Society and solitude: Twelve chapters
powers; as was said of the letters of the Frenchwomen,--“the charming
accident of their more charming existence.” Then the poet is never the
poorer for his song. A song is no song unless the circumstance is free
and fine. If the singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no
way of escape, I had rather have none. Those only can sleep who do not
care to sleep; and those only write or speak best who do not too much
respect the writing or the speaking.
The same rule holds in science. The savant is often an amateur. His
performance is a memoir to the Academy on fish-worms, tadpoles, or
spiders’ legs; he observes as other academicians observe; he is
on stilts at a microscope, and,--his memoir finished and read and
printed,--he retreats into his routinary existence, which is quite
separate from his scientific. But in Newton, science was as easy as
breathing; he used the same wit to weigh the moon that he used to
buckle his shoes; and all his life was simple, wise, and majestic. So
was it in Archimedes,--always self-same, like the sky. In Linnæus, in
Franklin, the like sweetness and equality,--no stilts, no tiptoe;--and
their results are wholesome and memorable to all men.
In stripping time of its illusions, in seeking to find what is the
heart of the day, we come to the quality of the moment, and drop the
duration altogether. It is the depth at which we live, and not at all
the surface extension, that imports. We pierce to the eternity, of
which time is the flitting surface; and, really, the least acceleration
of thought, and the least increase of power of thought, make life
to seem and to be of vast duration. We call it time; but when that
acceleration and that deepening take effect, it acquires another and a
higher name.
There are people who do not need much experimenting; who, after years
of activity, say, we knew all this before; who love at first sight
and hate at first sight; discern the affinities and repulsions; who
do not care so much for conditions as others, for they are always in
one condition, and enjoy themselves; who dictate to others, and are
not dictated to; who in their consciousness of deserving success
constantly slight the ordinary means of attaining it; who have
self-existence and self-help; who are suffered to be themselves in
society; who are great in the present; who have no talents, or care not
to have them,--being that which was before talent, and shall be after
it, and of which talent seems only a tool;--this is character, the
highest name at which philosophy has arrived.
’Tis not important how the hero does this or this, but what he is. What
he is will appear in every gesture and syllable. In this way the moment
and the character are one.
’Tis a fine fable for the advantage of character over talent, the Greek
legend of the strife of Jove and Phœbus. Phœbus challenged the gods,
and said, “Who will outshoot the far-darting Apollo?” Zeus said, “I
will.” Mars shook the lots in his helmet, and that of Apollo leaped out
first. Apollo stretched his bow and shot his arrow into the extreme
west. Then Zeus arose, and with one stride cleared the whole distance,
and said, “Where shall I shoot? there is no space left.” So the
bowman’s prize was adjudged to him who drew no bow.
And this is the progress of every earnest mind; from the works of man
and the activity of the hands to a delight in the faculties which rule
them; from a respect to the works to a wise wonder at this mystic
element of time in which he is conditioned; from local skills and the
economy which reckons the amount of production _per_ hour to the finer
economy which respects the quality of what is done, and the right we
have to the work, or the fidelity with which it flows from ourselves;
then to the depth of thought it betrays, looking to its universality,
or, that its roots are in eternity, not in time. Then it flows from
character, that sublime health which values one moment as another, and
makes us great in all conditions, and is the only definition we have of
freedom and power.
BOOKS.
BOOKS.
It is easy to accuse books, and bad ones are easily found; and the best
are but records, and not the things recorded; and certainly there is
dilettanteism enough, and books that are merely neutral and do nothing
for us. In Plato’s “Gorgias,” Socrates says: “The shipmaster walks in
a modest garb near the sea, after bringing his passengers from Ægina
or from Pontus, not thinking he has done anything extraordinary, and
certainly knowing that his passengers are the same, and in no respect
better than when he took them on board.” So is it with books, for
the most part: they work no redemption in us. The bookseller might
certainly know that his customers are in no respect better for the
purchase and consumption of his wares. The volume is dear at a dollar,
and, after reading to weariness the lettered backs, we leave the shop
with a sigh, and learn, as I did, without surprise, of a surly bank
director, that in bank parlors they estimate all stocks of this kind as
rubbish.
But it is not less true that there are books which are of that
importance in a man’s private experience, as to verify for him the
fables of Cornelius Agrippa, of Michael Scott, or of the old Orpheus of
Thrace,--books which take rank in our life with parents and lovers and
passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary,
so authoritative,--books which are the work and the proof of faculties
so comprehensive, so nearly equal to the world which they paint, that,
though one shuts them with meaner ones, he feels his exclusion from
them to accuse his way of living.
Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of
the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil
countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results
of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and
inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette;
but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is
here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another
age.
We owe to books those general benefits which come from high
intellectual action. Thus, I think, we often owe to them the perception
of immortality. They impart sympathetic activity to the moral power.
Go with mean people, and you think life is mean. Then read Plutarch,
and the world is a proud place, peopled with men of positive quality,
with heroes and demigods standing around us, who will not let us sleep.
Then, they address the imagination: only poetry inspires poetry.
They become the organic culture of the time. College education is the
reading of certain books which the common sense of all scholars agrees
will represent the science already accumulated. If you know that,--for
instance in geometry, if you have read Euclid and Laplace,--your
opinion has some value; if you do not know these, you are not entitled
to give any opinion on the subject. Whenever any sceptic or bigot
claims to be heard on the questions of intellect and morals, we ask if
he is familiar with the books of Plato, where all his pert objections
have once for all been disposed of. If not, he has no right to our
time. Let him go and find himself answered there.
Meantime the colleges, whilst they provide us with libraries, furnish
no professor of books; and, I think, no chair is so much wanted. In a
library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they
are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes;
and though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty
centuries for us,--some of them,--and are eager to give us a sign, and
unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not
speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter has dressed them, like
battalions of infantry, in coat and jacket of one cut, by the thousand
and ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the right one is to be
computed by the arithmetical rule of Permutation and Combination,--not
a choice out of three caskets, but out of half a million caskets all
alike. But it happens in our experience, that in this lottery there
are at least fifty or a hundred blanks to a prize. It seems, then,
as if some charitable soul, after losing a great deal of time among
the false books, and alighting upon a few true ones which made him
happy and wise, would do a right act in naming those which have been
bridges or ships to carry him safely over dark morasses and barren
oceans, into the heart of sacred cities, into palaces and temples.
This would be best done by those great masters of books who from time
to time appear,--the Fabricii, the Seldens, Magliabecchis, Scaligers,
Mirandolas, Bayles, Johnsons, whose eyes sweep the whole horizon of
learning. But private readers, reading purely for love of the book,
would serve us by leaving each the shortest note of what he found.
There are books; and it is practicable to read them, because they are
so few. We look over with a sigh the monumental libraries of Paris, of
the Vatican, and the British Museum. In 1858, the number of printed
books in the Imperial Library at Paris was estimated at eight hundred
thousand volumes, with an annual increase of twelve thousand volumes;
so that the number of printed books extant to-day may easily exceed
a million. It is easy to count the number of pages which a diligent
man can read in a day, and the number of years which human life in
favorable circumstances allows to reading; and to demonstrate, that,
though he should read from dawn till dark, for sixty years, he must
die in the first alcoves. But nothing can be more deceptive than this
arithmetic, where none but a natural method is really pertinent. I
visit occasionally the Cambridge Library, and I can seldom go there
without renewing the conviction that the best of it all is already
within the four walls of my study at home. The inspection of the
catalogue brings me continually back to the few standard writers who
are on every private shelf; and to these it can afford only the most
slight and casual additions. The crowds and centuries of books are only
commentary and elucidation, echoes and weakeners of these few great
voices of Time.
The best rule of reading will be a method from nature, and not a
mechanical one of hours and pages. It holds each student to a pursuit
of his native aim, instead of a desultory miscellany. Let him read what
is proper to him, and not waste his memory on a crowd of mediocrities.
As whole nations have derived their culture from a single book,--as the
Bible has been the literature as well as the religion of large portions
of Europe,--as Hafiz was the eminent genius of the Persians, Confucius
of the Chinese, Cervantes of the Spaniards; so, perhaps, the human mind
would be a gainer, if all the secondary writers were lost,--say, in
England, all but Shakspeare, Milton, and Bacon,--through the profounder
study so drawn to those wonderful minds. With this pilot of his own
genius, let the student read one, or let him read many, he will read
advantageously. Dr. Johnson said: “Whilst you stand deliberating
which book your son shall read first, another boy has read both: read
anything five hours a day, and you will soon be learned.”
Nature is much our friend in this matter. Nature is always clarifying
her water and her wine. No filtration can be so perfect. She does the
same thing by books as by her gases and plants. There is always a
selection in writers, and then a selection from the selection. In the
first place, all books that get fairly into the vital air of the world
were written by the successful class, by the affirming and advancing
class, who utter what tens of thousands feel though they cannot say.