_ PRUDENCE
THEME no poet gladly sung,
Fair to old and foul to young;
Scorn not thou the love of parts,
And the articles of arts.
Grandeur of the perfect sphere
Thanks the atoms that cohere.
VII. PRUDENCE
What right have I to write on Prudence, whereof I have
Little, and that of the negative sort? My prudence
consists in avoiding and going without, not in the
inventing of means and methods, not in adroit steering,
not in gentle repairing. I have no skill to make money
spend well, no genius in my economy, and whoever sees
my garden discovers that I must have some other garden.
Yet I love facts, and hate lubricity and people without
perception. Then I have the same title to write on prudence
that I have to write on poetry or holiness. We write from
aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We
paint those qualities which we do not possess. The poet
admires the man of energy and tactics; the merchant breeds
his son for the church or the bar; and where a man is not
vain and egotistic you shall find what he has not by his
praise. Moreover it would be hardly honest in me not to
balance these fine lyric words of Love and Friendship with
words of coarser sound, and whilst my debt to my senses is
real and constant, not to own it in passing.
Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science
of appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward
life. It is God taking thought for oxen. It moves matter
after the laws of matter. It is content to seek health
of body by complying with physical conditions, and health
of mind by the laws of the intellect.
The world of the senses is a world of shows; it does not
exist for itself, but has a symbolic character; and a true
prudence or law of shows recognizes the co-presence of other
laws and knows that its own office is subaltern; knows that
it is surface and not centre where it works. Prudence is
false when detached. It is legitimate when it is the Natural
History of the soul incarnate, when it unfolds the beauty
of laws within the narrow scope of the senses.
There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the
world. It is sufficient to our present purpose to indicate
three. One class live to the utility of the symbol,
esteeming health and wealth a final good. Another class
live above this mark to the beauty of the symbol, as the
poet and artist and the naturalist and man of science. A
third class live above the beauty of the symbol to the
beauty of the thing signified; these are wise men. The
first class have common sense; the second, taste; and the
third, spiritual perception. Once in a long time, a man
traverses the whole scale, and sees and enjoys the symbol
solidly, then also has a clear eye for its beauty, and
lastly, whilst he pitches his tent on this sacred volcanic
isle of nature, does not offer to build houses and barns
thereon,--reverencing the splendor of the God which he
sees bursting through each chink and cranny.
The world is filled with the proverbs and acts and
winkings of a base prudence, which is a devotion to
matter, as if we possessed no other faculties than
the palate, the nose, the touch, the eye and ear; a
prudence which adores the Rule of Three, which never
subscribes, which never gives, which seldom lends,
and asks but one question of any project,--Will it
bake bread? This is a disease like a thickening of
the skin until the vital organs are destroyed. But
culture, revealing the high origin of the apparent
world and aiming at the perfection of the man as the
end, degrades every thing else, as health and bodily
life, into means. It sees prudence not to be a several
faculty, but a name for wisdom and virtue conversing
with the body and its wants. Cultivated men always feel
and speak so, as if a great fortune, the achievement of
a civil or social measure, great personal influence, a
graceful and commanding address, had their value as
proofs of the energy of the spirit. If a man lose his
balance and immerse himself in any trades or pleasures
for their own sake, he may be a good wheel or pin, but
he is not a cultivated man.
The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the
god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all
comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore literature's.
The true prudence limits this sensualism by admitting
the knowledge of an internal and real world. This
recognition once made, the order of the world and the
distribution of affairs and times, being studied with
the co-perception of their subordinate place, will
reward any degree of attention. For our existence, thus
apparently attached in nature to the sun and the returning
moon and the periods which they mark,--so susceptible to
climate and to country, so alive to social good and evil,
so fond of splendor and so tender to hunger and cold and
debt,--reads all its primary lessons out of these books.
Prudence does not go behind nature and ask whence it is.
It takes the laws of the world whereby man's being is
conditioned, as they are, and keeps these laws that it
may enjoy their proper good. It respects space and time,
climate, want, sleep, the law of polarity, growth and
death. There revolve, to give bound and period to his
being on all sides, the sun and moon, the great formalists
in the sky: here lies stubborn matter, and will not swerve
from its chemical routine. Here is a planted globe, pierced
and belted with natural laws and fenced and distributed
externally with civil partitions and properties which impose
new restraints on the young inhabitant.
We eat of the bread which grows in the field. We live by
the air which blows around us and we are poisoned by the
air that is too cold or too hot, too dry or too wet. Time,
which shows so vacant, indivisible and divine in its coming,
is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A door is to
be painted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood or oil, or
meal or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then
the tax, and an affair to be transacted with a man without
heart or brains, and the stinging recollection of an
injurious or very awkward word,--these eat up the hours.
Do what we can, summer will have its flies; if we walk in
the woods we must feed mosquitos; if we go a-fishing we
must expect a wet coat. Then climate is a great impediment
to idle persons; we often resolve to give up the care of the
weather, but still we regard the clouds and the rain.
We are instructed by these petty experiences which usurp
the hours and years. The hard soil and four months of
snow make the inhabitant of the northern temperate zone
wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the fixed
smile of the tropics. The islander may ramble all day
at will. At night he may sleep on a mat under the moon,
and wherever a wild date-tree grows, nature has, without
a prayer even, spread a table for his morning meal. The
northerner is perforce a householder. He must brew, bake,
salt and preserve his food, and pile wood and coal. But
as it happens that not one stroke can labor lay to without
some new acquaintance with nature, and as nature is
inexhaustibly significant, the inhabitants of these
climates have always excelled the southerner in force.
Such is the value of these matters that a man who knows
other things can never know too much of these. Let him
have accurate perceptions. Let him, if he have hands,
handle; if eyes, measure and discriminate; let him accept
and hive every fact of chemistry, natural history and
economics; the more he has, the less is he willing to
spare any one. Time is always bringing the occasions that
disclose their value. Some wisdom comes out of every
natural and innocent action. The domestic man, who loves
no music so well as his kitchen clock and the airs which
the logs sing to him as they burn on the hearth, has
solaces which others never dream of. The application of
means to ends insures victory and the songs of victory not
less in a farm or a shop than in the tactics of party or
of war. The good husband finds method as efficient in the
packing of fire-wood in a shed or in the harvesting of
fruits in the cellar, as in Peninsular campaigns or the
files of the Department of State. In the rainy day he
builds a work-bench, or gets his tool-box set in the corner
of the barn-chamber, and stored with nails, gimlet, pincers,
screwdriver and chisel. Herein he tastes an old joy of youth
and childhood, the cat-like love of garrets, presses and
corn-chambers, and of the conveniences of long housekeeping.
His garden or his poultry-yard tells him many pleasant
anecdotes. One might find argument for optimism in the
abundant flow of this saccharine element of pleasure in
every suburb and extremity of the good world. Let a man
keep the law,--any law,--and his way will be strown with
satisfactions. There is more difference in the quality of
our pleasures than in the amount.
On the other hand, nature punishes any neglect of prudence.
If you think the senses final, obey their law. If you
believe in the soul, do not clutch at sensual sweetness
before it is ripe on the slow tree of cause and effect.
It is vinegar to the eyes to deal with men of loose and
imperfect perception. Dr. Johnson is reported to have said,
--"If the child says he looked out of this window, when he
looked out of that,--whip him." Our American character is
marked by a more than average delight in accurate perception,
which is shown by the currency of the byword, "No mistake."
But the discomfort of unpunctuality, of confusion of thought
about facts, of inattention to the wants of to-morrow, is
of no nation. The beautiful laws of time and space, once
dislocated by our inaptitude, are holes and dens. If the
hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of honey
it will yield us bees. Our words and actions to be fair must
be timely. A gay and pleasant sound is the whetting of the
scythe in the mornings of June, yet what is more lonesome
and sad than the sound of a whetstone or mower's rifle when
it is too late in the season to make hay? Scatter-brained
and "afternoon" men spoil much more than their own affair
in spoiling the temper of those who deal with them. I have
seen a criticism on some paintings, of which I am reminded
when I see the shiftless and unhappy men who are not true
to their senses. The last Grand Duke of Weimar, a man of
superior understanding, said,--"I have sometimes remarked
in the presence of great works of art, and just now
especially in Dresden, how much a certain property
contributes to the effect which gives life to the figures,
and to the life an irresistible truth. This property is
the hitting, in all the figures we draw, the right centre
of gravity. I mean the placing the figures firm upon their
feet, making the hands grasp, and fastening the eyes on
the spot where they should look. Even lifeless figures, as
vessels and stools--let them be drawn ever so correctly--
lose all effect so soon as they lack the resting upon their
centre of gravity, and have a certain swimming and oscillating
appearance. The Raphael in the Dresden gallery (the only
greatly affecting picture which I have seen) is the quietest
and most passionless piece you can imagine; a couple of saints
who worship the Virgin and Child. Nevertheless, it awakens a
deeper impression than the contortions of ten crucified
martyrs. For beside all the resistless beauty of form, it
possesses in the highest degree the property of the
perpendicularity of all the figures." This perpendicularity
we demand of all the figures in this picture of life. Let
them stand on their feet, and not float and swing. Let us
know where to find them. Let them discriminate between what
they remember and what they dreamed, call a spade a spade,
give us facts, and honor their own senses with trust.
But what man shall dare tax another with imprudence?
Who is prudent? The men we call greatest are least in
this kingdom. There is a certain fatal dislocation in
our relation to nature, distorting our modes of living
and making every law our enemy, which seems at last to
have aroused all the wit and virtue in the world to
ponder the question of Reform. We must call the highest
prudence to counsel, and ask why health and beauty and
genius should now be the exception rather than the rule
of human nature? We do not know the properties of plants
and animals and the laws of nature, through our sympathy
with the same; but this remains the dream of poets. Poetry
and prudence should be coincident. Poets should be
lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should
not chide and insult, but should announce and lead the
civil code and the day's work. But now the two things seem
irreconcilably parted. We have violated law upon law until
we stand amidst ruins, and when by chance we espy a
coincidence between reason and the phenomena, we are
surprised. Beauty should be the dowry of every man and
woman, as invariably as sensation; but it is rare. Health
or sound organization should be universal. Genius should
be the child of genius and every child should be inspired;
but now it is not to be predicted of any child, and nowhere
is it pure. We call partial half-lights, by courtesy,
genius; talent which converts itself to money; talent which
glitters to-day that it may dine and sleep well to-morrow;
and society is officered by men of parts, as they are properly
called, and not by divine men. These use their gifts to refine
luxury, not to abolish it. Genius is always ascetic, and piety,
and love. Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and
they find beauty in rites and bounds that resist it.
We have found out fine names to cover our sensuality
withal, but no gifts can raise intemperance. The man
of talent affects to call his transgressions of the
laws of the senses trivial and to count them nothing
considered with his devotion to his art. His art never
taught him lewdness, nor the love of wine, nor the
wish to reap where he had not sowed. His art is less
for every deduction from his holiness, and less for
every defect of common sense. On him who scorned the
world as he said, the scorned world wreaks its revenge.
He that despiseth small things will perish by little
and little. Goethe's Tasso is very likely to be a
pretty fair historical portrait, and that is true
tragedy. It does not seem to me so genuine grief when
some tyrannous Richard the Third oppresses and slays a
score of innocent persons, as when Antonio and Tasso,
both apparently right, wrong each other. One living
after the maxims of this world and consistent and true
to them, the other fired with all divine sentiments,
yet grasping also at the pleasures of sense, without
submitting to their law. That is a grief we all feel,
a knot we cannot untie. Tasso's is no infrequent case
in modern biography. A man of genius, of an ardent
temperament, reckless of physical laws, self-indulgent,
becomes presently unfortunate, querulous, a "discomfortable
cousin," a thorn to himself and to others.
The scholar shames us by his bifold life. Whilst
something higher than prudence is active, he is
admirable; when common sense is wanted, he is an
encumbrance. Yesterday, Caesar was not so great;
to-day, the felon at the gallows' foot is not more
miserable. Yesterday, radiant with the light of an
ideal world in which he lives, the first of men; and
now oppressed by wants and by sickness, for which he
must thank himself. He resembles the pitiful drivellers
whom travellers describe as frequenting the bazaars of
Constantinople, who skulk about all day, yellow,
emaciated, ragged, sneaking; and at evening, when the
bazaars are open, slink to the opium-shop, swallow their
morsel and become tranquil and glorified seers. And who
has not seen the tragedy of imprudent genius struggling
for years with paltry pecuniary difficulties, at last
sinking, chilled, exhausted and fruitless, like a giant
slaughtered by pins?
Is it not better that a man should accept the first
pains and mortifications of this sort, which nature
is not slack in sending him, as hints that he must
expect no other good than the just fruit of his own
labor and self-denial? Health, bread, climate, social
position, have their importance, and he will give them
their due. Let him esteem Nature a perpetual counsellor,
and her perfections the exact measure of our deviations.
Let him make the night night, and the day day. Let him
control the habit of expense. Let him see that as much
wisdom may be expended on a private economy as on an
empire, and as much wisdom may be drawn from it. The
laws of the world are written out for him on every
piece of money in his hand. There is nothing he will
not be the better for knowing, were it only the wisdom
of Poor Richard, or the State-Street prudence of buying
by the acre to sell by the foot; or the thrift of the
agriculturist, to stick a tree between whiles, because
it will grow whilst he sleeps; or the prudence which
consists in husbanding little strokes of the tool,
little portions of time, particles of stock and small
gains. The eye of prudence may never shut. Iron, if kept
at the ironmonger's, will rust; beer, if not brewed in
the right state of the atmosphere, will sour; timber of
ships will rot at sea, or if laid up high and dry, will
strain, warp and dry-rot; money, if kept by us, yields
no rent and is liable to loss; if invested, is liable to
depreciation of the particular kind of stock. Strike,
says the smith, the iron is white; keep the rake, says
the haymaker, as nigh the scythe as you can, and the cart
as nigh the rake. Our Yankee trade is reputed to be very
much on the extreme of this prudence. It takes bank-notes,
good, bad, clean, ragged, and saves itself by the speed
with which it passes them off. Iron cannot rust, nor beer
sour, nor timber rot, nor calicoes go out of fashion, nor
money stocks depreciate, in the few swift moments in which
the Yankee suffers any one of them to remain in his
possession. In skating over thin ice our safety is in our
speed.
Let him learn a prudence of a higher strain. Let him
learn that every thing in nature, even motes and
feathers, go by law and not by luck, and that what he
sows he reaps. By diligence and self-command let him
put the bread he eats at his own disposal, that he may
not stand in bitter and false relations to other men;
for the best good of wealth is freedom. Let him practise
the minor virtues. How much of human life is lost in
waiting! let him not make his fellow-creatures wait. How
many words and promises are promises of conversation!
Let his be words of fate. When he sees a folded and sealed
scrap of paper float round the globe in a pine ship and
come safe to the eye for which it was written, amidst a
swarming population, let him likewise feel the admonition
to integrate his being across all these distracting forces,
and keep a slender human word among the storms, distances
and accidents that drive us hither and thither, and, by
persistency, make the paltry force of one man reappear to
redeem its pledge after months and years in the most distant
climates.
We must not try to write the laws of any one virtue,
looking at that only. Human nature loves no contradictions,
but is symmetrical. The prudence which secures an outward
well-being is not to be studied by one set of men, whilst
heroism and holiness are studied by another, but they are
reconcilable. Prudence concerns the present time, persons,
property and existing forms. But as every fact hath its
roots in the soul, and if the soul were changed, would cease
to be, or would become some other thing,--the proper
administration of outward things will always rest on a just
apprehension of their cause and origin; that is, the good
man will be the wise man, and the single-hearted the politic
man. Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide
in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.
On the most profitable lie the course of events presently
lays a destructive tax; whilst frankness invites frankness,
puts the parties on a convenient footing and makes their
business a friendship. Trust men and they will be true to
you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great,
though they make an exception in your favor to all their
rules of trade.
So, in regard to disagreeable and formidable things,
prudence does not consist in evasion or in flight, but
in courage. He who wishes to walk in the most peaceful
parts of life with any serenity must screw himself up
to resolution. Let him front the object of his worst
apprehension, and his stoutness will commonly make his
fear groundless. The Latin proverb says, "In battles the
eye is first overcome." Entire self-possession may make
a battle very little more dangerous to life than a match
at foils or at football. Examples are cited by soldiers
of men who have seen the cannon pointed and the fire given
to it, and who have stepped aside from the path of the ball.
The terrors of the storm are chiefly confined to the parlor
and the cabin. The drover, the sailor, buffets it all day,
and his health renews itself at as vigorous a pulse under
the sleet as under the sun of June.
In the occurrence of unpleasant things among neighbors,
fear comes readily to heart and magnifies the consequence
of the other party; but it is a bad counsellor. Every man
is actually weak and apparently strong. To himself he
seems weak; to others, formidable. You are afraid of Grim;
but Grim also is afraid of you. You are solicitous of the
good-will of the meanest person, uneasy at his ill-will.
But the sturdiest offender of your peace and of the
neighborhood, if you rip up his claims, is as thin and
timid as any, and the peace of society is often kept,
because, as children say, one is afraid, and the other
dares not. Far off, men swell, bully and threaten; bring
them hand to hand, and they are a feeble folk.
It is a proverb that 'courtesy costs nothing'; but
calculation might come to value love for its profit.
Love is fabled to be blind, but kindness is necessary
to perception; love is not a hood, but an eye-water.
If you meet a sectary or a hostile partisan, never
recognize the dividing lines, but meet on what common
ground remains,--if only that the sun shines and the
rain rains for both; the area will widen very fast,
and ere you know it, the boundary mountains on which
the eye had fastened have melted into air. If they
set out to contend, Saint Paul will lie and Saint John
will hate. What low, poor, paltry, hypocritical people
an argument on religion will make of the pure and chosen
souls! They will shuffle and crow, crook and hide, feign
to confess here, only that they may brag and conquer
there, and not a thought has enriched either party, and
not an emotion of bravery, modesty, or hope. So neither
should you put yourself in a false position with your
contemporaries by indulging a vein of hostility and
bitterness. Though your views are in straight antagonism
to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment, assume that
you are saying precisely that which all think, and in the
flow of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid
column, with not the infirmity of a doubt. So at least
shall you get an adequate deliverance. The natural motions
of the soul are so much better than the voluntary ones that
you will never do yourself justice in dispute. The thought
is not then taken hold of by the right handle, does not show
itself proportioned and in its true bearings, but bears
extorted, hoarse, and half witness. But assume a consent and
it shall presently be granted, since really and underneath
their external diversities, all men are of one heart and
mind.
Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or men on
an unfriendly footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy
with people, as if we waited for some better sympathy
and intimacy to come. But whence and when? To-morrow
will be like to-day. Life wastes itself whilst we are
preparing to live. Our friends and fellow-workers die
off from us. Scarcely can we say we see new men, new
women, approaching us. We are too old to regard fashion,
too old to expect patronage of any greater or more powerful.
Let us suck the sweetness of those affections and consuetudes
that grow near us. These old shoes are easy to the feet.
Undoubtedly we can easily pick faults in our company, can
easily whisper names prouder, and that tickle the fancy more.
Every man's imagination hath its friends; and life would be
dearer with such companions. But if you cannot have them on
good mutual terms, you cannot have them. If not the Deity
but our ambition hews and shapes the new relations, their
virtue escapes, as strawberries lose their flavor in garden-beds.
Thus truth, frankness, courage, love, humility and all
the virtues range themselves on the side of prudence,
or the art of securing a present well-being. I do not
know if all matter will be found to be made of one
element, as oxygen or hydrogen, at last, but the world
of manners and actions is wrought of one stuff, and
begin where we will we are pretty sure in a short space
to be mumbling our ten commandments. _