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The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 by Various

V >> Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864




"Which leads men straight on every road."

He is delivered there at home to Beauty, which makes and is the world.

Genius is royal knowledge. In the nearest need it studies all ages and
all worlds. Let me understand my neighbors and my meat; you may have the
libraries and schools. I read here living languages,--the eye, the
attitude and temperament, the wish and will: Hebrew and Greek must wait.
He who knows how to value "Hamlet" will never subscribe for your picture
of "Shakspeare's Study." Great intelligence runs quickly through our
primers, our cities, constitutions, galleries, traditions, cathedrals,
creeds. The long invention of the race is a tortuous, obscure way. Must
I creep all my fresh years in that labyrinth, and postpone youth to the
end of age? What need of so much experience and contrivance, if without
contrivance, if by simplicity, the children surely and beautifully live?

Healthy thought is organic, grows by assimilation, vitalizes all it
takes, and so like a plant puts forth knowledge from the old and from
within. The apple of to-morrow is earth, not apple, till it hangs on the
tree. Our knowing seems rather rejection than acceptance, so much is
husk in bulk. From eight thousand miles of geology the tree takes a few
drops of water and distils from these its own again. Vigor of mind is
judgment, which divides the meat from the shell, that which cumbers from
that which thrills. The act is simple, inevitable; let it be energetic
and final. We say, "This is valuable, it quickens me; the rest is
nonsense." A feeble mind needs now chiefly to be rid of rubbish, of
cheap admirations, an awe before the hair-pins and shoe-ties of society,
before the true church, the scholastic learning, dead languages, the
Fathers and the fashion. To set the savage of civilization free from his
superstition, these idols must be insulted before his face.

A little energy of demand displaces them from regard. The scholars are
busy with punctuation, chronology, and the lives of the little great, so
that their visit is a vastation, and I must turn them out of doors.
Genius will continue unable to spell, to read the German, to count the
Egyptian kings. There is royal ignorance, the preoccupation of gods. For
the wise, if no object is trifling, yet part of every object is foreign
to its best intent. Every nut is inwardly a man and a miracle, but
outwardly a shell. If it be a book, the thought is a shell, though God
be in the thought. The book is another thing, another world of power and
form, and the power will consume the form as a sword eats its sheath,
the soul the body, or fire the pan. The letter drops, for the spirit
must expand and be set free. The positive and negative poles of Nature
reappear in every creature, and the positive element must prevail. When
we have learned to live, we shall--or shall not--learn to spell.

The last refreshment is intercourse with a kingly mind, which has no
need to shift its centre, but lies abroad hemispheric, and sleeps like
sunshine, bathing silently the earth and sky. Such a mind is at home,
not in position, but in a vital relation to Nature, which leaves no
spaces dark and cold for wandering, and knows no change that is worth
the name of change. It is rest to be with one who is at rest, who
cannot go to or go from his happiness, for whom the meaning of Deity is
here and now. What stillness and depth of manner are communicated to all
who sound the deeps of life! what a refuge is their society from wit,
zeal, and gossip, from petty estimates and demands! To these, now first
encountered, we have been always known; in them we meet no private
motive, no accomplishment, reputation, ability, immediate haunting
purpose, but a Sabbath from personal fortunes. We meet the great above
all that can be mine or thine, above gifts and accidents in common
manhood and prosperity. Swedenborg reports no encounter on higher
ground. The seven heavens open to me in a mind which gives rank to its
own facts, and wherever it is housed still finds the universe only a
larger body around the soul.

Genius declares the total or representative value of its own facts
against the neglect or contempt of mankind. Intelligence is centre of
centres, and all things diminish as they recede from the eye. Every
natural law is some hint to us of our commanding position. The good
thought is never a toilsome going abroad, but some settling at home to
new intimacy with the fortune which waits on all. It is no putting out
legs, but a putting down roots to take possession of the earth and the
nether heavens, while we fill the upper sky with climbing shoots.
Intelligence is at one with the system, able to entertain it as a unit,
to refer every particle, dark as a particle, to its shining place in the
transparent whole. How can I afford to drop my errand, to go wonder
after the fore-world, after Plato, Washington, or Paul? These are men
who never dropped their errands to go wonder after the Maker himself.
They found God in the thing lying nearest to be done. As right action in
the remotest corner is a world-victory, so right thought applied to the
lowest circumstance is cosmic thought. In the fortune of the hour we
have a home beyond the fortune of the hour. The least circle of order
now organized and established in our lives is not a poor house frozen to
the ground, but a ship able to outride the currents of time, a charmed
circle of security which will serve us still in every following world.
Our future is to be found, not in multiplication of examples, but in
deeper sympathy with all we have superficially known.

We shall never rightly celebrate the stillness and sweetness of truth in
an open mind. Clear perception is refreshing as sleep. It is a sleep
from blunder, care, and sin. In every thought we are lifted to sit with
the serene rulers, and see how lightly, yet firmly, in their orbits the
worlds are borne. With insight we work freely, for every result is
secure; we rest, for every stream will bear us to the sea. Peace is joy
beyond the perturbation of joy, is entertainment of Omnipotence in the
breast.

A filial relation to the universe is well expressed, not in speech, but
in the attitudes of her children, in their balance, tranquillity,
directness, their firm and quiet grasp, look, step, tone. Confidence and
joy are the only moral agents. Worship is immortal cheer. The Greeks
rebuke us with their sacred festivals and games: why should we not hunt
every evil as we follow gayly the buffalo and bear? Virtue cannot be
wrinkled and sad; Virtue is a joy of the Right added to our earliest
joy,--is refreshment and health, not fever. The Etruscan are right
religious sculptures: the body will be more, not less, when the soul is
most; for the body is created and perfected, not devoured by the soul.
In another Eden the curves of grace and power will reappear; every
wrinkle will be counted sin; goodness will be sap and blood, a growth of
grapes and roses, a sacrament of energy and content.

If there be great wrongs, we cannot distrust the Maker, and postpone the
security of the soul. Impatience is a wrong as great as any. Love and
trust are remedies for wrong. Music is our cure for insanity, and I
remember that incantation of fair reasons which Plato prescribed. What
gain is in scolding and knitting the brows? The blue sky, the bright
cloud, the star of night, the star of day, every creature is in its
smiling place a protest of the universe against our hasty method of
counter-working wrong with wrong. Let loose the Right. Go forward with
martial music; never await or seek, but carry victory and win every
battle in the organization of your band. Hear Beethoven:--"Nor do I fear
for my works. No evil can befall them, and whosoever shall understand
them shall be free from all such misery as burdens mankind."

From this security in the lap of Nature, this nest in the grass, we rise
easily to every height. Gladness becomes uncontainable, a pain of
fulness, for which, after all effort, there is no complete relief; for
language breaks under it in delivery, and Art falls to the ground. The
psalm of David, the statue of Angelo, the chorus of Handel, are
inarticulate cries. These men have not justified to us their confidence.
It will be shared, not justified. They have divined what they cannot
orderly publish, and their meaning will be by the same greatness divined
again. The work of such men remains a haunting, commanding enigma to
following ages. They do but repeat the promise and obscurity of Nature,
for she herself has the same largeness, is such another _raptus_,
proceeding to no end, but to a circle or complexity of ends. Men are
again and again divided over the images of Paul, of Plato, of Dante,
unable to escape from their authority, more unable to give them final
interpretation. They leave Nature, to puzzle over the inexhaustible
book. What does it mean? What does it not mean? The poet will never wait
till he can demonstrate and explain. He must hasten to convey a blessing
greater than explanation, to publish, if it were only by broken hints,
by signs and dumb pointing, his sense of a presence not to be
comprehended or named.

For, if the seer is sustained, he is also commanded by what he sees.
Genius is not religious, but religion, an opening to the conscience of
the universe no less than to the joy. From this original the moral,
intellectual, and aesthetic sense will each derive a conscience, and rule
with equal sovereignty the man. Through an ant or an angel the first
influx of reality is entertained in an attitude of worship, and the
poet, in his vision, cries with Virgil to Dante:--

"Down, down, bend low
Thy knees! behold God's angel! fold thy hands!
Henceforward shalt thou see true ministers!"

Revelation is not more a new light than a new heart and will; revelation
to me is the conquest and renewal of me. What is lovely will not be
encountered without love, the Creator holds the key to the creature,
Order and Right may freely enter to be man. He who can open any object
to its source is touched therein by the finger of God, and insight is
inevitable consecration. Give the coward a suspicion of our human
destiny, and he is no longer coward; he would gladly be cut in pieces
and burned in any flame to shed abroad that light. Life has such an
irresistible tendency to extend, that it makes of the man a mere
vehicle, takes him for hands and feet, wheels and wings: he is glad only
when the truth runs and prevails. Enthusiasm, devotion, earnestness are
names for this possession of the deep thinker by his thought. He lives
in that, and has in it his prosperity, no longer in the flesh. The
inspired man becomes great by absorption in a great design; he is
preoccupied, and trifles, for which other men are bought and sold, shine
before him as beads of glass with which savages are wheedled. We drop
our playthings, our banks and coaches, crowns, swords, colleges, and
sugar-plums in a heap together, when any moment opens to us the scope of
our activity, and carries far forward the curve through which we have
already run.

The divine authority of Genius is given in this descent and superiority
to will. That which in me I must obey, that also above me all men must
obey. Will is the centre of the practical man, of all force, not moral,
but brute or natural, and is identified in the common thought with
myself, as I am a natural cause. Will is the sum of physical forces
necessary for self-preservation, is reagency against the formidable
rivalry of every other organization. In this animal centre the laws are
carried up, as reins are gathered to be put into the hands of a driver,
and being tied in a knot just where the physical touches the celestial
sphere, they seem to be moral, and Will much more than the body is in
popular thought inseparable from man. It is an organ into which he has
thrown himself in reckless neglect of his privilege, a grasping hand
which rules the world as we see it ruled, masters and takes to itself
for extension all laws below its own level, wields Nature as an
instrument, breaks down a weaker will, and carries away the material
mind until some God from above shall deliver it. Will is that living
Fate of which exterior necessity is but the form. From it we are
instantly delivered in conviction, and find it ever after the servant,
not the synonyme of man.

The boy does not choose, neither does the belly choose for him, what
object shall be supremely beautiful in his eyes. He has not resolved to
see only this splendor of color, and neglect sound,--or to give himself
to sound alone, and shut his eyes to sight. If the divine order reaches
any mind, those creatures in which it appears will haunt that mind, will
take lordly their own place, and hang as constellations high overhead in
thought. So long as he can turn the eye hither and thither, or lightly
determine what he will see, the man is conversant with form alone, and
bigots who are on that plane of experience identify him with choice,
hold thought to be altogether voluntary, and burn the thinker, as though
his view were a fruit, not a root, of him. But truth is that which does
not wait for our making, but makes us,--does not lie like water at the
bottom of our wells, but comes like sunshine flooding the air, and
compelling recognition. "To believe your own thought," says a master,
"that is genius"; but is not genius primarily the arrival of a thought
able to authenticate itself, to compel trust, and make its own value
known against the sneers or anger of the world? From my own thought once
reached there is but one appeal,--to my own thought: from Philip sober
to Philip more sober.

The good spirit appears as a spark in our embers, and draws out these
careful hands to ward itself from every gust,--sets our tasks and crowns
them. We know that from first desire to last performance wisdom is
altogether a grace. Wisdom is this wish for wisdom, already given in the
readiness to receive. We have not cared for it, but it has cared for us.

Grown stronger, it is a guide, and needs none. Turner sees what he must
love; there is no rule for such seeing: what he does not love is hid
from him; there is no rule for such omission. It is in the eye, not more
a happy opening than a happy closing. A private ordinance, dividing man
into men, makes the same creature a wall to one, an open door to his
neighbor. The value of man appears to Scott in feudalism, to Wordsworth
in contemplation, to Byron in impatience, to Kant in certainty, to
Calvin in authority, to Calame in landscape, to Newton in measure, to
Carlyle in retribution, to Shakspeare in society, to Dante in the
contrast of right and wrong.

One man by grandeur sees mountains in the coals of his grate; another by
gentleness only sunshine and grasses on Monadnock. You will not say that
he chooses, but that he is chosen so to see. Light opens the eye without
our intention, and we are at no trouble to paint on the retina what must
there appear. Success is fidelity to that which must appear. Weak men
discuss forever the laws of Art, and contrive how to paint, questioning
whether this or that element should have emphasis or be shown. If there
is any question, there will be no Art. The man must feel to do, and
what he does from overmastering feeling will convince and be forever
right. The work is organic which grows so above composition or plan.
After you are engaged by the symphony, there is no escape, no pause;
each note springs out of each as branch from branch of a tree. It could
be no otherwise; it cannot be otherwise conceived. Why could not I have
found this sequence inevitable, as well as another? Plainly, the
symphony was discovered, not made,--was written before man, like
astronomy in the sky.

Only the mastery of one who is mastered by Nature will control and
renovate mankind. It is easy to recognize the habit of conviction,
freedom from within, and personal motive, the man bending himself as for
life or death to show exactly what he sees. The inspired man we know who
appeals to a divine necessity, and says, "I can do no otherwise; God be
my help! amen!"--for whom praise and property and comfortable
continuance on this planet are trifles, so great an object has opened to
him in the inviolable moral law.

Every perception takes hold at last on duty as well as desire, claims
and carries away the man entire, though it were to danger or death. The
system, grown friendly, has grown sacred also; departure from it is
shame and guilt, as well as loss. An artist, therefore, like the Greek,
is busy with portraits of the gods, and every celebration of Beauty is
another Missa Solemnis, Te Deum, and Gloria.

Whatever object becomes transparent to a man will be his medium of
communication with the Maker and with mankind. He hurries to show
therein what he has seen, as children run for their companions and point
their discoveries. These are his unsolicited angels, higher above his
reach than above that of the crowd; for every good thought is more a
surprise to the thinker than to any other. The seer points always from
himself as a telescope to the sky; he is no creator, but a bit of broken
glass in the sun. What is any man in the presence of haunting
Perfection, never to be shown without mutilation and dishonor? Is it
ours? In Him we live and move.

While the Ego is pronounced and fills consciousness, man seems to be and
do somewhat of himself; but when the universal Soul is manifest above
will, his eyes turn away from that old battery; he is absorbed in what
he sees,--forgets himself, his deeds, wants, gains. He is rapt; stands
like Socrates a day and a night in contemplation; sits like Newton for
twelve hours half dressed on the edge of his bed, arrested in rising. He
is that madman to the world who neglects his meat, postpones his private
enterprise, regards honor and comfort as so much interruption to this
commerce with reality. We are all tired of property which is exclusion,
of goods which must be taken from another to serve me. Good should grow
with sharing,--more for me when all is given. In the spirit there are no
fences, boxes, or bags.

Presenting truth, I declare it as freely yours as mine. Every act of
genius proclaims that the highest gift is no monopoly or singularity, no
privilege of one, but the birthright of the race. Shakspeare knows well
that we shall easily see what he sees; he considers it no secret. We are
always feeling beforehand for every right word now about to be spoken in
the world; many men give tokens of the general habit of thought before
he is born who clearly knows what all were dreaming. Wisdom has only
gone before us on our own path, and we overtake our guide in every
perception. Yet we are lifted quite off our feet by any new possibility
revealed in life: every circle drawn round our own astonishes, though it
be drawn from our centre. The poet in his certainty appears a child of
the heavens, and we strike another foolish line through the crowd, as
though every man were not his own poet as truly as he is his own priest
and governor, as though each were not entitled to see whatever is to be
seen. The masters of thought may teach us better. They address their
loftiest power in us, and never sing to oxen or dogs. The painting,
poem, statue, oratorio, calls to me by name; the morning is an eye that
solicits mine. Shall I take only the husks, and leave to another,
contented, always, the life of life?

He is supreme poet who can make me a poet, able to reach the same
supplies after he is gone. We are bits of iron charged by this magnet,
and lose our quality when it is removed; we are not quite made magnets
as we should be by this magnetic planet and the revolutions of the sun;
yet the great polarity of our globe is a sum of little polarities, and
every scrap of metal has its own. We are made musical by the passing
band; we go on humming and marching to the air; but he who wrote it was
made musical by silence and sunshine. Soon our own vibrations will be
more easily induced, as old instruments sound with a touch or breath. We
shall throb with inarticulate rhythms, and understand the bard who
sings,--

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter."

The poet is one who has detected this latency of power in every breast.
His delight is a feeling that all doors are open to all, that he is no
favorite, but the rest are late sleepers, and he only earlier awake.
Depth of genius is measured by depth of this conviction. Egotism is
incurable greenness. An artist is one who has more, not less, respect
for the common eye. The seer points always from his own to a public
privilege,--says never, "I, Jesus, have so received," but, "The Son of
Man must so receive"; and Shakspeare cuts himself into fragments till
there is no Shakspeare left behind, as if expressly to testify that this
wonderful wisdom is not his, but ours, is not that of the thinker and
penman in his study, but of priests and kings, ladies and courtiers,
lovers and warriors, knaves and fools. Paul sees that Moses read his law
from tables of the heart. Every wise word is an echo of the wisdom
inarticulate in our neighbors which sends them confident about their
work and play. The faith of healthy men and women is amazing when we
learn how incapable they are of showing grounds for it. In speculation
they hold horrible theories, blackening the day; yet they trust the good
which their lips unwittingly deny.

In discourse we are moved, not by what a man says, but by what he takes
for granted. The undertow of power is something unstated to which all
his facts and laws refer. But our resource seems to be rather a
reversion, is not quite available; we have blood and a beat at the
heart, yet it does not circulate freely, and Nature to every man is a
double of himself, so that the universe seems also cold in extremities,
as though there were too little original life to fill her veins. The
poet is not fire on the hearth to thaw this numbness by foreign heat. He
rubs and rouses us to activity, drags us to the open air, puts us on a
glowing chase, provokes us to race and climb with him till we also are
thoroughly alive. No other gift of his is worth much beside this hope of
reaching his side. The great know well that all men are approaching
their view even in departing from it, as travellers going from one port
turn their backs on each other here and their faces together toward the
antipodal point: they can leave their discoveries and fame to the race.
There is one object of sight. Every piece of wisdom is no less my
thought because another has found it in my mind. It is more mine than
any perception I called my own, for really with that I have
unconsciously been living in deeps below thought. The rest I have known,
that in all these years I am.

No man seriously doubts that he is born to entertain the meaning of the
world. Already we are inclined to reckon genius a mere faculty of
saying, not of knowing, since it opens a common experience in every
example. Minority and obligation to other eyes will cease. We have
outgrown many a Magnus Apollo of childhood; his beauty is no longer
beautiful, his gold is tinsel, we can dig better for ourselves.
Therefore we can draw no line that will stand between poets and
pretenders. That is fire which fires me to-day; to-morrow the same
influence is frost. The standard is my temperature, a sliding scale. My
neighbors are raised to ecstasy by what seems a rattle of pots and pans;
but I remember when heaven opened to me also in Scheffer, Byron,
Bellini. The judge places himself in his judgment,--declares only what
is now above him, what below. If I find Milton prosaic beside
Swedenborg, perhaps I do Milton no wrong; perhaps no man in the company
so admires his impetuous grandeur; but now the impersonality of the
Swede may meet my need more nearly, with his mysteries of
correspondence, spiritual law, enduring Nature, and supremacy of Love.
Discrimination is worth so much, because there are no great gaps between
man and man, between mind and mind: there is no virtuous, no vicious, no
poet, no unpoet, and only dulness lumps one with angels, another with
dogs. There are infinite kinds and infinite degrees of intelligence;
there is genius in every sort and every stage of adulteration, overlaid
by this, by that, by the other grave mistake; and we cannot afford to be
inhospitable to the feeblest protest against our condition and
ourselves.

We pass all but the few great masters, and they are only before us on
the road. Culture is the opening of spontaneous or liberal activity, and
hangs all on the pivotal perception that everything, experience, effort,
element, history, tradition, art, science, is another opening to the
same centre, and that our life. When the pupil is roused, enchanted,
fired, his redemption from sense is begun; he is delivered to the great
God, if it were only in a crystal or a caterpillar; he will never again
be the clod he was. The years are cruel and cold, want and appetite
devour many a day, but the man can never forget what was promised to the
boy. He believes in thought; believes against thought in the mad world,
in foolish man; believes in himself, and wonders what he could do, if he
had yet only half a chance. All that is streams toward the mind, will
stream through it and be known.

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