Society and solitude: Twelve chapters
in a tempest lash themselves to the mast and bulwarks of a ship, and
Nature employed certain illusions as her ties and straps,--a rattle,
a doll, an apple, for a child; skates, a river, a boat, a horse, a
gun, for the growing boy;--and I will not begin to name those of the
youth and adult, for they are numberless. Seldom and slowly the mask
falls, and the pupil is permitted to see that all is one stuff, cooked
and painted under many counterfeit appearances. Hume’s doctrine was
that the circumstances vary, the amount of happiness does not; that
the beggar cracking fleas in the sunshine under a hedge, and the duke
rolling by in his chariot, the girl equipped for her first ball, and
the orator returning triumphant from the debate, had different means,
but the same quantity of pleasant excitement.
This element of illusion lends all its force to hide the values of
present time. Who is he that does not always find himself doing
something less than his best task? “What are you doing?” “O, nothing;
I have been doing thus, or I shall do so or so, but now I am only--”
Ah! poor dupe, will you never slip out of the web of the master
juggler,--never learn that, as soon as the irrecoverable years have
woven their blue glory between to-day and us, these passing hours shall
glitter and draw us, as the wildest romance and the homes of beauty and
poetry? How difficult to deal erect with them! The events they bring,
their trade, entertainments, and gossip, their urgent work, all throw
dust in the eyes and distract attention. He is a strong man who can
look them in the eye, see through this juggle, feel their identity, and
keep his own; who can know surely that one will be like another to the
end of the world, nor permit love, or death, or politics, or money,
war, or pleasure, to draw him from his task.
The world is always equal to itself, and every man in moments of deeper
thought is apprised that he is repeating the experiences of the people
in the streets of Thebes or Byzantium. An everlasting Now reigns in
nature, which hangs the same roses on our bushes which charmed the
Roman and the Chaldæan in their hanging gardens. ‘To what end, then,’
he asks, ‘should I study languages, and traverse countries, to learn so
simple truths?’
History of ancient art, excavated cities, recovery of books and
inscriptions,--yes, the works were beautiful, and the history worth
knowing; and academies convene to settle the claims of the old schools.
What journeys and measurements,--Niebuhr and Müller and Layard,--to
identify the plain of Troy and Nimroud town! And your homage to Dante
costs you so much sailing; and to ascertain the discoverers of America
needs as much voyaging as the discovery cost. Poor child! that flexile
clay of which these old brothers moulded their admirable symbols was
not Persian, nor Memphian, nor Teutonic, nor local at all, but was
common lime and silex and water, and sunlight, the heat of the blood,
and the heaving of the lungs; it was that clay which thou heldest but
now in thy foolish hands, and threwest away to go and seek in vain in
sepulchres, mummy-pits, and old book-shops of Asia Minor, Egypt, and
England. It was the deep to-day which all men scorn; the rich poverty,
which men hate; the populous, all-loving solitude, which men quit
for the tattle of towns. HE lurks, _he_ hides,--_he_ who is success,
reality, joy, and power. One of the illusions is that the present hour
is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every
day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly,
until he knows that every day is Doomsday. ’Tis the old secret of the
gods that they come in low disguises. ’Tis the vulgar great who come
dizened with gold and jewels. Real kings hide away their crowns in
their wardrobes, and affect a plain and poor exterior. In the Norse
legend of our ancestors, Odin dwells in a fisher’s hut, and patches
a boat. In the Hindoo legends, Hari dwells a peasant among peasants.
In the Greek legend, Apollo lodges with the shepherds of Admetus; and
Jove liked to rusticate among the poor Ethiopians. So, in our history,
Jesus is born in a barn, and his twelve peers are fishermen. ’Tis the
very principle of science that Nature shows herself best in leasts;
’twas the maxim of Aristotle and Lucretius; and, in modern times, of
Swedenborg and of Hahnemann. The order of changes in the egg determines
the age of fossil strata. So it was the rule of our poets, in the
legends of fairy lore, that the fairies largest in power were the least
in size. In the Christian graces, humility stands highest of all, in
the form of the Madonna; and in life, this is the secret of the wise.
We owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the
common, and showing us that divinities are sitting disguised in the
seeming gang of gypsies and pedlers. In daily life, what distinguishes
the master is the using those materials he has, instead of looking
about for what are more renowned, or what others have used well. “A
general,” said Bonaparte, “always has troops enough, if he only knows
how to employ those he has, and bivouacs with them.” Do not refuse
the employment which the hour brings you, for one more ambitious. The
highest heaven of wisdom is alike near from every point, and thou must
find it, if at all, by methods native to thyself alone.
That work is ever the more pleasant to the imagination which is not now
required. How wistfully, when we have promised to attend the working
committee, we look at the distant hills and their seductions!
The use of history is to give value to the present hour and its duty.
That is good which commends to me my country, my climate, my means
and materials, my associates. I knew a man in a certain religious
exaltation, who “thought it an honor to wash his own face.” He seemed
to me more sane than those who hold themselves cheap.
Zoölogists may deny that horse-hairs in the water change to worms; but
I find that whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes. The
reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment.
Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present
moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they
hated and defied.
Another illusion is, that there is not time enough for our work. Yet
we might reflect that though many creatures eat from one dish, each,
according to its constitution, assimilates from the elements what
belongs to it, whether time, or space, or light, or water, or food. A
snake converts whatever prey the meadow yields him into snake; a fox,
into fox; and Peter and John are working up all existence into Peter
and John. A poor Indian chief of the Six Nations of New York made a
wiser reply than any philosopher, to some one complaining that he had
not enough time. “Well,” said Red Jacket, “I suppose you have all there
is.”
A third illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a decade,
a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says, “God works
in moments,”--“_En peu d’heure Dieu labeure_.” We ask for long life,
but ’tis deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of
time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily long. Moments
of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,--what ample
borrowers of eternity they are! Life culminates and concentrates; and
Homer said, “The gods ever give to mortals their apportioned share of
reason only on one day.”
I am of the opinion of the poet Wordsworth, “that there is no real
happiness in this life, but in intellect and virtue.” I am of the
opinion of Pliny, “that, whilst we are musing on these things, we are
adding to the length of our lives.” I am of the opinion of Glauco, who
said, “The measure of life, O Socrates, is, with the wise, the speaking
and hearing such discourses as yours.”
He only can enrich me who can recommend to me the space between sun
and sun. ’Tis the measure of a man,--his apprehension of a day. For
we do not listen with the best regard to the verses of a man who is
only a poet, nor to his problems, if he is only an algebraist; but if
a man is at once acquainted with the geometric foundations of things
and with their festal splendor, his poetry is exact and his arithmetic
musical. And him I reckon the most learned scholar, not who can unearth
for me the buried dynasties of Sesostris and Ptolemy, the Sothiac era,
the Olympiads and consulships, but who can unfold the theory of this
particular Wednesday. Can he uncover the ligaments concealed from
all but piety, which attach the dull men and things we know to the
First Cause? These passing fifteen minutes, men think, are time, not
eternity; are low and subaltern, are but hope or memory, that is, the
way _to_ or the way _from_ welfare, but not welfare. Can he show their
tie? That interpreter shall guide us from a menial and eleemosynary
existence into riches and stability. He dignifies the place where he
is. This mendicant America, this curious, peering, itinerant, imitative
America, studious of Greece and Rome, of England and Germany, will
take off its dusty shoes, will take off its glazed traveller’s-cap,
and sit at home with repose and deep joy on its face. The world has no
such landscape, the aeons of history no such hour, the future no equal
second opportunity. Now let poets sing! now let arts unfold!
One more view remains. But life is good only when it is magical and
musical, a perfect timing and consent, and when we do not anatomize
it. You must treat the days respectfully, you must be a day yourself,
and not interrogate it like a college professor. The world is
enigmatical,--everything said, and everything known or done,--and must
not be taken literally, but genially. We must be at the top of our
condition to understand anything rightly. You must hear the bird’s
song without attempting to render it into nouns and verbs. Cannot we be
a little abstemious and obedient? Cannot we let the morning be?
Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight
lines. I remember well the foreign scholar who made a week of my youth
happy by his visit. “The savages in the islands,” he said, “delight to
play with the surf, coming in on the top of the rollers, then swimming
out again, and repeat the delicious manœuvre for hours. Well, human
life is made up of such transits. There can be no greatness without
abandonment. But here your very astronomy is an espionage. I dare not
go out of doors and see the moon and stars, but they seem to measure
my tasks, to ask how many lines or pages are finished since I saw them
last. Not so, as I told you, was it in Belleisle. The days at Belleisle
were all different, and only joined by a perfect love of the same
object. Just to fill the hour,--that is happiness. Fill my hour, ye
gods, so that I shall not say, whilst I have done this, ‘Behold, also,
an hour of my life is gone,’--but rather, ‘I have lived an hour.’”
We do not want factitious men, who can do any literary or professional
feat, as, to write poems, or advocate a cause, or carry a measure, for
money; or turn their ability indifferently in any particular direction
by the strong effort of will. No, what has been best done in the
world,--the works of genius,--cost nothing. There is no painful effort,
but it is the spontaneous flowing of the thought. Shakspeare made his
Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest. Poems have been written between
sleeping and waking, irresponsibly. Fancy defines herself:
“Forms that men spy
With the half-shut eye
In the beams of the setting sun, am I.”
The masters painted for joy, and knew not that virtue had gone out
of them. They could not paint the like in cold blood. The masters of
English lyric wrote their songs so. It was a fine efflorescence of fine