Essays, First Series

R >> Ralph Waldo Emerson >> Essays, First Series

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But what man shall dare tax another with imprudence?
Who is prudent? The men we call greatest are least in
this kingdom. There is a certain fatal dislocation in
our relation to nature, distorting our modes of living
and making every law our enemy, which seems at last to
have aroused all the wit and virtue in the world to
ponder the question of Reform. We must call the highest
prudence to counsel, and ask why health and beauty and
genius should now be the exception rather than the rule
of human nature? We do not know the properties of plants
and animals and the laws of nature, through our sympathy
with the same; but this remains the dream of poets. Poetry
and prudence should be coincident. Poets should be
lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should
not chide and insult, but should announce and lead the
civil code and the day's work. But now the two things seem
irreconcilably parted. We have violated law upon law until
we stand amidst ruins, and when by chance we espy a
coincidence between reason and the phenomena, we are
surprised. Beauty should be the dowry of every man and
woman, as invariably as sensation; but it is rare. Health
or sound organization should be universal. Genius should
be the child of genius and every child should be inspired;
but now it is not to be predicted of any child, and nowhere
is it pure. We call partial half-lights, by courtesy,
genius; talent which converts itself to money; talent which
glitters to-day that it may dine and sleep well to-morrow;
and society is officered by men of parts, as they are properly
called, and not by divine men. These use their gifts to refine
luxury, not to abolish it. Genius is always ascetic, and piety,
and love. Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and
they find beauty in rites and bounds that resist it.

We have found out fine names to cover our sensuality
withal, but no gifts can raise intemperance. The man
of talent affects to call his transgressions of the
laws of the senses trivial and to count them nothing
considered with his devotion to his art. His art never
taught him lewdness, nor the love of wine, nor the
wish to reap where he had not sowed. His art is less
for every deduction from his holiness, and less for
every defect of common sense. On him who scorned the
world as he said, the scorned world wreaks its revenge.
He that despiseth small things will perish by little
and little. Goethe's Tasso is very likely to be a
pretty fair historical portrait, and that is true
tragedy. It does not seem to me so genuine grief when
some tyrannous Richard the Third oppresses and slays a
score of innocent persons, as when Antonio and Tasso,
both apparently right, wrong each other. One living
after the maxims of this world and consistent and true
to them, the other fired with all divine sentiments,
yet grasping also at the pleasures of sense, without
submitting to their law. That is a grief we all feel,
a knot we cannot untie. Tasso's is no infrequent case
in modern biography. A man of genius, of an ardent
temperament, reckless of physical laws, self-indulgent,
becomes presently unfortunate, querulous, a "discomfortable
cousin," a thorn to himself and to others.

The scholar shames us by his bifold life. Whilst
something higher than prudence is active, he is
admirable; when common sense is wanted, he is an
encumbrance. Yesterday, Caesar was not so great;
to-day, the felon at the gallows' foot is not more
miserable. Yesterday, radiant with the light of an
ideal world in which he lives, the first of men; and
now oppressed by wants and by sickness, for which he
must thank himself. He resembles the pitiful drivellers
whom travellers describe as frequenting the bazaars of
Constantinople, who skulk about all day, yellow,
emaciated, ragged, sneaking; and at evening, when the
bazaars are open, slink to the opium-shop, swallow their
morsel and become tranquil and glorified seers. And who
has not seen the tragedy of imprudent genius struggling
for years with paltry pecuniary difficulties, at last
sinking, chilled, exhausted and fruitless, like a giant
slaughtered by pins?

Is it not better that a man should accept the first
pains and mortifications of this sort, which nature
is not slack in sending him, as hints that he must
expect no other good than the just fruit of his own
labor and self-denial? Health, bread, climate, social
position, have their importance, and he will give them
their due. Let him esteem Nature a perpetual counsellor,
and her perfections the exact measure of our deviations.
Let him make the night night, and the day day. Let him
control the habit of expense. Let him see that as much
wisdom may be expended on a private economy as on an
empire, and as much wisdom may be drawn from it. The
laws of the world are written out for him on every
piece of money in his hand. There is nothing he will
not be the better for knowing, were it only the wisdom
of Poor Richard, or the State-Street prudence of buying
by the acre to sell by the foot; or the thrift of the
agriculturist, to stick a tree between whiles, because
it will grow whilst he sleeps; or the prudence which
consists in husbanding little strokes of the tool,
little portions of time, particles of stock and small
gains. The eye of prudence may never shut. Iron, if kept
at the ironmonger's, will rust; beer, if not brewed in
the right state of the atmosphere, will sour; timber of
ships will rot at sea, or if laid up high and dry, will
strain, warp and dry-rot; money, if kept by us, yields
no rent and is liable to loss; if invested, is liable to
depreciation of the particular kind of stock. Strike,
says the smith, the iron is white; keep the rake, says
the haymaker, as nigh the scythe as you can, and the cart
as nigh the rake. Our Yankee trade is reputed to be very
much on the extreme of this prudence. It takes bank-notes,
good, bad, clean, ragged, and saves itself by the speed
with which it passes them off. Iron cannot rust, nor beer
sour, nor timber rot, nor calicoes go out of fashion, nor
money stocks depreciate, in the few swift moments in which
the Yankee suffers any one of them to remain in his
possession. In skating over thin ice our safety is in our
speed.

Let him learn a prudence of a higher strain. Let him
learn that every thing in nature, even motes and
feathers, go by law and not by luck, and that what he
sows he reaps. By diligence and self-command let him
put the bread he eats at his own disposal, that he may
not stand in bitter and false relations to other men;
for the best good of wealth is freedom. Let him practise
the minor virtues. How much of human life is lost in
waiting! let him not make his fellow-creatures wait. How
many words and promises are promises of conversation!
Let his be words of fate. When he sees a folded and sealed
scrap of paper float round the globe in a pine ship and
come safe to the eye for which it was written, amidst a
swarming population, let him likewise feel the admonition
to integrate his being across all these distracting forces,
and keep a slender human word among the storms, distances
and accidents that drive us hither and thither, and, by
persistency, make the paltry force of one man reappear to
redeem its pledge after months and years in the most distant
climates.

We must not try to write the laws of any one virtue,
looking at that only. Human nature loves no contradictions,
but is symmetrical. The prudence which secures an outward
well-being is not to be studied by one set of men, whilst
heroism and holiness are studied by another, but they are
reconcilable. Prudence concerns the present time, persons,
property and existing forms. But as every fact hath its
roots in the soul, and if the soul were changed, would cease
to be, or would become some other thing,--the proper
administration of outward things will always rest on a just
apprehension of their cause and origin; that is, the good
man will be the wise man, and the single-hearted the politic
man. Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide
in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.
On the most profitable lie the course of events presently
lays a destructive tax; whilst frankness invites frankness,
puts the parties on a convenient footing and makes their
business a friendship. Trust men and they will be true to
you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great,
though they make an exception in your favor to all their
rules of trade.

So, in regard to disagreeable and formidable things,
prudence does not consist in evasion or in flight, but
in courage. He who wishes to walk in the most peaceful
parts of life with any serenity must screw himself up
to resolution. Let him front the object of his worst
apprehension, and his stoutness will commonly make his
fear groundless. The Latin proverb says, "In battles the
eye is first overcome." Entire self-possession may make
a battle very little more dangerous to life than a match
at foils or at football. Examples are cited by soldiers
of men who have seen the cannon pointed and the fire given
to it, and who have stepped aside from the path of the ball.
The terrors of the storm are chiefly confined to the parlor
and the cabin. The drover, the sailor, buffets it all day,
and his health renews itself at as vigorous a pulse under
the sleet as under the sun of June.

In the occurrence of unpleasant things among neighbors,
fear comes readily to heart and magnifies the consequence
of the other party; but it is a bad counsellor. Every man
is actually weak and apparently strong. To himself he
seems weak; to others, formidable. You are afraid of Grim;
but Grim also is afraid of you. You are solicitous of the
good-will of the meanest person, uneasy at his ill-will.
But the sturdiest offender of your peace and of the
neighborhood, if you rip up his claims, is as thin and
timid as any, and the peace of society is often kept,
because, as children say, one is afraid, and the other
dares not. Far off, men swell, bully and threaten; bring
them hand to hand, and they are a feeble folk.

It is a proverb that 'courtesy costs nothing'; but
calculation might come to value love for its profit.
Love is fabled to be blind, but kindness is necessary
to perception; love is not a hood, but an eye-water.
If you meet a sectary or a hostile partisan, never
recognize the dividing lines, but meet on what common
ground remains,--if only that the sun shines and the
rain rains for both; the area will widen very fast,
and ere you know it, the boundary mountains on which
the eye had fastened have melted into air. If they
set out to contend, Saint Paul will lie and Saint John
will hate. What low, poor, paltry, hypocritical people
an argument on religion will make of the pure and chosen
souls! They will shuffle and crow, crook and hide, feign
to confess here, only that they may brag and conquer
there, and not a thought has enriched either party, and
not an emotion of bravery, modesty, or hope. So neither
should you put yourself in a false position with your
contemporaries by indulging a vein of hostility and
bitterness. Though your views are in straight antagonism
to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment, assume that
you are saying precisely that which all think, and in the
flow of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid
column, with not the infirmity of a doubt. So at least
shall you get an adequate deliverance. The natural motions
of the soul are so much better than the voluntary ones that
you will never do yourself justice in dispute. The thought
is not then taken hold of by the right handle, does not show
itself proportioned and in its true bearings, but bears
extorted, hoarse, and half witness. But assume a consent and
it shall presently be granted, since really and underneath
their external diversities, all men are of one heart and
mind.

Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or men on
an unfriendly footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy
with people, as if we waited for some better sympathy
and intimacy to come. But whence and when? To-morrow
will be like to-day. Life wastes itself whilst we are
preparing to live. Our friends and fellow-workers die
off from us. Scarcely can we say we see new men, new
women, approaching us. We are too old to regard fashion,
too old to expect patronage of any greater or more powerful.
Let us suck the sweetness of those affections and consuetudes
that grow near us. These old shoes are easy to the feet.
Undoubtedly we can easily pick faults in our company, can
easily whisper names prouder, and that tickle the fancy more.
Every man's imagination hath its friends; and life would be
dearer with such companions. But if you cannot have them on
good mutual terms, you cannot have them. If not the Deity
but our ambition hews and shapes the new relations, their
virtue escapes, as strawberries lose their flavor in garden-beds.

Thus truth, frankness, courage, love, humility and all
the virtues range themselves on the side of prudence,
or the art of securing a present well-being. I do not
know if all matter will be found to be made of one
element, as oxygen or hydrogen, at last, but the world
of manners and actions is wrought of one stuff, and
begin where we will we are pretty sure in a short space
to be mumbling our ten commandments.

HEROISM.

"Paradise is under the shadow of swords."
Mahomet.

RUBY wine is drunk by knaves,
Sugar spends to fatten slaves,
Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons;
Thunderclouds are Jove's festoons,
Drooping oft in wreaths of dread
Lightning-knotted round his head;
The hero is not fed on sweets,
Daily his own heart he eats;
Chambers of the great are jails,
And head-winds right for royal sails.

VIII.
HEROISM.

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

Valerius. Bid thy wife farewell.

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

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

Mar. Dost know what 't is to die?

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

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

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

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

Val. What ails my brother?

Soph. Martius, O Martius,
Thou now hast found a way to conquer me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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