Contents


Introduction
  Life of Emerson
  Critical Opinions
  Chronological List of Principal Works

The American Scholar

Compensation

Self Reliance

Friendship

Heroism

Manners

Gifts

Nature

Shakespeare; Or, The Poet

Prudence

Circles

Life of Emerson


Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, May 25, 1803. He was descended
from a long line of New England ministers, men of refinement and
education. As a school-boy he was quiet and retiring, reading a great
deal, but not paying much attention to his lessons. He entered Harvard
at the early age of fourteen, but never attained a high rank there,
although he took a prize for an essay on Socrates, and was made class
poet after several others had declined. Next to his reserve and the
faultless propriety of his conduct, his contemporaries at college
seemed most impressed by the great maturity of his mind. Emerson
appears never to have been really a boy. He was always serene and
thoughtful, impressing all who knew him with that spirituality which
was his most distinguishing characteristic.

After graduating from college he taught school for a time, and then
entered the Harvard Divinity School under Dr. Channing, the great
Unitarian preacher. Although he was not strong enough to attend all
the lectures of the divinity course, the college authorities deemed
the name Emerson sufficient passport to the ministry. He was
accordingly "approbated to preach" by the Middlesex Association of
Ministers on October 10, 1826. As a preacher, Emerson was interesting,
though not particularly original. His talent seems to have been in
giving new meaning to the old truths of religion. One of his hearers
has said: "In looking back on his preaching I find he has impressed
truths to which I always assented in such a manner as to make them
appear new, like a clearer revelation." Although his sermons were
always couched in scriptural language, they were touched with the
light of that genius which avoids the conventional and commonplace. In
his other pastoral duties Emerson was not quite so successful. It is
characteristic of his deep humanity and his dislike for all fuss and
commonplace that he appeared to least advantage at a funeral. A
connoisseur in such matters, an old sexton, once remarked that on such
occasions "he did not appear at ease at all. To tell the truth, in my
opinion, that young man was not born to be a minister."

Emerson did not long remain a minister. In 1832 he preached a sermon
in which he announced certain views in regard to the communion service
which were disapproved by a large part of his congregation. He found
it impossible to continue preaching, and, with the most friendly
feelings on both sides, he parted from his congregation.

A few months later (1833) he went to Europe for a short year of
travel. While abroad, he visited Walter Savage Landor, Coleridge and
Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle. This visit to Carlyle was to both men
a most interesting experience. They parted feeling that they had much
intellectually in common. This belief fostered a sympathy which, by
the time they had discovered how different they really were, had grown
so strong a habit that they always kept up their intimacy. This year
of travel opened Emerson's eyes to many things of which he had
previously been ignorant; he had profited by detachment from the
concerns of a limited community and an isolated church.

After his return he began to find his true field of activity in the
lecture-hall, and delivered a number of addresses in Boston and its
vicinity. While thus coming before the open public on the lecture
platform, he was all the time preparing the treatise which was to
embody all the quintessential elements of his philosophical doctrine.
This was the essay _Nature_, which was published in 1836. By its
conception of external Nature as an incarnation of the Divine Mind it
struck the fundamental principle of Emerson's religious belief. The
essay had a very small circulation at first, though later it became
widely known.

In the winter of 1836 Emerson followed up his discourse on Nature by a
course of twelve lectures on the "Philosophy of History," a
considerable portion of which eventually became embodied in his
essays. The next year (1837) was the year of the delivery of the _Man
Thinking, or the American Scholar_ address before the Phi Beta Kappa
Society at Cambridge.

This society, composed of the first twenty-five men in each class
graduating from college, has annual meetings which have called forth
the best efforts of many distinguished scholars and thinkers.
Emerson's address was listened to with the most profound interest. It
declared a sort of intellectual independence for America. Henceforth
we were to be emancipated from clogging foreign influences, and a
national literature was to expand under the fostering care of the
Republic.

These two discourses, _Nature_ and _The American Scholar_, strike the
keynote of Emerson's philosophical, poetical, and moral teachings. In
fact he had, as every great teacher has, only a limited number of
principles and theories to teach. These principles of life can all be
enumerated in twenty words--self-reliance, culture, intellectual and
moral independence, the divinity of nature and man, the necessity of
labor, and high ideals.

Emerson spent the latter part of his life in lecturing and in literary
work. His son, Dr. Edward Emerson, gave an interesting account of how
these lectures were constructed. "All through his life he kept a
journal. This book, he said, was his 'Savings Bank.' The thoughts thus
received and garnered in his journals were indexed, and a great many
of them appeared in his published works. They were religiously set
down just as they came, in no order except chronological, but later
they were grouped, enlarged or pruned, illustrated, worked into a
lecture or discourse, and, after having in this capacity undergone
repeated testing and rearranging, were finally carefully sifted and
more rigidly pruned, and were printed as essays."

Besides his essays and lectures Emerson left some poetry in which is
embodied those thoughts which were to him too deep for prose
expression. Oliver Wendell Holmes in speaking of this says: "Emerson
wrote occasionally in verse from his school-days until he had reached
the age which used to be known as the grand climacteric,
sixty-three.... His poems are not and hardly can become popular; they
are not meant to be liked by the many, but to be dearly loved and
cherished by the few.... His occasional lawlessness in technical
construction, his somewhat fantastic expressions, his enigmatic
obscurities hardly detract from the pleasant surprise his verses so
often bring with them.... The poetic license which we allow in the
verse of Emerson is more than excused by the noble spirit which makes
us forget its occasional blemishes, sometimes to be pleased with them
as characteristic of the writer."

Emerson was always a striking figure in the intellectual life of
America. His discourses were above all things inspiring. Through them
many were induced to strive for a higher self-culture. His influence
can be discerned in all the literary movements of the time. He was the
central figure of the so-called transcendental school which was so
prominent fifty years ago, although he always rather held aloof from
any enthusiastic participation in the movement.

Emerson lived a quiet life in Concord, Massachusetts. "He was a
first-rate neighbor and one who always kept his fences up." He
traveled extensively on his lecturing tours, even going as far as
England. In _English Traits_ he has recorded his impressions of what
he saw of English life and manners.

Oliver Wendell Holmes has described him in this wise: "His personal
appearance was that of the typical New Englander of college-bred
ancestry. Tall, spare, slender, with sloping shoulders, slightly
stooping in his later years, with light hair and eyes, the scholar's
complexion, the prominent, somewhat arched nose which belongs to many
of the New England sub-species, thin lips, suggestive of delicacy, but
having nothing like primness, still less of the rigidity which is
often noticeable in the generation succeeding next to that of the men
in their shirt-sleeves, he would have been noticed anywhere as one
evidently a scholarly thinker astray from the alcove or the study,
which were his natural habitats. His voice was very sweet, and
penetrating without any loudness or mark of effort. His enunciation
was beautifully clear, but he often hesitated as if waiting for the
right word to present itself. His manner was very quiet, his smile was
pleasant, but he did not like explosive laughter any better than
Hawthorne did. None who met him can fail to recall that serene and
kindly presence, in which there was mingled a certain spiritual
remoteness with the most benignant human welcome to all who were
privileged to enjoy his companionship."

Emerson died April 27, 1882, after a few days' illness from pneumonia.
Dr. Garnett in his excellent biography says: "Seldom had 'the reaper
whose name is Death' gathered such illustrious harvest as between
December 1880 and April 1882. In the first month of this period George
Eliot passed away, in the ensuing February Carlyle followed; in April
Lord Beaconsfield died, deplored by his party, nor unregretted by his
country; in February of the following year Longfellow was carried to
the tomb; in April Rossetti was laid to rest by the sea, and the
pavement of Westminster Abbey was disturbed to receive the dust of
Darwin. And now Emerson lay down in death beside the painter of man
and the searcher of nature, the English-Oriental statesman, the poet
of the plain man and the poet of the artist, and the prophet whose
name is indissolubly linked with his own. All these men passed into
eternity laden with the spoils of Time, but of none of them could it
be said, as of Emerson, that the most shining intellectual glory and
the most potent intellectual force of a continent had departed along
with him."

Critical Opinions of Emerson and his Writings


Matthew Arnold, in an address on Emerson delivered in Boston, gave
an excellent estimate of the rank we should accord to him in the great
hierarchy of letters. Some, perhaps, will think that Arnold was
unappreciative and cold, but dispassionate readers will be inclined to
agree with his judgment of our great American.

After a review of the poetical works of Emerson the English critic
draws his conclusions as follows:

"I do not then place Emerson among the great poets. But I go farther,
and say that I do not place him among the great writers, the great men
of letters. Who are the great men of letters? They are men like
Cicero, Plato, Bacon, Pascal, Swift, Voltaire--writers with, in the
first place, a genius and instinct for style.... Brilliant and
powerful passages in a man's writings do not prove his possession of
it. Emerson has passages of noble and pathetic eloquence; he has
passages of shrewd and felicitous wit; he has crisp epigram; he has
passages of exquisitely touched observation of nature. Yet he is not a
great writer.... Carlyle formulates perfectly the defects of his
friend's poetic and literary productions when he says: 'For me it is
too ethereal, speculative, theoretic; I will have all things condense
themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy.' ...

".... Not with the Miltons and Grays, not with the Platos and Spinozas,
not with the Swifts and Voltaires, not with the Montaignes and
Addisons, can we rank Emerson. No man could see this clearer than
Emerson himself. 'Alas, my friend,' he writes in reply to Carlyle, who
had exhorted him to creative work,--'Alas, my friend, I can do no such
gay thing as you say. I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low
department of literature,--the reporters; suburban men.' He deprecated
his friend's praise; praise 'generous to a fault' he calls it; praise
'generous to the shaming of me,--cold, fastidious, ebbing person that
I am.'"

After all this unfavorable criticism Arnold begins to praise. Quoting
passages from the Essays, he adds:

"This is tonic indeed! And let no one object that it is too general;
that more practical, positive direction is what we want.... Yes,
truly, his insight is admirable; his truth is precious. Yet the secret
of his effect is not even in these; it is in his temper. It is in the
hopeful, serene, beautiful temper wherewith these, in Emerson, are
indissolubly united; in which they work and have their being.... One
can scarcely overrate the importance of holding fast to happiness and
hope. It gives to Emerson's work an invaluable virtue. As Wordsworth's
poetry is, in my judgment, the most important done in verse, in our
language, during the present century, so Emerson's Essays are, I
think, the most important work done in prose.... But by his conviction
that in the life of the spirit is happiness, and by his hope that this
life of the spirit will come more and more to be sanely understood,
and to prevail, and to work for happiness,--by this conviction and
hope Emerson was great, and he will surely prove in the end to have
been right in them.... You cannot prize him too much, nor heed him too
diligently."

Herman Grimm, a German critic of great influence in his own country,
did much to obtain a hearing for Emerson's works in Germany. At first
the Germans could not understand the unusual English, the unaccustomed
turns of phrase which are so characteristic of Emerson's style.

"Macaulay gives them no difficulty; even Carlyle is comprehended. But
in Emerson's writings the broad turnpike is suddenly changed into a
hazardous sandy foot-path. His thoughts and his style are American. He
is not writing for Berlin, but for the people of Massachusetts.... It
is an art to rise above what we have been taught.... All great men are
seen to possess this freedom. They derive their standard from their
own natures, and their observations on life are so natural and
spontaneous that it would seem as if the most illiterate person with a
scrap of common-sense would have made the same.... We become wiser
with them, and know not how the difficult appears easy and the
involved plain.

"Emerson possesses this noble manner of communicating himself. He
inspires me with courage and confidence. He has read and seen but
conceals the labor. I meet in his works plenty of familiar facts, but
he does not employ them to figure up anew the old worn-out problems:
each stands on a new spot and serves for new combinations. From
everything he sees the direct line issuing which connects it with the
focus of life....

".... Emerson's theory is that of the 'sovereignty of the individual.'
To discover what a young man is good for, and to equip him for the
path he is to strike out in life, regardless of any other
consideration, is the great duty to which he calls attention. He makes
men self-reliant. He reveals to the eyes of the idealist the
magnificent results of practical activity, and unfolds before the
realist the grandeur of the ideal world of thought. No man is to allow
himself, through prejudice, to make a mistake in choosing the task to
which he will devote his life. Emerson's essays are, as it were,
printed sermons--all having this same text.... The wealth and harmony
of his language overpowered and entranced me anew. But even now I
cannot say wherein the secret of his influence lies. What he has
written is like life itself--the unbroken thread ever lengthened
through the addition of the small events which make up each day's
experience."

Froude in his famous "Life of Carlyle" gives an interesting description
of Emerson's visit to the Carlyles in Scotland:

"The Carlyles were sitting alone at dinner on a Sunday afternoon at
the end of August when a Dumfries carriage drove to the door, and
there stepped out of it a young American then unknown to fame, but
whose influence in his own country equals that of Carlyle in ours, and
whose name stands connected with his wherever the English language is
spoken. Emerson, the younger of the two, had just broken his Unitarian
fetters, and was looking out around him like a young eagle longing for
light. He had read Carlyle's articles and had discerned with the
instinct of genius that here was a voice speaking real and fiery
convictions, and no longer echoes and conventionalisms. He had come to
Europe to study its social and spiritual phenomena; and to the young
Emerson as to the old Goethe, the most important of them appeared to
be Carlyle.... The acquaintance then begun to their mutual pleasure
ripened into a deep friendship, which has remained unclouded in spite
of wide divergences of opinion throughout their working lives."

Carlyle wrote to his mother after Emerson had left:

"Our third happiness was the arrival of a certain young unknown friend
named Emerson, from Boston, in the United States, who turned aside so
far from his British, French, and Italian travels to see me here! He
had an introduction from Mill and a Frenchman (Baron d'Eichthal's
nephew) whom John knew at Rome. Of course, we could do no other than
welcome him; the rather as he seemed to be one of the most lovable
creatures in himself we had ever looked on. He stayed till next day
with us, and talked and heard to his heart's content, and left us all
really sad to part with him."

In 1841 Carlyle wrote to John Sterling a few words apropos of the
recent publication of Emerson's essays in England:

"I love Emerson's book, not for its detached opinions, not even for
the scheme of the general world he has framed for himself, or any
eminence of talent he has expressed that with, but simply because it
is his own book; because there is a tone of veracity, an unmistakable
air of its being _his_, and a real utterance of a human soul, not a
mere echo of such. I consider it, in that sense, highly remarkable,
rare, very rare, in these days of ours. Ach Gott! It is frightful to
live among echoes. The few that read the book, I imagine, will get
benefit of it. To America, I sometimes say that Emerson, such as he
is, seems to me like a kind of New Era."

John Morley, the acute English critic, has made an analytic study of
Emerson's style, which may reconcile the reader to some of its
exasperating peculiarities.

"One of the traits that every critic notes in Emerson's writing is
that it is so abrupt, so sudden in its transitions, so discontinuous,
so inconsecutive. Dislike of a sentence that drags made him
unconscious of the quality that French critics name _coulant_.
Everything is thrown in just as it comes, and sometimes the pell-mell
is enough to persuade us that Pope did not exaggerate when he said
that no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer as the
power of rejecting his own thoughts.... Apart from his difficult
staccato, Emerson is not free from secondary faults. He uses words
that are not only odd, but vicious in construction; he is sometimes
oblique and he is often clumsy; and there is a visible feeling after
epigrams that do not always come. When people say that Emerson's style
must be good and admirable because it fits his thought, they forget
that though it is well that a robe should fit, there is still
something to be said about its cut and fashion.... Yet, as happens to
all fine minds, there came to Emerson ways of expression deeply marked
with character. On every page there is set the strong stamp of
sincerity, and the attraction of a certain artlessness; the most
awkward sentence rings true; and there is often a pure and simple note
that touches us more than if it were the perfection of elaborated
melody. The uncouth procession of the periods discloses the travail of
the thought, and that, too, is a kind of eloquence. An honest reader
easily forgives the rude jolt or unexpected start when it shows a
thinker faithfully working his way along arduous and unworn tracks.
Even at the roughest, Emerson often interjects a delightful cadence.
As he says of Landor, his sentences are cubes which will stand firm,
place them how or where you will. He criticised Swedenborg for being
superfluously explanatory, and having an exaggerated feeling of the
ignorance of men. 'Men take truths of this nature,' said Emerson,
'very fast;' and his own style does no doubt very boldly take this
capacity for granted in us. In 'choice and pith of diction,' again, of
which Mr. Lowell speaks, he hits the mark with a felicity that is
almost his own in this generation. He is terse, concentrated, and free
from the important blunder of mistaking intellectual dawdling for
meditation. Nor in fine does his abruptness ever impede a true
urbanity. The accent is homely and the apparel plain, but his bearing
has a friendliness, a courtesy, a hospitable humanity, which goes
nearer to our hearts than either literary decoration or rhetorical
unction. That modest and lenient fellow-feeling which gave such charm
to his companionship breathes in his gravest writing, and prevents us
from finding any page of it cold or hard or dry."

E.P. Whipple, the well-known American critic, wrote soon after Emerson's
death:

"But 'sweetness and light' are precious and inspiring only so far as
they express the essential sweetness of the disposition of the
thinker, and the essential illuminating power of his intelligence.
Emerson's greatness came from his character. Sweetness and light
streamed from him because they were _in_ him. In everything he
thought, wrote, and did, we feel the presence of a personality as
vigorous and brave as it was sweet, and the particular radical thought
he at any time expressed derived its power to animate and illuminate
other minds from the might of the manhood, which was felt to be within
and behind it. To 'sweetness and light' he therefore added the prime
quality of fearless manliness.

"If the force of Emerson's character was thus inextricably blended
with the force of all his faculties of intellect and imagination, and
the refinement of all his sentiments, we have still to account for the
peculiarities of his genius, and to answer the question, why do we
instinctively apply the epithet 'Emersonian' to every characteristic
passage in his writings? We are told that he was the last in a long
line of clergymen, his ancestors, and that the modern doctrine of
heredity accounts for the impressive emphasis he laid on the moral
sentiment; but that does not solve the puzzle why he unmistakably
differed in his nature and genius from all other Emersons. An
imaginary genealogical chart of descent connecting him with Confucius
or Gautama would be more satisfactory.

"What distinguishes _the_ Emerson was his exceptional genius and
character, that something in him which separated him from all other
Emersons, as it separated him from all other eminent men of letters,
and impressed every intelligent reader with the feeling that he was
not only 'original but aboriginal.' Some traits of his mind and
character may be traced back to his ancestors, but what doctrine of
heredity can give us the genesis of his genius? Indeed, the safest
course to pursue is to quote his own words, and despairingly confess
that it is the nature of genius 'to spring, like the rainbow daughter
of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all
history.'"

Chronological List of Emerson's Principal Works


Nature                         1836
Essays (First Series)          1841
Essays (Second Series)         1844
Poems                          1847
Miscellanies                   1849
Representative Men             1850
English Traits                 1856
Conduct of Life                1860
Society and Solitude           1870
Correspondence of Thomas
Carlyle and R.W. Emerson       1883

The American Scholar

     This address was delivered at Cambridge in 1837, before the
     Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, a college
     fraternity composed of the first twenty-five men in each
     graduating class. The society has annual meetings, which
     have been the occasion for addresses from the most
     distinguished scholars and thinkers of the day.


MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN,

I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year. Our
anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do
not meet for games of strength[1] or skill, for the recitation of
histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for
parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours;[2] nor for the
advancement of science, like our co-temporaries in the British and
European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly
sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy
to give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an
indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it
ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect
of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the
postponed expectation of the world with something better than the
exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long
apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The
millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on
the sere remains of foreign harvests.[3] Events, actions arise that
must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry
will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation
Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one
day be the pole-star[4] for a thousand years?

In the light of this hope I accept the topic which not only usage but
the nature of our association seem to prescribe to this day,--the
AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Year by year we come up hither to read one
more chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what new lights, new
events, and more days have thrown on his character, his duties, and
his hopes.

It is one of those fables which out of an unknown antiquity convey an
unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into
men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was
divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.[5]

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is
One Man,--present to all particular men only partially, or through one
faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole
man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is
all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and
soldier. In the _divided_ or social state these functions are parceled
out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint[6] of the joint
work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies that the
individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own
labor to embrace all the other laborers. But, unfortunately, this
original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to
multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it
is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is
one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk and
strut about so many walking monsters,--a good finger, a neck, a
stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter,
who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered
by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel
and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead
of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth
to his work, but is ridden[7] by the routine of his craft, and the
soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney a
statute-book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship.

In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated
intellect. In the right state he is _Man Thinking_. In the degenerate
state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker,
or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.

In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the whole theory of his office
is contained. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her
monitory pictures.[8] Him the past instructs. Him the future invites.
Is not indeed every man a student, and do not all things exist for the
student's behoof? And, finally, is not the true scholar the only true
master? But as the old oracle said, "All things have two handles:
Beware of the wrong one."[9] In life, too often, the scholar errs with
mankind and forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his school, and
consider him in reference to the main influences he receives.

       *       *       *       *       *

I. The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon
the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun;[10] and, after sunset,
Night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every
day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden.[11] The scholar
must needs stand wistful and admiring before this great spectacle. He
must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him? There is never
a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of
this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.[12]
Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he
never can find,--so entire, so boundless. Far too as her splendors
shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without
center, without circumference,--in the mass and in the particle, Nature
hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins.
To the young mind everything is individual, stands by itself. By and by
it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three,
then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying
instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies,
discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote
things cohere and flower out from one stem. It presently learns that
since the dawn of history there has been a constant accumulation and
classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that
these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which
is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry,
a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary
motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout
matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in
the most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each
refractory fact; one after another reduces all strange constitutions,
all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on forever to
animate the last fiber of organization, the outskirts of nature, by
insight.

Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is
suggested that he and it proceed from one Root; one is leaf and one is
flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that
root? Is not that the soul of his soul?--A thought too bold?--A dream
too wild? Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of
more earthly natures,--when he has learned to worship the soul, and to
see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first
gropings of its gigantic hand,--he shall look forward to an
ever-expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator.[13] He shall see
that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for
part. One is seal and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his
own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes
to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is
ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in
fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself,"[14] and the modern precept,
"Study nature," become at last one maxim.

       *       *       *       *       *

II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar is the
mind of the Past,--in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of
institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the
influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth,--learn
the amount of this influence more conveniently,--by considering their
value alone.

The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received
into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new
arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him
life; it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions;
it went out from him immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it
went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It
can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now
inspires.[15] Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which
it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.

Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, of
transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the
distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product
be. But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any means make a
perfect vacuum,[16] so neither can any artist entirely exclude the
conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book
of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a
remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age.
Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each
generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will
not fit this.

Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to
the act of creation, the act of thought, is instantly transferred to
the record. The poet chanting was felt to be a divine man. Henceforth
the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit.
Henceforward it is settled the book is perfect; as love of the hero
corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly the book becomes
noxious.[17] The guide is a tyrant. We sought a brother, and lo, a
governor. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, always
slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened,
having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry if
it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by
thinkers, not by Man Thinking, by men of talent, that is, who start
wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of
principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their
duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke,[18] which
Bacon,[19] have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were
only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence the
book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature
and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate[20]
with the world and soul. Hence the restorers of readings,[21] the
emendators,[22] the bibliomaniacs[23] of all degrees. This is bad;
this is worse than it seems.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What
is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect?
They are for nothing but to inspire.[24] I had better never see a book
than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and
made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world of
value is the active soul,--the soul, free, sovereign, active. This
every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although
in almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees
absolute truth and utters truth, or creates. In this action it is
genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound
estate of every man.[25] In its essence it is progressive. The book,
the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with
some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they,--let us hold by
this. They pin me down.[26] They look backward and not forward. But
genius always looks forward. The eyes of man are set in his forehead,
not in his hindhead. Man hopes. Genius creates. To create,--to
create,--is the proof of a divine presence. Whatever talents may be,
if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not
his;[27]--cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are
creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words;
manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or
authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind's own sense of good
and fair.

On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive
always from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of
light, without periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery; and a
fatal disservice[28] is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy
of genius by over-influence.[29] The literature of every nation bear
me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakespearized now for two
hundred years.[30]

Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly
subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.
Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly,
the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of
their readings.[31] But when the intervals of darkness come, as come
they must,--when the soul seeth not, when the sun is hid and the stars
withdraw their shining,--we repair to the lamps which were kindled by
their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn
is.[32] We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, "A
fig-tree, looking on a fig-tree, becometh fruitful."

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the
best books. They impress us ever with the conviction that one nature
wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great
English poets, of Chaucer,[33] of Marvell,[34] of Dryden,[35] with the
most modern joy,--with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part
caused by the abstraction of all _time_ from their verses. There is
some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived
in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which
lies close to my own soul, that which I also had well-nigh thought and
said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical
doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should suppose some
pre-established harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, and
some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact
observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub
they shall never see.

I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of
instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know that as the human body
can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the
broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And
great and heroic men have existed who had almost no other information
than by the printed page. I only would say that it needs a strong head
to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As the
proverb says, "He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must
carry out the wealth of the Indies." There is then creative reading as
well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and
invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with
manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense
of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always
true, that as the seer's hour of vision is short and rare among heavy
days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his
volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato[36] or Shakespeare,
only that least part,--only the authentic utterances of the
oracle;--all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato's
and Shakespeare's.

Of course there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise
man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading.
Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,--to teach
elements. But they can only highly serve us when they aim not to
drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various
genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires set
the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures
in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns[37] and
pecuniary foundations,[38] though of towns of gold, can never
countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit.[39] Forget this,
and our American colleges will recede in their public importance,
whilst they grow richer every year.

       *       *       *       *       *

III. There goes in the world a notion that the scholar should be a
recluse, a valetudinarian,[40]--as unfit for any handiwork or public
labor as a penknife for an axe. The so-called "practical men" sneer at
speculative men, as if, because they speculate or _see_, they could do
nothing. I have heard it said that the clergy--who are always, more
universally than any other class, the scholars of their day--are
addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous conversation of men
they do not hear, but only a mincing[41] and diluted speech. They are
often virtually disfranchised; and indeed there are advocates for
their celibacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is
not just and wise. Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is
essential. Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never
ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of
beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but
there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble[42] of
thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious
to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived.
Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.

The world--this shadow of the soul, or _other me_, lies wide around.
Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me
acquainted with myself. I launch eagerly into this resounding tumult.
I grasp the hands of those next me, and take my place in the ring to
suffer and to work, taught by an instinct that so shall the dumb
abyss[43] be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its
fear;[44] I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So
much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness
have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my
dominion. I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his
nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is
pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation,
want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar
grudges every opportunity of action passed by, as a loss of power.

It is the raw material out of which the intellect molds her splendid
products. A strange process too, this by which experience is converted
into thought, as a mulberry-leaf is converted into satin.[45] The
manufacture goes forward at all hours.

The actions and events of our childhood and youth are now matters of
calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so
with our recent actions,--with the business which we now have in hand.
On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet
circulate through it. We no more feel or know it than we feel the
feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a
part of life,--remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In
some contemplative hour it detaches itself from the life like a ripe
fruit,[46] to become a thought of the mind. Instantly it is raised,
transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption.[47] Henceforth
it is an object of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood.
Observe, too, the impossibility of antedating this act. In its grub
state it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly,
without observation, the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and
is an angel of wisdom. So is there no fact, no event, in our private
history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert
form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean.[48]
Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs,
and ferules,[49] the love of little maids and berries, and many
another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend
and relative, profession and party, town and country, nation and
world, must also soar and sing.[50]

Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions has
the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut myself out of this globe
of action, and transplant an oak into a flower-pot, there to hunger
and pine; nor trust the revenue of some single faculty, and exhaust
one vein of thought, much like those Savoyards,[51] who, getting their
livelihood by carving shepherds, shepherdesses, and smoking Dutchmen,
for all Europe, went out one day to the mountain to find stock, and
discovered that they had whittled up the last of their pine-trees.
Authors we have, in numbers, who have written out their vein, and who,
moved by a commendable prudence, sail for Greece or Palestine, follow
the trapper into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers, to replenish
their merchantable stock.

If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of
action. Life is our dictionary.[52] Years are well spent in country
labors; in town; in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank
intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one
end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate
and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how
much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his
speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and
copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn
grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and
the work-yard made.

But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than
books, is that it is a resource. That great principle of Undulation in
nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath;
in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night;
in heat and cold; and, as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and
every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity,--these "fits of
easy transmission and reflection," as Newton[53] called them, are the
law of nature because they are the law of spirit.

The mind now thinks, now acts, and each fit reproduces the other. When
the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer
paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended and books are a
weariness,--he has always the resource _to live_. Character is higher
than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.
The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to
live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to
impart his truth? He can still fall back on this elemental force of
living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act. Let the
grandeur of justice shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of affection
cheer his lowly roof. Those "far from fame," who dwell and act with
him, will feel the force of his constitution in the doings and
passages of the day better than it can be measured by any public and
designed display. Time shall teach him that the scholar loses no hour
which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of his
instinct, screened from influence. What is lost in seemliness is
gained in strength. Not out of those on whom systems of education have
exhausted their culture comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or
to build the new, but out of unhandselled[54] savage nature; out of
terrible Druids[55] and Berserkers[56] come at last Alfred[57] and
Shakespeare. I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be
said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is
virtue yet in the hoe and the spade,[58] for learned as well as for
unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are
invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall
not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the
popular judgments and modes of action.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books,
and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties.

They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be comprised in
self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to
guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow,
unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed[59] and
Herschel,[60] in their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars
with the praise of all men, and, the results being splendid and
useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing
obscure and nebulous[61] stars of the human mind, which as yet no man
has thought of as such,--watching days and months sometimes for a few
facts; correcting still his old records,--must relinquish display and
immediate fame. In the long period of his preparation he must betray
often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the
disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in
his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must
accept--how often!--poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of
treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the
religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of
course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty
and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way
of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual
hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to
educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to
find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature.
He is one who raises himself from private considerations and breathes
and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye.
He is the world's heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that
retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic
sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of
history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in
all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of
actions,--these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new
verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men
and events of to-day,--this he shall hear and promulgate.

These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in
himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows
the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some
great decorum, some fetich[62] of a government, some ephemeral trade,
or war, or man, is cried up[63] by half mankind and cried down by the
other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds
are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the
scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his
belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable[64]
of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in
steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add
observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach,
and bide his own time,--happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone
that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads on every
right step. For the instinct is sure that prompts him to tell his
brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the
secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all
minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private
thoughts is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks,
and of all into whose language his own can be translated. The poet, in
utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording
them, is found to have recorded that which men in cities vast find
true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his
frank confessions, his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses,
until he finds that he is the complement[65] of his hearers;--that
they drink his words because he fulfills for them their own nature;
the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his
wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public and
universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every
man feels--This is my music; this is myself.

In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the
scholar be,--free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom,
"without any hindrance that does not arise out of his own
constitution." Brave; for fear is a thing which a scholar by his very
function puts behind him. Fear always springs from ignorance. It is a
shame to him if his tranquility, amid dangerous times, arise from the
presumption that like children and women his is a protected class; or
if he seek a temporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from
politics or vexed questions, hiding his head like an ostrich in the
flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a
boy whistles to keep his courage up. So is the danger a danger still;
so is the fear worse. Manlike let him turn and face it. Let him look
into its eye and search its nature, inspect its origin,--see the
whelping of this lion,--which lies no great way back; he will then
find in himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and extent; he
will have made his hands meet on the other side, and can henceforth
defy it and pass on superior. The world is his who can see through its
pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown
error you behold is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See
it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

Yes, we are the cowed,--we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion
that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long
time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so
it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To
ignorance and sin it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they
may; but in proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the
firmament flows before him and takes his signet[66] and form. Not he
is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.
They are the kings of the world who give the color of their present
thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men, by the cheerful
serenity of their carrying the matter, that this thing which they do
is the apple which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last ripe,
and inviting nations to the harvest. The great man makes the great
thing. Wherever Macdonald[67] sits, there is the head of the table.
Linnæus[68] makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it
from the farmer and the herb-woman: Davy,[69] chemistry; and
Cuvier,[70] fossils. The day is always his who works in it with
serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him
whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic
follow the moon.[71]

For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed,--darker
than can be enlightened. I might not carry with me the feeling of my
audience in stating my own belief. But I have already shown the ground
of my hope, in adverting to the doctrine that man is one. I believe man
has been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light
that can lead him back to his prerogatives. Men are become of no
account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day, are bugs, are
spawn, and are called "the mass" and "the herd." In a century, in a
millennium, one or two men;[72] that is to say, one or two
approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in
the hero or the poet their own green and crude being,--ripened; yes, and
are content to be less, so _that_ may attain to its full stature. What a
testimony, full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of
his own nature, by the poor clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in
the glory of his chief! The poor and the low find some amends to their
immense moral capacity, for their acquiescence in a political and social
inferiority.[73] They are content to be brushed like flies from the path
of a great person, so that justice shall be done by him to that common
nature which it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and
glorified. They sun themselves in the great man's light, and feel it to
be their own element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod
selves upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of
blood to make that great heart beat, those giant sinews combat and
conquer. He lives for us, and we live in him.

Men such as they[74] are very naturally seek money or power; and power
because it is as good as money,--the "spoils," so called, "of office."
And why not? For they aspire to the highest, and this, in their
sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake them and they shall quit
the false good and leap to the true, and leave governments to clerks
and desks. This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual
domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of the world
for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are the
materials strewn along the ground. The private life of one man shall
be a more illustrious monarchy, more formidable to its enemy, more
sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in
history. For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth[75] the particular
natures of all men. Each philosopher, each bard, each actor has only
done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself. The
books which once we valued more than the apple of the eye, we have
quite exhausted. What is that but saying that we have come up with the
point of view which the universal mind took through the eyes of one
scribe; we have been that man, and have passed on. First, one, then
another, we drain all cisterns, and waxing greater by all these
supplies, we crave a better and a more abundant food. The man has
never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot be enshrined
in a person who shall set a barrier on any one side to this unbounded,
unboundable empire. It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of
the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily, and now out of the
throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It
is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which
animates all men.

       *       *       *       *       *

But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of the
Scholar. I ought not to delay longer to add what I have to say of
nearer reference to the time and to this country.

Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas which
predominate over successive epochs, and there are data for marking the
genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now of the Reflective or
Philosophical age.[76] With the views I have intimated of the oneness
or the identity of the mind through all individuals, I do not much
dwell on these differences. In fact, I believe each individual passes
through all three. The boy is a Greek; the youth, romantic; the
adult, reflective. I deny not, however, that a revolution in the
leading idea may be distinctly enough traced.

Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion.[77] Must that needs be
evil? We, it seems, are critical. We are embarrassed with second
thoughts.[78] We cannot enjoy anything for hankering to know whereof
the pleasure consists. We are lined with eyes. We see with our feet.
The time is infected with Hamlet's unhappiness,--

     "Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."[79]

Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be
blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink
truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary class as a mere
announcement of the fact that they find themselves not in the state of
mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried; as a
boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim. If there
is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of
Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side and admit of
being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and
by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by
the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a
very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

I read with some joy of the auspicious signs of the coming days, as
they glimmer already through poetry and art, through philosophy and
science, through church and state.

One of these signs is the fact that the same movement[80] which
effected the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the
state assumed in literature a very marked and as benign an aspect.
Instead of the sublime and beautiful, the near, the low, the common,
was explored and poetized. That which had been negligently trodden
under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves
for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer
than all foreign parts. The literature of the poor, the feelings of
the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household
life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a
sign--is it not?--of new vigor when the extremities are made active,
when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet. I ask not
for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or
Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provençal minstrelsy; I embrace the
common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give
me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future
worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the
firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the
boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body;--show
me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence
of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in
these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle
bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal
law;[81] and the shop, the plow, and the ledger referred to the like
cause by which light undulates and poets sing;--and the world lies no
longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order:
there is no trifle, there is no puzzle, but one design unites and
animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.

This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith,[82] Burns,[83]
Cowper,[84] and, in a newer time, of Goethe,[85] Wordsworth,[86] and
Carlyle.[87] This idea they have differently followed and with various
success. In contrast with their writing, the style of Pope,[88] of
Johnson,[89] of Gibbon,[90] looks cold and pedantic. This writing is
blood-warm. Man is surprised to find that things near are not less
beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far.
The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This
perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries.
Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown
us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.

There is one man of genius who has done much for this philosophy of
life, whose literary value has never yet been rightly estimated:--I
mean Emanuel Swedenborg.[91] The most imaginative of men, yet writing
with the precision of a mathematician, he endeavored to engraft a
purely philosophical Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time.
Such an attempt of course must have difficulty which no genius could
surmount. But he saw and showed the connexion between nature and the
affections of the soul. He pierced the emblematic or spiritual
character of the visible, audible, tangible world. Especially did his
shade-loving muse hover over and interpret the lower parts of nature;
he showed the mysterious bond that allies moral evil to the foul
material forms, and has given in epical parables a theory of insanity,
of beasts, of unclean and fearful things.

Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political
movement, is the new importance given to the single person. Everything
that tends to insulate the individual--to surround him with barriers
of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and
man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign
state--tends to true union as well as greatness. "I learned," said the
melancholy Pestalozzi,[92] "that no man in God's wide earth is either
willing or able to help any other man." Help must come from the bosom
alone. The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the
ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes
of the future. He must be an university of knowledges. If there be one
lesson more than another that should pierce his ear, it is--The world
is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and
you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers
the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all; it is for you to dare
all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched
might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all
preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the
courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already
suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice
make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent,
indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of
this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is
no work for any one but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of
the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the
mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth
below not in unison with these, but are hindered from action by the
disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and
turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of them suicides. What is the
remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful
now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that if
the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there
abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience,--patience;
with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace
the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work the study and
the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent,
the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in the
world, not to be an unit; not to be reckoned one character; not to
yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to
be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the
party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted
geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and
friends,--please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own
feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.
Then shall man be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for
sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a
wall of defense and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will
for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by
the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

Compensation.[93]


    The wings of Time are black and white,
    Pied with morning and with night.
    Mountain tall and ocean deep
    Trembling balance duly keep.
    In changing moon, in tidal wave,
    Glows the feud of Want and Have.
    Gauge of more and less through space
    Electric star and pencil plays.
    The lonely Earth amid the balls
    That hurry through the eternal halls,
    A makeweight flying to the void,
    Supplemental asteroid,
    Or compensatory spark,
    Shoots across the neutral Dark.

    Man's the elm, and Wealth the vine,
    Stanch and strong the tendrils twine;
    Through the frail ringlets thee deceive,
    None from its stock that vine can reave.
    Fear not, then, thou child infirm,
    There's no god dare wrong a worm.
    Laurel crowns cleave to deserts,
    And power to him who power exerts;
    Hast not thy share? On winged feet,
    Lo! it rushes thee to meet;
    And all that Nature made thy own,
    Floating in air or pent in stone,
    Will rive the hills and swim the sea,
    And, like thy shadow, follow thee.


Ever since I was a boy, I have wished to write a discourse on
Compensation: for it seemed to me when very young, that on this
subject life was ahead of theology, and the people knew more than the
preachers taught. The documents,[94] too, from which the doctrine is
to be drawn, charmed my fancy by their endless variety, and lay always
before me, even in sleep; for they are the tools in our hands, the
bread in our basket, the transactions of the street, the farm, and the
dwelling-house, greetings, relations, debts and credits, the influence
of character, the nature and endowment of all men. It seemed to me,
also, that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the present
action of the soul of this world, clean from all vestige of tradition,
and so the heart of man might be bathed by an inundation of eternal
love, conversing with that which he knows was always and always must
be, because it really is now. It appeared, moreover, that if this
doctrine could be stated in terms with any resemblance to those bright
intuitions in which this truth is sometimes revealed to us, it would
be a star in many dark hours and crooked passages in our journey that
would not suffer us to lose our way.

I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon at church.
The preacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy, unfolded in the
ordinary manner the doctrine of the Last Judgment. He assumed that
judgment is not executed in this world; that the wicked are
successful; that the good are miserable;[95] and then urged from
reason and from Scripture a compensation to be made to both parties in
the next life. No offense appeared to be taken by the congregation at
this doctrine. As far as I could observe, when the meeting broke up,
they separated without remark on the sermon.

Yet what was the import of this teaching? What did the preacher mean
by saying that the good are miserable in the present life? Was it that
houses and lands, offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are had by
unprincipled men, whilst the saints are poor and despised; and that a
compensation is to be made to these last hereafter, by giving them the
like gratifications another day,--bank stock and doubloons,[96]
venison and champagne? This must be the compensation intended; for
what else? Is it that they are to have leave to pray and praise? to
love and serve men? Why, that they can do now. The legitimate
inference the disciple would draw was: "We are to have _such_ a good
time as the sinners have now"; or, to push it to its extreme import:
"You sin now; we shall sin by and by; we would sin now, if we could;
not being successful, we expect our revenue to-morrow."

The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad are successful;
that justice is not done now. The blindness of the preacher consisted
in deferring to the base estimate of the market of what constitutes a
manly success, instead of confronting and convicting the world from
the truth; announcing the presence of the soul; the omnipotence of the
will: and so establishing the standard of good and ill, of success and
falsehood.

I find a similar base tone in the popular religious works of the day,
and the same doctrines assumed by the literary men when occasionally
they treat the related topics. I think that our popular theology has
gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the superstitions it has
displaced. But men are better than this theology. Their daily life
gives it the lie. Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the
doctrine behind him in his own experience; and all men feel sometimes
the falsehood which they cannot demonstrate. Few men are wiser than
they know. That which they hear in schools and pulpits without
afterthought, if said in conversation, would probably be questioned in
silence. If a man dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the
divine laws, he is answered by a silence which conveys well enough to
an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer, but his incapacity to
make his own statement.

I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to record some facts
that indicate the path of the law of Compensation; happy beyond my
expectation, if I shall truly draw the smallest arc of this circle.

POLARITY,[97] or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature;
in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters;
in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and
animals; in the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the
animal body; in the systole and diastole[98] of the heart; in the
undulations of fluids, and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal
gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce
magnetism at one end of a needle; the opposite magnetism takes place at
the other end. If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here,
you must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that
each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole; as,
spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out;
upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay.

Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. The
entire system of things gets represented in every particle. There is
somewhat that resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and night,
man and woman, in a single needle of the pine, in a kernel of corn, in
each individual of every animal tribe. The reaction, so grand in the
elements, is repeated within these small boundaries. For example, in
the animal kingdom the physiologist has observed that no creatures
are favorites, but a certain compensation balances every gift and
every defect. A surplusage given to one part is paid out of a
reduction from another part of the same creature. If the head and neck
are enlarged, the trunk and extremities are cut short.

The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What we gain in
power is lost in time; and the converse. The periodic or compensating
errors of the planets is another instance. The influences of climate
and soil in political history is another. The cold climate
invigorates. The barren soil does not breed fevers, crocodiles,
tigers, or scorpions.

The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man. Every
excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its
sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of
pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for
its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain
of folly. For everything you have missed, you have gained something
else; and for everything you gain, you lose something. If riches
increase, they are increased[99] that use them. If the gatherer
gathers too much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his
chest, swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies
and exceptions. The waves of the sea do not more speedily seek a level
from their loftiest tossing, than the varieties of condition tend to
equalize themselves. There is always some leveling circumstance that
puts down the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate,
substantially on the same ground with all others. Is a man too strong
and fierce for society, and by temper and position a bad citizen,--a
morose ruffian, with a dash of the pirate in him;--nature sends him a
troop of pretty sons and daughters, who are getting along in the
dame's classes at the village school, and love and fear for them
smooths his grim scowl to courtesy. Thus she contrives to
intenerate[100] the granite and felspar, takes the boar out and puts
the lamb in, and keeps her balance true.

The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President
has paid dear for his White House.[101] It has commonly cost him all
his peace, and the best of his many attributes. To preserve for a
short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is
content to eat dust[102] before the real masters who stand erect
behind the throne. Or, do men desire the more substantial and
permanent grandeur of genius? Neither has this an immunity. He who by
force of will or of thought, is great, and overlooks[103] thousands,
has the charges of that eminence. With every influx of light comes new
danger. Has he light? he must bear witness to the light, and always
outrun that sympathy which gives him such keen satisfaction, by his
fidelity to new revelations of the incessant soul. He must hate father
and mother, wife and child. Has he all that the world loves and
admires and covets?--he must cast behind him their admiration, and
afflict them by faithfulness to his truth, and become a by-word and a
hissing.

This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain to build
or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long.
_Res nolunt diu male administrari._[104] Though no checks to a new
evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is
cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If you tax too high, the
revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary,
juries will not convict. If the law is too mild, private vengeance
comes in. If the government is a terrific democracy, the pressure is
resisted by an overcharge of energy in the citizen, and life glows
with a fiercer flame. The true life and satisfactions of man seem to
elude the utmost rigors or felicities of condition, and to establish
themselves with great indifferency under all varieties of
circumstances. Under all governments the influence of character
remains the same,--in Turkey and in New England about alike. Under the
primeval despots of Egypt, history honestly confesses that man must
have been as free as culture could make him.

These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented
in every one of its particles. Everything in nature contains all the
powers of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff; as the
naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a
horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying
man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main
character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the
aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every
other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the
world and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem
of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its
course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole
man, and recite all his destiny.

The world globes itself in a drop of dew.[105] The microscope cannot
find the animalcule which is less perfect for being little.[106] Eyes,
ears, taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of
reproduction that take hold on eternity,--all find room to consist in
the small creature. So do we put our life into every act. The true
doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears with all his parts in
every moss and cobweb.[107] The value of the universe contrives to
throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil;
if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation.

Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul, which
within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its
inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. "It
is in the world, and the world was made by it." Justice is not
postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life.
[Greek: Hoi  kyboi Dios aei eupiptousi],[108]--the dice of God are
always loaded. The world looks like a multiplication table, or a
mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself.
Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still
returns to you. Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every
virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty. What
we call retribution is the universal necessity by which the whole
appears wherever a part appears. If you see smoke, there must be fire.
If you see a hand or limb, you know that the trunk to which it belongs
is there behind.

Every act rewards itself, or, in other words, integrates itself, in a
twofold manner; first, in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly,
in the circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance
the retribution. The causal retribution is in the thing, and is seen
by the soul. The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the
understanding; it is inseparable from the thing, but is often spread
over a long time, and so does not become distinct until after many
years. The specific stripes may follow late after the offense, but
they follow because they accompany it. Crime and punishment grow out
of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the
flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and
ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms
in the cause, the end preëxists in the means, the fruit in the seed.

Whilst thus the world will be whole, and refuses to be disparted, we
seek to act partially, to sunder, to appropriate; for example,--to
gratify the senses, we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs
of the character. The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to
the solution of one problem,--how to detach the sensual sweet, the
sensual strong, the sensual bright, etc., from the moral sweet, the
moral deep, the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean
off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a
_one end_, without an _other end_. The soul says, Eat; the body would
feast. The soul says, The man and woman shall be one flesh and one
soul; the body would join the flesh only. The soul says, Have dominion
over all things to the ends of virtue; the body would have the power
over things to its own ends.

The soul strives amain[109] to live and work through all things. It
would be the only fact. All things shall be added unto it,--power,
pleasure, knowledge, beauty. The particular man aims to be somebody;
to set up for himself; to truck and higgle for a private good; and, in
particulars, to ride, that he may ride; to dress, that he may be
dressed; to eat, that he may eat; and to govern, that he may be seen.
Men seek to be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and
fame. They think that to be great is to possess one side of
nature,--the sweet, without the other side,--the bitter.

This dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted. Up to this day,
it must be owned, no projector has had the smallest success. The
parted water reunites behind our hand. Pleasure is taken out of
pleasant things, profit out of profitable things, power out of strong
things, as soon as we seek to separate them from the whole. We can no
more have things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get
an inside that shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow.
"Drive out nature with a fork, she comes running back."[110]

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek
to dodge, which one and another brags that he does not know; that they
do not touch him;--but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in
his soul. If he escapes them in one part, they attack him in another
more vital part. If he has escaped them in form, and in the
appearance, it is because he has resisted his life, and fled from
himself, and the retribution is so much death. So signal is the
failure of all attempts to make this separation of the good from the
tax, that the experiment would not be tried,--since to try it is to be
mad,--but for the circumstance, that when the disease began in the
will, of rebellion and separation, the intellect is at once infected,
so that the man ceases to see God whole in each object, but is able to
see the sensual allurement of an object, and not see the sensual hurt;
he sees the mermaid's head, but not the dragon's tail; and thinks he
can cut off that which he would have, from that which he would not
have. "How secret art thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in
silence, O thou only great God, sprinkling with an unwearied
Providence certain penal blindnesses upon such as have unbridled
desires!"[111]

The human soul is true to these facts in the painting of fable, of
history, of law, of proverbs, of conversation. It finds a tongue in
literature unawares. Thus the Greeks called Jupiter,[112] Supreme
Mind; but having traditionally ascribed to him many base actions, they
involuntarily made amends to reason, by tying up the hands[113] of so
bad a god. He is made as helpless as a king of England.[114]
Prometheus[115] knows one secret which Jove must bargain for;
Minerva,[116] another. He cannot get his own thunders; Minerva keeps
the key of them.

   "Of all the gods, I only know the keys
    That ope the solid doors within whose vaults
    His thunders sleep."

A plain confession of the in-working of the All, and of its moral aim.
The Indian mythology ends in the same ethics; and it would seem
impossible for any fable to be invented to get any currency which was
not moral. Aurora[117] forgot to ask youth for her lover, and though
Tithonus is immortal, he is old, Achilles[118] is not quite
invulnerable; the sacred waters did not wash the heel by which Thetis
held him. Siegfried,[119] in the Niebelungen, is not quite immortal,
for a leaf fell on his back whilst he was bathing in the dragon's
blood, and that spot which it covered is mortal. And so it must be.
There is a crack in everything God has made. It would seem, there is
always this vindictive circumstance stealing in at unawares, even into
the wild poesy in which the human fancy attempted to make bold
holiday, and to shake itself free of the old laws,--this back-stroke,
this kick of the gun, certifying that the law is fatal; that in nature
nothing can be given, all things are sold.

This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis,[120] who keeps watch in the
universe, and lets no offense go unchastised. The Furies,[121] they
said, are attendants on justice, and if the sun in heaven should
transgress his path, they would punish him. The poets related that
stone walls, and iron swords, and leathern thongs had an occult
sympathy with the wrongs of their owners; that the belt which Ajax
gave Hector[122] dragged the Trojan hero over the field at the wheels
of the car of Achilles, and the sword which Hector gave Ajax was that
on whose point Ajax fell. They recorded, that when the Thasians[123]
erected a statue to Theagenes, a victor in the games, one of his
rivals went to it by night, and endeavored to throw it down by
repeated blows, until at last he moved it from its pedestal, and was
crushed to death beneath its fall.

This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It came from thought
above the will of the writer. That is the best part of each writer,
which has nothing private in it;[124] that which he does not know,
that which flowed out of his constitution, and not from his too
active invention; that which in the study of a single artist you might
not easily find, but in the study of many, you would abstract as the
spirit of them all. Phidias it is not, but the work of man in that
early Hellenic[125] world, that I would know. The name and
circumstance of Phidias, however convenient for history, embarrass
when we come to the highest criticism. We are to see that which man
was tending to do in a given period, and was hindered, or, if you
will, modified in doing, by the interfering volitions of Phidias, of
Dante, of Shakespeare, the organ whereby man at the moment wrought.

Still more striking is the expression of this fact in the proverbs of
all nations, which are always the literature of reason, or the
statements of an absolute truth, without qualification. Proverbs, like
the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions.
That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow
the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in
proverbs without contradiction. And this law of laws which the pulpit,
the senate, and the college deny, is hourly preached in all markets
and workshops by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as
omnipresent as that of birds and flies.

All things are double, one against another.--Tit for tat;[126] an eye
for an eye; a tooth for a tooth; blood for blood; measure for measure;
love for love.--Give and it shall be given you.--- He that watereth
shall be watered himself.--What will you have? quoth God; pay for it
and take it.--Nothing venture, nothing have.--Thou shalt be paid
exactly for what thou hast done, no more, no less.--Who doth not work
shall not eat.--Harm watch, harm catch.--Curses always recoil on the
head of him who imprecates them.--If you put a chain around the neck
of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.--Bad counsel
confounds the adviser.--The Devil is an ass.

It is thus written, because it is thus in life. Our action is
overmastered and characterized above our will by the law of nature. We
aim at a petty end quite aside from the public good, but our act
arranges itself by irresistible magnetism in a line with the poles of
the world.

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will, or against
his will, he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every
word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a thread-ball
thrown at a mark, but the other end remains in the thrower's bag. Or,
rather, it is a harpoon hurled at the whale, unwinding, as it flies, a
coil of cord in the boat, and if the harpoon is not good, or not well
thrown, it will go nigh to cut the steersman in twain, or to sink the
boat.

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. "No man had ever a point
of pride that was not injurious to him," said Burke.[127] The
exclusive in fashionable life does not see that he excludes himself
from enjoyment in the attempt to appropriate it. The exclusionist in
religion does not see that he shuts the door of heaven on himself, in
striving to shut out others. Treat men as pawns[128] and ninepins, and
you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave out their heart, you
shall lose your own. The senses would make things of all persons; of
women, of children, of the poor. The vulgar proverb, "I will get it
from his purse or get it from his skin," is sound philosophy.

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are
speedily punished. They are punished by fear. Whilst I stand in simple
relations to my fellow-man, I have no displeasure in meeting him. We
meet as water meets water, or as two currents of air mix, with perfect
diffusion and interpenetration of nature. But as soon as there is any
departure from simplicity, and attempt at halfness, or good for me
that is not good for him, my neighbor feels the wrong; he shrinks from
me as far as I have shrunk from him; his eyes no longer seek mine;
there is war between us; there is hate in him and fear in me.

All the old abuses in society, universal and particular, all unjust
accumulations of property and power, are avenged in the same manner.
Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all
revolutions. One thing he teaches, that there is rottenness where he
appears. He is a carrion crow, and though you see not well what he

hovers for, there is death somewhere. Our property is timid, our laws
are timid, our cultivated classes are timid. Fear for ages has boded
and mowed and gibbered over government and property. That obscene[129]
bird is not there for nothing. He indicates great wrongs which must be
revised.

Of the like nature is that expectation of change which instantly
follows the suspension of our voluntary activity. The terror of
cloudless noon, the emerald of Polycrates,[130] the awe of prosperity,
the instinct which leads every generous soul to impose on itself tasks
of a noble asceticism and vicarious virtue, are the tremblings of the
balance of justice through the heart and mind of man.

Experienced men of the world know very well that it is best to pay
scot and lot[131] as they go along, and that a man often pays dear for
a small frugality. The borrower runs in his own debt. Has a man gained
anything who has received a hundred favors and rendered none? Has he
gained by borrowing, through indolence or cunning, his neighbor's
wares, or horses, or money? There arises on the deed the instant
acknowledgment of benefit on the one part, and of debt on the other;
that is, of superiority and inferiority. The transaction remains in
the memory of himself and his neighbor; and every new transaction
alters, according to its nature, their relation to each other. He may
soon come to see that he had better have broken his own bones than to
have ridden in his neighbor's coach, and that "the highest price he
can pay for a thing is to ask for it."

A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of life, and know that
it is the part of prudence to face every claimant, and pay every just
demand on your time, your talents, or your heart. Always pay; for,
first or last, you must pay your entire debt. Persons and events may
stand for a time between you and justice, but it is only a
postponement. You must pay at last your own debt. If you are wise, you
will dread a prosperity which only loads you with more. Benefit is the
end of nature. But for every benefit which you receive, a tax is
levied. He is great who confers the most benefits. He is base--and
that is the one base thing in the universe--to receive favors and
render none. In the order of nature we cannot render benefits to those
from whom we receive them, or only seldom.[132] But the benefit we
receive must be rendered again, line for line, deed for deed, cent for
cent, to somebody. Beware of too much good staying in your hand. It
will fast corrupt and worm worms.[133] Pay it away quickly in some
sort.

Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws. Cheapest, say the
prudent, is the dearest labor. What we buy in a broom, a mat, a wagon,
a knife, is some application of good sense to a common want. It is
best to pay in your land a skillful gardener, or to buy good sense
applied to gardening; in your sailor, good sense applied to
navigation; in the house, good sense applied to cooking, sewing,
serving; in your agent, good sense applied to accounts and affairs.
So do you multiply your presence, or spread yourself throughout your
estate. But because of the dual constitution of things, in labor as in
life there can be no cheating. The thief steals from himself. The
swindler swindles himself. For the real price of labor is knowledge
and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like
paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they
represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or
stolen. These ends of labor cannot be answered but by real exertions
of the mind, and in obedience to pure motives. The cheat, the
defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the knowledge of material and
moral nature which his honest care and pains yield to the operative.
The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the power: but
they who do not the thing have not the power.

Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a stake to
the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of
the perfect compensation of the universe. The absolute balance of Give
and Take, the doctrine that everything has its price,--and if that
price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained, and
that it is impossible to get anything without its price,--is not less
sublime in the columns of a ledger than in the budgets of states, in
the laws of light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of
nature. I cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees
implicated in those processes with which he is conversant, the stern
ethics which sparkle on his chisel edge, which are measured out by his
plumb and foot rule, which stand as manifest in the footing of the
shop bill as in the history of a state,--do recommend to him his
trade, and though seldom named, exalt his business to his imagination.

The league between virtue and nature engages all things to assume a
hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and substances of the world
persecute and whip the traitor. He finds that things are arranged for
truth and benefit, but there is no den in the wide world to hide a
rogue. Commit a crime,[134] and the earth is made of glass. Commit a
crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as
reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel
and mole. You cannot recall the spoken word,[135] you cannot wipe out
the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet
or clew. Some damning circumstance always transpires. The laws and
substances of nature--water, snow, wind, gravitation--become penalties
to the thief.

On the other hand, the law holds with equal sureness for all right
action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just,
as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation. The good man has
absolute good, which like fire turns everything to its own nature, so
that you cannot do him any harm; but as the royal armies sent against
Napoleon, when he approached, cast down their colors and from enemies
became friends, so disasters of all kinds, as sickness, offense,
poverty, prove benefactors:--

              "Winds blow and waters roll
    Strength to the brave, and power and deity,
    Yet in themselves are nothing."

The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As no man had
ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had
ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him. The stag in
the fable[136] admired his horns and blamed his feet, but when the
hunter came, his feet saved him, and afterwards, caught in the
thicket, his horns destroyed him. Every man in his lifetime needs to
thank his faults. As no man thoroughly understands a truth until he
has contended against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with
the hindrances or talents of men, until he has suffered from the one,
and seen the triumph of the other over his own want of the same. Has
he a defect of temper that unfits him to live in society? Thereby he
is driven to entertain himself alone, and acquire habits of self-help;
and thus, like the wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.

Our strength grows out of our weakness. The indignation which arms
itself with secret forces does not awaken until we are pricked and
stung and sorely assailed. A great man is always willing to be little.
Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he
is punished, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something;
he has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts;
learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got
moderation and real skill. The wise man throws himself on the side of
his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his
weak point. The wound cicatrizes and falls off from him like a dead
skin, and when they would triumph, lo! he has passed on invulnerable.
Blame is safer than praise. I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As
long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain
assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise are
spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.
In general, every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor. As
the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the
enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the
temptation we resist.

The same guards which protect us from disaster, defect, and enmity,
defend us, if we will, from selfishness and fraud. Bolts and bars are
not the best of our institutions, nor is shrewdness in trade a mark of
wisdom. Men suffer all their life long, under the foolish superstition
that they can be cheated. But it is as impossible for a man to be
cheated by anyone but himself,[137] as for a thing to be and not to be
at the same time. There is a third silent party to all our bargains.
The nature and soul of things takes on itself the guaranty of the
fulfillment of every contract, so that honest service cannot come to
loss. If you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God
in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer the payment is
withholden,[138] the better for you; for compound interest on compound
interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature,
to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no
difference whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A
mob[139] is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of
reason, and traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending
to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its
actions are insane like its whole constitution; it persecutes a
principle; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by
inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who
have these. It resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire engines
to put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The inviolate
spirit turns their spite against the wrongdoers. The martyr cannot be
dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison, a
more illustrious abode; every burned book or house enlightens the
world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the
earth from side to side. Hours of sanity and consideration are always
arriving to communities, as to individuals, when the truth is seen,
and the martyrs are justified.

Thus do all things preach the indifferency of circumstances. The man
is all. Everything has two sides, a good and an evil. Every advantage
has its tax. I learn to be content. But the doctrine of compensation
is not the doctrine of indifferency. The thoughtless say, on hearing
these representations, What boots it to do well? there is one event to
good and evil; if I gain any good, I must pay for it; if I lose any
good, I gain some other; all actions are indifferent.

There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, its own
nature. The soul is not a compensation, but a life. The soul _is_.
Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow
with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being.
Essence, or God, is not a relation, or a part, but the whole. Being is
the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and
swallowing up all relations, parts, and times within itself. Nature,
truth, virtue, are the influx from thence. Vice is the absence or
departure of the same. Nothing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the
great Night or shade, on which, as a background, the living universe
paints itself forth, but no fact is begotten by it; it cannot work,
for it is not. It cannot work any good; it cannot work any harm. It is
harm inasmuch as it is worse not to be than to be.

We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil acts, because the
criminal adheres to his vice and contumacy, and does not come to a
crisis or judgment anywhere in visible nature. There is no stunning
confutation of his nonsense before men and angels. Has he therefore
outwitted the law? Inasmuch as he carries the malignity and the lie
with him, he so far deceases from nature. In some manner there will be
a demonstration of the wrong to the understanding also; but should we
not see it, this deadly deduction makes square the eternal account.

Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of rectitude
must be bought by any loss. There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty
to wisdom; they are proper additions of being. In a virtuous action, I
properly _am_; in a virtuous act, I add to the world; I plant into
deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and see the darkness
receding on the limits of the horizon. There can be no excess to love;
none to knowledge; none to beauty, when these attributes are
considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always
affirms an Optimism,[140] never a Pessimism.

Man's life is a progress, and not a station. His instinct is trust.
Our instinct uses "more" and "less" in application to man, of the
_presence of the soul_, and not of its absence; the brave man is
greater than the coward; the true, the benevolent, the wise, is more a
man, and not less, than the fool and knave. There is no tax on the
good of virtue; for that is the incoming of God himself, or absolute
existence without any comparative. Material good has its tax, and if
it came without desert or sweat, has no root in me, and the next wind
will blow it away. But all the good of nature is the soul's, and may
be had, if paid for in nature's lawful coin, that is, by labor which
the heart and the head allow. I no longer wish to meet a good I do not
earn; for example, to find a pot of buried gold, knowing that it
brings with it new burdens. I do not wish more external
goods,--neither possessions, nor honors, nor powers, nor persons. The
gain is apparent; the tax is certain. But there is no tax on the
knowledge that the compensation exists, and that it is not desirable
to dig up treasure. Herein I rejoice with a serene eternal peace. I
contract the boundaries of possible mischief. I learn the wisdom of
St. Bernard,[141]--"Nothing can, work me damage except myself; the
harm, that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real
sufferer but by my own fault."

In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequalities of
condition. The radical tragedy of nature seems to be the distinction
of More and Less. How can Less not feel the pain; how not feel
indignation or malevolence towards More? Look at those who have less
faculty, and one feels sad, and knows not well what to make of it. He
almost shuns their eye; he fears they will upbraid God. What should
they do? It seems a great injustice. But see the facts nearly, and
these mountainous inequalities vanish. Love reduces them, as the sun
melts the iceberg in the sea. The heart and soul of all men being one,
this bitterness of _His_ and _Mine_ ceases. His is mine. I am my
brother, and my brother is me. If I feel overshadowed and outdone by
great neighbors, I can yet love; I can still receive; and he that
loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves. Thereby I make the
discovery that my brother is my guardian, acting for me with the
friendliest designs, and the estate I so admired and envied is my own.
It is the nature of the soul to appropriate all things. Jesus[142] and
Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and
incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His[143] virtue,--is not
that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.

Such, also, is the natural history of calamity. The changes which
break up at short intervals the prosperity of men are advertisements
of a nature whose law is growth. Every soul is by this intrinsic
necessity quitting its whole system of things, its friends, and home,
and laws, and faith, as the shellfish crawls out of its beautiful but
stony case, because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly
forms a new house. In proportion to the vigor of the individual, these
revolutions are frequent, until in some happier mind they are
incessant, and all worldly relations hang very loosely about him,
becoming, as it were, a transparent fluid membrane through which the
living form is seen, and not, as in most men, an indurated
heterogeneous fabric of many dates, and of no settled character, in
which the man is imprisoned. Then there can be enlargement, and the
man of to-day scarcely recognizes the man of yesterday. And such
should be the outward biography of man in time, a putting off of dead
circumstances day by day, as he renews his raiment day by day. But to
us, in our lapsed estate, resting, not advancing, resisting, not
coöperating with the divine expansion, this growth comes by shocks.

We cannot part with our friend. We cannot let our angels go. We do not
see that they only go out, that archangels may come in. We are
idolaters of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in
its proper eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe there is any
force in to-day to rival or recreate that beautiful yesterday. We
linger in the ruins of the old tent, where once we had bread and
shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover, and
nerve us again. We cannot again find aught so dear, so sweet, so
graceful. But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty
saith, "Up and onward forevermore!" We cannot stay amid the ruins.
Neither will we rely on the new; and so we walk ever with reverted
eyes, like those monsters who look backwards.

And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the
understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a
mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of
friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure
years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The
death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but
privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius;
for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an
epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up
a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows
the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It
permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances, and the
reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the
next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny
garden flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for
its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener,
is made the banyan[144] of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to
wide neighborhoods of men.

Self-Reliance


"Ne te quæsiveris extra."[145]

    "Man is his own star; and the soul that can
    Render an honest and a perfect man,
    Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
    Nothing to him falls early or too late.
    Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
    Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."[146]

       *       *       *       *       *

      Cast the bantling on the rocks,
      Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat;
      Wintered with the hawk and fox,
      Power and speed be hands and feet.[147]

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which
were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an
admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The
sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may
contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for
you in your private heart is true for all men,--that is genius.[148]
Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal
sense;[149] for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,--and our
first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last
Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest
merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato,[150] and Milton[151] is, that they
set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what
they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of
light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster
of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice
his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize
our own rejected thoughts:[152] they come back to us with a certain
alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson
for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression
with good-humored inflexibility then most when[153] the whole cry of
voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with
masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the
time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from
another.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the
conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide;[154]
that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that
though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn
can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground
which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new
in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor
does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one
character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none.
This sculpture in the memory is not without preëstablished harmony.
The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of
that particular ray. We but half express ourselves,[155] and are
ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be
safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be
faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by
cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his
work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall
give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the
attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no
hope.

Trust thyself:[156] every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept
the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your
contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done
so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age,
betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated
at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all
their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind
the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a
protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides,
redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing
on Chaos[157] and the Dark.

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and
behavior of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel
mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed
the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these[158] have not.
Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we
look in their faces we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody:
all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five[159]
out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth
and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and
made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it
will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he
cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is
sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his
contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then, he will know how to make us
seniors very unnecessary.

The nonchalance[160] of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would
disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the
healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlor what the pit
is in the playhouse;[161] independent, irresponsible, looking out from
his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences
them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad,
interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never
about consequences about interests; he gives an independent, genuine
verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as
it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has
once acted or spoken with _éclat_[162] he is a committed person,
watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections
must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe[163] for this. Ah,
that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who[164] can thus avoid
all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same
unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always
be formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which
being seen to be not private, but necessary, would sink like darts
into the ear of men, and put them in fear.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint
and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in
conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is
a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better
securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty
and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity.
Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators,
but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.[165] He who would gather
immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must
explore if it be goodness.[166] Nothing is at last sacred but the
integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall
have the suffrage[167] of the world. I remember an answer which when
quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont
to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my
saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live
wholly from within? my friend suggested: "But these impulses may be
from below, not from above." I replied: "They do not seem to me to be
such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil."
No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but
names very readily transferable to that or this;[168] the only right
is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A
man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if
everything were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think
how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and
dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and
sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and
speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat
of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this
bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from
Barbadoes,[169] why should I not say to him: "Go love thy infant; love
thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and
never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible
tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is
spite at home." Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth
is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have
some edge to it,--else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be
preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules
and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my
genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post,
_Whim_.[170] I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we
cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I
seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good
man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good
situations. Are they _my_ poor? I tell thee, thou foolish
philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give
to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There
is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought
and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your
miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools;
the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now
stand; alms to sots; and the thousand-fold Relief Societies;--though I
confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a
wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the
rule. There is the man _and_ his virtues. Men do what is called a good
action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a
fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are
done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world,--as
invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances.
I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not
for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so
it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and
unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and
bleeding.[171] I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse
this appeal from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it
makes no difference whether I do or forbear those actions which are
reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I
have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am,
and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows
any secondary testimony.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.
This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may
serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is
the harder, because you will always find those who think they know
what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to
live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after
our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps
with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.[172]

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is,
that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the
impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church,
contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for
the government or against it, spread your table like base
housekeepers,--under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the
precise[173] man you are. And, of course, so much force is withdrawn
from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you.[174] Do
your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what
a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I
anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and
topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I
not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous
word? Do I not know that, with[175] all this ostentation of examining
the grounds of the institution, he will do no such thing? Do I not
know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side,--the
permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a
retained attorney, and these airs of the bench[176] are the emptiest
affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another
handkerchief,[177] and attached themselves to some one of these
communities of opinion.[178] This conformity makes them not false in a
few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars.
Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two,
their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us,
and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is
not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we
adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by
degrees the gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying
experience in particular which does not fail to wreak itself also in
the general history; I mean "the foolish face of praise," the forced
smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in
answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not
spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurping willfulness, grow
tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable
sensation.

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.[179] And
therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The bystanders
look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlor. If
this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his
own, he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces
of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are
put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs.[180] Yet is
the discontent of the multitude more formidable than that of the
senate and the college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the
world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is
decorous and prudent, for they are timid as being very vulnerable
themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the
people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the
unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made
to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to
treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment.

The other terror[181] that scares us from self-trust is our
consistency;[182] a reverence for our past act or word, because the
eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit[183] than
our past acts, and we are loth to disappoint them.

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about
this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat[184] you have
stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict
yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on
your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring
the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in
a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the
Deity; yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them
heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color.
Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and
flee.[185]

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by
little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a
great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself
with the shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words,
and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though
it contradict everything you said to-day.--"Ah, so you shall be sure
to be misunderstood."--Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?
Pythagoras[186] was misunderstood, and Socrates,[187] and Jesus, and
Luther,[188] and Copernicus,[189] and Galileo,[190] and Newton,[191]
and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to
be misunderstood.

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will
are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of
Andes[192] and Himmaleh[193] are insignificant in the curve of the
sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him. A character is
like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza;[194]--read it forward,
backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing,
contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my
honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it
will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not. My
book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The
swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he
carries in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we are.
Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate
their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue
or vice emit a breath every moment.

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be
each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions
will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost
sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One
tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line
of a hundred tacks.[195] See the line from a sufficient distance, and
it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action
will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your
conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already
done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If
I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes,[196] I must
have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will,
do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force
of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their
health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate
and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a
train of great days and victories behind. They shed an united light on
the advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels.
That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's[197] voice, and dignity
into Washington's port, and America into Adams's[198] eye. Honor is
venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient
virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it
and pay it homage, because it is not a trap for our love and homage,
but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old
immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.

I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and
consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.
Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the
Spartan[199] fife. Let us never bow and apologize more. A great man is
coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he
should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I
would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand
the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl
in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the
upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and
Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no
other time or place, but is the center of things. Where he is, there
is nature. He measures you, and all men, and all events. Ordinarily,
everybody in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other
person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes
place of the whole creation. The man must be so much, that he must
make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a
country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time
fully to accomplish his design;--and posterity seem to follow his
steps as a train of clients. A man Cæsar[200] is born, and for ages
after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds
so grow and cleave to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue
and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of
one man; as Monachism, of the hermit Antony;[201] the Reformation, of
Luther; Quakerism, of Fox;[202] Methodism, of Wesley;[203] Abolition,
of Clarkson.[204] Scipio,[205] Milton called "the height of Rome"; and
all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few
stout and earnest persons.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him
not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy,
a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. But
the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds
to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels
poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, a costly book,
have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem
to say like that, "Who are you, Sir?" Yet they all are his, suitors
for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out
and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to
command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular
fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried
to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed,
and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the
duke, and assured that he had been insane,[206] owes its popularity to
the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the
world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason,
and finds himself a true prince.

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history, our imagination
plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier
vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common
day's work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total
of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred,[207] and
Scanderbeg,[208] and Gustavus?[209] Suppose they were virtuous; did
they wear out virtue? As great a stake depends on your private act
to-day, as followed their public and renowned steps. When private men
shall act with original views, the luster will be transferred from the
actions of kings to those of gentlemen.

The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized the
eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual
reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful loyalty with which
men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, or the great
proprietor to walk among them by a law of his own, make his own scale
of men and things, and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money
but with honor, and represent the law in his person, was the
hieroglyphic[210] by which they obscurely signified their
consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of every
man.

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we
inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the
aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What
is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without
parallax,[211] without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of
beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of
independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the
essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity
or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all
later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind
which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For the
sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the
soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time,
from man, but one with them, and proceeds obviously from the same
source whence their life and being also proceed. We first share the
life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in
nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the
fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that
inspiration which giveth man wisdom, and which cannot be denied
without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense
intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its
activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do
nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask
whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all
philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can
affirm. Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his
mind, and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his
involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the
expression of them, but he knows that these things are so, like day
and night, not to be disputed. My willful actions and acquisitions are
but roving;--the idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion, command
my curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people contradict as readily the
statement of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more readily;
for, they do not distinguish between perception and notion. They fancy
that I choose to see this or that thing. But perception is not
whimsical, it is fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it
after me, and in course of time, all mankind,--although it may chance
that no one has seen it before me. For my perception of it is as much
a fact as the sun.

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is
profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh
he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the
world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls,
from the center of the present thought; and new date and new create
the whole. Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom,
old things pass away,--means, teachers, texts, temples, fall; it lives
now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are
made sacred by relation to it,--one as much as another. All things
are dissolved to their center by their cause, and, in the universal
miracle, petty and particular miracles disappear. If, therefore, a man
claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the
phraseology of some old moldered nation in another country, in another
world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its
fullness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom
he has cast his ripened being?[212] Whence, then, this worship of the
past?[213] The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and
authority of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors
which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where
it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it
be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and
becoming.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say
"I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before
the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window
make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what
they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There
is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.
Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown
flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its
nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike.
But man postpones, or remembers; he does not live in the present, but
with a reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that
surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be
happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above
time.

This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not
yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I know not
what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a
price on a few texts, on a few lives.[214] We are like children who
repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they
grow older, of the men and talents and characters they chance to
see,--painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards,
when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered
those saying, they understand them, and are willing to let the words
go; for, at any time, they can use words as good when occasion comes.
If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man
to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new
perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded
treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall
be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.

And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid;
probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far-off
remembering of the intuition. That thought, by what I can now nearest
approach to say it, is this. When good is near you, when you have
life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall
not discern the footprints of any other; you shall not see the face of
man; you shall not hear any name;--the way, the thought, the good,
shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and
experience. You take the way from man, not to man. All persons that
ever existed are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike
beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision,
there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The
soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation,
perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with
knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic
Ocean, the South Sea,--long intervals of time, years, centuries,--are
of no account. This which I think and feel underlay every former state
of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my present, and what is
called life, and what is called death.

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of
repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new
state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one
fact the world hates, that the soul _becomes_; for that forever
degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to
shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas[215]
equally aside. Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as
the soul is present, there will be power not confident but agent.[216]
To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather
of that which relies, because it works and is. Who has more obedience
than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I
must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when
we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height,
and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to
principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities,
nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not.

This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on
every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE.
Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it
constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into
all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they
contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whaling, war eloquence,
personal weight, are somewhat, and engage my respect as examples of
its presence and impure action. I see the same law working in nature
for conservation and growth. Power is in nature the essential measure
of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which
cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise
and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the
vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of
the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul.

Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the
cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books
and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the
invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here
within.[217] Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our
own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our
native riches.

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his
genius admonished to stay at home to put itself in communication with
the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the
urns of other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church before
the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool,
how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or
sanctuary! So let us always sit. Why should we assume the faults of
our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our
hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood, and
I have all men's.[218] Not for that will I adopt their petulance or
folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your isolation
must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At
times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with
emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want,
charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and say, "Come out unto
us." But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men
possess to annoy men, I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can
come near me but through my act. "What we love that we have, but by
desire we bereave ourselves of the love."

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith,
let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of
war, and wake Thor and Woden,[219] courage and constancy, in our Saxon
breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth.
Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to
the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we
converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O
friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward
I am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law
less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but
proximities.[220] I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, to support
my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife,--but these relations
I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your
customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you,
or you.[221] If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the
happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should.
I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is
deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever
inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will
love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by
hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth
with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not
selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine,
and all men's however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth.
Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what is dictated by
your nature as well as mine, and, if we follow the truth, it will
bring us out safe at last.[222] But so may you give these friends
pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their
sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when
they look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they
justify me, and do the same thing.

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a
rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism;[223] and the bold
sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the
law of consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one or
the other of which we must be shriven. You may fulfill your round of
duties by clearing yourself in the _direct_, or in the _reflex_ way.
Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother,
cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these can upbraid
you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard, and absolve me to
myself. I have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the
name of duty to many offices that are called duties. But if I can
discharge its debts, it enables me to dispense with the popular code.
If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its
commandment one day.

And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the
common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a
taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight,
that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself,
that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to
others!

If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by
distinction _society_, he will see the need of these ethics. The sinew
and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous,
desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune,
afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and
perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our
social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot
satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to
their practical force,[224] and do lean and beg day and night
continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations,
our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has
chosen for us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of
fate, where strength is born.

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all
heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is _ruined_. If the
finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in
an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of
Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is
right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life.
A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the
professions, who _teams it, farms it_,[225] _peddles_, keeps a school,
preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so
forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet,
is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his
days, and feels no shame in not "studying a profession," for he does
not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a
hundred chances. Let a Stoic[226] open the resources of man, and tell
men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves;
that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a
man is the word made flesh,[227] born to shed healing to the
nations,[228] that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that
the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books,
idolatries and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, but
thank and revere him,--and that teacher shall restore the life of man
to splendor, and make his name dear to all history.

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution
in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their
education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their
association; in their property; in their speculative views.

1. In what prayers do men allow themselves![229] That which they call
a holy office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad
and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign
virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural,
and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular
commodity,--anything less than all good,--is vicious. Prayer is the
contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It
is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul.[230] It is the
spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to
effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and
not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one
with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The
prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of
the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard
throughout nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach,[231] in Fletcher's
Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind of the god Audate,
replies,--

   "His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors;
    Our valors are our best gods."

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want
of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you
can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and
already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base.
We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company,
instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric
shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason.
The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods
and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him
all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our
love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We
solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he
held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him
because men hated him. "To the persevering mortal," said
Zoroaster,[232] "the blessed Immortals are swift."

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a
disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, "Let
not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and
we will obey."[233] Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my
brother, because he has shut his own temple doors, and recites fables
merely of his brother's, or his brother's brother's God. Every new mind
is a new classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and
power, a Locke,[234] a Lavoisier,[235] a Hutton,[236] a Betham,[237] a
Fourier,[238] it imposes its classification on other men, and lo! a new
system. In proportion to the depth of the thought, and so to the number
of the objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his
complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which
are also classifications of some powerful mind acting on the elemental
thought of duty, and man's relation to the Highest. Such is
Calvinism,[239] Quakerism,[240] Swedenborgism.[241] The pupil takes the
same delight in subordinating everything to the new terminology, as a
girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons
thereby. It will happen for A time, that the pupil will find his
intellectual power has grown by the study of his master's mind. But in
all unbalanced minds, the classification is idolized, passes for the
end, and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the
system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the
universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their
master built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to
see,--how you can see; "It must be somehow that you stole the light from
us." They do not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable,
will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and
call it their own. If they are honest and do well, presently their neat
new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot
and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed,
million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the first morning.

2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Traveling,
whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all
educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable
in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an
axis of the earth. In manly hours, we feel that duty is our place. The
soul is no traveler; the wise man stays at home, and when his
necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or
into foreign lands, he is at home still; and shall make men sensible
by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of
wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not
like an interloper or a valet.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for
the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is
first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding
somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get
somewhat which he does not carry,[242] travels away from himself, and
grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes,[243] in
Palmyra,[244] his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as
they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the
indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can
be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk,
embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples,
and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting,
identical, that I fled from.[245] I seek the Vatican,[246] and the
palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but
I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

3. But the rage of traveling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness of
affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond,
and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel
when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is
imitation but the traveling of the mind? Our houses are built with
foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our
opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the
Distant. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It
was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an
application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the
conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric[247] or the
Gothic[248] model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and
quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American
artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by
him considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the
wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will
create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and
taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.

Insist on yourself; never imitate.[249] Your own gift you can present
every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation;
but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous,
half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can
teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has
exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught
Shakespeare?[250] Where is the master who could have instructed
Franklin,[251] or Washington, or Bacon,[252] or Newton?[253] Every great
man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio[254] is precisely that part he
could not borrow. Shakespeare will never be made by the study of
Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too
much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance
brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias,[255] or
trowel of the Egyptians,[256] or the pen of Moses,[257] or Dante,[258]
but different from all these. Not possible will the soul all rich, all
eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if
you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in
the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of
one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy
heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld[259] again.

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our
spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of
society, and no man improves.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on
the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is
civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this
change is not amelioration. For everything that is given, something is
taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a
contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American,
with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the
naked New Zealander,[260] whose property is a club, a spear, a mat,
and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the
health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost
his aboriginal strength. If the traveler tell us truly, strike the
savage with a broad ax, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and
heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow
shall send the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He
has a fine Geneva[261] watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the
hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac[262] he has, and so
being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street
does not know a star in the sky. The solstice[263] he does not
observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar
of the year is without a dial in his mind. His notebooks impair his
memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases
the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery
does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some
energy, by a Christianity intrenched in establishments and forms, some
vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom
where is the Christian?

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard
of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A singular
equality may be observed between great men of the first and of the
last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of
the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than
Plutarch's[264] heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in
time is the race progressive. Phocion,[265] Socrates, Anaxagoras,[266]
Diogenes,[267] are great men, but they leave no class. He who is
really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be
his own man, and, in his turn, the founder of a sect. The arts and
inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate
men. The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good.
Hudson[268] and Bering[269] accomplished so much in their fishing
boats, as to astonish Parry[270] and Franklin,[271] whose equipment
exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an
opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena
than any one since. Columbus[272] found the New World in an undecked
boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of
means and machinery, which were introduced with loud laudation a few
years or centuries before. The great genius returns to essential man.
We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of
science, and yet Napoleon[273] conquered Europe by the bivouac, which
consisted of falling back on naked valor, and disencumbering it of all
aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Las
Casas,[274] "without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries, and
carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should
receive his supply of corn, grind it in his handmill, and bake his
bread himself."

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is
composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to
the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a
nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments
which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away
from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem
the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property,
and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be
assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what
each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes
ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially
he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental,--came to him by
inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having;
it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there,
because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man
is, does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is
living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or
revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually
renews itself wherever the man breathes. "Thy lot or portion of life,"
said the Caliph Ali,[275] "is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest
from seeking after it." Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us
to our slavish respect for numbers. The political parties meet in
numerous conventions; the greater the concourse, and with each new
uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex![276] The Democrats
from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! The young patriot feels
himself stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In
like manner the reformers summon conventions, and vote and resolve in
multitude. Not so, O friends! will the god deign to enter and inhabit
you, but by a method precisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts
off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong
and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a
man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and in the endless
mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder of
all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power is inborn, that he is
weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so
perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly
rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs,
works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than
a man who stands on his head.

So use all that is called Fortune.[277] Most men gamble with her, and
gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as
unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the
chancelors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained
the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her
rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your
sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable
event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for
you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Friendship


1. We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Barring all
the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human
family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many
persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we
honor, and who honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in
church, whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the
language of these wandering eyebeams. The heart knoweth.

2. The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain
cordial exhilaration. In poetry, and in common speech, the emotions of
benevolence and complacency which are felt toward others, are likened
to the material effects of fire; so swift, or much more swift, more
active, more cheering are these fine inward irradiations. From the
highest degree of passionate love, to the lowest degree of good will,
they make the sweetness of life.

3. Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The
scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not
furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is
necessary to write a letter to a friend, and, forthwith, troops of
gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words.
See in any house where virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation
which the approach of a stranger causes. A commended stranger is
expected and announced, and an uneasiness between pleasure and pain
invades all the hearts of a household. His arrival almost brings fear
to the good hearts that would welcome him. The house is dusted, all
things fly into their places, the old coat is exchanged for the new,
and they must get up a dinner if they can. Of a commended stranger,
only the good report is told by others, only the good and new is heard
by us. He stands to us for humanity. He is, what we wish. Having
imagined and invested him, we ask how we should stand related in
conversation and action with such a man, and are uneasy with fear. The
same idea exalts conversation with him. We talk better than we are
wont. We have the nimblest fancy, a richer memory, and our dumb devil
has taken leave for the time. For long hours we can continue a series
of sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn from the oldest,
secretest experience, so that they who sit by, of our own kinsfolk and
acquaintance, shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual powers. But
as soon as the stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his
definitions, his defects, into the conversation, it is all over. He
has heard the first, the last and best, he will ever hear from us. He
is no stranger now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension, are old
acquaintances. Now, when he comes, he may get the order, the dress,
and the dinner, but the throbbing of the heart, and the communications
of the soul, no more.

4. What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which relume[279] a
young world for me again? What is so delicious as a just and firm
encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling? How beautiful, on their
approach to this beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and
the true! The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is
metamorphosed; there is no winter, and no night; all tragedies, all
ennuis vanish; all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity
but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured
that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it
would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.

5. I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old
and the new. Shall I not call God, the Beautiful, who daily showeth
himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and
yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the
noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate.[280] Who hears me,
who understands me, becomes mine,--a possession for all time. Nor is
nature so poor, but she gives me this joy several times, and thus we
weave social threads of our own, a new web of relations; and, as many
thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by-and-by stand
in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims
is a traditionary globe. My friends have come[281] to me unsought. The
great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of
virtue with itself, I find them, or rather, not I, but the Deity in me
and in them, both deride and cancel the thick walls of individual
character, relation, age, sex and circumstance, at which he usually
connives, and now makes many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent
lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths, and
enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts. These are new poetry of the
first Bard[282]--poetry without stop--hymn, ode and epic,[283] poetry
still flowing, Apollo[284] and the Muses[285] chanting still. Will these
two separate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but
I fear it not; for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by
simple affinity, and the Genius[286] of my life being thus social, the
same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these
men and women, wherever I may be.

6. I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. It is
almost dangerous to me to "crush the sweet poison,[287] of misused
wine" of the affections. A new person is to me a great event, and
hinders me from sleep. I have had such fine fancies lately about two
or three persons, as have given me delicious hours, but the joy ends
in the day: it yields no fruit. Thought is not born of it; my action
is very little modified. I must feel pride in my friend's
accomplishments as if they were mine, and a property in his virtues.
I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the lover when he hears
applause of his engaged maiden. We over-estimate the conscience of our
friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer,
his temptations less. Everything that is his,--his name, his form, his
dress, books and instruments,--fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds
new and larger from his mouth.

7. Yet the systole and diastole[288] of the heart are not without
their analogy in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship, like the
immortality[289] of the soul, is too good to be believed. The lover,
beholding his maiden, half knows that she is not verily that which he
worships; and in the golden hour of friendship, we are surprised with
shades of suspicion and unbelief. We doubt that we bestow on our hero
the virtues in which he shines, and afterward worship the form to
which we have ascribed this divine inhabitation. In strictness, the
soul does not respect men as it respects itself. In strict science,
all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness.
Shall we fear to cool our love by mining for the metaphysical
foundation of this Elysian temple?[290] Shall I not be as real as the
things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they
are. Their essence is not less beautiful than their appearance, though
it needs finer organs for its apprehension. The root of the plant is
not unsightly to science, though for chaplets and festoons we cut the
stem short. And I must hazard the production of the bald fact amid
these pleasing reveries, though it should prove an Egyptian skull at
our banquet.[291] A man who stands united with his thought, conceives
magnificently to himself. He is conscious of a universal success,[292]
even though bought by uniform particular failures. No advantages, no
powers, no gold or force can be any match for him. I cannot choose but
rely on my own poverty, more than on your wealth. I cannot make your
consciousness tantamount to mine. Only the star dazzles; the planet
has a faint, moon-like ray. I hear what you say of the admirable parts
and tried temper of the party you praise, but I see well that for all
his purple cloaks I shall not like him, unless he is at least a poor
Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the
Phenomenal includes thee, also, in its pied and painted
immensity,--thee, also, compared with whom all else is shadow. Thou
art not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is,--thou art not my soul, but
a picture and effigy of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and already
thou art seizing thy hat and cloak. It is not that the soul puts forth
friends, as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently, by the
germination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf?[293] The law of nature
is alternation forevermore. Each electrical state superinduces the
opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter
into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone, for a
season, that it may exalt its conversation or society. This method
betrays itself along the whole history of our personal relations. The
instinct of affection revives the hope of union with our mates, and
the returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase. Thus
every man passes his life in the search after friendship, and if he
should record his true sentiment, he might write a letter like this,
to each new candidate for his love:--

     DEAR FRIEND:--

     If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to match
     my mood with thine, I should never think again of trifles,
     in relation to thy comings and goings. I am not very wise;
     my moods are quite attainable; and I respect thy genius; it
     is to me as yet unfathomed; yet dare I not presume in thee a
     perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art to me a
     delicious torment. Thine ever, or never.

8. Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, and
not for life. They are not to be indulged. This is to weave cobweb,
and not cloth. Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions,
because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams,[294] instead
of the tough fiber of the human heart. The laws of friendship are
great, austere, and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of
morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a
sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden
of God, which many summers and many winters must ripen. We seek our
friend not sacredly but with an adulterate passion which would
appropriate him to ourselves. In vain. We are armed all over with
subtle antagonisms, which, as soon as we meet, begin to play, and
translate all poetry into stale prose. Almost all people descend to
meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the
very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures
disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual
disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted!
After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be
tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable
apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of
friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both
parties are relieved by solitude.

9. I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes no difference how
many friends I have, and what content I can find in conversing with
each, if there be one to whom I am not equal. If I have shrunk unequal
from one contest instantly, the joy I find in all the rest becomes
mean and cowardly. I should hate myself, if then I made my other
friends my asylum.

    "The valiant warrior[295] famoused for fight,
       After a hundred victories, once foiled,
     Is from the book of honor razed quite,
       And all the rest forgot for which he toiled."

10. Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness and apathy are
a tough husk in which a delicate organization is protected from
premature ripening. It would be lost if it knew itself before any of
the best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. Respect the
_naturlangsamkeit_[296] which hardens the ruby in a million years,
and works in duration, in which Alps and Andes come and go as
rainbows. The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price
of rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but
for the total worth of man. Let us not have this childish luxury in
our regards, but the austerest worth; let us approach our friend with
an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in the breadth,
impossible to be overturned, of his foundations.

11. The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, and I
leave, for the time, all account of subordinate social benefit, to
speak of that select and sacred relation which is a kind of absolute,
and which even leaves the language of love suspicious and common, so
much is this purer, and nothing is so much divine.

12. I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest
courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work,
but the solidest thing we know. For now, after so many ages of
experience, what do we know of nature, or of ourselves? Not one step
has man taken toward the solution of the problem of his destiny. In
one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe of men. But the
sweet sincerity of joy and peace, which I draw from this alliance
with my brother's soul, is the nut itself whereof all nature and all
thought is but the husk and shell. Happy is the house that shelters a
friend! It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to
entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that
relation, and honor its law! He who offers himself a candidate for
that covenant comes up, like an Olympian,[297] to the great games,
where the first-born of the world are the competitors. He proposes
himself for contest where Time, Want, Danger are in the lists, and he
alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve
the delicacy of his beauty from the wear and tear of all these. The
gifts of fortune may be present or absent, but all the hap in that
contest depends on intrinsic nobleness, and the contempt of trifles.
There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each
so sovereign, that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason
why either should be first named. One is Truth. A friend is a person
with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud. I am
arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may
drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and
second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with
the simplicity and wholeness, with which one chemical atom meets
another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, but diadems and authority,
only to the highest rank, _that_ being permitted to speak truth as
having none above it to court or conform unto. Every man alone is
sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We
parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by
gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him
under a hundred folds. I knew a man who,[298] under a certain
religious frenzy, cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliments
and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he
encountered, and that with great insight and beauty. At first he was
resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting, as indeed he
could not help doing, for some time in this course, he attained to the
advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true
relations with him. No man would think of speaking falsely with him,
or of putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But
every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the like plain
dealing and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he
had, he did certainly show him. But to most of us society shows not
its face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in true
relations with men in a false age, is worth a fit of insanity, is it
not? We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we meet requires some
civility,--requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some
whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be
questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend
is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives
me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part. A
friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox[299] in nature. I who alone
am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with
equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being in all
its height, variety and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so
that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

13. The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holden to
men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by
lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and
badge and trifle, but we can scarce believe that so much character can
subsist in another as to draw us by love. Can another be so blessed,
and we so pure, that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes
dear to me, I have touched the goal of fortune. I find very little
written directly to the heart of this matter in books. And yet I have
one text which I cannot choose but remember. My author says,[300]--"I
offer myself faintly and bluntly to those whose I effectually am, and
tender myself least to him to whom I am the most devoted." I wish that
friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must
plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon. I wish it
to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub.[301] We
chide the citizen because he makes love a commodity. It is an exchange
of gifts, of useful loans; it is good neighborhood; it watches with
the sick; it holds the pall at the funeral; and quite loses sight of
the delicacies and nobility of the relation. But though we cannot find
the god under this disguise of a sutler, yet, on the other hand, we
cannot forgive the poet if he spins his thread too fine, and does not
substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues of justice,
punctuality, fidelity and pity. I hate the prostitution of the name of
friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the
company of plow-boys and tin-peddlers, to the silken and perfumed
amity which only celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous
display, by rides in a curricle,[302] and dinners at the best taverns.
The end of friendship is a commerce the most strict and homely that
can be joined; more strict than any of which we have experience. It is
for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and
death. It is fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country
rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty,
and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the
trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily needs
and offices of man's life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and
unity. It should never fall into something usual and settled, but
should be alert and inventive, and add rhyme and reason to what was
drudgery.

14. Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each
so well-tempered, and so happily adapted, and withal so
circumstanced, (for even in that particular, a poet says, love demands
that the parties be altogether paired,) that its satisfaction can very
seldom be assured. It cannot subsist in its perfection, say some of
those who are learned in this warm lore of the heart, betwixt more
than two. I am not quite so strict in my terms, perhaps because I have
never known so high a fellowship as others. I please my imagination
more with a circle of godlike men and women variously related to each
other, and between whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this
law of _one to one_,[303] peremptory for conversation, which is the
practice and consummation of friendship. Do not mix waters too much.
The best mix as ill as good and bad. You shall have very useful and
cheering discourse at several times with two several men, but let all
three of you come together, and you shall not have one new and hearty
word. Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a
conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company
there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes
place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals at
once merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with
the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend
to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are
there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can
sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to
his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the
high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running
of two souls into one.

15. No two men but being left alone with each other, enter into
simpler relations. Yet it is affinity that determines _which_ two
shall converse. Unrelated men give little joy to each other; will
never suspect the latent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a great
talent for conversation, as if it were a permanent property in some
individuals. Conversation is an evanescent relation,--no more. A man
is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say
a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as
much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the
shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his
thought, he will regain his tongue.

16. Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and
unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of consent
in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather
than that my friend should overstep by a word or a look his real
sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him
not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being
mine, is that the _not mine_ is _mine_. I hate, where I looked for a
manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of
concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend, than his
echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do
without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts. There
must be very two before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance
of two large formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared,
before yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these
disparities unites them.

17. He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who is sure
that greatness and goodness are always economy; who is not swift to
intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not intermeddle with this.
Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the
births of the eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment. We
talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence
is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course he
has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honor, if you must
needs hold him close to your person. Stand aside; give those merits
room; let them mount and expand. Are you the friend of your friend's
buttons, or of his thought? To a great heart he will still be a
stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the
holiest ground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as
property, and to suck a short and all-confounding pleasure instead of
the noblest benefits.

18. Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation. Why
should we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them?
Why insist on rash personal relations with your friend? Why go to his
house, or know his mother and brother and sisters? Why be visited by
him at your own? Are these things material to our covenant? Leave this
touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought,
a sincerity, a glance from him I want, but not news, nor pottage. I
can get politics, and chat, and neighborly conveniences, from cheaper
companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure,
universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is
profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the
horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us
not vilify but raise it to that standard. That great defying eye, that
scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on
reducing, but rather fortify and enhance. Worship his superiorities;
wish him not less by a thought, but hoard and tell them all. Guard him
as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee forever a sort of beautiful
enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to
be soon outgrown and cast aside. The hues of the opal, the light of
the diamond, are not to be seen, if the eye is too near. To my friend
I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you a
little. It suffices me. It is a spiritual gift worthy of him to give
and of me to receive. It profanes nobody. In these warm lines the
heart will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, and pour out
the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals of heroism
have yet made good.

19. Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as not to
prejudice its perfect flower by your impatience for its opening. We
must be our own before we can be another's. There is at least this
satisfaction in crime, according to the Latin proverb;--you can speak
to your accomplice on even terms. _Crimen quos[304] inquinat, æquat_.
To those whom we admire and love, at first we cannot. Yet the least
defect of self-possession vitiates, in my judgment, the entire
relation. There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never
mutual respect until, in their dialogue, each stands for the whole
world.

20. What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of
spirit we can. Let us be silent,--so we may hear the whisper of the
gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to cast about what you should
say to the select souls, or how to say anything to such? No matter how
ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There are innumerable
degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be
frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary
and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves
of your lips. The only reward of virtue, is virtue; the only way to
have a friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer a man by getting
into his house. If unlike, his soul only flees the faster from you,
and you shall catch never a true glance of his eye. We see the noble
afar off, and they repel us; why should we intrude? Late,--very
late,--we perceive that no arrangements, no introductions, no
consuetudes or habits of society, would be of any avail to establish
us in such relations with them as we desire,--but solely the uprise of
nature in us to the same degree it is in them; then shall we meet as
water with water; and if we should not meet them then, we shall not
want them, for we are already they. In the last analysis, love is only
the reflection of a man's own worthiness from other men. Men have
sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify
that in their friend each loved his own soul.

21. The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less
easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world.
Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope
cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of
the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which
can love us, and which we can love. We may congratulate ourselves that
the period of nonage,[305] of follies, of blunders, and of shame, is
passed in solitude, and when we are finished men, we shall grasp
heroic hands in heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you already
see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no
friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish
alliances which no God attends. By persisting in your path, though
you forfeit the little you gain the great. You demonstrate yourself,
so as to put yourself out of the reach of false relations, and you
draw to you the first-born of the world, those rare pilgrims whereof
only one or two wander in nature at once, and before whom the vulgar
great show as specters and shadows merely.

22. It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, as if
so we could lose any genuine love. Whatever correction of our popular
views we make from insight, nature will be sure to bear us out in, and
though it seem to rob us of some joy, will repay us with a greater.
Let us feel, if we will, the absolute insulation of man. We are sure
that we have all in us. We go to Europe, or we pursue persons, or we
read books, in the instinctive faith that these will call it out and
reveal us to ourselves. Beggars all. The persons are such as we; the
Europe, an old faded garment of dead persons; the books, their ghosts.
Let us drop this idolatry. Let us give over this mendicancy. Let us
even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, "Who are
you? Unhand me. I will be dependent no more." Ah! seest thou not, O
brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform,
and only be more each other's, because we are more our own? A friend
is Janus-faced:[306] he looks to the past and the future. He is the
child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and
the harbinger[307] of a greater friend.

23. I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them
where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on
our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I
cannot afford to speak much with my friend. If he is great, he makes
me so great that I cannot descend to converse. In the great days,
presentiments hover before me, far before me in the firmament. I ought
then to dedicate myself to them. I go in that I may seize them, I go
out that I may seize them. I fear only that I may lose them receding
into the sky in which now they are only a patch of brighter light.
Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and
study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a
certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual
astronomy, or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with
you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my
mighty gods. It is true, next week I shall have languid moods, when I
can well afford to occupy myself with foreign objects; then I shall
regret the lost literature of your mind, and wish you were by my side
again. But if you come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new
visions, not with yourself but with your lusters, and I shall not be
able any more than now to converse with you. So I will owe to my
friends this evanescent intercourse. I will receive from them, not
what they have, but what they are. They shall give me that which
properly they cannot give, but which emanates from them. But they
shall not hold me by any relations less subtile and pure. We will meet
as though we met not, and part as though we parted not.

24. It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a
friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the
other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is
not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall
wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the
reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold
companion. If he is unequal, he will presently pass away; but thou art
enlarged by thy own shining, and no longer a mate for frogs and worms,
dost soar and burn with the gods of the empyrean.[308] It is thought a
disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love
cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the unworthy object, and
dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask
crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its
independency the surer. Yet these things may hardly be said without a
sort of treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is
entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or
provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it may
deify both.

Heroism


    "Paradise is under the shadow of swords,"[310]
                                          _Mahomet._


1. In the elder English dramatists,[311] and mainly in the plays of
Beaumont and Fletcher,[312] there is a constant recognition of
gentility, as if a noble behavior were as easily marked in the society
of their age, as color is in our American population. When any Rodrigo,
Pedro, or Valerio[313] enters, though he be a stranger, the duke or
governor exclaims, This is a gentleman,--and proffers civilities without
end; but all the rest are slag and refuse. In harmony with this delight
in personal advantages, there is in their plays a certain heroic cast of
character and dialogue,--as in Bonduca, Sophocles, the Mad Lover, the
Double Marriage,[314]--wherein the speaker is so earnest and cordial,
and on such deep grounds of character, that the dialogue, on the
slightest additional incident in the plot, rises naturally into poetry.
Among many texts, take the following. The Roman Martius has conquered
Athens--all but the invincible spirits of Sophocles, the duke of Athens,
and Dorigen, his wife. The beauty of the latter inflames Martius, and he
seeks to save her husband; but Sophocles will not ask his life, although
assured, that a word will save him, and the execution of both proceeds.

"_Valerius._ Bid thy wife farewell.

_Soph._ No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen,
Yonder, above, 'bout Ariadne's crown.[315]
My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste.

_Dor._ Stay, Sophocles--with this, tie up my sight;
Let not soft nature so transformed be,
And lose her gentler sexed humanity,
To make me see my lord bleed. So, 'tis well;
Never one object underneath the sun
Will I behold before my Sophocles:
Farewell; now teach the Romans how to die.

_Mar._ Dost know what 'tis to die?

_Soph._ Thou dost not, Martius,
And therefore, not what 'tis to live; to die
Is to begin to live. It is to end
An old, stale, weary work, and to commence
A newer and a better. 'Tis to leave
Deceitful knaves for the society
Of gods and goodness. Thou, thyself, must part
At last, from all thy garlands, pleasures, triumphs,
And prove thy fortitude what then 'twill do.

_Val._ But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus?

_Soph._ Why should I grieve or vex for being sent
To them I ever loved best? Now, I'll kneel,
But with my back toward thee; 'tis the last duty
This trunk can do the gods.

_Mar._ Strike, strike, Valerius,
Or Martius' heart will leap out at his mouth:
This is a man, a woman! Kiss thy lord,
And live with all the freedom you were wont.
O love! thou doubly hast afflicted me
With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart,
My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn,
Ere thou transgress this knot of piety.

_Val._ What ails my brother?

_Soph._ Martius, oh Martius,
Thou now hast found a way to conquer me.

_Dor._ O star of Rome! what gratitude can speak
Fit words to follow such a deed as this?

_Mar._ This admirable duke, Valerius,
With his disdain of fortune and of death,
Captived himself, has captived me,
And though my arm hath ta'en his body here,
His soul hath subjugated Martius' soul.
By Romulus,[316] he is all soul, I think;
He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved;
Then we have vanquished nothing; he is free,
And Martius walks now in captivity."

2. I do not readily remember any poem, play, sermon, novel, or
oration, that our press vents in the last few years, which goes to the
same tune. We have a great many flutes and flageolets, but not often
the sound of any fife. Yet, Wordsworth's Laodamia, and the ode of
"Dion,"[317] and some sonnets, have a certain noble music; and
Scott[318] will sometimes draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord
Evandale, given by Balfour of Burley.[319] Thomas Carlyle,[320] with
his natural taste for what is manly and daring in character, has
suffered no heroic trait in his favorites to drop from his
biographical and historical pictures. Earlier, Robert Burns[321] has
given us a song or two. In the Harleian Miscellanies,[322] there is an
account of the battle of Lutzen,[323] which deserves to be read. And
Simon Ockley's[324] History of the Saracens recounts the prodigies of
individual valor with admiration, all the more evident on the part of
the narrator, that he seems to think that his place in Christian
Oxford[325] requires of him some proper protestations of abhorrence.
But if we explore the literature of Heroism, we shall quickly come to
Plutarch,[326] who is its Doctor and historian. To him we owe the
Brasidas,[327] the Dion,[328] the Epaminondas,[329] the Scipio[330] of
old, and I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to all
the ancient writers. Each of his "Lives" is a refutation to the
despondency and cowardice of our religious and political theorists. A
wild courage, a Stoicism[331] not of the schools, but of the blood,
shines in every anecdote, and has given that book its immense fame.

3. We need books of this tart cathartic virtue, more than books of
political science, or of private economy. Life is a festival only to
the wise. Seen from the nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a
ragged and dangerous front. The violations of the laws of nature by
our predecessors and our contemporaries are punished in us also. The
disease and deformity around us certify the infraction of natural,
intellectual, and moral laws, and often violation on violation to
breed such compound misery. A lockjaw that bends a man's head back to
his heels, hydrophobia that makes him bark at his wife and babes,
insanity that makes him eat grass; war, plague, cholera, famine
indicate a certain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by
human crime, must have its outlet by human suffering. Unhappily,
almost no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some
amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a
share in the expiation.

4. Our culture, therefore, must not omit the arming of the man. Let
him hear in season that he is born into the state of war, and that the
commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go
dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collected, and neither
defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and
life in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity, dare the gibbet and the
mob by the absolute truth of his speech, and the rectitude of his
behavior.

5. Toward all this external evil, the man within the breast assumes a
warlike attitude, and affirms his ability to cope single-handed with
the infinite army of enemies. To this military attitude of the soul we
give the name of Heroism. Its rudest form is the contempt for safety
and ease, which makes the attractiveness of war. It is a self-trust
which slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its
energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a mind
of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but
pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advances to his own music,
alike in frightful alarms, and in the tipsy mirth of universal
dissoluteness. There is somewhat not philosophical in heroism; there
is somewhat not holy in it; it seems not to know that other souls are
of one texture with it; it has pride; it is the extreme of individual
nature. Nevertheless, we must profoundly revere it. There is somewhat
in great actions, which does not allow us to go behind them. Heroism
feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right; and although a
different breeding, different religion, and greater intellectual
activity, would have modified or even reversed the particular action,
yet for the hero, that thing he does is the highest deed, and is not
open to the censure of philosophers or divines. It is the avowal of
the unschooled man, that he finds a quality in him that is negligent
of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of hatred, of reproach, and
knows that his will is higher and more excellent than all actual and
all possible antagonists.

6. Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind, and in
contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism
is an obedience[332] to a secret impulse of an individual's character.
Now to no other man can its wisdom appear as it does to him, for every
man must be supposed to see a little further on his own proper path
than any one else. Therefore, just and wise men take umbrage at his
act, until after some little time be past: then they see it to be in
unison with their acts. All prudent men see that the action is clean
contrary to a sensual prosperity; for every heroic act measures itself
by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success
at last, and then the prudent also extol.

7. Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of the soul
at war, and its ultimate objects are the last defiance of falsehood
and wrong, and the power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil
agents. It speaks the truth, and it is just, generous, hospitable,
temperate, scornful of petty calculations, and scornful of being
scorned. It persists; it is of an undaunted boldness, and of a
fortitude not to be wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of common
life. That false prudence which dotes on health and wealth is the butt
and merriment of heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus,[333] is almost
ashamed of its body. What shall it say, then, to the sugar-plums, and
cats'-cradles, to the toilet, compliments, quarrels, cards, and
custard, which rack the wit of all human society. What joys has kind
nature provided for us dear creatures! There seems to be no interval
between greatness and meanness. When the spirit is not master of the
world then it is its dupe. Yet the little man takes the great hoax so
innocently, works in it so headlong and believing, is born red, and
dies gray, arranging his toilet, attending on his own health, laying
traps for sweet food and strong wine, setting his heart on a horse or
a rifle, made happy with a little gossip or a little praise, that the
great soul cannot choose but laugh at such earnest nonsense. "Indeed,
these humble considerations[334] make me out of love with greatness.
What a disgrace is it to me to take note how many pairs of silk
stockings thou hast, namely, these and those that were the
peach-colored ones; or to bear the inventory of thy shirts, as one for
superfluity, and one other for use!"

8. Citizens, thinking after the laws of arithmetic, consider the
inconvenience of receiving strangers at their fireside, reckon
narrowly the loss of time and the unusual display: the soul of a
better quality thrusts back the unreasonable economy into the vaults
of life, and says, I will obey the God, and the sacrifice and the fire
he will provide. Ibn Hankal,[335] the Arabian geographer, describes a
heroic extreme in the hospitality of Sogd, in Bokhar,[336] "When I was
in Sogd I saw a great building, like a palace, the gates of which were
open and fixed back to the wall with large nails. I asked the reason,
and was told that the house had not been shut, night or day, for a
hundred years. Strangers may present themselves at any hour, and in
whatever number; the master has amply provided for the reception of
the men and their animals, and is never happier than when they tarry
for some time. Nothing of the kind have I seen in any other country."
The magnanimous know very well that they who give time, or money, or
shelter, to the stranger--so it be done for love, and not for
ostentation--do, as it were, put God under obligation to them, so
perfect are the compensations of the universe. In some way the time
they seem to lose is redeemed, and the pains they seem to take
remunerate themselves. These men fan the flame of human love, and
raise the standard of civil virtue among mankind. But hospitality must
be for service, and not for show, or it pulls down the host. The brave
soul rates itself too high to value itself by the splendor of its
table and draperies. It gives what it hath, and all it hath, but its
own majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks[337] and fair water
than belong to city feasts.

9. The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same wish to do no
dishonor to the worthiness he has. But he loves it for its elegancy,
not for its austerity. It seems not worth his while to be solemn, and
denounce with bitterness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of
tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold. A great man scarcely
knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision,
his living is natural and poetic. John Eliot,[338] the Indian Apostle,
drank water, and said of wine,--"It is a noble, generous liquor, and
we should be humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water was
made before it." Better still is the temperance of king David[339] who
poured out on the ground unto the Lord the water which three of his
warriors had brought him to drink, at the peril of their lives.

10. It is told of Brutus,[340] that when he fell on his sword, after
the battle of Philippi,[341] he quoted a line of Euripides,[342]--"O
virtue! I have followed thee through life, and I find thee at last but
a shade." I doubt not the hero is slandered by this report. The heroic
soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to
dine nicely, and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the
perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not
need plenty, and can very well abide its loss.

11. But that which takes my fancy most, in the heroic class, is the
good humor and hilarity they exhibit. It is a height to which common
duty can very well attain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity. But
these rare souls set opinion, success, and life, at so cheap a rate,
that they will not soothe their enemies by petitions, or the show of
sorrow, but wear their own habitual greatness. Scipio,[343] charged
with peculation, refuses to do himself so great a disgrace as to wait
for justification, though he had the scroll of his accounts in his
hands, but tears it to pieces before the tribunes. Socrates'[344]
condemnation of himself to be maintained in all honor in the
Prytaneum,[345] during his life, and Sir Thomas More's[346]
playfulness at the scaffold, are of the same strain. In Beaumont and
Fletcher's "Sea Voyage," Juletta tells the stout captain and his
company,

_Jul._ Why, slaves, 'tis in our power to hang ye.

_Master._                         Very likely,
'Tis in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.

These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the bloom and glow of a
perfect health. The great will not condescend to take anything
seriously; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were
the building of cities, or the eradication of old and foolish
churches and nations, which have cumbered the earth long thousands of
years. Simple hearts put all the history and customs of this world
behind them, and play their own play in innocent defiance of the
Blue-Laws[347] of the world; and such would appear, could we see the
human race assembled in vision, like little children frolicking
together; though, to the eyes of mankind at large, they wear a stately
and solemn garb of works and influences.

12. The interest these fine stories have for us, the power of a
romance over the boy who grasps the forbidden book under his bench at
school, our delight in the hero, is the main fact to our purpose. All
these great and transcendent properties are ours. If we dilate in
beholding the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it is that we are already
domesticating the same sentiment. Let us find room for this great
guest in our small houses. The first step of worthiness will be to
disabuse us of our superstitious associations with places and times,
with number and size. Why should these words, Athenian, Roman, Asia,
and England, so tingle in the ear? Where the heart is, there the
muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame.
Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry
places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But
here we are; and, if we will tarry a little, we may come to learn that
here is best. See to it only that thyself is here;--and art and
nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall
not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest. Epaminondas,[348]
brave and affectionate, does not seem to us to need Olympus[349] to
die upon, nor the Syrian sunshine. He lies very well where he is. The
Jerseys[350] were handsome ground enough for Washington to tread, and
London streets for the feet of Milton.[351] A great man makes his
climate genial in the imagination of men, and its air the beloved
element of all delicate spirits. That country is the fairest, which is
inhabited by the noblest minds. The pictures which fill the
imagination in reading the actions of Pericles,[352] Xenophon,[353]
Columbus,[354] Bayard,[355] Sidney,[356] Hampden,[357] teach us how
needlessly mean our life is, that we, by the depth of our living,
should deck it with more than regal or national splendor, and act on
principles that should interest man and nature in the length of our
days.

13. We have seen or heard of many extraordinary young men, who never
ripened, or whose performance in actual life was not extraordinary.
When we see their air and mien, when we hear them speak of society, or
books, or religion, we admire their superiority; they seem to throw
contempt on our entire polity and social state; theirs is the tone of
a youthful giant, who is sent to work revolutions. But they enter an
active profession, and the forming Colossus[358] shrinks to the common
size of man. The magic they used was the ideal tendencies, which
always make the Actual ridiculous; but the tough world had its revenge
the moment they put their horses of the sun to plow in its furrow.
They found no example and no companion, and their heart fainted. What
then? The lesson they gave in their first aspirations, is yet true;
and a better valor and a purer truth shall one day organize their
belief. Or why should a woman liken herself to any historical woman,
and think, because Sappho,[359] or Sévigné,[360] or De Staël,[361] or
the cloistered souls who have had genius and cultivation, do not
satisfy the imagination and the serene Themis,[362] none
can,--certainly not she. Why not? She has a new and unattempted
problem to solve, perchance that of the happiest nature that ever
bloomed. Let the maiden, with erect soul, walk serenely on her way,
accept the hint of each new experience, search, in turn, all the
objects that solicit her eye, that she may learn the power and the
charm of her new-born being which is the kindling of a new dawn in the
recesses of space. The fair girl, who repels interference by a decided
and proud choice of influences, so careless of pleasing, so wilful and
lofty, inspires every beholder with somewhat of her own nobleness. The
silent heart encourages her; O friend, never strike sail to a fear!
Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas. Not in vain you
live, for every passing eye is cheered and refined by the vision.

14. The characteristic of a genuine heroism is its persistency. All
men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when
you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to
reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common,
nor the common the heroic. Yet we have the weakness to expect the
sympathy of people in those actions whose excellence is that they
outrun sympathy, and appeal to a tardy justice. If you would serve
your brother, because it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back
your words when you find that prudent people do not commend you.
Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done
something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a
decorous age. It was a high counsel[363] that I once heard given to a
young person,--"Always do what you are afraid to do." A simple manly
character need never make an apology, but should regard its past
action with the calmness of Phocion,[364] when he admitted that the
event of the battle was happy, yet did not regret his dissuasion from
the battle.

15. There is no weakness or exposure for which we cannot find
consolation in the thought,--this is a part of my constitution, part
of my relation and office to my fellow-creature. Has nature covenanted
with me that I should never appear to disadvantage, never make a
ridiculous figure? Let us be generous of our dignity as well as of our
money. Greatness once and forever has done with opinion. We tell our
charities, not because we wish to be praised for them, not because we
think they have great merit, but for our justification. It is a
capital blunder; as you discover, when another man recites his
charities.

16. To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to live with some
rigor of temperance, or some extremes of generosity, seems to be an
asceticism which common good-nature would appoint to those who are at
ease and in plenty, in sign that they feel a brotherhood with the
great multitude of suffering men. And not only need we breathe and
exercise the soul by assuming the penalties of abstinence, of debt, of
solitude, of unpopularity, but it behooves the wise man to look with a
bold eye into those rarer dangers which sometimes invade men, and to
familiarize himself with disgusting forms of disease, with sounds of
execration, and the vision of violent death.

17. Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the day never
shines in which this element may not work. The circumstances of man,
we say, are historically somewhat better in this country, and at this
hour, than perhaps ever before. More freedom exists for culture. It
will not now run against an ax at the first step out of the beaten
track of opinion. But whoso is heroic will always find crises to try
his edge. Human virtue demands her champions and martyrs, and the
trial of persecution always proceeds. It is but the other day that the
brave Lovejoy[365] gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the
rights of free speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to
live.

18. I see not any road to perfect peace which a man can walk, but to
take counsel of his own bosom. Let him quit too much association, let
him go home much, and establish himself in those courses he approves.
The unremitting retention of simple and high sentiments in obscure
duties is hardening the character to that temper which will work with
honor, if need be, in the tumult, or on the scaffold. Whatever
outrages have happened to men may befall a man again; and very easily
in a republic, if there appear any signs of a decay of religion.
Coarse slander, fire, tar and feathers, and the gibbet, the youth may
freely bring home to his mind, and with what sweetness of temper he
can, and inquire how fast he can fix his sense of duty, braving such
penalties, whenever it may please the next newspaper and a sufficient
number of his neighbors to pronounce his opinions incendiary.

19. It may calm the apprehension of calamity in the most susceptible
heart to see how quick a bound nature has set to the utmost infliction
of malice. We rapidly approach a brink over which no enemy can follow
us.

                "Let them rave:[366]
    Thou art quiet in thy grave."

In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the hour when we
are deaf to the higher voices, who does not envy them who have seen
safely to an end their manful endeavor? Who that sees the meanness of
our politics, but inly congratulates Washington that he is long
already wrapped in his shroud, and forever safe; that he was laid
sweet in his grave, the hope of humanity not yet subjugated in him?
Who does not sometimes envy the good and brave, who are no more to
suffer from the tumults of the natural world, and await with curious
complacency the speedy term of his own conversation with finite
nature? And yet the love that will be annihilated sooner than
treacherous has already made death impossible, and affirms itself no
mortal, but a native of the deeps of absolute and inextinguishable
being.

Manners



1. Half the world, it is said, knows not how the other half live. Our
Exploring Expedition saw the Feejee Islanders[368] getting their
dinner off human bones; and they are said to eat their own wives and
children. The husbandry of the modern inhabitants of Gournou[369]
(west of old Thebes) is philosophical to a fault. To set up their
housekeeping, nothing is requisite but two or three earthen pots, a
stone to grind meal, and a mat which is the bed. The house, namely, a
tomb, is ready without rent or taxes. No rain can pass through the
roof, and there is no door, for there is no want of one, as there is
nothing to lose. If the house do not please them, they walk out and
enter another, as there are several hundreds at their command. "It is
somewhat singular," adds Berzoni, to whom we owe this account, "to
talk of Happiness among people who live in sepulchers, among corpses
and rags of an ancient nation which they knew nothing of." In the
deserts of Borgoo[370] the rock-Tibboos still dwell in caves, like
cliff-swallows, and the language of these negroes is compared by their
neighbors to the shrieking of bats, and to the whistling of birds.
Again, the Bornoos[371] have no proper names; individuals are called
after their height, thickness, or other accidental quality, and have
nick-names merely. But the salt, the dates, the ivory, and the gold,
for which these horrible regions are visited, find their way into
countries, where the purchaser and consumer can hardly be ranked in
one race with these cannibals and man-stealers; countries where man
serves himself with metals, wood, stone, glass, gum, cotton, silk and
wool; honors himself with architecture;[372] writes laws, and
contrives to execute his will through the hands of many nations; and,
especially, establishes a select society, running through all the
countries of intelligent men, a self-constituted aristocracy, or
fraternity of the best, which, without written law, or exact usage of
any kind, perpetuates itself, colonizes every new-planted island, and
adopts and makes its own whatever personal beauty or extraordinary
native endowment anywhere appears.

2. What fact more conspicuous in modern history, than the creation of
the gentleman? Chivalry[373] is that, and loyalty is that, and, in
English literature, half the drama, and all the novels, from Sir
Philip Sidney[374] to Sir Walter Scott,[375] paint this figure. The
word _gentleman_, which, like the word Christian, must hereafter
characterize the present and the few preceding centuries, by the
importance attached to it, is a homage to personal and incommunicable
properties. Frivolous and fantastic additions have got associated with
the name, but the steady interest of mankind in it must be attributed
to the valuable properties which it designates. An element which
unites all the most forcible persons of every country; makes them
intelligible and agreeable to each other, and is somewhat so precise,
that it is at once felt if an individual lack the masonic sign,[376]
cannot be any casual product, but must be an average result of the
character and faculties universally found in men. It seems a certain
permanent average; as the atmosphere is a permanent composition,
whilst so many gases are combined only to be decompounded. _Comme il
faut_, is the Frenchman's description of good society, _as we must
be_. It is a spontaneous fruit of talents and feelings of precisely
that class who have most vigor, who take the lead in the world of this
hour, and, though far from pure, far from constituting the gladdest
and highest tone of human feeling, is as good as the whole society
permits it to be. It is made of the spirit, more than of the talent of
men, and is a compound result, into which every great force enters as
an ingredient, namely, virtue, wit, beauty, wealth, and power.

3. There is something equivocal in all the words in use to express the
excellence of manners and social cultivation, because the qualities
are fluxional, and the last effect is assumed by the senses as the
cause. The word _gentleman_ has not any correlative abstract[377] to
express the quality. _Gentility_ is mean, and _gentilesse_[378] is
obsolete. But we must keep alive in the vernacular the distinction
between _fashion_, a word of narrow and often sinister meaning, and
the heroic character which the gentleman imports. The usual words,
however, must be respected: they will be found to contain the root of
the matter. The point of distinction in all this class of names, as
courtesy, chivalry, fashion, and the like, is, that the flower and
fruit, not the grain of the tree, are contemplated. It is beauty which
is the aim this time, and not worth. The result is now in question,
although our words intimate well enough the popular feeling, that the
appearance supposes a substance. The gentleman is a man of truth, lord
of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his behavior, not
in any manner dependent and servile either on persons, or opinions, or
possessions. Beyond this fact of truth and real force, the word
denotes good-nature and benevolence: manhood first, and then
gentleness. The popular notion certainly adds a condition of ease and
fortune; but that is a natural result of personal force and love, that
they should possess and dispense the goods of the world. In times of
violence, every eminent person must fall in with many opportunities to
approve his stoutness and worth; therefore every man's name that
emerged at all from the mass in the feudal ages,[379] rattles in our
ear like a flourish of trumpets. But personal force never goes out of
fashion. That is still paramount to-day, and, in the moving crowd of
good society, the men of valor and reality are known, and rise to
their natural place. The competition is transferred from war to
politics and trade, but the personal force appears readily enough in
these new arenas.

4. Power first, or no leading class. In politics and in trade,
bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks.
God knows[380] that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door; but
whenever used in strictness, and with any emphasis, the name will be
found to point at original energy. It describes a man standing in his
own right, and working after untaught methods. In a good lord, there
must first be a good animal, at least to the extent of yielding the
incomparable advantage of animal spirits.[381] The ruling class must
have more, but they must have these, giving in every company the sense
of power,[382] which makes things easy to be done which daunt the
wise. The society of the energetic class, in their friendly and
festive meetings, is full of courage, and of attempts, which
intimidate the pale scholar. The courage which girls exhibit is like a
battle of Lundy's Lane,[383] or a sea-fight. The intellect relies on
memory to make some supplies to face these extemporaneous squadrons.
But memory is a base mendicant with basket and badge, in the presence
of these sudden masters. The rulers of society must be up to the work
of the world, and equal to their versatile office: men of the right
Cæsarian pattern,[384] who have great range of affinity. I am far from
believing the timid maxim[385] of Lord Falkland,[386] ("That for
ceremony there must go two to it; since a bold fellow will go through
the cunningest forms,") and am of opinion that the gentleman is the
bold fellow whose forms are not to be broken through; and only that
plenteous nature is rightful master, which is the complement of
whatever person it converses with. My gentleman gives the law where he
is; he will outpray saints in chapel, outgeneral veterans in the
field, and outshine all courtesy in the hall. He is good company for
pirates, and good with academicians; so that it is useless to fortify
yourself against him; he has the private entrance to all minds, and I
could as easily exclude myself as him. The famous gentlemen of Asia
and Europe have been of this strong type: Saladin,[387] Sapor,[388]
the Cid,[389] Julius Cæsar,[390] Scipio,[391] Alexander,[392]
Pericles,[393] and the lordliest personages. They sat very carelessly
in their chairs, and were too excellent themselves to value any
condition at a high rate.

5. A plentiful fortune is reckoned necessary, in the popular judgment,
to the completion of this man of the world: and it is a material deputy
which walks through the dance which the first has led. Money is not
essential, but this wide affinity is, which transcends the habits of
clique and caste, and makes itself felt by men of all classes. If the
aristocrat is only valid in fashionable circles, and not with truckmen,
he will never be a leader in fashion; and if the man of the people
cannot speak on equal terms with the gentleman, so that the gentleman
shall perceive that he is already really of his own order, he is not to
be feared. Diogenes,[394] Socrates,[395] and Epaminondas[396] are
gentlemen of the best blood, who have chosen the condition of poverty,
when that of wealth was equally open to them. I use these old names, but
the men I speak of are my contemporaries.[397] Fortune will not supply
to every generation one of these well-appointed knights, but every
collection of men furnishes some example of the class: and the politics
of this country, and the trade of every town, are controlled by these
hardy and irresponsible doers, who have invention to take the lead, and
a broad sympathy which puts them in fellowship with crowds, and makes
their action popular.

6. The manners of this class are observed and caught with devotion by
men of taste. The association of these masters with each other, and
with men intelligent of their merits, is mutually agreeable and
stimulating. The good forms, the happiest expressions of each, are
repeated and adopted. By swift consent, everything superfluous is
dropped, everything graceful is renewed. Fine manners[398] show
themselves formidable to the uncultivated man. They are a subtler
science of defence to parry and intimidate; but once matched by the
skill of the other party, they drop the point of the sword,--points
and fences disappear, and the youth finds himself in a more
transparent atmosphere, wherein life is a less troublesome game, and
not a misunderstanding rises between the players. Manners aim to
facilitate life, to get rid of impediments, and bring the man pure to
energize. They aid our dealing and conversation, as a railway aids
traveling, by getting rid of all avoidable obstructions of the road,
and leaving nothing to be conquered but pure space. These forms very
soon become fixed, and a fine sense of propriety is cultivated with
more heed, that it becomes a badge of social and civil distinctions.
Thus grows up Fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the
most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which
morals and violence assault in vain.

7. There exists a strict relation between the class of power, and the
exclusive and polished circles. The last are always filled or filling
from the first. The strong men usually give some allowance even to the
petulances of fashion, for that affinity they find in it.
Napoleon,[399] child of the revolution, destroyer of the old
noblesse,[400] never ceased to court the Faubourg St. Germain:[401]
doubtless with the feeling, that fashion is a homage to men of his
stamp. Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue.
It is a virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does
not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a
hall of the Past. It usually sets its face against the great of this
hour. Great men are not commonly in its halls: they are absent in the
field: they are working, not triumphing. Fashion is made up of their
children; of those, who, through the value and virtue of somebody,
have acquired lustre to their name, marks of distinction, means of
cultivation and generosity, and, in their physical organization, a
certain health and excellence, which secures to them, if not the
highest power to work, yet high power to enjoy. The class of power,
the working heroes, the Cortez,[402] the Nelson,[403] the Napoleon,
see that this is the festivity and permanent celebration of such as
they; that fashion is funded talent; is Mexico,[404] Marengo,[405] and
Trafalgar[406][407] beaten out thin; that the brilliant names of
fashion run back to just such busy names as their own, fifty or sixty
years ago. They are the sowers, their sons shall be the reapers, and
_their_ sons, in the ordinary course of things, must yield the
possession of the harvest, to new competitors with keener eyes and
stronger frames. The city is recruited from the country. In the year
1805, it is said, every legitimate monarch in Europe was imbecile. The
city would have died out, rotted, and exploded, long ago, but that it
was reinforced from the fields. It is only country which came to town
day before yesterday, that is city and court to-day.

8. Aristocracy and fashion are certain inevitable results. These
mutual selections are indestructible. If they provoke anger in the
least favored class, and the excluded majority revenge themselves on
the excluding minority, by the strong hand, and kill them, at once a
new class finds itself at the top, as certainly as cream rises in a
bowl of milk: and if the people should destroy class after class,
until two men only were left, one of these would be the leader, and
would be involuntarily served and copied by the other. You may keep
this minority out of sight and out of mind, but it is tenacious of
life, and is one of the estates of the realm.[408] I am the more
struck with this tenacity, when I see its work. It respects the
administration of such unimportant matters, that we should not look
for any durability in its rule. We sometimes meet men under some
strong moral influence, as a patriotic, a literary, a religious
movement, and feel that the moral sentiment rules man and nature. We
think all other distinctions and ties will be slight and fugitive,
this of caste or fashion, for example; yet come from year to year, and
see how permanent that is, in this Boston or New York life of man,
where, too, it has not the lease countenance from the law of the land.
Not in Egypt or in India a firmer or more impassable line. Here are
associations whose ties go over, and under, and through it, a meeting
of merchants, a military corps, a college-class, a fire-club, a
professional association, a political, a religious convention;--the
persons seem to draw inseparably near; yet that assembly once
dispersed, its members will not in the year meet again. Each returns
to his degree in the scale of good society, porcelain remains
porcelain, and earthen earthen. The objects of fashion may be
frivolous, or fashion may be objectless, but the nature of this union
and selection can be neither frivolous nor accidental. Each man's rank
in that perfect graduation depends on some symmetry in his structure,
or some agreement in his structure to the symmetry of society. Its
doors unbar instantaneously to a natural claim of their own kind. A
natural gentleman finds his way in, and will keep the oldest patrician
out, who has lost his intrinsic rank. Fashion understands itself;
good-breeding and personal superiority of whatever country readily
fraternize with those of every other. The chiefs of savage tribes have
distinguished themselves in London and Paris, by the purity of their
tournure.[409]

9. To say what good of fashion we can,--it rests on reality, and hates
nothing so much as pretenders;--to exclude and mystify pretenders, and
send them into everlasting "Coventry,"[410] is its delight. We
contemn, in turn, every other gift of men of the world; but the habit,
even in little and the least matters, of not appealing to any but our
own sense of propriety, constitutes the foundation of all chivalry.
There is almost no kind of self-reliance, so it be sane and
proportioned, which fashion does not occasionally adopt, and give it
the freedom of its saloons. A sainted soul is always elegant, and, if
it will, passes unchallenged into the most guarded ring. But so will
Jock the teamster pass, in some crisis that brings him thither, and
find favor, as long as his head is not giddy with the new
circumstance, and the iron shoes do not wish to dance in waltzes and
cotillions. For there is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of
behavior yield to the energy of the individual. The maiden at her
first ball, the countryman at a city dinner, believes that there is a
ritual according to which every act and compliment must be performed,
or the failing party must be cast out of this presence. Later, they
learn that good sense and character make their own forms every moment,
and speak or abstain, to take wine or refuse it, stay or go, sit in a
chair or sprawl with children on the floor, or stand on their head, or
what else soever, in a new and aboriginal way: and that strong will is
always in fashion, let who will be unfashionable. All that fashion
demands is composure, and self-content. A circle of men perfectly
well-bred would be a company of sensible persons, in which every man's
native manners and character appear. If the fashionist have not this
quality, he is nothing. We are such lovers of self-reliance, that we
excuse in man many sins, if he will show us a complete satisfaction in
his position, which asks no leave to be of mine, or any man's good
opinion. But any deference to some eminent man or woman of the world,
forfeits all privilege of nobility. He is an underling: I have nothing
to do with him; I will speak with his master. A man should not go
where he cannot carry his whole sphere or society with him,--not
bodily, the whole circle of his friends, but atmospherically. He
should preserve in a new company the same attitude of mind and reality
of relation, which his daily associates draw him to, else he is shorn
of his best beams, and will be an orphan in the merriest club. "If you
could see Vich Ian Vohr with his tail on![411]--" But Vich Ian Vohr
must always carry his belongings in some fashion, if not added as
honor, then severed as disgrace.

10. There will always be in society certain persons who are
mercuries[412] of its approbation, and whose glance will at any time
determine for the curious their standing in the world. These are the
chamberlains of the lesser gods. Accept their coldness as an omen of
grace with the loftier deities, and allow them all their privilege.
They are clear in their office, nor could they be thus formidable,
without their own merits. But do not measure the importance of this
class by their pretension, or imagine that a fop can be the dispenser
of honor and shame. They pass also at their just rate; for how can
they otherwise, in circles which exist as a sort of herald's
office[413] for the sifting of character?

11. As the first thing man requires of man is reality, so that appears
in all the forms of society. We pointedly, and by name, introduce the
parties to each other. Know you before all heaven and earth, that this
is Andrew, and this is Gregory;--they look each other in the eye; they
grasp each other's hand, to identify and signalize each other. It is a
great satisfaction. A gentleman never dodges; his eyes look straight
forward, and he assures the other party, first of all, that he has
been met. For what is it that we seek, in so many visits and
hospitalities? Is it your draperies, pictures, and decorations? Or, do
we not insatiably ask. Was a man in the house? I may easily go into a
great household where there is much substance, excellent provision for
comfort, luxury, and taste, and yet not encounter there any
Amphitryon,[414] who shall subordinate these appendages. I may go into
a cottage, and find a farmer who feels that he is the man I have come
to see, and fronts me accordingly. It was therefore a very natural
point of old feudal etiquette, that a gentleman who received a visit,
though it were of his sovereign, should not leave his roof, but should
wait his arrival at the door of his house. No house, though it were
the Tuileries,[415] or the Escurial,[416] is good for anything without
a master. And yet we are not often gratified by this hospitality.
Everybody we know surrounds himself with a fine house, fine books,
conservatory, gardens, equipage, and all manner of toys, as screens to
interpose between himself and his guests. Does it not seem as if man
was of a very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing so much as a
full renconter front to front with his fellow? It were unmerciful, I
know, quite to abolish the use of these screens, which are of eminent
convenience, whether the guest is too great, or too little. We call
together many friends who keep each other in play, or by luxuries and
ornaments we amuse the young people, and guard our retirement. Or if,
perchance, a searching realist comes to our gate, before whose eyes we
have no care to stand, then again we run to our curtain, and hide
ourselves as Adam[417] at the voice of the Lord God in the garden.
Cardinal Caprara,[418] the Pope's[419] legate at Paris, defended
himself from the glances of Napoleon, by an immense pair of green
spectacles. Napoleon remarked them, and speedily managed to rally them
off: and yet Napoleon, in his turn, was not great enough, with eight
hundred thousand troops at his back, to face a pair of free-born eyes,
but fenced himself with etiquette, and within triple barriers of
reserve: and, as all the world knows from Madame de Stael,[420] was
wont, when he found himself observed, to discharge his face of all
expression. But emperors and rich men are by no means the most
skillful masters of good manners. No rent roll nor army-list can
dignify skulking and dissimulations: and the first point of courtesy
must always be truth, as really all forms of good-breeding point that
way.

12. I have just been reading, in Mr. Hazlitt's[421] translation,
Montaigne's[422] account of his journey into Italy, and am struck with
nothing more agreeably than the self-respecting fashions of the time.
His arrival in each place, the arrival of a gentleman of France, is an
event of some consequence. Wherever he goes, he pays a visit to
whatever prince or gentleman of note resides upon his road, as a duty
to himself and to civilization. When he leaves any house in which he
has lodged for a few weeks, he causes his arms to be painted and hung
up as a perpetual sign to the house, as was the custom of gentlemen.

13. The complement of this graceful self-respect, and that of all the
points of good breeding I most require and insist upon, is deference.
I like that every chair should be a throne, and hold a king. I prefer
a tendency to stateliness, to an excess of fellowship. Let the
incommunicable objects of nature and the metaphysical isolation of man
teach us independence. Let us not be too much acquainted. I would have
a man enter his house through a hall filled with heroic and sacred
sculptures, that he might not want the hint of tranquillity and
self-poise.[423] We should meet each morning, as from foreign
countries, and spending the day together, should depart at night, as
into foreign countries. In all things I would have the island of a man
inviolate. Let us sit apart as the gods, talking from peak to peak all
round Olympus. No degree of affection need invade this religion. This
is myrrh and rosemary to keep the other sweet. Lovers should guard
their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all slides into confusion
and meanness. It is easy to push this deference to a Chinese
etiquette;[424] but coolness and absence of heat and haste indicate
fine qualities. A gentleman makes no noise: a lady is serene
Proportionate is our disgust at those invaders who fill a studious
house with blast and running, to secure some paltry convenience. Not
less I dislike a low sympathy of each with his neighbors's needs. Must
we have a good understanding with one another's palates? as foolish
people who have lived long together, know when each wants salt or
sugar. I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to ask me for
bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them,
and not to hold out his plate, as if I knew already. Every natural
function can be dignified by deliberation and privacy. Let us leave
hurry to slaves. The compliments and ceremonies of our breeding should
recall,[425] however remotely, the grandeur of our destiny.

14. The flower of courtesy does not very well bide handling, but if we
dare to open another leaf, and explore what parts go to its
conformation, we shall find also an intellectual quality. To the
leaders of men, the brain as well as the flesh and the heart must
furnish a proportion. Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine
perceptions. Men are too coarsely made for the delicacy of beautiful
carriage and customs. It is not quite sufficient to good breeding, a
union of kindness and independence. We imperatively require a
perception of, and a homage to, beauty in our companions. Other
virtues are in request in the field and work yard, but a certain
degree of taste is not to be spared in those we sit with. I could
better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws, than
with a sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualities rule the
world, but at short distances the senses are despotic. The same
discrimination of fit and fair runs out, if with less rigor, into all
parts of life. The average spirit of the energetic class is good
sense, acting under certain limitations and to certain ends. It
entertains every natural gift. Social in its nature, it respects
everything which tends to unite men. It delights in measure.[426] The
love of beauty is mainly the love of measure or proportion. The person
who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat,
puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love
measure. You must have genius, or a prodigious usefulness, if you will
hide the want of measure. This perception comes in to polish and
perfect the parts of the social instrument. Society will pardon much
to genius and special gifts, but, being in its nature a convention, it
loves what is conventional, or what belongs to coming together. That
makes the good and bad of manners, namely, what helps or hinders
fellowship. For, fashion is not good sense absolute, but relative; not
good sense private, but good sense entertaining company. It hates
corners and sharp points of character, hates quarrelsome, egotistical,
solitary, and gloomy people; hates whatever can interfere with total
blending of parties; whilst it values all peculiarities as in the
highest degree refreshing, which can consist with good fellowship. And
besides the general infusion of wit to heighten civility, the direct
splendor of intellectual power is ever welcome in fine society as the
costliest addition to its rule and its credit.

15. The dry light must shine in to adorn our festival, but it must be
tempered and shaded, or that will also offend. Accuracy is essential
to beauty, and quick perceptions to politeness, but not too quick
perceptions. One may be too punctual and too precise. He must leave
the omniscience of business at the door, when he comes into the palace
of beauty. Society loves creole natures,[427] and sleepy, languishing
manners, so that they cover sense, grace, and good-will: the air of
drowsy strength, which disarms criticism; perhaps, because such a
person seems to reserve himself for the best of the game, and not
spend himself on surfaces; an ignoring eye, which does not see the
annoyances, shifts, and inconveniences, that cloud the brow and
smother the voice of the sensitive.

16. Therefore, besides personal force and so much perception as
constitutes unerring taste, society demands in its patrician class,
another element already intimated, which it significantly terms
good-nature, expressing all degrees of generosity, from the lowest
willingness and faculty to oblige, up to the heights of magnanimity
and love. Insight we must have, or we shall run against one another,
and miss the way to our food; but intellect is selfish and barren. The
secret of success in society, is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A
man who is not happy in the company, cannot find any word in his
memory that will fit the occasion. All his information is a little
impertinent. A man who is happy there, finds in every turn of the
conversation equally lucky occasions for the introduction of that
which he has to say. The favorites of society, and what it calls
_whole souls_, are able men, and of more spirit than wit, who have no
uncomfortable egotism, but who exactly fill the hour and the company,
contented and contenting, at a marriage or a funeral, a ball or a
jury, a water-party or a shooting-match. England, which is rich in
gentlemen, furnished, in the beginning of the present century, a good
model of that genius which the world loves, in Mr. Fox,[428] who
added to his great abilities the most social disposition, and real
love of men. Parliamentary history has few better passages than the
debate, in which Burke[429] and Fox separated in the House of Commons;
when Fox urged on his old friend the claims of old friendship with
such tenderness, that the house was moved to tears. Another anecdote
is so close to my matter, that I must hazard the story. A tradesman
who had long dunned him for a note of three hundred guineas, found him
one day counting gold, and demanded payment. "No," said Fox, "I owe
this money to Sheridan[430]: it is a debt of honor: if an accident
should happen to me, he has nothing to show." "Then," said the
creditor, "I change my debt into a debt of honor," and tore the note
in pieces. Fox thanked the man for his confidence, and paid him,
saying, "his debt was of older standing, and Sheridan must wait."
Lover of liberty, friend of the Hindoo, friend of the African slave,
he possessed a great personal popularity; and Napoleon said of him on
the occasion of his visit to Paris, in 1805, "Mr. Fox will always hold
the first place in an assembly at the Tuileries."

17. We may easily seem ridiculous in our eulogy of courtesy, whenever
we insist on benevolence as its foundation. The painted phantasm
Fashion rises to cast a species of derision on what we say. But I will
neither be driven from some allowance to Fashion as a symbolic
institution, nor from the belief that love is the basis of courtesy.
"We must obtain _that_, if we can; but by all means we must affirm
_this_. Life owes much of its spirit to these sharp contrasts. Fashion
which affects to be honor, is often, in all men's experience, only a
ballroom code. Yet, so long as it is the highest circle, in the
imagination of the best heads on the planet, there is something
necessary and excellent in it; for it is not to be supposed that men
have agreed to be the dupes of anything preposterous; and the respect
which these mysteries inspire in the most rude and sylvan characters,
and the curiosity with which details of high life are read, betray the
universality of the love of cultivated manners. I know that a comic
disparity would be felt, if we should enter the acknowledged 'first
circles,' and apply these terrific standards of justice, beauty, and
benefit, to the individuals actually found there. Monarchs and heroes,
sages and lovers, these gallants are not. Fashion has many classes and
many rules of probation and admission; and not the best alone. There
is not only the right of conquest, which genius pretends,--the
individual, demonstrating his natural aristocracy best of the
best;--but less claims will pass for the time; for Fashion loves
lions, and points, like Circe,[431] to her horned company. This
gentleman is this afternoon arrived from Denmark; and that is my Lord
Ride, who came yesterday from Bagdad; here is Captain Friese, from
Cape Turnagain, and Captain Symmes,[432] from the interior of the
earth; and Monsieur Jovaire, who came down this morning in a balloon;
Mr. Hobnail, the reformer; and Reverend Jul Bat, who has converted
the whole torrid zone in his Sunday school; and Signer Torre del
Greco, who extinguished Vesuvius by pouring into it the Bay of Naples;
Spahr, the Persian ambassador; and Tul Wil Shan, the exiled nabob of
Nepaul, whose saddle is the new moon.--But these are monsters of one
day, and to-morrow will be dismissed to their holes and dens; for, in
these rooms every chair is waited for. The artist, the scholar, and,
in general, the clerisy,[433] wins its way up into these places, and
gets represented here, somewhat on this footing of conquest. Another
mode is to pass through all the degrees, spending a year and a day in
St. Michael's Square,[434] being steeped in Cologne water,[435] and
perfumed, and dined, and introduced, and properly grounded in all the
biography, and politics, and anecdotes of the boudoirs.

18. Yet these fineries may have grace and wit. Let there be grotesque
sculpture about the gates and offices of temples. Let the creed and
commandments even have the saucy homage of parody. The forms of
politeness universally express benevolence in superlative degrees.
What if they are in the mouths of selfish men, and used as means of
selfishness? What if the false gentleman almost bows the true out of
the world? What if the false gentleman contrives so to address his
companion, as civilly to exclude all others from his discourse, and
also to make them feel excluded? Real service will not lose its
nobleness. All generosity is not merely French and sentimental; nor is
it to be concealed, that living blood and a passion of kindness does
at last distinguish God's gentleman from Fashion's. The epitaph of Sir
Jenkin Grout is not wholly unintelligible to the present age. "Here
lies Sir Jenkin Grout, who loved his friend, and persuaded his enemy:
what his mouth ate, his hand paid for: what his servants robbed, he
restored: if a woman gave him pleasure, he supported her in pain: he
never forgot his children: and whoso touched his finger, drew after it
his whole body." Even the line of heroes is not utterly extinct. There
is still ever some admirable person in plain clothes, standing on the
wharf, who jumps in to rescue a drowning man; there is still some
absurd inventor of charities; some guide and comforter of runaway
slaves; some friend of Poland;[436] some Philhellene;[437] some
fanatic who plants shade-trees for the second and third generation,
and orchards when he is grown old; some well-concealed piety; some
just man happy in an ill-fame; some youth ashamed of the favors of
fortune, and impatiently casting them on other shoulders. And these
are the centers of society, on which it returns for fresh impulses.
These are the creators of Fashion, which is an attempt to organize
beauty of behavior. The beautiful and the generous are in the theory,
the doctors and apostles of this church: Scipio, and the Cid, and Sir
Philip Sidney, and Washington, and every pure and valiant heart, who
worshiped Beauty by word and by deed. The persons who constitute the
natural aristocracy, are not found in the actual aristocracy, or only
on its edge; as the chemical energy of the spectrum is found to be
greatest just outside of the spectrum. Yet that is the infirmity of
the seneschals, who do not know their sovereign, when he appears. The
theory of society supposes the existence and sovereignty of these. It
divines afar off their coming. It says with the elder gods,--

    "As Heaven and Earth are fairer far[438]
    Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;
    And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth,
    In form and shape compact and beautiful;
    So, on our heels a fresh perfection treads;
    A power, more strong in beauty, born of us,
    And fated to excel us, as we pass
    In glory that old Darkness:
     ... for, 'tis the eternal law,
    That first in beauty shall be first in might."

19. Therefore, within the ethnical circle of good society, there is a
narrower and higher circle, concentration of its light, and flower of
courtesy, to which there is always a tacit appeal of pride and
reference, as to its inner and imperial court, the parliament of love
and chivalry. And this is constituted of those persons in whom heroic
dispositions are native, with the love of beauty, the delight in
society, and the power to embellish the passing day. If the
individuals who compose the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe,
the guarded blood of centuries, should pass in review, in such manner
as that we could, leisurely and critically, inspect their behavior, we
might find no gentleman, and no lady; for although excellent specimens
of courtesy and high-breeding would gratify us in the assemblage, in
the particulars, we should detect offense. Because, elegance comes of
no breeding, but of birth. There must be romance of character, or the
most fastidious exclusion of impertinencies will not avail. It must be
genius which takes that direction: it must be not courteous, but
courtesy. High behavior is as rare in fiction as it is in fact. Scott
is praised for the fidelity with which he painted the demeanor and
conversation of the superior classes. Certainly, kings and queens,
nobles and great ladies, had some right to complain of the absurdity
that had been put in their mouths, before the days of Waverley;[439]
but neither does Scott's dialogue bear criticism. His lords brave each
other in smart epigrammatic speeches, but the dialogue is in costume,
and does not please on the second reading; it is not warm with life.
In Shakespeare alone, the speakers do not strut and bridle, the
dialogue is easily great, and he adds to so many titles that of being
the best-bred man in England, and in Christendom. Once or twice in a
lifetime we are permitted to enjoy the charm of noble manners, in the
presence of a man or woman who have no bar in their nature, but whose
character emanates freely in their word and gesture. A beautiful form
is better than a beautiful face: a beautiful behavior is better than a
beautiful form: it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures;
it is the finest of the fine arts. A man is but a little thing in the
midst of the objects of nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating
from his countenance, he may abolish all considerations of magnitude,
and in his manners equal the majesty of the world. I have seen an
individual whose manners though wholly within the conventions of
elegant society, were never learned there, but were original and
commanding, and held out protection and prosperity; one who did not
need the aid of a court-suit, but carried the holiday in his eye; who
exhilarated the fancy by flinging wide the doors of new modes of
existence; who shook off the captivity of etiquette, with happy,
spirited bearing, good-natured and free as Robin Hood;[440] yet with
the port of an emperor,--if need be, calm, serious, and fit to stand
the gaze of millions.

20. The open air and the fields, the street and public chambers, are
the places where Man executes his will; let him yield or divide the
scepter at the door of the house. Woman, with her instinct of
behavior, instantly detects in man a love of trifles, any coldness or
imbecility, or, in short, any want of that large, flowing, and
magnanimous deportment, which is indispensable as an exterior in the
hall. Our American institutions have been friendly to her, and at this
moment I esteem it a chief felicity of this country, that it excels in
women. A certain awkward consciousness of inferiority in the men, may
give rise to the new chivalry in behalf of Woman's Rights. Certainly,
let her be as much better placed in the laws and in social forms, as
the most zealous reformer can ask, but I confide so entirely in her
inspiring and musical nature, that I believe only herself can show us
how she shall be served. The wonderful generosity of her sentiments
raises her at times into heroical and godlike regions, and verifies
the pictures of Minerva,[441] Juno,[442] or Polymnia;[443] and, by the
firmness with which she treads her upward path, she convinces the
coarsest calculators that another road exists than that which their
feet know. But besides those who make good in our imagination the
place of muses and of Delphic Sibyls,[444] are there not women who
fill our vase with wine and roses to the brim, so that the wine runs
over and fills the house with perfume; who inspire us with courtesy;
who unloose our tongues, and we speak; who anoint our eyes, and we
see? We say things we never thought to have said; for once, our walls
of habitual reserve vanished, and left us at large; we were children
playing with children in a wide field of flowers. Steep us, we cried,
in these influences, for days, for weeks, and we shall be sunny poets,
and will write out in many-colored words the romance that you are. Was
it Hafiz[445] or Firdousi[446] that said of his Persian Lilla, "She
was an elemental force, and astonished me by her amount of life, when
I saw her day after day radiating, every instant, redundant joy and
grace on all around her.[447] She was a solvent powerful to reconcile
all heterogeneous persons into one society; like air or water, an
element of such a great range of affinities, that it combines readily
with a thousand substances. Where she is present, all others will be
more than they are wont. She was a unit and whole, so that whatsoever
she did, became her. She had too much sympathy and desire to please,
than that you could say, her manners were marked with dignity, yet no
princess could surpass her clear and erect demeanor on each occasion.
She did not study the Persian grammar, nor the books of the seven
poets, but all the poems of the seven seemed to be written upon her.
For, though the bias of her nature was not to thought, but to
sympathy, yet was she so perfect in her own nature, as to meet
intellectual persons by the fullness of her heart, warming them by her
sentiments; believing, as she did, that by dealing nobly with all, all
would show themselves noble."

21. I know that this Byzantine[448] pile of chivalry of Fashion, which
seems so fair and picturesque to those who look at the contemporary
facts for science or for entertainment, is not equally pleasant to all
spectators. The constitution of our society makes it a giant's castle
to the ambitious youth who have not found their names enrolled in its
Golden Book,[449] and whom it has excluded from its coveted honors and
privileges. They have yet to learn that its seeming grandeur is
shadowy and relative: it is great by their allowance: its proudest
gates will fly open at the approach of their courage and virtue. For
the present distress, however, of those who are predisposed to suffer
from the tyrannies of this caprice, there are easy remedies. To remove
your residence a couple of miles, or at most four, will commonly
relieve the most extreme susceptibility. For, the advantages which
fashion values are plants which thrive in very confined localities,
in a few streets, namely. Out of this precinct, they go for nothing;
are of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the market, in war, in
the nuptial society, in the literary or scientific circle, at sea, in
friendship, in the heaven of thought or virtue.

22. But we have lingered long enough in these painted courts. The
worth of the thing signified must vindicate our taste for the emblem.
Everything that is called fashion and courtesy humbles itself before
the cause and fountain of honor, creator of titles and dignities,
namely, the heart of love. This is the royal blood, this the fire,
which, in all countries and contingencies, will work after its kind
and conquer ind expand all that approaches it. This gives new meanings
to every fact. This impoverishes the rich, suffering no grandeur but
its own. What _is_ rich? Are you rich enough to help anybody? to
succor the unfashionable and the eccentric? rich enough to make the
Canadian in his wagon, the itinerant with his consul's paper which
commends him "To the charitable," the swarthy Italian with his few
broken words of English, the lame pauper hunted by overseers from town
to town, even the poor insane or besotted wreck of man or woman, feel
the noble exception of your presence and your house, from the general
bleakness and stoniness; to make such feel that they were greeted with
a voice which made them both remember and hope? What is vulgar, but to
refuse the claim on acute and conclusive reasons? What is gentle, but
to allow it, and give their heart and yours lone holiday from the
national caution? Without the rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.
The king of Schiraz[450] could not afford to be so bountiful as the
poor Osman[451] who dwelt at his gate. Osman had a humanity so broad
and deep, that although his speech was so bold and free with the
Koran[452] as to disgust all the dervishes, yet was there never a poor
outcast, eccentric, or insane man, some fool who had cut off his
beard, or who had been mutilated under a vow, or had a pet madness in
his brain, but fled at once to him,--that great heart lay there so
sunny and hospitable in the center of the country,--that it seemed as
if the instinct of all sufferers drew them to his side. And the
madness which he harbored, he did not share. Is not this to be rich?
this only to be rightly rich?

23. But I shall hear without pain, that I play the courtier very ill,
and talk of that which I do not well understand. It is easy to see,
that what is called by distinction society and fashion, has good laws
as well as bad, has much that is necessary, and much that is absurd.
Too good for banning, and too bad for blessing, it reminds us of a
tradition of the pagan mythology, in any attempt to settle its
character. "I overheard Jove,[453] one day," said Silenus,[454]
"talking of destroying the earth; he said, it had failed; they were
all rogues and vixens, who went from bad to worse, as fast as the days
succeeded each other. Minerva said, she hoped not; they were only
ridiculous little creatures, with this odd circumstance, that they had
a blur, or indeterminate aspect, seen far or seen near; if you called
them bad, they would appear so; if you called them good, they would
appear so; and there was no one person or action among them, which
would not puzzle her owl,[455] much more all Olympus, to know whether
it was fundamentally bad or good."