Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 by Various
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Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861
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We require it as a pledge of the sanity of our condition, and consequent
wholesomeness of our action, that we can withhold our hand, and
leave the world in that of its Maker. No man is quite necessary to
Omnipotence; grass grew before we were born, and doubtless will continue
to grow when we are dead. If we act, let it be because our soul has
somewhat to bring forth, and not because our fingers itch. We have in
these days been emphatically instructed that all speech not rooted in
silence, rooted, that is, in pure, vital, silent Nature, is
poor and unworthy; but we should be aware that action equally
requires this solemn and celestial perspective, this issue out of the
never-trodden, noiseless realms of the soul. Only that which comes from
a divine depth can attain to a divine height.
There is a courage of withholding and forbearing greater than any other
courage; and before this Fate itself succumbs. Wellington won the
Battle of Waterloo by heroically standing still; and every hour of that
adventurous waiting was heaping up significance for the moment when at
length he should cry, "Up, Guards, and at them !" What Cecil said of
Raleigh, "He can toil terribly," has been styled "an electric touch";
but the "masterly inactivity" of Sir James Mackintosh, happily
appropriated by Mr. Calhoun, carries an equal appeal to intuitive sense,
and has already become proverbial. He is no sufficient hero who in the
delays of Destiny, when his way is hedged up and his hope deferred,
cannot reserve his strength and bide his time. The power of acting
greatly includes that of greatly abstaining from action. The leader of
an epoch in affairs should therefore be some Alfred, Bruce, Gustavus
Vasa, Cromwell, Washington, Garibaldi, who can wait while the iron of
opportunity heats at the forge of time; and then, in the moment of its
white glow, can so smite as to shape it forever to the uses of mankind.
One should be able not only to wait, but to wait strenuously, sternly,
immovably, rooted in his repose like a mountain oak in the soil; for
it may easily happen that the necessity of refraining shall be most
imperative precisely when, the external pressure toward action is most
vehement. Amid the violent urgency of events, therefore, one should
learn the art of the mariner, who, in time of storm lies to, with sails
mostly furled, until milder gales permit him again to spread sail
and stretch away. With us, as with him, even a fair wind may blow so
fiercely that one cannot safely run before it. There are movements with
whose direction we sympathize, which are yet so ungoverned that we lose
our freedom and the use of our reason in committing ourselves to
them. So the seaman who runs too long before the increasing gale has
thereafter no election; go on he must, for there is death in pausing,
though it be also death to proceed. Learn, therefore, to wait. Is there
not many a one who never arrives at fruit, for no better reason than
that he persists in plucking his own blossoms? Learn to wait. Take time,
with the smith, to raise your arm, if you would deliver a telling blow.
Does it seem wasteful, this waiting? Let us, then, remind ourselves that
excess and precipitation are more than wasteful,--they are directly
destructive. The fire that blazes beyond bounds not warms the house,
but burns it down, and only helps infinitesimally to warm the wide
out-of-doors. Any live snail will out-travel a wrecked locomotive, and
besides will leave no trail of slaughter on its track. Though despatch
be the soul of business, yet he who outruns his own feet comes to the
ground, and makes no despatch,--unless it be of himself. Hurry is the
spouse of Flurry, and the father of Confusion. Extremes meet, and
overaction steadfastly returns to the effect of non-action,--bringing,
however, the seven devils of disaster in its company. The ocean storm
which heaps the waves so high may, by a sufficient increase, blow them
down again; and in no calm is the sea so level as in the extremest
hurricane.
Persistent excess of outward performance works mischief in one of two
directions,--either upon the body or on the soul. If one will not
accommodate himself to this unreasonable quantity by abatement of
quality,--if he be resolute to put love, faith, and imagination into
his labor, and to be alive to the very top of his brain,--then the body
enters a protest, and dyspepsia, palsy, phthisis, insanity, or somewhat
of the kind, ensues. Commonly, however, the tragedy is different from
this, and deeper. Commonly, in these cases, action loses height as it
gains lateral surface; the superior faculties starve, being robbed of
sustenance by this avarice of performance, and consequently of supply,
on the part of the lower,--they sit at second table, and eat of
remainder-crumbs. The delicate and divine sprites, that should bear the
behests of the soul to the will and to the houses of thought in the
brain her intuitions, are crowded out from the streets of the cerebral
cities by the mob and trample of messengers bound upon baser errands;
and thus is the soul deprived of service, and the man of inspiration.
The man becomes, accordingly, a great merchant who values a cent, but
does not value a human sentiment; or a lawyer who can convince a jury
that white is black, but cannot convince himself that white is white,
God God, and the sustaining faiths of great souls more than moonshine.
So if the apple-tree will make too much wood, it can bear no fruit;
during summer it is full of haughty thrift, but the autumn, which brings
grace to so many a dwarfed bush and low shrub, shows it naked and in
shame.
How many mistake the crowing of the cock for the rising of the sun,
albeit the cock often crows at midnight, or at the moon's rising, or
only at the advent of a lantern and a tallow candle! And yet what
a bloated, gluttonous devourer of hopes and labors is this same
precipitation! All shores are strown with wrecks of barks that went too
soon to sea. And if you launch even your well-built ship at half-tide,
what will it do but strike bottom, and stick there? The perpetual
tragedy of literary history, in especial, is this. What numbers of young
men, gifted with great imitative quickness, who, having, by virtue of
this, arrived at fine words and figures of speech, set off on their
nimble rhetorical Pegasus, keep well out of the Muse's reach ever
after! How many go conspicuously through life, snapping their smart
percussion-caps upon empty barrels, because, forsooth, powder and ball
do not come of themselves, and it takes time to load!
I know that there is a divine impatience, a rising of the waters of love
and noble pain till they _must_ overflow, with or without the hope of
immediate apparent use, and no matter what swords and revenges impend.
History records a few such defeats which are worth thousands of ordinary
victories. Yet the rule is, that precipitation comes of levity.
Eagerness is shallow. Haste is but half-earnest. If an apple is found
to grow mellow and seemingly ripe much before its fellows on the same
bough, you will probably discover, upon close inspection, that there is
a worm in it.
To be sure, any time is too soon with those who dote upon Never. There
are such as find Nature precipitate and God forward. They would have
effect limp at untraversable distances behind cause; they would keep
destiny carefully abed and feed it upon spoon-victual. They play duenna
to the universe, and are perpetually on the _qui vive_, lest it escape,
despite their care, into improprieties. The year is with them too fast
by so much as it removes itself from the old almanac. The reason is that
_they_ are the old almanac. Or, more distinctly, they are at odds with
universal law, and, knowing that to them it can come only as judgment
and doom, they, not daring to denounce the law itself, fall to the trick
of denouncing its agents as visionaries, and its effects as premature.
The felon always finds the present an unseasonable day on which to be
hanged: the sheriff takes another view of the matter.
But the error of these consists, not in realizing good purposes too
slowly and patiently, but in failing effectually to purpose good at
all. To those who truly are making it the business of their lives to
accomplish worthy aims, this counsel cannot come amiss,--TAKE TIME.
Take a year in which to thread a needle, rather than go dabbing at the
texture with the naked thread. And observe, that there is an excellence
and an efficacy of slowness, no less than of quickness. The armadillo
is equally secure of his prey with the hawk or leopard; and Sir Charles
Bell mentions a class of thieves in India, who, having, through
extreme patience and command of nerve, acquired the power of motion
imperceptibly slow, are the most formidable of all peculators, and
almost defy precaution. And to leave these low instances, slowness
produced by profoundness of feeling and fineness of perception
constitutes that divine patience of genius without which genius does not
exist. Mind lingers where appetite hurries on; it is only the Newtons
who stay to meditate over the fall of an apple, too trivial for the
attention of the clown. It is by this noble slowness that the highest
minds faintly emulate that inconceivable deliberateness and delicacy of
gradation with which solar systems are built and worlds habilitated.
Now haste and intemperance are the Satans that beset virtuous Americans.
And these mischiefs are furthered by those who should guard others
against them. The Rev. Dr. John Todd, in a work, not destitute of merit,
entitled "The Student's Manual," urges those whom he addresses to study,
while about it, with their utmost might, crowding into an hour as much
work as it can possibly be made to contain; so, he says, they will
increase the power of the brain. But this is advice not fit to be given
to a horse, much less to candidates for the graces of scholarly manhood.
I read that race-horses, during the intervals between their public
contests, are permitted only occasionally and rarely to be driven at
their extreme speed, but are assiduously made to _walk_ several hours
each day. By this constancy of _moderate_ exercise they preserve health
and suppleness of limb, without exhaustion of strength. And it appears,
that, were such an animal never to be taken from the stable but to be
pushed to the top of his speed, he would be sure to make still greater
speed toward ruin. Why not be as wise for men as for horses?
And here I desire to lay stress upon one point, which American students
will do well to consider gravely,--_It is a_ PURE, _not a strained and
excited, attention which has signal prosperity._ Distractions, tempests,
and head-winds in the brain, by-ends, the sidelong eyes of vanity, the
overleaping eyes of ambition, the bleared eyes of conceit,--these are
they which thwart study and bring it to nought. Nor these only, but all
impatience, all violent eagerness, all passionate and perturbed feeling,
fill the brain with thick and hot blood, suited to the service of
desire, unfit for the uses of thought. Intellect can be served only by
the finest properties of the blood; and if there be any indocility
of soul, any impurity of purpose, any coldness or carelessness, any
prurience or crude and intemperate heat, then base spirits are sent down
from the seat of the soul to summon the sanguineous forces; and these
gather a crew after their own kind. Purity of attention, then, is the
magic that the scholar may use; and let him know, that, the purer it is,
the more temperate, tranquil, reposeful. Truth is not to be run down
with fox-hounds; she is a divinity, and divinely must he draw nigh who
will gain her presence. Go to, thou bluster-brain! Dost thou think to
learn? Learn docility first, and the manners of the skies. And thou
egotist, thinkest thou that these eyes of thine, smoky with the fires of
diseased self-love, and thronged with deceiving wishes, shall perceive
the essential and eternal? They shall see only silver and gold, houses
and lands, reputes, supremacies, fames, and, as instrumental to these,
the forms of logic and seemings of knowledge. If thou wilt discern the
truth, desire IT, not its accidents and collateral effects. Rest in the
pursuit of it, putting _simplicity of quest_ in the place of either
force or wile; and such quest cannot be unfruitful.
Let the student, then, shun an excited and spasmodic tension of brain,
and he will gain more while expending less. It is not toil, it is morbid
excitement, that kills; and morbid excitement in constant connection
with high mental endeavor is, of all modes and associations of
excitement, the most disastrous. Study as the grass grows, and your old
age--and its laurels--shall be green.
Already, however, we are trenching upon that more intimate relationship
of the great opposites under consideration which has been designated
Rest _in_ Motion. More intimate relationship, I say,--at any rate,
more subtile, recondite, difficult of apprehension and exposition, and
perhaps, by reason of this, more central and suggestive. An example
of this in its physical aspect may be seen in the revolutions of the
planets, and in all orbital or circular motion. For such, it will be
at once perceived, is, in strictness of speech, _fixed and stationary_
motion: it is, as Sir Isaac Newton demonstrated, an exact and equal
obedience, in the same moment, to the law of fixity and the law of
progression. Observe especially, that it is not, like merely retarded
motion, a partial neutralization of each principle by the other, an
imbecile Aristotelian compromise and half-way house between the two;
but it is at once, and in virtue of the same fact, perfect Rest _and_
perfect Motion. A revolving body is not hindered, but the same impulse
which begot its movement causes this perpetually to return into itself.
Now the principles that are seen to govern the material universe are
but a large-lettered display of those that rule in perfect humanity.
Whatsoever makes distinguished order and admirableness in Nature makes
the same in man; and never was there a fine deed that was not begot of
the same impulse and ruled by the same laws to which solar systems are
due. I desire, accordingly, here to take up and emphasize the statement
previously made in a general way,--that the secret of perfection in
all that appertains to man--in morals, manners, art, politics--must
be sought in such a correspondence and reciprocation of these great
opposites as the motions of the planets perfectly exemplify.
It must not, indeed, be overlooked or unacknowledged, that the planets
do not move in exact circles, but diverge slightly into ellipses. The
fact is by no means without significance, and that of an important kind.
Pure circular motion is the type of perfection in the universe as
a _whole_, but each part of the whole will inevitably express its
partiality, will acknowledge its special character, and upon the
frankness of this confession its comeliness will in no small degree
depend; nevertheless, no sooner does the eccentricity, or individuality,
become so great as to suggest disloyalty to the idea of the whole,
than ugliness ensues. Thus, comets are portents, shaking the faith of
nations, not supporting it, like the stars. So among men. Nature is
at pains to secure divergence, magnetic variation, putting into every
personality and every powerful action some element of irregularity
and imperfection; and her reason for doing so is, that irregularity
appertains to the state of growth, and is the avenue of access to higher
planes and broader sympathies; still, as the planets, though not moving
in perfect circles, yet come faithfully round to the same places, and
accomplish _the ends_ of circular motion, so in man, the divergence must
be special, not total, no act being the mere arc of a circle, and yet
_revolution_ being maintained. And to the beauty of characters and
deeds, it is requisite that they should never seem even to imperil
fealty to the universal idea. Revolution perfectly exact expresses only
necessity, not voluntary fidelity; but departure, _still deferential to
the law of the whole_, in evincing freedom elevates its obedience
into fealty and noble faithfulness: by this measure of eccentricity,
centricity is not only emphasized, but immeasurably exalted.
But having made this full and willing concession to the element of
individuality in persons and of special character in actions, we are at
liberty to resume the general thesis,--that orbital rest of movement
furnishes the type of perfect excellence, and suggests accordingly the
proper targe of aspiration and culture.
In applying this law, we will take first a low instance, wherein the
opposite principles stand apart, rather upon terms of outward covenant,
or of mere mixture, than of mutual assimilation. _Man_ is infinite;
_men_ are finite: the purest aspect of great laws never appears in
collections and aggregations, yet the same laws rule here as in the
soul, and such excellence as is possible issues from the same sources.
As an instance, accordingly, of that ruder reciprocation which may
obtain among multitudes, I name the Roman Legion.
It is said that the success of the armies of Rome is not fully accounted
for, until one takes into account the constitution of this military
body. It united, in an incomparable degree, the different advantages
of fixity and fluency. Moderate in size, yet large enough to give the
effect of mass, open in texture, yet compact in form, it afforded to
every man room for individual prowess, while it left no man to his
individual strength. Each soldier leaned and rested upon the Legion,
a body of six thousand men; yet around each was a space in which his
movements might be almost as free, rapid, and individual as though he
had possessed the entire field to himself. The Macedonian Phalanx was a
marvel of mass, but it was mass not penetrated with mobility; it could
move, indeed could be said to have an existence, only as a whole;
its decomposed parts were but _debris_. The Phalanx, therefore, was
terrible, the constituent parts of it imbecile; and the Battle of
Cynocephalae finally demonstrated its inferiority, for the various
possible exigencies of battle, to the conquering Legion. The brave
rabble of Gauls and Goths, on the other hand, illustrated all that
private valor, not reposing upon any vaster and more stable strength,
has power to achieve; but these rushing torrents of prowess dashed
themselves into vain spray upon the coordinated and reposing courage of
Rome.
The same perpetual opposites must concur to produce the proper form and
uses of the State,--though they here appear in a much more elevated
form. Rest is here known as _Law_, motion as _Liberty_. In the true
commonwealth, these, so far from being mutually destructive or
antagonistic, incessantly beget and vivify each other; so that Law
is the expression and guaranty of Freedom, while Freedom flows
spontaneously into the forms of Justice. Neither of these can exist,
neither can be properly _conceived of_, apart from its correlative
opposite. Nor will any condition of mere truce, or of mere mechanical
equilibrium, suffice. Nothing suffices but a reciprocation so active and
total that each is constantly resolving itself into the other.
The notion of Rousseau, which is countenanced by much of the
phraseology, to say the least, of the present day, was, indeed, quite
contrary to this. He assumed freedom to exist only where law is not,
that is, in the savage state, and to be surrendered, piece for piece,
with every acknowledgment of social obligation. Seldom was ever so
plausible a doctrine equally false. Law is properly _the public
definition of freedom and the affirmation of its sacredness and
inviolability as so defined_; and only in the presence of it, either
express or implicit, does man become free. Duty and privilege are one
and the same, however men may set up a false antagonism between them;
and accordingly social obligation can subtract nothing from the
privilege and prerogative of liberty. Consequently, the freedom which is
defined as the negation of social duty and obligation is not true regal
freedom, but is that worst and basest of all tyrannies, the tyranny of
pure egotism, masked in the semblance of its divine contrary. That,
be it observed, is the freest society, in which the noblest and most
delicate human powers find room and secure respect,--wherein the
loftiest and costliest spiritualities are most invited abroad by
sympathetic attraction. Now among savages little obtains appreciation,
save physical force and its immediate allies: the divine fledglings of
the human soul, instead of being sweetly drawn and tempted forth, are
savagely menaced, rudely repelled; whatsoever is finest in the man,
together with the entire nature of woman, lies, in that low temperature,
enchained and repressed, like seeds in a frozen soil. The harsh,
perpetual contest with want and lawless rivalry, to which all
uncivilized nations are doomed, permits only a few low powers, and those
much the same in all,--lichens, mosses, rude grasses, and other coarse
cryptogamous growths,--to develop themselves; since these alone can
endure the severities of season and treatment to which all that would
clothe the fields of the soul must remain exposed. Meanwhile the utmost
of that wicked and calamitous suppression of faculty, which constitutes
the essence and makes the tragedy of human slavery, is equally effected
by the inevitable isolation and wakeful trampling and consequent
barrenness of savage life. Liberty without law is not liberty; and the
converse may be asserted with like confidence.
Where, then, the fixed term, State, or Law, and the progressive term,
Person, or Freewill, are in relations of reciprocal support and mutual
reproduction, there alone is freedom, there alone public order. We were
able to command this truth from the height of our general proposition,
and closer inspection shows those anticipations to have been correct.
But man is greater than men; and for the finest aspect of high laws, we
must look to individual souls, not to masses.
What is the secret of noble manners? Orbital action, always returning
into and compensating itself. The gentleman, in offering his respect to
others, offers an equal, or rather the same, respect to himself; and his
courtesies may flow without stint or jealous reckoning, because they
feed their source, being not an expenditure, but a circulation.
Submitting to the inward law of honor and the free sense of what befits
a man,--to a law perpetually made and spontaneously executed in his
own bosom, the instant flowering of his own soul,--he commands his own
obedience, and he obeys his own commanding. Though throned above all
nations, a king of kings, yet the faithful humble vassal of his own
heart; though he serve, yet regal, doing imperial service; he escapes
outward constraint by inward anticipation; and all that could he rightly
named as his duty to others, he has, ere demand, already discovered, and
engaged in, as part of his duty to himself. Now it is the expression of
royal freedom in loyal service, of sovereignty in obedience, courage in
concession, and strength in forbearance, which makes manners noble. Low
may he bow, not with loss, but with access of dignity, who bows with an
elevated and ascending heart: there is nothing loftier, nothing less
allied to abject behavior, than this grand lowliness. The worm, because
it is low, cannot be lowly; but man, uplifted in token of supremacy, may
kneel in adoration, bend in courtesy, and stoop in condescension. Only a
great pride, that is, a great and reverential repose in one's own being,
renders possible a noble humility, which is a great and reverential
acknowledgment of the being of others; this humility in turn sustains a
higher self-reverence; this again resolves itself into a more majestic
humility; and so run, in ever enhancing wave, the great circles of
inward honor and outward grace. And without this self-sustaining
return of the action into itself, each quality feeding itself from its
correlative opposite, there can be no high behavior. This is the reason
why qualities loftiest in kind and largest in measure are vulgarly
mistaken, not for their friendly opposites, but for their mere
contraries,--why a very profound sensibility, a sensibility, too,
peculiarly of the spirit, not of nerve only, is sure to be named
coldness, as Mr. Ruskin recently remarks,--why vast wealth of good
pride, in its often meek acceptance of wrong, in its quiet ignoring
of insult, in its silent superiority to provocation, passes with
the superficial and petulant for poverty of pride and mere
mean-spiritedness,--why a courage which is not partial, but _total_,
coexisting, as it always does, with a noble peacefulness, with a noble
inaptness for frivolous hazards, and a noble slowness to take offence,
is, in its delays and forbearances, thought by the half-courageous to
be no better than cowardice;--it is, as we have said, because great
qualities revolve and repose in orbits of reciprocation with their
opposites, which opposites are by coarse and ungentle eyes misdeemed to
be contraries. Feeling transcendently deep and powerful is unimpassioned
and far lower-voiced than indifference and unfeelingness, being wont
to express itself, not by eloquent ebullition, but by extreme
understatement, or even by total silence. Sir Walter Raleigh, when at
length he found himself betrayed to death--and how basely betrayed!--by
Sir Lewis Stukely, only said, "Sir Lewis, these actions will not turn to
your credit." The New Testament tells us of a betrayal yet more quietly
received. These are instances of noble manners.
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