Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essays: Second Series [1844]
Experience 
The lords of life, the lords of life,--
I saw them pass,
In their own guise,
Like and unlike,
Portly and grim,
Use and Surprise,
Surface and Dream,
Succession swift, and spectral Wrong,
Temperament without a tongue,
And the inventor of the game
Omnipresent without name; --
Some to see, some to be guessed,
They marched from east to west:
Little man, least of all,
Among the legs of his guardians tall,
Walked about with puzzled look: --
Him by the hand dear nature took;
Dearest nature, strong and kind,
Whispered, `Darling, never mind!
Tomorrow they will wear another face,
The founder thou! these are thy race!'
Where do we find ourselves? In a series of
which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We
wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we
seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go
upward and out of sight. But the Genius which, according to the old belief,
stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink,
that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake
off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all our lifetime
about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs
of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our
life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide
through nature, and should not know our place again. Did our birth fall
in some fit of indigence and frugality in nature, that she was so sparing
of her fire and so liberal of her earth, that it appears to us that we
lack the affirmative principle, and though we have health and reason, yet
we have no superfluity of spirit for new creation? We have enough to live
and bring the year about, but not an ounce to impart or to invest. Ah that
our Genius were a little more of a genius! We are
like millers on the lower levels of a stream, when the factories above
them have exhausted the water. We too fancy that the upper people must
have raised their dams.
If any of us knew what we were doing, or
where we are going, then when we think we best know! We do not know today
whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought
ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered, that much was accomplished,
and much was begun in us. All our days are so unprofitable while
they pass, that 'tis wonderful where or when we ever got anything of this
which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar
day. Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere, like those
that Hermes won with dice of the Moon, that Osiris might be born. It is
said, all martyrdoms looked mean when they were suffered. Every
ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance
quits our vessel, and hangs on every other sail in the horizon.
Our life looks trivial, and we shun to record it.
Men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual retreating
and reference. `Yonder uplands are rich pasturage, and my neighbor has
fertile meadow, but my field,' says the querulous farmer, `only holds the
world together.' I quote another man's saying; unluckily, that other withdraws
himself in the same way, and quotes me. 'Tis the trick of nature thus to
degrade today; a good deal of buzz, and somewhere a result slipped magically
in. Every roof is agreeable to the eye, until it
is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women, and hard-eyed husbands,
and deluges of lethe, and the men ask, `What's the news?' as if the old
were so bad. How many individuals can we count in society? how many
actions? how many opinions? So much of our time is preparation, so much
is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man's genius
contracts itself to a very few hours. The history of literature -- take
the net result of Tiraboschi, Warton, or Schlegel,--is a sum of very
few ideas, and of very few original tales,--all the rest being variation
of these. So in this great society wide lying around
us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is
almost all custom and gross sense. There are even few opinions, and these
seem organic in the speakers, and do not disturb the universal necessity.
What opium is instilled
into all disaster! It shows formidable as we approach it, but there is
at last no rough rasping friction, but the most slippery sliding surfaces.
We fall soft on a thought. Ate Dea is gentle,
"Over men's heads
walking aloft,
With tender feet
treading so soft."
People grieve and bemoan themselves, but
it is not half so bad with them as they say. There
are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least,
we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out
to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught
me, is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about
the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with
which, we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich
who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch
their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent
waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief
too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years
ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, -- no more. I cannot get it
nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my
principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience
to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me, --
neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity: it does not touch
me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me,
which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching
me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve
that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.
The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on
him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all.
The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every
drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim
satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us.
I take this evanescence
and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers
then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.
Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be
her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for
our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes
she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are
accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.
Dream delivers us
to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life
is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them,
they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue,
and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you
see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we
see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that
see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset
or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius;
but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism.
The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament
is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune
or talent to a cold and defective nature? Who cares what sensibility or
discrimination a man has at some time shown, if he falls asleep in his
chair? or if he laugh and giggle? or if he apologize? or is affected with
egotism? or thinks of his dollar? or cannot go by food? or has gotten a
child in his boyhood? Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex
or too concave, and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon
of human life? Of what use, if the brain is too cold or too hot, and the
man does not care enough for results, to stimulate him to experiment, and
hold him up in it? or if the web is too finely woven, too irritable by
pleasure and pain, so that life stagnates from too much reception, without
due outlet? Of what use to make heroic vows of amendment, if the same old
law-breaker is to keep them? What cheer can the religious sentiment yield,
when that is suspected to be secretly dependent on the seasons of the year,
and the state of the blood? I knew a witty physician who found theology
in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was disease in the
liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became
a Unitarian. Very mortifying is the reluctant experience that some unfriendly
excess or imbecility neutralizes the promise of genius. We see young men
who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they
never acquit the debt; they die young and dodge the account: or if they
live, they lose themselves in the crowd.
Temperament also
enters fully into the system of illusions, and shuts us in a prison of
glass which we cannot see. There is an optical illusion about every person
we meet. In truth, they are all creatures of given temperament,
which will appear in a given character, whose boundaries they will never
pass: but we look at them, they seem alive, and we presume there is impulse
in them. In the moment it seems impulse; in the year,
in the lifetime, it turns out to be a certain uniform tune which the revolving
barrel of the music-box must play. Men resist the conclusion in
the morning, but adopt it as the evening wears on, that temper prevails
over everything of time, place, and condition, and is inconsumable in the
flames of religion. Some modifications the moral sentiment avails to impose,
but the individual texture holds its dominion, if not to bias the moral
judgments, yet to fix the measure of activity and of enjoyment.
I thus express the law as it is read from
the platform of ordinary life, but must not leave it without noticing the
capital exception. For temperament is a power which no man willingly hears
any one praise but himself. On the platform of physics, we cannot resist
the contracting influences of so-called science.
Temperament puts all divinity to rout. I know the mental proclivity
of physicians. I hear the chuckle of the phrenologists. Theoretic kidnappers
and slave-drivers, they esteem each man the victim of another, who winds
him round his finger by knowing the law of his being, and by such cheap
signboards as the color of his beard, or the slope of his occiput, reads
the inventory of his fortunes and character. The grossest ignorance does
not disgust like this impudent knowingness. The physicians say, they are
not materialists; but they are:--Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme
thinness: O so thin!--But the definition of spiritual should be, that
which is its own evidence. What notions do they attach to love! what to
religion! One would not willingly pronounce these words in their hearing,
and give them the occasion to profane them. I saw a gracious gentleman
who adapts his conversation to the form of the head of the man he talks
with! I had fancied that the value of life lay in its inscrutable possibilities;
in the fact that I never know, in addressing myself to a new individual,
what may befall me. I carry the keys of my castle
in my hand, ready to throw them at the feet of my lord, whenever and in
what disguise soever he shall appear. I know he is in the neighborhood
hidden among vagabonds. Shall I preclude my future, by taking a high seat,
and kindly adapting my conversation to the shape of heads? When I come
to that, the doctors shall buy me for a cent.----'But, sir, medical history;
the report to the Institute; the proven facts!'--I distrust the facts
and the inferences. Temperament is the veto or limitation-power in the
constitution, very justly applied to restrain an opposite excess in the
constitution, but absurdly offered as a bar to original equity. When virtue
is in presence, all subordinate powers sleep. On its own level, or in view
of nature, temperament is final. I see not, if one be once caught in this
trap of so-called sciences, any escape for the man from the links of the
chain of physical necessity. Given such an embryo, such a history must
follow. On this platform, one lives in a sty of sensualism, and would soon
come to suicide. But it is impossible that the creative power should exclude
itself. Into every intelligence there is a door which is never closed,
through which the creator passes. The intellect, seeker of absolute truth,
or the heart, lover of absolute good, intervenes for our succor, and at
one whisper of these high powers, we awake from ineffectual struggles with
this nightmare. We hurl it into its own hell, and cannot again contract
ourselves to so base a state.
The secret of the
illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects.
Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand.
This onward trick of nature is too strong for us: Pero si muove.
When, at night, I look at the moon and stars, I seem stationary, and they
to hurry. Our love of the real draws us to permanence,
but health of body consists in circulation, and sanity of mind in variety
or facility of association. We need change of objects. Dedication
to one thought is quickly odious. We house with the insane, and must humor
them; then conversation dies out. Once I took such delight in Montaigne,
that I thought I should not need any other book; before that, in Shakspeare;
then in Plutarch; then in Plotinus; at one time in Bacon; afterwards in
Goethe; even in Bettine; but now I turn the pages of either of them languidly,
whilst I still cherish their genius. So with pictures; each will bear an
emphasis of attention once, which it cannot retain, though we fain would
continue to be pleased in that manner. How strongly I have felt of pictures,
that when you have seen one well, you must take your leave of it; you shall
never see it again. I have had good lessons from pictures, which I have
since seen without emotion or remark. A deduction must be made from the
opinion, which even the wise express of a new book or occurrence. Their
opinion gives me tidings of their mood, and some vague guess at the new
fact but is nowise to be trusted as the lasting relation between that intellect
and that thing. The child asks, `Mamma, why don't I like the story as well
as when you told it me yesterday?' Alas, child, it is even so with the
oldest cherubim of knowledge. But will it answer thy question to say, Because
thou wert born to a whole, and this story is a particular? The reason of
the pain this discovery causes us (and we make it late in respect to works
of art and intellect), is the plaint of tragedy which murmurs from it in
regard to persons, to friendship and love.
That immobility and absence of elasticity
which we find in the arts, we find with more pain in the artist. There
is no power of expansion in men. Our friends early appear to us as representatives
of certain ideas, which they never pass or exceed. They
stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take
the single step that would bring them there. A man is like a bit of Labrador
spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand, until you come to
a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors. There
is no adaptation or universal applicability in men, but each has his special
talent, and the mastery of successful men consists in adroitly keeping
themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be practised.
We do what we must, and call it by the best names we can, and would fain
have the praise of having intended the result which ensues. I cannot recall
any form of man who is not superfluous sometimes. But is not this pitiful?
Life is not worth the taking, to do tricks in.
Of course, it needs
the whole society, to give the symmetry we seek. The
parti-colored wheel must revolve very fast to appear white. Something
is learned too by conversing with so much folly and defect. In fine, whoever
loses, we are always of the gaining party. Divinity is behind our failures
and follies also. The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative
nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce,
government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread,
and the ways by which he is to come by it. Like a
bird which alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from bough to bough, is
the Power which abides in no man and in no woman, but for a moment speaks
from this one, and for another moment from that one.
* # *
But what help from these fineries or pedantries?
What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times,
have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism. Our young people
have thought and written much on labor and reform, and for all that they
have written, neither the world nor themselves have got on a step. Intellectual
tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider
the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would
starve. At Education-Farm, the noblest theory of life sat on the noblest
figures of young men and maidens, quite powerless and melancholy. It would
not rake or pitch a ton of hay; it would not rub down a horse; and the
men and maidens it left pale and hungry. A political
orator wittily compared our party promises to western roads, which opened
stately enough, with planted trees on either side, to tempt the traveller,
but soon became narrow and narrower, and ended in a squirrel-track, and
ran up a tree. So does culture with us; it ends in head-ache. Unspeakably
sad and barren does life look to those, who a few months ago were dazzled
with the splendor of the promise of the times. "There is now no longer
any right course of action, nor any self-devotion left among the Iranis."
Objections and criticism we have had our fill of. There are objections
to every course of life and action, and the practical wisdom infers an
indifferency, from the omnipresence of objection. The
whole frame of things preaches indifferency. Do not craze yourself with
thinking, but go about your business anywhere. Life is not intellectual
or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can
enjoy what they find, without question. Nature hates peeping, and
our mothers speak her very sense when they say, "Children, eat your victuals,
and say no more of it." To fill the hour, -- that
is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or
an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate
well on them. Under the oldest mouldiest conventions, a man of native
force prospers just as well as in the newest world, and that by skill of
handling and treatment. He can take hold anywhere. Life itself is a mixture
of power and form, and will not bear the least excess of either.
To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road,
to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. It is not
the part of men, but of fanatics, or of mathematicians, if you will, to
say, that, the shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring whether
for so short a duration we were sprawling in want, or sitting high. Since
our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes of today
are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us
be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat the men and women
well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are. Men
live in their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too soft and tremulous
for successful labor. It is a tempest of fancies,
and the only ballast I know, is a respect to the present hour. Without
any shadow of doubt, amidst this vertigo of shows and politics, I settle
myself ever the firmer in the creed, that we should not postpone and refer
and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with,
accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious,
as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure
for us. If these are mean and malignant, their contentment, which is the
last victory of justice, is a more satisfying echo to the heart, than the
voice of poets and the casual sympathy of admirable persons. I think that
however a thoughtful man may suffer from the defects and absurdities of
his company, he cannot without affectation deny to any set of men and women,
a sensibility to extraordinary merit. The coarse and frivolous have an
instinct of superiority, if they have not a sympathy, and honor it in their
blind capricious way with sincere homage.
The fine young people despise life, but
in me, and in such as with me are free from dyspepsia, and to whom a day
is a sound and solid good, it is a great excess of politeness to look scornful
and to cry for company. I am grown by sympathy a little eager and sentimental,
but leave me alone, and I should relish every hour and what it brought
me, the pot-luck of the day, as heartily as the oldest gossip in the bar-room.
I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends
who expects everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything
is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting
nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods. I
accept the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies. I find my
account in sots and bores also. They give a reality to the circumjacent
picture, which such a vanishing meteorous appearance can ill spare. In
the morning I awake, and find the old world, wife, babes, and mother, Concord
and Boston, the dear old spiritual world, and even the dear old devil not
far off. If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall
have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis.
Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the
temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry
and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes
is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry, -- a narrow belt.
Moreover, in popular experience, everything good is on the highway.
A collector peeps into all the picture-shops of Europe, for a landscape
of Poussin, a crayon-sketch of Salvator; but the Transfiguration, the Last
Judgment, the Communion of St. Jerome, and what are as transcendent as
these, are on the walls of the Vatican, the Uffizii, or the Louvre, where
every footman may see them; to say nothing of nature's pictures in every
street, of sunsets and sunrises every day, and the sculpture of the human
body never absent. A collector recently bought at public auction, in London,
for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakspeare: but
for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet, and can detect secrets of highest
concernment yet unpublished therein. I think I will never read any but
the commonest books, -- the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton.
Then we are impatient of so public a life and planet, and run hither and
thither for nooks and secrets. The imagination delights in the wood-craft
of Indians, trappers, and bee-hunters. We fancy that we are strangers,
and not so intimately domesticated in the planet as the wild man, and the
wild beast and bird. But the exclusion reaches them also; reaches the climbing,
flying, gliding, feathered and four-footed man. Fox and woodchuck, hawk
and snipe, and bittern, when nearly seen, have no more root in the deep
world than man, and are just such superficial tenants of the globe. Then
the new molecular philosophy shows astronomical interspaces betwixt atom
and atom, shows that the world is all outside: it has no inside.
The mid-world is best. Nature,
as we know her, is no saint. The lights of the church, the ascetics,
Gentoos and |
