Essays, First Series
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Ralph Waldo Emerson >> Essays, First Series
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16 Essays, First Series
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
HISTORY.
There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are
And it cometh everywhere.
I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakspeare's strain.
I.
HISTORY.
THERE is one mind common to all individual men. Every
man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He
that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a
freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought,
he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what
at any time has befallen any man, he can understand.
Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to
all that is or can be done, for this is the only and
sovereign agent.
Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its
genius is illustrated by the entire series of days.
Man is explicable by nothing less than all his
history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit
goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty,
every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it, in
appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to
the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the
mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances
predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but
one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts.
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and
Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded
already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp,
kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the
application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.
This human mind wrote history, and this must read it.
The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of
history is in one man, it is all to be explained from
individual experience. There is a relation between the
hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the
air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of
nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a
hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my
body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and
centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed
by the ages and the ages explained by the hours. Of
the universal mind each individual man is one more
incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each
new fact in his private experience flashes a light on
what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of
his life refer to national crises. Every revolution
was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the
same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to
that era. Every reform was once a private opinion, and
when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve
the problem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond
to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We, as
we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and
king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images
to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall
learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or Caesar
Borgia is as much an illustration of the mind's powers
and depravations as what has befallen us. Each new law
and political movement has meaning for you. Stand before
each of its tablets and say, 'Under this mask did my
Proteus nature hide itself.' This remedies the defect
of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our
actions into perspective; and as crabs, goats, scorpions,
the balance and the waterpot lose their meanness when
hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices
without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades,
and Catiline.
It is the universal nature which gives worth to
particular men and things. Human life, as containing
this, is mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it
round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence
their ultimate reason; all express more or less
distinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable
essence. Property also holds of the soul, covers great
spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold to
it with swords and laws and wide and complex combinations.
The obscure consciousness of this fact is the light of
all our day, the claim of claims; the plea for education,
for justice, for charity; the foundation of friendship
and love and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to
acts of self-reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily
we always read as superior beings. Universal history, the
poets, the romancers, do not in their stateliest pictures,
--in the sacerdotal, the imperial palaces, in the triumphs
of will or of genius,--anywhere lose our ear, anywhere make
us feel that we intrude, that this is for better men; but
rather is it true that in their grandest strokes we feel
most at home. All that Shakspeare says of the king, yonder
slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathize in the great moments of history, in
the great discoveries, the great resistances, the great
prosperities of men;--because there law was enacted, the
sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was
struck, for us, as we ourselves in that place would have
done or applauded.
We have the same interest in condition and character.
We honor the rich because they have externally the
freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be proper
to man, proper to us. So all that is said of the wise
man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes
to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained
but attainable self. All literature writes the character
of the wise man. Books, monuments, pictures, conversation,
are portraits in which he finds the lineaments he is
forming. The silent and the eloquent praise him and accost
him, and he is stimulated wherever he moves, as by personal allusions. A true aspirant therefore never needs look for
allusions personal and laudatory in discourse. He hears the commendation, not of himself, but, more sweet, of that
character he seeks, in every word that is said concerning character, yea further in every fact and circumstance,--in
the running river and the rustling corn. Praise is looked,
homage tendered, love flows, from mute nature, from the
mountains and the lights of the firmament.
These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night,
let us use in broad day. The student is to read
history actively and not passively; to esteem his own
life the text, and books the commentary. Thus
compelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles, as
never to those who do not respect themselves. I have
no expectation that any man will read history aright
who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men
whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense
than what he is doing to-day.
The world exists for the education of each man. There
is no age or state of society or mode of action in
history to which there is not somewhat corresponding
in his life. Every thing tends in a wonderful manner
to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him.
He should see that he can live all history in his own
person. He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer
himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know
that he is greater than all the geography and all the
government of the world; he must transfer the point of
view from which history is commonly read, from Rome
and Athens and London, to himself, and not deny his
conviction that he is the court, and if England or
Egypt have any thing to say to him he will try the
case; if not, let them for ever be silent. He must
attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yield
their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike.
The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature,
betrays itself in the use we make of the signal
narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining
ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no
cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact.
Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome
are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden,
the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry
thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the fact
was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang
in heaven an immortal sign? London and Paris and New
York must go the same way. "What is history," said
Napoleon, "but a fable agreed upon?" This life of ours
is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War,
Colonization, Church, Court and Commerce, as with so
many flowers and wild ornaments grave and gay. I will
not make more account of them. I believe in Eternity.
I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain and the Islands,
--the genius and creative principle of each and of all
eras, in my own mind.
We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of
history in our private experience and verifying them
here. All history becomes subjective; in other words
there is properly no history, only biography. Every
mind must know the whole lesson for itself,--must go
over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it
does not live, it will not know. What the former age
has epitomized into a formula or rule for manipular
convenience, it will lose all the good of verifying
for itself, by means of the wall of that rule.
Somewhere, sometime, it will demand and find
compensation for that loss, by doing the work itself.
Ferguson discovered many things in astronomy which had
long been known. The better for him.
History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which
the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature;
that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary
reason of every fact,--see how it could and must be.
So stand before every public and private work; before
an oration of Burke, before a victory of Napoleon,
before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, of
Marmaduke Robinson; before a French Reign of Terror,
and a Salem hanging of witches; before a fanatic
Revival and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in
Providence. We assume that we under like influence
should be alike affected, and should achieve the like;
and we aim to master intellectually the steps and
reach the same height or the same degradation that
our fellow, our proxy has done.
All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting
the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the
Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis,--is the desire to do
away this wild, savage, and preposterous There or Then,
and introduce in its place the Here and the Now. Belzoni
digs and measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of
Thebes, until he can see the end of the difference between
the monstrous work and himself. When he has satisfied
himself, in general and in detail, that it was made by
such a person as he, so armed and so motived, and to ends
to which he himself should also have worked, the problem
is solved; his thought lives along the whole line of
temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through
them all with satisfaction, and they live again to the
mind, or are now.
A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and
not done by us. Surely it was by man, but we find it
not in our man. But we apply ourselves to the history
of its production. We put ourselves into the place and
state of the builder. We remember the forest-dwellers,
the first temples, the adherence to the first type,
and the decoration of it as the wealth of the nation
increased; the value which is given to wood by carving
led to the carving over the whole mountain of stone of
a cathedral. When we have gone through this process,
and added thereto the Catholic Church, its cross, its
music, its processions, its Saints' days and image-
worship, we have as it were been the man that made the
minster; we have seen how it could and must be. We have
the sufficient reason.
The difference between men is in their principle of
association. Some men classify objects by color and
size and other accidents of appearance; others by
intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause and
effect. The progress of the intellect is to the
clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface
differences. To the poet, to the philosopher, to the
saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events
profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the eye
is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance.
Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in
its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of
appearance.
Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating
nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, why
should we be such hard pedants, and magnify a few
forms? Why should we make account of time, or of
magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows them not, and
genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with them
as a young child plays with graybeards and in
churches. Genius studies the causal thought, and far
back in the womb of things sees the rays parting from
one orb, that diverge, ere they fall, by infinite
diameters. Genius watches the monad through all his
masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature.
Genius detects through the fly, through the
caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the
constant individual; through countless individuals
the fixed species; through many species the genus;
through all genera the steadfast type; through all
the kingdoms of organized life the eternal unity.
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never
the same. She casts the same thought into troops of
forms, as a poet makes twenty fables with one moral.
Through the bruteness and toughness of matter, a
subtle spirit bends all things to its own will. The
adamant streams into soft but precise form before it,
and whilst I look at it its outline and texture are
changed again. Nothing is so fleeting as form; yet
never does it quite deny itself. In man we still trace
the remains or hints of all that we esteem badges of
servitude in the lower races; yet in him they enhance
his nobleness and grace; as Io, in Aeschylus,
transformed to a cow, offends the imagination; but how
changed when as Isis in Egypt she meets Osiris-Jove,
a beautiful woman with nothing of the metamorphosis
left but the lunar horns as the splendid ornament of
her brows!
The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the
diversity equally obvious. There is, at the surface,
infinite variety of things; at the centre there is
simplicity of cause. How many are the acts of one man
in which we recognize the same character! Observe the
sources of our information in respect to the Greek
genius. We have the civil history of that people, as
Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have
given it; a very sufficient account of what manner of
persons they were and what they did. We have the same
national mind expressed for us again in their
literature, in epic and lyric poems, drama, and
philosophy; a very complete form. Then we have it once
more in their architecture, a beauty as of temperance
itself, limited to the straight line and the square,
--a builded geometry. Then we have it once again in
sculpture, the "tongue on the balance of expression,"
a multitude of forms in the utmost freedom of action
and never transgressing the ideal serenity; like
votaries performing some religious dance before the
gods, and, though in convulsive pain or mortal combat,
never daring to break the figure and decorum of their
dance. Thus of the genius of one remarkable people we
have a fourfold representation: and to the senses what
more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a marble centaur,
the peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last actions
of Phocion?
Every one must have observed faces and forms which,
without any resembling feature, make a like impression
on the beholder. A particular picture or copy of
verses, if it do not awaken the same train of images,
will yet superinduce the same sentiment as some wild
mountain walk, although the resemblance is nowise
obvious to the senses, but is occult and out of the
reach of the understanding. Nature is an endless
combination and repetition of a very few laws. She
hums the old well-known air through innumerable
variations.
Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout
her works, and delights in startling us with resemblances
in the most unexpected quarters. I have seen the head of
an old sachem of the forest which at once reminded the
eye of a bald mountain summit, and the furrows of the brow
suggested the strata of the rock. There are men whose
manners have the same essential splendor as the simple
and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon and
the remains of the earliest Greek art. And there are
compositions of the same strain to be found in the books
of all ages. What is Guido's Rospigliosi Aurora but a
morning thought, as the horses in it are only a morning
cloud? If any one will but take pains to observe the
variety of actions to which he is equally inclined in
certain moods of mind, and those to which he is averse,
he will see how deep is the chain of affinity.
A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree
without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child
by studying the outlines of its form merely,--but,
by watching for a time his motions and plays, the
painter enters into his nature and can then draw him
at will in every attitude. So Roos "entered into the
inmost nature of a sheep." I knew a draughtsman
employed in a public survey who found that he could
not sketch the rocks until their geological structure
was first explained to him. In a certain state of
thought is the common origin of very diverse works. It
is the spirit and not the fact that is identical. By a
deeper apprehension, and not primarily by a painful
acquisition of many manual skills, the artist attains
the power of awakening other souls to a given activity.
It has been said that "common souls pay with what they
do, nobler souls with that which they are." And why?
Because a profound nature awakens in us by its actions
and words, by its very looks and manners, the same power
and beauty that a gallery of sculpture or of pictures
addresses.
Civil and natural history, the history of art and of
literature, must be explained from individual history,
or must remain words. There is nothing but is related
to us, nothing that does not interest us,--kingdom,
college, tree, horse, or iron shoe,--the roots of all
things are in man. Santa Croce and the Dome of St.
Peter's are lame copies after a divine model. Strasburg
Cathedral is a material counterpart of the soul of Erwin
of Steinbach. The true poem is the poet's mind; the true
ship is the ship-builder. In the man, could we lay him
open, we should see the reason for the last flourish and
tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the
sea-shell preexists in the secreting organs of the fish.
The whole of heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A
man of fine manners shall pronounce your name with all
the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add.
The trivial experience of every day is always verifying
some old prediction to us and converting into things the
words and signs which we had heard and seen without heed.
A lady with whom I was riding in the forest said to me
that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the
genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the
wayfarer had passed onward; a thought which poetry has
celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off
on the approach of human feet. The man who has seen the
rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has been
present like an archangel at the creation of light and of
the world. I remember one summer day in the fields my
companion pointed out to me a broad cloud, which might
extend a quarter of a mile parallel to the horizon, quite
accurately in the form of a cherub as painted over churches,
--a round block in the centre, which it was easy to animate
with eyes and mouth, supported on either side by wide-
stretched symmetrical wings. What appears once in the
atmosphere may appear often, and it was undoubtedly the
archetype of that familiar ornament. I have seen in the
sky a chain of summer lightning which at once showed to
me that the Greeks drew from nature when they painted the
thunderbolt in the hand of Jove. I have seen a snow-drift
along the sides of the stone wall which obviously gave the
idea of the common architectural scroll to abut a tower.
By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances
we invent anew the orders and the ornaments of architecture,
as we see how each people merely decorated its primitive
abodes. The Doric temple preserves the semblance of the
wooden cabin in which the Dorian dwelt. The Chinese pagoda
is plainly a Tartar tent. The Indian and Egyptian temples
still betray the mounds and subterranean houses of their
forefathers. "The custom of making houses and tombs in
the living rock," says Heeren in his Researches on the
Ethiopians, "determined very naturally the principal
character of the Nubian Egyptian architecture to the
colossal form which it assumed. In these caverns, already
prepared by nature, the eye was accustomed to dwell on
huge shapes and masses, so that when art came to the
assistance of nature it could not move on a small scale
without degrading itself. What would statues of the usual
size, or neat porches and wings have been, associated with
those gigantic halls before which only Colossi could sit
as watchmen or lean on the pillars of the interior?"
The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation
of the forest trees, with all their boughs, to a festal
or solemn arcade; as the bands about the cleft pillars
still indicate the green withes that tied them. No one
can walk in a road cut through pine woods, without being
struck with the architectural appearance of the grove,
especially in winter, when the barrenness of all other
trees shows the low arch of the Saxons. In the woods in
a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of
the stained glass window, with which the Gothic cathedrals
are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through
the bare and crossing branches of the forest. Nor can any
lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and the
English cathedrals, without feeling that the forest
overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel,
his saw and plane still reproduced its ferns, its spikes
of flowers, its locust, elm, oak, pine, fir and spruce.
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued
by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The
mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower,
with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the
aerial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty.
In like manner all public facts are to be individualized,
all private facts are to be generalized. Then at once
History becomes fluid and true, and Biography deep and
sublime. As the Persian imitated in the slender shafts
and capitals of his architecture the stem and flower of
the lotus and palm, so the Persian court in its magnificent
era never gave over the nomadism of its barbarous tribes,
but travelled from Ecbatana, where the spring was spent,
to Susa in summer and to Babylon for the winter.
In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and
Agriculture are the two antagonist facts. The geography
of Asia and of Africa necessitated a nomadic life. But
the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil
or the advantages of a market had induced to build towns.
Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because
of the perils of the state from nomadism. And in these
late and civil countries of England and America these
propensities still fight out the old battle, in the nation
and in the individual. The nomads of Africa were constrained
to wander, by the attacks of the gad-fly, which drives the
cattle mad, and so compels the tribe to emigrate in the
rainy season and to drive off the cattle to the higher sandy
regions. The nomads of Asia follow the pasturage from month
to month. In America and Europe the nomadism is of trade and
curiosity; a progress, certainly, from the gad-fly of
Astaboras to the Anglo and Italo-mania of Boston Bay. Sacred
cities, to which a periodical religious pilgrimage was
enjoined, or stringent laws and customs, tending to invigorate
the national bond, were the check on the old rovers; and the
cumulative values of long residence are the restraints on the
itineracy of the present day. The antagonism of the two
tendencies is not less active in individuals, as the love of
adventure or the love of repose happens to predominate. A man
of rude health and flowing spirits has the faculty of rapid
domestication, lives in his wagon and roams through all
latitudes as easily as a Calmuc. At sea, or in the forest, or
in the snow, he sleeps as warm, dines with as good appetite,
and associates as happily as beside his own chimneys. Or
perhaps his facility is deeper seated, in the increased range
of his faculties of observation, which yield him points of
interest wherever fresh objects meet his eyes. The pastoral
nations were needy and hungry to desperation; and this
intellectual nomadism, in its excess, bankrupts the mind
through the dissipation of power on a miscellany of objects.
The home-keeping wit, on the other hand, is that continence
or content which finds all the elements of life in its own
soil; and which has its own perils of monotony and
deterioration, if not stimulated by foreign infusions.
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