Society and solitude: Twelve chapters
_soirées_ are tedious, and because the _soirée_ finds us tedious. A
backwoodsman, who had been sent to the university, told me that, when
he heard the best-bred young men at the law-school talk together, he
reckoned himself a boor; but whenever he caught them apart, and had one
to himself alone, then they were the boors, and he the better man. And
if we recall the rare hours when we encountered the best persons, we
then found ourselves, and then first society seemed to exist. That was
society, though in the transom of a brig, or on the Florida Keys.
A cold, sluggish blood thinks it has not facts enough to the purpose,
and must decline its turn in the conversation. But they who speak
have no more,--have less. ’Tis not new facts that avail, but the heat
to dissolve everybody’s facts. Heat puts you in right relation with
magazines of facts. The capital defect of cold, arid natures is the
want of animal spirits. They seem a power incredible, as if God should
raise the dead. The recluse witnesses what others perform by their
aid, with a kind of fear. It is as much out of his possibility as the
prowess of Cœur de Lion, or an Irishman’s day’s-work on the railroad.
’Tis said, the present and the future are always rivals. Animal spirits
constitute the power of the present, and their feats are like the
structure of a pyramid. Their result is a lord, a general, or a boon
companion. Before these, what a base mendicant is Memory with his
leathern badge! But this genial heat is latent in all constitutions,
and is disengaged only by the friction of society. As Bacon said of
manners, “To obtain them, it only needs not to despise them,” so we say
of animal spirits, that they are the spontaneous product of health and
of a social habit. “For behavior, men learn it, as they take diseases,
one of another.”
But the people are to be taken in very small doses. If solitude is
proud, so is society vulgar. In society, high advantages are set
down to the individual as disqualifications. We sink as easily as we
rise, through sympathy. So many men whom I know are degraded by their
sympathies, their native aims being high enough, but their relation
all too tender to the gross people about them. Men cannot afford to
live together on their merits, and they adjust themselves by their
demerits,--by their love of gossip, or by sheer tolerance and animal
good-nature. They untune and dissipate the brave aspirant.
The remedy is, to reinforce each of these moods from the other.
Conversation will not corrupt us, if we come to the assembly in our
own garb and speech, and with the energy of health to select what
is ours and reject what is not. Society we must have; but let it be
society, and not exchanging news, or eating from the same dish. Is it
society to sit in one of your chairs? I cannot go to the houses of my
nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone. Society exists by
chemical affinity, and not otherwise.
Put any company of people together with freedom for conversation, and a
rapid self-distribution takes place, into sets and pairs. The best are
accused of exclusiveness. It would be more true to say, they separate
as oil from water, as children from old people, without love or hatred
in the matter, each seeking his like; and any interference with the
affinities would produce constraint and suffocation. All conversation
is a magnetic experiment. I know that my friend can talk eloquently;
you know that he cannot articulate a sentence: we have seen him in
different company. Assort your party, or invite none. Put Stubbs and
Coleridge, Quintilian and Aunt Miriam, into pairs, and you make them
all wretched. ’Tis an extempore Sing-Sing built in a parlor. Leave them
to seek their own mates, and they will be as merry as sparrows.
A higher civility will re-establish in our customs a certain reverence
which we have lost. What to do with these brisk young men who break
through all fences, and make themselves at home in every house? I find
out in an instant if my companion does not want me, and ropes cannot
hold me when my welcome is gone. One would think that the affinities
would pronounce themselves with a surer reciprocity.
Here again, as so often, Nature delights to put us between extreme
antagonisms, and our safety is in the skill with which we keep the
diagonal line. Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal. We must
keep our head in the one and our hands in the other. The conditions are
met, if we keep our independence, yet do not lose our sympathy. These
wonderful horses need to be driven by fine hands. We require such a
solitude as shall hold us to its revelations when we are in the street
and in palaces; for most men are cowed in society, and say good things
to you in private, but will not stand to them in public. But let us
not be the victims of words. Society and solitude are deceptive names.
It is not the circumstance of seeing more or fewer people, but the
readiness of sympathy, that imports; and a sound mind will derive its
principles from insight, with ever a purer ascent to the sufficient and
absolute right, and will accept society as the natural element in which
they are to be applied.
CIVILIZATION.
CIVILIZATION.
A certain degree of progress from the rudest state in which man is
found,--a dweller in caves, or on trees, like an ape,--a cannibal,
and eater of pounded snails, worms, and offal,--a certain degree of
progress from this extreme is called Civilization. It is a vague,
complex name, of many degrees. Nobody has attempted a definition.
Mr. Guizot, writing a book on the subject, does not. It implies the
evolution of a highly organized man, brought to supreme delicacy of
sentiment, as in practical power, religion, liberty, sense of honor,
and taste. In the hesitation to define what it is, we usually suggest
it by negations. A nation that has no clothing, no iron, no alphabet,
no marriage, no arts of peace, no abstract thought, we call barbarous.
And after many arts are invented or imported, as among the Turks
and Moorish nations, it is often a little complaisant to call them
civilized.
Each nation grows after its own genius, and has a civilization of its
own. The Chinese and Japanese, though each complete in his way, is
different from the man of Madrid or the man of New York. The term
imports a mysterious progress. In the brutes is none; and in mankind
to-day the savage tribes are gradually extinguished rather than
civilized. The Indians of this country have not learned the white man’s
work; and in Africa, the negro of to-day is the negro of Herodotus.
In other races the growth is not arrested; but the like progress that
is made by a boy “when he cuts his eye-teeth,” as we say,--childish
illusions passing daily away, and he seeing things really and
comprehensively,--is made by tribes. It is the learning the secret of
cumulative power, of advancing on one’s self. It implies a facility
of association, power to compare, the ceasing from fixed ideas. The
Indian is gloomy and distressed when urged to depart from his habits
and traditions. He is overpowered by the gaze of the white, and his eye
sinks. The occasion of one of these starts of growth is always some
novelty that astounds the mind, and provokes it to dare to change. Thus
there is a Cadmus, a Pytheas, a Manco Capac at the beginning of each
improvement,--some superior foreigner importing new and wonderful arts,
and teaching them. Of course, he must not know too much, but must have
the sympathy, language, and gods of those he would inform. But chiefly
the sea-shore has been the point of departure to knowledge, as to
commerce. The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the
most. The power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him
very fast, and the change of shores and population clears his head of
much nonsense of his wigwam.
Where shall we begin or end the list of those feats of liberty and
wit, each of which feats made an epoch of history? Thus, the effect
of a framed or stone house is immense on the tranquillity, power, and
refinement of the builder. A man in a cave or in a camp, a nomad,
will die with no more estate than the wolf or the horse leaves. But
so simple a labor as a house being achieved, his chief enemies are
kept at bay. He is safe from the teeth of wild animals, from frost,
sun-stroke, and weather; and fine faculties begin to yield their fine
harvest. Invention and art are born, manners and social beauty and
delight. ’Tis wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log-hut on the
frontier. You would think they found it under a pine-stump. With it
comes a Latin grammar,--and one of those tow-head boys has written a
hymn on Sunday. Now let colleges, now let senates take heed! for here
is one who, opening these fine tastes on the basis of the pioneer’s
iron constitution, will gather all their laurels in his strong hands.
When the Indian trail gets widened, graded, and bridged to a good
road, there is a benefactor, there is a missionary, a pacificator,
a wealth-bringer, a maker of markets, a vent for industry. Another
step in civility is the change from war, hunting, and pasturage to
agriculture. Our Scandinavian forefathers have left us a significant
legend to convey their sense of the importance of this step. “There
was once a giantess who had a daughter, and the child saw a husbandman
ploughing in the field. Then she ran and picked him up with her finger
and thumb, and put him and his plough and his oxen into her apron, and
carried them to her mother, and said, ‘Mother, what sort of a beetle is
this that I found wriggling in the sand?’ But the mother said, ‘Put it
away, my child; we must begone out of this land, for these people will
dwell in it.’” Another success is the post-office, with its educating
energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious
sentiment in mankind; so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or
gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea, over land, and comes to
its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a
fine metre of civilization.
The division of labor, the multiplication of the arts of peace, which
is nothing but a large allowance to each man to choose his work
according to his faculty,--to live by his better hand,--fills the State
with useful and happy laborers; and they, creating demand by the very
temptation of their productions, are rapidly and surely rewarded by
good sale: and what a police and ten commandments their work thus
becomes. So true is Dr. Johnson’s remark that “men are seldom more
innocently employed than when they are making money.”
The skilful combinations of civil government, though they usually
follow natural leadings, as the lines of race, language, religion, and
territory, yet require wisdom and conduct in the rulers, and in their
result delight the imagination. “We see insurmountable multitudes
obeying, in opposition to their strongest passions, the restraints
of a power which they scarcely perceive, and the crimes of a single
individual marked and punished at the distance of half the earth.”[A]
Right position of woman in the State is another index. Poverty and
industry with a healthy mind read very easily the laws of humanity, and
love them: place the sexes in right relations of mutual respect, and
a severe morality gives that essential charm to woman which educates
all that is delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing, breeds courtesy
and learning, conversation and wit, in her rough mate; so that I have
thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good
women.
Another measure of culture is the diffusion of knowledge, overrunning
all the old barriers of caste, and, by the cheap press, bringing the