The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858. Various
retreats, as the horizon withdraws before a traveller, and lures us on and on. It even travels faster than our best endeavors can follow, and so beckons to us from farther and farther away. We may give ourselves to the ideal, or we may turn aside to appetite and sleep; but in every moment of returning sanity we are again on our feet and again upon an endless ascending road.
When a man has tasted power, when he sees the supply there is so near in Nature for all need, he hungers for reinforcement. That desire is prayer. It opens its own doors and takes supplies from God's hand. No wise man can grudge the necessary use of the mind to serve the body with shelter and food, for we go merrily to Nature, and with our milk we drink order, justice, beauty, and benignity. We cannot take the husks on which our bodies are fed, without expressing these juices also, which circulate as sap and blood through the sphere. We cannot touch any object but some spark of vital electricity is shot through us. Every creature is a battery, charged not with mere vegetable or animal, but with moral life. Our metaphysical being is fed from something hidden in rocks and woods, in streams and skies, in fire, water, earth, and air. While we dig roots, and gather nuts, and hunt and roast our meat, our blood is quickened not in the heart alone. Deeper currents are swelled. The springs of our humanity are opened in Nature; for that which streams through the landscape, and comes in at the eye and ear, is plainly the same fluid which enters as consciousness, and is the life by which we live. While we enjoy this spiritual refreshment and keep ourselves open to it, we may dig without degradation; but if our minds fasten on the thing to be done, on commodity and safety, on getting and having, those avenues seem to close by which the soul was fed. Then we forget our incalculable chances and certainties; we go mad, and make the mind a muck-rake. If a man will direct his faculties to any limited and not to illimitable ends, he cripples his faculties. No matter whether he is deluded by a fortune or a reputation or position, if he does not give himself wholly to grow and be a man, regardless of minor advantages, he has lost his way in the world. "Be true," said Schiller, "to the dream of thy youth." That dream was generous, not sordid. We must be surrendered to the perfection which claims us, and suffer no narrow aim to postpone that insatiable demand.
But the potency of life will bring back every wanderer, as he well knows. Every sinner keeps his trunk packed, ready to return to the good. The poor traders really mean to buy love with their gold. Feeling the hold of a chain which binds us even when we do not cling to it, we grow prodigal of time and power. The essence of life, as we enjoy it, is a sense of the inextinguishable ascending tendency in life; and this gives courage when there is yet no reverence or devotion.
In development of character is involved great change of circumstances. We cannot grow or work in a corner. It is not for greed alone or mainly that men make war and build cities and found governments, but to try what they can do and become, to justify themselves to themselves and to their fellows. We desire to please and help,—but still more, at first, to be sure that we can please and help. If he hears any man speak effectually in public, the ambitious boy will never rest till he can also speak, or do some other deed as difficult and as well worth doing. For the trial of faculty we must go out into the world of institutions, range ourselves beside the workers, take up their tools and strike stroke for stroke with them. Every new situation and employment dazzles till we find out the trick of it. The boy longs to escape from a farm to college, from college to the city and practical life. Then he looks up from his desk, or from the pit in the theatre, to the gay world of fashion,—harder to conquer than even the world of thought. At last he makes his way upward into the sacred circle, and finds there a little original power and a great deal of routine. These fine parts are like those of players, learned by heart. The men who invented them, with whom they were spontaneous, seem to have died out and left their manners with their wardrobes to narrow-breasted children, whom neither clothes nor courtesies will fit. So in every department we find the snail freezing in an oyster-shell. The judges do not know the meaning of justice. The preacher thinks religion is a spasm of desire and fear. A young man soon loses all respect for titles, wigs, and gowns, and looks for a muscular master-mind. Somebody wrote the laws, and set the example of noble behavior, and founded every religion. Only a man capable of originating can understand, sustain, or use any institution. The Church, the State, the Social System come tumbling ruinous over the heads of bunglers, who cannot uphold, because they never could have built them, and the rubbish obstructs every path in life. An honest, vigorous thinker will clear away these ruins and begin anew at the earth. When the boy has broken loose from home, and fairly entered the world that allured him, he finds it not fit to live in without revolutions. He is as much cramped in it as he was in the ways of the old homestead. Feeding the pigs and picking up chips did not seem work for a man, but he finds that almost all the activity of the race amounts to nothing more; no more thought or purpose goes into it. Men find Church and State and Custom ready-made, and they fall into the procession, ask no searching questions, but take things for granted without reason; and their imitation is as easy as picking up chips. It is no doing, but merely sliding down hill. The way of the world will not suit a valiant boy. To make elbow-room and get breathing-space, he becomes a reformer; and when now he can find no new worlds to conquer, he will make a world, laying in truth and justice every stone. The same seeker, who was so fired by the sight of his eyes, looking out from a mill-yard or a shoe-shop on the many-colored activity of his kind, who ran such a round of arts and sciences, pursuing the very secret of his being in each new enterprise, is now discontented with all that has been done. He begins again to look forward,—he becomes a prophet, instead of the historian he was. He easily sees that a true manhood would disuse our ways of teaching and worshipping, would unbuild and rebuild every town and house, would tear away the jails and abolish pauperism as well as slavery. He sees the power of government lying unused and unsuspected in spelling-books and Bibles. Now he has found a work, not for one finger, but for fighting Hercules and singing Apollo, worthy of Minerva and of Jove. He will try what man can do for man.
The history of every brave girl is parallel with that of her play-fellow and yoke-fellow. She sighs for sympathy, for a gallant company of youths and maidens worthy of all desire. Her music, drawing, and Italian are only doors which she hopes to open upon such a company. She longs for society to make the hours lyrical, for tasks to make them epic and heroic. The attitudes and actions of imaginative young persons are exalted every moment by the invisible presence of lovers, poets, inspired and inspiring companions. Such as they are we also shall be; when we walk among them and with them, we shall wash our hands of all injustice, meanness, and pretension. Women are as tired as men of our silly civilization, its compliments, restraints, and compromises. They feel the burden of routine as heavily, and keep their elasticity under it as long as we. What they cannot hope to do, a great-hearted man, some lover of theirs, shall do for them; and they will sustain him with appreciation, anticipating the tardy justice of mankind. Every generous girl shares with her sex that new development of feminine consciousness, which the vulgar have named, in derision, a movement for woman's rights. She will seek to be more truly woman, to assert her special power and privilege, to approach from her own side the common ideal, offering a pure soprano to match the manly bass.
We all look for a future, not only better than our won past, but better than any past. Humanity is our inheritance, but not historical humanity. Man seems to be broken and scattered all abroad. The great lives are only eminent examples of a single virtue, and by admiration of every hero we have been crippled on some one side. If he is free, he is also coarse; if delicate, he is overlaid by the gross world; saints are timid and feverish, afraid of being spattered in the first puddle; heroes are profane. We must melt up all the old metal to make a new man and carry forward the common consciousness. Every failure was part of the final success. We go over a causeway in which every timber is some soldier fallen in this enterprise. Who doubts the result doubts God. We say, regretfully "If I could only continue at my best!" and we ach with the little ebb, between wave and wave, of an advancing tide. But this tide is Omnipotence. It rises surely, if it were only an inch in a thousand years. The changes in society are like the geologic upheaval and sinking of continents; yet man is morally as far removed from the savage as he is physically superior to the saurian. We do not see the corn grow or the world revolve; yet if motion be given as the primal essence, we must look for inconceivable results. Wisdom will take care of wisdom, and extend. Consider the growth of intellect in the history of your own parish for twenty years. See how old views have died out of New England and new ones come in. Every man is fortified in his opinions, yet no man