Essays — Second Series
was sound, he became a Unitarian. Very mortifying is the reluctant
experience that some unfriendly excess or imbecility neutralizes the
promise of genius. We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily
and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die
young and dodge the account; or if they live they lose themselves in the
crowd.
Temperament also enters fully into the system of illusions and shuts us
in a prison of glass which we cannot see. There is an optical illusion
about every person we meet. In truth they are all creatures of given
temperament, which will appear in a given character, whose boundaries
they will never pass: but we look at them, they seem alive, and we
presume there is impulse in them. In the moment it seems impulse; in the
year, in the lifetime, it turns out to be a certain uniform tune
which the revolving barrel of the music-box must play. Men resist the
conclusion in the morning, but adopt it as the evening wears on, that
temper prevails over everything of time, place, and condition, and is
inconsumable in the flames of religion. Some modifications the moral
sentiment avails to impose, but the individual texture holds its
dominion, if not to bias the moral judgments, yet to fix the measure of
activity and of enjoyment.
I thus express the law as it is read from the platform of ordinary
life, but must not leave it without noticing the capital exception. For
temperament is a power which no man willingly hears any one praise but
himself. On the platform of physics we cannot resist the contracting
influences of so-called science. Temperament puts all divinity to rout.
I know the mental proclivity of physicians. I hear the chuckle of the
phrenologists. Theoretic kidnappers and slave-drivers, they esteem each
man the victim of another, who winds him round his finger by knowing the
law of his being; and by such cheap signboards as the color of his beard
or the slope of his occiput, reads the inventory of his fortunes and
character. The grossest ignorance does not disgust like this impudent
knowingness. The physicians say they are not materialists; but they
are:--Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin!--But
the definition of spiritual should be, that which is its own evidence.
What notions do they attach to love! what to religion! One would not
willingly pronounce these words in their hearing, and give them the
occasion to profane them. I saw a gracious gentleman who adapts his
conversation to the form of the head of the man he talks with! I had
fancied that the value of life lay in its inscrutable possibilities; in
the fact that I never know, in addressing myself to a new individual,
what may befall me. I carry the keys of my castle in my hand, ready to
throw them at the feet of my lord, whenever and in what disguise
soever he shall appear. I know he is in the neighborhood hidden among
vagabonds. Shall I preclude my future by taking a high seat and kindly
adapting my conversation to the shape of heads? When I come to that, the
doctors shall buy me for a cent.--'But, sir, medical history; the report
to the Institute; the proven facts!'--I distrust the facts and
the inferences. Temperament is the veto or limitation-power in the
constitution, very justly applied to restrain an opposite excess in the
constitution, but absurdly offered as a bar to original equity. When
virtue is in presence, all subordinate powers sleep. On its own level,
or in view of nature, temperament is final. I see not, if one be once
caught in this trap of so-called sciences, any escape for the man from
the links of the chain of physical necessity. Given such an embryo,
such a history must follow. On this platform one lives in a sty of
sensualism, and would soon come to suicide. But it is impossible that
the creative power should exclude itself. Into every intelligence there
is a door which is never closed, through which the creator passes. The
intellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, lover of absolute
good, intervenes for our succor, and at one whisper of these high powers
we awake from ineffectual struggles with this nightmare. We hurl it into
its own hell, and cannot again contract ourselves to so base a state.
The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession
of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is
quicksand. This onward trick of nature is too strong for us: Pero si
muove. When at night I look at the moon and stars, I seem stationary,
and they to hurry. Our love of the real draws us to permanence, but
health of body consists in circulation, and sanity of mind in variety
or facility of association. We need change of objects. Dedication to
one thought is quickly odious. We house with the insane, and must humor
them; then conversation dies out. Once I took such delight in Montaigne,
that I thought I should not need any other book; before that, in
Shakspeare; then in Plutarch; then in Plotinus; at one time in Bacon;
afterwards in Goethe; even in Bettine; but now I turn the pages of
either of them languidly, whilst I still cherish their genius. So with
pictures; each will bear an emphasis of attention once, which it cannot
retain, though we fain would continue to be pleased in that manner. How
strongly I have felt of pictures that when you have seen one well, you
must take your leave of it; you shall never see it again. I have had
good lessons from pictures which I have since seen without emotion or
remark. A deduction must be made from the opinion which even the wise
express of a new book or occurrence. Their opinion gives me tidings of
their mood, and some vague guess at the new fact, but is nowise to be
trusted as the lasting relation between that intellect and that thing.
The child asks, 'Mamma, why don't I like the story as well as when
you told it me yesterday?' Alas! child it is even so with the oldest
cherubim of knowledge. But will it answer thy question to say, Because
thou wert born to a whole and this story is a particular? The reason
of the pain this discovery causes us (and we make it late in respect to
works of art and intellect), is the plaint of tragedy which murmurs from
it in regard to persons, to friendship and love.
That immobility and absence of elasticity which we find in the arts,
we find with more pain in the artist. There is no power of expansion in
men. Our friends early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas
which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the ocean of
thought and power, but they never take the single step that would bring
them there. A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as
you turn it in your hand until you come to a particular angle; then it
shows deep and beautiful colors. There is no adaptation or universal
applicability in men, but each has his special talent, and the mastery
of successful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when
that turn shall be oftenest to be practised. We do what we must, and
call it by the best names we can, and would fain have the praise of
having intended the result which ensues. I cannot recall any form of man
who is not superfluous sometimes. But is not this pitiful? Life is not
worth the taking, to do tricks in.
Of course it needs the whole society to give the symmetry we seek. The
party-colored wheel must revolve very fast to appear white. Something is
earned too by conversing with so much folly and defect. In fine, whoever
loses, we are always of the gaining party. Divinity is behind our
failures and follies also. The plays of children are nonsense, but very
educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with
commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every
man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it. Like a bird
which alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from bough to bough, is the
Power which abides in no man and in no woman, but for a moment speaks
from this one, and for another moment from that one.
But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought?
Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons
enough of the futility of criticism. Our young people have thought and
written much on labor and reform, and for all that they have written,
neither the world nor themselves have got on a step. Intellectual
tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should
consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat,
he would starve. At Education-Farm, the noblest theory of life sat
on the noblest figures of young men and maidens, quite powerless and
melancholy. It would not rake or pitch a ton of hay; it would not
rub down a horse; and the men and maidens it left pale and hungry. A
political orator wittily compared our party promises to western roads,
which opened stately enough, with planted trees on either side to
tempt the traveller, but soon became narrow and narrower and ended in
a squirrel-track and ran up a tree. So does culture with us; it ends in
headache. Unspeakably sad and barren does life look to those who a few
months ago were dazzled with the splendor of the promise of the times.
"There is now no longer any right course of action nor any self-devotion
left among the Iranis." Objections and criticism we have had our fill
of. There are objections to every course of life and action, and the
practical wisdom infers an indifferency, from the omnipresence of
objection. The whole frame of things preaches indifferency. Do not craze
yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere. Life is not
intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed
people who can enjoy what they find, without question. Nature hates
peeping, and our mothers speak her very sense when they say, "Children,
eat your victuals, and say no more of it." To fill the hour,--that is
happiness; to fill the hour and leave no crevice for a repentance or an
approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate
well on them. Under the oldest mouldiest conventions a man of native
force prospers just as well as in the newest world, and that by skill
of handling and treatment. He can take hold anywhere. Life itself is a
mixture of power and form, and will not bear the least excess of either.
To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the
road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. It is not
the part of men, but of fanatics, or of mathematicians if you will,
to say that the shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring
whether for so short a duration we were sprawling in want or sitting
high. Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five
minutes of today are worth as much to me as five minutes in the next
millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat
the men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they
are. Men live in their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too soft
and tremulous for successful labor. It is a tempest of fancies, and the
only ballast I know is a respect to the present hour. Without any shadow
of doubt, amidst this vertigo of shows and politics, I settle myself
ever the firmer in the creed that we should not postpone and refer and
wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with,
accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or
odious as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated
its whole pleasure for us. If these are mean and malignant, their
contentment, which is the last victory of justice, is a more satisfying
echo to the heart than the voice of poets and the casual sympathy of
admirable persons. I think that however a thoughtful man may suffer