Texts:Emerson/Conduct: Difference between revisions

<p>1871</p>

__TOC__

To the lone bard true witness bare;

Birds with auguries on their wings

Unto the thing so signified;

Or say, the foresight that awaits

<h2>Fate</h2>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — But let us honestly state the facts.  Our America has a bad name for superficialness.  Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.  The Spartan, embodying his religion in his country, dies before its majesty without a question.  The Turk, who believes his doom is written on the iron leaf in the moment when he entered the world, rushes on the enemy's sabre with undivided will.  The Turk, the Arab, the Persian, accepts the foreordained fate.</p>

The appointed, and the unappointed day;

On the first, neither balm nor physician can save,

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — The Hindoo, under the wheel, is as firm.  Our Calvinists, in the last generation, had something of the same dignity.  They felt that the weight of the Universe held them down to their place. What could <em>they</em> do?  Wise men feel that there is something which cannot be talked or voted away,—a strap or belt which girds the world.</p>

That executeth in the world o'er all,

The purveyance which God hath seen beforne,

All this is ruled by the sight above."

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — The Greek Tragedy expressed the same sense: "Whatever is fated, that will take place.  The great immense mind of Jove is not to be transgressed."</p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — The secret of the world is, the tie between person and event.  Person makes event, and event person. The "times," "the age," what is that, but a few profound persons and a few active persons who epitomize the times?—Goethe, Hegel, Metternich, Adams, Calhoun, Guizot, Peel, Cobden, Kossuth, Rothschild, Astor, Brunel, and the rest.  The same fitness must be presumed between a man and the time and event, as between the sexes, or between a race of animals and the food it eats, or the inferior races it uses.  He thinks his fate alien, because the copula is hidden.  But the soul contains the event that shall befall it, for the event is only the actualization of its thoughts; and what we pray to ourselves for is always granted.  The event is the print of your form.  It fits you like your skin.  What each does is proper to him.  Events are the children of his body and mind.  We learn that the soul of Fate is the soul of us, as Hafiz sings,</p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — All the toys that infatuate men, and which they play for,—houses, land, money, luxury, power, fame, are the selfsame thing, with a new gauze or two of illusion overlaid.  And of all the drums and rattles by which men are made willing to have their heads broke, and are led out solemnly every morning to parade,—the most admirable is this by which we are brought to believe that events are arbitrary, and independent of actions.  At the conjuror's, we detect the hair by which he moves his puppet, but we have not eyes sharp enough to descry the thread that ties cause and effect.</p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — This correlation really existing can be divined. If the threads are there, thought can follow and show them.  Especially when a soul is quick and docile; as Chaucer sings,</p>

Be so perfect as men find,

That it wot what is to come,

But that our flesh hath not might

It to understand aright

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — Some people are made up of rhyme, coincidence, omen, periodicity, and presage: they meet the person they seek; what their companion prepares to say to them, they first say to him; and a hundred signs apprise them of what is about to befall.</p>

<hr>

And his hand was armed with skill,

His face was the mould of beauty,

<h2>Power</h2>

<hr>

Far away in time, when once,

Over the lifeless ball,

Electric thrills and ties of Law,

Which bind the strengths of Nature wild

<h2>Wealth</h2>

<hr>

The semigod whom we await?<br>

He must be musical,

But, to his native centre fast,

Shall into Future fuse the Past,

<h2>Culture</h2>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — I wish cities could teach their best lesson,—of quiet manners.  It is the foible especially of American youth,—pretension.  The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension.  He does not make a speech; he takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact.  He calls his employment by its lowest name, and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon.  His conversation clings to the weather and the news, yet he allows himself to be surprised into thought, and the unlocking of his learning and philosophy.  How the imagination is piqued by anecdotes of some great man passing incognito, as a king in gray clothes,—of Napoleon affecting a plain suit at his glittering levee; of Burns, or Scott, or Beethoven, or Wellington, or Goethe, or any container of transcendent power, passing for nobody; of Epaminondas, "who never says anything, but will listen eternally;" of Goethe, who preferred trifling subjects and common expressions in intercourse with strangers, worse rather than better clothes, and to appear a little more capricious than he was.  There are advantages in the old hat and box-coat.  I have heard, that, throughout this country, a certain respect is paid to good broadcloth; but dress makes a little restraint: men will not commit themselves.  But the box-coat is like wine; it unlocks the tongue, and men say what they think.  An old poet says,<ref>Beaumont and Fletcher: <em>The Tamer Tamed</em>.</ref></p>

For you'll find it certain,

The poorer and the baser you appear,

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — Not much otherwise Milnes writes, in the "Lay of the Humble,"</p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — 'Tis odd that our people should have—not water on the brain,—but a little gas there.  A shrewd foreigner said of the Americans, that, "whatever they say has a little the air of a speech."  Yet one of the traits down in the books as distinguishing the Anglo-Saxon, is, a trick of self-disparagement.  To be sure, in old, dense countries, among a million of good coats, a fine coat comes to be no distinction, and you find humorists.  In an English party, a man with no marked manners or features, with a face like red dough, unexpectedly discloses wit, learning, a wide range of topics, and personal familiarity with good men in all parts of the world, until you think you have fallen upon some illustrious personage.  Can it be that the American forest has refreshed some weeds of old Pictish barbarism just ready to die out,—the love of the scarlet feather, of beads, and tinsel?  The Italians are fond of red clothes, peacock plumes, and embroidery; and I remember one rainy morning in the city of Palermo, the street was in a blaze with scarlet umbrellas.  The English have a plain taste.  The equipages of the grandees are plain.  A gorgeous livery indicates new and awkward city wealth. Mr. Pitt, like Mr. Pym, thought the title of <em>Mister</em> good against any king in Europe.  They have piqued themselves on governing the whole world in the poor, plain, dark Committee-room which the House of Commons sat in, before the fire.</p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.  The countryman finds the town a chophouse, a barber's shop.  He has lost the lines of grandeur of the horizon, hills and plains, and with them, sobriety and elevation.  He has come among a supple, glib-tongued tribe, who live for show, servile to public opinion.  Life is dragged down to a fracas of pitiful cares and disasters.  You say the gods ought to respect a life whose objects are their own; but in cities they have betrayed you to a cloud of insignificant annoyances:<ref>Béranger.</ref></p>

Mirmidons,

Enfin nous commandons;

Our turn to-day! we take command,

Jove gives the globe into the hand

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — What is odious but noise, and people who scream and bewail? people whose vane points always east, who live to dine, who send for the doctor, who coddle themselves, who toast their feet on the register, who intrigue to secure a padded chair, and a corner out of the draught.  Suffer them once to begin the enumeration of their infirmities, and the sun will go down on the unfinished tale.  Let these triflers put us out of conceit with petty comforts.  To a man at work, the frost is but a color: the rain, the wind, he forgot them when he came in.  Let us learn to live coarsely, dress plainly, and lie hard. The least habit of dominion over the palate has certain good effects not easily estimated.  Neither will we be driven into a quiddling abstemiousness.  'Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet.  All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.</p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices, but for proficients. These are lessons only for the brave.  We must know our friends under ugly masks.  The calamities are our friends.  Ben Jonson specifies in his address to the Muse:—</p>

And, reconciled, keep him suspected still,

Make him lose all his friends, and, what is worse,

Almost all ways to any better course;

With me thou leav'st a better Muse than thee,

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — We wish to learn philosophy by rote, and play at heroism.  But the wiser God says, Take the shame, the poverty, and the penal solitude, that belong to truth-speaking.  Try the rough water as well as the smooth.  Rough water can teach lessons worth knowing.  When the state is unquiet, personal qualities are more than ever decisive.  Fear not a revolution which will constrain you to live five years in one.  Don't be so tender at making an enemy now and then.  Be willing to go to Coventry sometimes, and let the populace bestow on you their coldest contempts.  The finished man of the world must eat of every apple once.  He must hold his hatreds also at arm's length, and not remember spite.  He has neither friends nor enemies, but values men only as channels of power.</p>

<hr>

Build this golden portal;

Graceful women, chosen men

The tyrants of his doom,

The much deceived Endymion

<h2>Behavior</h2>

<hr>

Sprung harmless up, refreshed by blows

He to captivity was sold,

Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line,

Severing rightly his from thine,

<h2>Worship</h2>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — I see not why we should give ourselves such sanctified airs.  If the Divine Providence has hid from men neither disease, nor deformity, nor corrupt society, but has stated itself out in passions, in war, in trade, in the love of power and pleasure, in hunger and need, in tyrannies, literatures, and arts,—let us not be so nice that we cannot write these facts down coarsely as they stand, or doubt but there is a counter-statement as ponderous, which we can arrive at, and which, being put, will make all square.  The solar system has no anxiety about its reputation, and the credit of truth and honesty is as safe; nor have I any fear that a skeptical bias can be given by leaning hard on the sides of fate, of practical power, or of trade, which the doctrine of Faith cannot down-weigh.  The strength of that principle is not measured in ounces and pounds: it tyrannizes at the centre of Nature. We may well give skepticism as much line as we can.  The spirit will return, and fill us.  It drives the drivers.  It counterbalances any accumulations of power.</p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — We are born loyal.  The whole creation is made of hooks and eyes, of bitumen, of sticking-plaster, and whether your community is made in Jerusalem or in California, of saints or of wreckers, it coheres in a perfect ball.  Men as naturally make a state, or a church, as caterpillars a web.  If they were more refined, it would be less formal, it would be nervous, like that of the Shakers, who, from long habit of thinking and feeling together, it is said, are affected in the same way, at the same time, to work and to play, and as they go with perfect sympathy to their tasks in the field or shop, so are they inclined for a ride or a journey at the same instant, and the horses come up with the family carriage unbespoken to the door.</p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — Christianity, in the romantic ages, signified European culture,—the grafted or meliorated tree in a crab forest.  And to marry a pagan wife or husband, was to marry Beast, and voluntarily to take a step backwards towards the baboon.</p>

A daughter both fair and gent,

But she was heathen Sarazine,

And was cursed in all his life;

For he let Christian wed heathen,

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — What Gothic mixtures the Christian creed drew from the pagan sources, Richard of Devizes's chronicle of Richard I.'s crusade, in the twelfth century, may show.  King Richard taunts God with forsaking him: "O fie!  O how unwilling should I be to forsake thee, in so forlorn and dreadful a position, were I thy lord and advocate, as thou art mine.  In sooth, my standards will in future be despised, not through my fault, but through thine: in sooth, not through any cowardice of my warfare, art thou thyself, my king and my God conquered, this day, and not Richard thy vassal."  The religion of the early English poets is anomalous, so devout and so blasphemous, in the same breath.  Such is Chaucer's extraordinary confusion of heaven and earth in the picture of Dido.</p>

So young, so lusty, with her eyen glad,

And womanhede, truth, and seemliness,

Whom should he loven but this lady sweet?

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — With these grossnesses, we complacently compare our own taste and decorum.  We think and speak with more temperance and gradation,—but is not indifferentism as bad as superstition?</p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — Thus can the faithful student reverse all the warnings of his early instinct, under the guidance of a deeper instinct.  He learns to welcome misfortune, learns that adversity is the prosperity of the great.  He learns the greatness of humility. He shall work in the dark, work against failure, pain, and ill-will.  If he is insulted, he can be insulted; all his affair is not to insult.  Hafiz writes,</p>

On their heads the dust,

As ensign and as ornament

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — The moral equalizes all; enriches, empowers all. It is the coin which buys all, and which all find in their pocket.  Under the whip of the driver, the slave shall feel his equality with saints and heroes. In the greatest destitution and calamity, it surprises man with a feeling of elasticity which makes nothing of loss.</p>

<hr>

Of keenest eye and truest tongue.

Say not, the chiefs who first arrive

Loved and lovers bide at home,

A day for toil, an hour for sport,

<h2>Considerations by the Way.</h2>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — "<em>Croyez moi, l'erreur aussi a son mérite</em>," said Voltaire.  We see those who surmount, by dint of some egotism or infatuation, obstacles from which the prudent recoil.  The right partisan is a heady narrow man, who, because he does not see many things, sees some one thing with heat and exaggeration, and, if he falls among other narrow men, or on objects which have a brief importance, as some trade or politics of the hour, he prefers it to the universe, and seems inspired, and a godsend to those who wish to magnify the matter, and carry a point.  Better, certainly, if we could secure the strength and fire which rude, passionate men bring into society, quite clear of their vices.  But who dares draw out the linchpin from the wagon-wheel? 'Tis so manifest, that there is no moral deformity, but is a good passion out of place; that there is no man who is not indebted to his foibles; that, according to the old oracle, "the Furies are the bonds of men;" that the poisons are our principal medicines, which kill the disease, and save the life.  In the high prophetic phrase, <em>He causes the wrath of man to praise him</em>, and twists and wrenches our evil to our good. Shakspeare wrote,—</p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — and great educators and lawgivers, and especially generals, and leaders of colonies, mainly rely on this stuff, and esteem men of irregular and passional force the best timber.  A man of sense and energy, the late head of the Farm School in Boston harbor, said to me, "I want none of your good boys,—give me the bad ones."  And this is the reason, I suppose, why, as soon as the children are good, the mothers are scared, and think they are going to die.  Mirabeau said, "There are none but men of strong passions capable of going to greatness; none but such capable of meriting the public gratitude."  Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.  Any absorbing passion has the effect to deliver from the little coils and cares of every day: 'tis the heat which sets our human atoms spinning, overcomes the friction of crossing thresholds, and first addresses in society, and gives us a good start and speed, easy to continue, when once it is begun.  In short, there is no man who is not at some time indebted to his vices, as no plant that is not fed from manures.  We only insist that the man meliorate, and that the plant grow upward, and convert the base into the better nature.</p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — It is an old commendation of right behavior, "<em>Aliis lœtus, sapiens sibi</em>," which our English proverb translates, "Be merry <em>and</em> wise."  I know how easy it is to men of the world to look grave and sneer at your sanguine youth, and its glittering dreams.  But I find the gayest castles in the air that were ever piled, far better for comfort and for use, than the dungeons in the air that are daily dug and caverned out by grumbling, discontented people. I know those miserable fellows, and I hate them, who see a black star always riding through the light and colored clouds in the sky overhead: waves of light pass over and hide it for a moment, but the black star keeps fast in the zenith.  But power dwells with cheerfulness; hope puts us in a working mood, whilst despair is no muse, and untunes the active powers.  A man should make life and Nature happier to us, or he had better never been born.  When the political economist reckons up the unproductive classes, he should put at the head this class of pitiers of themselves, cravers of sympathy, bewailing imaginary disasters.  An old French verse runs, in my translation:—</p>

And the sharpest you still have survived;

But what torments of pain you endured

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — There are three wants which never can be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveller, who says, 'Anywhere but here.'  The Turkish cadi said to Layard, "After the fashion of thy people, thou hast wandered from one place to another, until thou art happy and content in none."  My countrymen are not less infatuated with the <em>rococo</em> toy of Italy.  All America seems on the point of embarking for Europe.  But we shall not always traverse seas and lands with light purposes, and for pleasure, as we say.  One day we shall cast out the passion for Europe, by the passion for America.  Culture will give gravity and domestic rest to those who now travel only as not knowing how else to spend money.  Already, who provoke pity like that excellent family party just arriving in their well-appointed carriage, as far from home and any honest end as ever?  Each nation has asked successively, 'What are they here for?' until at last the party are shamefaced, and anticipate the question at the gates of each town.</p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — Add the consent of will and temperament, and there exists the covenant of friendship.  Our chief want in life, is, somebody who shall make us do what we can.  This is the service of a friend. With him we are easily great.  There is a sublime attraction in him to whatever virtue is in us.  How he flings wide the doors of existence!  What questions we ask of him! what an understanding we have! how few words are needed!  It is the only real society.  An Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Taleb, writes with sad truth,—</p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — But few writers have said anything better to this point than Hafiz, who indicates this relation as the test of mental health: "Thou learnest no secret until thou knowest friendship, since to the unsound no heavenly knowledge enters."  Neither is life long enough for friendship.  That is a serious and majestic affair, like a royal presence, or a religion, and not a postilion's dinner to be eaten on the run. There is a pudency about friendship, as about love, and though fine souls never lose sight of it, yet they do not name it.  With the first class of men our friendship or good understanding goes quite behind all accidents of estrangement, of condition, of reputation.  And yet we do not provide for the greatest good of life.  We take care of our health; we lay up money; we make our roof tight, and our clothing sufficient; but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting in the best property of all,—friends? We know that all our training is to fit us for this, and we do not take the step towards it.  How long shall we sit and wait for these benefactors?</p>

<hr>

So sweet to SEYD as only grace

Which did not slumber like a stone

Thieving Ambition and paltering Gain!

He thought it happier to be dead,

<h2>Beauty</h2>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — But the sovereign attribute remains to be noted. Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.  This is the reason why beauty is still escaping out of all analysis.  It is not yet possessed, it cannot be handled.  Proclus says, "it swims on the light of forms."  It is properly not in the form, but in the mind.  It instantly deserts possession, and flies to an object in the horizon.  If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful?  The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water.  For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time.  Wordsworth rightly speaks of "a light that never was on sea or land," meaning, that it was supplied by the observer, and the Welsh bard warns his countrywomen, that</p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — The new virtue which constitutes a thing beautiful, is a certain cosmical quality, or, a power to suggest relation to the whole world, and so lift the object out of a pitiful individuality.  Every natural feature,—sea, sky, rainbow, flowers, musical tone,—has in it somewhat which is not private, but universal, speaks of that central benefit which is the soul of Nature, and thereby is beautiful.  And, in chosen men and women, I find somewhat in form, speech, and manners, which is not of their person and family, but of a humane, catholic, and spiritual character, and we love them as the sky.  They have a largeness of suggestion, and their face and manners carry a certain grandeur, like time and justice.</p>

<hr>

Accursed, adored,

The waves of mutation:

Horsed on the Proteus,

Thou ridest to power,

<h2>Illusions</h2>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — The intellect is stimulated by the statement of truth in a trope, and the will by clothing the laws of life in illusions.  But the unities of Truth and of Right are not broken by the disguise.  There need never be any confusion in these.  In a crowded life of many parts and performers, on a stage of nations, or in the obscurest hamlet in Maine or California, the same elements offer the same choices to each new comer, and, according to his election, he fixes his fortune in absolute Nature. It would be hard to put more mental and moral philosophy than the Persians have thrown into a sentence:—</p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe.  All is system and gradation.  Every god is there sitting in his sphere.  The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snow-storms of illusions.  He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and whose movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant.  The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that.  What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself?  Every moment, new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract him.  And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones,—they alone with him alone.</p>