Society and solitude: Twelve chapters
wrong, but has cleared his own skirts, has engaged himself to wholesome
exertion. Let him look on opposition as opportunity. He cannot be
defeated or put down. There is a principle of resurrection in him, an
immortality of purpose. Men are averse and hostile, to give value to
their suffrages. It is not the people that are in fault for not being
convinced, but he that cannot convince them. He should mould them,
armed as he is with the reason and love which are also the core of
their nature. He is not to neutralize their opposition, but he is to
convert them into fiery apostles and publishers of the same wisdom.
The highest platform of eloquence is the moral sentiment. It is what
is called affirmative truth, and has the property of invigorating the
hearer; and it conveys a hint of our eternity, when he feels himself
addressed on grounds which will remain when everything else is taken,
and which have no trace of time or place or party. Everything hostile
is stricken down in the presence of the sentiments; their majesty is
felt by the most obdurate. It is observable that, as soon as one acts
for large masses, the moral element will and must be allowed for,
will and must work; and the men least accustomed to appeal to these
sentiments invariably recall them when they address nations. Napoleon,
even, must accept and use it as he can.
It is only to these simple strokes that the highest power
belongs,--when a weak human hand touches, point by point, the eternal
beams and rafters on which the whole structure of Nature and society
is laid. In this tossing sea of delusion, we feel with our feet the
adamant; in this dominion of chance, we find a principle of permanence.
For I do not accept that definition of Isocrates, that the office of
his art is, to make the great small and the small great; but I esteem
this to be its perfection,--when the orator sees through all masks to
the eternal scale of truth, in such sort that he can hold up before
the eyes of men the fact of to-day steadily to that standard, thereby
making the great great, and the small small, which is the true way to
astonish and to reform mankind.
All the chief orators of the world have been grave men, relying on
this reality. One thought the philosophers of Demosthenes’s own time
found running through all his orations,--this namely, that “virtue
secures its own success.” “To stand on one’s own feet” Heeren finds the
key-note to the discourses of Demosthenes, as of Chatham.
Eloquence, like every other art, rests on laws the most exact and
determinate. It is the best speech of the best soul. It may well stand
as the exponent of all that is grand and immortal in the mind. If it do
not so become an instrument, but aspires to be somewhat of itself, and
to glitter for show, it is false and weak. In its right exercise, it
is an elastic, unexhausted power,--who has sounded, who has estimated
it?--expanding with the expansion of our interests and affections. Its
great masters, whilst they valued every help to its attainment, and
thought no pains too great which contributed in any manner to further
it;--resembling the Arabian warrior of fame, who wore seventeen weapons
in his belt, and in personal combat used them all occasionally;--yet
subordinated all means; never permitted any talent--neither voice,
rhythm, poetic power, anecdote, sarcasm--to appear for show; but were
grave men, who preferred their integrity to their talent, and esteemed
that object for which they toiled, whether the prosperity of their
country, or the laws, or a reformation, or liberty of speech or of the
press, or letters, or morals, as above the whole world, and themselves
also.
DOMESTIC LIFE.
DOMESTIC LIFE.
The perfection of the providence for childhood is easily acknowledged.
The care which covers the seed of the tree under tough husks and stony
cases provides for the human plant the mother’s breast and the father’s
house. The size of the nestler is comic, and its tiny beseeching
weakness is compensated perfectly by the happy patronizing look of the
mother, who is a sort of high reposing Providence toward it. Welcome to
the parents the puny struggler, strong in his weakness, his little arms
more irresistible than the soldier’s, his lips touched with persuasion
which Chatham and Pericles in manhood had not. His unaffected
lamentations when he lifts up his voice on high, or, more beautiful,
the sobbing child,--the face all liquid grief, as he tries to swallow
his vexation,--soften all hearts to pity, and to mirthful and
clamorous compassion. The small despot asks so little that all reason
and all nature are on his side. His ignorance is more charming than
all knowledge, and his little sins more bewitching than any virtue.
His flesh is angels’ flesh, all alive. “Infancy,” said Coleridge,
“presents body and spirit in unity: the body is all animated.” All
day, between his three or four sleeps, he coos like a pigeon-house,
sputters, and spurs, and puts on his faces of importance; and when he
fasts, the little Pharisee fails not to sound his trumpet before him.
By lamplight he delights in shadows on the wall; by daylight, in yellow
and scarlet. Carry him out of doors,--he is overpowered by the light
and by the extent of natural objects, and is silent. Then presently
begins his use of his fingers, and he studies power, the lesson of
his race. First it appears in no great harm, in architectural tastes.
Out of blocks, thread-spools, cards, and checkers, he will build his
pyramid with the gravity of Palladio. With an acoustic apparatus of
whistle and rattle he explores the laws of sound. But chiefly, like his
senior countrymen, the young American studies new and speedier modes of
transportation. Mistrusting the cunning of his small legs, he wishes
to ride on the necks and shoulders of all flesh. The small enchanter
nothing can withstand,--no seniority of age, no gravity of character;
uncles, aunts, grandsires, grandams, fall an easy prey: he conforms to
nobody, all conform to him; all caper and make mouths, and babble, and
chirrup to him. On the strongest shoulders he rides, and pulls the hair
of laurelled heads.
“The childhood,” said Milton, “shows the man, as morning shows the
day.” The child realizes to every man his own earliest remembrance,
and so supplies a defect in our education, or enables us to live over
the unconscious history with a sympathy so tender as to be almost
personal experience.
Fast--almost too fast for the wistful curiosity of the parents,
studious of the witchcraft of curls and dimples and broken words--the
little talker grows to a boy. He walks daily among wonders: fire,
light, darkness, the moon, the stars, the furniture of the house, the
red tin horse, the domestics, who like rude foster-mothers befriend and
feed him, the faces that claim his kisses, are all in turn absorbing;
yet warm, cheerful, and with good appetite the little sovereign subdues
them without knowing it; the new knowledge is taken up into the life of
to-day and becomes the means of more. The blowing rose is a new event;
the garden full of flowers is Eden over again to the small Adam; the
rain, the ice, the frost, make epochs in his life. What a holiday is
the first snow in which Twoshoes can be trusted abroad!
What art can paint or gild any object in after-life with the glow which
Nature gives to the first baubles of childhood! St. Peter’s cannot
have the magical power over us that the red and gold covers of our
first picture-book possessed. How the imagination cleaves to the warm
glories of that tinsel even now! What entertainments make every day
bright and short for the fine freshman! The street is old as Nature;
the persons all have their sacredness. His imaginative life dresses all
things in their best. His fears adorn the dark parts with poetry. He
has heard of wild horses and of bad boys, and with a pleasing terror he
watches at his gate for the passing of those varieties of each species.
The first ride into the country, the first bath in running water,
the first time the skates are put on, the first game out of doors in
moonlight, the books of the nursery, are new chapters of joy. The
“Arabian Nights’ Entertainments,” the “Seven Champions of Christendom,”
“Robinson Crusoe,” and the “Pilgrim’s Progress,”--what mines of thought
and emotion, what a wardrobe to dress the whole world withal, are
in this encyclopædia of young thinking! And so by beautiful traits,
which, without art, yet seem the masterpiece of wisdom, provoking the
love that watches and educates him, the little pilgrim prosecutes the
journey through nature which he has thus gayly begun. He grows up the
ornament and joy of the house, which rings to his glee, to rosy boyhood.
The household is the home of the man, as well as of the child. The
events that occur therein are more near and affecting to us than
those which are sought in senates and academies. Domestic events are
certainly our affair. What are called public events may or may not
be ours. If a man wishes to acquaint himself with the real history
of the world, with the spirit of the age, he must not go first to
the state-house or the court-room. The subtle spirit of life must be
sought in facts nearer. It is what is done and suffered in the house,
in the constitution, in the temperament, in the personal history, that
has the profoundest interest for us. Fact is better than fiction, if
only we could get pure fact. Do you think any rhetoric or any romance
would get your ear from the wise gypsy who could tell straight on the
real fortunes of the man; who could reconcile your moral character and
your natural history; who could explain your misfortunes, your fevers,
your debts, your temperament, your habits of thought, your tastes,
and, in every explanation, not sever you from the whole, but unite you
to it? Is it not plain that not in senates, or courts, or chambers
of commerce, but in the dwelling-house must the true character and
hope of the time be consulted? These facts are, to be sure, harder to
read. It is easier to count the census, or compute the square extent
of a territory, to criticise its polity, books, art, than to come to
the persons and dwellings of men, and read their character and hope
in their way of life. Yet we are always hovering round this better
divination. In one form or another, we are always returning to it. The
physiognomy and phrenology of to-day are rash and mechanical systems
enough, but they rest on everlasting foundations. We are sure that
the sacred form of man is not seen in these whimsical, pitiful, and
sinister masks (masks which we wear and which we meet), these bloated
and shrivelled bodies, bald heads, bead eyes, short winds, puny and
precarious healths, and early deaths. We live ruins amidst ruins. The
great facts are the near ones. The account of the body is to be sought
in the mind. The history of your fortunes is written first in your life.
Let us come, then, out of the public square, and enter the domestic
precinct. Let us go to the sitting-room, the table-talk, and the
expenditure of our contemporaries. An increased consciousness of the
soul, you say, characterizes the period. Let us see if it has not only
arranged the atoms at the circumference, but the atoms at the core.
Does the household obey an idea? Do you see the man,--his form, genius,
and aspiration,--in his economy? Is that translucent, thorough-lighted?
There should be nothing confounding and conventional in economy, but
the genius and love of the man so conspicuously marked in all his
estate, that the eye that knew him should read his character in his
property, in his grounds, in his ornaments, in every expense. A man’s
money should not follow the direction of his neighbor’s money, but