Essays — Second Series
from the defects and absurdities of his company, he cannot without
affectation deny to any set of men and women a sensibility to
extraordinary merit. The coarse and frivolous have an instinct of
superiority, if they have not a sympathy, and honor it in their blind
capricious way with sincere homage.
The fine young people despise life, but in me, and in such as with me
are free from dyspepsia, and to whom a day is a sound and solid good, it
is a great excess of politeness to look scornful and to cry for company.
I am grown by sympathy a little eager and sentimental, but leave me
alone and I should relish every hour and what it brought me, the potluck
of the day, as heartily as the oldest gossip in the bar-room. I am
thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who
expects everything of the universe and is disappointed when anything
is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme,
expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods. I
accept the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies. I find my account
in sots and bores also. They give a reality to the circumjacent picture
which such a vanishing meteorous appearance can ill spare. In the
morning I awake and find the old world, wife, babes, and mother, Concord
and Boston, the dear old spiritual world and even the dear old devil not
far off. If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we
shall have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis.
Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is
the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure
geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between
these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of
poetry,--a narrow belt. Moreover, in popular experience everything
good is on the highway. A collector peeps into all the picture-shops of
Europe for a landscape of Poussin, a crayon-sketch of Salvator; but the
Transfiguration, the Last Judgment, the Communion of St. Jerome, and
what are as transcendent as these, are on the walls of the Vatican, the
Uffizii, or the Louvre, where every footman may see them; to say nothing
of Nature's pictures in every street, of sunsets and sunrises every day,
and the sculpture of the human body never absent. A collector recently
bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven
guineas, an autograph of Shakspeare; but for nothing a school-boy
can read Hamlet and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet
unpublished therein. I think I will never read any but the commonest
books,--the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton. Then we are
impatient of so public a life and planet, and run hither and thither for
nooks and secrets. The imagination delights in the woodcraft of Indians,
trappers, and bee-hunters. We fancy that we are strangers, and not so
intimately domesticated in the planet as the wild man and the wild beast
and bird. But the exclusion reaches them also; reaches the climbing,
flying, gliding, feathered and four-footed man. Fox and woodchuck, hawk
and snipe and bittern, when nearly seen, have no more root in the deep
world than man, and are just such superficial tenants of the globe. Then
the new molecular philosophy shows astronomical interspaces betwixt atom
and atom, shows that the world is all outside; it has no inside.
The mid-world is best. Nature, as we know her, is no saint. The lights
of the church, the ascetics, Gentoos, and corn-eaters, she does not
distinguish by any favor. She comes eating and drinking and sinning. Her
darlings, the great, the strong, the beautiful, are not children of our
law; do not come out of the Sunday School, nor weigh their food, nor
punctually keep the commandments. If we will be strong with her strength
we must not harbor such disconsolate consciences, borrowed too from the
consciences of other nations. We must set up the strong present tense
against all the rumors of wrath, past or to come. So many things are
unsettled which it is of the first importance to settle;--and, pending
their settlement, we will do as we do. Whilst the debate goes forward on
the equity of commerce, and will not be closed for a century or two,
New and Old England may keep shop. Law of copyright and international
copyright is to be discussed, and in the interim we will sell our books
for the most we can. Expediency of literature, reason of literature,
lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned; much is to say on
both sides, and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick
to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles add
a line. Right to hold land, right of property, is disputed, and the
conventions convene, and before the vote is taken, dig away in your
garden, and spend your earnings as a waif or godsend to all serene and
beautiful purposes. Life itself is a bubble and a skepticism, and a
sleep within a sleep. Grant it, and as much more as they will,--but
thou, God's darling! heed thy private dream; thou wilt not be missed in
the scorning and skepticism; there are enough of them; stay there in
thy closet and toil until the rest are agreed what to do about it. Thy
sickness, they say, and thy puny habit require that thou do this or
avoid that, but know that thy life is a flitting state, a tent for a
night, and do thou, sick or well, finish that stint. Thou art sick, but
shalt not be worse, and the universe, which holds thee dear, shall be
the better.
Human life is made up of the two elements, power and form, and the
proportion must be invariably kept if we would have it sweet and sound.
Each of these elements in excess makes a mischief as hurtful as its
defect. Everything runs to excess; every good quality is noxious if
unmixed, and, to carry the danger to the edge of ruin, nature causes
each man's peculiarity to superabound. Here, among the farms, we adduce
the scholars as examples of this treachery. They are nature's victims of
expression. You who see the artist, the orator, the poet, too near, and
find their life no more excellent than that of mechanics or farmers, and
themselves victims of partiality, very hollow and haggard, and pronounce
them failures, not heroes, but quacks,--conclude very reasonably that
these arts are not for man, but are disease. Yet nature will not bear
you out. Irresistible nature made men such, and makes legions more
of such, every day. You love the boy reading in a book, gazing at a
drawing, or a cast; yet what are these millions who read and behold, but
incipient writers and sculptors? Add a little more of that quality which
now reads and sees, and they will seize the pen and chisel. And if one
remembers how innocently he began to be an artist, he perceives that
nature joined with his enemy. A man is a golden impossibility. The line
he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom is
made a fool.
How easily, if fate would suffer it, we might keep forever these
beautiful limits, and adjust ourselves, once for all, to the perfect
calculation of the kingdom of known cause and effect. In the street
and in the newspapers, life appears so plain a business that manly
resolution and adherence to the multiplication-table through all
weathers will insure success. But ah! presently comes a day, or is
it only a half-hour, with its angel-whispering,--which discomfits the
conclusions of nations and of years! Tomorrow again everything looks
real and angular, the habitual standards are reinstated, common sense is
as rare as genius,--is the basis of genius, and experience is hands and
feet to every enterprise;--and yet, he who should do his business on
this understanding would be quickly bankrupt. Power keeps quite another
road than the turnpikes of choice and will; namely the subterranean and
invisible tunnels and channels of life. It is ridiculous that we are
diplomatists, and doctors, and considerate people: there are no dupes
like these. Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking
or keeping if it were not. God delights to isolate us every day, and
hide from us the past and the future. We would look about us, but with
grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen
of purest sky, and another behind us of purest sky. 'You will not
remember,' he seems to say, `and you will not expect.' All good
conversation, manners, and action, come from a spontaneity which forgets
usages and makes the moment great. Nature hates calculators; her methods
are saltatory and impulsive. Man lives by pulses; our organic movements
are such; and the chemical and ethereal agents are undulatory and
alternate; and the mind goes antagonizing on, and never prospers but by
fits. We thrive by casualties. Our chief experiences have been casual.
The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely
and not by the direct stroke; men of genius, but not yet accredited; one
gets the cheer of their light without paying too great a tax. Theirs
is the beauty of the bird or the morning light, and not of art. In the
thought of genius there is always a surprise; and the moral sentiment is
well called "the newness," for it is never other; as new to the oldest
intelligence as to the young child;--"the kingdom that cometh without
observation." In like manner, for practical success, there must not be
too much design. A man will not be observed in doing that which he
can do best. There is a certain magic about his properest action which
stupefies your powers of observation, so that though it is done before
you, you wist not of it. The art of life has a pudency, and will not
be exposed. Every man is an impossibility until he is born; every thing
impossible until we see a success. The ardors of piety agree at last
with the coldest skepticism,--that nothing is of us or our works,--that
all is of God. Nature will not spare us the smallest leaf of laurel.
All writing comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having. I would
gladly be moral and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly love, and
allow the most to the will of man; but I have set my heart on honesty in
this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, than
more or less of vital force supplied from the Eternal. The results of
life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the
days never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and come
and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of it
all, but an unlooked-for result. The individual is always mistaken.
He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors,
quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all
are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns
out somewhat new and very unlike what he promised himself.
The ancients, struck with this irreducibleness of the elements of human
life to calculation, exalted Chance into a divinity; but that is to
stay too long at the spark, which glitters truly at one point, but the
universe is warm with the latency of the same fire. The miracle of life
which will not be expounded but will remain a miracle, introduces a new
element. In the growth of the embryo, Sir Everard Home I think noticed
that the evolution was not from one central point, but coactive from
three or more points. Life has no memory. That which proceeds in
succession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or
ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knows
not its own tendency. So is it with us, now skeptical or without unity,
because immersed in forms and effects all seeming to be of equal yet
hostile value, and now religious, whilst in the reception of spiritual