Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Transcendentalist *
The first thing we have to say respecting what are called new
views here in New England, at the present time, is, that they are
not new, but the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these
new times. The light is always identical in its composition, but it
falls on a great variety of objects, and by so falling is first
revealed to us, not in its own form, for it is formless, but in
theirs; in like manner, thought only appears in the objects it
classifies. What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is
Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have
ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first
class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first
class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second
class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses
give us representations of things, but what are the things
themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on
history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man;
the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on
miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of thinking are both
natural, but the idealist contends that his way of thinking is in
higher nature. He concedes all that the other affirms, admits the
impressions of sense, admits their coherency, their use and beauty,
and then asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that
things are as his senses represent them. But I, he says, affirm
facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts which are of the
same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to
doubt; facts which in their first appearance to us assume a native
superiority to material facts, degrading these into a language by
which the first are to be spoken; facts which it only needs a
retirement from the senses to discern. Every materialist will be an
idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.
The idealist, in speaking of events, sees them as spirits. He
does not deny the sensuous fact: by no means; but he will not see
that alone. He does not deny the presence of this table, this chair,
and the walls of this room, but he looks at these things as the
reverse side of the tapestry, as the other end, each being a sequel
or completion of a spiritual fact which nearly concerns him. This
manner of looking at things, transfers every object in nature from an
independent and anomalous position without there, into the
consciousness. Even the materialist Condillac, perhaps the most
logical expounder of materialism, was constrained to say, "Though we
should soar into the heavens, though we should sink into the abyss,
we never go out of ourselves; it is always our own thought that we
perceive." What more could an idealist say?
The materialist, secure in the certainty of sensation, mocks at
fine-spun theories, at star-gazers and dreamers, and believes that
his life is solid, that he at least takes nothing for granted, but
knows where he stands, and what he does. Yet how easy it is to show
him, that he also is a phantom walking and working amid phantoms, and
that he need only ask a question or two beyond his daily questions,
to find his solid universe growing dim and impalpable before his
sense. The sturdy capitalist, no matter how deep and square on
blocks of Quincy granite he lays the foundations of his banking-house
or Exchange, must set it, at last, not on a cube corresponding to the
angles of his structure, but on a mass of unknown materials and
solidity, red-hot or white-hot, perhaps at the core, which rounds off
to an almost perfect sphericity, and lies floating in soft air, and
goes spinning away, dragging bank and banker with it at a rate of
thousands of miles the hour, he knows not whither, -- a bit of
bullet, now glimmering, now darkling through a small cubic space on
the edge of an unimaginable pit of emptiness. And this wild balloon,
in which his whole venture is embarked, is a just symbol of his whole
state and faculty. One thing, at least, he says is certain, and does
not give me the headache, that figures do not lie; the multiplication
table has been hitherto found unimpeachable truth; and, moreover, if
I put a gold eagle in my safe, I find it again to-morrow; -- but for
these thoughts, I know not whence they are. They change and pass
away. But ask him why he believes that an uniform experience will
continue uniform, or on what grounds he founds his faith in his
figures, and he will perceive that his mental fabric is built up on
just as strange and quaking foundations as his proud edifice of
stone.
In the order of thought, the materialist takes his departure
from the external world, and esteems a man as one product of that.
The idealist takes his departure from his consciousness, and reckons
the world an appearance. The materialist respects sensible masses,
Society, Government, social art, and luxury, every establishment,
every mass, whether majority of numbers, or extent of space, or
amount of objects, every social action. The idealist has another
measure, which is metaphysical, namely, the rank which things
themselves take in his consciousness; not at all, the size or
appearance. Mind is the only reality, of which men and all other
natures are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history,
are only subjective phenomena. Although in his action overpowered by
the laws of action, and so, warmly cooperating with men, even
preferring them to himself, yet when he speaks scientifically, or
after the order of thought, he is constrained to degrade persons into
representatives of truths. He does not respect labor, or the
products of labor, namely, property, otherwise than as a manifold
symbol, illustrating with wonderful fidelity of details the laws of
being; he does not respect government, except as far as it reiterates
the law of his mind; nor the church; nor charities; nor arts, for
themselves; but hears, as at a vast distance, what they say, as if
his consciousness would speak to him through a pantomimic scene. His
thought, -- that is the Universe. His experience inclines him to
behold the procession of facts you call the world, as flowing
perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded centre in himself,
centre alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all
things as having a subjective or relative existence, relative to that
aforesaid Unknown Centre of him.
From this transfer of the world into the consciousness, this
beholding of all things in the mind, follow easily his whole ethics.
It is simpler to be self-dependent. The height, the deity of man is,
to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is
good when it does not violate me; but best when it is likest to
solitude. Everything real is self-existent. Everything divine
shares the self-existence of Deity. All that you call the world is
the shadow of that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of
the powers of thought, of those that are dependent and of those that
are independent of your will. Do not cumber yourself with fruitless
pains to mend and remedy remote effects; let the soul be erect, and
all things will go well. You think me the child of my circumstances:
I make my circumstance. Let any thought or motive of mine be
different from that they are, the difference will transform my
condition and economy. I -- this thought which is called I, -- is
the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax. The mould
is invisible, but the world betrays the shape of the mould. You call
it the power of circumstance, but it is the power of me. Am I in
harmony with myself? my position will seem to you just and
commanding. Am I vicious and insane? my fortunes will seem to you
obscure and descending. As I am, so shall I associate, and, so shall
I act; Caesar's history will paint out Caesar. Jesus acted so,
because he thought so. I do not wish to overlook or to gainsay any
reality; I say, I make my circumstance: but if you ask me, Whence am
I? I feel like other men my relation to that Fact which cannot be
spoken, or defined, nor even thought, but which exists, and will
exist.
The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual
doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the
human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in
inspiration, and in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle
should be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible
applications to the state of man, without the admission of anything
unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus,
the spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth of the thought, and
never, who said it? And so he resists all attempts to palm other
rules and measures on the spirit than its own.
In action, he easily incurs the charge of antinomianism by his
avowal that he, who has the Lawgiver, may with safety not only
neglect, but even contravene every written commandment. In the play
of Othello, the expiring Desdemona absolves her husband of the
murder, to her attendant Emilia. Afterwards, when Emilia charges him
with the crime, Othello exclaims,
"You heard her say herself it was not I."
Emilia replies,
"The more angel she, and thou the blacker devil."
Of this fine incident, Jacobi, the Transcendental moralist,
makes use, with other parallel instances, in his reply to Fichte.
Jacobi, refusing all measure of right and wrong except the
determinations of the private spirit, remarks that there is no crime
but has sometimes been a virtue. "I," he says, "am that atheist,
that godless person who, in opposition to an imaginary doctrine of
calculation, would lie as the dying Desdemona lied; would lie and
deceive, as Pylades when he personated Orestes; would assassinate
like Timoleon; would perjure myself like Epaminondas, and John de
Witt; I would resolve on suicide like Cato; I would commit sacrilege
with David; yea, and pluck ears of corn on the Sabbath, for no other
reason than that I was fainting for lack of food. For, I have
assurance in myself, that, in pardoning these faults according to the
letter, man exerts the sovereign right which the majesty of his being
confers on him; he sets the seal of his divine nature to the grace he
accords."
In like manner, if there is anything grand and daring in human
thought or virtue, any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any
presentiment; any extravagance of faith, the spiritualist adopts it
as most in nature. The oriental mind has always tended to this
largeness. Buddhism is an expression of it. The Buddhist who thanks
no man, who says, "do not flatter your benefactors," but who, in his
conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its
reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has
done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist.
You will see by this sketch that there is no such thing as a
Transcendental party; that there is no pure Transcendentalist; that
we know of none but prophets and heralds of such a philosophy; that
all who by strong bias of nature have leaned to the spiritual side in
doctrine, have stopped short of their goal. We have had many
harbingers and forerunners; but of a purely spiritual life, history
has afforded no example. I mean, we have yet no man who has leaned
entirely on his character, and eaten angels' food; who, trusting to
his sentiments, found life made of miracles; who, working for
universal aims, found himself fed, he knew not how; clothed,
sheltered, and weaponed, he knew not how, and yet it was done by his
own hands. Only in the instinct of the lower animals, we find the
suggestion of the methods of it, and something higher than our
understanding. The squirrel hoards nuts, and the bee gathers honey,
without knowing what they do, and they are thus provided for without
selfishness or disgrace.
Shall we say, then, that Transcendentalism is the Saturnalia or
excess of Faith; the presentiment of a faith proper to man in his
integrity, excessive only when his imperfect obedience hinders the
satisfaction of his wish. Nature is transcendental, exists
primarily, necessarily, ever works and advances, yet takes no thought
for the morrow. Man owns the dignity of the life which throbs around
him in chemistry, and tree, and animal, and in the involuntary
functions of his own body; yet he is balked when he tries to fling
himself into this enchanted circle, where all is done without
degradation. Yet genius and virtue predict in man the same absence
of private ends, and of condescension to circumstances, united with
every trait and talent of beauty and power.
This way of thinking, falling on Roman times, made Stoic
philosophers; falling on despotic times, made patriot Catos and
Brutuses; falling on superstitious times, made prophets and apostles;
on popish times, made protestants and ascetic monks, preachers of
Faith against the preachers of Works; on prelatical times, made
Puritans and Quakers; and falling on Unitarian and commercial times,
makes the peculiar shades of Idealism which we know.
It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism of
the present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of
that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the
skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing
in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the
senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or
imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which
experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind
itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms. The
extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man's thinking have
given vogue to his nomenclature, in Europe and America, to that
extent, that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought, is
popularly called at the present day Transcendental.
Although, as we have said, there is no pure Transcendentalist,
yet the tendency to respect the intuitions, and to give them, at
least in our creed, all authority over our experience, has deeply
colored the conversation and poetry of the present day; and the
history of genius and of religion in these times, though impure, and
as yet not incarnated in any powerful individual, will be the history
of this tendency.
It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest
observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw
themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and
the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical
way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify
their separation. They hold themselves aloof: they feel the
disproportion between their faculties and the work offered them, and
they prefer to ramble in the country and perish of ennui, to the
degradation of such charities and such ambitions as the city can
propose to them. They are striking work, and crying out for somewhat
worthy to do! What they do, is done only because they are
overpowered by the humanities that speak on all sides; and they
consent to such labor as is open to them, though to their lofty dream
the writing of Iliads or Hamlets, or the building of cities or
empires seems drudgery.
Now every one must do after his kind, be he asp or angel, and
these must. The question, which a wise man and a student of modern
history will ask, is, what that kind is? And truly, as in
ecclesiastical history we take so much pains to know what the
Gnostics, what the Essenes, what the Manichees, and what the
Reformers believed, it would not misbecome us to inquire nearer home,
what these companions and contemporaries of ours think and do, at
least so far as these thoughts and actions appear to be not
accidental and personal, but common to many, and the inevitable
flower of the Tree of Time. Our American literature and spiritual
history are, we confess, in the optative mood; but whoso knows these
seething brains, these admirable radicals, these unsocial
worshippers, these talkers who talk the sun and moon away, will
believe that this heresy cannot pass away without leaving its mark.
They are lonely; the spirit of their writing and conversation
is lonely; they repel influences; they shun general society; they
incline to shut themselves in their chamber in the house, to live in
the country rather than in the town, and to find their tasks and
amusements in solitude. Society, to be sure, does not like this very
well; it saith, Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he
declareth all to be unfit to be his companions; it is very uncivil,
nay, insulting; Society will retaliate. Meantime, this retirement
does not proceed from any whim on the part of these separators; but
if any one will take pains to talk with them, he will find that this
part is chosen both from temperament and from principle; with some
unwillingness, too, and as a choice of the less of two evils; for
these persons are not by nature melancholy, sour, and unsocial, --
they are not stockish or brute, -- but joyous; susceptible,
affectionate; they have even more than others a great wish to be
loved. Like the young Mozart, they are rather ready to cry ten times
a day, "But are you sure you love me?" Nay, if they tell you their
whole thought, they will own that love seems to them the last and
highest gift of nature; that there are persons whom in their hearts
they daily thank for existing, -- persons whose faces are perhaps
unknown to them, but whose fame and spirit have penetrated their
solitude, -- and for whose sake they wish to exist. To behold the
beauty of another character, which inspires a new interest in our
own; to behold the beauty lodged in a human being, with such vivacity
of apprehension, that I am instantly forced home to inquire if I am
not deformity itself: to behold in another the expression of a love
so high that it assures itself, -- assures itself also to me against
every possible casualty except my unworthiness; -- these are degrees
on the scale of human happiness, to which they have ascended; and it
is a fidelity to this sentiment which has made common association
distasteful to them. They wish a just and even fellowship, or none.
They cannot gossip with you, and they do not wish, as they are
sincere and religious, to gratify any mere curiosity which you may
entertain. Like fairies, they do not wish to be spoken of. Love me,
they say, but do not ask who is my cousin and my uncle. If you do
not need to hear my thought, because you can read it in my face and
behavior, then I will tell it you from sunrise to sunset. If you
cannot divine it, you would not understand what I say. I will not
molest myself for you. I do not wish to be profaned.
And yet, it seems as if this loneliness, and not this love,
would prevail in their circumstances, because of the extravagant
demand they make on human nature. That, indeed, constitutes a new
feature in their portrait, that they are the most exacting and
extortionate critics. Their quarrel with every man they meet, is not
with his kind, but with his degree. There is not enough of him, --
that is the only fault. They prolong their privilege of childhood in
this wise, of doing nothing, -- but making immense demands on all the
gladiators in the lists of action and fame. They make us feel the
strange disappointment which overcasts every human youth. So many
promising youths, and never a finished man! The profound nature will
have a savage rudeness; the delicate one will be shallow, or the
victim of sensibility; the richly accomplished will have some capital
absurdity; and so every piece has a crack. 'T is strange, but this
masterpiece is a result of such an extreme delicacy, that the most
unobserved flaw in the boy will neutralize the most aspiring genius,
and spoil the work. Talk with a seaman of the hazards to life in his
profession, and he will ask you, "Where are the old sailors? do you
not see that all are young men?" And we, on this sea of human
thought, in like manner inquire, Where are the old idealists? where
are they who represented to the last generation that extravagant
hope, which a few happy aspirants suggest to ours? In looking at the
class of counsel, and power, and wealth, and at the matronage of the
land, amidst all the prudence and all the triviality, one asks, Where
are they who represented genius, virtue, the invisible and heavenly
world, to these? Are they dead, -- taken in early ripeness to the
gods, -- as ancient wisdom foretold their fate? Or did the high idea
die out of them, and leave their unperfumed body as its tomb and
tablet, announcing to all that the celestial inhabitant, who once
gave them beauty, had departed? Will it be better with the new
generation? We easily predict a fair future to each new candidate
who enters the lists, but we are frivolous and volatile, and by low
aims and ill example do what we can to defeat this hope. Then these
youths bring us a rough but effectual aid. By their unconcealed
dissatisfaction, they expose our poverty, and the insignificance of
man to man. A man is a poor limitary benefactor. He ought to be a
shower of benefits -- a great influence, which should never let his
brother go, but should refresh old merits continually with new ones;
so that, though absent, he should never be out of my mind, his name
never far from my lips; but if the earth should open at my side, or
my last hour were come, his name should be the prayer I should utter
to the Universe. But in our experience, man is cheap, and friendship
wants its deep sense. We affect to dwell with our friends in their
absence, but we do not; when deed, word, or letter comes not, they
let us go. These exacting children advertise us of our wants. There
is no compliment, no smooth speech with them; they pay you only this
one compliment, of insatiable expectation; they aspire, they severely
exact, and if they only stand fast in this watch-tower, and persist
in demanding unto the end, and without end, then are they terrible
friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in awe; and
what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been without
service to the race of man.
With this passion for what is great and extraordinary, it
cannot be wondered at, that they are repelled by vulgarity and
frivolity in people. They say to themselves, It is better to be
alone than in bad company. And it is really a wish to be met, -- the
wish to find society for their hope and religion, -- which prompts
them to shun what is called society. They feel that they are never
so fit for friendship, as when they have quitted mankind, and taken
themselves to friend. A picture, a book, a favorite spot in the
hills or the woods, which they can people with the fair and worthy
creation of the fancy, can give them often forms so vivid, that these
for the time shall seem real, and society the illusion.
But their solitary and fastidious manners not only withdraw
them from the conversation, but from the labors of the world; they
are not good citizens, not good members of society; unwillingly they
bear their part of the public and private burdens; they do not
willingly share in the public charities, in the public religious
rites, in the enterprises of education, of missions foreign or
domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the temperance
society. They do not even like to vote. The philanthropists inquire
whether Transcendentalism does not mean sloth: they had as lief hear
that their friend is dead, as that he is a Transcendentalist; for
then is he paralyzed, and can never do anything for humanity. What
right, cries the good world, has the man of genius to retreat from
work, and indulge himself? The popular literary creed seems to be,
`I am a sublime genius; I ought not therefore to labor.' But genius
is the power to labor better and more availably. Deserve thy genius:
exalt it. The good, the illuminated, sit apart from the rest,
censuring their dulness and vices, as if they thought that, by
sitting very grand in their chairs, the very brokers, attorneys, and
congressmen would see the error of their ways, and flock to them.
But the good and wise must learn to act, and carry salvation to the
combatants and demagogues in the dusty arena below.
On the part of these children, it is replied, that life and
their faculty seem to them gifts too rich to be squandered on such
trifles as you propose to them. What you call your fundamental
institutions, your great and holy causes, seem to them great abuses,
and, when nearly seen, paltry matters. Each `Cause,' as it is
called, -- say Abolition, Temperance, say Calvinism, or Unitarianism,
-- becomes speedily a little shop, where the article, let it have
been at first never so subtle and ethereal, is now made up into
portable and convenient cakes, and retailed in small quantities to
suit purchasers. You make very free use of these words `great' and
`holy,' but few things appear to them such. Few persons have any
magnificence of nature to inspire enthusiasm, and the philanthropies
and charities have a certain air of quackery. As to the general
course of living, and the daily employments of men, they cannot see
much virtue in these, since they are parts of this vicious circle;
and, as no great ends are answered by the men, there is nothing noble
in the arts by which they are maintained. Nay, they have made the
experiment, and found that, from the liberal professions to the
coarsest manual labor, and from the courtesies of the academy and the
college to the conventions of the cotillon-room and the morning call,
there is a spirit of cowardly compromise and seeming, which intimates
a frightful skepticism, a life without love, and an activity without
an aim.
Unless the action is necessary, unless it is adequate, I do not
wish to perform it. I do not wish to do one thing but once. I do
not love routine. Once possessed of the principle, it is equally
easy to make four or forty thousand applications of it. A great man
will be content to have indicated in any the slightest manner his
perception of the reigning Idea of his time, and will leave to those
who like it the multiplication of examples. When he has hit the
white, the rest may shatter the target. Every thing admonishes us
how needlessly long life is. Every moment of a hero so raises and
cheers us, that a twelve-month is an age. All that the brave Xanthus
brings home from his wars, is the recollection that, at the storming
of Samos, "in the heat of the battle, Pericles smiled on me, and
passed on to another detachment." It is the quality of the moment,
not the number of days, of events, or of actors, that imports.
New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if
you want the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of
the labor. We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and
rust: but we do not like your work.
`Then,' says the world, `show me your own.'
`We have none.'
`What will you do, then?' cries the world.
`We will wait.'
`How long?'
`Until the Universe rises up and calls us to work.'
`But whilst you wait, you grow old and useless.'
`Be it so: I can sit in a corner and perish, (as you call
it,) but I will not move until I have the highest command. If no
call should come for years, for centuries, then I know that the want
of the Universe is the attestation of faith by my abstinence. Your
virtuous projects, so called, do not cheer me. I know that which
shall come will cheer me. If I cannot work, at least I need not lie.
All that is clearly due to-day is not to lie. In other places, other
men have encountered sharp trials, and have behaved themselves well.
The martyrs were sawn asunder, or hung alive on meat-hooks. Cannot
we screw our courage to patience and truth, and without complaint, or
even with good-humor, await our turn of action in the Infinite
Counsels?'
But, to come a little closer to the secret of these persons, we
must say, that to them it seems a very easy matter to answer the
objections of the man of the world, but not so easy to dispose of the
doubts and objections that occur to themselves. They are exercised
in their own spirit with queries, which acquaint them with all
adversity, and with the trials of the bravest heroes. When I asked
them concerning their private experience, they answered somewhat in
this wise: It is not to be denied that there must be some wide
difference between my faith and other faith; and mine is a certain
brief experience, which surprised me in the highway or in the market,
in some place, at some time, -- whether in the body or out of the
body, God knoweth, -- and made me aware that I had played the fool
with fools all this time, but that law existed for me and for all;
that to me belonged trust, a child's trust and obedience, and the
worship of ideas, and I should never be fool more. Well, in the
space of an hour, probably, I was let down from this height; I was at
my old tricks, the selfish member of a selfish society. My life is
superficial, takes no root in the deep world; I ask, When shall I
die, and be relieved of the responsibility of seeing an Universe
which I do not use? I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith
for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.
These two states of thought diverge every moment, and stand in
wild contrast. To him who looks at his life from these moments of
illumination, it will seem that he skulks and plays a mean,
shiftless, and subaltern part in the world. That is to be done which
he has not skill to do, or to be said which others can say better,
and he lies by, or occupies his hands with some plaything, until his
hour comes again. Much of our reading, much of our labor, seems mere
waiting: it was not that we were born for. Any other could do it as
well, or better. So little skill enters into these works, so little
do they mix with the divine life, that it really signifies little
what we do, whether we turn a grindstone, or ride, or run, or make
fortunes, or govern the state. The worst feature of this double
consciousness is, that the two lives, of the understanding and of the
soul, which we lead, really show very little relation to each other,
never meet and measure each other: one prevails now, all buzz and
din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise; and,
with the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition to
reconcile themselves. Yet, what is my faith? What am I? What but a
thought of serenity and independence, an abode in the deep blue sky?
Presently the clouds shut down again; yet we retain the belief that
this petty web we weave will at last be overshot and reticulated with
veins of the blue, and that the moments will characterize the days.
Patience, then, is for us, is it not? Patience, and still patience.
When we pass, as presently we shall, into some new infinitude, out of
this Iceland of negations, it will please us to reflect that, though
we had few virtues or consolations, we bore with our indigence, nor
once strove to repair it with hypocrisy or false heat of any kind.
But this class are not sufficiently characterized, if we omit
to add that they are lovers and worshippers of Beauty. In the
eternal trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, each in its
perfection including the three, they prefer to make Beauty the sign
and head. Something of the same taste is observable in all the moral
movements of the time, in the religious and benevolent enterprises.
They have a liberal, even an aesthetic spirit. A reference to Beauty
in action sounds, to be sure, a little hollow and ridiculous in the
ears of the old church. In politics, it has often sufficed, when
they treated of justice, if they kept the bounds of selfish
calculation. If they granted restitution, it was prudence which
granted it. But the justice which is now claimed for the black, and
the pauper, and the drunkard is for Beauty, -- is for a necessity to
the soul of the agent, not of the beneficiary. I say, this is the
tendency, not yet the realization. Our virtue totters and trips,
does not yet walk firmly. Its representatives are austere; they
preach and denounce; their rectitude is not yet a grace. They are
still liable to that slight taint of burlesque which, in our strange
world, attaches to the zealot. A saint should be as dear as the
apple of the eye. Yet we are tempted to smile, and we flee from the
working to the speculative reformer, to escape that same slight
ridicule. Alas for these days of derision and criticism! We call
the Beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean,
escaping the dowdiness of the good, and the heartlessness of the
true. -- They are lovers of nature also, and find an indemnity in
the inviolable order of the world for the violated order and grace of
man.
There is, no doubt, a great deal of well-founded objection to
be spoken or felt against the sayings and doings of this class, some
of whose traits we have selected; no doubt, they will lay themselves
open to criticism and to lampoons, and as ridiculous stories will be
to be told of them as of any. There will be cant and pretension;
there will be subtilty and moonshine. These persons are of unequal
strength, and do not all prosper. They complain that everything
around them must be denied; and if feeble, it takes all their
strength to deny, before they can begin to lead their own life.
Grave seniors insist on their respect to this institution, and that
usage; to an obsolete history; to some vocation, or college, or
etiquette, or beneficiary, or charity, or morning or evening call,
which they resist, as what does not concern them. But it costs such
sleepless nights, alienations and misgivings, -- they have so many
moods about it; -- these old guardians never change their minds;
they have but one mood on the subject, namely, that Antony is very
perverse, -- that it is quite as much as Antony can do, to assert his
rights, abstain from what he thinks foolish, and keep his temper. He
cannot help the reaction of this injustice in his own mind. He is
braced-up and stilted; all freedom and flowing genius, all sallies of
wit and frolic nature are quite out of the question; it is well if he
can keep from lying, injustice, and suicide. This is no time for
gaiety and grace. His strength and spirits are wasted in rejection.
But the strong spirits overpower those around them without effort.
Their thought and emotion comes in like a flood, quite withdraws them
from all notice of these carping critics; they surrender themselves
with glad heart to the heavenly guide, and only by implication reject
the clamorous nonsense of the hour. Grave seniors talk to the deaf,
-- church and old book mumble and ritualize to an unheeding,
preoccupied and advancing mind, and thus they by happiness of greater
momentum lose no time, but take the right road at first.
But all these of whom I speak are not proficients; they are
novices; they only show the road in which man should travel, when the
soul has greater health and prowess. Yet let them feel the dignity
of their charge, and deserve a larger power. Their heart is the ark
in which the fire is concealed, which shall burn in a broader and
universal flame. Let them obey the Genius then most when his impulse
is wildest; then most when he seems to lead to uninhabitable desarts
of thought and life; for the path which the hero travels alone is the
highway of health and benefit to mankind. What is the privilege and
nobility of our nature, but its persistency, through its power to
attach itself to what is permanent?
Society also has its duties in reference to this class, and
must behold them with what charity it can. Possibly some benefit may
yet accrue from them to the state. In our Mechanics' Fair, there
must be not only bridges, ploughs, carpenters' planes, and baking
troughs, but also some few finer instruments, -- raingauges,
thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides farmers,
sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept
specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine,
detecting instinct, who betray the smallest accumulations of wit and
feeling in the bystander. Perhaps too there might be room for the
exciters and monitors; collectors of the heavenly spark with power to
convey the electricity to others. Or, as the storm-tossed vessel at
sea speaks the frigate or `line packet' to learn its longitude, so it
may not be without its advantage that we should now and then
encounter rare and gifted men, to compare the points of our spiritual
compass, and verify our bearings from superior chronometers.
Amidst the downward tendency and proneness of things, when
every voice is raised for a new road or another statute, or a
subscription of stock, for an improvement in dress, or in dentistry,
for a new house or a larger business, for a political party, or the
division of an estate, -- will you not tolerate one or two solitary
voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and principles not
marketable or perishable? Soon these improvements and mechanical
inventions will be superseded; these modes of living lost out of
memory; these cities rotted, ruined by war, by new inventions, by new
seats of trade, or the geologic changes: -- all gone, like the shells
which sprinkle the seabeach with a white colony to-day, forever
renewed to be forever destroyed. But the thoughts which these few
hermits strove to proclaim by silence, as well as by speech, not only
by what they did, but by what they forbore to do, shall abide in
beauty and strength, to reorganize themselves in nature, to invest
themselves anew in other, perhaps higher endowed and happier mixed
clay than ours, in fuller union with the surrounding system.
*A Lecture read at the Masonic Temple, Boston,
January, 1842
