, but
their discord and their concord introduce wild absurdities into our
thinking and speech. No sentence will hold the whole truth, and the only
way in which we can be just, is by giving ourselves the lie; Speech is
better than silence; silence is better than speech;--All things are in
contact; every atom has a sphere of repulsion;--Things are, and are not,
at the same time;--and the like. All the universe over, there is but one
thing, this old Two-Face, creator-creature, mind-matter, right-wrong, of
which any proposition may be affirmed or denied. Very fitly therefore
I assert that every man is a partialist, that nature secures him as an
instrument by self-conceit, preventing the tendencies to religion and
science; and now further assert, that, each man's genius being nearly
and affectionately explored, he is justified in his individuality, as
his nature is found to be immense; and now I add that every man is a
universalist also, and, as our earth, whilst it spins on its own axis,
spins all the time around the sun through the celestial spaces, so
the least of its rational children, the most dedicated to his private
affair, works out, though as it were under a disguise, the universal
problem. We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every
pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history. The
rabid democrat, as soon as he is senator and rich man, has ripened
beyond possibility of sincere radicalism, and unless he can resist the
sun, he must be conservative the remainder of his days. Lord Eldon said
in his old age that "if he were to begin life again, he would be damned
but he would begin as agitator."
We hide this universality if we can, but it appears at all points. We
are as ungrateful as children. There is nothing we cherish and strive to
draw to us but in some hour we turn and rend it. We keep a running
fire of sarcasm at ignorance and the life of the senses; then goes by,
perchance, a fair girl, a piece of life, gay and happy, and making the
commonest offices beautiful by the energy and heart with which she does
them; and seeing this we admire and love her and them, and say, 'Lo! a
genuine creature of the fair earth, not dissipated or too early ripened
by books, philosophy, religion, society, or care!' insinuating a
treachery and contempt for all we had so long loved and wrought in
ourselves and others.
If we could have any security against moods! If the profoundest prophet
could be holden to his words, and the hearer who is ready to sell
all and join the crusade could have any certificate that tomorrow his
prophet shall not unsay his testimony! But the Truth sits veiled there
on the Bench, and never interposes an adamantine syllable; and the
most sincere and revolutionary doctrine, put as if the ark of God were
carried forward some furlongs, and planted there for the succor of the
world, shall in a few weeks be coldly set aside by the same speaker,