He is a good man, who can receive a gift well. We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming. Some violence, I think, is done, some degradation borne, when I rejoice or grieve at a gift. I am sorry when my independence is invaded, or when a gift comes from such as do not know my spirit, and so the act is not supported; and if the gift pleases me overmuch, then I should be ashamed that the donor should read my heart, and see that I love his commodity, and not him. The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him. When the waters are at level, then my goods pass to him, and his to me. All his are mine, all mine his. I say to him, How can you give me this pot of oil, or this flagon of wine, when all your oil and wine is mine, which belief of mine this gift seems to deny? Hence the fitness of beautiful, not useful things for gifts. This giving is flat usurpation, and therefore when the beneficiary is ungrateful, as all beneficiaries hate all Timons, 1 not at all considering the value of the gift, but looking back to the greater store it was taken from, I rather sympathize with the beneficiary, than with the anger of my lord, Timon. For, the expectation of gratitude is mean, and is continually punished by the total insensibility of the obliged person. It is a great happiness to get off without injury and heart-burning, from one who has had the ill luck to be served by you. It is a very onerous business, 2 this of being served, and the debtor naturally wishes to give you a slap. A golden text for these gentlemen is that which I admire in the Buddhist, 3 who never thanks, and who says, "Do not flatter your benefactors."
The reason of these discords I conceive to be, that there is no commensurability between a man and any gift. You cannot give anything to a magnanimous person. After you have served him, he at once puts you in debt by his magnanimity. The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small. Besides, our action on each other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at random, that we can seldom hear the acknowledgments of any person who would thank us for a benefit, without some shame and humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct stroke, but must be content with an oblique one; we seldom have the satisfaction of yielding a direct benefit, which is directly received. But rectitude scatters favors on every side without knowing it, and receives with wonder the thanks of all people.
I fear to breathe any treason against the majesty of love, which is the genius and god of gifts, and to whom we must not affect to prescribe. Let him give kingdoms or flower-leaves indifferently. There are persons from whom we always expect fairy tokens; let us not cease to expect them. This is prerogative, and not to be limited by our municipal rules. For the rest, I like to see that we cannot be bought and sold. The best of hospitality and of generosity is also not in the will, but in fate. I find that I am not much to you; you do not need me; you do not feel me; then am I thrust out of doors, though you proffer me house and lands. No services are of any value, but only likeness. When I have attempted to join myself to others by services, it proved an intellectual trick--no more. They eat your service like apples, and leave you out. But love them, and they feel for you, and delight in you all the time.
NATURE 4
The rounded world is fair to see,
Nine times folded in mystery:
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its laboring heart,
Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin;
Self-kindled every atom glows,
And hints the future which it owes.
There are days 5 which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons 6 may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather, which we distinguish by the name of Indian Summer. 7 The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely. At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How willingly we would escape the barriers which render them comparatively impotent, escape the sophistication and second thought, and suffer nature to entrance us. The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported spells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks, almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures, and by thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was crowded out of the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present, and we were led in triumph by nature.
These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly and native to us. We come to our own, and make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. We never can part with it; the mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our eyes, and hands, and feet. It is firm water: it is cold flame: what health, what affinity! Ever an old friend, ever like a dear friend and brother, when we chat affectedly with strangers, comes in this honest face, and takes a grave liberty with us, and shames us out of our nonsense. Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath. There are all degrees of natural influence, from these quarantine powers of nature, up to her dearest and gravest ministrations to the imagination and the soul. There is the bucket of cold water from the spring, the wood-fire to which the chilled traveler rushes for safety,--and there is the sublime moral of autumn and of noon. We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains, and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude, and foretell the remotest future. The blue zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet. I think, if we should be rapt away into all that we dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel 8 and Uriel, 9 the upper sky would be all that would remain of our furniture.
It seems as if the day was not wholly profane, in which we have given heed to some natural object. The fall of snowflakes in a still air, preserving to each crystal its perfect form; the blowing of sleet over a wide sheet of water, and over plains; the waving rye-fields; the mimic waving of acres of houstonia, whose innumerable florets whiten and ripple before the eye; the reflections of trees and flowers in glassy lakes; the musical steaming odorous south wind, which converts all trees to wind-harps; 10 the crackling and spurting of hemlock in the flames; or of pine-logs, which yield glory to the walls and faces in the sitting-room,--these are the music and pictures of the most ancient religion. My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and on the skirt of the village. 11 But I go with my friend 12 to the shore of our little river, 13 and with one stroke of the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation. 14 We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty: we dip our hands in this painted element: our eyes are bathed in these lights and forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura, 15 a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever decked and enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant. These sunset clouds, these delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable glances, signify it and proffer it. I am taught the poorness of our invention, the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this original beauty. I am overinstructed for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive and sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance: but a countryman shall be my master of revels. He who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man. Only as far as masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, 16 villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves, to back their faulty personality with these strong accessories. I do not wonder that the landed interest should be invincible in the state with these dangerous auxiliaries. These bribe and invite; not kings, not palaces, not men, not women, but these tender and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. We heard what the rich man said, we knew of his villa, his grove, his wine, and his company, but the provocation and point of the invitation came out of these beguiling stars. In their soft glances, I see what men strove to realize in some Versailles, 17 or Paphos, 18 or Ctesiphon. 19 Indeed, it is the magical lights of the horizon, and the blue sky for the background, which save all our works of art, which were otherwise baubles. When the rich tax the poor with servility and obsequiousness, they should consider the effect of man reputed to be the possessors of nature, on imaginative minds. Ah! if the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches! A boy hears a military band play on the field at night, and he has kings and queens, and famous chivalry palpably before him. He hears the echoes of a horn in a hill country, in the Notch Mountains, 20 for example, which converts the mountains into an Æolian harp, 21 and this supernatural tiralira restores to him the Dorian 22 mythology, Apollo, 23 Diana, 24 and all divine hunters and huntresses. Can a musical note be so lofty, so haughtily beautiful! To the poor young poet, thus fabulous is his picture of society; he is loyal; he respects the rich; they are rich for the sake of his imagination; how poor his fancy would be, if they were not rich! That they have some high-fenced grove, which they call a park; that they live in larger and better-garnished saloons than he has visited, and go in coaches, keeping only the society of the elegant, to watering-places, and to distant cities, are the groundwork from which he has delineated estates of romance, compared with which their actual possessions are shanties and paddocks. The muse herself betrays her son, and enhances the gift of wealthy and well-born beauty, by a radiation out of the air, and clouds, and forests that skirt the road,--a certain haughty favor, as if from patrician genii to patricians, a kind of aristocracy in nature, a prince of the power of the air.
The moral sensibility which makes Edens 25 and Tempes 26 so easily, may not be always found, but the material landscape is never far off. We can find these enchantments without visiting the Como Lake, 27 or the Madeira Islands. 28 We exaggerate the praises of local scenery. In every landscape, the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock as well as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common, 29 with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna, 30 or on the marble deserts of Egypt. The uprolled clouds and the colors of morning and evening, will transfigure maples and alders. The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is great difference in the beholders. There is nothing so wonderful in any particular landscape, as the necessity of being beautiful under which every landscape lies. Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty breaks in everywhere.
But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers on this topic, which school-men called natura naturata, or nature passive. One can hardly speak directly of it without excess. It is as easy to broach in mixed companies what is called "the subject of religion." A susceptible person does not like to indulge his tastes in this kind, without the apology of some trivial necessity: he goes to see a wood-lot, or to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral from a remote locality, or he carries a fowling-piece, or a fishing-rod. I suppose this shame must have a good reason. A dilettantism 31 in nature is barren and unworthy. The fop of fields is no better than his brother of Broadway. Men are naturally hunters and inquisitive of woodcraft and I suppose that such a gazetteer as wood-cutters and Indians should furnish facts for would take place in the most sumptuous drawing-rooms of all the "Wreaths" and "Flora's chaplets" 32 of the book-shops; yet ordinarily, whether we are too clumsy for so subtle a topic, or from whatever cause, as soon as men begin to write on nature, they fall into euphuism. Frivolity is a most unfit tribute to Pan, 33 who ought to be represented in the mythology as the most continent of gods. I would not be frivolous before the admirable reserve and prudence of time, yet I cannot renounce the right of returning often to this old topic. The multitude of false churches 34 accredits the true religion. Literature, poetry, science, are the homage of man to this unfathomed secret, concerning which no sane man can affect an indifference or incuriosity. Nature is loved by what is best in us. It is loved as the city of God, although, or rather because there is no citizen. The sunset is unlike anything that is underneath it: it wants men. And the beauty of nature must always seem unreal and mocking, until the landscape has human figures, that are as good as itself. If there were good men, there would never be this rapture in nature. If the king is in the palace nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people, to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and architecture. The critics who complain of the sickly separation of the beauty of nature from the thing to be done, must consider that our hunting of the picturesque is inseparable from our protest against false society. Man is fallen; nature is erect, and serves as a differential thermometer, detecting the presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man. By fault of our dulness and selfishness, we are looking up to nature, but when we are convalescent, nature will look up to us. We see the foaming brook with compunction; if our own life flowed with the right energy, we should shame the brook. The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, and not with reflex rays of sun and moon. Nature may be as selfishly studied as trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology; psychology, mesmerism (with intent to show where our spoons are gone); and anatomy and physiology become phrenology and palmistry.
But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on this topic, but not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, natura naturans, the quick cause, before which all forms flee as the driven snows, itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and multitudes, (as the ancient represented nature by Proteus, 35 a shepherd), and in undescribable variety. It publishes itself in creatures, reaching from particles and spicula, through transformation on transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate results without a shock or a leap. A little heat, that is, a little motion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling white, and deadly cold poles of the earth from the prolific tropical climates. All changes pass without violence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space and boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the secularity of nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-school measures, and exchange our Mosaic 36 and Ptolemaic schemes 37 for her large style. We know nothing rightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed, then before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the door for the remote Flora, 38 Fauna, 39 Ceres, 40 and Pomona, 41 to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive, 42 and then race after race of men. It is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to Plato, 43 and the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet all must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides.
Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumb-nail, or the signet of a ring. The whirling bubble on the surface of a brook, admits us to the secret of the mechanics of the sky. Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A little water made to rotate in a cup explains the formation of the simpler shells; the addition of matter from year to year, arrives at last at the most complex forms; and yet so poor is nature with all her craft, that, from the beginning to the end of the universe, she has but one stuff,--but one stuff with its two ends, to serve up all her dream-like variety. Compound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the same properties.
Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms and equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and, at the same time, she arms and equips another animal to destroy it. Space exists to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird with a few feathers, she gives him a petty omnipresence. The direction is forever onward, but the artist still goes back for materials, and begins again with the first elements on the most advanced stage: otherwise, all goes to ruin. If we look at her work, we seem to catch a glance of a system in transition. Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward toward consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground. The animal is the novice and probationer of a more advanced order. The men, though young, having tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are already dissipated: the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt; yet no doubt, when they come to consciousness, they too will curse and swear. Flowers so strictly belong to youth, that we adult men soon come to feel, that their beautiful generations concern not us: we have had our day; now let the children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness.
Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the eye, from any one object the parts and properties of any other may be predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wall would certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as readily as the city. That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great intervals on our customary scale. We talk of deviations from natural life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is directly related, there amid essences and billets-doux, to Himalaya mountain-chains 44 and the axis of the globe. If we consider how much we are nature's, we need not be superstitious about towns, as if that terrific or benefic force did not find us there also, and fashion cities. Nature, who made the mason, made the house. We may easily hear too much of rural influences. The cool, disengaged air of natural objects, makes them enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures with red faces, and we think we shall be as grand as they, if we camp out and eat roots, but let us be men instead of wood-chucks, and the oak and the elm shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets of silk.
This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts of the piece, and characterizes every law. Man carries the world in his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing laws which bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas, crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its own, and recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment. The common sense of Franklin, 45 Dalton, 46 Davy 47 and Black, 48 is the same common sense which made the arrangements which now it discovers.
If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter action runs also into organization. The astronomers said, 49 "Give us matter, and a little motion, and we will construct the universe. It is not enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse, one shove to launch the mass, and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and centripetal 50 forces. Once heave the ball from the hand, and we can show how all this mighty order grew." "A very unreasonable postulate," said the metaphysicians, "and a plain begging of the question. Could you not prevail to know the genesis of projection, as well as the continuation of it?" Nature, meanwhile, had not waited for the discussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed the impulse, and the balls rolled. It was no great affair, a mere push, but the astronomers were right in making much of it, for there is no end of the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push propagates itself through all the balls of the system, and through every atom of every ball, through all the races of creatures, and through the history and performances of every individual. Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so, to every creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight generosity, a drop too much. Without electricity the air would rot, and without this violence of direction which men and women have, without a spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We aim above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it. And when now and then comes along some sad, sharp-eyed man, who sees how paltry a game is played, and refuses to play, but blabs the secret;--how then? is the bird flown? O no, the wary Nature sends a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths, with a little more excess of direction to hold them fast to their several aims; makes them a little wrongheaded in that direction in which they are rightest, and on goes the game again with new whirl, for a generation or two more. The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a ginger-bread dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this day of continual petty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame, by all these attitudes and exertions,--an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own. This glitter, this opaline luster plays round the top of every toy to his eye, to insure his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We are made alive and kept alive by the same arts. Let the Stoics 51 say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity, that, at least, one may replace the parent. All things betray the same calculated profusion. The excess of fear with which the animal frame is hedged round, shrinking from cold, starting at sight of a snake, or a sudden noise, protects us, through a multitude of groundless alarms, from some one real danger at last. The lover seeks in marriage his private felicity and perfection, with no prospective end; and nature hides in his happiness her own end, namely, progeny, or the perpetuity of the race.
But the craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to heart. Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters. Not less remarkable is the overfaith of each man in the importance of what he has to do or say. The poet, the prophet, has a higher value for what he utters than any hearer, and therefore it gets spoken. The strong, self-complacent Luther 52 declares with an emphasis, not to be mistaken, that "God himself cannot do without wise men." Jacob Behmen 53 and George Fox 54 betray their egotism in the pertinacity of their controversial tracts, and James Naylor 55 once suffered himself to be worshiped as the Christ. Each prophet comes presently to identify himself with his thought, and to esteem his hat and shoes sacred. However this may discredit such persons with the judicious, it helps them with the people, as it gives heat, pungency, and publicity to their words. A similar experience is not infrequent in private life. Each young and ardent person writes a diary, in which, when the hours of prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. The pages thus written are, to him, burning and fragrant: he reads them on his knees by midnight and by the morning star; he wets them with his tears: they are sacred; too good for the world, and hardly yet to be shown to the dearest friend. This is the man-child that is born to the soul, and her life still circulates in the babe. The umbilical cord has not yet been cut. After some time has elapsed, he begins to wish to admit his friend to this hallowed experience, and with hesitation, yet with firmness, exposes the pages to his eye. Will they not burn his eyes? The friend coldly turns them over, and passes from the writing to conversation, with easy transition, which strikes the other party with astonishment and vexation. He cannot suspect the writing itself. Days and nights of fervid life, of communion with angels of darkness and of light, have engraved their shadowy characters on that tear-stained book. He suspects the intelligence or the heart of his friend. Is there then no friend? He cannot yet credit that one may have impressive experience, and yet may not know how to put his private fact into literature; and perhaps the discovery that wisdom has other tongues and ministers than we, that though we should hold our peace, the truth would not the less be spoken, might check injuriously the flames of our zeal. A man can only speak, so long as he does not feel his speech to be partial and inadequate. It is partial, but he does not see it to be so, whilst he utters it. As soon as he is released from the instinctive and particular, and sees its partiality, he shuts his mouth in disgust. For, no man can write anything, who does not think that what he writes is for the time the history of the world; or do anything well, who does not esteem his work to be of importance. My work may be of none, but I must not think it is of none, or I shall not do it with impunity.
In like manner, there is throughout nature something mocking, something that leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere, keeps no faith with us. All promise outruns the performance. We live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated. Hunger and thirst lead us on to eat and to drink; but bread and wine, mix and cook them how you will, leave us hungry and thirsty, after the stomach is full. It is the same with all our arts and performances. Our music, our poetry, our language itself are not satisfactions, but suggestions. The hunger for wealth, which reduces the planet to a garden, fools the eager pursuer. What is the end sought? Plainly to secure the ends of good sense and beauty, from the intrusion of deformity or vulgarity of any kind. But what an operose 56 method! What a train of means to secure a little conversation! This palace of brick and stone, these servants, this kitchen, these stables, horses and equipage, this bank-stock, and file of mortgages; trade to all the world, country-house and cottage by the water-side, all for a little conversation, high, clear, and spiritual! Could it not be had as well by beggars on the highway? No, all these things came from successive efforts of these beggars to remove friction from the wheels of life, and give opportunity. Conversation, character, were the avowed ends; wealth was good as it appeased the animal cravings, cured the smoky chimney, silenced the creaking door, brought friends together in a warm and quiet room, and kept the children and the dinner-table in a different apartment. Thought, virtue, beauty, were the ends; but it was known that men of thought and virtue sometimes had the headache, or wet feet, or could lose good time, whilst the room was getting warm in winter days. Unluckily, in the exertions necessary to remove these inconveniences, the main attention has been diverted to this object; the old aims have been lost sight of, and to remove friction has come to be the end. That is the ridicule of rich men, and Boston, London, Vienna, and now the governments generally of the world, are cities and governments of the rich, and the masses are not men, but poor men, that is, men who would be rich; this is the ridicule of the class, that they arrive with pains and sweat and fury nowhere; when all is done, it is for nothing. They are like one who has interrupted the conversation of a company to make his speech, and now has forgotten what he went to say. The appearance strikes the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of aimless nations. Were the ends of nature so great and cogent, as to exact this immense sacrifice of men?
Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is, as might be expected, a similar effect on the eye from the face of external nature. There is in woods and waters a certain enticement and flattery, together with a failure to yield a present satisfaction. This disappointment is felt in every landscape. I have seen the softness and beauty of the summer clouds floating feathery overhead, enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege of motion, whilst yet they appeared not so much the drapery of this place and hour, as fore-looking to such pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond. It is an odd jealousy; but the poet finds himself not near enough to this object. The pine tree, the river, the bank of flowers before him, does not seem to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere. This or this is but outskirt and far-off reflection 57 and echo of the triumph that has passed by, and is now at its glancing splendor and heyday, perchance in the neighboring fields, or, if you stand in the field, then in the adjacent woods. The present object shall give you this sense of stillness that follows a pageant which has just gone by. What splendid distance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and loveliness in the sunset! But who can go where they are, or lay his hand or plant his foot thereon? Off they fall from the round world forever and ever. It is the same among men and women as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it, that beauty can never be grasped? in persons and in landscapes is equally inaccessible? The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven whilst he pursued her as a star: she cannot be heaven, if she stoops to such a one as he.
What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance of that first projectile impulse, of this flattery and balking of so many well-meaning creatures? Must we not suppose somewhere in the universe a slight treachery and derision? Are we not engaged to a serious resentment of this use that is made of us? Are we tickled trout, and fools of nature? One looks at the face of heaven and earth lays all petulance at rest, and soothes us to wiser convictions. To the intelligent, nature converts itself into a vast promise, and will not be rashly explained. Her secret is untold. Many and many an Oedipus 58 arrives: he has the whole mystery teeming in his brain. Alas! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill; no syllable can he shape on his lips. Her mighty orbit vaults like the fresh rainbow into the deep, but no archangel's wing was yet strong enough to follow it, and report of the return of the curve. But it also appears, that our actions are seconded and disposed to greater conclusions than we designed. We are escorted on every hand through life by spiritual agents, and a beneficent purpose lies in wait for us. We cannot bandy words with nature, or deal with her as we deal with persons. If we measure our individual forces against hers, we may easily feel as if we were the sport of an insuperable destiny. But if, instead of identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that the soul of the workman streams through us, we shall find the peace of the morning dwelling first in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity and chemistry, and, over them, of life preëxisting within us in their highest form.
The uneasiness which the thought of our helplessness in the chain of causes occasions us, results from looking too much at one condition of nature, namely, Motion. But the drag is never taken from the wheel. Wherever the impulse exceeds the Rest or Identity insinuates its compensation. All over the wide fields of earth grows the prunella 59 or self-heal. After every foolish day we sleep off the fumes and furies of its hours; and though we are always engaged with particulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every experiment the innate universal laws. These, while they exist in the mind as ideas, stand around us in nature forever embodied, a present sanity to expose and cure the insanity of men. Our servitude to particulars betrays us into a hundred foolish expectations. We anticipate a new era from the invention of a locomotive, or a balloon; the new engine brings with it the old checks. They say that by electro-magnetism, your salad shall be grown from the seed whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of our modern aims and endeavors,--of our condensation and acceleration of objects: but nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man's life is but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow. In these checks and impossibilities, however, we find our advantage, not less than in impulses. Let the victory fall where it will, we are on that side. And the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the center to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every possibility, lends that sublime luster to death, which philosophy and religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spent ball. The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind, of natural objects, whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. That power which does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the particle its equal channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and distills its essence into every drop of rain. Every moment instructs and every object: for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence, until after a long time.
SHAKSPEARE; 60 OR, THE POET
[^Transcriber's Note: Shakspeare is spelled as "Shakspeare" as well as "Shakespeare" in this book. The original spellings have been retained.
Great men are more distinguished by range and extent, than by originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving, like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and making bricks, and building the house; no great men are original. Nor does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero is in the press of knights, and the thick of events; and, seeing what men want, and sharing their desire, he adds the needful length of sight and of arm, to come to the desired point. The greatest genius is the most indebted man. A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes uppermost and, because he says everything, saying, at last, something good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.
The Genius 61 of our life is jealous of individuals and will not have any individual great, except through the general. There is no choice to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning, and say, "I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic continent: to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and find a new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a new mechanic power:" no, but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. The church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out the advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by her chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him, by trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad. Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hollows, and bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into their labors. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out of the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do for himself: his powers would be expended in the first preparations. Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.
Shakspeare's youth 62 fell in a time when the English people were importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offense easily at political allusions, and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans, 63 a growing and energetic party and the religious among the Anglican Church, 64 would suppress them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards, houses without roofs, and extemporaneous inclosures at country fairs, were the ready theaters of strolling players. The people had tasted this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress newspapers now,--no, not by the strongest party,--neither then could king, prelate, or puritan,--alone or united, suppress an organ, which was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch, 65 and library, at the same time. Probably king, prelate, and puritan, all found their own account in it. It had become, by all causes, a national interest,--by no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of treating it in an English history,--but not a whit less considerable, because it was cheap, and of no account, like a baker's shop. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene, 66 Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont, and Fletcher.
The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the case of Shakspeare there is much more. At the time when 67 he left Stratford, and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays, of all dates and writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn produced on the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy, 68 which the audience will bear hearing some part of, every week; the Death of Julius Cæsar, 69 and other stories out of Plutarch, 70 which they never tire of; a shelf full of English history, from the chronicles of Brut 71 and Arthur, 72 down to the royal Henries, 73 which men hear eagerly; and a string of doleful tragedies, merry Italian tales, 74 and Spanish voyages, 75 which all the London prentices know. All the mass has been treated, with more or less skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has the soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now no longer possible to say who wrote them first. They have been the property of the Theater so long, and so many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered them, inserting a speech, or a whole scene, or adding a song, that no man can any longer claim copyright in this work of numbers. Happily, no man wishes to. They are not yet desired in that way. We have few readers, many spectators and hearers. They had best lie where they are.
Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old plays, waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had the prestige 76 which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living England circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination. In short, the poet owes to his legend what sculpture owed to the temple. Sculpture in Egypt, and in Greece, grew up in subordination to architecture. It was the ornament of the temple wall: at first, a rude relief carved on pediments, then the relief became bolder, and a head or arm was projected from the wall, the groups being still arranged with reference to the building, which serves also as a frame to hold the figures; and when, at last, the greatest freedom of style and treatment was reached, the prevailing genius of architecture still enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As soon as the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the temple or palace, the art began to decline: freak, extravagance, and exhibition, took the place of the old temperance. This balance-wheel, which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irritability of poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which the people were already wonted, and which had a certain excellence which no single genius, 77 however extraordinary, could hope to create.
In point of fact, it appears that Shakspeare did owe debts in all directions, and was able to use whatever he found; and the amount of indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's 78 laborious computations in regard to the First, Second, and Third parts of Henry VI., in which, "out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding Shakspeare; 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors; and 1899 were entirely his own." And the proceeding investigation hardly leaves a single drama of his absolute invention. Malone's sentence is an important piece of external history. In Henry VIII, I think I see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his own finer stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior, thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know well their cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy, 79 and the following scene from Cromwell, 80 where,--instead of the meter of Shakspeare, whose secret is, that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading for the sense will best bring out the rhythm,--here the lines are constructed on a given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit eloquence. But the play contains, through all its length, unmistakable traits of Shakspeare's hand, and some passages, as the account of the coronation, 81 are like autographs. What is odd, the compliment to Queen Elizabeth 82 is in bad rhythm. 83
Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his resources; and, at that day, our petulant demand for originality was not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet, who appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light which is anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower of sentiment, it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he comes to value his memory 84 equally with his invention. He is therefore little solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived; whether through translation, whether through tradition, whether by travel in distant countries, whether by inspiration; from whatever source, they are equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very near home. Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a good many foolish things, and do not know when they have spoken wisely. He knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high place, wherever he finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer, 85 perhaps; of Chaucer, 86 of Saadi. 87 They felt that all wit was their wit. And they are librarians and historiographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was heir and dispenser of all the hundred tales of the world,--
"Presenting Thebes' 88 and Pelops' line And the tale of Troy divine."
The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature; and, more recently, not only Pope 89 and Dryden 90 have been beholden to him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower. 91 Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgat 92 and Caxton, 93 from Guido di Colonna, 94 whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Dares Phrygius, 95 Ovid, 96 and Statius. 97 Then Petrarch, 98 Boccaccio, 99 and the Provençal poets, 100 and his benefactors: the Romaunt of the Rose 101 is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and John of Meung: Troilus and Creseide, 102 from Lollius of Urbino: The Cock and the Fox, 103 from the Lais of Marie: The House of Fame, 104 from the French or Italian: and poor Gower 105 he uses as if he were only a brick-kiln or stone-quarry, out of which to build his house. He steals by this apology,--that what he takes has no worth where he finds it, and the greatest where he leaves it. It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who can entertain it; and of him who can adequately place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but, as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.
Thus, all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective. The learned member of the legislature, at Westminister, 106 or at Washington, speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the constituency, and the now invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of their wishes, the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence or conversation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes, and estimates, and it will bereave his fine attitude and resistance of something of their impressiveness. As Sir Robert Peel 107 and Mr. Webster 108 vote, so Locke 109 and Rousseau 110 think for thousands; and so there were foundations all around Homer, 111 Menu, 112 Saada, 113 or Milton, 114 from which they drew; friends, lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,--all perished,--which, if seen, would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard speak with authority? Did he feel himself overmatched by any companion? The appeal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there at last in his breast a Delphi 115 whereof to ask concerning any thought or thing whether it be verily so, yea or nay? and to have answer, and rely on that? All the debts which such a man could contract to other wit, would never disturb his consciousness of originality: for the ministrations of books, and of other minds, are a whiff of smoke to that most private reality with which he has conversed.
It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius, in the world, was no man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English Bible 116 is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English language. But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but centuries and churches brought it to perfection. There never was a time when there was not some translation existing. The Liturgy, 117 admired for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the Catholic church,--these collected, too, in long periods, from the prayers and meditations of every saint and sacred writer all over the world. Grotius 118 makes the like remark in respect to the Lord's Prayer, that the single clauses of which it is composed were already in use, in the time of Christ, in the rabbinical forms. 119 He picked out the grains of gold. The nervous language of the Common Law, 120 the impressive forms of our courts, and the precision and substantial truth of the legal distinctions, are the contribution of all the sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived in the countries where these laws govern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence by being translation on translation. There never was a time when there was none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and all others successively picked out, and thrown away. Something like the same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these books. The world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas, 121 Æsop's Fables, 122 Pilpay, 123 Arabian Nights, 124 Cid, 125 Iliad, 126 Robin Hood, 127 Scottish Minstrelsy, 128 are not the work of single men. In the composition of such works, the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the fop, all think for us. Every book supplies its time with one good word; every municipal law, every trade, every folly of the day, and the generic catholic genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the originality of all, stands with the next age as the recorder and embodiment of his own.
We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakspeare Society, 129 for ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from the Mysteries 130 celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the final detachment from the church, and the completion of secular plays, from Ferrex and Porrex, 131 and Gammer Gurton's Needle, 132 down to the possession of the stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare altered, remodelled, and finally made his own. Elated with success, and piqued by the growing interest of the problem, they have left no book-stall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file of old yellow accounts to decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to discover whether the boy Shakspeare poached 133 or not, whether he held horses at the theater-door, whether he kept school, and why he left in his will only his second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.
Footnotes
Timons. Here used in the sense of wealthy givers. Timon, the hero of Shakespeare's play, Timon of Athens, wasted his fortune in lavish gifts and entertainments, and in his poverty was exposed to the ingratitude of those whom he had served. He became morose and died in miserable retirement.
↩It is a very onerous business, etc. One of Emerson's favorite passages in the essays of Montaigne, a French writer, was this: "Oh, how am I obliged to Almighty God, who has been pleased that I should immediately receive all I have from his bounty, and particularly reserved all my obligation to himself! How instantly do I beg of his holy compassion that I may never owe a real thanks to anyone. O happy liberty in which I have thus far lived! May it continue with me to the last. I endeavor to have no need of any one."
↩Buddhist. A follower of Buddha, a Hindoo religious teacher of the fifth century before Christ.
↩Nature. Emerson's first published volume was a little book of essays, entitled Nature, which appeared in 1836. In the years which followed, he thought more deeply on the subject and, according to his custom, made notes about it and entries in his journals. In the winter of 1843 he delivered a lecture on Relation to Nature, and it is probable that this essay is built up from that. The plan of it, however, had been long in his mind: In 1840 he wrote in his journal: "I think I must do these eyes of mine the justice to write a new chapter on Nature. This delight we all take in every show of night or day or field or forest or sea or city, down to the lowest particulars, is not without sequel, though we be as yet only wishers and gazers, not at all knowing what we want. We are predominated here as elsewhere by an upper wisdom, and resemble those great discoverers who are haunted for years, sometimes from infancy, with a passion for the fact, or class of facts in which the secret lies which they are destined to unlock, and they let it not go until the blessing is won. So these sunsets and starlights, these swamps and rocks, these bird notes and animal forms off which we cannot get our eyes and ears, but hover still, as moths round a lamp, are no doubt a Sanscrit cipher covering the whole religious history of the universe, and presently we shall read it off into action and character. The pastures are full of ghosts for me, the morning woods full of angels."
↩There are days, etc. The passage in Emerson's journal is hardly less beautiful. Under date of October 30, 1841, he wrote: "On this wonderful day when heaven and earth seem to glow with magnificence, and all the wealth of all the elements is put under contribution to make the world fine, as if Nature would indulge her offspring, it seemed ungrateful to hide in the house. Are there not dull days enough in the year for you to write and read in, that you should waste this glittering season when Florida and Cuba seem to have left their glittering seats and come to visit us with all their shining hours, and almost we expect to see the jasmine and cactus burst from the ground instead of these last gentians and asters which have loitered to attend this latter glory of the year? All insects are out, all birds come forth, the very cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great thoughts, and Egypt and India look from their eyes."
↩Halcyons. Halcyon days, ones of peace and tranquillity; anciently, days of calm weather in mid-winter, when the halcyon, or kingfisher, was supposed to brood. It was fabled that this bird laid its eggs in a nest that floated on the sea, and that it charmed the winds and waves to make them calm while it brooded.
↩Indian Summer. Calm, dry, hazy weather which comes in the autumn in America. The Century Dictionary says it was called Indian Summer because the season was most marked in the sections of the upper eastern Mississippi valley inhabited by Indians about the time the term became current.
↩Gabriel. One of the seven archangels. The Hebrew name means "God is my strong one."
↩Uriel. Another of the seven archangels; the name means "Light of God."
↩Converts all trees to wind-harps. Compare with this passage the lines in Emerson's poem, Woodnotes:
↩The village. Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson's home the greater part of the time from 1832 till his death.
↩I go with my friend, etc. With Henry Thoreau, the lover of Nature.
↩Our little river. The Concord river.
↩Novitiate and probation. Explain the meaning of these words, in the Roman Catholic Church. What does Emerson mean by them here?
↩Villegiatura. The Italian name for a season spent in country pleasures.
↩Hanging gardens. The hanging gardens of Babylon were one of the seven wonders of the world.
↩Versailles. A royal residence near Paris, with beautiful formal gardens.
↩Paphos. A beautiful city on the island of Cyprus, where was situated a temple of Astarte, or Venus.
↩Ctesiphon. One of the chief cities of ancient Persia, the site of a magnificent royal palace.
↩Notch Mountains. Probably the White Mountains near Crawford Notch, a deep, narrow valley which is often called "The Notch."
↩Æolian harp. A stringed instrument from which sound is drawn by the passing of the wind over its strings. It was named for Æolus, the god of the winds, in Greek mythology.
↩Dorian. Dorus was one of the four divisions of Greece: the word is here used in a general sense for Grecian.
↩Apollo. In Greek and Roman mythology, the sun god, who presided over music, poetry, and healing.
↩Diana. In Roman mythology, the goddess of the moon devoted to the chase.
↩Edens. Beautiful, sinless places,--like the garden of Eden.
↩Tempes. Places like the lovely valley of Tempe in Thessaly, Greece.
↩Como Lake. A lake of northern Italy, celebrated for its beauty.
↩Madeira Islands. Where are these islands, famous for picturesque beauty and balmy atmosphere?
↩Common. What is a common?
↩Campagna. The plain near Rome.
↩Dilettantism. Define this word and explain its use here.
↩"Wreaths" and "Flora's Chaplets." About the time that Emerson was writing his essays, volumes of formal, artificial verses were very fashionable, more as parlor ornaments than as literature. Two such volumes were A Wreath of Wild Flowers from New England and The Floral Offering by Mrs. Frances Osgood, a New England writer.
↩Pan. In Greek mythology, the god of woods, fields, flocks, and shepherds.
↩The multitude of false cherubs, etc. Explain the meaning of this sentence. If true money were valueless, would people make false money?
↩Proteus. In Greek mythology, a sea god who had the power of assuming different shapes. If caught and held fast, however, he was forced to assume his own shape and answer the questions put to him.
↩Mosaic ... Schemes. The conception of the world as given in Genesis on which the law of Moses, the great Hebrew lawgiver, was founded.
↩Ptolemaic schemes. The system of geography and astronomy taught in the second century by Ptolemy of Alexandria; it was accepted till the sixteenth century, when the Copernican system was established. Ptolemy believed that the sun, planets, and stars revolve around the earth; Copernicus taught that the planets revolve around the sun.
↩Flora. In Roman mythology, the goddess of the spring and of flowers.
↩Fauna. In Roman mythology, the goddess of fields and shepherds; she represents the fruitfulness of the earth.
↩Ceres. The Roman goddess of grain and harvest, corresponding to the Greek goddess, Demeter.
↩Pomona. The Roman goddess of fruit trees and gardens.
↩All duly arrive. Emerson deducts from nature the doctrine of evolution. What is its teaching?
↩Plato. (See note 36.)
↩Himalaya Mountain chains. (See note 193.)
↩Franklin. Give an account of Benjamin Franklin, the famous American scientist and patriot. What did he prove about lightening?
↩Dalton. John Dalton was an English chemist who, about the beginning of the nineteenth century, perfected the atomic theory, that is, the theory that all chemical combinations take place in certain ways between the atoms, or ultimate particles, of bodies.
↩Davy. (See note 69.)
↩Black. Joseph Black, a Scotch chemist who made valuable discoveries about latent heat and carbon dioxide, or carbonic acid gas.
↩The astronomers said, etc. Beginning with this passage, several pages of this essay was published in 1844, under the title of Tantalus, in the next to the last number of The Dial, which Emerson edited.
↩Centrifugal, centripetal. Define these words.
↩Stoics. See "Stoicism," 331.
↩Luther. (See note 188.)
↩Jacob Behmen. A German mystic of the sixteenth century; his name is usually written Boehme.
↩George Fox. (See note 202.)
↩James Naylor. An English religious enthusiast of the seventeenth century; he was first a Puritan and later a Quaker.
↩Operose. Laborious.
↩Outskirt and far-off reflection, etc. Compare with this passage Emerson's poem, The Forerunners.
↩Oedipus. In Greek mythology, the King of Thebes who solved the riddle of the Sphinx, a fabled monster.
↩Prunella. A widely scattered plant, called self-heal, because a decoction of its leaves and stems was, and to some extent is, valued as an application to wounds. An editor comments on the fact that during the last years of Emerson's life "the little blue self-heal crept into the grass before his study window."
↩Shakespeare; or the Poet is one of seven essays on great men in various walks of life, published in 1850 under the title of Representative Men. These essays were first delivered as lectures in Boston in the winter of 1845, and were repeated two years later before English audiences. They must have been especially interesting to those Englishmen who had, seven years before, heard Emerson's friend, Carlyle, deliver his six lectures on great men whom he selected as representative ones. These lectures were published under the title of Heroes and Hero-Worship. You should read the latter part of Carlyle's lecture on The Hero as Poet and compare what he says about Shakespeare with Emerson's words. Both Emerson and Carlyle reverenced the great English poet as "the master of mankind." Even in serious New England, the plays of Shakespeare were found upon the bookshelf beside religious tracts and doctrinal treatises. There the boy Emerson found them and learned to love them, and the man Emerson loved them but the more. It was as a record of personal experiences that he wrote in his journal: "Shakespeare fills us with wonder the first time we approach him. We go away, and work and think, for years, and come again,--he astonishes us anew. Then, having drank deeply and saturated us with his genius, we lose sight of him for another period of years. By and by we return, and there he stands immeasurable as at first. We have grown wiser, but only that we should see him wiser than ever. He resembles a high mountain which the traveler sees in the morning and thinks he shall quickly near it and pass it and leave it behind. But he journeys all day till noon, till night. There still is the dim mountain close by him, having scarce altered its bearings since the morning light."
↩Genius. Here instead of speaking as in Friendship, see note 286, of the genius or spirit supposed to preside over each man's life, Emerson mentions the guardian spirit of human kind.
↩Shakespeare's youth, etc. It is impossible to appreciate or enjoy this essay without having some clear general information about the condition of the English people and English literature in the glorious Elizabethan age in which Shakespeare lived. Consult, for this information, some brief history of England and a comprehensive English literature.
↩Puritans. Strict Protestants who became so powerful in England that in the time of the Commonwealth they controlled the political and religious affairs of the country.
↩Anglican Church. The Established Church of England; the Episcopal church.
↩Punch. The chief character in a puppet show, hence the puppet show itself.
↩Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, etc. For an account of these dramatists consult a text book on English literature. The English drama seems to have begun in the Middle Ages with what were called Miracle plays, which were scenes from Bible history; about the same time were performed the Mystery plays, which dramatized the lives of saints. These were followed by the Moralities, plays in which were personified abstract virtues and vices. The first step in the creation of the regular drama was taken by Heywood, who composed some farcical plays called Interludes. The people of the sixteenth century were fond of pageants, shows in which classical personages were introduced, and Masques, which gradually developed from pageants into dramas accompanied with music. About the middle of the sixteenth century, rose the English drama,--comedy, tragedy, and historical plays. The chief among the group of dramatists who attained fame before Shakespeare began to write were Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, and Peele. Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher rank next to Shakespeare among his contemporaries, and among the other dramatists of the period were Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Ford, and Massinger.
↩At the time when, etc. Probably about 1585.
↩Tale of Troy. Drama founded on the Trojan war. The subject of famous poems by Latin and Greek poets.
↩Death of Julius Cæsar. An account of the plots which ended in the assassination of the great Roman general.
↩Plutarch. See note on Heroism(264). Shakespeare, like the earlier dramatists, drew freely on Plutarch's Lives for material.
↩Brut. A poetical version of the legendary history of Britain, by Layamon. Its hero is Brutus, a mythical King of Britain.
↩Arthur. A British King of the sixth century, around whose life and deeds so many legends have grown up that some historians say he, too, was a myth. He is the center of the great cycle of romances told in prose in Mallory's Morte d'Arthur and in poetry in Tennyson's Idylls of the King.
↩The royal Henries. Among the dramas popular in Shakespeare's day which he retouched or rewrote are the historical plays. Henry IV., First and Second Parts; Henry V; Henry VI., First, Second, and Third Parts; and Henry VIII.
↩Italian tales. Italian literature was very popular in Shakespeare's day, and authors drew freely from it for material, especially from the Decameron, a famous collection of a hundred tales, by Boccaccio, a poet of the fourteenth century.
↩Spanish voyages. In the sixteenth century, Spain was still a power upon the high seas, and the tales of her conquests and treasures in the New World were like tales of romance.
↩Prestige. Can you give an English equivalent for this French word?
↩Which no single genius, etc. In the same way, some critics assure us, the poems credited to the Greek poet, Homer, were built up by a number of poets.
↩Malone. An Irish critic and scholar of the eighteenth century, best known by his edition of Shakespeare's plays.
↩Wolsey's Soliloquy. See Shakespeare's Henry VIII. III, 2. Cardinal Wolsey was prime minister of England in the reign of Henry VIII.
↩Scene with Cromwell. See Henry VIII. III, 2. Thomas Cromwell was the son of an English blacksmith; he rose to be lord high chamberlain of England in the reign of Henry VIII., but, incurring the King's displeasure, was executed on a charge of treason.
↩Account of the coronation. See Henry VIII. IV, 1.
↩Compliment to Queen Elizabeth. See Henry VIII. V, 5.
↩Bad rhythm. Too much importance must not be attached to these matters in deciding authorship, as critics disagree about them.
↩Value his memory, etc. The Greeks, in appreciation of the value of memory to the poet, represented the Muses as the daughters of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory.
↩Homer. A Greek poet to whom is assigned the authorship of the two greatest Greek poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey; he is said to have lived about a thousand years before Christ.
↩Chaucer. (See note 33.)
↩Saadi. A Persian poet, supposed to have lived in the thirteenth century. His best known poems are his odes.
↩Presenting Thebes, etc. This quotation is from Milton's poem, Il Penseroso. Milton here names the three most popular subjects of Greek tragedy,--the story of Oedipus, the ill-fated King of Thebes who slew his father; the tale of the descendants of Pelops, King of Pisa, who seemed born to woe--Agamemnon was one of his grandsons; the third subject was the tale of Troy and the heroes of the Trojan war,--called "divine" because the Greeks represented even the gods as taking part in the contest.
↩Pope. (See note 88.)
↩Dryden. (See note 35.)
↩Chaucer is a huge borrower. Taine, the French critic, says on this subject: "Chaucer was capable of seeking out in the old common forest of the Middle Ages, stories and legends, to replant them in his own soil and make them send out new shoots.... He has the right and power of copying and translating because by dint of retouching he impresses ... his original work. He recreates what he imitates."
↩Lydgate. John Lydgate was an English poet who lived a generation later than Chaucer; in his Troy Book and other poems he probably borrowed from the sources used by Chaucer; he called himself "Chaucer's disciple."
↩Caxton. William Caxton, the English author, more famous as the first English printer, was not born until after Chaucer's death. The work from which Emerson supposes the poet to have borrowed Caxton's translation of Recueil des Histoires de Troye, the first printed English book, appeared about 1474.
↩Guido di Colonna. A Sicilian poet and historian of the thirteenth century. Chaucer in his House of Fame placed in his vision "on a pillar higher than the rest, Homer and Livy, Dares the Phrygian, Guido Colonna, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the other historians of the war of Troy."
↩Dares Phrygius. A Latin account of the fall of Troy, written about the fifth century, which pretends to be a translation of a lost work on the fall of Troy by Dares, a Trojan priest mentioned in Homer's Iliad.
↩Ovid. A Roman poet who lived about the time of Christ, whose best-known work is the Metamorphoses, founded on classical legends.
↩Statius. A Roman poet of the first century after Christ.
↩Petrarch. An Italian poet of the fourteenth century.
↩Boccaccio. An Italian novelist and poet of the fourteenth century. See note on "Italian tales," 539. It is supposed that the plan of the Decameron suggested the similar but far superior plan of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
↩Provençal poets. The poets of Provençe, a province of the southeastern part of France. In the Middle Ages it was celebrated for its lyric poets, called troubadours.
↩Romaunt of the Rose, etc. Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose, written during the period of French influence, is an incomplete and abbreviated translation of a French poem of the thirteenth century, Roman de la Rose, the first part of which was written by William of Loris and the latter by John of Meung, or Jean de Meung.
↩Troilus and Creseide, etc. Chaucer ascribes the Italian poem which he followed in his Troilus and Creseide to an unknown "Lollius of Urbino"; the source of the poem, however, is Il Filostrato, by Boccaccio, the Italian poet already mentioned. Chaucer's poem is far more than a translation; more than half is entirely original, and it is a powerful poem, showing profound knowledge of the Italian poets, whose influence with him superseded the French poets.
↩The Cock and the Fox. The Nun's Priest's Tale in the Canterbury Tales was an original treatment of the Roman de Renart, of Marie of France, a French poet of the twelfth century.
↩House of Fame, etc. The plan of the House of Fame, written during the period of Chaucer's Italian influence, shows the influence of Dante; the general idea of the poem is from Ovid, the Roman poet.
↩Gower. John Gower was an English poet, Chaucer's contemporary and friend; the two poets went to the same sources for poetic materials, but Chaucer made no such use of Gower's works as we would infer from this passage. Emerson relied on his memory for facts, and hence made mistakes, as here in the instances of Lydgate, Caxton, and Gower.
↩Westminster, Washington. What legislative body assembles at Westminster Palace, London? What at Washington?
↩Sir Robert Peel. An English statesman who died in 1850, not long after Representative Men was published.
↩Webster. Daniel Webster, an American statesman and orator who was living when this essay was written.
↩Locke. John Locke. (See note 18.)
↩Rousseau. Jean Jacques Rousseau, a French philosopher of the eighteenth century.
↩Homer. (See note 550.)
↩Menn. Menn, or Mann, was in Sanscrit one of fourteen legendary beings; the one referred to by Emerson, Mann Vaivasvata was supposed to be the author of the laws of Mann, a collection made about the second century.
↩Saadi or Sadi. (See note 552.)
↩Milton. Of this great English poet and prose writer of the seventeenth century, Emerson says: "No man can be named whose mind still acts on the cultivated intellect of England and America with an energy comparable to that of Milton. As a poet Shakespeare undoubtedly transcends and far surpasses him in his popularity with foreign nations: but Shakespeare is a voice merely: who and what he was that sang, that sings, we know not."
↩Delphi. Here, source of prophecy. Delphi was a city in Greece, where was the oracle of Apollo, the most famous of the oracles of antiquity.
↩Our English Bible. The version made in the reign of King James I. by forty-seven learned divines is a monument of noble English.
↩Liturgy. An appointed form of worship used in a Christian church,--here, specifically, the service of the Episcopal church. Emerson's mother had been brought up in that church, and though she attended her husband's church, she always loved and read her Episcopal prayer book.
↩Grotius. Hugo Grotius was a Dutch jurist, statesman, theologian, and poet of the seventeenth century.
↩Rabbinical forms. The forms used by the rabbis, Jewish doctors or expounders of the law.
↩Common law. In a general sense, the system of law derived from England, in general use among English-speaking people.
↩Vedas. The sacred books of the Brahmins.
↩Æsop's Fables. Fables ascribed to Æsop, a Greek slave who lived in the sixth century before Christ.
↩Pilpay, or Bidpai. Indian sage to whom were ascribed some fables. From an Arabic translation, these passed into European languages and were used by La Fontaine, the French fabulist.
↩Arabian Nights. The Arabian Nights' Entertainment or A Thousand and One Nights is a collection of Oriental tales, the plan and name of which are very ancient.
↩Cid. The Romances of the Cid, the story of the Spanish national hero, mentioned in note on _Heroism_139:5, was written about the thirteenth century by an unknown author; it supplied much of the material for two Spanish chronicles and Spanish and French tragedies written later on the same subject.
↩Iliad. The poem in which the Greek, poet, Homer, describes the siege and fall of Troy. Emerson here expresses the view adopted by many scholars that it was the work, not of one, but of many men.
↩Robin Hood. The ballads about Robin Hood, an English outlaw and popular hero of the twelfth century.
↩Scottish Minstrelsy. The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a collection of original and collected poems, published by Sir Walter Scott in 1802.
↩Shakespeare Society. The Shakespeare Society, founded in 1841, was dissolved in 1853. In 1874 The New Shakespeare Society was founded.
↩Mysteries. See "Kyd, Marlowe, etc." 531.
↩Ferrex and Porrex, or Gorboduc. The first regular English tragedy, by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, printed in 1565.
↩Gammer Gurtor's Needle. One of the first English comedies, written by Bishop Still and printed in 1575.
↩Whether the boy Shakespeare poached, etc. For a fuller account of the facts of Shakespeare's life, of which some traditions and facts are mentioned here, consult some good biography of the poet.
↩