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<title>Ralph Waldo Emerson</title>
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<title>Thomas Carlyle</title>
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Emerson West]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 29 Feb 2024 17:24:00 +0000</pubDate>
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<description><![CDATA[Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) was a Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian, and teacher during the Victorian era. Known for his sharp critique of democracy, industrialization, and the spiritual malaise of his time, Carlyle became one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th century. His work is characterized by a profound, often pessimistic, reflection on society and a strong advocacy for heroic leadership and individual moral integrity. Carlyle’s significant contributions include his essay “Sartor Resartus” (1833-1834), a satirical work that presents a philosophy of clothes as a metaphor for the human condition and societal values. His magnum opus, “The French Revolution: A History” (1837), is a dramatic and detailed account…
The post <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/influenced-by-emerson/thomas-carlyle/">Thomas Carlyle</a> appeared first on <a href="https://emersoncentral.com">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a>.
]]></description>
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Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) was a Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian, and teacher during the Victorian era. Known for his sharp critique of democracy, industrialization, and the spiritual malaise of his time, Carlyle became one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th century. His work is characterized by a profound, often pessimistic, reflection on society and a strong advocacy for heroic leadership and individual moral integrity.
Carlyle’s significant contributions include his essay “Sartor Resartus” (1833-1834), a satirical work that presents a philosophy of clothes as a metaphor for the human condition and societal values. His magnum opus, “The French Revolution: A History” (1837), is a dramatic and detailed account of the French Revolution, showcasing his unique narrative style. Carlyle also coined the term “the dismal science” to describe economics, highlighting his disdain for the discipline’s focus on material wealth over human well-being.
<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img decoding="async" width="800" height="630" src="https://emersoncentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/carlyle-emerson.jpg" alt="Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle" class="wp-image-69830" srcset="https://emersoncentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/carlyle-emerson.jpg 800w, https://emersoncentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/carlyle-emerson-300x236.jpg 300w, https://emersoncentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/carlyle-emerson-768x605.jpg 768w, https://emersoncentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/carlyle-emerson-20x16.jpg 20w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /></figure></div>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Influence of Emerson on Carlyle:</h2>
The relationship between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle was one of mutual admiration and influence. However, given the physical distance between America and Britain, it was more intellectual and correspondence-based. Despite never meeting as frequently in person as Emerson did with Thoreau, the two maintained a prolific and impactful exchange of letters over several decades.
<ul>
<li>Philosophical Exchange: Emerson and Carlyle shared a deep philosophical dialogue through their correspondence, discussing their views on society, religion, philosophy, and literature. This exchange helped shape their respective philosophies, with Emerson introducing Carlyle to Transcendentalist ideas and Carlyle sharing his views on historical inevitability and moral force.</li>
<li>Promotion of Carlyle’s Work in America: Emerson played a crucial role in introducing Carlyle’s work to the American audience. He helped publish Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus” in the United States, significantly boosting Carlyle’s international reputation.</li>
<li>Shared Critique of Materialism: Both thinkers criticized their societies’ materialism and moral decline. Carlyle’s critique of economic determinism and his call for spiritual and moral regeneration resonated with Emerson’s Transcendentalist ideals, emphasizing the importance of individual conscience and integrity.</li>
<li>Influence on American Thought: Through Emerson, Carlyle’s ideas influenced American thought, contributing to the broader intellectual discourse on democracy, individualism, and the role of the hero in history.</li>
<li>Mutual Respect and Influence: Despite their differences, such as Carlyle’s more pessimistic worldview compared to Emerson’s more optimistic transcendentalism, both men respected each other’s intellect and influence. Their correspondence is a testament to a deep intellectual friendship transcending geographical and cultural boundaries.</li>
</ul>
Thomas Carlyle was a towering figure in Victorian literature and thought, known for his critiques of society and his call for moral and spiritual renewal. His interaction with Ralph Waldo Emerson represented a significant intellectual exchange that influenced their works and their respective countries’ broader cultural and philosophical landscapes.
The post <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/influenced-by-emerson/thomas-carlyle/">Thomas Carlyle</a> appeared first on <a href="https://emersoncentral.com">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a>.
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<item>
<title>Friedrich Nietzsche</title>
<link>https://emersoncentral.com/influenced-by-emerson/friedrich-nietzsche/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Emerson West]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 28 Feb 2024 17:34:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Influenced By Emerson]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://emersoncentral.com/?p=67939</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, philologist, and a profound influencer of modern intellectual thought. His work is known for its radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth, its critique of religion and morality as understood in the traditional sense, and its exploration of the concept of the “will to power.” Nietzsche’s philosophy delves into the complexities of existence, the nature of power, and the potential for individual transcendence by creating one’s own values instead of relying on the values of others. Key works of Nietzsche include “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (1883-1885), a philosophical novel that introduces the idea of the Übermensch, or “Overman,” as…
The post <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/influenced-by-emerson/friedrich-nietzsche/">Friedrich Nietzsche</a> appeared first on <a href="https://emersoncentral.com">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a>.
]]></description>
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Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, philologist, and a profound influencer of modern intellectual thought. His work is known for its radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth, its critique of religion and morality as understood in the traditional sense, and its exploration of the concept of the “will to power.” Nietzsche’s philosophy delves into the complexities of existence, the nature of power, and the potential for individual transcendence by creating one’s own values instead of relying on the values of others.
Key works of Nietzsche include “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (1883-1885), a philosophical novel that introduces the idea of the Übermensch, or “Overman,” as a goal for humanity to overcome itself and its limitations. “Beyond Good and Evil” (1886) further explores Nietzsche’s critique of traditional morality, proposing instead that life’s inherent will to power is the primary driving force of all human action. In “The Genealogy of Morals” (1887), he examines the origins and values of conventional morality, suggesting that it is an expression of the weak to assert control over the strong.
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Influence of Emerson on Nietzsche:</h2>
Although Friedrich Nietzsche and Ralph Waldo Emerson never met or corresponded directly, Nietzsche was profoundly influenced by Emerson’s writings, which he first encountered in his early twenties. Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche can be seen in several key aspects:
<ul>
<li>Appreciation for Individualism: Nietzsche found in Emerson a kindred spirit in the celebration of individualism and the importance of self-reliance. Emerson’s emphasis on the inner life and the value of self-trust resonated with Nietzsche’s philosophical explorations of autonomy and the creation of self-derived values.</li>
<li>Critique of Conformity and Traditional Morals: Emerson’s critique of societal conformity and traditional morality found a strong echo in Nietzsche’s work. Nietzsche admired Emerson’s courage to challenge societal norms and call for individuals to live according to their principles, regardless of societal pressures.</li>
<li>Philosophical Provocation and Style: Nietzsche appreciated Emerson’s aphoristic style and his ability to provoke thought through paradox and contradiction. This influence is evident in Nietzsche’s aphoristic writing and his penchant for challenging conventional wisdom with bold assertions and philosophical provocations.</li>
<li>Transcendental Influences: While Nietzsche would move beyond Emerson’s transcendental philosophy to develop his own existential and power-centric theories, the influence of Emerson’s optimistic belief in the potential for personal transcendence can be traced in Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch, which represents an ideal of human evolution and self-overcoming.</li>
<li>Nature and the Cosmos: Like Emerson, Nietzsche also harbored a profound sense of wonder towards nature and the cosmos, viewing them as philosophical insight and inspiration sources. This perspective is infused in Nietzsche’s writings, echoing Emerson’s transcendental appreciation of the natural world.</li>
</ul>
Despite the lack of direct interaction, the intellectual kinship between Emerson and Nietzsche illustrates the profound impact that Emerson’s ideas had on Nietzsche’s development as a philosopher. Nietzsche’s work, in turn, pushed Emerson’s celebration of individuality and questioning of traditional values into new, more radical directions, contributing significantly to the landscape of modern philosophical thought.
The post <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/influenced-by-emerson/friedrich-nietzsche/">Friedrich Nietzsche</a> appeared first on <a href="https://emersoncentral.com">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a>.
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<title>How Ralph Waldo Emerson Changed American Poetry</title>
<link>https://emersoncentral.com/discussion/how-ralph-waldo-emerson-changed-american-poetry/</link>
<comments>https://emersoncentral.com/discussion/how-ralph-waldo-emerson-changed-american-poetry/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Emerson West]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 21 Feb 2024 18:36:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Discussion]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://stompernet.com/emerson/?p=69</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The listlessness of Emerson’s poetry is surprising, given the veneration he expressed for the art. Some of his best prose is devoted to lobbying for the special advantages of poetry. These works are thrilling because they are written in thrilling sentences. 
The post <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/discussion/how-ralph-waldo-emerson-changed-american-poetry/">How Ralph Waldo Emerson Changed American Poetry</a> appeared first on <a href="https://emersoncentral.com">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a>.
]]></description>
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Ralph Waldo Emerson, a central figure in the American transcendentalist movement, revolutionized poetry by emphasizing individual intuition, nature, and spirituality as primary sources of insight and inspiration.
Eschewing traditional European forms and themes, Emerson championed that American poets should forge a unique poetic identity rooted in the American experience. His lyrical style merged personal reflection with broader philosophical inquiry, laying the groundwork for a new poetic tradition that encouraged poets to explore their inner selves and their relationship with the universe, redefining the boundaries and possibilities of American verse.
When significant shifts happen in someone's life, they can frequently be linked to heartrending events. In a parallel manner, Emerson's transformation of American poetry had its roots in a personal tragedy: the death of his eldest son, Waldo.
The bond between them was profound. Born in 1836, Waldo was often seen as a source of immense joy for his father. Tragically, Waldo died of scarlet fever in 1842 when he was just six years old.
The loss was devastating for Emerson. In his journals and subsequent writings, it's evident that the death of his young son deeply affected him. Emerson grappled with profound grief and tried to make sense of the loss philosophically and spiritually.
The first evidence of this revolution in poetry Emerson was first noticed in Emerson's personal writings. He was a prolific journal keeper, and his entries following Waldo's death display a raw, immediate grappling with grief. They offer glimpses into the intimate, personal anguish he felt, juxtaposed with his broader philosophical musings.
Then his grief seeped into his poetry.
In "<a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-second-series/experience/">Experience</a>," an essay from his second series, Emerson delves into the nature of grief, loss, and the human experience. While the essay does not solely focus on Waldo, the young boy's death heavily influences its themes. Emerson writes, "Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none." This reflects the unpredictability of life and the inescapable presence of death.
Waldo's death contributed to a noticeable shift in Emerson's philosophy. Before the tragedy, Emerson's works like "<a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/nature-addresses-lectures/nature2/chapter1-nature/">Nature</a>" and "<a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/self-reliance/">Self-Reliance</a>" were imbued with an optimistic faith in individual potential and the benevolence of the universe. Post-tragedy, his writings took on a more somber, introspective tone, reflecting a deeper contemplation of suffering, fate, and the mysteries of existence.
Emerson's letters and reported conversations with close friends and family members after Waldo's death further elucidate his grief. He frequently expressed a longing to connect with Waldo in the afterlife and sought solace in spiritual and philosophical exploration.
To capture Emerson's emotional depth concerning Waldo's death, one would have to consider not only his overt expressions of grief but also the subtle changes in his outlook on life, the nature of existence, and the human soul's journey. This multifaceted exploration reflects a man deeply pained by personal loss, yet ever the philosopher, trying to find meaning and understanding amidst sorrow.
Unknown by most, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson shared a deep and multifaceted relationship, marked by mutual respect, occasional disagreements, and profound intellectual exchanges.
Thoreau lived with the Emerson family at various times, but not continuously. The most notable period was from 1841 to 1843. During this time, Thoreau lived with the Emersons and assisted with household tasks, took care of the garden, and helped with Emerson's children. This arrangement provided Thoreau with a stable environment in which he could focus on his writing and intellectual pursuits, and it further solidified the close bond between the two men. The Emerson home became a hub of intellectual activity.
When Emerson's son Waldo died, Thoreau was profoundly affected, not just because of his empathy for his friend but also due to his personal affection for the child.
Thoreau expressed his sorrow and condolences in personal ways. For instance, he crafted a small green wooden box to hold Waldo's letters and other keepsakes as a gesture of remembrance. Moreover, Thoreau took solitary walks in the woods to reflect upon the transience of life, a theme which deeply resonated in both their works.
However, while Emerson grappled with grief in a more overtly emotional and philosophical manner, Thoreau's response was more subdued and internalized, in line with his nature-focused introspection.
In a broader context, while Thoreau might not have commented extensively on Emerson's grief in his writings, it's evident that he held a deep respect for Emerson's emotional and philosophical processes. Their bond allowed them to support each other during such trying times, even if their personal expressions of sorrow differed.
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Despite Emerson's vocal admiration for the art of poetry, his own verses sometimes lack the anticipated energy. In his engaging prose, he champions the unparalleled virtues of poetry with phrases that spark the reader's curiosity. However, the vibrancy of his prose doesn't necessarily ensure that his poetry will evoke similar enthusiasm, even if he surely aimed for his lofty declarations about poetry to be reflected in his own compositions.
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<div class="flex flex-col text-sm dark:bg-gray-800">In many instances, Emerson's essays, such as "The Poet," include an original short lyric as an epigraph. Regrettably, these poem-epigraphs often pale in comparison to the essays' attempts to exalt them as superior forms of expression. This results in a peculiar juxtaposition between electrifying prose and uninspiring verse, ostensibly meant to pay homage. Emerson's vision of the "poet" as a "complete man," a "man without impediment," a "sayer," and a "namer," akin to Adam, would not have condoned the inclusion of lackluster verses like those appended to "The Poet," which extol "Olympian bards" and "divine ideas" with rhymes as buoyant as a Super Ball.</div>
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In "Merlin I," penned during the 1840s, Emerson engages in a futile endeavor by pitting meter against meter and rhyme against rhyme, an unwinnable battle of poetic forms.
Emerson once kept an Aeolian harp in a window of his residence, aspiring to create, in verse, an instrument that nature herself could play. However, this instrument itself was antiquated, ostentatious, and domestic in nature.
Emerson's profound ideas were undoubtedly ill-served by the frail verse structures he constructed for them. Watching these structures strain and falter under the weight of his intellect and ambition led him, in "The Poet," to not only call for a new type of poem, one he could theoretically have composed, but also for an entirely new type of individual, a persona he was not and had no desire to become. His most exceptional poems, including "Each and All," "Brahma," "<a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/poems/the-rhodora/">The Rhodora,</a>" and "The Snow-Storm," represent the refinement of oratory into the specialized rhetorical techniques of poetry. However, his mercurial prose itself possessed the essence of poetry, with its sentences resembling successive signal flares launched into the ether. What he proclaims about the poet holds truer for these astonishing prose performances:
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.</blockquote>
In this passage, much like in numerous instances within his remarkable essays, it reveals its intrinsic character, a distinctive "architecture" unique to itself. This encapsulates the essence of Emerson's call for a literature of "insight and not of tradition." Every sentence serves as an embodiment of innovation, a manifestation of "a new thing." Emerson did not aspire to craft verses about the New World; rather, he aimed to use poetry as a means to rejuvenate the world. Consequently, it is truly captivating to observe how he orchestrated his own eventual obsolescence. At times, his poems may appear deliberately modest, as if they were clearing the path for the rapidly advancing future, constantly approaching from behind. His prose served as a form of poetry in itself, beckoning for its own reflection, a poetry whose "argument" eclipsed its forms.
Emerson was not the poet envisioned in his work "The Poet." In 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville foretold the emergence of an American poetry devoid of "legendary lays," "ancient traditions," "supernatural entities," masks, and personifications. Americans led lives saturated with "trivial" and "uninspiring" pursuits, lives deemed "anti-poetic." For an American poet, the only plausible subject was humanity itself, and, as Tocqueville articulated, "the poet needs no more." Emerson, despite cultivating the persona of an elder for most of his life, advocated for the rise of "a brood of Titans" who would ascend the Western mountains on a mission of genius and love.
In July of 1855, Emerson encountered the very poet he had longed for. He retrieved a package from the Concord post office, which contained the initial edition of "Leaves of Grass," sent anonymously from Brooklyn by its author. Although the book lacked a signature, it bore a frontispiece portrait, the name "Walter Whitman" on the copyright page, and the exultant declaration inside, "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos." After a brief search, Emerson unearthed Whitman's name and the distributor's address in a newspaper advertisement. He then composed his renowned letter to Whitman, extending a welcome to him on the threshold of immortality: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start."
In response, Whitman incorporated Emerson's letter into the subsequent edition of his book, along with twenty fresh poems and his own expansive letter to Emerson, spanning several thousand words, extolling the "immense foundation of the supremacy of Individuality—that novel moral American continent" whose "shores you found."
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">I say you have led The States there—have led Me there. I say that none has ever done, or ever can do, a greater deed for The States, than your deed. Others may line out the lines, build cities, work mines, break up farms; it is yours to have been the original true Captain who put to sea, intuitive, positive, rendering the first report, to be told less by any report, and more by the mariners of a thousand bays, in each tack of their arriving and departing, many years after you.</blockquote>
Whitman's enduring presence became an integral part of the American cultural landscape from that pivotal moment onward. Yet, it would take some time for another equally influential figure to emerge – Emily Dickinson. She held in high regard an edition of Emerson's poems gifted to her by an admirer. Moreover, her brother and sister-in-law, Austin and Susan Dickinson, had the privilege of hosting Emerson multiple times at their stately residence, the Evergreens, situated just across the field from Emily's own home.
While Dickinson's poetic style bears little resemblance to Emerson's, he provided the essential framework and served as the catalyst for the fervent intellectual endeavors of his disciples. In essence, Emerson functioned as their guiding force, their intellectual beacon. It is worth noting that had Emerson's own poems been only slightly superior to what they were, the landscape of American literature as we now recognize it might never have taken shape. Our preeminent writers, upon witnessing their own creative visions overshadowed by Emerson's brilliance, could have chosen to remain devoted readers of his works.
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</div>The post <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/discussion/how-ralph-waldo-emerson-changed-american-poetry/">How Ralph Waldo Emerson Changed American Poetry</a> appeared first on <a href="https://emersoncentral.com">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a>.
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<title>Success</title>
<link>https://emersoncentral.com/essays/success/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Emerson West]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 19 Feb 2024 17:55:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Essays]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Society and Solitude (1870)]]></category>
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<description><![CDATA[OUR American people cannot be taxed with slowness in performance or in praising their performance. The earth is shaken by our engineries. We are feeling our youth and nerve and bone. We have the power of territory and of seacoast, and know the use of these. We count our census, we read our growing valuations, we survey our map, which becomes old in a year or two. Our eyes run approvingly along the lengthened lines of railroad and telegraph. We have gone nearest to the Pole. We have discovered the Antarctic continent. We interfere in Central and South America, at Canton and in Japan; we are adding to an already…
The post <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/essays/success/">Success</a> appeared first on <a href="https://emersoncentral.com">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a>.
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OUR American people cannot be taxed with slowness in performance or in praising their performance. The earth is shaken by our engineries. We are feeling our youth and nerve and bone. We have the power of territory and of seacoast, and know the use of these. We count our census, we read our growing valuations, we survey our map, which becomes old in a year or two. Our eyes run approvingly along the lengthened lines of railroad and telegraph. We have gone nearest to the Pole. We have discovered the Antarctic continent. We interfere in Central and South America, at Canton and in Japan; we are adding to an already enormous territory. Our political constitution is the hope of the world, and we value ourselves on all these feats.
‘T is the way of the world; ‘t is the law of youth, and of unfolding strength. Men are made each with some triumphant superiority, which, through some adaptation of fingers or ear or eye or ciphering or pugilistic or musical or literary craft, enriches the community with a new art; and not only we, but all men of European stock, value these certificates. Giotto could draw a perfect circle: Erwin of Steinbach could build a minster; Olaf, king of Norway, could run round his galley on the blades of the oars of the rowers when the ship was in motion; Ojeda could run out swiftly on a plank projected from the top of a tower, turn round swiftly and come back; Evelyn writes from Rome: “Bernini, the Florentine sculptor, architect, painter and poet, a little before my coming to Rome, gave a public opera, wherein he painted the scenes, cut the statues, invented the engines, composed the music, writ the comedy and built the theatre.”
“There is nothing in war,” said Napoleon, “which I cannot do by my own hands. If there is nobody to make gunpowder, I can manufacture it. The guncarriages I know how to construct. If it is necessary to make cannons at the forge, I can make them. The details of working them in battle, if it is necessary to teach, I shall teach them. In administration, it is I alone who have arranged the finances, as you know.”
It is recorded of Linnaeus, among many proofs of his beneficent skill, that when the timber in the shipyards of Sweden was ruined by rot, Ligneous was desired by the government to find a remedy. He studied the insects that infested the timber, and found that they laid their eggs in the logs within certain days in April, and he directed that during ten days at that season the logs should be immersed under water in the docks; which being done, the timber was found to be uninjured.
Columbus at Veragua found plenty of gold; but leaving the coast, the ship full of one hundred and fifty skilful seamen,-some of them old pilots, and with too much experience of their craft and treachery to him,-the wise admiral kept his private record of his homeward path. And when he reached Spain he told the King and Queen that “they may ask all the pilots who came with him where is Veragua. Let them answer and say if they know where Veragua lies. I assert that they can give no other account than that they went to lands where there was abundance of gold, but they do not know the way to return thither, but would be obliged to go on a voyage of discovery as much as if they had never been there before. There is a mode of reckoning.” he proudly adds, “derived from astronomy, which is sure and safe to any one who understands it.”
Hippocrates in Greece knew how to stay the devouring plague which ravaged Athens in his time, and his skill died with him. Dr. Benjamin Rush, in Philadelphia, carried that city heroically through the yellow fever of the year 1793. Leverrier carried the Copernican system in his head, and knew where to look for the new planet. We have seen an American woman write a novel of which a million copies were sold, in all languages, and which had one merit, of speaking to the universal heart, and was read with equal interest to three audiences, namely, in the parlor, in the kitchen and in the nursery of every house. We have seen women who could institute hospitals and schools in armies. We have seen a woman who by pure song could melt the souls of whole populations. And there is no limit to these varieties of talent.
These are arts to be thankful for, each one as it is a new direction of human power. We cannot choose but respect them. Our civilization is made up of a million contributions of this kind. For success, to be sure we esteem it a test in other people, since we do first in ourselves. We respect ourselves more if we have succeeded. Neither do we grudge to each of these benefactors the praise or the profit which accrues from his industry.
Here are already quite different degrees of moral merit in these examples. I don’t know but we and our race elsewhere set a higher value on wealth, victory and coarse superiority of all kinds, than other men,—have less tranquility of mind, are less easily contented. The Saxon is taught from his infancy to wish to be first. The Norseman was a restless rider, fighter, freebooter. The ancient Norse ballads describe him as afflicted with this inextinguishable thirst of victory. The mother says to her son:
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“Success shall be in thy courser tall, Success in thyself, which is best of all, Success in thy hand, success in thy foot, In struggle with man, in battle with brute: The holy God and Saint Drothin dear Shall never shut eyes on thy career: Look out, look out, Svend Vonved!”
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These feats that we extol do not signify so much as we say. These boasted arts are of very recent origin. They are local conveniences, but do not really add to our stature. The greatest men of the world have managed not to want them. Newton was a great man, without telegraph, or gas, or steam-coach, or rubber shoes, or lucifer-matches, or ether for his pain; so was Shakespeare and Alfred and Scipio and Socrates. These are local con veniences, but how easy to go now to parts of the world where not only all these arts are wanting, but where they are despised. The Arabian sheiks, the most dignified people in the planet, do not want them; yet have as much self respect as the English, and are easily able to impress the Frenchman or the American who visits them with the respect due to a brave and sufficient man.
These feats have to be sure great difference of merit, and some of them involve power of a high kind. But the public values the invention more than the inventor does. The inventor knows there is much more and better where this came from. The public sees in it a lucrative secret. Men see the reward which the inventor enjoys, and they think, “How shall we win that?” Cause and effect are a little tedious; how to leap to the result by short or by false means? We are not scrupulous. What we ask is victory, without regard to the cause; after the Rob Roy rule, after the Napoleon rule, to be the strongest to-day, the way of the Talleyrands, prudent people, whose watches go faster than their neighbors’, and who detect the first moment of decline and throw them selves on the instant on the winning side. I have heard that Nelson used to say, “Never mind the justice or the impudence, only let me succeed.” Lord Brougham’s single duty of counsel is, “to get the prisoner clear.” Fuller says ‘t is a maxim of lawyers that “a crown once worn cleareth all defects of the wearer thereof.” Rien ne reussit mieux que le succes. And we Americans are tainted with this insanity, as out bankruptcies and our reckless politics may show. We are great by exclusion, grasping and egotism. Our success takes from all what it gives to one, ‘Tis a haggard, malignant, careworn running for luck.
Egotism is a kind of buckram that gives momentary strength and concentration to men, and seems to be much used in Nature for fabrics in which local and spasmodic energy is required. I could point to men in this country, of indispensable importance to the carrying on of American life, of this humor, whom we could ill spare; any one of them would be a national loss. But it spoils conversation. They will not try conclusions with you. They are ever thrusting this pampered self between you and them. It is plain they have a long education to undergo to reach simplicity and plain-dealing, which are what a wise man mainly cares for in his companion. Nature knows how to convert evil to good: Nature utilizes misers, fanatics, show-men, egotists, to accomplish her ends; but we must not think better of the foible for that. The passion for sudden success is rude and puerile, just as war, cannons and executions are used to clear the ground of bad, lumpish, irreclaimable savages, but always to the damage of the conquerors.
I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables. to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship, or the sale of goods through pretending that they sell, or power through making believe you are powerful, or through a packed jury or caucus, bribery and “repeating” votes, or wealth by fraud, They think they have got it, but they have got something else,-a crime which calls for another crime, and another devil behind that: these are steps to suicide, infamy and the harming of mankind. We countenance each other in this life of show, puffing, advertisement and manufacture of public opinion; and excellence is lost sight of in the hunger for sudden performance and praise.
There was a wise man, an Italian artist, <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/uncollected-prose/dial-essays-1841/michael-angelo/">Michael Angelo</a>, who writes thus of himself: “Meanwhile the Cardinal Ippolito, in whom all my best hopes were placed, being dead, I began to understand that the promises of this world are for the most part vain phantoms, and that to confide in one’s self, and become something of worth and value, is the best and safest course.” Now, though I am by no means sure that the reader will assent to all my propositions, yet I think we shall agree in my first rule for success,—that we shall drop the brag and the advertisement, and take Michael Angelo’s course, “to confide in one’s self, and be something of worth and value.”
Each man has an aptitude born with him. Do your work. I have to say this often, but Nature says it oftener. ‘T is clownish to insist on doing all with one’s own hands, as if every man should build his own clumsy house, forge his hammer, and bake his dough; but he is to dare to do what he can do best; not help others as they would direct him, but as he knows his helpful power to be. To do otherwise is to neutralize all those extraordinary special talents distributed among men. Yet whilst this self-truth is essential to the exhibition of the world and to the growth and glory of each mind, it is rare to find a man who believes his own thought or who speaks that which he was created to say. As nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing, so nothing is more rare in any man than an act of his own. Any work looks wonderful to him, except that which he can do. We do not believe our own thought; we must serve somebody; we must quote somebody; we dote on the old and the distant: we are tickled by great names; we import the religion of other nations; we quote their opinions; we cite their laws. The gravest and learnedest courts in this country shudder to face a new question, and will wait months and years for a case to occur that can be tortured into a precedent, and thus throw on a bolder party the onus of an initiative. Thus we do not carry a counsel in our breasts, or do not know it; and because we cannot shake off from our shoes this dust of Europe and Asia, the world seems to be born old, society is under a spell, every man is a borrower and a mimic, life is theatrical and literature a quotation; and hence that depression of spirits, that furrow of care, said to mark every American brow.
Self-trust is the first secret of success, the belief that if you are here the authorities of the universe put you here, and for cause, or with some task strictly appointed you in your constitution, and so long as you work at that you are well and successful. It by no means consists in rushing prematurely to a showy feat that shall catch the eye and satisfy spec[ 709]tators. It is enough if you work in the right direction. So far from the performance being the real success, it is clear that the success was much earlier than that, namely, when all the feats that make our civility were the thoughts of good heads. The fame of each discovery rightly attaches to the mind that made the formula which contains all the details, and not to the manufacturers who now make their gain by it; although the mob uniformly cheers the publisher, and not the inventor. It is the dulness of the multitude that they cannot see the house in the groundplan; the working, in the model of the projector. Whilst it is a thought, though it were a new fuel, or a new food, or the creation of agriculture, it is cried down, it is a chimera; but when it is a fact, and comes in the shape of eight per cent., ten per cent., a hundred per cent., they cry, “It is the voice of God.” Horatio Greenough the sculptor said to me of Robert Fulton’s visit to Paris: “Fulton knocked at the door of Napoleon with steam, and was rejected; and Napoleon lived long enough to know that he had excluded a greater power than his own.”
Is there no loving of knowledge, and of art, and of our design, for itself alone? Cannot we please ourselves with performing our work, or gaining truth and power, without being praised for it? I gain my point, I gain all points, if I can reach my companion with any statement which teaches him his own worth. The sum of wisdom is, that the time is never lost that is devoted to work. The good workman never says, “There, that will do;” but, “There, that is it: try it, and come again, it will last always.” If the artist, in whatever art, is well at work on his own design, it signifies little that he does not yet find orders or customers. I pronounce that young man happy who is content with having acquired the skill which he had aimed at, and waits willingly when the occasion of making it appreciated shall arrive, knowing well that it will not loiter. The time your rival spends in dressing up his work for effect, hastily, and for the market, you spend in study and experiments towards real knowledge and efficiency. He has thereby sold his picture or machine, or won the prize, or got the appointment; but you have raised yourself into a higher school of art, and a few years will show the advantage of the real master over the short popularity of the showman. I know it is a nice point to discriminate this self-trust, which is the pledge of all mental vigor and performance, from the disease to which it is allied,-the exaggeration of the part which we can play;-yet they are two things. But it is sanity to know that, over my talent or knack. and a million times better than any talent, is the central intelligence which subordinates and uses all talents; and it is only as a door into this, that any talent or the knowledge it gives is of value. He only who comes into this central intelligence, in which no egotism or exaggeration can be, comes into self-possession.
My next point is that in the scale of powers it is not talent but sensibility which is best: talent confines, but the central life puts us in relation to all. How often it seems the chief good to be born with a cheerful temper and well adjusted to the tone of the human race. Such a man feels himself in harmony, and conscious by his receptivity of an infinite strength. Like Alfred, “good fortune accompanies him like a gift of God.” Feel yourself, and be not daunted by things. ‘T is the fulness of man that runs over into objects, and makes his Bibles and Shakspeares and Homers so great. The joyful reader borrows of his own ideas to fill their faulty outline, and knows not that lie borrows and gives.
There is something of poverty in our criticism. We assume that there are few <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/representative-men/uses-of-great-men/">great men</a>, all the rest are little; that there is but one Homer, but one Shakspeare, one Newton, one Socrates. But the soul in her beaming hour does not acknowledge these usurpations. We should know how to praise Socrates, or Plato, or Saint John, without impoverishing us. In good hours we do not find Shakspeare or Homer over-great, only to have been translators of the happy present, and every man and woman divine possibilities. ‘T is the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss, in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear.
The light by which we see in this world comes out from the soul of the observer. Wherever any noble sentiment dwelt, it made the faces and houses around to shine. Nay, the powers of this busy brain are miraculous and illimitable. Therein are the rules and formulas by which the whole empire of matter is worked. There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.
Is all life a surface affair? ‘T is curious, but our difference of wit appears to be only a difference of impressionability, or power to appreciate faint, fainter and infinitely faintest voices and visions. When the scholar or the writer has pumped his brain for thoughts and verses, and then comes abroad into Nature, has he never found that there is a better poetry hinted in a boy’s whistle of a tune, or in the piping of a sparrow, than in all his literary results? We call it health. What is so admirable as the health of youth?-with his long days because his eyes are good, and brisk circulations keep him warm in cold rooms, and he loves books that speak to the imagination; and he can read Plato, covered to his chin with a cloak in a cold upper chamber, though he should associate the Dialogues ever after with a woollen smell. ‘T is the bane of life that natural effects are continually crowded out, and artificial arrangements substituted. We remember when in early youth the earth spoke and the heavens glowed; when an evening, any evening, grim and wintry, sleet and snow, was enough for us; the houses were in the air. Now it costs a rare combination of clouds and lights to overcome the common and mean. What is it we look for in the landscape, in sunsets and sunrises, in the sea and the firmament? what but a compensation for the cramp and pettiness of human performances? We bask in the day, and the mind finds somewhat as great as itself. In Nature all is large massive repose. Remember what befalls a city boy who goes for the first time into the October woods. He is suddenly initiated into a pomp and glory that brings to pass for him the dreams of romance. He is the king he dreamed he was; he walks through tents of gold, through bowers of crimson, porphyry and topaz, pavilion on pavilion, garlanded with vines, flowers and sunbeams, with incense and music, with so many hints to his astonished senses; the leaves twinkle and pique and flatter him, and his eye and step are tempted on by what hazy distances to happier solitudes. All this happiness he owes only to his finer perception. The owner of the wood-lot finds only a number of discolored trees, and says, “They ought to come down; they aren’t growing any better; they should be cut and corded before spring.”
Wordsworth writes of the delights of the boy in Nature;—
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“For never will come back the hour Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower.”
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But I have just seen a man, well knowing what he spoke of, who told me that the verse was not true for him; that his eyes opened as he grew older, and that every spring was more beautiful to him than the last.
We live among gods of our own creation. Does that deep-toned bell, which has shortened many a night of ill nerves, render to you nothing but acoustic vibrations? Is the old church which gave you the first lessons of religious life, or the village school, or the college where you first knew the dreams of fancy and joys of thought, only boards or brick and mortar? Is the house in which you were born, or the house in which your dearest friend lived, only a piece of real estate whose value is covered by the Hartford insurance? You walk on the beach and enjoy the animation of the picture. Scoop up a little water in the hollow of your palm, take up a handful of shore sand; well, these are the elements. What is the beach but acres of sand? what is the ocean but cubic miles of water? a little more or less signifies nothing. No, it is that this brute matter is part of somewhat not brute. It is that the sand floor is held by spheral gravity, and bent to be a part of the round globe, under the optical sky,-part of the astonishing astronomy, and existing at last to moral ends and from moral causes.
The world is not made up to the eye of figures, that is, only half; it is also made of color. How that element washes the universe with its enchanting waves! The sculptor had ended his work, and behold a new world of dream-like glory. ‘ T is the last stroke of Nature; beyond color she cannot go. In like manner, life is made up, not of knowledge only, but of love also. If thought is form, sentiment is color. It clothes the skeleton world with space, variety and glow. The hues of sunset make life great; so the affections make some little web of cottage and fireside populous, important, and filling the main space in our history.
The fundamental fact in our metaphysic constitution is the correspondence of man to the world, so that every change in that writes a record in the mind. The mind yields sympathetically to the tendencies or law which stream through things and make the order of Nature; and in the perfection of this correspondence or expressiveness, the health and force of man consist. If we follow this hint into our intellectual education, we shall find that it is not propositions, not new dogmas and a logical exposition of the world that are our first need; but to watch and tenderly cherish the intellectual and moral sensibilities, those fountains of right thought, and woo them to stay and make their home with us. Whilst they abide with us we shall not think amiss. Our perception far outruns our talent. We bring a welcome to the highest lessons of religion and of poetry out of all proportion beyond our skill to teach. And, further, the great hearing and sympathy of men is more true and wise than their speaking is wont to be. A deep sympathy is what we require for any student of the mind; for the chief difference between man and man is a difference of impressionability. Aristotle or Bacon or Kant propound some maxim which is the key-note of philosophy thenceforward. But I am more interested to know that when at last they have hurled out their grand word, it is only some familiar experience of every man in the street. If it be not, it will never be heard of again.
Ah! if one could keep this sensibility, and live in the happy sufficing present, and find the day and its cheap means contenting, which only ask receptivity in you, and no strained exertion and cankering ambition, overstimulating to be at the head of your class and the head of society, and to have distinction and laurels and consumption’ We are not strong by our power to penetrate, but by our relatedness. The world is enlarged for us, not by new objects, but by finding more affinities and potencies in those we have.
This sensibility appears in the homage to beauty which exalts the faculties of youth; in the power which form and color exert upon the soul; when we see eyes that are a compliment to the human race, features that explain the Phidian sculpture. Fontenelle said: “There are three things about which I have curiosity, though I know nothing of them,-music, poetry and love.” The great doctors of this science are the greatest men,-Dante, Petrarch, <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/uncollected-prose/dial-essays-1841/michael-angelo/">Michael Angelo</a> and Shakspeare. The wise Socrates treats this matter with a certain archness, yet with very marked expressions. “I am always,” he says, “asserting that I happen to know, I may say, nothing but a mere trifle relating to matters of love; yet in that kind of learning I lay claim to being more skilled than any one man of the past or present time.” They may well speak in this uncertain manner of their knowledge, and in this confident manner of their will, for the secret of it is hard to detect, so deep it is; and yet genius is measured by its skill in this science.
Who is he in youth or in maturity or even in old age, who does not like to hear of those sensibilities which turn curled heads round at church, and send wonderful eye-beams across assemblies, from one to one, never missing in the thickest crowd? The keen statist reckons by tens and hundreds; the genial man is interested in every slipper that comes into the assembly. The passion, alike everywhere, creeps under the snows of Scandinavia, under the fires of the equator, and swims in the seas of Polynesia. Lofn is as puissant a divinity in the Norse Edda as Camadeva in the red vault of India, Eros in the Greek, or Cupid in the Latin heaven. And what is specially true of love is that it is a state of extreme impressionability; the lover has more senses and finer senses than others; his eye and ear are telegraphs; he reads omens on the flower, and cloud, and face, and form, and gesture, and reads them aright. In his surprise at the sudden and entire understanding that is between him and the be loved person, it occurs to him that they might somehow meet independently of time and place. How delicious the belief that he could elude all guards, precautions, ceremonies, means and delays, and hold instant and sempiternal communication! In solitude, in banishment, the hope returned, and the experiment was eagerly tried. The supernal powers seem to take his part. What was on his lips to say is uttered by his friend. When he went abroad, he met, by wonderful casualties, the one person he sought. If in his walk he chanced to look back, his friend was walking behind him. And it has happened that the artist has often drawn in his pictures the face of the future wife whom he had not yet seen.
But also in complacencies nowise so strict as this of the passion, the man of sensibility counts it a delight only to hear a child’s voice fully addressed to him, or to see the <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-second-series/manners/">beautiful manners</a> of the youth of either sex. When the event is past and remote, how insignificant the greatest compared with the piquancy of the present! To-day at the school examination the professor interrogates Sylvina in the history class about Odoacer and Alaric. Sylvina can’t remember, but suggests that Odoacer was defeated; and the professor tartly replies, “No, he defeated the Romans.” But ‘t is plain to the visitor that ‘t is of no importance at all about Odoacer and ‘t is a great deal of importance about Sylvina, and if she says he was defeated, why he had better a great deal have been defeated than give her a moment’s annoy. Odoacer, if there was a particle of the gentleman in him, would have said, Let me be defeated a thousand times.
And as our tenderness for youth and beauty gives a new and just importance to their fresh and manifold claims, so the like sensibility gives welcome to all excellence, has eyes and hospitality for merit in corners. An Englishman of marked character and talent, who had brought with him hither one or two friends and a library of mystics, assured me that nobody and nothing of possible interest was left in England, he had brought all that was alive away. I was forced to reply: “No, next door to you probably, on the other side of the partition in the same house, was a greater man than any you had seen.” Every man has a history worth knowing, if he could tell it, or if we could draw it from him. Character and wit have their own magnetism. Send a deep man into any town, and he will find another deep man there, unknown hitherto to his neighbors. That is the great happiness of life, to add to our high acquaintances. The very law of averages might have assured you that there will be in every hundred heads, say ten or five good heads. Morals are generated as the atmosphere is. ‘T is a secret, the genesis of either; but the springs of justice and courage do not fail any more than salt or sulphur springs.
The world is always opulent, the oracles are never silent; but the receiver must by a happy temperance be brought to that top of condition, that frolic health, that he can easily take and give these fine communications. Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness,—an open and noble temper. There was never poet who had not the heart in the right place. The old trouveur, Pons Capdueil, wrote,—
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“Oft have I beard, and deem the witness true, Whom man delights in, God delights in too.”
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All beauty warms the heart, is a sign of health, prosperity and the favor of God. Everything lasting and fit for men the Divine Power has marked with this stamp. What delights, what emancipates, not what scars and pains us, is wise and good in speech and in the arts. For, truly, the heart at the centre of the universe with every throb hurls the flood of happiness into every artery, vein and veinlet, so that the whole system is inundated with the tides of joy. The plenty of the poorest place is too great: the harvest cannot be gathered. Every sound ends in music. The edge of every surface is tinged with prismatic rays.
One more trait of true success. The good mind chooses what is positive, what is advancing,-embraces the affirmative. Our system is one of poverty. ‘T is presumed, as I said, there is but one Shakspeare, one Homer, one Jesus, -not that all are or shall be inspired. But we must begin by affirming. Truth and goodness subsist forevermore. It is true there is evil and good, night and day: but these are not equal. The day is great and final. The night is for the day, but the day is not for the night. What is this immortal demand for more, which belongs to our constitution? this enormous ideal? There is no such critic and beggar as this terrible Soul. No historical person begins to content us. We know the satisfactoriness of justice, the sufficiency of truth. We know the answer that leaves nothing to ask. We know the Spirit by its victorious tone. The searching tests to apply to every new pretender are amount and quality, -what does he add? and what is the state of mind he leaves me in? Your theory is unimportant; but what new stock you can add to humanity, or how high you can carry life? A man is a man only as he makes life and nature happier to us.
I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition in all points to the real and wholesome success. One adores public opinion, the other private opinion: one fame, the other desert; one feats, the other humility: one lucre, the other love; one monopoly, and the other hospitality of mind.
We may apply this affirmative law to letters, to manners, to art, to the decorations of our houses, etc. I do not find executions or tortures or lazar-houses, or grisly photographs of the field on the day after the battle, fit subjects for cabinet pictures. I think that some so-called “sacred subjects” must be treated with more genius than I have seen in the masters of Italian or Spanish art to be right pictures for houses and churches. Nature does not invite such exhibition. Nature lays the ground-plan of each creature accurately, sternly fit for all his functions; then veils it scrupulously. See how carefully she covers up the skeleton. The eye shall not see it; the sun shall not shine on it. She weaves her tissues and integuments of flesh and skin and hair and beautiful colors of the day over it, and forces death down underground, and makes haste to cover it up with leaves and vines, and wipes carefully out every trace by new creation. Who and what are you that would lay the ghastly anatomy bare?
Don’t hang a dismal picture on the wall, and do not daub with sables and gloomy in your conversation. Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail and bemoan. Omit the negative propositions. Nerve us with incessant affirmatives. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good. When that is spoken which has a right to be spoken, the chatter and the criticism will stop. Set down nothing that will not help somebody;—
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“For every gift of noble origin Is breathed upon by Hope’s perpetual breath.”
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The affirmative of affirmatives is love. As much love, so much perception. As caloric to matter, so is love to mind; so it enlarges, and so it empowers it. Good will makes insight, as one finds his way to the sea by embarking on a river. I have seen scores of people who can silence me, but I seek one who shall make me forget or overcome the frigidities and imbecilities into which I fall. The painter Giotto, Vasari tells us, renewed art because he put more goodness into his heads. To awake in man and to raise the sense of worth, to educate his feeling and judgment so that he shall scorn himself for a bad action, that is the only aim.
‘T is cheap and easy to destroy. There is not a joyful boy or an innocent girl buoyant with fine purposes of duty, in all the street full of eager and rosy faces, but a cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word. Despondency comes readily enough to the most sanguine. The cynic has only to follow their hint with his bitter confirmation, and they check that eager courageous pace and go home with heavier step and premature age. They will themselves quickly enough give the hint he wants to the cold wretch. Which of them has not failed to please where they most wished it’ or blundered where they were most ambitious of success? or found themselves awkward or tedious or incapable of study, thought or heroism, and only hoped by good sense and fidelity to do what they could and pass unblamed? And this witty malefactor makes their little hope less with satire and skepticism, and slackens the springs of endeavor. Yes, this is easy; but to help the young soul, add energy, inspire hope and blow the coals into a useful flame; to redeem defeat by new thought, by firm action, that is not easy, that is the work of divine men.
We live on different planes or platforms. There is an external life, which is educated at school, taught to read, write, cipher and trade; taught to grasp all the boy can get, urging him to put himself forward, to make himself useful and agreeable in the world, to ride, run, argue and contend, unfold his talents, shine, conquer and possess.
But the inner life sits at home, and does not learn to do things, nor value these feats at all. ‘T is a quiet, wise perception. It loves truth, because it is itself real: it loves right, it knows nothing else; but it makes no progress; was as wise in our first memory of it as now; is just the same now in maturity and hereafter in age, it was in youth. We have grown to manhood and womanhood; we have powers, connection, children, reputations, professions: this makes no account of them all. It lives in the great present; it makes the present great. This tranquil, wellfounded, wide-seeing soul is no expressrider, no attorney, no magistrate: it lies in the sun and broods on the world. A person of this temper once said to a man of much activity, “I will pardon you that you do so much, and you me that I do nothing.” And Euripides says that “Zeus hates busybodies and those who do too much.”
The post <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/essays/success/">Success</a> appeared first on <a href="https://emersoncentral.com">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a>.
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<title>Old Age</title>
<link>https://emersoncentral.com/essays/old-age/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Emerson West]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sun, 18 Jun 2023 18:05:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Essays]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Society and Solitude (1870)]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://emersoncentral.com/?p=68509</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ONCE more,’ the old man cried, ye clouds,Airy turrets purple-piled,Which once my infancy beguiled,Beguile me with the wonted spell.I know ye skilful to convoyThe total freight of hope and joyInto rude and homely nooks,Shed mocking lustres on shelf of books,On farmer’s byre, on pasture rude,And stony pathway to the wood.I care not if the pomps you showBe what they soothfast appear,Or if von realms in sunset glowBe bubbles of the atmosphere.And if it be to you allowedTo fool me with a shining cloud,So only new griefs are consoledBy new delights, as old by old,Frankly I will be your guest,Count your change and cheer the best.The world bath overmuch of pain,…
The post <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/essays/old-age/">Old Age</a> appeared first on <a href="https://emersoncentral.com">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a>.
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ONCE more,’ the old man cried,
ye clouds, Airy turrets purple-piled, Which once my infancy beguiled, Beguile me with the wonted spell. I know ye skilful to convoy The total freight of hope and joy Into rude and homely nooks, Shed mocking lustres on shelf of books, On farmer’s byre, on pasture rude, And stony pathway to the wood. I care not if the pomps you show Be what they soothfast appear, Or if von realms in sunset glow Be bubbles of the atmosphere. And if it be to you allowed To fool me with a shining cloud, So only new griefs are consoled By new delights, as old by old, Frankly I will be your guest, Count your change and cheer the best. The world bath overmuch of pain, – If Nature give me joy again, Of such deceit I’II not complain.’
As the bird trims her to the gale, I trim myself to the storm of time, I man the rudder, reef the sail, Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime: Lowly faithful, banish fear, Right onward drive unharmed; The port, well worth the cruise, is near, And every wave is charmed.’
OLD AGE
ON the anniversary of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge in 1861, the venerable President Quincy, senior member of the Society, as well as senior alumnus of the University, was received at the dinner with peculiar demonstrations of respect. He replied to these compliments in a speech, and, gracefully claiming the privileges of a literary society, entered at some length into an Apology for Old Age, and, aiding himself by notes in his hand, made a sort of running commentary on Cicero’s chapter De Senectute. The character of the speaker, the transparent good faith of his praise and blame, and the naivete of his eager preference of Cicero’s opinions to King David’s, gave unusual interest to the College festival. It was a discourse full of dignity, honoring him who spoke and those who heard.
The speech led me to look over at home – an easy task – Cicero’s famous essay, charming by its uniform rhetorical merit ; heroic with Stoical precepts, with a Roman eye to the claims of the State ; happiest perhaps in his praise of life on the farm ; and rising at the conclusion to a lofty strain. But he does not exhaust the subject ; rather invites the attempt to add traits to the picture from our broader modern life.
Cicero makes no reference to the illusions which cling to the element of time, and in which Nature delights. Wellington, in speaking of military men, said, ” What masks are these uniforms to hide cowards ! ” I have often detected the like deception in the cloth shoe, wadded pelisse, wig, spectacles and padded chair of Age. Nature lends herself to these illusions, and adds dim sight, deafness, cracked voice, snowy hair, short memory and sleep. These also are masks, and all is not Age that wears them. Whilst we yet call ourselves young and our mates are yet youths with even boyish remains, one good fellow in the set prematurely sports a gray or a bald head, which does not impose on us who know how innocent of sanctity or of Platonism he is, but does deceive his juniors and the public, who presently distinguish him with a most amusing respect : and this lets us into the secret that the venerable forms that so awed our childhood were just such impostors. Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then a young heart beating under fourscore winters.
For if the essence of age is not present, these signs, whether of Art or Nature, are counterfeit and ridiculous : and the essence of age is intellect. Wherever that appears, we call it old. If we look into the eyes of the youngest person we sometimes discover that here is one who knows already what you would go about with much pains to teach him ; there is that in him which is the ancestor of all around him : which fact the Indian Vedas express when they say, ” He that can discriminate is the father of his father.” And in our old British legends of Arthur and the Round Table, his friend and counsellor, Merlin the Wise, is a babe found exposed in a basket by the river-side, and, though an infant of only a few days, speaks articulately to those who discover him, tells his name and history, and presently foretells the fate of the by-standers. Wherever there is power, there is age. Don’t be deceive by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old.’
Time is indeed the theatre and seat of illusion : nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century and dwarfs an age to an hour.’ <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/poems/saadi/">Saadi</a> found in a mosque at Damascus an old Persian of a hundred and fifty years, who was dying, and was saying to him- self, ” I said, coming into the world by birth, ` I will enjoy myself for a few moments.’ Alas ! at the variegated table of life I partook of a few mouthfuls, and the Fates said, ‘Enough! ‘” That which does not decay is so central and controlling in us, that, as long as one is alone by himself, he is not sensible of the inroads of time, which always begin at the surface-edges. If, on a winter day, you should stand within a bell-glass, the face and color of the afternoon clouds would not indicate whether it were June or January ; and if we did not find the reflection of ourselves in the eves of the young people, we could not know that the century-clock had struck seventy instead of twenty. How many men habitually believe that each chance passenger with whom they converse is of their own age, and presently find it was his father and not his brother whom they knew ! ‘
But not to press too hard on these deceits and illusions of Nature, which are inseparable from our condition, and looking at age under an aspect more conformed to the common sense, if the question be the felicity of age, I fear the first popular judgments will be unfavorable. From the point of sensuous experience, seen from the streets and markets and the haunts of pleasure and gain, the estimate of age is low, melancholy and skeptical. Frankly face the facts, and see the result. Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions : the surest poison is time. This cup which Nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpassing that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds power, fills us with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science : especially, it creates a craving for larger draughts of itself. But they who take the larger draughts are drunk with it, lose their stature, strength, beauty and senses, and end in folly and delirium. We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent was a youthful effervescence which we have now lost.’ We had a judge in Massachusetts who at sixty proposed to resign, alleging that he perceived a certain decay in his faculties ; he was dissuaded by his friends, on account of the public convenience at that time. At seventy it was hinted to him that it was time to retire; but he now replied that he thought his judgment as robust and all his faculties as good as ever they were. But besides the self-deception, the strong and hasty laborers of the street do not work well with the chronic valetudinarian. Youth is everywhere in place. Age, like woman, requires fit surroundings. Age is comely in coaches, in churches, in chairs of state and ceremony, in council-chambers, in courts of justice and historical societies. Age is becoming in the country. But in the rush and uproar of Broadway, if you look into the faces of the passengers there is dejection or indignation in the seniors, a certain concealed sense of injury, and the lip made up with a heroic determination not to mind it. Few envy the consideration enjoyed by the oldest inhabitant. We do not count a man’s years, until he has nothing else to count. The vast inconvenience of animal immortality was told in the fable of Tithonus.1 In short, the creed of the street is, Old Age is not disgraceful, but immensely disadvantageous. Life is well enough, but we shall all be glad to get out of it, and they will all be glad to have us.
This is odious on the face of it. Universal convictions are not to be shaken by the whimseys of overfed butchers and firemen, or by the sentimental fears of girls who would keep the infantile bloom on their cheeks. We know the value of experience. Life and art are cumulative ; and he who has accomplished something in any department alone deserves to be heard on that subject. A man of great employments and excellent performance used to assure me that he did not think a man worth anything until he was sixty ; although this smacks a little of the resolution of a certain ” Young Men’s Republican Club,” that all men should be held eligible who are under seventy. But in all governments, the councils of power were held by the old ; and patricians or patres, senate or senes, seigneurs or seniors, gerousia, the senate of Sparta, the presbytery of the Church, and the like, all signify simply old men
The cynical creed or lampoon of the market is refuted by the universal prayer for long life, which is the verdict of Nature and justified by all history. We have, it is true, examples of an accelerated pace by which young men achieved grand works ; as in the Macedonian Alexander, in Raffaelle, Shakspeare, Pascal, Burns and Byron ; but these are rare exceptions. Nature, in the main, vindicates her law. Skill to do comes of doing; knowledge comes by eyes always open, and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power. Beranger said, “Almost all the good workmen live long.”‘ And if the life be true and noble, we have quite an-other sort of seniors than the frowzy, timorous, peevish dotards who are falsely old, -namely, the men who fear no city, but by whom cities stand ; who appearing in any street, the people empty their houses to gaze at and obey them : as at ” My Cid, with the fleecy beard,” in Toledo ; or Bruce, as Barbour reports him ; as blind old Dandolo, elected doge at eighty-four years, storming Constantinople at ninety-four, and after the revolt again victorious and elected at the age of ninety-six to the throne of the Eastern Empire, which he declined, and died doge at ninety-seven. We still feel the force of Socrates, “whom well-advised the oracle pronounced wisest of men ; ” of Archimedes, holding Syracuse against the Romans by his wit, and himself better than all their nation ; of Michel Angelo, wearing the four crowns of architecture, sculpture, painting and poetry ; of Galileo, of whose blindness Castelli said, ” The noblest eye is darkened that Nature ever made, – an eye that hath seen more than all that went before him, and hath opened the eyes of all that shall come after him ;” of Newton, who made an important discovery for every one of his eighty-five years; of Bacon, who ” took all knowledge to be his province ; ” of Fontenelie, ” that precious porcelain vase laid up in the centre of France to be guarded with the utmost care for a hundred years ; ” of Franklin, Jefferson and Adams, the wise and heroic statesmen ; of Washington, the perfect citizen ; of Welling-ton, the perfect soldier; <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/representative-men/goethe-the-writer/">of Goethe, the all-knowing poet</a> ; of Humboldt, the encyclopedia of science.’
Under the general assertion of the well-being of age, we can easily count particular benefits of that condition. It has weathered the perilous capes and shoals in the sea whereon we sail, and the chief evil of life is taken away in removing the grounds of fear. The insurance of a ship expires as she enters the harbor at home. It were strange if a man should turn his sixtieth year without a feeling of immense relief from the number of dangers he has escaped. When the old wife says, ‘ Take care of that tumor in your shoulder, perhaps it is cancerous,’ – he replies, ` I am yielding to a surer decomposition.’ The humorous thief who drank a pot of beer at the gallows blew off the froth because he had heard it was unhealthy ; but it will not add a pang to the prisoner marched out to be shot, to assure him that the pain in his knee threatens mortification. When the pleuro-pneumonia of the cows raged, the butchers said that though the acute degree was novel, there never was a time when this disease did not occur among cattle. All men carry seeds of all distempers through life latent, and we die without developing them ; such is the affirmative force of the constitution ; but if you are enfeebled by any cause, some of these sleeping seeds start and open. Meantime, at every stage we lose a foe. At fifty years, ‘t is said, afflicted citizens lose their sick-headaches. I hope this hegira is not as movable a feast as that one I annually look for, when the horticulturists assure me that the rose-bugs in our gardens disappear on the tenth of July ; they stay a fortnight later in mine.’ But be it as it may with the sick-headache, – ‘t is certain that graver headaches and heart-aches are lulled once for all as we come up with certain goals of time. The passions have answered their purpose : that slight but dread overweight with which in each instance Nature secures the execution of her aim, drops off. To keep man in the planet, she impresses the terror of death. To perfect the commissariat, she implants in each a certain rapacity to get the supply, and a little oversupply, of his wants. To insure the existence of the race, she reinforces the sexual instinct, at the risk of disorder, grief and pain.’ To secure strength, she plants cruel hunger and thirst, which so easily overdo their office, and invite disease. But these temporary stays and shifts for the protection of the young animal are shed as fast as they can be replaced by nobler resources. We live in youth amidst this rabble of passions, quite too tender, quite too hungry and irritable. Later, the interiors of mind and heart open, and sup-ply grander motives. We learn the fatal compensations that wait on every act. Then, one after another, this riotous time-destroying crew disappear.
I count it another capital advantage of age, this, that a success more or less signifies nothing. Little by little it has amassed such a fund of merit that it can very well afford to go on its credit when it will.’ When I chanced to meet <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-second-series/the-poet/">the poet</a> Wordsworth, then sixty-three years old, he told me that ” he had just had a fall and lost a tooth, and when his companions were much concerned for the mischance, he had replied that he was glad it had not happened forty years before.” Well, Nature takes care that we shall not lose our organs forty years too soon. A lawyer argued a cause yesterday in the Supreme Court, and I was struck with a certain air of levity and defiance which vastly became him. Thirty years ago it was a serious concern to him whether his pleading was good and effective. Now it is of importance to his client, but of none to himself. It has been long already fixed what he can do and cannot do, and his reputation does not gain or suffer from one or a dozen new performances. If he should on a new occasion rise quite beyond his mark and achieve somewhat great and extraordinary, that, of course, would instantly tell ; but he may go below his mark with impunity, and people will say, ‘ O, he had headache,’ or ` He lost his sleep for two nights.’ What a lust of appearance, what a load of anxieties that once degraded him he is thus rid of! Every one is sensible of this cumulative advantage in living. All the good days behind him are sponsors, who speak for him when he is silent, pay for him when he has no money, introduce him where he has no letters, and work for him when he sleeps.
A third felicity of age is that it has found expression. The youth suffers not only from ungratified desires, but from powers untried, and from a picture in his mind of a career which has as yet no outward reality. He is tormented with the want of correspondence between things and thoughts. Michel Angelo’s head is full of masculine and gigantic figures as gods walking, which make him savage until his furious chisel can render them into marble; and of architectural dreams, until a hundred stone-masons can lay them in courses of travertine. There is the like tempest in every good head in which some great benefit for the world is planted. The throes continue until the child is born. Every faculty new to each man thus goads him and drives him out into doleful deserts until it finds proper vent. All the functions of human duty irritate and lash him forward, bemoaning and chiding, until they are performed. He wants friends, employment, knowledge, power, house and land, wife and children, honor and fame; he has religious wants, aesthetic wants, domestic, civil, humane wants. One by one, day after day, he learns to coin his wishes into facts. He has his calling, homestead, social connection and personal power, and thus, at the end of fifty years, his soul is appeased by seeing some sort of correspondence between his wish and his possession. This makes the value of age, the satisfaction it slowly offers to every craving. He is serene who does not feel himself pinched and wronged, but whose condition, in particular and in general, allows the utterance of his mind. In old persons, when thus fully expressed, we often observe a fair, plump, per-ennial, waxen complexion, which indicates that all the ferment of earlier days has subsided into serenity of thought and behavior.
The compensations of Nature play in age as in youth. In a world so charged and sparkling with power, a man does not live long and actively without costly additions of experience, which, though not spoken, are recorded in his mind. What to the youth is only a guess or a hope, is in the veteran a digested statute. He beholds the feats of the juniors with complacency, but as one who having long ago known these games, has refined them into results and morals. The Indian Red Jacket, when the young braves were boasting their deeds, said, ” But the sixties have all the twenties and forties in them.”
For a fourth benefit, age sets its house in order, and finishes its works, which to every artist is a supreme pleasure.’ Youth has an excess of sensibility, before which every object glitters and attracts. We leave one pursuit for another, and the young man’s year is a heap of beginnings. At the end of a twelvemonth, he has nothing to show for it, – not one completed work. But the time is not lost. Our instincts drove us to hive innumerable experiences, that are yet of no visible value, and which we may keep for twice seven years before they shall be wanted. The best things are of secular growth. The instinct of classifying marks the wise and healthy mind. Linnaeus projects his system, and lays out his twenty-four classes of plants, before yet he has found in Nature a single plant to justify certain of his classes. His seventh class has not one. In process of time, he finds with delight the little white Trientalis, the only plant with seven petals and sometimes seven stamens, which constitutes a seventh class in conformity with his system.’ The conchologist builds his cabinet whilst as yet he has few shells. He labels shelves for classes, cells for species : all but a few are empty. But every year fills some blanks, and with accelerating speed as he becomes knowing and known. An old scholar finds keen delight in verifying the impressive anecdotes and citations he has met with in miscellaneous reading and hearing, in all the years of youth. We carry in memory important anecdotes, and have lost all clew to the author from whom we had them. We have a heroic speech from Rome or Greece, but cannot fix it on the man who said it. We have an admirable line worthy of Horace, ever and anon resounding in our mind’s ear, but have searched all probable and improbable books for it in vain. We consult the reading men : but, strangely enough, they who know everything know not this. But especially we have a certain insulated thought, which haunts us, but remains insulated and barren. Well, there is nothing for all this but patience and time. Time, yes, that is the finder, the unweariable explorer, not subject to casualties, omniscient at last. The day comes when the hidden author of our story is found ; when the brave speech returns straight to the hero who said it ; when the admirable verse finds <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-second-series/the-poet/">the poet</a> to whom it belongs ; and best of all, when the lonely thought, which seemed so wise, yet half-wise, half-thought, be-cause it cast no light abroad, is suddenly matched in our mind by its twin, by its sequence, or next related analogy, which gives it instantly radiating power, and justifies the superstitious instinct with which we have hoarded it. We remember our old Greek Professor at Cambridge, an ancient bachelor, amid his folios, possessed by this hope of completing a task, with nothing to break his leisure after the three hours of his daily classes, yet ever restlessly stroking his leg and assuring himself “he should retire from the University and read the authors.” ‘ In Goethe’s Romance, Makaria, the central figure for wisdom and influence, pleases herself with withdrawing into solitude to astronomy and epistolary correspondence. Goethe himself carried this completion of studies to the highest point. Many of his works hung on the easel from youth to age, and received a stroke in every month or year. A literary astrologer, he never applied himself to any task but at the happy moment when all the stars consented. Bentley thought himself likely to live till fourscore, – long enough to read everything that was worth reading, -” Et tune magna mein sub terris ibit imago.” 1 Much wider is spread the pleasure which old men take in completing their secular affairs, the inventor his inventions, the agriculturist his experiments, and all old men in finishing their houses, rounding their estates, clearing their titles, reducing tangled interests to order, reconciling enmities and leaving all in the best posture for the future. It must be believed that there is a proportion between the designs of a man and the length of his life : there is a calendar of his years, so of his performances.2
America is the country of young men, and too full of work hitherto for leisure and tranquillity ; yet we have had robust centenarians, and examples of dignity and wisdom. I have lately found in an old note-book a record of a visit to ex-President John Adams, in 1825, soon after the election of his son to the Presidency. It is but a sketch, and nothing important passed in the conversation ; but it reports a moment in the life of a heroic person, who, in extreme old age, appeared still erect and worthy of his fame.
—, Feb., 1825. To-day at Quincy, with my brother, by invitation of Mr. Adams’s family. The old President sat in a large stuffed arm-chair, dressed in a blue coat, black small-clothes, white stockings ; a cotton cap covered his bald head. We made our compliment, told him he must let us join our congratulations to those of the nation on the happiness of his house. He thanked us, and said : ” I am rejoiced, because the nation is happy. The time of gratulation and congratulations is nearly over with me ; I am astonished that I have lived to see and know of this event. I have lived now nearly a century [he was ninety in the following October] ; a long, harassed and distracted life.” I said, “The world thinks a good deal of joy has been mixed with it.” -” The world does not know,” he replied, ” how much toil, anxiety and sorrow I have suffered.” – I asked if Mr. Adams’s letter of acceptance had been read to him.-” Yes,” he said, and added, ” My son has more political prudence than any man that I know who has existed in my time; he never was put off his guard ; and I hope he will continue such : but what effect age may work in diminishing the power of his mind, I do not know ; it has been very much on the stretch, ever since he was born. He has always been laborious, child and man, from infancy.” – When Mr. J. Q. Adams’s age was mentioned, he said, ” He is now fifty-eight, or will be in July ;” and remarked that ” all the Presidents were of the same age : General Washington was about fifty-eight, and I was about fifty-eight, and Mr. Jefferson, and Mr. Madison, and Mr. Mon-roe.” – We inquired when he expected to see Mr. Adams. – He said : ” Never : Mr. Adams will not come to Quincy but to my funeral. It would be a great satisfaction to me to see him, but I don’t wish him to come on my account.” He spoke of Mr. Lechmere, whom he ” well remembered to have seen come down daily, at a great age, to walk in the old town-house,” adding, ” And I wish I could walk as well as he did. He was Collector of the Customs for many years under the Royal Government.” – E. said :” I suppose, sir, you would not have taken his place, even to walk as well as he.” -” No,” he replied, ” that was not what I wanted.” – He talked of Whitefield,1 and remembered when he was a Freshman in College to have come into town to the Old South church [I think] to hear him, but could not get into the house; -” I, however, saw him,” he said, “through a window, and distinctly heard all. He had a voice such as I never heard before or since. He cast it out so that you might hear it at the meeting-house [pointing towards the Quincy meeting-house], and he had the grace of a dancing-master, of an actor of plays. His voice and manner helped him more than his sermons. I went with Jonathan Sewall.”-“And you were pleased with him, sir?”-“Pleased ! I was delighted beyond measure.”-We asked if at Whitefield’s return the same popularity continued. -” Not the same fury,” he said, ” not the same wild enthusiasm as before, but a greater esteem, as he became more known. He did not terrify, but was ad-mired.”
We spent about an hour in his room. He speaks very distinctly for so old a man, enters bravely into long sentences, which are interrupted by want of breath, but carries them invariably to a conclusion, without correcting a word.
He spoke of the new novels of Cooper, and Peep at the Pilgrims, and Saratoga, with praise, and named with accuracy the characters in them. He likes to have a person always reading to him, or company talking in his room, and is better the next day after having visitors in his chamber from morning to night.
He received a premature report of his son’s election, on Sunday afternoon, without any excitement, and told the reporter he had been hoaxed, for it was not vet time for any news to arrive. The informer, something damped in his heart, insisted on repairing to the meeting-house, and proclaimed it aloud to the congregation, who were so overjoyed that they rose in their seats and cheered thrice. The Reverend Mr. Whitney dismissed them immediately.
When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare,-muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these. But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and, drop-ping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise. I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old.’ I have heard that whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced ; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill, – at the end of life just ready to be born, – affirms the inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment.2
The post <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/essays/old-age/">Old Age</a> appeared first on <a href="https://emersoncentral.com">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a>.
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<title>Domestic Life</title>
<link>https://emersoncentral.com/essays/domestic-life/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Emerson West]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sat, 29 Apr 2023 17:35:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Essays]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Society and Solitude (1870)]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://emersoncentral.com/?p=68490</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I REACHED the middle of the mountUp which the incarnate soul must climb,And paused for them, and looked around,With me who walked through space and time.Five rosy boys with morning lightHad leaped from one fair mother’s arms,Fronted the sun with hope as bright,And greeted God with childhood’s psalms. Thou shalt make thy houseThe temple of a nation’s vows.Spirits of a higher strainWho sought thee once shall seek again.I detected many a godForth already on the road,Ancestors of beauty comeIn thy breast to make a home. DOMESTIC LIFE THE perfection of the providence for child-hood is easily acknowledged. The care which covers the seed of the tree under tough husks and…
The post <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/essays/domestic-life/">Domestic Life</a> appeared first on <a href="https://emersoncentral.com">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a>.
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I REACHED the middle of the mount Up which the incarnate soul must climb, And paused for them, and looked around, With me who walked through space and time. Five rosy boys with morning light Had leaped from one fair mother’s arms, Fronted the sun with hope as bright, And greeted God with childhood’s psalms.
Thou shalt make thy house The temple of a nation’s vows. Spirits of a higher strain Who sought thee once shall seek again. I detected many a god Forth already on the road, Ancestors of beauty come In thy breast to make a home.
DOMESTIC LIFE
THE perfection of the providence for child-hood is easily acknowledged. The care which covers the seed of the tree under tough husks and stony cases provides for the human plant the mother’s breast and the father’s house. The size of the nestler is comic, and its tiny beseeching weakness is compensated perfectly by the happy patronizing look of the mother, who is a sort of high reposing Providence toward it. Welcome to the parents the puny struggler, strong in his weakness, his little arms more irresistible than the soldier’s, his lips touched with persuasion which Chatham and Pericles in manhood had not. His unaffected lamentations when he lifts up his voice on high, or, more beautiful, the sobbing child,- the face all liquid grief, as he tries to swallow his vexation, – soften all hearts to pity, and to mirthful and clamorous compassion. The small despot asks so little that all reason and all nature are on his side.’ His ignorance is more charming than all knowledge, and his little sins more bewitching than any virtue. His flesh is angels’ flesh, all alive. “Infancy,” said Coleridge, “presents body and spirit in unity: the body is all animated.” All day, between his three or four sleeps, he coos like a pigeon-house, sputters and spurs and puts on his faces of importance ; and when he fasts, the little Pharisee fails not to sound his trumpet before him. By lamplight he delights in shadows on the wall ; by daylight, in yellow and scarlet. Carry him out of doors, – he is overpowered by the light and by the extent of natural objects, and is silent.’ Then presently begins his use of his fingers, and he studies power, the lesson of his race. First it appears in no great harm, in architectural tastes. Out of blocks, thread-spools, cards and checkers, he will build his pyramid with the gravity of Palladio. With an acoustic apparatus of whistle and rattle he explores the laws of sound. But chiefly, like his senior countrymen, <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/nature-addresses-lectures/lectures/the-young-american/">the young American</a> studies new and speedier modes of transportation. Mistrusting the cunning of his small legs, he wishes to ride on the necks and shoulders of all flesh. The small enchanter nothing can withstand, – no seniority of age, no gravity of character ; uncles, aunts, grand-sires, grandams, fall an easy prey : he conforms to nobody, all conform to him ; all caper and make mouths and babble and chirrup to him.
On the strongest shoulders he rides, and pulls the hair of laurelled heads.
“The childhood,” said Milton, “shows the man, as morning shows the day.” The child realizes to every man his own earliest remembrance, and so supplies a defect in our education, or enables us to live over the unconscious history with a sympathy so tender as to be al-most personal experience.’
Fast – almost too fast for the wistful curiosity of the parents, studious of the witchcraft of curls and dimples and broken words – the little talker grows to a boy. He walks daily among wonders : fire, light, darkness, the moon, the stars, the furniture of the house, the red tin horse, the domestics, who like rude foster-mothers befriend and feed him, the faces that claim his kisses, are all in turn absorbing ; yet warm, cheerful and with good appetite the little sovereign subdues them without knowing it; the new knowledge is taken up into the life of to-day and becomes the means of more. The blowing rose is a new event ; the garden full of flowers is Eden over again to the small Adam ; the rain, the ice, the frost, make epochs in his life. What a holiday is the first snow in which Twoshoes can be trusted abroad!
What art can paint or gild any object in after-life with the glow which Nature gives to the first baubles of childhood ! St. Peter’s cannot have the magical power over us that the red and gold covers of our first picture-book possessed. How the imagination cleaves to the warm glories of that tinsel even now ! What entertainments make every day bright and short for the fine freshman ! The street is old as Nature ; the persons all have their sacredness. His imaginative life dresses all things in their best. His fears adorn the dark parts with poetry. He has heard of wild horses and of bad boys, and with a pleasing terror he watches at his gate for the passing of those varieties of each species. The first ride into the country, the first bath in running water, the first time the skates are put on, the first game out of doors in moonlight, the books of the nursery, are new chapters of joy. The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, the Seven Champions of Christendom, Robin-son Crusoe and the Pilgrim’s Progress, – what mines of thought and emotion, what a ward-robe to dress the whole world withal, are in this encyclopaedia of young thinking! I And so by beautiful traits, which without art yet seem the masterpiece of wisdom, provoking the love that watches and educates him, the little pilgrim prosecutes the journey through Nature which he has thus gayly begun. He grows up the ornament and joy of the house, which rings to his glee, to rosy boyhood.
The household is the home of the man, as well as of the child.’ The events that occur therein are more near and affecting to us than those which are sought in senates and academies. Domestic events are certainly our affair. What are called public events may or may not be ours. If a man wishes to acquaint himself with the real history of the world, with the spirit of the age, he must not go first to the state-house or the court-room. The subtle spirit of life must be sought in facts nearer. It is what is done and suffered in the house, in the constitution, in the temperament, in the personal history, that has the profoundest interest for us. Fact is better than fiction, if only we could get pure fact. Do you think any rhetoric or any romance would get your ear from the wise gypsy who could tell straight on the real fortunes of the man ; who could reconcile your moral character and your natural history ; who could explain your misfortunes, your fevers, your debts, your temperament, your habits of thought, your tastes, and, in every explanation, not sever you from the whole, but unite you to it ? Is it not plain that not in senates, or courts, or chambers of commerce, but in the dwelling-house must the true character and hope of the time be consulted ? These facts are, to be sure, harder to read. It is easier to count the census, or compute the square extent of a territory, to criticise its polity, books, art, than to come to the persons and dwellings of men and read their character and hope in their way of life. Yet we are always hovering round this better divination. In one form or another we are always returning to it. The physiognomy and phrenology of to-day are rash and mechanical systems enough, but they rest on everlasting foundations. We are sure that the sacred form of man is not seen in these whimsical, pitiful and sinister masks (masks which we wear and which we meet), these bloated and shrivelled bodies, bald heads, bead eyes, short winds, puny and precarious healths and early deaths.’ We live ruins amidst ruins. The great facts are the near ones. The account of the body is to be sought in the mind. The history of your fortunes is written first in your life.
Let us come then out of the public square and enter the domestic precinct. Let us go to the sitting-room, the table-talk and the expenditure of our contemporaries. An increased consciousness of the soul, you say, characterizes the period. Let us see if it has not only arranged the atoms at the circumference, but the atoms at the core. Does the household obey an idea ? Do you see the man, – his form, genius and aspiration, – in his economy ? Is that translucent, thorough-lighted ? There should be nothing confounding and conventional in economy, but the genius and love of the man so conspicuously marked in all his estate that the eye that knew him should read his character in his property, in his grounds, in his ornaments, in every expense. A man’s money should not follow the direction of his neighbor’s money, but should represent to him the things he would willingliest do with it. I am not one thing and my expenditure another. My expenditure is me. That our expenditure and our character are twain, is the vice of society.
We ask the price of many things in shops and stalls, but some things each man buys without hesitation ; if it were only letters at the post-office, conveyance in carriages and boats, tools for his work, books that are written to his condition, etc. Let him never buy anything else than what he wants, never subscribe at others’ instance, never give unwillingly. Thus, a scholar is a literary foundation. All his expense is for Aristotle, Fabricius, Erasmus and Petrarch. Do not ask him to help with his savings young drapers or grocers to stock their shops, or eager agents to lobby in legislatures, or join a company to build a factory or a fishing-craft. These things are also to be done, but not by such as he. How could such a book as Plato’s Dialogues have come down, but for the sacred savings of scholars and their fantastic appropriation of them ?
Another man is a mechanical genius, an inventor of looms, a builder of ships, – a ship-building foundation, and could achieve nothing if he should dissipate himself on books or on horses. Another is a farmer, an agricultural foundation ; another is a chemist, and the same rule holds for all. We must not make believe with our money, but spend heartily, and buy up and not down.
I am afraid that, so considered, our houses will not be found to have unity and to express the best thought. The household, the calling, the friendships, of the citizen are not homogeneous. His house ought to show us his honest opinion of what makes his well-being when he rests among his kindred, and forgets all affectation, compliance, and even exertion of will. He brings home whatever commodities and ornaments have for years allured his pursuit, and his character must be seen in them. But what idea predominates in our houses ? Thrift first, then convenience and pleasure. Take off all the roofs, from street to street, and we shall seldom find the temple of any higher god than Prudence. The progress of domestic living has been in cleanliness, in ventilation, in health, in decorum, in countless means and arts of comfort, in the concentration of all the utilities of every clime in each house. They are arranged for low benefits. The houses of the rich are confectioners’ shops, where we get sweetmeats and wine ; the houses of the poor are imitations of these to the extent of their ability. With these ends housekeeping is not beautiful ; it cheers and raises neither the husband,- the wife, nor the child ; neither the host nor the guest ; it oppresses women. A house kept to the end of prudence is laborious without joy ; a house kept to the end of display is impossible to all but a few women, and their success is dearly bought.
If we look at this matter curiously, it becomes dangerous. We need all the force of an idea to lift this load, for the wealth and multiplication of conveniences embarrass us, especially in northern climates. The shortest enumeration of our wants in this rugged climate appalls us by the multitude of things not easy to be done. And if you look at the multitude of particulars, one would say : Good housekeeping is impossible ; order is too precious a thing to dwell with men and women. See, in families where there is both substance and taste, at what expense any favorite punctuality is maintained. If the children, for example, are considered, dressed, dieted, at-tended, kept in proper company, schooled and at home fostered by the parents, – then does the hospitality of the house suffer ; friends are less carefully bestowed, the daily table less catered. If the hours of meals are punctual, the apartments are slovenly. If the linens and hangings are clean and fine and the furniture good, the yard, the garden, the fences are neglected. If all are well attended, then must the master and mistress be studious of particulars at the cost of their own accomplishments and growth ; or persons are treated as things.
The difficulties to be overcome must be freely admitted ; they are many and great. Nor are they to be disposed of by any criticism or amendment of particulars taken one at a time, but only by the arrangement of the household to a higher end than those to which our dwellings are usually built and furnished. And is there any calamity more grave, or that more invokes the best good will to remove it, than this?- to go from chamber to chamber and see no beauty ; to find in the housemates no aim ; to hear an endless chatter and blast; to be compelled to criticise ; to hear only to dissent and to be disgusted ; to find no invitation to what is good in us, and no receptacle for what is wise : – this is a great price to pay for sweet bread and warm lodging, – being defrauded of affinity, of repose, of genial culture and the inmost presence of beauty.
It is a sufficient accusation of our ways of living, and certainly ought to open our ear to every good-minded reformer, that our idea of domestic well-being now needs wealth to execute it. Give me the means, says the wife, and your house shall not annoy your taste nor waste your time. On hearing this we under-stand how these Means have come to be so omnipotent on earth. And indeed the love of wealth seems to grow chiefly out of the root of the love of the Beautiful. The desire of gold is not for gold. It is not the love of much wheat and wool and household stuff. It is the means of freedom and benefit. We scorn shifts ; we desire the elegance of munificence ; we de-sire at least to put no stint or limit on our parents, relatives, guests or dependents ; we desire to play the benefactor and the prince with our townsmen, with the stranger at the gate, with the bard or the beauty, with the man or woman of worth who alights at our door. How can we do this, if the wants of each day imprison us in lucrative labors, and constrain us to a continual vigilance lest we be betrayed into expense?
Give us wealth, and the home shall exist. But that is a very imperfect and inglorious solution of the problem, and therefore no solution. ” Give us wealth.” You ask too much. Few have wealth, but all must have a home. Men are not born rich ; and in getting wealth the man is generally sacrificed, and often is sacrificed without acquiring wealth at last. Besides, that cannot be the right answer ;- there are objections to wealth. Wealth is a shift. The wise man angles with himself only, and with no meaner bait. Our whole use of wealth needs revision and reform. Generosity does not consist in giving money or money’s worth. These so-called goods are only the shadow of good. To give money to a sufferer is only a come-off. It is only a postponement of the real payment, a bribe paid for silence, a credit system in which a paper promise to pay answers for the time instead of liquidation. We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man man. If he is sick, is unable, is mean-spirited and odious, it is because there is so much of his nature which is unlawfully withholden from him. He should be visited in this his prison with rebuke to the evil demons, with manly encouragement, with no mean-spirited offer of condolence because you have not money, or mean offer of money as the utmost benefit, but by your heroism, your purity and your faith. You are to bring with you that spirit which is understanding, health and self-help. To offer him money in lieu of these is to do him the same wrong as when the bridegroom offers his betrothed virgin a sum of money to release him from his engagements. The great depend on their heart, not on their purse. Genius and virtue, like diamonds, are best plain-set, – set in lead, set in poverty. The greatest man in history was the poorest. How was it with the captains and sages of Greece and Rome, with Socrates, with Epaminondas ? Aristides was made general receiver of Greece, to collect the tribute which each state was to furnish against the barbarian. ” Poor,” says Plutarch, ” when he set about it, poorer when he had finished it.” How was it with AEmilius and Cato ? What kind of a house was kept by Paul and John, by Milton and Marvell, by Samuel Johnson, by Samuel Adams in Boston and Jean Paul Richter at Baireuth ?
I think it plain that this voice of communities and ages, ‘Give us wealth, and the good house-hold shall exist,’ is vicious, and leaves the whole difficulty untouched. It is better, certainly, in this form, ‘ Give us your labor, and the house-hold begins.’ I see not how serious labor, the labor of all and every day, is to be avoided ; and many things betoken a revolution of opinion and practice in regard to manual labor that may go far to aid our practical inquiry. Another age may .divide the manual labor of the world more equally on all the members of society, and so make the labors of a few hours avail to the wants and add to the vigor of the man. But the reform that applies itself to the household must not be partial. It must correct the whole system of our social living. It must come with plain living and high thinking ; it must break up caste, and put domestic service on another foundation. It must come in connection with a true acceptance by each man of his vocation, – not chosen by his parents or friends, but by his genius, with earnestness and love.
Nor is this redress so hopeless as it seems. Certainly, if we begin by reforming particulars of our present system, correcting a few evils and letting the rest stand, we shall soon give up in despair. For our social forms are very far from truth and equity. But the way to set the axe at the root of the tree is to raise our aim. Let us understand then that a house should hear witness in all its economy that human culture is the end to which it is built and garnished. It stands there under the sun and moon to ends analogous, and not less noble than theirs. It is not for festivity, it is not for sleep : but the pine and the oak shall gladly descend from the mountains to uphold the roof of men as faithful and necessary as themselves; to be the shelter always open to good and true persons ; – a hall which shines with sincerity, brows ever tranquil, and a demeanor impossible to disconcert ; whose in-mates know what they want ; who do not ask your house how theirs should be kept. They have aims ; they cannot pause for trifles.’ The diet of the house does not create its order, but knowledge, character, action, absorb so much life and yield so much entertainment that the refectory has ceased to be so curiously studied. With a change of aim has followed a change of the whole scale by which men and things were wont to be measured. Wealth and poverty are seen for what they are. It begins to be seen that the poor are only they who feel poor, and poverty consists in feeling poor. The rich, as we reckon them, and among them the very rich, -in a true scale would be found very indigent and ragged. The great make us feel, first of all, the indifference of circumstances. They call into activity the higher perceptions and subdue the low habits of comfort and luxury ; but the higher perceptions find their objects everywhere ; only the low habits need palaces and banquets.
Let a man, then, say, My house is here in the county, for the culture of the county ; – an eating-house and sleeping-house for travellers it shall be, but it shall be much more. I pray you, O excellent wife, not to cumber yourself and me to get a rich dinner for this man or this woman who has alighted at our gate, nor a bed-chamber made ready at too great a cost. These things, if they are curious in them, they can get for a dollar at any village. But let this stranger, if he will, in your looks, in your accent and behavior, read your heart and earnestness, your thought and will, which he cannot buy at any price, in any village or city ; and which he may well travel fifty miles, and dine sparely and sleep hard in order to behold. Certainly, let the board be spread and let the bed be dressed for the traveller ; but let not the emphasis of hospitality lie in these things. Honor to the house where they are simple to the verge of hardship, so that there the intellect is awake and reads the laws of the universe, the soul worships truth and love, honor and courtesy flow into all deeds.
There was never a country in the world which could so easily exhibit this heroism as ours ; never any where the state has made such efficient provision for popular education, where intellectual entertainment is so within reach of youthful ambition.’ The poor man’s son is educated. There is many a humble house in every city, in every town, where talent and taste and sometimes genius dwell with poverty and labor. Who has not seen, and who can see unmoved, under a low roof, the eager, blushing boys discharging as they can their household chores, and hastening into the sitting-room to the study of to-morrow’s merciless lesson, yet stealing time to read one chapter more of the novel hardly smuggled into the tolerance of father and mother, -atoning for the same by some pages of Plutarch or Goldsmith ; the warm sympathy with which they kindle each other in school-yard or in barn or wood-shed with scraps of poetry or song, with phrases of the last oration, or mimicry of the orator ; the youthful criticism, on Sunday, of the sermons; the school declamation faithfully rehearsed at home, sometimes to the fatigue, sometimes to the admiration of sisters ; the first solitary joys of literary vanity, when the translation or the theme has been completed, sitting alone near the top of the house ; the cautious comparison of the attractive advertisement of the arrival of Macready, Booth or Kemble, or of the discourse of a well-known speaker, with the expense of the entertainment ; the affectionate delight with which they greet the return of each one after the early separations which school or business require ; the foresight with which, during such absences, they hive the honey which opportunity offers, for the ear and imagination of the others ; and the unrestrained glee with which they disburden themselves of their early mental treasures when the holidays bring them again together? What is the hoop that holds them stanch ? It is the iron band of poverty, of necessity, of austerity, which, excluding them from the sensual enjoyments which make other boys too early old, has directed their activity in safe and right channels, and made them, despite themselves, reverers of the grand, the beautiful and the good. Ah ! short-sighted students of books, of Nature and of man! too happy, could they know their advantages. I They pine for freedom from that mild parental yoke; they sigh for fine clothes, for rides, for the theatre and premature freedom and dissipation, which others possess. Woe to them if their wishes were crowned ! The angels that dwell with them and are weaving laurels of life for their youthful brows, are Toil and Want, and Truth, and Mutual Faith. 2
In many parts of true economy a cheering lesson may be learned from the mode of life and <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-second-series/manners/">manners</a> of the later Romans, as described to us in the letters of the younger Pliny. Nor can I resist the temptation of quoting so trite an instance as the noble housekeeping of Lord Falk-land in Clarendon : His house being within little more than ten miles from Oxford, he contracted familiarity and friendship with the most polite and accurate men of that University, who found such an immenseness of wit and such a solidity of judgment in him, so infinite a fancy, bound in by a most logical ratiocination, such a vast knowledge that he was not ignorant in any-thing, yet such an excessive humility, as if he had known nothing, that they frequently resorted and dwelt with him, as in a college situated in a purer air; so that his house was a university in a less volume, whither they came, not so much for repose as study, and to examine and refine those grosser propositions which laziness and consent made current in vulgar conversation.”
I honor that man whose ambition it is, not to win laurels in the state or the army, not to be a jurist or a naturalist, not to be a poet or a commander, but to be a master of living well, and to administer the offices of master or servant, of husband, father and friend. But it requires as much breadth of power for this as for those other functions, – as much, or more, – and the reason for the failure is the same. I think the vice of our housekeeping is that it does not hold man sacred. The vice of government, the vice of education, the vice of religion, is one with that of private life.
In the old fables we used to read of a cloak brought from fairy-land as a gift for the fairest and purest in Prince Arthur’s court. It was to be her prize whom it would fit. Every one was eager to try it on, but it would fit nobody : for one it was a world too wide, for the next it dragged on the ground, and for the third it shrunk to a scarf. They, of course, said that the devil was in the mantle, for really the truth was in the mantle, and was exposing the ugliness which each would fain conceal. All drew back with terror from the garment. The innocent Venelas alone could wear it.I In like manner, every man is provided in his thought with a measure of man which he applies to every passenger. Unhappily, not one in many thou-sands comes up to the stature and proportions of the model. Neither does the measurer him-self; neither do the people in the street; neither do the select individuals whom he admires, – the heroes of the race. When he inspects them critically, he discovers that their aims are low, that they are too quickly satisfied. He observes the swiftness with which life culminates, and the humility of the expectations of the greatest part of men. To each occurs, soon after the age of puberty, some event or society or way of living, which becomes the crisis of life and the chief fact in their history. In woman, it is love and marriage (which is more reasonable) ; and yet it is pitiful to date and measure all the facts and sequel of an unfolding life from such a youthful and generally inconsiderate period as the age of courtship and marriage. In men, it is their place of education, choice of an employment, settlement in a town, or removal to the East or to the West, or some other magnified trifle which makes the meridian moment, and all the after years and actions only derive interest from their relation to that. Hence it comes that we soon catch the trick of each man’s conversation, and knowing his two or three main facts, anticipate what he thinks of each new topic that rises. It is scarcely less perceivable in educated men, so called, than in the uneducated. I have seen finely endowed men at college festivals, ten, twenty years after they had left the halls, returning, as it seemed, the same boys who went away. The same jokes pleased, the same straws tickled; the manhood and offices they brought thither at this return seemed mere ornamental masks ; underneath they were boys yet. We never come to be citizens of the world, but are still villagers, who think that every thing in their petty town is a little superior to the same thing anywhere else. In each the circumstance signalized differs, but in each it is made the coals of an ever-burning egotism. In one, it was his going to sea ; in a second, the difficulties he combated in going to college ; in a third, his journey to the West, or his voyage to Canton ; in a fourth, his coming out of the Quaker Society ; in a fifth, his new diet and regimen ; in a sixth, his coming forth from the abolition organizations ; and in a seventh, his going into them. It is a life of toys and trinkets. We are too easily pleased.
I think this sad result appears in the <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-second-series/manners/">manners</a>. The men we see in each other do not give us the image and likeness of man. The men we see are whipped through the world ; they are harried, wrinkled, anxious ; they all seem the hacks of some invisible riders. How seldom do we behold tranquillity! We have never yet seen a man. We do not know the majestic <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-second-series/manners/">manners</a> that belong to him, which appease and exalt the beholder. There are no divine persons with us, and the multitude do not hasten to be divine. And yet we hold fast, all our lives long, a faith in a better life, in better men, in clean and noble relations, not-withstanding our total inexperience of a true society.I Certainly this was not the intention of Nature, to produce, with all this immense expenditure of means and power, so cheap and humble a result. The aspirations in the heart after the good and true teach us better, -nay, the men themselves suggest a better life.
Every individual nature has its own beauty. One is struck in every company, at every fire-side, with the riches of Nature, when he hears so many new tones, all musical, sees in each person original <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-second-series/manners/">manners</a>, which have a proper and peculiar charm, and reads new expressions of face. He perceives that Nature has laid for each the foundations of a divine building, if the soul will build thereon. There is no face, no form, which one cannot in fancy associate with great power of intellect or with generosity of soul. In our experience, to be sure, beauty is not, as it ought to be, the dower of man and of woman as invariably as sensation. Beauty is, even in the beautiful, occasional, – or, as one has said, culminating and perfect only a single moment, before which it is unripe, and after which it is on the wane. But beauty is never quite absent from our eyes. Every face, every figure, suggests its own right and sound estate. Our friends are not their own highest form. But let the hearts they have agitated witness what power has lurked in the traits of these structures of clay that pass and repass us ! The secret power of form over the imagination and affections transcends all our philosophy. The first glance we meet may satisfy us that matter is the vehicle of higher powers than its own, and that no laws of line or surface can ever account for the inexhaustible expressiveness of form. We see heads that turn on the pivot of the spine, – no more ; and we see heads that seem to turn on a pivot as deep as the axle of the world, – so slow, and lazily, and great, they move. We see on the lip of our companion the presence or absence of the great masters of thought and poetry to his mind. We read in his brow, on meeting him after many years, that he is where we left him, or that he has made great strides.
Whilst thus Nature and the hints we draw from man suggest a true and lofty life, a house-hold equal to the beauty and grandeur of this world, especially we learn the same lesson from those best relations to individual men which the heart is always prompting us to form. Happy will that house be in which the relations are formed from character ; after the highest, and not after the lowest order ; the house in which character marries, and not confusion and a miscellany of unavowable motives. Then shall marriage be a covenant to secure to either party the sweetness and honor of being a calm, continuing, inevitable benefactor to the other. Yes, and the sufficient <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/representative-men/montaigne-the-skeptic/">reply to the skeptic</a> who doubts the competence of man to elevate and to be elevated is in that desire and power to stand in joyful and ennobling intercourse with individuals, which makes the faith and the practice of all reasonable men.
The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it. There is no event greater in life than the appearance of new persons about our hearth, except it be the progress of the character which draws them. It has been finely added by Landor to his definition of the great man, “It is he who can call together the most select company when it pleases him.” A verse of the old Greek Menander remains, which runs in translation : –
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
” Not on the store of sprightly wine, Nor plenty of delicious meats, Though generous Nature did design To court us with perpetual treats, – ‘T is not on these we for content depend, So much as on the shadow of a Friend.”
</blockquote>
It is the happiness which, where it is truly known, postpones all other satisfactions, and makes politics and commerce and churches cheap. For we figure to ourselves, -do we not ? – that when men shall meet as they should, as states meet, – each a benefactor, a shower of falling stars, so rich with deeds, with thoughts, with so much accomplishment, – it shall be the festival of Nature, which all things symbolize; and perhaps Love is only the highest symbol of Friendship, as all other things seem symbols of love. In the progress of each man’s character, his relations to the best men, which at first seem only the romances of youth, acquire a graver importance ; and he will have learned the lesson of life who is skilful in the ethics of friendship.
Beyond its primary ends of the conjugal, parental and amicable relations, the household should cherish the beautiful arts and the sentiment of veneration.
I. Whatever brings the dweller into a finer life, what educates his eye, or ear, or hand, whatever purifies and enlarges him, may well find place there. And yet let him not think that a property in beautiful objects is necessary to VII his apprehension of them, and seek to turn his house into a museum. Rather let the noble practice of the Greeks find place in our society, and let the creations of the plastic arts be collected with care in galleries by the piety and taste of the people, and yielded as freely as the sunlight to all. Meantime, be it remembered, we are artists ourselves, and competitors, each one, with Phidias and Raphael in the production of what is graceful or grand. The fountain of beauty is the heart, and every generous thought illustrates the walls of your chamberI Why should we owe our power of attracting our friends to pictures and vases, to cameos and architecture ? Why should we convert ourselves into showmen and appendages to our fine houses and our works of art ? If by love and nobleness we take up into ourselves the beauty we admire, we shall spend it again on all around us. The man, the woman, needs not the embellishment of canvas and marble, whose every act is a subject for the sculptor, and to whose eye the gods and nymphs never appear ancient, for they know by heart the whole instinct of majesty.
I do not undervalue the fine instruction which statues and pictures give. But I think the public museum in each town will one day relieve the private house of this charge of owning and exhibiting them. I go to Rome and see on the walls of the Vatican the Transfiguration, painted by Raphael, reckoned the first picture in the world ; or in the Sistine Chapel I see the grand sibyls and prophets, painted in fresco by Michel Angelo, – which have every day now for three hundred years inflamed the imagination and exalted the piety of what vast multitudes of men of all nations! I wish to bring home to my children and my friends copies of these admirable forms, which I can find in the shops of the engravers ; but I do not wish the vexation of owning them. I wish to find in my own town a library and museum which is the property of the town, where I can deposit this precious treasure, where I and my children can see it from time to time, and where it has its proper place among hundreds of such donations from other citizens who have brought thither whatever articles they have judged to be in their nature rather a public than a private property.
A collection of this kind, the property of each town, would dignify the town, and we should love and respect our neighbors more. Obviously, it would be easy for every town to discharge this truly municipal duty. Every one of us would gladly contribute his share ; and the more gladly, the more considerable the institution had become.’
2. Certainly, not aloof from this homage to beauty, but in strict connection therewith, the house will come to be esteemed a Sanctuary. The language of a ruder age has given to common law the maxim that every man’s house is his castle : the progress of truth will make every house a shrine. Will not man one day open his eyes and see how dear he is to the soul of Nature,- how near it is to him? Will he not see, through all he miscalls accident, that Law prevails for ever and ever; that his private being is a part of it ; that its home is in his own unsounded heart; that his economy, his labor, his good and bad fortune, his health and <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-second-series/manners/">manners</a> are all a curious and exact demonstration in miniature of the Genius of the Eternal Providence? When he perceives the Law, he ceases to despond. Whilst he sees it, every thought and act is raised, and becomes an act of religion. Does the consecration of Sunday confess the desecration of the entire week? Does the consecration of the church confess the profanation of the house ? Let us read the incantation back ward. Let the man stand on his feet. Let religion cease to be occasional ; and the pulses of thought that go to the borders of the universe, let them proceed from the bosom of the Household.
These are the consolations, – these are the ends to which the household is instituted and the roof-tree stands. If these are sought and in any good degree attained, can the state, can commerce, can climate, can the labor of many for one, yield anything better, or half as good’? Beside these aims, Society is weak and the State an intrusion. I think that the heroism which at this day would make on us the impression of Epaminondas and Phocion must be that of a domestic conqueror. He who shall bravely and gracefully subdue this Gorgon of Convention and Fashion, and show men how to lead a clean, handsome and heroic life amid the beggarly ele? ments of our cities and villages; whoso shall teach me how to eat my meat and take my re? pose and deal with men, without any shame following, will restore the life of man to splen? dor, and make his own name dear to all history.
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<title>Eloquence</title>
<link>https://emersoncentral.com/essays/eloquence/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Emerson West]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 19 Apr 2023 17:29:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Essays]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Society and Solitude (1870)]]></category>
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<description><![CDATA[For whom the Muses smile upon,And touch with soft persuasion,His words, like a storm-wind, can bringTerror and beauty on their wing;In his every syllableLurketh nature veritable;And though he speak in midnight dark, –In heaven no star, on earth no spark, –Yet before the listener’s eyeSwims the world in ecstasy,The forest waves, the morning breaks,The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes,Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons beAnd life pulsates in rock or tree. ELOQUENCE IT is the doctrine of the popular music-masters that whoever can speak can sing. So probably every man is eloquent once in his life. Our temperaments differ in capacity of heat, or, we boil at different degrees. One man…
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For whom the Muses smile upon, And touch with soft persuasion, His words, like a storm-wind, can bring Terror and beauty on their wing; In his every syllable Lurketh nature veritable; And though he speak in midnight dark, – In heaven no star, on earth no spark, – Yet before the listener’s eye Swims the world in ecstasy, The forest waves, the morning breaks, The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes, Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be And life pulsates in rock or tree.
ELOQUENCE
IT is the doctrine of the popular music-masters that whoever can speak can sing. So probably every man is eloquent once in his life. Our temperaments differ in capacity of heat, or, we boil at different degrees. One man is brought to the boiling-point by the excitement of conversation in the parlor. The waters, of course, are not very deep. He has a two-inch enthusiasm, a patty-pan ebullition. Another requires the additional caloric of a multitude and a public de-bate; a third needs an antagonist, or a hot indignation ; a fourth needs a revolution ; and a fifth, nothing less than the grandeur of absolute ideas, the splendors and shades of Heaven and Hell.
But, because every man is an orator, how long soever he may have been a mute, an assembly of men is so much more susceptible. The eloquence of one stimulates all the rest, some up to the speaking-point, and all others to a degree that makes them good receivers and conductors, and they avenge themselves for their enforced silence by increased loquacity on their return to the fireside.
The plight of these phlegmatic brains is better than that of those who prematurely boil, and who impatiently break silence before their time. Our county conventions often exhibit a smallpot-soon-hot style of eloquence. We are too much reminded of a medical experiment where a series of patients are taking nitrous-oxide gas. Each patient in turn exhibits similar symptoms, -redness in the face, volubility, violent gesticulation, delirious attitudes, occasional stamping, an alarming loss of perception of the passage of time, a selfish enjoyment of his sensations, and loss of perception of the sufferings of the audience.
Plato says that the punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is, to live under the government of worse men ; and the like regret is suggested to all the auditors, as the penalty of abstaining to speak, – that they shall hear worse orators than themselves.`
But this lust to speak marks the universal feeling of the energy of the engine, and the curiosity men feel to touch the springs. Of all the musical instruments on which men play, a popular assembly is that which has the largest compass and variety, and out of which, by genius and study, the most wonderful effects can be drawn. An audience is not a simple addition of the individuals that compose it. Their sympathy gives them a certain social organism, which fills each member, in his own degree, and most of all the orator, as a jar in a battery is charged with the whole electricity of the battery. No one can survey the face of an excited assembly, without being apprised of new opportunity for painting in fire human thought, and being agitated to agitate. How many orators sit mute there below ! They come to get justice done to that ear and intuition which no Chatham and no Demosthenes has begun to satisfy.
The Welsh Triads say, ” Many are the friends of the golden tongue.” ‘ Who can wonder at the attractiveness of Parliament, or of Congress, or the bar, for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of society are at the feet of the successful orator? He has his audience at his devotion. All other fames must hush before his. He is the true potentate ; for they are not kings who sit on thrones, but they who know how to govern. The definitions of eloquence describe its attraction for young men. Antiphon the Rhamnusian, one of Plutarch’s ten orators, advertised in Athens ” that he would cure distempers of the mind with words.” 2 No man has a prosperity so high or firm but two or three words can dishearten it. There is no calamity which right words will not begin to redress. Isocrates described his art as ” the power of magnifying what was small and diminishing what was great,” – an acute but partial definition. Among the Spartans, the art assumed a Spartan shape, namely, of the sharpest weapon. Socrates says : ” If any one wishes to converse with the meanest of the Lacedaemonians, he will at first find him despicable in conversation, but when a proper opportunity offers, this same per-son, like a skilful jaculator, will hurl a sentence worthy of attention, short and contorted, so that he who converses with him will appear to be in no respect superior to a boy.” Plato’s definition of rhetoric is, “the art of ruling the minds of men.” The Koran says, “A mountain may change its place, but a man will not change his disposition ; ” yet the end of eloquence is – is it not? -to alter in a pair of hours, perhaps in a half hour’s discourse, the convictions and habits of years. Young Men, too, are eager to enjoy this sense of added power and enlarged sympathetic existence. The orator sees himself the organ of a multitude, and concentrating their valors and powers : –
” But now the blood of twenty thousand men Blushed in my face.”
That which he wishes, that which eloquence ought to reach, is not a particular skill in telling a store, or neatly summing up evidence, or arguing logically, or dexterously addressing the prejudice of the company,- no, but a taking sovereign possession of the audience. Him we call an artist who shall play on an assembly of men as a master on the keys of the piano,-who, seeing the people furious, shall soften and compose them, shall draw them, when he will, to laughter and to tears. Bring him to his audience, and, be they who they may,- coarse or refined, pleased or displeased, sulky or savage, with their opinions in the keeping of a confessor, or with their opinions in their bank-safes,- he will have them pleased and humored as he chooses ; and they shall carry and execute that which he bids them.
This is that despotism which poets have celebrated in the Pied Piper of Hamelin, whose music drew like the power of gravitation,- drew soldiers and priests, traders and feasters, women and boys, rats and mice ; or that of the minstrel of Meudon, who made the pall-bearers dance around the bier. 2 This is a power of many degrees and requiring in the orator a great range of faculty and experience, requiring a large composite man, such as Nature rarely organizes ; so that in our experience we are forced to gather up the figure in fragments, here one talent and there another.
The audience is a constant meter of the orator. There are many audiences in every public assembly, each one of which rules in turn. If any-thing comic and coarse is spoken, you shall see the emergence of the boys and rowdies, so loud and vivacious that you might think the house was filled with them. If new topics are started, graver and higher, these roisters recede ; a more chaste and wise attention takes place. You would think the boys slept, and that the men have any degree of profoundness. If the speaker utter a noble sentiment, the attention deepens, a new and highest audience now listens, and the audiences of the fun and of facts and of the under-standing are all silenced and awed. There is also something excellent in every audience,- the capacity of virtue. They are ready to be beatified. They know so much more than the orator,-and are so just ! There is a tablet there for every line he can inscribe, though he should mount to the highest levels. Humble persons are con? scious of new illumination ; narrow brows expand with enlarged affections; – delicate spirits, long unknown to themselves, masked and muffled in coarsest fortunes, who now hear their own native language for the first time, and leap to hear it.’ But all these several audiences, each above each, which successively appear to greet the variety of style and topic, are really composed out of the same persons ; nay, sometimes the same individual will take active part in them all, in turn.
This range of many powers in the consummate speaker, and of many audiences in one assembly, leads us to consider the successive stages of oratory.
Perhaps it is the lowest of the qualities of an orator, but it is, on so many occasions, of chief importance,-a certain robust and radiant physical health ; or, – shall I say ? – great volumes of animal heat. When each auditor feels himself to make too large a part of the assembly, and shudders with cold at the thinness of the morning audience, and with fear lest all will heavily fail through one bad speech, mere energy and mellowness are then inestimable. Wisdom and learning would be harsh and unwelcome, compared with a substantial cordial man, made of milk as we say, who is a house-warmer, with his obvious honesty and good meaning, and a hue-and-cry style of harangue, which inundates the assembly with a flood of animal spirits, and makes all safe and secure, so that any and every sort of good speaking becomes at once practicable. I do not rate this animal eloquence very highly; and yet, as we must be fed and warmed before we can do any work well, – even the best, – so is this semi-animal exuberance, like a good stove, of the first necessity in a cold house.
Climate has much to do with it,-climate and race. Set. a New Englander to describe any accident which happened in his presence. What hesitation and reserve in his narrative! He tells with difficulty some particulars, and gets as fast as he can to the result, and, though he cannot describe, hopes to suggest the whole scene. Now listen to a poor Irishwoman recounting some experience of hers. Her speech flows like a river, – so unconsidered, so humorous, so pathetic, such justice done to all the parts! ‘ It is a true transubstantiation,-the fact converted into speech, all warm and colored and alive, as it fell out. Our Southern people are almost all speakers, and have every advantage over the New England people, whose climate is so cold that ‘t is said we do not like to open our mouths very wide.’ But neither can the Southerner in the United States, nor the Irish, compare with the lively inhabitant of the south of Europe. The traveller in Sicily needs no gayer melodramatic exhibition than the table d’hote of his inn will afford him in the conversation of the joyous guests. They mimic the voice and manner of the person they describe ; they crow, squeal, hiss, cackle, bark, and scream like mad, and, were it only by the physical strength exerted in telling the story, keep the table in unbounded excitement. But in every constitution some large degree of animal vigor is necessary as material foundation for the higher qualities of the art.
But eloquence must be attractive, or it is none. The virtue of books is to be readable, and of orators to be interesting ; and this is a gift of Nature ; as Demosthenes, the most laborious student in that kind, signified his sense of this necessity when he wrote, “Good Fortune,” as his motto on his shield. As we know, the power of discourse of certain individuals amounts to fascination, though it may have no lasting effect. Some portion of this sugar must intermingle. The right eloquence needs no bell to call the people together, and no constable to keep them. It draws the children from their play, the old from their arm-chairs, the invalid from his warm chamber : it holds the hearer fast; steals away his feet, that he shall not depart ; his memory, that he shall not remember the most pressing affairs ; his belief; that he shall not admit any opposing considerations. The pictures we have of it in semi-barbarous ages, when it has some advantages in the simpler habit of the people, show what it aims at. It is said that the Khans or story-tellers in Ispahan and other cities of the East, attain a controlling power over their audience, keeping them for many hours attentive to the most fanciful and extravagant adventures. The whole world knows pretty well the style of these improvisators, and how fascinating they are, in our translations of the Arabian Nights. Scheherezade tells these stories to save her life, and the delight of young Europe and young America in them proves that she fairly earned it. And who does not remember in childhood some white or black or yellow Scheherezade, who, by that talent of telling endless feats of fairies and magicians and kings and queens, was more dear and wonderful to a circle of children than any orator in England or America is now?’
The more indolent and imaginative complexion of the Eastern nations makes them much more impressible by these appeals to the fancy.
These legends are only exaggerations of real occurrences, and every literature contains these high compliments to the art of the orator and the bard, from the Hebrew and the Greek down to the Scottish Glenkindie, who
” harpit a fish out o’ saut-water, Or water out of a stone, Or milk out of a maiden’s breast Who bairn had never none.”
Homer specially delighted in drawing the same figure. For what is the Odyssey but a history of the orator, in the largest style, carried through a series of adventures furnishing brilliant opportunities to his talent? See with what care and pleasure the poet brings him on the stage. Helen is pointing out to Priam, from a tower, the different Grecian chiefs. ” The old man asked: Tell me, dear child, who is that man, shorter by a head than Agamemnon, yet he looks broader in his shoulders and breast. His arms lie on the ground, but he, like a leader, walks about the bands of the men. He seems to me like a stately ram, who goes as a master of the flock.’ Him answered Helen, daughter of Jove, This is the wise Ulysses, son of Laertes, who was reared in the state of craggy Ithaca, knowing all wiles and wise counsels.’ To her the prudent Antenor re-plied again : O woman, you have spoken truly. For once the wise Ulysses came hither on an embassy, with Menelaus, beloved by Mars. I received them and entertained them at my house. I became acquainted with the genius and the prudent judgments of both. When they mixed with the assembled Trojans, and stood, the broad shoulders of Menelaus rose above the other; but, both sitting, Ulysses was more majestic. When they conversed, and interweaved stories and opinions with all, Menelaus spoke succinctly, – few but very sweet words, since he was not talkative nor superfluous in speech, and was the younger. But when the wise Ulysses arose and stood and looked down, fixing his eves on the ground, and neither moved his sceptre backward nor forward, but held it still, like an awkward person, you would say it was some angry or foolish man ; but when he sent his great voice forth out of his breast, and his words fell like the winter snows, not then would any mortal contend with Ulysses ; and we, beholding, wondered not afterwards so much at his aspect.’ ” Thus he does not fail to arm Ulysses at first with this power of overcoming all opposition by the blandishments of speech. Plutarch tells us that Thucydides, when Archidamus, king of Sparta, asked him which was the best wrestler, Pericles or he, replied, ” When I throw him, he says he was never down, and he persuades the very spectators to believe him.” Philip of Macedon said of Demosthenes, on hearing the report of one of his orations, ” Had I been there, he would have persuaded me to take up arms against myself;” and Warren Hastings said of Burke’s speech on his impeachment, ” As I listened to the orator, I felt for more than half an hour as if I were the most culpable being on earth.”
In these examples, higher qualities have al-ready entered, but the power of detaining the ear by pleasing speech, and addressing the fancy and imagination, often exists without higher merits. Thus separated, as this fascination of discourse aims only at amusement, though it be decisive in its momentary effect, it is yet a juggle, and of no lasting power. It is heard like a band of music passing through the streets, which converts all the passengers into poets, but is forgotten as soon as it has turned the next corner; and unless this oiled tongue could, in Oriental phrase, lick the sun and moon away, it must take its place with opium and brandy. I know no remedy against it but cotton-wool, or the wax which Ulysses stuffed into the ears of his sailors to pass the Sirens safely.’
There are all degrees of power, and the least are interesting, but they must not be con-founded. There is the glib tongue and cool self-possession of the salesman in a large shop, which, as is well known, overpower the prudence and resolution of housekeepers of both sexes. There is a petty lawyer’s fluency, which is sufficiently impressive to him who is devoid of that talent, though it be, in so many cases, nothing more than a facility of expressing with accuracy and speed what everybody thinks and says more slowly ; without new information, or precision of thought, but the same thing, neither less nor more. It requires no special insight to edit one of our country newspapers. Yet whoever can say off currently, sentence by sentence, matter neither better nor worse than what is there printed, will be very impressive to our easilv pleased population. These talkers are of that class who prosper, like the celebrated school-master, by being only one lesson ahead of the pupil. Add a little sarcasm and prompt allusion to passing occurrences, and you have the mischievous member of Congress. A spice of malice, a ruffian touch in his rhetoric, will do him no harm with his audience. These accomplishments are of the same kind, and only a degree higher than the coaxing of the auctioneer, or the vituperative style well described in the street-word “jawing.” These kinds of public and private speaking have their use and convenience to the practitioners ; but we may say of such collectively that the habit of oratory is apt to disqualify them for eloquence.
One of our statesmen ‘ said, ” The curse of this country is eloquent men.” And one cannot wonder at the uneasiness sometimes manifested by trained statesmen, with large experience of public affairs, when they observe the disproportionate advantage suddenly given to oratory over the most solid and accumulated public service. In a Senate or other business committee, the solid result depends on a few men with working talent. They know how to deal with the facts before them, to put things into a practical shape, and they value men only as they can forward the work. But a new man comes there who has no capacity for helping them at all, is insignificant, and nobody in the committee, but has a talent for speaking. I n the debate with open doors, this precious person makes a speech which is printed and read all over the Union, and he at once becomes famous, and takes the lead in the public mind over all these executive men, who, of course, are full of indignation to find one who has no tact or skill and knows he has none, put over them by means of this talking-power which they despise.
Leaving behind us these pretensions, better or worse, to come a little nearer to the verity,-eloquence is attractive as an example of the magic of personal ascendency, -a total and resultant power, rare, because it requires a rich coincidence of powers, intellect, will, sympathy, organs and, over all, good fortune in the cause. We have a half belief that the person is possible who can counterpoise all other persons. We believe that there may be a man who is a match for events, one who never found his match, against whom other men being dashed are broken,-one of inexhaustible personal resources, who can give you any odds and beat you. What we really wish for is a mind equal to any exigency. You are safe in your rural district, or in the city, in broad daylight, amidst the police, and under the eyes of a hundred thousand people. But how is it on the Atlantic, in a storm, – do you under-stand how to infuse your reason into men disabled by terror, and to bring yourself off safe then ? – how among thieves, or among an infuriated populace, or among cannibals ? Face to face with a highwayman who has every temptation and opportunity for violence and plunder, can you bring yourself off safe by your wit exercised through speech? – a problem easy enough to Caesar or Napoleon. Whenever a man of that stamp arrives, the highwayman has found a master. What a difference between men in power of face ! A man succeeds be-cause he has more power of eye than another, and so coaxes or confounds him. The news-papers, every week, report the adventures of some impudent swindler, who, by steadiness of carriage, duped those who should have known better. Yet any swindlers we have known are novices and bunglers, as is attested by their ill name. A greater power of face would accomplish anything, and, with the rest of their takings, take away the bad name. A greater power of carrying the thing loftily and with perfect assurance, would confound merchant, banker, judge, men of influence and power, poet and president, and might head any party, unseat any sovereign, and abrogate any constitution in Europe and America. It was said that a man has at one step attained vast power, who has renounced his moral sentiment, and settled it with himself that he will no longer stick at anything. It was said of Sir William Pepperell, one of the worthies of New England, that, “put him where you might, he commanded, and saw what he willed come to pass.” Julius Caesar said to Metellus, when that tribune interfered to hinder him from entering the Roman treasury, “Young man, it is easier for me to put you to death than to say that I will ;” and the youth yielded. I n earlier days, he was taken by pirates. What then? He threw himself into their ship, established the most extraordinary intimacies, told them stories, de-claimed to them; if they did not applaud his speeches, he threatened them with hanging,-which he performed afterwards,-and, in a short time, was master of all on board. A man this is who cannot be disconcerted, and so can never play his last card, but has a reserve of power when he has hit his mark. With a serene face, he subverts a kingdom. What is told of him is miraculous; it affects men so. The confidence of men in him is lavish, and he changes the face of the world, and histories, poems and new philoso? phies arise to account for him. A supreme commander over all his passions and affections ; but the secret of his ruling is higher than that. It is the power of Nature running without impediment from the brain and will into the hands.’ Men and women are his game. Where they are, he cannot be without resource. ” Whoso can speak well,” said Luther, ” is a man.” It was men of this stamp that the Grecian States used to ask of Sparta for generals. They did not send to Lacedaemon for troops, but they said, “Send us a commander ; ” and Pausanias, or Gylippus, or Brasidas, or Agis, was despatched by the Ephors.
It is easy to illustrate this overpowering personality by these examples of soldiers and kings; but there are men of the most peaceful way of life and peaceful principle, who are felt wherever they go, as sensibly as a July sun or a December frost, -men who, if they speak, are heard, though they speak in a whisper,-who, when they act, act effectually, and what they do is imitated; and these examples may be found on very humble platforms as well as on high ones. In old countries a high money value is set on the services of men who have achieved a personal distinction. He who has points to carry must hire, not a skilful attorney, but a commanding person. A barrister in England is reputed to have made thirty or forty thousand pounds per annum in representing the claims of railroad companies before committees of the House of Commons. His clients pay not so much for legal as for manly accomplishments,-for courage, conduct and a commanding social position, which enable him to make their claims heard and respected.’
I know very well that among our cool and calculating people, where every man mounts guard over himself, where heats and panics and abandonments are quite out of the system, there is a good deal of skepticism as to extraordinary influence. To talk of an overpowering mind rouses the same jealousy and defiance which one may observe round a table where anybody is recounting the marvellous anecdotes of mesmerism. Each auditor puts a final stroke to the discourse by exclaiming, ” Can he mesmerize me?” So each man inquires if any orator can change his conyictions.
But does any one suppose himself to be quite impregnable ? Does he think that not possibly a man may come to him who shall persuade him out of his most settled determination ? – for example, good sedate citizen as he is, to make a fanatic of him, – or, if he is penurious, to squander money for some purpose he now least thinks of,- or, if he is a prudent, industrious person, to forsake his work, and give days and weeks to a new interest ? No, he defies any one, every one. Ah ! he is thinking of resistance, and of a different turn from his own. But what if one should come of the same turn of mind as his own, and who sees much farther on his own way than he ? A man who has tastes like mine, but in greater power, will rule me any day, and make me love my ruler.
Thus it is not powers of speech that we primarily consider under this word eloquence, but the power that being present, gives them their perfection, and being absent, leaves them a merely superficial value. Eloquence is the appropriate organ of the highest personal energy. Personal ascendency may exist with or without adequate talent for its expression. It is as surely felt as a mountain or a planet ; but when it is weaponed with a power of speech, it seems first to become truly human, works actively in all directions, and supplies the imagination with fine materials.
This circumstance enters into every consideration of the power of orators, and is the key to all their effects. In the assembly, you shall find the orator and the audience in perpetual balance ; and the predominance of either is indicated by the choice of topic. If the talents for speaking exist, but not the strong personality, then there are good speakers who perfectly receive and express the will of the audience, and the commonest populace is flattered by hearing its low mind returned to it with every ornament which happy talent can add. But if there be personality in the orator, the face of things changes. The audience is thrown into the attitude of pupil, follows like a child its preceptor, and hears what he has to say. It is as if, amidst the king’s council at Madrid, Ximenes urged that an advantage might be gained of France, and Mendoza that Flanders might be kept down, and Columbus, being introduced, was interrogated whether his geographical knowledge could aid the cabinet ; and he can say nothing to one party or to the other, but he can show how all Europe can be diminished and reduced under the king, by annexing to Spain a continent as large as six or seven Europes.
This balance between the orator and the audience is expressed in what is called the perti? nence of the speaker.’ There is always a rivalry between the orator and the occasion, between the demands of the hour and the prepossession of the individual. The emergency which has convened the meeting is usually of more importance than anything the debaters have in their minds, and therefore becomes imperative to them. But if one of them have anything of commanding necessity in his heart, how speedily he will find vent for it, and with the applause of the assembly ! This balance is observed in the privatest intercourse. Poor Tom never knew the time when the present occurrence was so trivial that he could tell what was passing in his mind without being checked for unseasonable speech ; but let Bacon speak and wise men would rather listen though the revolution of kingdoms was on foot. I have heard it reported of an eloquent preacher, whose voice is not yet forgotten in this city,’ that, on occasions of death or tragic disaster which overspread the congregation with gloom, he ascended the pulpit with more than his usual alacrity, and turning to his favorite lessons of devout and jubilant thankfulness,-” Let us praise the Lord,” – carried audience, mourners and mourning along with him, and swept away all the impertinence of private sorrow with his hosannas and songs of praise. Pepys says of Lord Clarendon (with whom ” he is mad in love “) on his return from a conference, ” I did never observe how much easier a man do speak when he knows all the company to be below him, than in him ; for, though he spoke indeed excellent well, yet his manner and freedom of doing it, as if he played with it, and was informing only all the rest of the company, was mighty pretty.”
This rivalry between the orator and the occasion is inevitable, and the occasion always yields to the eminence of the speaker ; for a great man is the greatest of occasions. Of course the interest of the audience and of the orator conspire. It is well with them only when his influence is complete ; then only they are well pleased. Especially he consults his power by making instead of taking his theme. If he should attempt to instruct the people in that which they already know, he would fail ; but by making them wise in that which he knows, he has the advantage of the assembly every moment. Napoleon’s tactics of marching on the angle of an army, and always presenting a superiority of numbers, is the orator’s secret also.
The several talents which the orator em-ploys, the splendid weapons which went to the equipment of Demosthenes, of AEschines, of Demades the natural orator, of Fox, of Pitt, of Patrick Henry, of Adams, of Mirabeau, de-serve a special enumeration. We must not quite omit to name the principal pieces.
The orator, as we have seen, must be a substantial personality. Then, first, he must have power of statement, – must have the fact, and know how to tell it.’ In any knot of men conversing on any subject, the person who knows most about it will have the ear of the company if he wishes it, and lead the conversation, no matter what genius or distinction other men there present may have ; and in any public assembly, him who has the facts and can and will state them, people will listen to, though he is other-wise ignorant, though he is hoarse and ungraceful, though he stutters and screams.
In a court of justice the audience are impartial ; they really wish to sift the statements and know what the truth is. And in the examination of witnesses there usually leap out, quite unexpectedly, three or four stubborn words or phrases which are the pith and fate of the business, which sink into the ear of all parties, and stick there, and determine the cause. All the rest is repetition and qualifying ; and the court and the county have really come together to arrive at these three or four memorable expressions which betrayed the mind and meaning of somebody.
In every company the man with the fact is like the guide you hire to lead your party up a mountain, or through a difficult country. He may not compare with any of the party in mind or breeding or courage or possessions, but he is much more important to the present need than any of them.’ That is what we go to the court-house for,- the statement of the fact, and of a general fact, the real relation of all the par-ties ; and it is the certainty with which, indifferently in any affair that is well handled, the truth stares us in the face through all the disguises that are put upon it,-a piece of the well-known human life, – that makes the interest of a court-room to the intelligent spectator.
I remember long ago being attracted, by the distinction of the counsel and the local importance of the cause, into the court-room. The prisoner’s counsel were the strongest and cunningest lawyers in the commonwealth. They drove the attorney for the state from corner to corner, taking his reasons from under him, and reducing him to silence, but not to submission. When hard pressed, he revenged himself, in his turn, on the judge, by requiring the court to de-fine what salvage was. The court, thus pushed, tried words, and said everything it could think of to fill the time, supposing cases, and describing duties of insurers, captains, pilots and miscellaneous sea-officers that are or might be,-like a schoolmaster puzzled by a hard sum, who reads the context with emphasis. But all this flood not serving the cuttle-fish to get away in, the horrible shark of the district attorney being still there, grimly awaiting with his ” The court must define,”- the poor court pleaded its inferiority. The superior court must establish the law for this, and it read away piteously the decisions of the Supreme Court, but read to those who had no pity. The judge was forced at last to rule something, and the lawyers saved their rogue under the fog of a definition. The parts were so well cast and discriminated that it was an interesting game to watch. The government was well enough represented. It was stupid, but it had a strong will and possession, and stood on that to the last. The judge had a task beyond his preparation, yet his position remained real : he was there to represent a great reality,-the justice of states, which we could well enough see beetling over his head, and which his trifling talk nowise affected, and did not impede, since he was entirely well meaning.
The statement of the fact, however, sinks before the statement of the law, which requires immeasurably higher powers, and is a rarest gift, being in all great masters one and the same thing,-in lawyers nothing technical, but always some piece of common sense, alike interesting to laymen as to clerks. Lord Mansfield’s merit is the merit of common sense.’ It is the same quality we admire in Aristotle, Montaigne, Cervantes, or in Samuel Johnson or Franklin. Its application to law seems quite accidental. Each of Mansfield’s famous decisions contains a level sentence or two which hit the mark. His sentences are not always finished to the eve, but are finished to the mind. The sentences are involved, but a solid proposition is set forth, a true distinction is drawn. They come from and they go to the sound human understanding; and I read without surprise that the black-letter lawyers of the day sneered at his ” equitable decisions,” as if they were not also learned. This, indeed, is what speech is for, – to make the statement ; and all that is called eloquence seems to me of little use for the most part to those who have it, but inestimable to such as have something to say.
Next to the knowledge of the fact and its law is method, which constitutes the genius and efficiency of all remarkable men. A crowd of men go up to Faneuil Hall ; they are all pretty well acquainted with the object of the meeting ; they have all read the facts in the same news-papers. The orator possesses no information which his hearers have not, yet he teaches them to see the thing with his eyes. By the new placing, the circumstances acquire new solidity and worth. Every fact gains consequence by his naming it, and trifles become important. His expressions fix themselves in men’s memories, and fly from mouth to mouth. His mind has some new principle of order. Where he looks, all things fly into their places. What will he say next? Let this man speak, and this man only. By applying the habits of a higher style of thought to the common affairs of this world, he introduces beauty and magnificence wherever he goes. Such a power was Burke’s, and of this genius we have had some brilliant examples in our own political and legal men.
Imagery. The orator must be, to a certain extent, a poet. We are such imaginative creatures that nothing so works on the human mind, barbarous or civil, as a trope. Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol, and an audience is electrified. They feel as if they already possessed some new right and power over a fact which they can detach, and so completely master in thought. It is a wonderful aid to the memory, which carries away the image and never loses it. A popular assembly, like the House of Commons, or the French Chamber, or the American Congress, is commanded by these two powers, – first by a fact, then by skill of statement. Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, – some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, – and the cause is half won.
Statement, method, imagery, selection, tenacity of memory, power of dealing with facts, of illuminating them, of sinking them by ridicule or by diversion of the mind, rapid generalization, humor, pathos, are keys which the orator holds ; and yet these fine gifts are not eloquence, and do often hinder a man’s attainment of it. And if we come to the heart of the mystery, perhaps we should say that the truly eloquent man is a sane man with power to communicate his sanity.’ If you arm the man with the extraordinary weapons of this art, give him a grasp of facts, learning, quick fancy, sarcasm, splendid allusion, interminable illustration, – all these talents, so potent and charming, have an equal power to ensnare and mislead the audience and the orator. His talents are too much for him, his horses run away with him ; and people al-ways perceive whether you drive or whether the horses take the bits in their teeth and run. 2 But these talents are quite something else when they are subordinated and serve him ; and we go to Washington, or to Westminster Hall, or might well go round the world, to see a man who drives, and is not run away with, – a man who, in prosecuting great designs, has an absolute command of the means of representing his ideas, and uses them only to express these ; placing facts, placing men ; amid the inconceivable levity of human beings, never for an instant warped from his erectness. There is for every man a statement possible of that truth which he is most unwilling to receive, – a statement possible, so broad and so pungent that he cannot get away from it, but must either bend to it or die of it. Else there would be no such word as eloquence, which means this. The listener cannot hide from himself that something has been shown him and the whole world which he did not wish to see ; and as he cannot dispose of it, it disposes of him. The history of public men and affairs in America will readily furnish tragic examples of this fatal force.’
For the triumphs of the art somewhat more must still be required, namely a reinforcing of man from events, so as to give the double force of reason and destiny. In transcendent eloquence, there was ever some crisis in affairs, such as could deeply engage the man to the cause he pleads, and draw all this wide power to a point. For the explosions and eruptions, there must be accumulations of heat somewhere, beds of ignited anthracite at the centre. And in cases where profound conviction has been wrought, the eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief. It agitates and tears him, and perhaps almost bereaves him of the power of articulation.’ Then it rushes from him as in short, abrupt screams, in torrents of meaning. The possession the subject has of his mind is so en-tire that it insures an order of expression which is the order of Nature itself, and so the order of greatest force, and inimitable by any art. And the main distinction between him and other well-graced actors is the conviction, communicated by every word, that his mind is contemplating a whole, and inflamed by the contemplation of the whole, and that the words and sentences uttered by him, however admirable, fall from him as unregarded parts of that terrible whole which he sees and which he means that you shall see. Add to this concentration a certain regnant calmness, which, in all the tumult, never utters a premature syllable, but keeps the secret of its means and method ; and the orator stands before the people as a demoniacal power to whose miracles they have no key. This terrible earnestness makes good the ancient superstition of the hunter, that the bullet will hit its mark, which is first dipped in the marks-man’s blood.
Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards, it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color, speaks only through the most poetic forms ; but, first and last, it must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact. The orator is thereby an orator, that he keeps his feet ever on a fact.
Thus only is he invincible. No gifts, no graces, no power of wit or learning or illustration will make any amends for want of this. All audiences are just to this point. Fame of voice or of rhetoric will carry people a few times to hear a speaker ; but they soon begin to ask, ” What is he driving at ? ” and if this man does not stand for anything, he will be deserted. A good upholder of anything which they believe, a fact-speaker of any kind, they will long follow ; but a pause in the speaker’s own character is very properly a loss of attraction. The preacher enumerates his classes of men and I do not find my place therein ; I suspect then that no man does. Everything is my cousin ; and whilst he speaks things, I feel that he is touching some of my relations, and I am uneasy ; but whilst he deals in words we are released from attention.’ If you would lift me you must be on higher ground. If you would liberate me you must be free. If you would correct my false view of facts,- hold up to me the same facts in the true order of thought, and I cannot go back from the new conviction.
The power of Chatham, of Pericles, of Luther, rested on this strength of character, which, because it did not and could not fear anybody, made nothing of their antagonists, and became sometimes exquisitely provoking and sometimes terrific to these.
We are slenderly furnished with anecdotes of these men, nor can we help ourselves by those heavy books in which their discourses are re-ported. Some of them were writers, like Burke ; but most of them were not, and no record at all adequate to their fame remains. Besides, what is best is lost, – the fiery life of the moment. But the conditions for eloquence always exist. It is always dying out of famous places and appearing in corners. Wherever the polarities meet, wherever the fresh moral sentiment, the instinct of freedom and duty, come in direct opposition to fossil conservatism and the thirst of gain, the spark will pass. The resistance to slavery in this country has been a fruitful nursery of orators.’ The natural connection by which it drew to itself a train of moral reforms, and the slight vet sufficient party organization it offered, reinforced the city with new blood from the woods and mountains. Wild men, John Baptists, Hermit Peters, John Knoxes, utter the savage sentiment of Nature in the heart of commercial capitals. They send us every year some piece of aboriginal strength, some tough oak-stick of a man who is not to be silenced or insulted or intimidated by a mob, because he is more mob than they,- one who mobs the mob, – some sturdy countryman, on whom neither money, nor politeness, nor hard words, nor eggs, nor blows, nor brickbats make any impression. He is fit to meet the barroom wits and bullies ; he is a wit and a bully himself, and something more: he is a graduate of the plough, and the stub-hoe, and the bushwhacker; knows all the secrets of swamp and snow-bank, and has nothing to learn of labor or poverty or the rough of farming. His hard head went through, in childhood, the drill of Calvinism, with text and mortification, so that he stands in the New England assembly a purer bit of New England than any, and flings his sarcasms right and left. He has not only the documents in his pocket to answer all cavils and to prove all his positions, but he has the eternal reason in his head: This man scornfully renounces your civil organizations, – county, or city, or governor, or army; – is his own navy and artillery, judge and jury, legislature and executive. He has learned his lessons in a bitter school. Yet, if the pupil be of a texture to bear it, the best university that can be recom? mended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mobs.
He who will train himself to mastery in this science of persuasion must lay the emphasis of education, not on popular arts, but on character and insight. Let him see that his speech is not differenced from action ; that when he has spoken he has not done nothing, nor done wrong, but has cleared his own skirts, has engaged himself to wholesome exertion. Let him look on opposition as opportunity. He cannot be defeated or put down. There is a principle of resurrection in him, an immortality of purpose. Men are averse and hostile, to give value to their suffrages. It is not the people that are in fault for not being convinced, but he that cannot convince them. He should mould them, armed as he is with the reason and love which are also the core of their nature. He is not to neutralize their opposition, but he is to convert them into fiery apostles and publishers of the same wisdom.
The highest platform of eloquence is the moral sentiment. It is what is called affirmative truth, and has the property of invigorating the hearer ; and it conveys a hint of our eternity, when he feels himself addressed on grounds which will remain when everything else is taken, and which have no trace of time or place or party. Everything hostile is stricken down in the presence of the sentiments; their majesty is felt by the most obdurate.’ It is observable that as soon as one acts for large masses, the moral element will and must be allowed for, will and must work ; and the men least accustomed to appeal to these sentiments invariably recall them when they address nations. Napoleon, even, must accept and use it as he can.
It is only to these simple strokes that the highest power belongs, – when a weak human hand touches, point by point, the eternal beams and rafters on which the whole structure of Nature and society is laid. 2 In this tossing sea of delusion we feel with our feet the adamant ; in this dominion of chance we find a principle of permanence. For I do not accept that definition of Isocrates, that the office of his art is to make the great small and the small great ; but I esteem this to be its perfection,-when the orator sees through all masks to the eternal scale of truth, in such sort that he can hold up before the eyes of men the fact of to-day steadily to that standard, thereby making the great great, and the small small, which is the true way to astonish and to reform mankind.’
All the chief orators of the world have been grave men, relying on this reality. One thought the philosophers of Demosthenes’s own time found running through all his orations,-this namely, that ” virtue secures its own success.” ” To stand on one’s own feet ” Heeren’ finds the key-note to the discourses of Demosthenes, as of Chatham.
Eloquence, like every other art, rests on laws the most exact and determinate. It is the best speech of the best soul. It may well stand as the exponent of all that is grand and immortal in the mind. If it do not so become an instrument, but aspires to be somewhat of itself, and to glitter for show, it is false and weak. In its right exercise, it is an elastic, unexhausted power, – who has sounded, who has estimated it ? – expanding with the expansion of our interests and affections. Its great masters, whilst they valued every help to its attainment, and thought no pains too great which contributed in any manner to further it, – resembling the Arabian warrior of fame, who wore seventeen weapons in his belt, and in personal combat used them all occasionally,’ – yet subordinated all means; never permitted any talent – neither voice, rhythm, poetic power, anecdote, sarcasm – to appear for show; but were grave men, who preferred their integrity to their talent, and esteemed that object for which they toiled, whether the prosperity of their country, or the laws, or a reformation, or liberty of speech or of the press, or letters, or morals, as above the whole world, and themselves also.
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<title>Dive into Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”: Insights, Analysis, and Discussion</title>
<link>https://emersoncentral.com/discussion/emersons-self-reliance/</link>
<comments>https://emersoncentral.com/discussion/emersons-self-reliance/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Emerson West]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 09 Feb 2023 18:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Discussion]]></category>
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<description><![CDATA[“Self-Reliance” was published five years after Nature; do you see any development in Emerson’s thought during that period, or does “Self-Reliance” just recapitulate the ideas of Nature? You might look for passages in “Self-Reliance” that seem to echo Nature, and think about whether they offer “new ideas” compared to the earlier formulation.
The post <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/discussion/emersons-self-reliance/">Dive into Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”: Insights, Analysis, and Discussion</a> appeared first on <a href="https://emersoncentral.com">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a>.
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<content:encoded><![CDATA[<a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/self-reliance/">Emerson Self Reliance</a>
How is this essay more focused than Nature? What seems to be the thrust of the discussion?
“Self-Reliance” was published five years after Nature; do you see any development in Emerson’s thought during that period, or does “Self-Reliance” recapitulate the ideas of Nature? You might look for passages in “Self-Reliance” that seem to echo Nature and consider whether they offer “new ideas” compared to the earlier formulation.
What distinguishes self-reliance from selfishness? Do you see any points in the essay where Emerson seems to cross this line?
In this essay, Emerson states, “Imitation is suicide”; what do you think he means by this? How might we compare it with Ben Franklin’s stance that his life is “fit to be imitated”? Are these two positions fundamentally opposite, or is it possible to reconcile them?
What does Emerson say in this essay about philanthropy and charity? Do his arguments seem credible? Why or why not?
The post <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/discussion/emersons-self-reliance/">Dive into Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”: Insights, Analysis, and Discussion</a> appeared first on <a href="https://emersoncentral.com">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a>.
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<title>Clubs</title>
<link>https://emersoncentral.com/essays/clubs/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Emerson West]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sun, 24 Jul 2022 17:46:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Essays]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Society and Solitude (1870)]]></category>
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<description><![CDATA[YET Saadi loved the race of men, –No churl, immured in cave or den;In bower and hallHe wants them all; But he has no companion;Come ten, or come a million, <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/poems/saadi/">Good Saadi dwells alone</a> . Too long shut in strait and few,Thinly dieted on dew,I will use the world, and sift it,To a thousand humors shift it. CLUBS WE are delicate machines, and require nice treatment to get from us the maximum of power and pleasure. We need tonics, but must have those that cost little or no reaction. The flame of life burns too fast in pure oxygen, and Nature has tempered the air with nitrogen. So thought is the native air of…
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YET Saadi loved the race of men, – No churl, immured in cave or den; In bower and hall He wants them all;
But he has no companion; Come ten, or come a million, <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/poems/saadi/">Good Saadi dwells alone</a>.
Too long shut in strait and few, Thinly dieted on dew, I will use the world, and sift it, To a thousand humors shift it.
CLUBS
WE are delicate machines, and require nice treatment to get from us the maximum of power and pleasure. We need tonics, but must have those that cost little or no reaction. The flame of life burns too fast in pure oxygen, and Nature has tempered the air with nitrogen. So thought is the native air of the mind, yet pure it is a poison to our mixed constitution, and soon burns up the bone-house of man, unless tempered with affection and coarse practice in the material world. Varied foods, climates, beautiful objects, – and especially the alternation of a large variety of objects, – are the necessity of this exigent system of ours. But our tonics, our luxuries, are force-pumps which exhaust the strength they pretend to supply ; and of all the cordials known to us, the best, safest and most exhilarating, with the least harm, is society ; and every healthy and efficient mind passes a large part of life in the company most easy to him.’
We seek society with very different aims, and the staple of conversation is widely unlike in its circles. Sometimes it is facts, – running from those of daily necessity, to the last results of science, – and has all degrees of importance ; sometimes it is love, and makes the balm of our early and of our latest days ; ‘ sometimes it is thought, as from a person who is a mind only ; sometimes a singing, as if the heart poured out all like a bird ; sometimes experience. With some men it is a debate ; at the approach of a dispute they neigh like horses. Unless there be an argument, they think nothing is doing. Some talkers excel in the precision with which they formulate their thoughts, so that you get from them somewhat to remember ; others lay criticism asleep by a charm. Especially women use words that are not words, – as steps in a dance are not steps, – but reproduce the genius of that they speak of; as the sound of some bells makes us think of the bell merely, whilst the church-chimes in the distance bring the church and its serious memories before us. Opinions are accidental in people, -have a poverty-stricken air. A man valuing himself as the organ of this or that dogma is a dull companion enough ; but opinion native to the speaker is sweet and refreshing, and inseparable from his image. Neither do we by any means always go to people for conversation. How often to say nothing,- and yet must go ; as a child will long for his companions, but among them plays by himself. ‘T is only presence which we want. But one thing is certain, – at some rate, intercourse we must have. The experience of retired men is positive, – that we lose our days and are barren of thought for want of some person to talk with. The understanding can no more empty itself by its own action than can a deal box.
The clergyman walks from house to house all day all the year to give people the comfort of good talk. The physician helps them mainly in the same way, by healthy talk giving a right tone to the patient’s mind. The dinner, the walk, the fireside, all have that for their main end.’
See how Nature has secured the communication of knowledge. ‘T is certain that money does not more burn in a boy’s pocket than a piece of news burns in our memory until we can tell it. And in higher activity of mind, every new perception is attended with a thrill of plea-sure, and the imparting of it to others is also attended with pleasure. Thought is the child of the intellect, and this child is conceived with joy and born with joy.’
Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student. The affection or sympathy helps. The wish to speak to the want of another mind assists to clear your own. A certain truth possesses us which we in all ways strive to utter. Every time we say a thing in conversation, we get a mechanical advantage in detaching it well and deliverly. I prize the mechanics of conversation. ‘T is pulley and lever and screw. To fairly disengage the mass, and send it jingling down, a good boulder, – a block of quartz and gold, to be worked up at leisure in the useful arts of life, – is a wonderful relief.’
What are the best days in memory ? Those in which we met a companion who was truly such. How sweet those hours when the day was not long enough to communicate and compare our intellectual jewels, – the favorite passages of each book, the proud anecdotes of our heroes, the delicious verses we had hoarded ! What a motive had then our solitary days ! How the countenance of our friend still left some light after he had gone!’ We remember the time when the best gift we could ask of fortune was to fall in with a valuable companion in a ship’s cabin, or on a long journey in the old stage-coach, where, each passenger being forced to know every other, and other employments being out of question, conversation naturally flowed, people became rapidly acquainted, and, if well adapted, more intimate in a day than if they had been neighbors for years.
In youth, in the fury of curiosity and acquisition, the day is too short for books and’ the crowd of thoughts, and we are impatient of interruption. Later, when books tire, thought has a more languid flow ; and the days come when we are alarmed, and say there are no thoughts. What a barren-witted pate is mine ! ‘ the student says ; ‘ I will go and learn whether I have lost my reason.’ He seeks intelligent persons, whether more wise or less wise than he, who give him provocation, and at once and easily the old motion begins in his brain : thoughts, fancies, humors flow ; the cloud lifts ; the horizon broadens ; and the infinite opulence of things is again shown him. But the right conditions must be observed. Mainly he must have leave to be himself. Sancho Panza blessed the man who invented sleep. So I prize the good invention whereby everybody is provided with somebody who is glad to see him.
If men are less when together than they are alone, they are also in some respects enlarged. They kindle each other ; and such is the power of suggestion that each sprightly story calls out more ; and sometimes a fact that had long slept in the recesses of memory hears the voice, is welcomed to daylight, and proves of rare value. Every metaphysician must have observed, not only that no thought is alone, but that thoughts commonly go in pairs ; though the related thoughts first appeared in his mind at long distances of time. Things are in pairs : a natural fact has only half its value until a fact in moral nature, its counterpart, is stated.’ Then they confirm and adorn each other; a story is matched by another story. And that may be the reason why, when a gentleman has told a good thing, he immediately tells it again.
Nothing seems so cheap as the benefit of conversation ; nothing is more rare. ‘T is wonderful how you are balked and baffled. There is plenty of intelligence, reading, curiosity; but serious, happy discourse, avoiding personalities, dealing with results, is rare : and I seldom meet with a reading and thoughtful person but he tells me, as if it were his exceptional mishap, that he has no companion.
Suppose such a one to go out exploring different circles in search of this wise and genial counterpart,- he might inquire far and wide. Conversation in society is found to be on a plat-form so low as to exclude science, the saint and <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-second-series/the-poet/">the poet</a>. Amidst all the gay banter, sentiment cannot profane itself and venture out. The re-ply of old Isocrates comes so often to mind, – The things which are now seasonable I cannot say ; and for the things which I can say it is not now the time.” Besides, who can resist the charm of talent ? The lover of letters loves power too. Among the men of wit and learning, he could not withhold his homage from the gayety, grasp of memory, luck, splendor and speed ; such exploits of discourse, such feats of society ! What new powers, what mines of wealth ! But when he came home, his brave sequins were dry leaves. He found either that the fact they had thus dizened and adorned was of no value, or that he already knew all and more than all they had told him. He could not find that he was helped by so much as one thought or principle, one solid fact, one commanding impulse : great was the dazzle, but the gain was small. He uses his occasions ; he seeks the company of those who have convivial talent. But the moment they meet, to be sure they be-gin to be something else than they were ; they play pranks, dance jigs, run on each other, pun, tell stories, try many fantastic tricks, under some superstition that there must be excitement and elevation ;- and they kill conversation at once. I know well the rusticity of the shy hermit. No doubt he does not make allowance enough for men of more active blood and habit. But it is only on natural ground that conversation can be rich. It must not begin with uproar and violence. Let it keep the ground, let it feel the connection with the battery. Men must not be off their centres. Some men love only to talk where they are masters. They like to go to school-girls, or to boys, or into the shops where the sauntering people gladly lend an ear to any one. On these terms they give information and please them-selves by sallies and chat which are admired by the idlers ; and the talker is at his ease and jolly, for he can walk out without ceremony when he pleases. They go rarely to their equals, and then as for their own convenience simply, making too much haste to introduce and impart their new whim or discovery ; listen badly or do not listen to the comment or to the thought by which the company strive to repay them ; rather, as soon as their own speech is done, they take their hats.’ Then there are the gladiators, to whom it is always a battle; ‘t is no matter on which side, they fight for victory; then the heady men, the egotists, the monotones, the steriles and the impracticables.
It does not help that you find as good or a better man than yourself, if he is not timed and fitted to you. The greatest sufferers are often those who have the most to say, – men of a delicate sympathy, who are dumb in mixed company.1 Able people, if they do not know how to make allowance for them, paralyze them. One of those conceited prigs who value Nature only as it feeds and exhibits them is equally a pest with the roysterers. There must be large reception as well as giving. How delightful after these disturbers is the radiant, playful wit of – one whom I need not name, – for in every society there is his representative. Good nature is stronger than tomahawks. His conversation is all pictures : he can reproduce whatever he has seen ; he tells the best story in the county, and is of such genial temper that he disposes all others irresistibly to good humor and discourse. Diderot said of the Abbe Galiani: ” He was a treasure in rainy days ; and if the cabinet-makers made such things, everybody would have one in the country.”‘
One lesson we learn early, – that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion. We know beforehand that yonder man must think as we do. Has he not two hands, – two feet, – hair and nails ? Does he not eat, – bleed, – laugh, – cry ? His dissent from me is the veriest affectation. This conclusion is at once the logic of persecution and of love. And the ground of our indignation is our conviction that his dissent is some wilfulness he practises on himself. He checks the flow of his opinion, as the cross cow holds up her milk. Yes, and we look into his eye, and see that he knows it and hides his eye from ours.
But to come a little nearer to my mark, I am to say that there may easily be obstacles in the way of finding the pure article we are in search of, but when we find it it is worth the pursuit, for beside its comfort as medicine and cordial, once in the right company, new and vast values do not fail to appear. All that man can do for man is to be found in that market. There are great prizes in this game. Our fortunes in the world are as our mental equipment for this competition is. Yonder is a man who can answer the questions which I cannot. Is it so? Hence comes to me boundless curiosity to know his experiences and his wit. Hence competition for the stakes dearest to man. What is a match at whist, or draughts, or billiards, or chess, to a match of mother-wit, of knowledge and of re-sources? However courteously we conceal it, it is social rank and spiritual power that are compared ; whether in the parlor, the courts, the caucus, the senate, or the chamber of science, – which are only less or larger theatres for this competition.’
He that can define, he that can answer a question so as to admit of no further answer, is the best man. This was the meaning of the story of the Sphinx. In the old time conundrums were sent from king to king by ambassadors. The seven wise masters at Periander’s banquet spent their time in answering them.2 The life of Socrates is a propounding and a solution of these. So, in the hagiology of each nation, the lawgiver was in each case some man of eloquent tongue, whose sympathy brought him face to face with the extremes of society. Jesus, Menu, the first Buddhist, Mahomet, Zertusht,1 Pythagoras, are examples.
Jesus spent his life in discoursing with humble people on life and duty, in giving wise answers, showing that he saw at a larger angle of vision, and at least silencing those who were not generous enough to accept his thoughts. Luther spent his life so ; and it is not his theologic works, – his Commentary on the Galatians, and the rest, but his Table-Talk, which is still read by men. Dr. Johnson was a man of no profound mind, – full of English limitations, English politics, English Church, Oxford philosophy ; yet, having a large heart, mother-wit and good sense which impatiently overleaped his customary bounds, his conversation as re-ported by Boswell has a lasting charm. Conversation is the vent of character as well as of thought ; and Dr. Johnson impresses his company, not only by the point of the remark, but also, when the point fails, because he makes it. His obvious religion or superstition, his deep wish that they should think so or so, weighs with them, so rare is depth of feeling, or a constitutional value for a thought or opinion, among the light-minded men and women who make up society ; and though they know that there is in the speaker a degree of shortcoming, of insincerity and of talking for victory, yet the existence of character, and habitual reverence for principles over talent or learning, is felt by the frivolous.
One of the best records of the great German master who towered over all his contemporaries in the first thirty years of this century, is his conversations as recorded by Eckermann ; and the Table-Talk of Coleridge is one of the best remains of his genius.
In the Norse legends, the gods of Valhalla, when they meet the Jotuns, converse on the perilous terms that he who cannot answer the other’s questions forfeits his own life. Odin comes to the threshold of the Jotun Wafthrudnir in disguise, calling himself Gangrader; is invited into the hall, and told that he cannot go out thence unless he can answer every question Wafthrudnir shall put. Wafthrudnir asks him the name of the god of the sun, and of the god who brings the night ; what river separates the dwellings of the sons of the giants from those of the gods ; what plain lies between the gods and Surtur, their adversary, etc. ; all which the disguised Odin answers satisfactorily. Then it is his turn to interrogate, and he is answered well for a time by the Jotun. At last he puts a question which none but himself could answer: What did Odin whisper in the ear of his son Balder, when Balder mounted the funeral pile ?” The startled giant replies: ” None of the gods knows what in the old time THOU saidst in the ear of thy son : with death on my mouth have I spoken the fate-words of the generation of the Aesir; with Odin contended I in wise words. Thou must ever the wisest be.”
And still the gods and giants are so known, and still they play the same game in all the million mansions of heaven and of earth ; at all tables, clubs and tete-a-tetes, the lawyers in the court-house, the senators in the capitol, the doctors in the academy, the wits in the hotel. Best is he who gives an answer that cannot be answered again. Omnis definitio periculosa est, and only wit has the secret. The same thing took place when Leibnitz came to visit Newton; when Schiller came to Goethe ; when France, in the person of Madame de Stael, visited Goethe and Schiller; when Hegel was the guest of Victor Cousin in Paris ; when Linnaeus was the guest of Jussieu. It happened many years ago that an American chemist carried a letter of introduction to Dr. Dalton of Manchester, England, the author of the theory of atomic proportions, and was coolly enough received by the doctor in the laboratory where he was engaged. Only Dr. Dalton scratched a formula on a scrap of paper and pushed it towards the guest,-” Had he seen that ? ” The visitor scratched on another paper a formula describing some results of his own with sulphuric acid, and pushed it across the table, -” Had he seen that ? ” The attention of the English chemist was instantly arrested, and they became rapidly acquainted.
To answer a question so as to admit of no reply, is the test of a man, – to touch bottom every time. Hyde, Earl of Rochester, asked Lord-Keeper Guilford, ” Do you not think I could understand any business in England in a month ? ” ” Yes, my lord,” replied the other, ” but I think you would understand it better in two months.” When Edward I. claimed to be acknowledged by the Scotch (1292) as lord paramount, the nobles of Scotland replied, ” No answer can be made while the throne is vacant.” When Henry III. (1217) plead duress against his people demanding confirmation and execution of the Charter, the reply was : ” If this were admitted, civil wars could never close but by the extirpation of one of the contending parties.”
What can you do with one of these sharp respondents ? What can you do with an eloquent man ? No rules of debate, no contempt of court, no exclusions, no gag-laws can be contrived that his first syllable will not set aside or overstep and annul. You can shut out the light, it may be, but can you shut out gravitation ? You may condemn his book, but can you fight against his thought? That is always too nimble for you, anticipates you, and breaks out victorious in some other quarter. Can you stop the motions of good sense ? What can you do with Beaumarchais, who converts the censor whom the court has appointed to stifle his play into an ardent advocate ? The court appoints another censor, who shall crush it this time. Beaumarchais persuades him to defend it. The court successively appoints three more severe inquisitors; Beaumarchais converts them all into triumphant vindicators of the play which is to bring in the Revolution.’ Who can stop the mouth of Luther, – of Newton, – of Franklin, – of Mirabeau, – of Talleyrand ?
These masters can make good their own place, and need no patron. Every variety of gift – science, religion, politics, letters, art, prudence, war or love – has its vent and exchange in conversation. Conversation is the Olympic games whither every superior gift resorts to assert and approve itself, – and, of course, the inspirations of powerful and public men, with the rest. But it is not this class, whom the splendor of their accomplishment almost inevitably guides into the vortex of ambition, makes them chancellors and commanders of council and of action, and makes them at last fatalists, – not these whom we now consider. We consider those who are interested in thoughts, their own and other men’s, and who delight in comparing them ; who think it the highest compliment they can pay a man to deal with him as an intellect, to expose to him the grand and cheerful secrets perhaps never opened to their daily companions, to share with him the sphere of freedom and the simplicity of truth.’
But the best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions ; and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.
It is possible that the best conversation is between two persons who can talk only to each other. Even Montesquieu confessed that in conversation, if he perceived he was listened to by a third person, it seemed to him from that moment the whole question vanished from his mind. I have known persons of rare ability who were heavy company to good social men who knew well enough how to draw out others of retiring habit ; and, moreover, were heavy to intellectual men who ought to have known them. And does it never occur that we perhaps live with people too superior to be seen, – as there are musical notes too high for the scale of most ears ? There are men who are great only to one or two companions of more opportunity, or more adapted.
It was to meet these wants that in all civil nations attempts have been made to organize conversation by bringing together cultivated people under the most favorable conditions. ‘T is certain there was liberal and refined conversation in the Greek, in the Roman and in the Middle Age. There was a time when in France a revolution occurred in domestic architecture; when the houses of the nobility, which, up to that time, had been constructed on feudal necessities, in a hollow square,- the ground-floor being resigned to offices and stables, and the floors above to rooms of state and to lodging-rooms,- were rebuilt with new purpose. It was the Marchioness of Rambouillet who first got the horses out of and the scholars into the palaces, having constructed her hotel with a view to society, with superb suites of drawing-rooms on the same floor, and broke through the morgue of etiquette by inviting to her house men of wit and learning as well as men of rank, and piqued the emulation of Cardinal Richelieu to rival assemblies, and so to the founding of the French Academy. The history of the Hotel Rambouillet and its brilliant circles makes an important date in French civilization. And a history of clubs from early antiquity, tracing the efforts to secure liberal and refined conversation, through the Greek and Roman to the Middle Age, and thence down through French, English and German memoirs, tracing the clubs and coteries in each country, would be an important chapter in history. We know well the Mermaid Club, in London, of Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Chapman, Herrick, Selden, Beaumont and Fletcher ; its Rules are preserved, and many allusions to their suppers are found in Jonson, Herrick and in Aubrey. Anthony Wood has many details of Harrington’s Club. Dr. Bentley’s Club held Newton, Wren, Evelyn and Locke ; and we owe to Boswell our knowledge of the club of Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith, Burke, Gibbon, Reynolds, Garrick, Beauclerk and Percy. And we have records of the brilliant society that Edinburgh boasted in the first decade of this century. Such societies are possible only in great cities, and are the compensation which these can make to their dwellers for depriving them of the free intercourse with Nature. Every scholar is surrounded by wiser men than he – if they cannot write as well.’ Cannot they meet and exchange results to their mutual benefit and delight ? It was a pathetic experience when a genial and accomplished person said to me, looking from his country home to the capital of New England, ” There is a town of two hundred thousand people, and not a chair in it for me.” If he were sure to find at No. 2000 Tremont Street what scholars were abroad after the morning studies were ended, Boston would shine as the New Jerusalem to his eyes.
Now this want of adapted society is mutual. The man of thought, the man of letters, the man of science, the administrator skilful in affairs, <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-second-series/manners/">the man of manners and culture</a>, whom you so much wish to find, – each of these is wishing to be found. Each wishes to open his thought, his knowledge, his social skill to the daylight in your company and affection, and to exchange his gifts for yours ; and the first hint of a select and intelligent company is welcome.
But the club must be self-protecting, and obstacles arise at the outset. There are people who cannot well be cultivated; whom you must keep down and quiet if you can. There are those who have the instinct of a bat to fly against any lighted candle and put it out, – marplots and contradictors. There are those who go only to talk, and those who go only to hear : both are bad. A right rule for a club would be, – Admit no man whose presence excludes any one topic. It requires people who are not surprised and shocked, who do and let do and let be, who sink trifles and know solid values, and who take a great deal for granted.
It is always a practical difficulty with clubs to regulate the laws of election so as to exclude peremptorily every social nuisance. Nobody wishes bad manners. We must have loyalty and character. <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-second-series/the-poet/">The poet</a> Marvell was wont to say that he ” would not drink wine with any one with whom he could not trust his life.” But neither can we afford to be superfine. A man of irreproachable behavior and excellent sense preferred on his travels taking his chance at a hotel for company, to the charging himself with too many select letters of introduction.1 He confessed he liked low company. He said the fact was incontestable that the society of gypsies was more attractive than that of bishops. The girl deserts the parlor for the kitchen ; the boy, for the wharf. Tutors and parents cannot interest him like the uproarious conversation he finds in the market or the dock. I knew a scholar, of some experience in camps, who said that he liked, in a barroom, to tell a few coon stories and put himself on a good footing with the company ; then he could be as silent as he chose. A scholar does not wish to be always pumping his brains ; he wants gossips. The black-coats are good company only for black-coats ; but when the manufacturers, merchants and shipmasters meet, see how much they have to say, and how long the conversation lasts ! They have come from many zones ; they have traversed wide countries ; they know each his own arts, and the cunning artisans of his craft ; they have seen the best and the worst of men. Their knowledge contradicts the popular opinion and your own on many points. Things which you fancy wrong they know to be right and profitable ; things which you reckon superstitious they know to be true. They have found virtue in the strangest homes ; and in the rich store of their adventures are instances and examples which you have been seeking in vain for years, and which they suddenly and unwittingly offer you.
I remember a social experiment in this direction, wherein it appeared that each of the members fancied he was in need of society, but himself unpresentable. On trial they all found that they could be tolerated by, and could tolerate, each other. Nay, the tendency to extreme self-respect which hesitated to join in a club was running rapidly down to abject admiration of each other, when the club was broken up by new combinations.
The use of the hospitality of the club hardly needs explanation. Men are unbent and social at table ; and I remember it was explained to me, in a Southern city, that it was impossible to set any public charity on foot unless through a tavern dinner. I do not think our metropolitan charities would plead the same necessity ; but to a club met for conversation a supper is a good basis, as it disarms all parties and puts pedantry and business to the door. All are in good humor and at leisure, which are the first conditions of discourse ; the ordinary reserves are thrown off, experienced men meet with the freedom of boys, and, sooner or later, impart all that is singular in their experience.
The hospitalities of clubs are easily exaggerated. No doubt the suppers of wits and philosophers acquire much lustre by time and renown. Plutarch, Xenophon and Plato, who have celebrated each a banquet of their set, have given us next to no data of the viands ; and it is to be believed that an indifferent tavern dinner in such society was more relished by the convives than a much better one in worse company. Herrick’s verses to Ben Jonson no doubt paint the fact : –
” When we such clusters had As made us nobly wild, not mad; And yet, each verse of thine Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine.” ‘
Such friends make the feast satisfying; and I notice that it was when things went prosperously, and the company was full of honor, at the banquet of the Cid, that ” the guests all were joyful, and agreed in one thing, – that they had not eaten better for three years.”
I need only hint the value of the club for bringing masters in their several arts to compare and expand their views, to come to an under-standing on these points, and so that their united opinion shall have its just influence on public questions of education and politics. It is agreed that in the sections of the British Association more information is mutually and effectually communicated, in a few hours, than in many months of ordinary correspondence and the printing and transmission of ponderous reports. We know that 1′ homme de lettres is a little wary, and not fond of giving away his seed-corn ; but there is an infallible way to draw him out, namely, by having as good as he. If you have Tuscaroora and he Canada, he may exchange kernel for kernel. If his discretion is incurable, and he dare not speak of fairy gold, he will yet tell what new books he has found, what old ones recovered, what men write and read abroad. A principal purpose also is the hospitality of the club, as a means of receiving a worthy foreigner with mutual advantage.
Every man brings into society some partial thought and local culture. We need range and alternation of topics and variety of minds. One likes in a companion a phlegm which it is a triumph to disturb, and, not less, to make in an old acquaintance unexpected discoveries of scope and power through the advantage of an inspiring subject. Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.1 But while we look complacently at these obvious pleasures and values of good companions, I do not forget that Nature is always very much in earnest, and that her great gifts have something serious and stern. When we look for the highest benefits of conversation, the Spartan rule of one to one is usually enforced. Discourse, when it rises high-est and searches deepest, when it lifts us into that mood out of which thoughts come that remain as stars in our firmament, is between two.’
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<title>Courage</title>
<link>https://emersoncentral.com/essays/courage/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Emerson West]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sat, 23 Jul 2022 17:51:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Essays]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Society and Solitude (1870)]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://emersoncentral.com/?p=68502</guid>
<description><![CDATA[So nigh is grandeur to our dust,So near is God to man,When Duty whispers low, Thou must,The youth replies, I can. PERIL around, all else appalling,Cannon in front and leaden rain,Him duty, through the clarion callingTo the van, called not in vain. COURAGE I OBSERVE that there are three qualities which conspicuously attract the wonder and reverence of mankind : – 1. Disinterestedness, as shown in indifference to the ordinary bribes and influences of conduct, – a purpose so sincere and generous that it cannot be tempted aside by any prospects of wealth or other private advantage. Self-love is, in almost all men, such an over-weight, that they are incredulous…
The post <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/essays/courage/">Courage</a> appeared first on <a href="https://emersoncentral.com">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a>.
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So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can.
PERIL around, all else appalling, Cannon in front and leaden rain, Him duty, through the clarion calling To the van, called not in vain.
COURAGE
I OBSERVE that there are three qualities which conspicuously attract the wonder and reverence of mankind : –
1. Disinterestedness, as shown in indifference to the ordinary bribes and influences of conduct, – a purpose so sincere and generous that it cannot be tempted aside by any prospects of wealth or other private advantage. Self-love is, in almost all men, such an over-weight, that they are incredulous of a man’s habitual preference of the general good to his own ; 1 but when they see it proved by sacrifices of ease, wealth, rank, and of life itself, there is no limit to their admiration. This has made the power of the saints of the East and West, who have led the religion of great nations. Self-sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grew. This makes the renown of the heroes of Greece and Rome, – of Socrates, Aristides and Phocion ; of Quintus Curtius, Cato and Regulus ; of Hatem Tai’s hospitality;
2 of Chatham, whose scornful magnanimity gave him immense popularity; of Washington, giving his service to the public without salary or reward.’ 2. Practical power. Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass, – the man who can build the boat, who has the impiety to make the rivers run the way he wants them ; who can lead his telegraph through the ocean from shore to shore ; who, sitting in his closet, can lay out the plans of a campaign, sea-war and land-war, such that the best generals and admirals, when all is done, see that they must thank him for success ; the power of better combination and foresight, however exhibited, whether it only plays a game of chess, or whether, more loftily, a cunning mathematician, penetrating the cubic weights of stars, predicts the planet which eyes had never seen ; or whether, exploring the chemical elements whereof we and the world are made, and seeing their secret, Franklin draws off the lightning in his hand; suggesting that one day a wiser geology shall make the earthquake harmless and the volcano an agricultural resource. Or here is one who, seeing the wishes of men, knows how to come at their end ; whispers to this friend, argues down that adversary, moulds society to his purpose, and looks at all men as wax for his hands; takes command of them as the wind does of clouds, as the mother does of the child, or the man that knows more does of the man that knows less, and leads them in glad surprise to the very point where they would be : this man is followed with acclamation.
3. The third excellence is courage, the perfect will, which no terrors can shake, which is attracted by frowns or threats or hostile armies, nay, needs these to awake and fan its reserved energies into a pure flame, and is never quite itself until the hazard is extreme ; then it is serene and fertile, and all its powers play well.’ There is a Hercules, an Achilles, a Rustem, an Arthur or a Cid in the mythology of every nation ; and in authentic history, a Leonidas, a Scipio, a Caesar, a Richard Coeur de Lion, a Cromwell, a Nelson, a Great Conde, a Bertrand du Guesclin, a Doge Dandolo, a Napoleon, a Massaena, and Ney. ‘T is said courage is common, but the immense esteem in which it is held proves it to be rare. Animal resistance, the instinct of the male animal when cornered, is no doubt common ; but the pure article, courage with eyes, courage with conduct, self-possession at the cannon’s mouth, cheerfulness in lonely adherence to the right, is the endowment of elevated characters. I need not show how much it is esteemed, for the people give it the first rank. They forgive everything to it. What an ado we make through two thousand years about Thermopylae and Salamis ! What a memory of Poitiers and Crecy, and Bunker Hill, and Washington’s endurance ! And any man who puts his life in peril in a cause which is esteemed becomes the darling of all men. The very nursery-books, the ballads which delight boys, the romances which delight men, the favorite topics of <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/essays/eloquence/">eloquence</a>, the thunderous emphasis which orators give to every martial defiance and passage of arms, and which the people greet, may testify. How short a time since this whole nation rose every morning to read or to hear the traits of courage of its sons and brothers in the field, and was never weary of the theme! We have had examples of men who, for showing effective courage on a single occasion, have become a favorite spectacle to nations, and must be brought in chariots to every mass meeting.
Men are so charmed with valor that they have pleased themselves with being called lions, leopards, eagles and dragons, from the animals contemporary with us in the geologic formations. But the animals have great advantage of us in precocity. Touch the snapping-turtle with a stick, and he seizes it with his teeth. Cut off his head, and the teeth will not let go the stick. Break the egg of the young, and the little embryo, before yet the eyes are open, bites fiercely ; these vivacious creatures contriving – shall we say ? – not only to bite after they are dead, but also to bite before they are born.
But man begins life helpless. The babe is in paroxysms of fear the moment its nurse leaves it alone, and it comes so slowly to any power of self-protection that mothers say the salvation of the life and health of a young child is a perpetual miracle. The terrors of the child are quite reasonable, and add to his loveliness; for his utter ignorance and weakness, and his enchanting indignation on such a small basis of capital compel every by-stander to take his part. Every moment as long as he is awake he studies the use of his eyes, ears, hands and feet, learning how to meet and avoid his dangers, and thus every hour loses one terror more. But this education stops too soon. A large majority of men being bred in families and beginning early to be occupied day by day with some routine of safe industry, never come to the rough experiences that make Lhe Indian, the soldier or the frontiersman self-subsistent and fearless. Hence the high price of courage indicates the general timidity. ” Mankind,” said Franklin, ” are dastardly when they meet with opposition.” In war even generals are seldom found eager to give battle. Lord Wellington said, ” Uniforms were often masks ; ” and again, ” When my journal appears, many statues must come down.” The Norse Sagas relate that when Bishop Magne reproved King Sigurd for his wicked divorce, the priest who attended the bishop, expecting every moment when the savage king would burst with rage and slay his superior, said that he ” saw the sky no bigger than a calf-skin.” And I remember when a pair of Irish girls who had been run away with in a wagon by a skittish horse, said that when he began to rear, they were so frightened that they could not see the horse.
Cowardice shuts the eyes till the sky is not larger than a calf-skin ; shuts the eyes so that we cannot see the horse that is running away with us ; worse, shuts the eyes of the mind and chills the heart. Fear is cruel and mean. The political reigns of terror have been reigns of madness and malignity, a total perversion of opinion ; society is upside down, and its best men are thought too bad to live. Then the protection which a house, a family, neighbor-hood and property, even the first accumulation of savings gives, go in all times to generate this taint of the respectable classes. Those political parties which gather in the well-disposed portion of the community, – how infirm and ignoble ! what white lips they have! always on the defensive, as if the lead were intrusted to the journals, often written in great part by women and boys, who, without strength, wish to keep up the appearance of strength. They can do the hurras, the placarding, the flags, – and the voting, if it is a fair day ; but the aggressive attitude of men who will have right done, will no longer be bothered with burglars and ruffians in the streets, counterfeiters in public offices, and thieves on the bench ; that part, the part of the leader and soul of the vigilance committee, must be taken by stout and sincere men who are really angry and determined. In ordinary, we have a snappish criticism which watches and contradicts the opposite party. We want the will which advances and dictates. When we get an advantage, as in Congress the other day, it is because our adversary has committed a fault, not that we have taken the initiative and given the law.’ Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended. Complaining never so loud and with never so much reason is of no use. One heard much cant of peace-parties long ago in Kansas and elsewhere, that their strength lay in the greatness of their wrongs, and dissuading all resistance, as if to make this strength greater. But were their wrongs greater than the negro’s ? And what kind of strength did they ever give him ?’ It was always invitation to the tyrant, and bred disgust in those who would protect the victim. What cannot stand must fall ; and the measure of our sincerity and therefore of the respect of men, is the amount of health and wealth we will hazard in the defence of our right. An old farmer, my neighbor across the fence, when I ask him if he is not going to town-meeting, says : ” No ; ‘t is no use balloting, for it will not stay ; but what you do with the gun will stay so.”‘ Nature has charged every one with his own defence as with his own support, and the only title I can have to your help is when I have manfully put forth all the means I possess to keep me, and being overborne by odds, the by-standers have a natural wish to interfere and see fair play.
But with this pacific education we have no readiness for bad times. I am much mistaken if every man who went to the army in the late war had not a lively curiosity to know how he should behave in action. Tender, amiable boys, who had never encountered any rougher play than a base-ball match or a fishing excursion, were suddenly drawn up to face a bayonet charge or capture a battery. Of course they must each go into that action with a certain despair.’ Each whispers to himself: “My exertions must be of small account to the result ; only will the benignant Heaven save me from disgracing myself and my friends and my State. Die ! 0 yes, I can well die ; but I cannot afford to misbehave ; and I do not know how I shall feel.” So great a soldier as the old French Marshal Montluc acknowledges that he has often trembled with fear, and recovered courage when he had said a prayer for the occasion. I knew a young soldier who died in the early campaign, who confided to his sister that he had made up his mind to volunteer for the war. ” I have not,” he said, ” any proper courage, but I shall never let any one find it out.” And he had accustomed himself always to go into whatever place of danger, and do whatever he was afraid to do, setting a dogged resolution to resist this natural infirmity. Coleridge has preserved an anecdote of an officer in the British Navy who told him that when he, in his first boat expedition, a midshipman in his fourteenth year, accompanied Sir Alexander Ball, as we were rowing up to the vessel we were to attack, amid a discharge of musketry, I was overpowered with fear, my knees shook and I was ready to faint away. Lieutenant Ball seeing me, placed himself close beside me, took hold of my hand and whispered, ‘Courage, my dear boy ! you will recover in a minute or so ; I was just the same when I first went out in this way.’ It was as if an angel spoke to me. From that moment I was as fearless and as forward as the oldest of the boat’s crew. But I dare not think what would have become of me, if, at that moment, he had scoffed and exposed me.”
Knowledge is the antidote to fear, – Know-ledge, Use and Reason, with its higher aids. The child is as much in danger from a staircase, or the fire-grate, or a bath-tub, or a cat, as the soldier from a cannon or an ambush. Each surmounts the fear as fast as he precisely understands the peril and learns the means of resistance. Each is liable to panic, which is, exactly, the terror of ignorance surrendered to the imagination. Knowledge is the encourager, knowledge that takes fear out of the heart, know-ledge and use, which is knowledge in practice. They can conquer who believe they can. It is he who has done the deed once who does not shrink from attempting it again. It is the groom who knows the jumping horse well who can safely ride him. It is the veteran soldier, who, seeing the flash of the cannon, can step aside from the path of the ball. Use makes a better soldier than the most urgent considerations of duty, – familiarity with danger enabling him to estimate the danger. He sees how much is the risk, and is not afflicted with imagination ; knows practically Marshal Saxe’s rule, that every soldier killed costs the enemy his weight in lead.
The sailor loses fear as fast as he acquires command of sails and spars and steam ; the frontiersman, when he has a perfect rifle and has acquired a sure aim. To the sailor’s experience every new circumstance suggests what he must do. The terrific chances which make the hours and the minutes long to the passenger, he whiles away by incessant application of expedients and repairs. To him a leak, a hurricane, or a water-spout is so much work, – no more. The hunter is not alarmed by bears, catamounts or wolves, nor the grazier by his bull, nor the dog-breeder by his bloodhound, nor an Arab by the simoon, nor a farmer by a fire in the woods. The forest on fire looks discouraging enough to a citizen : the farmer is skilful to fight it. The neighbors run together; with pine boughs they can mop out the flame, and by raking with the hoe a long but little trench, confine to a patch the fire which would easily spread over a hundred acres.’
In short, courage consists in equality to the problem before us. The school-boy is daunted before his tutor by a question of arithmetic, because he does not yet command the simple steps of the solution which the boy beside him has mastered. These once seen, he is as cool as Archimedes, and cheerily proceeds a step farther. Courage is equality to the problem, in affairs, in science, in trade, in council, or in action ; consists in the conviction that the agents with whom you contend are not superior in strength of resources or spirit to you. The general must stimulate the mind of his soldiers to the perception that they are men, and the enemy is no more. Knowledge, yes ; for the danger of dangers is illusion. The eye is easily daunted ; and the drums, flags, shining helmets, beard and moustache of the soldier have conquered you long before his sword or bayonet reaches you.
But we do not exhaust the subject in the slight analysis ; we must not forget the variety of temperaments, each of which qualifies this power of resistance. It is observed that men with little imagination are less fearful ; they wait till they feel pain, whilst others of more sensibility anticipate it, and suffer in the fear of the pang more acutely than in the pang. ‘T is certain that the threat is sometimes more formidable than the stroke, and ‘t is possible that the beholders suffer more keenly than the victims. Bodily pain is superficial, seated usually in the skin and the extremities, for the sake of giving us warning to put us on our guard ; not in the vitals, where the rupture that produces death is perhaps not felt, and the victim never knew what hurt him. Pain is superficial, and therefore fear is. The torments of martyrdoms are probably most keenly felt by the by-standers. The torments are illusory. The first suffering is the last suffering, the later hurts being lost on in-sensibility. Our affections and wishes for the external welfare of the hero tumultuously rush to expression in tears and outcries : but we, like him, subside into indifferency and defiance when we perceive how short is the longest arm of malice, how serene is the sufferer.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue ; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do. It is directness, – the instant performing of that which he ought. The thoughtful man says, You differ from me in opinion and methods, but do you not see that I cannot think or act otherwise than I do ? that my way of living is organic? And to be really strong we must adhere to our own means. On organic action all strength depends.’ Hear what women say of doing a task by sheer force of will : it costs them a fit of sickness. Plutarch relates that the Pythoness who tried to prophesy without command in the Temple at Delphi, though she performed the usual rites, and inhaled the air of the cavern standing on the tripod, fell into convulsions and died. Undoubtedly there is a temperamental courage, a warlike blood, which loves a fight, does not feel itself except in a quarrel, as one sees in wasps, or ants, or cocks, or cats. The like vein appears in certain races of men and in individuals of every race. I n every school there are certain fighting boys ; in every society, the contradicting men ; in every town, bravoes and bullies, better or worse dressed, fancy-men, patrons of the cock-pit and the ring. Courage is temperamental, scientific, ideal. <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/representative-men/swedenborg-the-mystic/">Swedenborg</a> has left this record of his king : ” Charles XI I. of Sweden did not know what that was which others called fear, nor what that spurious valor and daring that is excited by inebriating draughts, for he never tasted any liquid but pure water. Of him we may say that he led a life more remote from death, and in fact lived more, than any other man.” It was told of the Prince of Conde that ” there not being a more furious man in the world, danger in fight never disturbs him more than just to make him civil, and to command in words of great obligation to his officers and men, and without any the least disturbance to his judgment or spirit.” Each has his own courage, as his own talent ; but the courage of the tiger is one, and of the horse another. The dog that scorns to fight, will fight for his master. The llama that will carry a load if you caress him, will refuse food and die if he is scourged. The fury of onset is one, and of calm endurance another. There is a courage of the cabinet as well as a courage of the field ; a <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-second-series/manners/">courage of manners</a> in private assemblies, and another in public assemblies ; a courage which enables one man to speak masterly to a hostile company, whilst another man who can easily face a cannon’s mouth dares not open his own.
There is a courage of a merchant in dealing with his trade, by which dangerous turns of affairs are met and prevailed over. Merchants recognize as much gallantry, well judged too, in the conduct of a wise and upright man of business in difficult times, as soldiers in a soldier.
There is a courage in the treatment of every art by a master in architecture, in sculpture, in painting or in poetry, each cheering the mind of the spectator or receiver as by true strokes of genius, which yet nowise implies the presence of physical valor in the artist. This is the courage of genius, in every kind. A certain quantity of power belongs to a certain quantity of faculty. The beautiful voice at church goes sounding on, and covers up in its volume, as in a cloak, all the defects of the choir. The singers, I observe, all yield to it, and so the fair singer indulges her instinct, and dares, and dares, because she knows she can.’
It gives the cutting edge to every profession. The judge puts his mind to the tangle of contradictions in the case, squarely accosts the question, and by not being afraid of it, by dealing with it as business which must be disposed of, he sees presently that common arithmetic and common methods apply to this affair. Perseverance strips it of all peculiarity, and ranges it on the same ground as other business. Morphy played a daring game in chess : the daring was only an illusion of the spectator, for the player sees his move to be well fortified and safe. You may see the same dealing in criticism ; a new book astonishes for a few days, takes itself out of common jurisdiction, and nobody knows what to say of it : but the scholar is not deceived. The old principles which books exist to express are more beautiful than any book ; and out of love of the reality he is an expert judge how far the book has approached it and where it has come short. In all applications it is the same power, – the habit of reference to one’s own mind, as the home of all truth and counsel, and which can easily dispose of any book because it can very well do without all books. When a confident man comes into a company magnifying this or that author he has freshly read, the company grow silent and ashamed of their ignorance. But I remember the old professor, whose searching mind engraved every word he spoke on the memory of the class, when we asked if he had read this or that shining novelty, ” No, I have never read that book ; ” instantly the book lost credit, and was not to be heard of again.’
Every creature has a courage of his constitution fit for his duties : – Archimedes, the courage of a geometer to stick to his diagram, heedless of the siege and sack of the city ; and the Roman soldier his faculty to strike at Archimedes. Each is strong, relying on his own, and each is betrayed when he seeks in himself the courage of others.
Captain John Brown, the hero of Kansas, said to me in conversation, that ” for a settler in a new country, one good, believing, strong-minded man is worth a hundred, nay, a thousand men without character ; and that the right men will give a permanent direction to the fortunes of a state. As for the bullying drunkards of which armies are usually made up, he thought cholera, small-pox and consumption as valuable recruits.” He held the belief that courage and chastity are silent concerning themselves. He said, ” As soon as I hear one of my men say, ‘ Ah, let me only get my eye on such a man, I ’11 bring him down,’ I don’t expect much aid in the fight from that talker. ‘T is the quiet, peaceable men, the men of principle, that make the best soldiers.”
” ‘T is still observed those men most valiant are Who are most modest ere they came to war.”
True courage is not ostentatious ; men who wish to inspire terror seem thereby to confess themselves cowards. Why do they rely on it, but because they know how potent it is with themselves ? 2
The true temper has genial influences. It makes a bond of union between enemies. Governor Wise of Virginia, in the record of his first interviews with his prisoner, appeared to great advantage. If Governor Wise is a superior man, or inasmuch as he is a superior man, he distinguishes John Brown. As they confer, they understand each other swiftly ; each respects the other. If opportunity allowed, they would prefer each other’s society and desert their former companions.’ Enemies would become affection-ate. Hector and Achilles, Richard and Saladin, Wellington and Soult, General Daumas and Abdel-Kader, become aware that they are nearer and more alike than any other two, and, if their nation and circumstance did not keep them apart, would run into each other’s arms.
See too what good contagion belongs to it. Everywhere it finds its own with magnetic affinity. Courage of the soldier awakes the courage of woman. Florence Nightingale brings lint and the blessing of her shadow.1 Heroic women offer themselves as nurses of the brave veteran. The troop of Virginian infantry that had marched to guard the prison of John Brown ask leave to pay their respects to the prisoner. Poetry and <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/essays/eloquence/">eloquence</a> catch the hint, and soar to a pitch unknown before. Everything feels the new breath except the old doting nigh-dead politicians, whose heart the trumpet of resurrection could not wake.
The charm of the best courages is that they are inventions, inspirations, flashes of genius. The hero could not have done the feat at another hour, in a lower mood. The best act of the marvellous genius of Greece was its first act ; not in the statue or the Parthenon, but in the instinct which, at Thermopylae, held Asia at bay, kept Asia out of Europe, – Asia with its antiquities and organic slavery, – from corrupting the hope and new morning of the West. The statue, the architecture, were the later and inferior creation of the same genius. In view of this moment of history, we recognize a certain prophetic instinct, better than wisdom. Napoleon said well, ” My hand is immediately connected with my head ; ” but the sacred courage is connected with the heart. The head is a half, a fraction, until it is enlarged and inspired by the moral sentiment. For it is not the means on which we draw, as health or wealth, practical skill or dexterous talent, or multitudes of followers, that count, but the aims only. The aim re-acts back on the means. A great aim aggrandizes the means. The meal and water that are the commissariat of the forlorn hope that stake their lives to defend the pass are sacred as the Holy Grail, or as if one had eyes to see in chemistry the fuel that is rushing to feed the sun.
There is a persuasion in the soul of man that he is here for cause, that he was put down in this place by the Creator to do the work for which he inspires him, that thus he is an overmatch for all antagonists that could combine against him. The pious Mrs. Hutchinson says of some passages in the defence of Nottingham against the Cavaliers, “It was a great instruction that the best and high-est courages are beams of the Almighty.” And whenever the religious sentiment is adequately affirmed, it must be with dazzling courage. As long as it is cowardly insinuated, as with the wish to succor some partial and temporary interest, or to make it affirm some pragmatical tenet which our parish church receives to-day, it is not imparted, and cannot inspire or create. For it is always new, leads and surprises, and practice never comes up with it. There are ever appearing in the world men who, almost as soon as they are born, take a bee-line to the rack of the inquisitor, the axe of the tyrant, like Giordano Bruno, Vanini, Huss, Paul, Jesus and Socrates. Look at Fox’s Lives of the Martyrs, Sewel’s History of the Quakers, Southey’s Book of the Church, at the folios of the Brothers Bollandi, who collected the lives of twenty-five thousand martyrs, confessors, ascetics and self-tormentors.’ There is much of fable, but a broad basis of fact. The tender skin does not shrink from bayonets, the timid woman is not scared by fagots ; the rack is not frightful, nor the rope ignominious. The poor Puritan, Antony Parsons, at the stake, tied straw on his head when the fire approached him, and said, ” This is God’s hat.” Sacred courage indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world; that he is aiming neither at pelf nor comfort, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought in his mind. He is every-where a liberator, but of a freedom that is ideal ;not seeking to have land or money or conveniences, but to have no other limitation than that which his own constitution imposes. He is free to speak truth ; he is not free to lie. He wishes to break every yoke all over the world which hinders his brother from acting after his thought.
There are degrees of courage, and each step upward makes us acquainted with a higher virtue.’ Let us say then frankly that the education of the will is the object of our existence. Poverty, the prison, the rack, the fire, the hatred and execrations of our fellow men, appear trials beyond the endurance of common humanity ; but to the hero whose intellect is aggrandized by the soul, and so measures these penalties against the good which his thought surveys, these terrors vanish as darkness at sunrise.
We have little right in piping times of peace to pronounce on these rare heights of character; but there is no assurance of security. In the most private life, difficult duty is never far off. Therefore we must think with courage. Scholars and thinkers are prone to an effeminate habit, and shrink if a coarser shout comes up from the street, or a brutal act is recorded in the journals. The Medical College piles up in its museum its grim monsters of morbid anatomy, and there are melancholy skeptics with a taste for carrion who batten on the hideous facts in history, – persecutions, inquisitions, St. Bartholomew massacres, devilish lives, Nero, Caesar Borgia, Marat, Lopez ; men in whom every ray of humanity was extinguished, parricides, matricides and whatever moral monsters. These are not cheerful facts, but they do not disturb a healthy mind; they require of us a patience as robust as the energy that attacks us, and an unresting exploration of final causes. Wolf, snake and crocodile are not inharmonious in Nature, but are made useful as checks, scavengers and pioneers ; and we must have a scope as large as Nature’s to deal with beast-like men, detect what scullion function is assigned them, and foresee in the secular melioration of the planet how these will become unnecessary and will die out.
He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear. I do not wish to put myself or any man into a theatrical position, or urge him to ape the courage of his comrade. Have the courage not to adopt another’s courage. There is scope and cause and resistance enough for us in our proper work and circumstance. And there is no creed of an honest man, be he Christian, Turk or Gentoo, which does not equally preach it. If you have no faith in beneficent power above you, but see only an adamantine fate coiling its folds about Nature and man, then reflect that the best use of fate is to teach us courage, if only because baseness cannot change the appointed event. If you accept your thoughts as inspirations from the Supreme Intelligence, obey them when they prescribe difficult duties, because they come only so long as they are used ; or, if your skepticism reaches to the last verge, and you have no confidence in any foreign mind, then be brave, because there is one good opinion which must always be of consequence to you, namely, your own.
I am permitted to enrich my chapter by adding an anecdote of pure courage from real life, as narrated in a ballad by a lady to whom all the particulars of the fact are exactly known.2
GEORGE NIDIVER
Men have done brave deeds, And bards have sung them well: I of good George Nidiver Now the tale will tell.
In Californian mountains A hunter bold was he: Keen his eye and sure his aim As any you should see.
A little Indian boy Followed him everywhere, Eager to share the hunter’s joy, The hunter’s meal to share.
And when the bird or deer Fell by the hunter’s skill, The boy was always near To help with right good will.
One day as through the cleft Between two mountains steep, Shut in both right and left, Their questing way they keep,
They see two grizzly bears With hunger fierce and fell Rush at them unawares Right down the narrow dell.
The boy turned round with screams, And ran with terror wild; One of the pair of savage beasts Pursued the shrieking child.
The hunter raised his gun, – He knew one charge was all, – And through the boy’s pursuing foe He sent his only ball.
The other on George Nidiver Came on with dreadful pace: The hunter stood unarmed, And met him face to face.
I say unarmed he stood. Against those frightful paws The rifle butt, or club of wood, Could stand no more than straws.
George Nidiver stood still And looked him in the face; The wild beast stopped amazed, Then came with slackening pace.
Still firm the hunter stood, Although his heart beat high; Again the creature stopped, And gazed with wondering eye.
The hunter met his gaze, Nor yet an inch gave way; The bear turned slowly round, And slowly moved away.
What thoughts were in his mind It would be hard to spell: What thoughts were in George Nidiver I rather guess than tell.
But sure that rifle’s aim, Swift choice of generous part, Showed in its passing gleam The depths of a brave heart.
The post <a href="https://emersoncentral.com/essays/courage/">Courage</a> appeared first on <a href="https://emersoncentral.com">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a>.
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