Society and solitude: Twelve chapters
hearth, except it be the progress of the character which draws them.
It has been finely added by Landor to his definition of the _great
man_, “It is he who can call together the most select company when it
pleases him.” A verse of the old Greek Menander remains, which runs in
translation:--
“Not on the store of sprightly wine,
Nor plenty of delicious meats,
Though generous Nature did design
To court us with perpetual treats,--
’Tis not on these we for content depend,
So much as on the shadow of a Friend.”
It is the happiness which, where it is truly known, postpones all other
satisfactions, and makes politics and commerce and churches cheap. For
we figure to ourselves,--do we not?--that when men shall meet as they
should, as states meet,--each a benefactor, a shower of falling stars,
so rich with deeds, with thoughts, with so much accomplishment,--it
shall be the festival of nature, which all things symbolize; and
perhaps Love is only the highest symbol of Friendship, as all other
things seem symbols of love. In the progress of each man’s character,
his relations to the best men, which at first seem only the romances of
youth, acquire a graver importance; and he will have learned the lesson
of life who is skilful in the ethics of friendship.
Beyond its primary ends of the conjugal, parental, and amicable
relations, the household should cherish the beautiful arts and the
sentiment of veneration.
* * * * *
1. Whatever brings the dweller into a finer life, what educates his
eye, or ear, or hand, whatever purifies and enlarges him, may well find
place there. And yet let him not think that a property in beautiful
objects is necessary to his apprehension of them, and seek to turn
his house into a museum. Rather let the noble practice of the Greeks
find place in our society, and let the creations of the plastic arts
be collected with care in galleries by the piety and taste of the
people, and yielded as freely as the sunlight to all. Meantime, be it
remembered, we are artists ourselves, and competitors, each one, with
Phidias and Raphael in the production of what is graceful or grand. The
fountain of beauty is the heart, and every generous thought illustrates
the walls of your chamber. Why should we owe our power of attracting
our friends to pictures and vases, to cameos and architecture? Why
should we convert ourselves into show-men and appendages to our fine
houses and our works of art? If by love and nobleness we take up into
ourselves the beauty we admire, we shall spend it again on all around
us. The man, the woman, needs not the embellishment of canvas and
marble, whose every act is a subject for the sculptor, and to whose eye
the gods and nymphs never appear ancient; for they know by heart the
whole instinct of majesty.
I do not undervalue the fine instruction which statues and pictures
give. But I think the public museum in each town will one day relieve
the private house of this charge of owning and exhibiting them. I
go to Rome and see on the walls of the Vatican the Transfiguration,
painted by Raphael, reckoned the first picture in the world; or in the
Sistine Chapel I see the grand sibyls and prophets, painted in fresco
by Michael Angelo,--which have every day now for three hundred years
inflamed the imagination and exalted the piety of what vast multitudes
of men of all nations! I wish to bring home to my children and my
friends copies of these admirable forms, which I can find in the shops
of the engravers; but I do not wish the vexation of owning them. I
wish to find in my own town a library and museum which is the property
of the town, where I can deposit this precious treasure, where I and
my children can see it from time to time, and where it has its proper
place among hundreds of such donations from other citizens who have
brought thither whatever articles they have judged to be in their
nature rather a public than a private property.
A collection of this kind, the property of each town, would dignify the
town, and we should love and respect our neighbors more. Obviously, it
would be easy for every town to discharge this truly municipal duty.
Every one of us would gladly contribute his share; and the more gladly,
the more considerable the institution had become.
* * * * *
2. Certainly, not aloof from this homage to beauty, but in strict
connection therewith, the house will come to be esteemed a Sanctuary.
The language of a ruder age has given to common law the maxim that
every man’s house is his castle: the progress of truth will make every
house a shrine. Will not man one day open his eyes and see how dear
he is to the soul of Nature,--how near it is to him? Will he not see,
through all he miscalls accident, that Law prevails for ever and ever;
that his private being is a part of it; that its home is in his own
unsounded heart; that his economy, his labor, his good and bad fortune,
his health and manners, are all a curious and exact demonstration in
miniature of the Genius of the Eternal Providence? When he perceives
the Law, he ceases to despond. Whilst he sees it, every thought and
act is raised, and becomes an act of religion. Does the consecration
of Sunday confess the desecration of the entire week? Does the
consecration of the church confess the profanation of the house? Let
us read the incantation backward. Let the man stand on his feet. Let
religion cease to be occasional; and the pulses of thought that go to
the borders of the universe, let them proceed from the bosom of the
Household.
These are the consolations,--these are the ends to which the household
is instituted and the rooftree stands. If these are sought, and in any
good degree attained, can the State, can commerce, can climate, can
the labor of many for one, yield anything better, or half as good?
Beside these aims, Society is weak and the State an intrusion. I think
that the heroism which at this day would make on us the impression
of Epaminondas and Phocion must be that of a domestic conqueror. He
who shall bravely and gracefully subdue this Gorgon of Convention and
Fashion, and show-men how to lead a clean, handsome, and heroic life
amid the beggarly elements of our cities and villages; whoso shall
teach me how to eat my meat and take my repose, and deal with men,
without any shame following, will restore the life of man to splendor,
and make his own name dear to all history.
FARMING.
FARMING.
The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his
part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity. He
stands close to nature; he obtains from the earth the bread and the
meat. The food which was not, he causes to be. The first farmer was
the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use
of land. Men do not like hard work, but every man has an exceptional
respect for tillage, and a feeling that this is the original calling of
his race, that he himself is only excused from it by some circumstance
which made him delegate it for a time to other hands. If he have
not some skill which recommends him to the farmer, some product for
which the farmer will give him corn, he must himself return into his
due place among the planters. And the profession has in all eyes its
ancient charm, as standing nearest to God, the first cause.
Then the beauty of nature, the tranquillity and innocence of the
countryman, his independence, and his pleasing arts,--the care of bees,
of poultry, of sheep, of cows, the dairy, the care of hay, of fruits,
of orchards and forests, and the reaction of these on the workman, in
giving him a strength and plain dignity, like the face and manners
of nature, all men acknowledge. All men keep the farm in reserve as
an asylum where, in case of mischance, to hide their poverty,--or a
solitude, if they do not succeed in society. And who knows how many
glances of remorse are turned this way from the bankrupts of trade,
from mortified pleaders in courts and senates, or from the victims
of idleness and pleasure? Poisoned by town life and town vices, the
sufferer resolves: ‘Well, my children, whom I have injured, shall go
back to the land, to be recruited and cured by that which should have
been my nursery, and now shall be their hospital.’
The farmer’s office is precise and important, but you must not try to
paint him in rose-color; you cannot make pretty compliments to fate and
gravitation, whose minister he is. He represents the necessities. It is
the beauty of the great economy of the world that makes his comeliness.
He bends to the order of the seasons, the weather, the soils and crops,
as the sails of a ship bend to the wind. He represents continuous hard
labor, year in, year out, and small gains. He is a slow person, timed
to nature, and not to city watches. He takes the pace of seasons,
plants, and chemistry. Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little
by little, she achieves her work. The lesson one learns in fishing,
yachting, hunting, or planting, is the manners of Nature; patience
with the delays of wind and sun, delays of the seasons, bad weather,
excess or lack of water,--patience with the slowness of our feet, with
the parsimony of our strength, with the largeness of sea and land we
must traverse, etc. The farmer times himself to Nature, and acquires
that livelong patience which belongs to her. Slow, narrow man, his rule
is, that the earth shall feed and clothe him; and he must wait for his
crop to grow. His entertainments, his liberties, and his spending must
be on a farmer’s scale, and not on a merchant’s. It were as false for
farmers to use a wholesale and massy expense, as for states to use a
minute economy. But if thus pinched on one side, he has compensatory
advantages. He is permanent, clings to his land as the rocks do. In
the town where I live, farms remain in the same families for seven and
eight generations; and most of the first settlers (in 1635), should
they reappear on the farms to-day, would find their own blood and names
still in possession. And the like fact holds in the surrounding towns.
This hard work will always be done by one kind of man; not by scheming
speculators, nor by soldiers, nor professors, nor readers of Tennyson;
but by men of endurance,--deep-chested, long-winded, tough, slow and
sure, and timely. The farmer has a great health, and the appetite of
health, and means to his end: he has broad lands for his home, wood
to burn great fires, plenty of plain food; his milk, at least, is
unwatered; and for sleep, he has cheaper and better and more of it than
citizens.
He has grave trusts confided to him. In the great household of Nature,
the farmer stands at the door of the bread-room, and weighs to each
his loaf. It is for him to say whether men shall marry or not. Early
marriages and the number of births are indissolubly connected with
abundance of food; or, as Burke said, “Man breeds at the mouth.” Then
he is the Board of Quarantine. The farmer is a hoarded capital of
health, as the farm is the capital of wealth; and it is from him that
the health and power, moral and intellectual, of the cities came.
The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who
are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics, or
practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius are the children or
grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their
fathers’ hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows, in poverty,
necessity, and darkness.
He is the continuous benefactor. He who digs a well, constructs a stone
fountain, plants a grove of trees by the roadside, plants an orchard,
builds a durable house, reclaims a swamp, or so much as puts a stone