Society and solitude: Twelve chapters
The fundamental fact in our metaphysic constitution is the
correspondence of man to the world, so that every change in that
writes a record in the mind. The mind yields sympathetically to the
tendencies or law which stream through things, and make the order of
nature; and in the perfection of this correspondence or expressiveness,
the health and force of man consist. If we follow this hint into our
intellectual education, we shall find that it is not propositions, not
new dogmas and a logical exposition of the world, that are our first
need; but to watch and tenderly cherish the intellectual and moral
sensibilities, those fountains of right thought, and woo them to stay
and make their home with us. Whilst they abide with us, we shall not
think amiss. Our perception far outruns our talent. We bring a welcome
to the highest lessons of religion and of poetry out of all proportion
beyond our skill to teach. And, further, the great hearing and sympathy
of men is more true and wise than their speaking is wont to be. A deep
sympathy is what we require for any student of the mind; for the chief
difference between man and man is a difference of impressionability.
Aristotle, or Bacon, or Kant propound some maxim which is the key-note
of philosophy thenceforward. But I am more interested to know, that,
when at last they have hurled out their grand word, it is only some
familiar experience of every man in the street. If it be not, it will
never be heard of again.
Ah! if one could keep this sensibility, and live in the happy sufficing
present, and find the day and its cheap means contenting, which
only ask receptivity in you, and no strained exertion and cankering
ambition, overstimulating to be at the head of your class and the head
of society, and to have distinction and laurels and consumption! We are
not strong by our power to penetrate, but by our relatedness. The world
is enlarged for us, not by new objects, but by finding more affinities
and potencies in those we have.
This sensibility appears in the homage to beauty which exalts the
faculties of youth, in the power which form and color exert upon
the soul; when we see eyes that are a compliment to the human race,
features that explain the Phidian sculpture. Fontenelle said: “There
are three things about which I have curiosity, though I know nothing of
them,--music, poetry, and love.” The great doctors of this science are
the greatest men,--Dante, Petrarch, Michel Angelo, and Shakspeare. The
wise Socrates treats this matter with a certain archness, yet with very
marked expressions. “I am always,” he says, “asserting that I happen to
know, I may say, nothing but a mere trifle relating to matters of love;
yet in that kind of learning I lay claim to being more skilled than
any one man of the past or present time.” They may well speak in this
uncertain manner of their knowledge, and in this confident manner of
their will, for the secret of it is hard to detect, so deep it is; and
yet genius is measured by its skill in this science.
Who is he in youth, or in maturity, or even in old age, who does not
like to hear of those sensibilities which turn curled heads round at
church, and send wonderful eye-beams across assemblies, from one to
one, never missing in the thickest crowd. The keen statist reckons by
tens and hundreds; the genial man is interested in every slipper that
comes into the assembly. The passion, alike everywhere, creeps under
the snows of Scandinavia, under the fires of the equator, and swims in
the seas of Polynesia. Lofn is as puissant a divinity in the Norse Edda
as Camadeva in the red vault of India, Eros in the Greek, or Cupid in
the Latin heaven. And what is specially true of love is, that it is a
state of extreme impressionability; the lover has more senses and finer
senses than others; his eye and ear are telegraphs; he reads omens on
the flower, and cloud, and face, and form, and gesture, and reads them
aright. In his surprise at the sudden and entire understanding that is
between him and the beloved person, it occurs to him that they might
somehow meet independently of time and place. How delicious the belief
that he could elude all guards, precautions, ceremonies, means, and
delays, and hold instant and sempiternal communication! In solitude, in
banishment, the hope returned, and the experiment was eagerly tried.
The supernal powers seem to take his part. What was on his lips to say
is uttered by his friend. When he went abroad, he met, by wonderful
casualties, the one person he sought. If in his walk he chanced to look
back, his friend was walking behind him. And it has happened that the
artist has often drawn in his pictures the face of the future wife whom
he had not yet seen.
But also in complacences, nowise so strict as this of the passion, the
man of sensibility counts it a delight only to hear a child’s voice
fully addressed to him, or to see the beautiful manners of the youth
of either sex. When the event is past and remote, how insignificant
the greatest compared with the piquancy of the present! To-day at the
school examination the professor interrogates Sylvina in the history
class about Odoacer and Alaric. Sylvina can’t remember, but suggests
that Odoacer was defeated; and the professor tartly replies, “No, he
defeated the Romans.” But ’tis plain to the visitor, that ’tis of no
importance at all about Odoacer, and ’tis a great deal of importance
about Sylvina; and if she says he was defeated, why he had better,
a great deal, have been defeated, than give her a moment’s annoy.
Odoacer, if there was a particle of the gentleman in him, would have
said, Let me be defeated a thousand times.
And as our tenderness for youth and beauty gives a new and just
importance to their fresh and manifold claims, so the like sensibility
gives welcome to all excellence, has eyes and hospitality for merit in
corners. An Englishman of marked character and talent, who had brought
with him hither one or two friends and a library of mystics, assured me
that nobody and nothing of possible interest was left in England,--he
had brought all that was alive away. I was forced to reply: “No, next
door to you, probably, on the other side of the partition in the same
house, was a greater man than any you had seen.” Every man has a
history worth knowing, if he could tell it, or if we could draw it from
him. Character and wit have their own magnetism. Send a deep man into
any town, and he will find another deep man there, unknown hitherto
to his neighbors. That is the great happiness of life,--to add to our
high acquaintances. The very law of averages might have assured you
that there will be in every hundred heads, say ten or five good heads.
Morals are generated as the atmosphere is. ’Tis a secret, the genesis
of either; but the springs of justice and courage do not fail any more
than salt or sulphur springs.
The world is always opulent, the oracles are never silent; but
the receiver must by a happy temperance be brought to that top of
condition, that frolic health, that he can easily take and give these
fine communications. Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign
is cheerfulness,--an open and noble temper. There was never poet who
had not the heart in the right place. The old trouveur, Pons Capdueil,
wrote,--
“Oft have I heard, and deem the witness true,
Whom man delights in, God delights in too.”
All beauty warms the heart, is a sign of health, prosperity, and the
favor of God. Everything lasting and fit for men, the Divine Power
has marked with this stamp. What delights, what emancipates, not what
scares and pains us, is wise and good in speech and in the arts. For,
truly, the heart at the centre of the universe with every throb hurls
the flood of happiness into every artery, vein, and veinlet, so that
the whole system is inundated with the tides of joy. The plenty of the
poorest place is too great: the harvest cannot be gathered. Every sound
ends in music. The edge of every surface is tinged with prismatic rays.
One more trait of true success. The good mind chooses what is positive,
what is advancing,--embraces the affirmative. Our system is one of
poverty. ’Tis presumed, as I said, there is but one Shakspeare, one
Homer, one Jesus,--not that all are or shall be inspired. But we must
begin by affirming. Truth and goodness subsist forevermore. It is true
there is evil and good, night and day: but these are not equal. The day
is great and final. The night is for the day, but the day is not for
the night. What is this immortal demand for more, which belongs to our
constitution? this enormous ideal? There is no such critic and beggar
as this terrible Soul. No historical person begins to content us. We
know the satisfactoriness of justice, the sufficiency of truth. We
know the answer that leaves nothing to ask. We know the Spirit by its
victorious tone. The searching tests to apply to every new pretender
are amount and quality,--what does he add? and what is the state of
mind he leaves me in? Your theory is unimportant; but what new stock
you can add to humanity, or how high you can carry life? A man is a man
only as he makes life and nature happier to us.
I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition in all
points to the real and wholesome success. One adores public opinion,
the other private opinion; one fame, the other desert; one feats, the
other humility; one lucre, the other love; one monopoly, and the other
hospitality of mind.
We may apply this affirmative law to letters, to manners, to art,
to the decorations of our houses, etc. I do not find executions or
tortures or lazar-houses, or grisly photographs of the field on the day
after the battle fit subjects for cabinet pictures. I think that some
so-called “sacred subjects” must be treated with more genius than I
have seen in the masters of Italian or Spanish art to be right pictures
for houses and churches. Nature does not invite such exhibition. Nature
lays the ground-plan of each creature accurately,--sternly fit for
all his functions; then veils it scrupulously. See how carefully she
covers up the skeleton. The eye shall not see it: the sun shall not
shine on it. She weaves her tissues and integuments of flesh and skin
and hair and beautiful colors of the day over it, and forces death down
underground, and makes haste to cover it up with leaves and vines, and
wipes carefully out every trace by new creation. Who and what are you
that would lay the ghastly anatomy bare?
Don’t hang a dismal picture on the wall, and do not daub with sables
and glooms in your conversation. Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate
preacher. Don’t bewail and bemoan. Omit the negative propositions.
Nerve us with incessant affirmatives. Don’t waste yourself in
rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
When that is spoken which has a right to be spoken, the chatter and the
criticism will stop. Set down nothing that will not help somebody;
“For every gift of noble origin
Is breathed upon by Hope’s perpetual breath.”
The affirmative of affirmatives is love. As much love, so much
perception. As caloric to matter, so is love to mind; so it enlarges,
and so it empowers it. Good-will makes insight, as one finds his way
to the sea by embarking on a river. I have seen scores of people who
can silence me, but I seek one who shall make me forget or overcome the
frigidities and imbecilities into which I fall. The painter Giotto,
Vasari tells us, renewed art, because he put more goodness into his
heads. To awake in man and to raise the sense of worth, to educate his
feeling and judgment so that he shall scorn himself for a bad action,
that is the only aim.
’Tis cheap and easy to destroy. There is not a joyful boy or an