_ HISTORY.
There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are
And it cometh everywhere.
I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakspeare's strain.
I. HISTORY.
THERE is one mind common to all individual men. Every
man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He
that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a
freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought,
he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what
at any time has befallen any man, he can understand.
Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to
all that is or can be done, for this is the only and
sovereign agent.
Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its
genius is illustrated by the entire series of days.
Man is explicable by nothing less than all his
history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit
goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty,
every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it, in
appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to
the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the
mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances
predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but
one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts.
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and
Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded
already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp,
kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the
application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.
This human mind wrote history, and this must read it.
The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of
history is in one man, it is all to be explained from
individual experience. There is a relation between the
hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the
air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of
nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a
hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my
body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and
centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed
by the ages and the ages explained by the hours. Of
the universal mind each individual man is one more
incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each
new fact in his private experience flashes a light on
what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of
his life refer to national crises. Every revolution
was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the
same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to
that era. Every reform was once a private opinion, and
when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve
the problem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond
to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We, as
we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and
king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images
to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall
learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or Caesar
Borgia is as much an illustration of the mind's powers
and depravations as what has befallen us. Each new law
and political movement has meaning for you. Stand before
each of its tablets and say, 'Under this mask did my
Proteus nature hide itself.' This remedies the defect
of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our
actions into perspective; and as crabs, goats, scorpions,
the balance and the waterpot lose their meanness when
hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices
without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades,
and Catiline.
It is the universal nature which gives worth to
particular men and things. Human life, as containing
this, is mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it
round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence
their ultimate reason; all express more or less
distinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable
essence. Property also holds of the soul, covers great
spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold to
it with swords and laws and wide and complex combinations.
The obscure consciousness of this fact is the light of
all our day, the claim of claims; the plea for education,
for justice, for charity; the foundation of friendship
and love and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to
acts of self-reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily
we always read as superior beings. Universal history, the
poets, the romancers, do not in their stateliest pictures,
--in the sacerdotal, the imperial palaces, in the triumphs
of will or of genius,--anywhere lose our ear, anywhere make
us feel that we intrude, that this is for better men; but
rather is it true that in their grandest strokes we feel
most at home. All that Shakspeare says of the king, yonder
slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathize in the great moments of history, in
the great discoveries, the great resistances, the great
prosperities of men;--because there law was enacted, the
sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was
struck, for us, as we ourselves in that place would have
done or applauded.
We have the same interest in condition and character.
We honor the rich because they have externally the
freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be proper
to man, proper to us. So all that is said of the wise
man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes
to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained
but attainable self. All literature writes the character
of the wise man. Books, monuments, pictures, conversation,
are portraits in which he finds the lineaments he is
forming. The silent and the eloquent praise him and accost
him, and he is stimulated wherever he moves, as by personal allusions. A true aspirant therefore never needs look for
allusions personal and laudatory in discourse. He hears the commendation, not of himself, but, more sweet, of that
character he seeks, in every word that is said concerning character, yea further in every fact and circumstance,--in
the running river and the rustling corn. Praise is looked,
homage tendered, love flows, from mute nature, from the
mountains and the lights of the firmament.
These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night,
let us use in broad day. The student is to read
history actively and not passively; to esteem his own
life the text, and books the commentary. Thus
compelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles, as
never to those who do not respect themselves. I have
no expectation that any man will read history aright
who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men
whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense
than what he is doing to-day.
The world exists for the education of each man. There
is no age or state of society or mode of action in
history to which there is not somewhat corresponding
in his life. Every thing tends in a wonderful manner
to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him.
He should see that he can live all history in his own
person. He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer
himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know
that he is greater than all the geography and all the
government of the world; he must transfer the point of
view from which history is commonly read, from Rome
and Athens and London, to himself, and not deny his
conviction that he is the court, and if England or
Egypt have any thing to say to him he will try the
case; if not, let them for ever be silent. He must
attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yield
their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike.
The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature,
betrays itself in the use we make of the signal
narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining
ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no
cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact.
Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome
are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden,
the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry
thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the fact
was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang
in heaven an immortal sign? London and Paris and New
York must go the same way. "What is history," said
Napoleon, "but a fable agreed upon?" This life of ours
is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War,
Colonization, Church, Court and Commerce, as with so
many flowers and wild ornaments grave and gay. I will
not make more account of them. I believe in Eternity.
I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain and the Islands,
--the genius and creative principle of each and of all
eras, in my own mind.
We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of
history in our private experience and verifying them
here. All history becomes subjective; in other words
there is properly no history, only biography. Every
mind must know the whole lesson for itself,--must go
over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it
does not live, it will not know. What the former age
has epitomized into a formula or rule for manipular
convenience, it will lose all the good of verifying
for itself, by means of the wall of that rule.
Somewhere, sometime, it will demand and find
compensation for that loss, by doing the work itself.
Ferguson discovered many things in astronomy which had
long been known. The better for him.
History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which
the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature;
that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary
reason of every fact,--see how it could and must be.
So stand before every public and private work; before
an oration of Burke, before a victory of Napoleon,
before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, of
Marmaduke Robinson; before a French Reign of Terror,
and a Salem hanging of witches; before a fanatic
Revival and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in
Providence. We assume that we under like influence
should be alike affected, and should achieve the like;
and we aim to master intellectually the steps and
reach the same height or the same degradation that
our fellow, our proxy has done.
All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting
the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the
Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis,--is the desire to do
away this wild, savage, and preposterous There or Then,
and introduce in its place the Here and the Now. Belzoni
digs and measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of
Thebes, until he can see the end of the difference between
the monstrous work and himself. When he has satisfied
himself, in general and in detail, that it was made by
such a person as he, so armed and so motived, and to ends
to which he himself should also have worked, the problem
is solved; his thought lives along the whole line of
temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through
them all with satisfaction, and they live again to the
mind, or are now.
A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and
not done by us. Surely it was by man, but we find it
not in our man. But we apply ourselves to the history
of its production. We put ourselves into the place and
state of the builder. We remember the forest-dwellers,
the first temples, the adherence to the first type,
and the decoration of it as the wealth of the nation
increased; the value which is given to wood by carving
led to the carving over the whole mountain of stone of
a cathedral. When we have gone through this process,
and added thereto the Catholic Church, its cross, its
music, its processions, its Saints' days and image-
worship, we have as it were been the man that made the
minster; we have seen how it could and must be. We have
the sufficient reason.
The difference between men is in their principle of
association. Some men classify objects by color and
size and other accidents of appearance; others by
intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause and
effect. The progress of the intellect is to the
clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface
differences. To the poet, to the philosopher, to the
saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events
profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the eye
is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance.
Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in
its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of
appearance.
Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating
nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, why
should we be such hard pedants, and magnify a few
forms? Why should we make account of time, or of
magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows them not, and
genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with them
as a young child plays with graybeards and in
churches. Genius studies the causal thought, and far
back in the womb of things sees the rays parting from
one orb, that diverge, ere they fall, by infinite
diameters. Genius watches the monad through all his
masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature.
Genius detects through the fly, through the
caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the
constant individual; through countless individuals
the fixed species; through many species the genus;
through all genera the steadfast type; through all
the kingdoms of organized life the eternal unity.
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never
the same. She casts the same thought into troops of
forms, as a poet makes twenty fables with one moral.
Through the bruteness and toughness of matter, a
subtle spirit bends all things to its own will. The
adamant streams into soft but precise form before it,
and whilst I look at it its outline and texture are
changed again. Nothing is so fleeting as form; yet
never does it quite deny itself. In man we still trace
the remains or hints of all that we esteem badges of
servitude in the lower races; yet in him they enhance
his nobleness and grace; as Io, in Aeschylus,
transformed to a cow, offends the imagination; but how
changed when as Isis in Egypt she meets Osiris-Jove,
a beautiful woman with nothing of the metamorphosis
left but the lunar horns as the splendid ornament of
her brows!
The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the
diversity equally obvious. There is, at the surface,
infinite variety of things; at the centre there is
simplicity of cause. How many are the acts of one man
in which we recognize the same character! Observe the
sources of our information in respect to the Greek
genius. We have the civil history of that people, as
Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have
given it; a very sufficient account of what manner of
persons they were and what they did. We have the same
national mind expressed for us again in their
literature, in epic and lyric poems, drama, and
philosophy; a very complete form. Then we have it once
more in their architecture, a beauty as of temperance
itself, limited to the straight line and the square,
--a builded geometry. Then we have it once again in
sculpture, the "tongue on the balance of expression,"
a multitude of forms in the utmost freedom of action
and never transgressing the ideal serenity; like
votaries performing some religious dance before the
gods, and, though in convulsive pain or mortal combat,
never daring to break the figure and decorum of their
dance. Thus of the genius of one remarkable people we
have a fourfold representation: and to the senses what
more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a marble centaur,
the peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last actions
of Phocion?
Every one must have observed faces and forms which,
without any resembling feature, make a like impression
on the beholder. A particular picture or copy of
verses, if it do not awaken the same train of images,
will yet superinduce the same sentiment as some wild
mountain walk, although the resemblance is nowise
obvious to the senses, but is occult and out of the
reach of the understanding. Nature is an endless
combination and repetition of a very few laws. She
hums the old well-known air through innumerable
variations.
Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout
her works, and delights in startling us with resemblances
in the most unexpected quarters. I have seen the head of
an old sachem of the forest which at once reminded the
eye of a bald mountain summit, and the furrows of the brow
suggested the strata of the rock. There are men whose
manners have the same essential splendor as the simple
and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon and
the remains of the earliest Greek art. And there are
compositions of the same strain to be found in the books
of all ages. What is Guido's Rospigliosi Aurora but a
morning thought, as the horses in it are only a morning
cloud? If any one will but take pains to observe the
variety of actions to which he is equally inclined in
certain moods of mind, and those to which he is averse,
he will see how deep is the chain of affinity.
A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree
without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child
by studying the outlines of its form merely,--but,
by watching for a time his motions and plays, the
painter enters into his nature and can then draw him
at will in every attitude. So Roos "entered into the
inmost nature of a sheep." I knew a draughtsman
employed in a public survey who found that he could
not sketch the rocks until their geological structure
was first explained to him. In a certain state of
thought is the common origin of very diverse works. It
is the spirit and not the fact that is identical. By a
deeper apprehension, and not primarily by a painful
acquisition of many manual skills, the artist attains
the power of awakening other souls to a given activity.
It has been said that "common souls pay with what they
do, nobler souls with that which they are." And why?
Because a profound nature awakens in us by its actions
and words, by its very looks and manners, the same power
and beauty that a gallery of sculpture or of pictures
addresses.
Civil and natural history, the history of art and of
literature, must be explained from individual history,
or must remain words. There is nothing but is related
to us, nothing that does not interest us,--kingdom,
college, tree, horse, or iron shoe,--the roots of all
things are in man. Santa Croce and the Dome of St.
Peter's are lame copies after a divine model. Strasburg
Cathedral is a material counterpart of the soul of Erwin
of Steinbach. The true poem is the poet's mind; the true
ship is the ship-builder. In the man, could we lay him
open, we should see the reason for the last flourish and
tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the
sea-shell preexists in the secreting organs of the fish.
The whole of heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A
man of fine manners shall pronounce your name with all
the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add.
The trivial experience of every day is always verifying
some old prediction to us and converting into things the
words and signs which we had heard and seen without heed.
A lady with whom I was riding in the forest said to me
that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the
genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the
wayfarer had passed onward; a thought which poetry has
celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off
on the approach of human feet. The man who has seen the
rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has been
present like an archangel at the creation of light and of
the world. I remember one summer day in the fields my
companion pointed out to me a broad cloud, which might
extend a quarter of a mile parallel to the horizon, quite
accurately in the form of a cherub as painted over churches,
--a round block in the centre, which it was easy to animate
with eyes and mouth, supported on either side by wide-
stretched symmetrical wings. What appears once in the
atmosphere may appear often, and it was undoubtedly the
archetype of that familiar ornament. I have seen in the
sky a chain of summer lightning which at once showed to
me that the Greeks drew from nature when they painted the
thunderbolt in the hand of Jove. I have seen a snow-drift
along the sides of the stone wall which obviously gave the
idea of the common architectural scroll to abut a tower.
By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances
we invent anew the orders and the ornaments of architecture,
as we see how each people merely decorated its primitive
abodes. The Doric temple preserves the semblance of the
wooden cabin in which the Dorian dwelt. The Chinese pagoda
is plainly a Tartar tent. The Indian and Egyptian temples
still betray the mounds and subterranean houses of their
forefathers. "The custom of making houses and tombs in
the living rock," says Heeren in his Researches on the
Ethiopians, "determined very naturally the principal
character of the Nubian Egyptian architecture to the
colossal form which it assumed. In these caverns, already
prepared by nature, the eye was accustomed to dwell on
huge shapes and masses, so that when art came to the
assistance of nature it could not move on a small scale
without degrading itself. What would statues of the usual
size, or neat porches and wings have been, associated with
those gigantic halls before which only Colossi could sit
as watchmen or lean on the pillars of the interior?"
The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation
of the forest trees, with all their boughs, to a festal
or solemn arcade; as the bands about the cleft pillars
still indicate the green withes that tied them. No one
can walk in a road cut through pine woods, without being
struck with the architectural appearance of the grove,
especially in winter, when the barrenness of all other
trees shows the low arch of the Saxons. In the woods in
a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of
the stained glass window, with which the Gothic cathedrals
are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through
the bare and crossing branches of the forest. Nor can any
lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and the
English cathedrals, without feeling that the forest
overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel,
his saw and plane still reproduced its ferns, its spikes
of flowers, its locust, elm, oak, pine, fir and spruce.
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued
by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The
mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower,
with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the
aerial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty.
In like manner all public facts are to be individualized,
all private facts are to be generalized. Then at once
History becomes fluid and true, and Biography deep and
sublime. As the Persian imitated in the slender shafts
and capitals of his architecture the stem and flower of
the lotus and palm, so the Persian court in its magnificent
era never gave over the nomadism of its barbarous tribes,
but travelled from Ecbatana, where the spring was spent,
to Susa in summer and to Babylon for the winter.
In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and
Agriculture are the two antagonist facts. The geography
of Asia and of Africa necessitated a nomadic life. But
the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil
or the advantages of a market had induced to build towns.
Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because
of the perils of the state from nomadism. And in these
late and civil countries of England and America these
propensities still fight out the old battle, in the nation
and in the individual. The nomads of Africa were constrained
to wander, by the attacks of the gad-fly, which drives the
cattle mad, and so compels the tribe to emigrate in the
rainy season and to drive off the cattle to the higher sandy
regions. The nomads of Asia follow the pasturage from month
to month. In America and Europe the nomadism is of trade and
curiosity; a progress, certainly, from the gad-fly of
Astaboras to the Anglo and Italo-mania of Boston Bay. Sacred
cities, to which a periodical religious pilgrimage was
enjoined, or stringent laws and customs, tending to invigorate
the national bond, were the check on the old rovers; and the
cumulative values of long residence are the restraints on the
itineracy of the present day. The antagonism of the two
tendencies is not less active in individuals, as the love of
adventure or the love of repose happens to predominate. A man
of rude health and flowing spirits has the faculty of rapid
domestication, lives in his wagon and roams through all
latitudes as easily as a Calmuc. At sea, or in the forest, or
in the snow, he sleeps as warm, dines with as good appetite,
and associates as happily as beside his own chimneys. Or
perhaps his facility is deeper seated, in the increased range
of his faculties of observation, which yield him points of
interest wherever fresh objects meet his eyes. The pastoral
nations were needy and hungry to desperation; and this
intellectual nomadism, in its excess, bankrupts the mind
through the dissipation of power on a miscellany of objects.
The home-keeping wit, on the other hand, is that continence
or content which finds all the elements of life in its own
soil; and which has its own perils of monotony and
deterioration, if not stimulated by foreign infusions.
Every thing the individual sees without him corresponds to
his states of mind, and every thing is in turn intelligible
to him, as his onward thinking leads him into the truth to
which that fact or series belongs.
The primeval world,--the Fore-World, as the Germans say,
--I can dive to it in myself as well as grope for it with
researching fingers in catacombs, libraries, and the broken
reliefs and torsos of ruined villas.
What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in
Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods
from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of
the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later?
What but this, that every man passes personally through a
Grecian period. The Grecian state is the era of the bodily
nature, the perfection of the senses,--of the spiritual
nature unfolded in strict unity with the body. In it existed
those human forms which supplied the sculptor with his
models of Hercules, Phoebus, and Jove; not like the forms
abounding in the streets of modern cities, wherein the face
is a confused blur of features, but composed of incorrupt,
sharply defined and symmetrical features, whose eye-sockets
are so formed that it would be impossible for such eyes to
squint and take furtive glances on this side and on that, but
they must turn the whole head. The manners of that period are
plain and fierce. The reverence exhibited is for personal
qualities; courage, address, self-command, justice, strength,
swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest. Luxury and elegance
are not known. A sparse population and want make every man his
own valet, cook, butcher and soldier, and the habit of supplying
his own needs educates the body to wonderful performances. Such
are the Agamemnon and Diomed of Homer, and not far different is
the picture Xenophon gives of himself and his compatriots in the
Retreat of the Ten Thousand. "After the army had crossed the
river Teleboas in Armenia, there fell much snow, and the troops
lay miserably on the ground covered with it. But Xenophon arose
naked, and taking an axe, began to split wood; whereupon others
rose and did the like." Throughout his army exists a boundless
liberty of speech. They quarrel for plunder, they wrangle with
the generals on each new order, and Xenophon is as sharp-tongued
as any and sharper-tongued than most, and so gives as good as he
gets. Who does not see that this is a gang of great boys, with
such a code of honor and such lax discipline as great boys have?
The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, and indeed of all the
old literature, is that the persons speak simply,--speak as
persons who have great good sense without knowing it, before
yet the reflective habit has become the predominant habit of
the mind. Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of
the old, but of the natural. The Greeks are not reflective, but
perfect in their senses and in their health, with the finest
physical organization in the world. Adults acted with the
simplicity and grace of children. They made vases, tragedies,
and statues, such as healthy senses should,--that is, in good
taste. Such things have continued to be made in all ages, and
are now, wherever a healthy physique exists; but, as a class,
from their superior organization, they have surpassed all. They
combine the energy of manhood with the engaging unconsciousness
of childhood. The attraction of these manners is that they
belong to man, and are known to every man in virtue of his
being once a child; besides that there are always individuals
who retain these characteristics. A person of childlike genius
and inborn energy is still a Greek, and revives our love of the
Muse of Hellas. I admire the love of nature in the Philoctetes.
In reading those fine apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks,
mountains and waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea.
I feel the eternity of man, the identity of his thought. The
Greek had it seems the same fellow-beings as I. The sun and moon,
water and fire, met his heart precisely as they meet mine. Then
the vaunted distinction between Greek and English, between Classic
and Romantic schools, seems superficial and pedantic. When a
thought of Plato becomes a thought to me,--when a truth that
fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I
feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are
tinged with the same hue, and do as it were run into one, why
should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count
Egyptian years?
The student interprets the age of chivalry by his own
age of chivalry, and the days of maritime adventure
and circumnavigation by quite parallel miniature
experiences of his own. To the sacred history of the
world he has the same key. When the voice of a prophet
out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a
sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then
pierces to the truth through all the confusion of
tradition and the caricature of institutions.
Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who
disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that men of
God have from time to time walked among men and made
their commission felt in the heart and soul of the
commonest hearer. Hence evidently the tripod, the
priest, the priestess inspired by the divine afflatus.
Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They
cannot unite him to history, or reconcile him with
themselves. As they come to revere their intuitions
and aspire to live holily, their own piety explains
every fact, every word.
How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster,
of Menu, of Socrates, domesticate themselves in the
mind. I cannot find any antiquity in them. They are
mine as much as theirs.
I have seen the first monks and anchorets, without
crossing seas or centuries. More than once some
individual has appeared to me with such negligence of
labor and such commanding contemplation, a haughty
beneficiary begging in the name of God, as made good
to the nineteenth century Simeon the Stylite, the
Thebais, and the first Capuchins.
The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian,
Brahmin, Druid, and Inca, is expounded in the individual's
private life. The cramping influence of a hard formalist
on a young child, in repressing his spirits and courage,
paralyzing the understanding, and that without producing
indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even much
sympathy with the tyranny,--is a familiar fact, explained
to the child when he becomes a man, only by seeing that
the oppressor of his youth is himself a child tyrannized
over by those names and words and forms of whose influence
he was merely the organ to the youth. The fact teaches him
how Belus was worshipped and how the Pyramids were built,
better than the discovery by Champollion of the names of
all the workmen and the cost of every tile. He finds
Assyria and the Mounds of Cholula at his door, and himself
has laid the courses.
Again, in that protest which each considerate person
makes against the superstition of his times, he
repeats step for step the part of old reformers, and
in the search after truth finds, like them, new perils
to virtue. He learns again what moral vigor is needed
to supply the girdle of a superstition. A great
licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation.
How many times in the history of the world has the
Luther of the day had to lament the decay of piety in
his own household! "Doctor," said his wife to Martin
Luther, one day, "how is it that whilst subject to
papacy we prayed so often and with such fervor, whilst
now we pray with the utmost coldness and very seldom?"
The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has
in literature,--in all fable as well as in all history.
He finds that the poet was no odd fellow who described
strange and impossible situations, but that universal
man wrote by his pen a confession true for one and true
for all. His own secret biography he finds in lines
wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he
was born. One after another he comes up in his private
adventures with every fable of Aesop, of Homer, of Hafiz,
of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and verifies them with
his own head and hands.
The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper
creations of the imagination and not of the fancy, are
universal verities. What a range of meanings and what
perpetual pertinence has the story of Prometheus!
Beside its primary value as the first chapter of the
history of Europe, (the mythology thinly veiling
authentic facts, the invention of the mechanic arts
and the migration of colonies,) it gives the history
of religion, with some closeness to the faith of later
ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of the old mythology. He
is the friend of man; stands between the unjust "justice"
of the Eternal Father and the race of mortals, and readily
suffers all things on their account. But where it departs
from the Calvinistic Christianity and exhibits him as the
defier of Jove, it represents a state of mind which readily
appears wherever the doctrine of Theism is taught in a
crude, objective form, and which seems the self-defence
of man against this untruth, namely a discontent with
the believed fact that a God exists, and a feeling
that the obligation of reverence is onerous. It would
steal if it could the fire of the Creator, and live
apart from him and independent of him. The Prometheus
Vinctus is the romance of skepticism. Not less true to
all time are the details of that stately apologue.
Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus, said the poets.
When the gods come among men, they are not known.
Jesus was not; Socrates and Shakspeare were not.
Antaeus was suffocated by the gripe of Hercules, but
every time he touched his mother earth his strength
was renewed. Man is the broken giant, and in all his
weakness both his body and his mind are invigorated
by habits of conversation with nature. The power of
music, the power of poetry, to unfix and as it were
clap wings to solid nature, interprets the riddle of
Orpheus. The philosophical perception of identity
through endless mutations of form makes him know the
Proteus. What else am I who laughed or wept yesterday,
who slept last night like a corpse, and this morning
stood and ran? And what see I on any side but the
transmigrations of Proteus? I can symbolize my thought
by using the name of any creature, of any fact, because
every creature is man agent or patient. Tantalus is
but a name for you and me. Tantalus means the
impossibility of drinking the waters of thought which
are always gleaming and waving within sight of the soul.
The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were;
but men and women are only half human. Every animal of
the barn-yard, the field and the forest, of the earth
and of the waters that are under the earth, has contrived
to get a footing and to leave the print of its features
and form in some one or other of these upright, heaven-
facing speakers. Ah! brother, stop the ebb of thy soul,
--ebbing downward into the forms into whose habits thou
hast now for many years slid. As near and proper to us
is also that old fable of the Sphinx, who was said to
sit in the road-side and put riddles to every passenger.
If the man could not answer, she swallowed him alive. If
he could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was slain. What is
our life but an endless flight of winged facts or events?
In splendid variety these changes come, all putting
questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer
by a superior wisdom these facts or questions of time,
serve them. Facts encumber them, tyrannize over them, and
make the men of routine, the men of sense, in whom a
literal obedience to facts has extinguished every spark
of that light by which man is truly man. But if the man
is true to his better instincts or sentiments, and refuses
the dominion of facts, as one that comes of a higher race;
remains fast by the soul and sees the principle, then the
facts fall aptly and supple into their places; they know
their master, and the meanest of them glorifies him.
See in Goethe's Helena the same desire that every word
should be a thing. These figures, he would say, these
Chirons, Griffins, Phorkyas, Helen and Leda, are
somewhat, and do exert a specific influence on the
mind. So far then are they eternal entities, as real
to-day as in the first Olympiad. Much revolving them
he writes out freely his humor, and gives them body
to his own imagination. And although that poem be as
vague and fantastic as a dream, yet is it much more
attractive than the more regular dramatic pieces of
the same author, for the reason that it operates a
wonderful relief to the mind from the routine of
customary images,--awakens the reader's invention
and fancy by the wild freedom of the design, and by
the unceasing succession of brisk shocks of surprise.
The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature
of the bard, sits on his neck and writes through his
hand; so that when he seems to vent a mere caprice and
wild romance, the issue is an exact allegory. Hence
Plato said that "poets utter great and wise things
which they do not themselves understand." All the
fictions of the Middle Age explain themselves as a
masked or frolic expression of that which in grave
earnest the mind of that period toiled to achieve.
Magic and all that is ascribed to it is a deep
presentiment of the powers of science. The shoes of
swiftness, the sword of sharpness, the power of
subduing the elements, of using the secret virtues of
minerals, of understanding the voices of birds, are
the obscure efforts of the mind in a right direction.
The preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of
perpetual youth, and the like, are alike the endeavour
of the human spirit "to bend the shows of things to
the desires of the mind."
In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul a garland and a
rose bloom on the head of her who is faithful, and
fade on the brow of the inconstant. In the story of
the Boy and the Mantle even a mature reader may be
surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the
triumph of the gentle Venelas; and indeed all the
postulates of elfin annals,--that the fairies do not
like to be named; that their gifts are capricious and
not to be trusted; that who seeks a treasure must not
speak; and the like,--I find true in Concord, however
they might be in Cornwall or Bretagne.
Is it otherwise in the newest romance? I read the
Bride of Lammermoor. Sir William Ashton is a mask for
a vulgar temptation, Ravenswood Castle a fine name for
proud poverty, and the foreign mission of state only a
Bunyan disguise for honest industry. We may all shoot
a wild bull that would toss the good and beautiful, by
fighting down the unjust and sensual. Lucy Ashton is
another name for fidelity, which is always beautiful
and always liable to calamity in this world.
But along with the civil and metaphysical history of
man, another history goes daily forward,--that of
the external world,--in which he is not less strictly
implicated. He is the compend of time; he is also the
correlative of nature. His power consists in the
multitude of his affinities, in the fact that his life
is intertwined with the whole chain of organic and
inorganic being. In old Rome the public roads
beginning at the Forum proceeded north, south, east,
west, to the centre of every province of the empire,
making each market-town of Persia, Spain and Britain
pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so out of the
human heart go as it were highways to the heart of
every object in nature, to reduce it under the
dominion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a
knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.
His faculties refer to natures out of him and predict
the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish
foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle
in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live without a
world. Put Napoleon in an island prison, let his
faculties find no men to act on, no Alps to climb, no
stake to play for, and he would beat the air, and
appear stupid. Transport him to large countries, dense
population, complex interests and antagonist power,
and you shall see that the man Napoleon, bounded that
is by such a profile and outline, is not the virtual
Napoleon. This is but Talbot's shadow;--
"His substance is not here.
For what you see is but the smallest part
And least proportion of humanity;
But were the whole frame here,
It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch,
Your roof were not sufficient to contain it."
Henry VI.
Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon.
Newton and Laplace need myriads of age and thick-strewn
celestial areas. One may say a gravitating solar system
is already prophesied in the nature of Newton's mind.
Not less does the brain of Davy or of Gay-Lussac, from
childhood exploring the affinities and repulsions of
particles, anticipate the laws of organization. Does not
the eye of the human embryo predict the light? the ear of
Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound? Do not
the constructive fingers of Watt, Fulton, Whittemore,
Arkwright, predict the fusible, hard, and temperable
texture of metals, the properties of stone, water, and
wood? Do not the lovely attributes of the maiden child
predict the refinements and decorations of civil society?
Here also we are reminded of the action of man on man. A
mind might ponder its thought for ages and not gain so
much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it
in a day. Who knows himself before he has been thrilled
with indignation at an outrage, or has heard an eloquent
tongue, or has shared the throb of thousands in a national
exultation or alarm? No man can antedate his experience,
or guess what faculty or feeling a new object shall unlock,
any more than he can draw to-day the face of a person whom
he shall see to-morrow for the first time.
I will not now go behind the general statement to explore
the reason of this correspondency. Let it suffice that in
the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One,
and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read
and written.
Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and reproduce
its treasures for each pupil. He too shall pass through
the whole cycle of experience. He shall collect into a
focus the rays of nature. History no longer shall be a
dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise
man. You shall not tell me by languages and titles a
catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me
feel what periods you have lived. A man shall be the Temple
of Fame. He shall walk, as the poets have described that
goddess, in a robe painted all over with wonderful events
and experiences;--his own form and features by their
exalted intelligence shall be that variegated vest. I
shall find in him the Foreworld; in his childhood the Age
of Gold, the Apples of Knowledge, the Argonautic Expedition,
the calling of Abraham, the building of the Temple, the
Advent of Christ, Dark Ages, the Revival of Letters, the
Reformation, the discovery of new lands, the opening of new
sciences and new regions in man. He shall be the priest of
Pan, and bring with him into humble cottages the blessing of
the morning stars, and all the recorded benefits of heaven
and earth.
Is there somewhat overweening in this claim? Then I reject
all I have written, for what is the use of pretending to
know what we know not? But it is the fault of our rhetoric
that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to
belie some other. I hold our actual knowledge very cheap.
Hear the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the
fungus under foot, the lichen on the log. What do I know
sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of life?
As old as the Caucasian man,--perhaps older,--these creatures
have kept their counsel beside him, and there is no record of
any word or sign that has passed from one to the other. What
connection do the books show between the fifty or sixty
chemical elements and the historical eras? Nay, what does
history yet record of the metaphysical annals of man? What
light does it shed on those mysteries which we hide under the
names Death and Immortality? Yet every history should be
written in a wisdom which divined the range of our affinities
and looked at facts as symbols. I am ashamed to see what a
shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times
we must say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does
Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates
to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or
experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter,
for the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore,
the porter?
Broader and deeper we must write our annals,--from an ethical
reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative
conscience,--if we would trulier express our central and wide-
related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness
and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that
day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of
science and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot,
the Indian, the child and unschooled farmer's boy stand nearer
to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector
or the antiquary. _