Society and solitude: Twelve chapters
looks, in your accent and behavior, read your heart and earnestness,
your thought and will, which he cannot buy at any price, in any village
or city, and which he may well travel fifty miles, and dine sparely
and sleep hard, in order to behold. Certainly, let the board be spread
and let the bed be dressed for the traveller; but let not the emphasis
of hospitality lie in these things. Honor to the house where they are
simple to the verge of hardship, so that there the intellect is awake
and reads the laws of the universe, the soul worships truth and love,
honor and courtesy flow into all deeds.
There was never a country in the world which could so easily exhibit
this heroism as ours; never anywhere the State has made such efficient
provision for popular education, where intellectual entertainment is
so within reach of youthful ambition. The poor man’s son is educated.
There is many a humble house in every city, in every town, where talent
and taste, and sometimes genius, dwell with poverty and labor. Who
has not seen, and who can see unmoved, under a low roof, the eager,
blushing boys discharging as they can their household chores, and
hastening into the sitting-room to the study of to-morrow’s merciless
lesson, yet stealing time to read one chapter more of the novel hardly
smuggled into the tolerance of father and mother,--atoning for the
same by some pages of Plutarch or Goldsmith; the warm sympathy with
which they kindle each other in school-yard, or in barn or wood-shed,
with scraps of poetry or song, with phrases of the last oration, or
mimicry of the orator; the youthful criticism, on Sunday, of the
sermons; the school declamation faithfully rehearsed at home, sometimes
to the fatigue, sometimes to the admiration of sisters; the first
solitary joys of literary vanity, when the translation or the theme has
been completed, sitting alone near the top of the house; the cautious
comparison of the attractive advertisement of the arrival of Macready,
Booth, or Kemble, or of the discourse of a well-known speaker, with
the expense of the entertainment; the affectionate delight with which
they greet the return of each one after the early separations which
school or business require; the foresight with which, during such
absences, they hive the honey which opportunity offers, for the ear and
imagination of the others; and the unrestrained glee with which they
disburden themselves of their early mental treasures when the holidays
bring them again together? What is the hoop that holds them stanch?
It is the iron band of poverty, of necessity, of austerity, which,
excluding them from the sensual enjoyments which make other boys too
early old, has directed their activity in safe and right channels, and
made them, despite themselves, reverers of the grand, the beautiful,
and the good. Ah! short-sighted students of books, of Nature, and of
man! too happy, could they know their advantages. They pine for freedom
from that mild parental yoke; they sigh for fine clothes, for rides,
for the theatre, and premature freedom and dissipation, which others
possess. Woe to them, if their wishes were crowned! The angels that
dwell with them, and are weaving laurels of life for their youthful
brows, are Toil, and Want, and Truth, and Mutual Faith.
In many parts of true economy a cheering lesson may be learned from the
mode of life and manners of the later Romans, as described to us in
the letters of the younger Pliny. Nor can I resist the temptation of
quoting so trite an instance as the noble housekeeping of Lord Falkland
in Clarendon: “His house being within little more than ten miles from
Oxford, he contracted familiarity and friendship with the most polite
and accurate men of that University, who found such an immenseness of
wit, and such a solidity of judgment in him, so infinite a fancy, bound
in by a most logical ratiocination, such a vast knowledge that he was
not ignorant in anything, yet such an excessive humility, as if he had
known nothing, that they frequently resorted and dwelt with him, as in
a college situated in a purer air; so that his house was a university
in a less volume, whither they came, not so much for repose as study,
and to examine and refine those grosser propositions which laziness
and consent made current in vulgar conversation.”
I honor that man whose ambition it is, not to win laurels in the state
or the army, not to be a jurist or a naturalist, not to be a poet or
a commander, but to be a master of living well, and to administer
the offices of master or servant, of husband, father, and friend.
But it requires as much breadth of power for this as for those other
functions,--as much, or more,--and the reason for the failure is the
same. I think the vice of our housekeeping is, that it does not hold
man sacred. The vice of government, the vice of education, the vice of
religion, is one with that of private life.
In the old fables, we used to read of a cloak brought from fairy-land
as a gift for the fairest and purest in Prince Arthur’s court. It was
to be her prize whom it would fit. Every one was eager to try it on,
but it would fit nobody: for one it was a world too wide, for the next
it dragged on the ground, and for the third it shrunk to a scarf. They,
of course, said that the devil was in the mantle, for really the truth
was in the mantle, and was exposing the ugliness which each would fain
conceal. All drew back with terror from the garment. The innocent
Genelas alone could wear it. In like manner, every man is provided in
his thought with a measure of man which he applies to every passenger.
Unhappily, not one in many thousands comes up to the stature and
proportions of the model. Neither does the measurer himself; neither
do the people in the street; neither do the select individuals whom he
admires,--the heroes of the race. When he inspects them critically, he
discovers that their aims are low, that they are too quickly satisfied.
He observes the swiftness with which life culminates, and the humility
of the expectations of the greatest part of men. To each occurs, soon
after the age of puberty, some event, or society, or way of living,
which becomes the crisis of life, and the chief fact in their history.
In woman, it is love and marriage (which is more reasonable); and
yet it is pitiful to date and measure all the facts and sequel of an
unfolding life from such a youthful, and generally inconsiderate,
period as the age of courtship and marriage. In men, it is their place
of education, choice of an employment, settlement in a town, or removal
to the East or to the West, or some other magnified trifle, which makes
the meridian moment, and all the after years and actions only derive
interest from their relation to that. Hence it comes that we soon catch
the trick of each man’s conversation, and, knowing his two or three
main facts, anticipate what he thinks of each new topic that rises. It
is scarcely less perceivable in educated men, so called, than in the
uneducated. I have seen finely endowed men at college festivals, ten,
twenty years after they had left the halls, returning, as it seemed,
the same boys who went away. The same jokes pleased, the same straws
tickled; the manhood and offices they brought thither at this return
seemed mere ornamental masks: underneath they were boys yet. We never
come to be citizens of the world, but are still villagers, who think
that everything in their petty town is a little superior to the same
thing anywhere else. In each the circumstance signalized differs, but
in each it is made the coals of an ever-burning egotism. In one, it was
his going to sea; in a second, the difficulties he combated in going to
college; in a third, his journey to the West, or his voyage to Canton;
in a fourth, his coming out of the Quaker Society; in a fifth, his
new diet and regimen; in a sixth, his coming forth from the abolition
organizations; and in a seventh, his going into them. It is a life of
toys and trinkets. We are too easily pleased.
I think this sad result appears in the manners. The men we see in each
other do not give us the image and likeness of man. The men we see are
whipped through the world; they are harried, wrinkled, anxious; they
all seem the hacks of some invisible riders. How seldom do we behold
tranquillity! We have never yet seen a man. We do not know the majestic
manners that belong to him, which appease and exalt the beholder. There
are no divine persons with us, and the multitude do not hasten to be
divine. And yet we hold fast, all our lives long, a faith in a better
life, in better men, in clean and noble relations, notwithstanding
our total inexperience of a true society. Certainly, this was not the
intention of nature, to produce, with all this immense expenditure of
means and power, so cheap and humble a result. The aspirations in the
heart after the good and true teach us better,--nay, the men themselves
suggest a better life.
Every individual nature has its own beauty. One is struck in every
company, at every fireside, with the riches of nature, when he hears
so many new tones, all musical, sees in each person original manners,
which have a proper and peculiar charm, and reads new expressions of
face. He perceives that nature has laid for each the foundations of a
divine building, if the soul will build thereon. There is no face, no
form, which one cannot in fancy associate with great power of intellect
or with generosity of soul. In our experience, to be sure, beauty is
not, as it ought to be, the dower of man and of woman as invariably as
sensation. Beauty is, even in the beautiful, occasional,--or, as one
has said, culminating and perfect only a single moment, before which
it is unripe, and after which it is on the wane. But beauty is never
quite absent from our eyes. Every face, every figure, suggests its own
right and sound estate. Our friends are not their own highest form.
But let the hearts they have agitated witness what power has lurked in
the traits of these structures of clay that pass and repass us! The
secret power of form over the imagination and affections transcends all
our philosophy. The first glance we meet may satisfy us that matter is
the vehicle of higher powers than its own, and that no laws of line
or surface can ever account for the inexhaustible expressiveness of
form. We see heads that turn on the pivot of the spine,--no more; and
we see heads that seem to turn on a pivot as deep as the axle of the
world,--so slow, and lazily, and great, they move. We see on the lip of
our companion the presence or absence of the great masters of thought
and poetry to his mind. We read in his brow, on meeting him after many
years, that he is where we left him, or that he has made great strides.
Whilst thus nature and the hints we draw from man suggest a true and
lofty life, a household equal to the beauty and grandeur of this world,
especially we learn the same lesson from those best relations to
individual men which the heart is always prompting us to form. Happy
will that house be in which the relations are formed from character,
after the highest, and not after the lowest order; the house in which
character marries, and not confusion and a miscellany of unavowable
motives. Then shall marriage be a covenant to secure to either party
the sweetness and honor of being a calm, continuing, inevitable
benefactor to the other. Yes, and the sufficient reply to the sceptic
who doubts the competence of man to elevate and to be elevated is in
that desire and power to stand in joyful and ennobling intercourse with
individuals, which makes the faith and the practice of all reasonable
men.
The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it. There is no
event greater in life than the appearance of new persons about our