Society and solitude: Twelve chapters
safest course.” Now, though I am by no means sure that the reader will
assent to all my propositions, yet I think we shall agree in my first
rule for success,--that we shall drop the brag and the advertisement,
and take Michel Angelo’s course, “to confide in one’s self, and be
something of worth and value.”
Each man has an aptitude born with him to do easily some feat
impossible to any other. Do your work. I have to say this often, but
nature says it oftener. ’Tis clownish to insist on doing all with
one’s own hands, as if every man should build his own clumsy house,
forge his hammer, and bake his dough; but he is to dare to do what
he can do best; not help others as they would direct him, but as he
knows his helpful power to be. To do otherwise is to neutralize all
those extraordinary special talents distributed among men. Yet, whilst
this self-truth is essential to the exhibition of the world and to the
growth and glory of each mind, it is rare to find a man who believes
his own thought or who speaks that which he was created to say. As
nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain-dealing, so
nothing is more rare in any man than an act of his own. Any work looks
wonderful to him, except that which he can do. We do not believe our
own thought; we must serve somebody; we must quote somebody; we dote
on the old and the distant; we are tickled by great names; we import
the religion of other nations; we quote their opinions; we cite their
laws. The gravest and learnedest courts in this country shudder to face
a new question, and will wait months and years for a case to occur that
can be tortured into a precedent, and thus throw on a bolder party the
_onus_ of an initiative. Thus we do not carry a counsel in our breasts,
or do not know it; and because we cannot shake off from our shoes this
dust of Europe and Asia, the world seems to be born old, society is
under a spell, every man is a borrower and a mimic, life is theatrical,
and literature a quotation; and hence that depression of spirits, that
furrow of care, said to mark every American brow.
Self-trust is the first secret of success, the belief that, if you are
here, the authorities of the universe put you here, and for cause, or
with some task strictly appointed you in your constitution, and so
long as you work at that you are well and successful. It by no means
consists in rushing prematurely to a showy feat that shall catch the
eye and satisfy spectators. It is enough if you work in the right
direction. So far from the performance being the real success, it is
clear that the success was much earlier than that, namely, when all the
feats that make our civility were the thoughts of good heads. The fame
of each discovery rightly attaches to the mind that made the formula
which contains all the details, and not to the manufacturers who now
make their gain by it; although the mob uniformly cheers the publisher,
and not the inventor. It is the dulness of the multitude that they
cannot see the house, in the ground-plan; the working, in the model of
the projector. Whilst it is a thought, though it were a new fuel, or
a new food, or the creation of agriculture, it is cried down; it is a
chimera: but when it is a fact, and comes in the shape of eight per
cent, ten per cent, a hundred per cent, they cry, ‘It is the voice of
God.’ Horatio Greenough, the sculptor, said to me of Robert Fulton’s
visit to Paris: “Fulton knocked at the door of Napoleon with steam,
and was rejected; and Napoleon lived long enough to know that he had
excluded a greater power than his own.”
Is there no loving of knowledge, and of art, and of our design, for
itself alone? Cannot we please ourselves with performing our work, or
gaining truth and power, without being praised for it? I gain my point,
I gain all points, if I can reach my companion with any statement
which teaches him his own worth. The sum of wisdom is, that the time
is never lost that is devoted to work. The good workman never says,
‘There, that will do’; but, ‘There, that is it: try it, and come again,
it will last always.’ If the artist, in whatever art, is well at work
on his own design, it signifies little that he does not yet find orders
or customers. I pronounce that young man happy who is content with
having acquired the skill which he had aimed at, and waits willingly
when the occasion of making it appreciated shall arrive, knowing well
that it will not loiter. The time your rival spends in dressing up his
work for effect, hastily, and for the market, you spend in study and
experiments towards real knowledge and efficiency. He has thereby sold
his picture or machine, or won the prize, or got the appointment; but
you have raised yourself into a higher school of art, and a few years
will show the advantage of the real master over the short popularity of
the showman. I know it is a nice point to discriminate this self-trust,
which is the pledge of all mental vigor and performance, from the
disease to which it is allied,--the exaggeration of the part which we
can play;--yet they are two things. But it is sanity to know, that,
over my talent or knack, and a million times better than any talent,
is the central intelligence which subordinates and uses all talents;
and it is only as a door into this, that any talent or the knowledge it
gives is of value. He only who comes into this central intelligence,
in which no egotism or exaggeration can be, comes into self-possession.
My next point is that, in the scale of powers, it is not talent, but
sensibility, which is best: talent confines, but the central life
puts us in relation to all. How often it seems the chief good to be
born with a cheerful temper, and well adjusted to the tone of the
human race. Such a man feels himself in harmony, and conscious by
his receptivity of an infinite strength. Like Alfred, “good fortune
accompanies him like a gift of God.” Feel yourself, and be not daunted
by things. ’Tis the fulness of man that runs over into objects, and
makes his Bibles and Shakspeares and Homers so great. The joyful reader
borrows of his own ideas to fill their faulty outline, and knows not
that he borrows and gives.
There is something of poverty in our criticism. We assume that there
are few great men, all the rest are little; that there is but one
Homer, but one Shakspeare, one Newton, one Socrates. But the soul in
her beaming hour does not acknowledge these usurpations. We should know
how to praise Socrates, or Plato, or Saint John, without impoverishing
us. In good hours we do not find Shakspeare or Homer over-great,--only
to have been translators of the happy present,--and every man and woman
divine possibilities. ’Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a
good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem
confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for
his ear.
The light by which we see in this world comes out from the soul of
the observer. Wherever any noble sentiment dwelt, it made the faces
and houses around to shine. Nay, the powers of this busy brain are
miraculous and illimitable. Therein are the rules and formulas by which
the whole empire of matter is worked. There is no prosperity, trade,
art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it
home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.
Is all life a surface affair? ’Tis curious, but our difference of wit
appears to be only a difference of impressionability, or power to
appreciate faint, fainter, and infinitely faintest voices and visions.
When the scholar or the writer has pumped his brain for thoughts and
verses, and then comes abroad into Nature, has he never found that
there is a better poetry hinted in a boy’s whistle of a tune, or in
the piping of a sparrow, than in all his literary results? We call
it health. What is so admirable as the health of youth?--with his
long days because his eyes are good, and brisk circulations keep him
warm in cold rooms, and he loves books that speak to the imagination;
and he can read Plato, covered to his chin with a cloak in a cold
upper chamber, though he should associate the Dialogues ever after
with a woollen smell. ’Tis the bane of life that natural effects are
continually crowded out, and artificial arrangements substituted.
We remember when, in early youth, the earth spoke and the heavens
glowed; when an evening, any evening, grim and wintry, sleet and snow,
was enough for us; the houses were in the air. Now it costs a rare
combination of clouds and lights to overcome the common and mean. What
is it we look for in the landscape, in sunsets and sunrises, in the sea
and the firmament? what but a compensation for the cramp and pettiness
of human performances? We bask in the day, and the mind finds somewhat
as great as itself. In Nature, all is large, massive repose. Remember
what befalls a city boy who goes for the first time into the October
woods. He is suddenly initiated into a pomp and glory that brings to
pass for him the dreams of romance. He is the king he dreamed he was;
he walks through tents of gold, through bowers of crimson, porphyry,
and topaz, pavilion on pavilion, garlanded with vines, flowers, and
sunbeams, with incense and music, with so many hints to his astonished
senses; the leaves twinkle and pique and flatter him, and his eye and
step are tempted on by what hazy distances to happier solitudes. All
this happiness he owes only to his finer perception. The owner of the
wood-lot finds only a number of discolored trees, and says, ‘They
ought to come down; they aren’t growing any better; they should be cut
and corded before spring.’
Wordsworth writes of the delights of the boy in Nature:--
“For never will come back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower.”
But I have just seen a man, well knowing what he spoke of, who told me
that the verse was not true for him; that his eyes opened as he grew
older, and that every spring was more beautiful to him than the last.
We live among gods of our own creation. Does that deep-toned bell,
which has shortened many a night of ill nerves, render to you nothing
but acoustic vibrations? Is the old church, which gave you the first
lessons of religious life, or the village school, or the college where
you first knew the dreams of fancy and joys of thought, only boards or
brick and mortar? Is the house in which you were born, or the house
in which your dearest friend lived, only a piece of real estate whose
value is covered by the Hartford insurance? You walk on the beach and
enjoy the animation of the picture. Scoop up a little water in the
hollow of your palm, take up a handful of shore sand; well, these are
the elements. What is the beach but acres of sand? What is the ocean
but cubic miles of water? a little more or less signifies nothing.
No, it is that this brute matter is part of somewhat not brute. It is
that the sand floor is held by spheral gravity, and bent to be a part
of the round globe, under the optical sky,--part of the astonishing
astronomy, and existing, at last, to moral ends and from moral causes.
The world is not made up to the eye of figures, that is, only half; it
is also made of color. How that element washes the universe with its
enchanting waves! The sculptor had ended his work, and behold a new
world of dream-like glory. ’Tis the last stroke of Nature; beyond color
she cannot go. In like manner, life is made up, not of knowledge only,
but of love also. If thought is form, sentiment is color. It clothes
the skeleton world with space, variety, and glow. The hues of sunset
make life great; so the affections make some little web of cottage and
fireside populous, important, and filling the main space in our history.