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WALDEN
By Henry David Thoreau
Chapter 1, Economy. LibriVox Part 5.
One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres, told me
that he thought he should live as I did, _if he had the means_. I would
not have any one adopt _my_ mode of living on any account; for, beside
that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for
myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the
world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find
out and pursue _his own_ way, and not his father's or his mother's or his
neighbor's instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him
not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do.
It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or
the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient
guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a
calculable period, but we would preserve the true course.
Undoubtedly, in this case, what is true for one is truer still for a
thousand, as a large house is not proportionally more expensive than a
small one, since one roof may cover, one cellar underlie, and one wall
separate several apartments. But for my part, I preferred the solitary
dwelling. Moreover, it will commonly be cheaper to build the whole
yourself than to convince another of the advantage of the common wall;
and when you have done this, the common partition, to be much cheaper,
must be a thin one, and that other may prove a bad neighbor, and also
not keep his side in repair. The only co-operation which is commonly
possible is exceedingly partial and superficial; and what little true
co-operation there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony inaudible
to men. If a man has faith, he will co-operate with equal faith
everywhere; if he has not faith, he will continue to live like the rest
of the world, whatever company he is joined to. To co-operate in the
highest as well as the lowest sense, means _to get our living together_. I
heard it proposed lately that two young men should travel together over
the world, the one without money, earning his means as he went, before
the mast and behind the plow, the other carrying a bill of exchange in
his pocket. It was easy to see that they could not long be companions or
co-operate, since one would not _operate_ at all. They would part at
the first interesting crisis in their adventures. Above all, as I have
implied, the man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with
another must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time
before they get off.
But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my townsmen say.
I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in philanthropic
enterprises. I have made some sacrifices to a sense of duty, and among
others have sacrificed this pleasure also. There are those who have
used all their arts to persuade me to undertake the support of some
poor family in the town; and if I had nothing to do—for the devil finds
employment for the idle—I might try my hand at some such pastime as
that. However, when I have thought to indulge myself in this respect,
and lay their Heaven under an obligation by maintaining certain poor
persons in all respects as comfortably as I maintain myself, and have
even ventured so far as to make them the offer, they have one and all
unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor. While my townsmen and women are
devoted in so many ways to the good of their fellows, I trust that one
at least may be spared to other and less humane pursuits. You must have
a genius for charity as well as for anything else. As for Doing-good,
that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried it
fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree
with my constitution. Probably I should not consciously and deliberately
forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of
me, to save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a like
but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves
it. But I would not stand between any man and his genius; and to him who
does this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and life,
I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it is
most likely they will.
I am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar one; no doubt many of
my readers would make a similar defence. At doing something—I will not
engage that my neighbors shall pronounce it good—I do not hesitate to
say that I should be a capital fellow to hire; but what that is, it is
for my employer to find out. What _good_ I do, in the common sense of
that word, must be aside from my main path, and for the most part wholly
unintended. Men say, practically, Begin where you are and such as you
are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness
aforethought go about doing good. If I were to preach at all in this
strain, I should say rather, Set about being good. As if the sun should
stop when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon or
a star of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a Robin Goodfellow,
peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting
meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increasing his
genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that no mortal
can look him in the face, and then, and in the meanwhile too, going
about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a truer
philosophy has discovered, the world going about him getting good. When
Phaeton, wishing to prove his heavenly birth by his beneficence, had the
sun's chariot but one day, and drove out of the beaten track, he burned
several blocks of houses in the lower streets of heaven, and scorched
the surface of the earth, and dried up every spring, and made the great
desert of Sahara, till at length Jupiter hurled him headlong to the
earth with a thunderbolt, and the sun, through grief at his death, did
not shine for a year.
There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It
is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a man
was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good,
I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the
African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and
ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should
get some of his good done to me—some of its virus mingled with my
blood. No—in this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way.
A man is not a good _man_ to me because he will feed me if I should be
starving, or warm me if I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch
if I should ever fall into one. I can find you a Newfoundland dog that
will do as much. Philanthropy is not love for one's fellow-man in the
broadest sense. Howard was no doubt an exceedingly kind and worthy man
in his way, and has his reward; but, comparatively speaking, what are a
hundred Howards to _us_, if their philanthropy do not help us in our
best estate, when we are most worthy to be helped? I never heard of a
philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any good
to me, or the like of me.
The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being burned at
the stake, suggested new modes of torture to their tormentors. Being
superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were
superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer; and the
law to do as you would be done by fell with less persuasiveness on the
ears of those who, for their part, did not care how they were done by,
who loved their enemies after a new fashion, and came very near freely
forgiving them all they did.
Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your
example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself
with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. We make curious mistakes
sometimes. Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is
dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his
misfortune. If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with
it. I was wont to pity the clumsy Irish laborers who cut ice on the
pond, in such mean and ragged clothes, while I shivered in my more tidy
and somewhat more fashionable garments, till, one bitter cold day, one
who had slipped into the water came to my house to warm him, and I saw
him strip off three pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he got
down to the skin, though they were dirty and ragged enough, it is true,
and that he could afford to refuse the _extra_ garments which I offered
him, he had so many _intra_ ones. This ducking was the very thing he
needed. Then I began to pity myself, and I saw that it would be a
greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole slop-shop
on him. There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who
is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest
amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of
life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. It is
the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every tenth slave to
buy a Sunday's liberty for the rest. Some show their kindness to the
poor by employing them in their kitchens. Would they not be kinder if
they employed themselves there? You boast of spending a tenth part of
your income in charity; maybe you should spend the nine tenths so, and
done with it. Society recovers only a tenth part of the property then.
Is this owing to the generosity of him in whose possession it is found,
or to the remissness of the officers of justice?
Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated
by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our selfishness
which overrates it. A robust poor man, one sunny day here in Concord,
praised a fellow-townsman to me, because, as he said, he was kind to the
poor; meaning himself. The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more
esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers. I once heard a
reverend lecturer on England, a man of learning and intelligence,
after enumerating her scientific, literary, and political worthies,
Shakespeare, Bacon, Cromwell, Milton, Newton, and others, speak next of
her Christian heroes, whom, as if his profession required it of him,
he elevated to a place far above all the rest, as the greatest of the
great. They were Penn, Howard, and Mrs. Fry. Every one must feel the
falsehood and cant of this. The last were not England's best men and
women; only, perhaps, her best philanthropists.
I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to
philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives
and works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a man's
uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves.
Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick
serve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks. I want the
flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him
to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not
be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs
him nothing and of which he is unconscious. This is a charity that hides
a multitude of sins. The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with
the remembrance of his own castoff griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it
sympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health
and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread
by contagion. From what southern plains comes up the voice of wailing?
Under what latitudes reside the heathen to whom we would send light? Who
is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem? If anything ail
a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in
his bowels even—for that is the seat of sympathy—he forthwith sets
about reforming—the world. Being a microcosm himself, he discovers—and
it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it—that the world has
been eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is
a great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the
children of men will nibble before it is ripe; and straightway his
drastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimau and the Patagonian, and
embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages; and thus, by a few
years of philanthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile using him
for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his dyspepsia, the
globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its cheeks, as if it were
beginning to be ripe, and life loses its crudity and is once more sweet
and wholesome to live. I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I
have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than
myself.
I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his
fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is
his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the
morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions
without apology. My excuse for not lecturing against the use of
tobacco is, that I never chewed it, that is a penalty which reformed
tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I have
chewed which I could lecture against. If you should ever be betrayed
into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what
your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing. Rescue the drowning
and tie your shoestrings. Take your time, and set about some free labor.
Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints. Our
hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Him
forever. One would say that even the prophets and redeemers had rather
consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of man. There is nowhere
recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of
life, any memorable praise of God. All health and success does me good,
however far off and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and failure
helps to make me sad and does me evil, however much sympathy it may have
with me or I with it. If, then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly
Indian, botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple
and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own
brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an
overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the
world.
I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi of Shiraz, that
"they asked a wise man, saying: Of the many celebrated trees which the
Most High God has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or
free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is there
in this? He replied, Each has its appropriate produce, and appointed
season, during the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and
during their absence dry and withered; to neither of which states is the
cypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of this nature are the
azads, or religious independents.—Fix not thy heart on that which is
transitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through
Bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be
liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an
azad, or free man, like the cypress."
COMPLEMENTAL VERSES
The Pretensions of Poverty
Thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch, To claim a station in the firmament
Because thy humble cottage, or thy tub, Nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue
In the cheap sunshine or by shady springs, With roots and pot-herbs; where thy right
hand, Tearing those humane passions from the mind,
Upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish, Degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense,
And, Gorgon-like, turns active men to stone. We not require the dull society
Of your necessitated temperance, Or that unnatural stupidity
That knows nor joy nor sorrow; nor your forc'd Falsely exalted passive fortitude
Above the active. This low abject brood, That fix their seats in mediocrity,
Become your servile minds; but we advance Such virtues only as admit excess,
Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence, All-seeing prudence, magnanimity
That knows no bound, and that heroic virtue For which antiquity hath left no name,
But patterns only, such as Hercules, Achilles, Theseus. Back to thy loath'd cell;
And when thou seest the new enlightened sphere, Study to know but what those worthies were.
T. CAREW
Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot
as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed the country on
every side within a dozen miles of where I live. In imagination I have
bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and I
knew their price. I walked over each farmer's premises, tasted his wild
apples, discoursed on husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, at
any price, mortgaging it to him in my mind; even put a higher price on
it—took everything but a deed of it—took his word for his deed, for I
dearly love to talk—cultivated it, and him too to some extent, I trust,
and withdrew when I had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it
on. This experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real-estate
broker by my friends. Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the
landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a _sedes_, a
seat?—better if a country seat. I discovered many a site for a house
not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far
from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. Well,
there I might live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer
and a winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the
winter through, and see the spring come in. The future inhabitants of
this region, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that they
have been anticipated. An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into
orchard, wood-lot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines
should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree
could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow,
perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which
he can afford to let alone.
My imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal of several
farms—the refusal was all I wanted—but I never got my fingers burned
by actual possession. The nearest that I came to actual possession was
when I bought the Hollowell place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and
collected materials with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or
off with; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife—every man
has such a wife—changed her mind and wished to keep it, and he offered
me ten dollars to release him. Now, to speak the truth, I had but ten
cents in the world, and it surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if I was
that man who had ten cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all
together. However, I let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for
I had carried it far enough; or rather, to be generous, I sold him the
farm for just what I gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made
him a present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and
materials for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus that I had been a rich
man without any damage to my poverty. But I retained the landscape, and
I have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow.
With respect to landscapes,
"I am monarch of all I _survey_, My right there is none to dispute."
I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable
part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few
wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when
a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible
fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the
cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.
The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were: its complete
retirement, being, about two miles from the village, half a mile from
the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field;
its bounding on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogs
from frosts in the spring, though that was nothing to me; the gray color
and ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences,
which put such an interval between me and the last occupant; the hollow
and lichen-covered apple trees, gnawed by rabbits, showing what kind of
neighbors I should have; but above all, the recollection I had of it
from my earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealed
behind a dense grove of red maples, through which I heard the house-dog
bark. I was in haste to buy it, before the proprietor finished getting
out some rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up
some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had
made any more of his improvements. To enjoy these advantages I was ready
to carry it on; like Atlas, to take the world on my shoulders—I never
heard what compensation he received for that—and do all those things
which had no other motive or excuse but that I might pay for it and
be unmolested in my possession of it; for I knew all the while that it
would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I wanted, if I could only
afford to let it alone. But it turned out as I have said.
All that I could say, then, with respect to farming on a large scale—I
have always cultivated a garden—was, that I had had my seeds ready.
Many think that seeds improve with age. I have no doubt that time
discriminates between the good and the bad; and when at last I shall
plant, I shall be less likely to be disappointed. But I would say to my
fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It
makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the
county jail.
Old Cato, whose "De Re Rusticâ" is my "Cultivator," says—and the only
translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage—"When you
think of getting a farm turn it thus in your mind, not to buy greedily;
nor spare your pains to look at it, and do not think it enough to go
round it once. The oftener you go there the more it will please you, if
it is good." I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it
as long as I live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me the
more at last.
The present was my next experiment of this kind, which I purpose to
describe more at length, for convenience putting the experience of two
years into one. As I have said, I do not propose to write an ode
to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning,
standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.
When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my
nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was on Independence
Day, or the Fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished for winter,
but was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or
chimney, the walls being of rough, weather-stained boards, with wide
chinks, which made it cool at night. The upright white hewn studs and
freshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look,
especially in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so
that I fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them. To my
imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral
character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which I had
visited a year before. This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit
to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her
garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep
over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial
parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the
poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it.
Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere.
The only house I had been the owner of before, if I except a boat, was
a tent, which I used occasionally when making excursions in the summer,
and this is still rolled up in my garret; but the boat, after passing
from hand to hand, has gone down the stream of time. With this more
substantial shelter about me, I had made some progress toward
settling in the world. This frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of
crystallization around me, and reacted on the builder. It was suggestive
somewhat as a picture in outlines. I did not need to go outdoors to take
the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. It
was not so much within doors as behind a door where I sat, even in the
rainiest weather. The Harivansa says, "An abode without birds is like
a meat without seasoning." Such was not my abode, for I found myself
suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having
caged myself near them. I was not only nearer to some of those which
commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those smaller and
more thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or rarely, serenade
a villager—the wood thrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager, the field
sparrow, the whip-poor-will, and many others.
I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south
of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it, in the midst of
an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and about two miles
south of that our only field known to fame, Concord Battle Ground; but
I was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like
the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. For the first
week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high
up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other
lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing
of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth
reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were
stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the
breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle. The very dew seemed to
hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides of
mountains.
This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of a
gentle rain-storm in August, when, both air and water being perfectly
still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity of
evening, and the wood thrush sang around, and was heard from shore to
shore. A lake like this is never smoother than at such a time; and the
clear portion of the air above it being, shallow and darkened by clouds,
the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself
so much the more important. From a hill-top near by, where the wood had
been recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward across
the pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which form the shore
there, where their opposite sides sloping toward each other suggested a
stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded valley, but stream
there was none. That way I looked between and over the near green
hills to some distant and higher ones in the horizon, tinged with blue.
Indeed, by standing on tiptoe I could catch a glimpse of some of
the peaks of the still bluer and more distant mountain ranges in the
northwest, those true-blue coins from heaven's own mint, and also of
some portion of the village. But in other directions, even from this
point, I could not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me. It
is well to have some water in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and
float the earth. One value even of the smallest well is, that when you
look into it you see that earth is not continent but insular. This is
as important as that it keeps butter cool. When I looked across the
pond from this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which in time of flood
I distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley,
like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like
a thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of
interverting water, and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt was
but _dry land_.
Though the view from my door was still more contracted, I did not
feel crowded or confined in the least. There was pasture enough for my
imagination. The low shrub oak plateau to which the opposite shore
arose stretched away toward the prairies of the West and the steppes of
Tartary, affording ample room for all the roving families of men.
"There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a
vast horizon"—said Damodara, when his herds required new and larger
pastures.
Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of
the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted
me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by
astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some
remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation
of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that
my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and
unprofaned, part of the universe. If it were worth the while to settle
in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or
Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life
which I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to
my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. Such
was that part of creation where I had squatted;
"There was a shepherd that did live, And held his thoughts as high
As were the mounts whereon his flocks Did hourly feed him by."
What should we think of the shepherd's life if his flocks always
wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts?
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal
simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as
sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed
in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things
which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub
of King Tchingthang to this effect: "Renew thyself completely each
day; do it again, and again, and forever again." I can understand that.
Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint
hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through
my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows
open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was
Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own
wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing
advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of
the world. The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day,
is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an
hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of
the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be
called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the
mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own
newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by
the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a
fragrance filling the air—to a higher life than we fell asleep from;
and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good,
no less than the light. That man who does not believe that each day
contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet
profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and
darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul
of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius
tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should
say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas
say, "All intelligences awake with the morning." Poetry and art, and
the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an
hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and
emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought
keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not
what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when
I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to
throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day
if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators.
If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed
something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only
one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion,
only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake
is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How
could I have looked him in the face?
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical
aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake
us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than
the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious
endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or
to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far
more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through
which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the
day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life,
even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated
and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry
information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this
might be done.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only
the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to
teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did
not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish
to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to
live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and
Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad
swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its
lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole
and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or
if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true
account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are
in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God,
and have _somewhat hastily_ concluded that it is the chief end of man here
to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."
Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were
long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is
error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its
occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered
away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten
fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest.
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or
three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half
a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of
this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and
quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has
to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his
port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed
who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it
be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce
other things in proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, made
up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even
a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation
itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way
are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown
establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps,
ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a
worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for
it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan
simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men
think that it is essential that the _Nation_ have commerce, and export
ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour,
without a doubt, whether _they_ do or not; but whether we should live
like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out
sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work,
but go to tinkering upon our _lives_ to improve _them_, who will build
railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven
in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want
railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you
ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one
is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and
they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They
are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid
down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a
rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run
over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the
wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make
a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know
that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers
down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may
sometime get up again.
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined
to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves
nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow.
As for _work_, we haven't any of any consequence. We have the Saint Vitus'
dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. If I should only give
a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without
setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of
Concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse
so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might almost say,
but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property
from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see
it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on
fire—or to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as
handsomely; yes, even if it were the parish church itself. Hardly a man
takes a half-hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his
head and asks, "What's the news?" as if the rest of mankind had stood
his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half-hour,
doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what
they have dreamed. After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable
as the breakfast. "Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man
anywhere on this globe"—and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that
a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River;
never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth
cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.
For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that
there are very few important communications made through it. To speak
critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life—I
wrote this some years ago—that were worth the postage. The penny-post
is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man
that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest.
And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we
read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house
burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow
run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot
of grasshoppers in the winter—we never need read of another. One is
enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for
a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all _news_, as it
is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over
their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such
a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the
foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate
glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure—news
which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelve-month, or
twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy. As for Spain, for
instance, if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta,
and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right
proportions—they may have changed the names a little since I saw the
papers—and serve up a bull-fight when other entertainments fail, it
will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact
state or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports
under this head in the newspapers: and as for England, almost the last
significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649;
and if you have learned the history of her crops for an average year,
you never need attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are
of a merely pecuniary character. If one may judge who rarely looks into
the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French
revolution not excepted.
What news! how much more important to know what that is which was never
old! "Kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the state of Wei) sent a man to
Khoung-tseu to know his news. Khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be
seated near him, and questioned him in these terms: What is your
master doing? The messenger answered with respect: My master desires
to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of
them. The messenger being gone, the philosopher remarked: What a worthy
messenger! What a worthy messenger!" The preacher, instead of vexing the
ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end of the week—for
Sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not the fresh
and brave beginning of a new one—with this one other draggle-tail of
a sermon, should shout with thundering voice, "Pause! Avast! Why so
seeming fast, but deadly slow?"
Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is
fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow
themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we
know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments.
If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and
poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise,
we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and
absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the
shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. By
closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by
shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and
habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations.
Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly
than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are
wiser by experience, that is, by failure. I have read in a Hindoo book,
that "there was a king's son, who, being expelled in infancy from his
native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to maturity
in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with
which he lived. One of his father's ministers having discovered him,
revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was
removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. So soul," continues the
Hindoo philosopher, "from the circumstances in which it is placed,
mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some
holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be Brahme." I perceive that
we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our
vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that _is_
which _appears_ to be. If a man should walk through this town and see only
the reality, where, think you, would the "Mill-dam" go to? If he should
give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not
recognize the place in his description. Look at a meeting-house, or a
court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what
that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces
in your account of them. Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of
the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last
man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all
these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself
culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the
lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is
sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of
the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently
answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is
laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or
the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his
posterity at least could accomplish it.
Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off
the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the
rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without
perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring
and the children cry—determined to make a day of it. Why should we
knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed
in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the
meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of
the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail
by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine
whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell
rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are
like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward
through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and
delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through
Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through
Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we
come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call _reality_, and
say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a _point d'appui_,
below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a
wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not
a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a
freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you
stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun
glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its
sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will
happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only
reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats
and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our
business.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I
drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin
current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in
the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know
not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that
I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it
discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to
be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and
feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells
me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their
snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through
these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts;
so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will
begin to mine.
Reading
With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men
would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly
their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumulating
property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a
state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with
truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest
Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the
statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and
I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was
then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust
has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was
revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is
neither past, present, nor future.
My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious
reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the range of the
ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the
influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose
sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from
time to time on to linen paper. Says the poet Mîr Camar Uddîn Mast,
"Being seated, to run through the region of the spiritual world; I have
had this advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of
wine; I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of
the esoteric doctrines." I kept Homer's Iliad on my table through the
summer, though I looked at his page only now and then. Incessant labor
with my hands, at first, for I had my house to finish and my beans to
hoe at the same time, made more study impossible. Yet I sustained myself
by the prospect of such reading in future. I read one or two shallow
books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made
me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that _I_ lived.
The student may read Homer or Æschylus in the Greek without danger of
dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure
emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. The
heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue,
will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must
laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a
larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and
generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its
translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers
of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they
are printed as rare and curious, as ever. It is worth the expense of
youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an
ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street,
to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the
farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard. Men
sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way
for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will
always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and
however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest
recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not
decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them
as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature
because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true
spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than
any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training
such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole
life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly
as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the
language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a
memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the
language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory,
a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn
it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the
maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is
our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to
be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak. The
crowds of men who merely spoke the Greek and Latin tongues in the Middle
Ages were not entitled by the accident of birth to read the works of
genius written in those languages; for these were not written in
that Greek or Latin which they knew, but in the select language of
literature. They had not learned the nobler dialects of Greece and Rome,
but the very materials on which they were written were waste paper to
them, and they prized instead a cheap contemporary literature. But when
the several nations of Europe had acquired distinct though rude written
languages of their own, sufficient for the purposes of their rising
literatures, then first learning revived, and scholars were enabled to
discern from that remoteness the treasures of antiquity. What the Roman
and Grecian multitude could not _hear_, after the lapse of ages a few
scholars _read_, and a few scholars only are still reading it.
However much we may admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence,
the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the
fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind
the clouds. _There_ are the stars, and they who can may read them.
The astronomers forever comment on and observe them. They are not
exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. What is
called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the
study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and
speaks to the mob before him, to those who can _hear_ him; but the writer,
whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted
by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the
intellect and health of mankind, to all in any age who can _understand_
him.
No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions
in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of relics. It is
something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any
other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may
be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually
breathed from all human lips;—not be represented on canvas or in marble
only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of
an ancient man's thought becomes a modern man's speech. Two thousand
summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her
marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried
their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them
against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured wealth of the
world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the
oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of
every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they
enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse
them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in
every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on
mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by
enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is
admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at
last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and
genius, and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the
vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his
good sense by the pains which he takes to secure for his children that
intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that
he becomes the founder of a family.
Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language
in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the
history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of
them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization
itself may be regarded as such a transcript. Homer has never yet been
printed in English, nor Æschylus, nor Virgil even—works as refined, as
solidly done, and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for
later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever,
equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic
literary labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who
never knew them. It will be soon enough to forget them when we have the
learning and the genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate
them. That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call
Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known
Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when
the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with
Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall
have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By
such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.
The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind,
for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the
multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.
Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they
have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in
trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little
or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which
lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the
while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most
alert and wakeful hours to.
I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is
in literature, and not be forever repeating our a-b-abs, and words of
one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and
foremost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read or hear
read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book,
the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their
faculties in what is called easy reading. There is a work in several
volumes in our Circulating Library entitled "Little Reading," which I
thought referred to a town of that name which I had not been to. There
are those who, like cormorants and ostriches, can digest all sorts of
this, even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they
suffer nothing to be wasted. If others are the machines to provide
this provender, they are the machines to read it. They read the nine
thousandth tale about Zebulon and Sophronia, and how they loved as none
had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true love run
smooth—at any rate, how it did run and stumble, and get up again and
go on! how some poor unfortunate got up on to a steeple, who had better
never have gone up as far as the belfry; and then, having needlessly
got him up there, the happy novelist rings the bell for all the world to
come together and hear, O dear! how he did get down again! For my part,
I think that they had better metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of
universal noveldom into man weather-***, as they used to put heroes
among the constellations, and let them swing round there till they are
rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest men with their pranks.
The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the
meeting-house burn down. "The Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of the
Middle Ages, by the celebrated author of 'Tittle-Tol-Tan,' to appear
in monthly parts; a great rush; don't all come together." All this
they read with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, and with
unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet need no sharpening, just
as some little four-year-old bencher his two-cent gilt-covered
edition of Cinderella—without any improvement, that I can see, in the
pronunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more skill in extracting
or inserting the moral. The result is dulness of sight, a stagnation of
the vital circulations, and a general deliquium and sloughing off of all
the intellectual faculties. This sort of gingerbread is baked daily and
more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and-Indian in almost every oven,
and finds a surer market.
The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers.
What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a
very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even
in English literature, whose words all can read and spell. Even the
college-bred and so-called liberally educated men here and elsewhere
have really little or no acquaintance with the English classics; and
as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics and Bibles,
which are accessible to all who will know of them, there are the
feeblest efforts anywhere made to become acquainted with them. I know a
woodchopper, of middle age, who takes a French paper, not for news as he
says, for he is above that, but to "keep himself in practice," he being
a Canadian by birth; and when I ask him what he considers the best thing
he can do in this world, he says, beside this, to keep up and add to
his English. This is about as much as the college-bred generally do or
aspire to do, and they take an English paper for the purpose. One who
has just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will
find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he comes
from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are
familiar even to the so-called illiterate; he will find nobody at all
to speak to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed, there is hardly the
professor in our colleges, who, if he has mastered the difficulties of
the language, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit
and poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the
alert and heroic reader; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of
mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles? Most men do not
know that any nation but the Hebrews have had a scripture. A man, any
man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but
here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered,
and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us
of;—and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers
and class-books, and when we leave school, the "Little Reading," and
story-books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our
conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of
pygmies and manikins.
I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has
produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of
Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never
saw him—my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to
the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which
contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never
read them. We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this
respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between
the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the
illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for
children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of
antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a race
of ***-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than
the columns of the daily paper.
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are
probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could
really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or
the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of
things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the
reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain
our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we
may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle
and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one
has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability,
by his words and his life. Moreover, with wisdom we shall learn
liberality. The solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of
Concord, who has had his second birth and peculiar religious experience,
and is driven as he believes into the silent gravity and exclusiveness
by his faith, may think it is not true; but Zoroaster, thousands of
years ago, travelled the same road and had the same experience; but
he, being wise, knew it to be universal, and treated his neighbors
accordingly, and is even said to have invented and established worship
among men. Let him humbly commune with Zoroaster then, and through the
liberalizing influence of all the worthies, with Jesus Christ himself,
and let "our church" go by the board.
We boast that we belong to the Nineteenth Century and are making the
most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little this village
does for its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to
be flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us. We need
to be provoked—goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have a
comparatively decent system of common schools, schools for infants only;
but excepting the half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and latterly
the puny beginning of a library suggested by the State, no school for
ourselves. We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or
ailment than on our mental aliment. It is time that we had uncommon
schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men
and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder
inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure—if they are,
indeed, so well off—to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.
Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot
students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of
Concord? Can we not hire some Abelard to lecture to us? Alas! what with
foddering the cattle and tending the store, we are kept from school too
long, and our education is sadly neglected. In this country, the village
should in some respects take the place of the nobleman of Europe. It
should be the patron of the fine arts. It is rich enough. It wants only
the magnanimity and refinement. It can spend money enough on such things
as farmers and traders value, but it is thought Utopian to propose
spending money for things which more intelligent men know to be of
far more worth. This town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a
town-house, thank fortune or politics, but probably it will not spend so
much on living wit, the true meat to put into that shell, in a hundred
years. The one hundred and twenty-five dollars annually subscribed for a
Lyceum in the winter is better spent than any other equal sum raised in
the town. If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy
the advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life
be in any respect provincial? If we will read newspapers, why not
skip the gossip of Boston and take the best newspaper in the world at
once?—not be sucking the pap of "neutral family" papers, or browsing
"Olive Branches" here in New England. Let the reports of all the learned
societies come to us, and we will see if they know anything. Why
should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to select
our reading? As the nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself
with whatever conduces to his culture—genius—learning—wit—books— paintings—statuary—music—philosophical
instruments, and the like; so let the village do—not stop short at a pedagogue,
a parson, a sexton, a parish library, and three selectmen, because
our Pilgrim forefathers got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock
with these. To act collectively is according to the spirit of
our institutions; and I am confident that, as our circumstances are more
flourishing, our means are greater than the nobleman's. New England can
hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and board
them round the while, and not be provincial at all. That is the _uncommon_
school we want. Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.
If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little
there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance
which surrounds us.
End of Chapter III �