Essays, First Series

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16

A man passes for that he is worth. Very idle is all
curiosity concerning other people's estimate of us,
and all fear of remaining unknown is not less so. If
a man know that he can do any thing,--that he can do
it better than any one else,--he has a pledge of the
acknowledgment of that fact by all persons. The world
is full of judgment-days, and into every assembly that
a man enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged
and stamped. In every troop of boys that whoop and run
in each yard and square, a new-comer is as well and
accurately weighed in the course of a few days and
stamped with his right number, as if he had undergone
a formal trial of his strength, speed and temper. A
stranger comes from a distant school, with better dress,
with trinkets in his pockets, with airs and pretensions;
an older boy says to himself, 'It's of no use; we shall
find him out to-morrow.' 'What has he done?' is the divine
question which searches men and transpierces every false
reputation. A fop may sit in any chair of the world nor
be distinguished for his hour from Homer and Washington;
but there need never be any doubt concerning the respective
ability of human beings. Pretension may sit still, but
cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real
greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nor drove back
Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.

As much virtue as there is, so much appears; as much
goodness as there is, so much reverence it commands.
All the devils respect virtue. The high, the generous,
the self-devoted sect will always instruct and command
mankind. Never was a sincere word utterly lost. Never a
magnanimity fell to the ground, but there is some heart
to greet and accept it unexpectedly. A man passes for
that he is worth. What he is engraves itself on his face,
on his form, on his fortunes, in letters of light.
Concealment avails him nothing, boasting nothing. There
is confession in the glances of our eyes, in our smiles,
in salutations, and the grasp of hands. His sin bedaubs
him, mars all his good impression. Men know not why they
do not trust him, but they do not trust him. His vice
glasses his eye, cuts lines of mean expression in his
cheek, pinches the nose, sets the mark of the beast on
the back of the head, and writes O fool! fool! on the
forehead of a king.

If you would not be known to do any thing, never do it.
A man may play the fool in the drifts of a desert, but
every grain of sand shall seem to see. He may be a
solitary eater, but he cannot keep his foolish counsel.
A broken complexion, a swinish look, ungenerous acts
and the want of due knowledge,--all blab. Can a cook, a
Chiffinch, an Iachimo be mistaken for Zeno or Paul?
Confucius exclaimed,--"How can a man be concealed? How
can a man be concealed?"

On the other hand, the hero fears not that if he
withhold the avowal of a just and brave act it will
go unwitnessed and unloved. One knows it,--himself,
--and is pledged by it to sweetness of peace and to
nobleness of aim which will prove in the end a better
proclamation of it than the relating of the incident.
Virtue is the adherence in action to the nature of
things, and the nature of things makes it prevalent.
It consists in a perpetual substitution of being for
seeming, and with sublime propriety God is described
as saying, I AM.

The lesson which these observations convey is, Be, and
not seem. Let us acquiesce. Let us take our bloated
nothingness out of the path of the divine circuits. Let
us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in
the Lord's power and learn that truth alone makes rich
and great.

If you visit your friend, why need you apologize for
not having visited him, and waste his time and deface
your own act? Visit him now. Let him feel that the
highest love has come to see him, in thee its lowest
organ. Or why need you torment yourself and friend by
secret self-reproaches that you have not assisted him
or complimented him with gifts and salutations heretofore?
Be a gift and a benediction. Shine with real light and not
with the borrowed reflection of gifts. Common men are
apologies for men; they bow the head, excuse themselves
with prolix reasons, and accumulate appearances because
the substance is not.

We are full of these superstitions of sense, the worship
of magnitude. We call the poet inactive, because he is
not a president, a merchant, or a porter. We adore an
institution, and do not see that it is founded on a
thought which we have. But real action is in silent
moments. The epochs of our life are not in the visible
facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our
acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent
thought by the way-side as we walk; in a thought which
revises our entire manner of life and says,--'Thus hast
thou done, but it were better thus.' And all our after
years, like menials, serve and wait on this, and according
to their ability execute its will. This revisal or
correction is a constant force, which, as a tendency,
reaches through our lifetime. The object of the man, the
aim of these moments, is to make daylight shine through
him, to suffer the law to traverse his whole being without
obstruction, so that on what point soever of his doing your
eye falls it shall report truly of his character, whether
it be his diet, his house, his religious forms, his society,
his mirth, his vote, his opposition. Now he is not homogeneous,
but heterogeneous, and the ray does not traverse; there are
no thorough lights, but the eye of the beholder is puzzled,
detecting many unlike tendencies and a life not yet at one.

Why should we make it a point with our false modesty
to disparage that man we are and that form of being
assigned to us? A good man is contented. I love and
honor Epaminondas, but I do not wish to be Epaminondas.
I hold it more just to love the world of this hour than
the world of his hour. Nor can you, if I am true, excite
me to the least uneasiness by saying, 'He acted and thou
sittest still.' I see action to be good, when the need
is, and sitting still to be also good. Epaminondas, if
he was the man I take him for, would have sat still with
joy and peace, if his lot had been mine. Heaven is large,
and affords space for all modes of love and fortitude.
Why should we be busybodies and superserviceable? Action
and inaction are alike to the true. One piece of the tree
is cut for a weathercock and one for the sleeper of a
bridge; the virtue of the wood is apparent in both.

I desire not to disgrace the soul. The fact that I am
here certainly shows me that the soul had need of an
organ here. Shall I not assume the post? Shall I skulk
and dodge and duck with my unseasonable apologies and
vain modesty and imagine my being here impertinent?
less pertinent than Epaminondas or Homer being there?
and that the soul did not know its own needs? Besides,
without any reasoning on the matter, I have no discontent.
The good soul nourishes me and unlocks new magazines of
power and enjoyment to me every day. I will not meanly
decline the immensity of good, because I have heard that
it has come to others in another shape.

Besides, why should we be cowed by the name of Action?
'Tis a trick of the senses,--no more. We know that the
ancestor of every action is a thought. The poor mind does
not seem to itself to be any thing unless it have an
outside badge,--some Gentoo diet, or Quaker coat, or
Calvinistic prayer-meeting, or philanthropic society, or
a great donation, or a high office, or, any how, some wild
contrasting action to testify that it is somewhat. The rich
mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature. To think is
to act.

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so.
All action is of an infinite elasticity, and the least
admits of being inflated with the celestial air until
it eclipses the sun and moon. Let us seek one peace
by fidelity. Let me heed my duties. Why need I go gadding
into the scenes and philosophy of Greek and Italian
history before I have justified myself to my benefactors?
How dare I read Washington's campaigns when I have not
answered the letters of my own correspondents? Is not
that a just objection to much of our reading? It is a
pusillanimous desertion of our work to gaze after our
neighbors. It is peeping. Byron says of Jack Bunting,--

"He knew not what to say, and so he swore."

I may say it of our preposterous use of books,--He knew
not what to do, and so he read. I can think of nothing
to fill my time with, and I find the Life of Brant. It
is a very extravagant compliment to pay to Brant, or to
General Schuyler, or to General Washington. My time
should be as good as their time,--my facts, my net of
relations, as good as theirs, or either of theirs. Rather
let me do my work so well that other idlers if they choose
may compare my texture with the texture of these and find
it identical with the best.

This over-estimate of the possibilities of Paul and
Pericles, this under-estimate of our own, comes from a
neglect of the fact of an identical nature. Bonaparte
knew but one merit, and rewarded in one and the same
way the good soldier, the good astronomer, the good
poet, the good player. The poet uses the names of Caesar,
of Tamerlane, of Bonduca, of Belisarius; the painter uses
the conventional story of the Virgin Mary, of Paul, of
Peter. He does not therefore defer to the nature of these
accidental men, of these stock heroes. If the poet write
a true drama, then he is Caesar, and not the player of
Caesar; then the selfsame strain of thought, emotion as
pure, wit as subtle, motions as swift, mounting, extravagant,
and a heart as great, self-sufficing, dauntless, which on
the waves of its love and hope can uplift all that is
reckoned solid and precious in the world,--palaces, gardens,
money, navies, kingdoms,--marking its own incomparable worth
by the slight it casts on these gauds of men;--these all are
his, and by the power of these he rouses the nations. Let a
man believe in God, and not in names and places and persons.
Let the great soul incarnated in some woman's form, poor and
sad and single, in some Dolly or Joan, go out to service,
and sweep chambers and scour floors, and its effulgent
daybeams cannot be muffled or hid, but to sweep and scour
will instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top
and radiance of human life, and all people will get mops and
brooms; until, lo! suddenly the great soul has enshrined
itself in some other form and done some other deed, and that
is now the flower and head of all living nature.

We are the photometers, we the irritable goldleaf and
tinfoil that measure the accumulations of the subtle
element. We know the authentic effects of the true fire
through every one of its million disguises.

Love.

"I was as a gem concealed;
Me my burning ray revealed."
Koran .

V.
Love.

Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfilments;
each of its joys ripens into a new want. Nature,
uncontainable, flowing, forelooking, in the first
sentiment of kindness anticipates already a benevolence
which shall lose all particular regards in its general
light. The introduction to this felicity is in a private
and tender relation of one to one, which is the enchantment
of human life; which, like a certain divine rage and
enthusiasm, seizes on man at one period and works a
revolution in his mind and body; unites him to his race,
pledges him to the domestic and civic relations, carries
him with new sympathy into nature, enhances the power of
the senses, opens the imagination, adds to his character
heroic and sacred attributes, establishes marriage, and
gives permanence to human society.

The natural association of the sentiment of love with
the heyday of the blood seems to require that in order
to portray it in vivid tints, which every youth and maid
should confess to be true to their throbbing experience,
one must not be too old. The delicious fancies of youth
reject the least savor of a mature philosophy, as chilling
with age and pedantry their purple bloom. And therefore I
know I incur the imputation of unnecessary hardness and
stoicism from those who compose the Court and Parliament
of Love. But from these formidable censors I shall appeal
to my seniors. For it is to be considered that this passion
of which we speak, though it begin with the young, yet
forsakes not the old, or rather suffers no one who is truly
its servant to grow old, but makes the aged participators
of it not less than the tender maiden, though in a different
and nobler sort. For it is a fire that kindling its first
embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from
a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and
enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men
and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights
up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames.
It matters not therefore whether we attempt to describe
the passion at twenty, at thirty, or at eighty years. He
who paints it at the first period will lose some of its
later, he who paints it at the last, some of its earlier
traits. Only it is to be hoped that by patience and the
Muses' aid we may attain to that inward view of the law
which shall describe a truth ever young and beautiful, so
central that it shall commend itself to the eye, at whatever
angle beholden.

And the first condition is, that we must leave a too
close and lingering adherence to facts, and study the
sentiment as it appeared in hope and not in history.
For each man sees his own life defaced and disfigured,
as the life of man is not, to his imagination. Each man
sees over his own experience a certain stain of error,
whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal. Let any
man go back to those delicious relations which make the
beauty of his life, which have given him sincerest
instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and moan.
Alas! I know not why, but infinite compunctions embitter
in mature life the remembrances of budding joy and cover
every beloved name. Every thing is beautiful seen from the
point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour, if
seen as experience. Details are melancholy; the plan is
seemly and noble. In the actual world--the painful kingdom
of time and place--dwell care, and canker, and fear. With
thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of
joy. Round it all the Muses sing. But grief cleaves to
names, and persons, and the partial interests of to-day
and yesterday.

The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion
which this topic of personal relations usurps in the
conversation of society. What do we wish to know of
any worthy person so much, as how he has sped in the
history of this sentiment? What books in the circulating
libraries circulate? How we glow over these novels of
passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth
and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse
of life, like any passage betraying affection between two
parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall
meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or
betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We
understand them, and take the warmest interest in the
development of the romance. All mankind love a lover. The
earliest demonstrations of complacency and kindness are
nature's most winning pictures. It is the dawn of civility
and grace in the coarse and rustic. The rude village boy
teases the girls about the school-house door;--but to-day
he comes running into the entry, and meets one fair child
disposing her satchel; he holds her books to help her, and
instantly it seems to him as if she removed herself from
him infinitely, and was a sacred precinct. Among the throng
of girls he runs rudely enough, but one alone distances him;
and these two little neighbors, that were so close just now,
have learned to respect each other's personality. Or who can
avert his eyes from the engaging, half-artful, half-artless
ways of school-girls who go into the country shops to buy a
skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and talk half an hour
about nothing with the broad-faced, good-natured shop-boy.
In the village they are on a perfect equality, which love
delights in, and without any coquetry the happy, affectionate
nature of woman flows out in this pretty gossip. The girls
may have little beauty, yet plainly do they establish between
them and the good boy the most agreeable, confiding relations,
what with their fun and their earnest, about Edgar and Jonas
and Almira, and who was invited to the party, and who danced
at the dancing-school, and when the singing-school would begin,
and other nothings concerning which the parties cooed. By and
by that boy wants a wife, and very truly and heartily will he
know where to find a sincere and sweet mate, without any risk
such as Milton deplores as incident to scholars and great men.

I have been told that in some public discourses of mine
my reverence for the intellect has made me unjustly cold
to the personal relations. But now I almost shrink at the
remembrance of such disparaging words. For persons are
love's world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount
the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to
the power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as
treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the social
instincts. For though the celestial rapture falling out
of heaven seizes only upon those of tender age, and
although a beauty overpowering all analysis or comparison
and putting us quite beside ourselves we can seldom see
after thirty years, yet the remembrance of these visions
outlasts all other remembrances, and is a wreath of flowers
on the oldest brows. But here is a strange fact; it may
seem to many men, in revising their experience, that they
have no fairer page in their life's book than the delicious
memory of some passages wherein affection contrived to give
a witchcraft, surpassing the deep attraction of its own
truth, to a parcel of accidental and trivial circumstances.
In looking backward they may find that several things which
were not the charm have more reality to this groping memory
than the charm itself which embalmed them. But be our
experience in particulars what it may, no man ever forgot
the visitations of that power to his heart and brain, which
created all things anew; which was the dawn in him of music,
poetry, and art; which made the face of nature radiant with
purple light, the morning and the night varied enchantments;
when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound,
and the most trivial circumstance associated with one form
is put in the amber of memory; when he became all eye when
one was present, and all memory when one was gone; when the
youth becomes a watcher of windows and studious of a glove,
a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage; when no place
is too solitary and none too silent, for him who has richer
company and sweeter conversation in his new thoughts than
any old friends, though best and purest, can give him; for
the figures, the motions, the words of the beloved object
are not like other images written in water, but, as Plutarch
said, "enamelled in fire," and make the study of midnight:--

"Thou art not gone being gone, where'er thou art,
Thou leav'st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy
loving heart."

In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at
the recollection of days when happiness was not happy
enough, but must be drugged with the relish of pain and
fear; for he touched the secret of the matter who said
of love,--

"All other pleasures are not worth its pains:"

and when the day was not long enough, but the night too
must be consumed in keen recollections; when the head
boiled all night on the pillow with the generous deed
it resolved on; when the moonlight was a pleasing fever
and the stars were letters and the flowers ciphers and
the air was coined into song; when all business seemed
an impertinence, and all the men and women running to
and fro in the streets, mere pictures.

The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes
all things alive and significant. Nature grows conscious.
Every bird on the boughs of the tree sings now to his
heart and soul. The notes are almost articulate. The
clouds have faces as he looks on them. The trees of the
forest, the waving grass and the peeping flowers have
grown intelligent; and he almost fears to trust them with
the secret which they seem to invite. Yet nature soothes
and sympathizes. In the green solitude he finds a dearer
home than with men:--

"Fountain-heads and pathless groves,
Places which pale passion loves,
Moonlight walks, when all the fowls
Are safely housed, save bats and owls,
A midnight bell, a passing groan,--
These are the sounds we feed upon."

Behold there in the wood the fine madman! He is a
palace of sweet sounds and sights; he dilates; he is
twice a man; he walks with arms akimbo; he soliloquizes;
he accosts the grass and the trees; he feels the blood
of the violet, the clover and the lily in his veins; and
he talks with the brook that wets his foot.

The heats that have opened his perceptions of natural
beauty have made him love music and verse. It is a
fact often observed, that men have written good verses
under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well
under any other circumstances.

The like force has the passion over all his nature. It
expands the sentiment; it makes the clown gentle and
gives the coward heart. Into the most pitiful and abject
it will infuse a heart and courage to defy the world, so
only it have the countenance of the beloved object. In
giving him to another it still more gives him to himself.
He is a new man, with new perceptions, new and keener
purposes, and a religious solemnity of character and aims.
He does not longer appertain to his family and society; he
is somewhat; he is a person; he is a soul.

And here let us examine a little nearer the nature of that
influence which is thus potent over the human youth. Beauty,
whose revelation to man we now celebrate, welcome as the
sun wherever it pleases to shine, which pleases everybody
with it and with themselves, seems sufficient to itself.
The lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor and
solitary. Like a tree in flower, so much soft, budding,
informing loveliness is society for itself; and she teaches
his eye why Beauty was pictured with Loves and Graces
attending her steps. Her existence makes the world rich.
Though she extrudes all other persons from his attention
as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him by carrying out
her own being into somewhat impersonal, large, mundane, so
that the maiden stands to him for a representative of all
select things and virtues. For that reason the lover never
sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred
or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to her
mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The
lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and
diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who
can analyze the nameless charm which glances from one
and another face and form? We are touched with emotions
of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find whereat
this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points. It is
destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it
to organization. Nor does it point to any relations of
friendship or love known and described in society, but,
as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable
sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness,
to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. We cannot
approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck
lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the
most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character,
defying all attempts at appropriation and use. What else
did Jean Paul Richter signify, when he said to music, "Away!
away! thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless
life I have not found, and shall not find." The same fluency
may be observed in every work of the plastic arts. The statue
is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when
it is passing out of criticism and can no longer be defined
by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active
imagination to go with it and to say what it is in the act of
doing. The god or hero of the sculptor is always represented
in a transition from that which is representable to the senses,
to that which is not. Then first it ceases to be a stone. The
same remark holds of painting. And of poetry the success is
not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it
astonishes and fires us with new endeavors after the
unattainable. Concerning it Landor inquires "whether it
is not to be referred to some purer state of sensation and
existence."

In like manner, personal beauty is then first charming
and itself when it dissatisfies us with any end; when
it becomes a story without an end; when it suggests
gleams and visions and not earthly satisfactions; when
it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he
cannot feel his right to it, though he were Caesar; he
cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and
the splendors of a sunset.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16