"Ne te quaesiveris extra."
"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."
Epilogue to
Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune
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.
ESSAY II Self-Reliance
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. Speak
your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in
due time becomes the utmost, 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, and Milton 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: 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 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; 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 pre-established harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall,
that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves,
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: 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
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 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 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 of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a
lord to do or say ought to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human
nature. A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in the playhouse; 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 eclat, 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
for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who 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 requests 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. He who would gather immortal palms must
not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to
yourself, and you shall have the suffrage 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; 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 Barbados, 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. I hope it is somewhat better than whim
at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show because
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. 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.
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 man you are. And, of course, so much force is withdrawn from your
proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. 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 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 are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound
their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some
one of these communities of opinion. 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. And therefore a man
must know how to estimate a sour face. The by-standers 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. 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 that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our
past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing
our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath 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 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.
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 his shadow on the wall. Speak what you
think now in hard words, and to-morrow speaks what to-morrow thinks in hard
words again, though it contradicts everything you said to-day. 'Ah, so you shall
be sure to be misunderstood.' Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?
Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and
Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, 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 and Himmaleh 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; 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. 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, 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 voice, and dignity into Washington's port,
and America into Adams's 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 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 seems to follow his steps as a train of clients. A man Caesar 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; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of
Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, 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, or 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, 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, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus? 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 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, 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,
but 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 mouldered 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? Whence,
then, this worship of the past? 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 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. We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and
tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character 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 these
sayings, 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 foot-prints 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 a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally
aside. Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the soul is
present, there will be power not confident but agent. 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 master 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. 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.
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 me, 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, 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. I
shall endeavour 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. 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. But so
you may 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
thinks that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard
and mere antinomianism; 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
considers 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 whisperers. 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, 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, 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 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, born to shed healing to
the nations, 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! 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. 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, in Fletcher's Bonduca, when
admonished to inquire the mind of the god Audate, replies, �
"His
hidden meaning lies in our endeavours;
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, "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.' 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 God. Every
new mind is a new classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and
power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, 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, Quakerism, Swedenborgism. 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 Travelling, 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, travels away
from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in
Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries
ruins to ruins.
Travelling
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. I seek the Vatican, 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 travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness 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 travelling 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 or the Gothic 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. 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? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or
Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of
Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakespeare will never be
made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned 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, or trowel of the
Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different from all these. Not
possibly 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 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, 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 tells us truly, strike the savage
with a broad axe, 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 watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A
Greenwich nautical almanac 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
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 note-books 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 Christianity
entrenched 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 the 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 heroes, three or four and twenty centuries
ago. Not in time is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras,
Diogenes, 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 and Behring accomplished so much in their
fishing-boats, as to astonish Parry and Franklin, 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 found the
New World in an undocked 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 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, "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
hand-mill, 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, "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! 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. 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 chancellors 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.
.jpg)
.jpg)