Society and solitude: Twelve chapters
shoes, gloves, glasses, and gimlets; we have the calculus; we have the
newspaper, which does its best to make every square acre of land and
sea give an account of itself at your breakfast-table; we have money,
and paper money; we have language,--the finest tool of all, and nearest
to the mind. Much will have more. Man flatters himself that his command
over nature must increase. Things begin to obey him. We are to have the
balloon yet, and the next war will be fought in the air. We may yet
find a rose-water that will wash the negro white. He sees the skull of
the English race changing from its Saxon type under the exigencies of
American life.
Tantalus, who in old times was seen vainly trying to quench his thirst
with a flowing stream, which ebbed whenever he approached it, has been
seen again lately. He is in Paris, in New York, in Boston. He is now in
great spirits; thinks he shall reach it yet; thinks he shall bottle the
wave. It is, however, getting a little doubtful. Things have an ugly
look still. No matter how many centuries of culture have preceded, the
new man always finds himself standing on the brink of chaos, always in
a crisis. Can anybody remember when the times were not hard, and money
not scarce? Can anybody remember when sensible men, and the right sort
of men, and the right sort of women, were plentiful? Tantalus begins to
think steam a delusion, and galvanism no better than it should be.
Many facts concur to show that we must look deeper for our salvation
than to steam, photographs, balloons, or astronomy. These tools
have some questionable properties. They are reagents. Machinery is
aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine. If
you do not use the tools, they use you. All tools are in one sense
edge-tools, and dangerous. A man builds a fine house; and now he has
a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and
keep it in repair, the rest of his days. A man has a reputation, and
is no longer free, but must respect that. A man makes a picture or
a book, and, if it succeeds, ’tis often the worse for him. I saw a
brave man the other day, hitherto as free as the hawk or the fox of
the wilderness, constructing his cabinet of drawers for shells, eggs,
minerals, and mounted birds. It was easy to see that he was amusing
himself with making pretty links for his own limbs.
Then the political economist thinks “’tis doubtful if all the
mechanical inventions that ever existed have lightened the day’s toil
of one human being.” The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine
is so perfect, the engineer is nobody. Every new step in improving the
engine restricts one more act of the engineer,--unteaches him. Once it
took Archimedes; now it only needs a fireman, and a boy to know the
coppers, to pull up the handles or mind the water-tank. But when the
engine breaks, they can do nothing.
What sickening details in the daily journals! I believe they have
ceased to publish the “Newgate Calendar” and the “Pirate’s Own Book”
since the family newspapers, namely, the New York Tribune and the
London Times, have quite superseded them in the freshness, as well
as the horror, of their records of crime. Politics were never more
corrupt and brutal; and Trade, that pride and darling of our ocean,
that educator of nations, that benefactor in spite of itself, ends in
shameful defaulting, bubble, and bankruptcy, all over the world.
Of course, we resort to the enumeration of his arts and inventions as a
measure of the worth of man. But if, with all his arts, he is a felon,
we cannot assume the mechanical skill or chemical resources as the
measure of worth. Let us try another gauge.
What have these arts done for the character, for the worth of mankind?
Are men better? ’Tis sometimes questioned whether morals have not
declined as the arts have ascended. Here are great arts and little men.
Here is greatness begotten of paltriness. We cannot trace the triumphs
of civilization to such benefactors as we wish. The greatest meliorator
of the world is selfish, huckstering Trade. Every victory over matter
ought to recommend to man the worth of his nature. But now one wonders
who did all this good. Look up the inventors. Each has his own knack;
his genius is in veins and spots. But the great, equal, symmetrical
brain, fed from a great heart, you shall not find. Every one has more
to hide than he has to show, or is lamed by his excellence. ’Tis too
plain that with the material power the moral progress has not kept
pace. It appears that we have not made a judicious investment. Works
and days were offered us, and we took works.
The new study of the Sanskrit has shown us the origin of the old names
of God,--Dyaus, Deus, Zeus, Zeu pater, Jupiter,--names of the sun,
still recognizable through the modifications of our vernacular words,
importing that the Day is the Divine Power and Manifestation, and
indicating that those ancient men, in their attempts to express the
Supreme Power of the universe, called him the Day, and that this name
was accepted by all the tribes.
Hesiod wrote a poem which he called “Works and Days,” in which he
marked the changes of the Greek year, instructing the husbandman at
the rising of what constellation he might safely sow, when to reap,
when to gather wood, when the sailor might launch his boat in security
from storms, and what admonitions of the planets he must heed. It is
full of economies for Grecian life, noting the proper age for marriage,
the rules of household thrift, and of hospitality. The poem is full of
piety as well as prudence, and is adapted to all meridians, by adding
the ethics of works and of days. But he has not pushed his study of
days into such inquiry and analysis as they invite.
A farmer said “he should like to have all the land that joined his
own.” Bonaparte, who had the same appetite, endeavored to make the
Mediterranean a French lake. Czar Alexander was more expansive, and
wished to call the Pacific _my ocean_; and the Americans were obliged
to resist his attempts to make it a close sea. But if he had the earth
for his pasture, and the sea for his pond, he would be a pauper still.
He only is rich who owns the day. There is no king, rich man, fairy,
or demon who possesses such power as that. The days are ever divine
as to the first Aryans. They are of the least pretension, and of the
greatest capacity, of anything that exists. They come and go like
muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but
they say nothing; and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry
them as silently away.
How the day fits itself to the mind, winds itself round it like a fine
drapery, clothing all its fancies! Any holiday communicates to us its
color. We wear its cockade and favors in our humor. Remember what
boys think in the morning of “Election day,” of the Fourth of July,
of Thanksgiving or Christmas. The very stars in their courses wink
to them of nuts and cakes, bonbons, presents, and fireworks. Cannot
memory still descry the old school-house and its porch, somewhat hacked
by jack-knives, where you spun tops and snapped marbles; and do you
not recall that life was then calendared by moments, threw itself
into nervous knots or glittering hours, even as now, and not spread
itself abroad an equable felicity? In college terms, and in years
that followed, the young graduate, when the Commencement anniversary
returned, though he were in a swamp, would see a festive light, and
find the air faintly echoing with plausive academic thunders. In
solitude and in the country, what dignity distinguishes the holy time!
The old Sabbath, or Seventh Day, white with the religions of unknown
thousands of years, when this hallowed hour dawns out of the deep,--a
clean page, which the wise may inscribe with truth, whilst the savage
scrawls it with fetishes,--the cathedral music of history breathes
through it a psalm to our solitude.
So, in the common experience of the scholar, the weathers fit his
moods. A thousand tunes the variable wind plays, a thousand spectacles
it brings, and each is the frame or dwelling of a new spirit. I used
formerly to choose my time with some nicety for each favorite book.
One author is good for winter, and one for the dog-days. The scholar
must look long for the right hour for Plato’s Timæus. At last the elect
morning arrives, the early dawn,--a few lights conspicuous in the
heaven, as of a world just created and still becoming,--and in its wide
leisures we dare open that book.
There are days when the great are near us, when there is no frown on
their brow, no condescension even; when they take us by the hand, and
we share their thought. There are days which are the carnival of the
year. The angels assume flesh, and repeatedly become visible. The
imagination of the gods is excited, and rushes on every side into
forms. Yesterday not a bird peeped; the world was barren, peaked,
and pining: to-day ’tis inconceivably populous; creation swarms and
meliorates.
The days are made on a loom whereof the warp and woof are past and
future time. They are majestically dressed, as if every god brought
a thread to the skyey web. ’Tis pitiful the things by which we are
rich or poor,--a matter of coins, coats, and carpets, a little more
or less stone, or wood, or paint, the fashion of a cloak or hat; like
the luck of naked Indians, of whom one is proud in the possession of
a glass bead or a red feather, and the rest miserable in the want
of it. But the treasures which Nature spent itself to amass,--the
secular, refined, composite anatomy of man,--which all strata go to
form, which the prior races, from infusory and saurian, existed to
ripen; the surrounding plastic natures; the earth with its foods; the
intellectual, temperamenting air; the sea with its invitations; the
heaven deep with worlds; and the answering brain and nervous structure
replying to these; the eye that looketh into the deeps, which again
look back to the eye,--abyss to abyss;--these, not like a glass bead,
or the coins or carpets, are given immeasurably to all.
This miracle is hurled into every beggar’s hands. The blue sky is a
covering for a market, and for the cherubim and seraphim. The sky
is the varnish or glory with which the Artist has washed the whole
work,--the verge or confines of matter and spirit. Nature could no
farther go. Could our happiest dream come to pass in solid fact,--could
a power open our eyes to behold “millions of spiritual creatures walk
the earth,”--I believe I should find that mid-plain on which they
moved floored beneath and arched above with the same web of blue depth
which weaves itself over me now, as I trudge the streets on my affairs.
’Tis singular that our rich English language should have no word to
denote the face of the world. _Kinde_ was the old English term, which,
however, filled only half the range of our fine Latin word, with its
delicate future tense,--_natura_, _about to be born_, or what German
philosophy denotes as a _becoming_. But nothing expresses that power
which seems to work for beauty alone. The Greek _Kosmos_ did; and
therefore, with great propriety, Humboldt entitles his book, which
recounts the last results of science, _Cosmos_.
Such are the days,--the earth is the cup, the sky is the cover, of the
immense bounty of nature which is offered us for our daily aliment; but
what a force of _illusion_ begins life with us, and attends us to the
end! We are coaxed, flattered, and duped, from morn to eve, from birth
to death; and where is the old eye that ever saw through the deception?
The Hindoos represent Maia, the illusory energy of Vishnu, as one of
his principal attributes. As if, in this gale of warring elements,
which life is, it was necessary to bind souls to human life as mariners