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Title: Life Without Principle Author: Henry David Thoreau Date: October 1863 Language: en Topics: principles, anti-work, life Source: Retrieved on May 18, 2022 from [[https://www.thoreau-online.org/life-without-principle.html]] Notes: This essay was derived from the lecture "What Shall It Profit?", which Thoreau first delivered on 6 December 1854, at Railroad Hall in Providence Rhode Island. He delivered it several times over the next two years, and edited it for publication before he died in 1862. It was first published in the October 1863 issue of The Atlantic Monthly ( Volume 12, Issue 71, pp. 484-495.) where it was given its modern title.
At a lyceum, not long since, I felt that the lecturer had chosen a theme
too foreign to himself, and so failed to interest me as much as he might
have done. He described things not in or near to his heart, but toward
his extremities and superficies. There was, in this sense, no truly
central or centralizing thought in the lecture. I would have had him
deal with his privatest experience, as the poet does. The greatest
compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought,
and attended to my answer. I am surprised, as well as delighted, when
this happens, it is such a rare use he would make of me, as if he were
acquainted with the tool. Commonly, if men want anything of me, it is
only to know how many acres I make of their land,—since I am a
surveyor,—or, at most, what trivial news I have burdened myself with.
They never will go to law for my meat; they prefer the shell. A man once
came a considerable distance to ask me to lecture on Slavery; but on
conversing with him, I found that he and his clique expected
seven-eighths of the lecture to be theirs, and only one-eighth mine; so
I declined. I take it for granted, when I am invited to lecture
anywhere,—for I have had a little experience in that business,—that
there is a desire to hear what I think on some subject, though I may be
the greatest fool in the country,—and not that I should say pleasant
things merely, or such as the audience will assent to; and I resolve,
accordingly, that I will give them a strong dose of myself. They have
sent for me, and engaged to pay for me, and I am determined that they
shall have me, though I bore them beyond all precedent.
So now I would say something similar to you, my readers. Since you are
my readers, and I have not been much of a traveller, I will not talk
about people a thousand miles off, but come as near home as I can. As
the time is short, I will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the
criticism.
Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.
This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked
almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my
dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at
leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily
buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for
dollars and cents. An Irishman, seeing me making a minute in the fields,
took it for granted that I was calculating my wages. If a man was tossed
out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or
scared out of his wits by the Indians, it is regretted chiefly because
he was thus incapacitated for—business! I think that there is nothing,
not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life
itself, than this incessant business.
There is a coarse and boisterous money-making fellow in the outskirts of
our town, who is going to build a bank-wall under the hill along the
edge of his meadow.
The powers have put this into his head to keep him out of mischief, and
he wishes me to spend three weeks digging there with him. The result
will be that he will perhaps get some more money to hoard, and leave for
his heirs to spend foolishly. If I do this, most will commend me as an
industrious and hard-working man; but if I choose to devote myself to
certain labors which yield more real profit, though but little money,
they may be inclined to look on me as an idler. Nevertheless, as I do
not need the police of meaningless labor to regulate me, and do not see
anything absolutely praiseworthy in this fellow's undertaking, any more
than in many an enterprise of our own or foreign governments, however
amusing it may be to him or them, I prefer to finish my education at a
different school.
If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in
danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as
a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her
time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a
town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!
Most men would feel insulted, if it were proposed to employ them in
throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that
they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.
For instance: just after sunrise, one summer morning, I noticed one of
my neighbors walking beside his team, which was slowly drawing a heavy
hewn stone swung under the axle, surrounded by an atmosphere of
industry,—his day's work begun,—his brow commenced to sweat,—a reproach
to all sluggards and idlers,—pausing abreast the shoulders of his oxen,
and half turning round with a flourish of his merciful whip, while they
gained their length on him. And I thought, Such is the labor which the
American Congress exists to protect,—honest, manly toil,—honest as the
day is long,—that makes his bread taste sweet, and keeps society
sweet,—which all men respect and have consecrated: one of the sacred
band, doing the needful, but irksome drudgery. Indeed, I felt a slight
reproach, because I observed this from the window, and was not abroad
and stirring about a similar business. The day went by, and at evening I
passed the yard of another neighbor, who keeps many servants, and spends
much money foolishly, while he adds nothing to the common stock, and
there I saw the stone of the morning lying beside a whimsical structure
intended to adorn this Lord Timothy Dexter's premises, and the dignity
forthwith departed from the teamster's labor, in my eyes. In my opinion,
the sun was made to light worthier toil than this. I may add, that his
employer has since run off, in debt to a good part of the town, and,
after passing through Chancery, has settled somewhere else, there to
become once more a patron of the arts.
The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead
downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to
have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the
wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. If
you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which
is to go down perpendicularly. Those services which the community will
most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for
being something less than a man. The State does not commonly reward a
genius any more wisely.
Even the poet-laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents
of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another
poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe. As for my own
business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most
satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should
do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When I
observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly
asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct. I
once invented a rule for measuring cord-wood, and tried to introduce it
in Boston; but the measurer there told me that the sellers did not wish
to have their wood measured correctly,—that he was already too accurate
for them, and therefore they commonly got their wood measured in
Charlestown before crossing the bridge.
The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good
job," but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary
sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that
they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a
livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a
man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
It is remarkable that there are few men so well employed, so much to
their minds, but that a little money or fame would commonly buy them off
from their present pursuit. I see advertisements for active young men,
as if activity were the whole of a young man's capital. Yet I have been
surprised when one has with confidence proposed to me, a grown man, to
embark in some enterprise of his, as if I had absolutely nothing to do,
my life having been a complete failure hitherto. What a doubtful
compliment this is to pay me! As if he had met me half-way across the
ocean beating up against the wind, but bound nowhere, and proposed to me
to go along with him! If I did, what do you think the underwriters would
say? No, no! I am not without employment at this stage of the voyage. To
tell the truth, I saw an advertisement for able-bodied seamen, when I
was a boy, sauntering in my native port, and as soon as I came of age I
embarked.
The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. You may raise
money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to
hire a man who is minding his own business. An efficient and valuable
man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not. The
inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are
forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose that they
were rarely disappointed.
Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom. I
feel that my connection with and obligation to society are still very
slight and transient. Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood,
and by which it is allowed that I am to some extent serviceable to my
contemporaries, are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often
reminded that they are a necessity. So far I am successful. But I
foresee, that, if my wants should be much increased, the labor required
to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my
forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure,
that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that
I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to
suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time
well.
There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part
of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are
self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his
poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it
makes. You must get your living by loving. But as it is said of the
merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail, so the life of men
generally, tried by this standard, is a failure, and bankruptcy may be
surely prophesied.
Merely to come into the world the heir of a fortune is not to be born,
but to be still-born, rather. To be supported by the charity of friends,
or a government-pension,—provided you continue to breathe,—by whatever
fine synonymes you describe these relations, is to go into the
almshouse. On Sundays the poor debtor goes to church to take an account
of stock, and finds, of course, that his outgoes have been greater than
his income. In the Catholic Church, especially, they go into Chancery,
make a clean confession, give up all, and think to start again. Thus men
will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make
an effort to get up.
As for the comparative demand which men make on life, it is an important
difference between two, that the one is satisfied with a level success,
that his marks can all be hit by point-blank shots, but the other,
however low and unsuccessful his life may be, constantly elevates his
aim, though at a very slight angle to the horizon. I should much rather
be the last man,—though, as the Orientals say, "Greatness doth not
approach him who is forever looking down; and all those who are looking
high are growing poor."
It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered
written on the subject of getting a living: how to make getting a living
not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious;
for if getting a living is not so, then living is not. One would think,
from looking at literature, that this question had never disturbed a
solitary individual's musings. Is it that men are too much disgusted
with their experience to speak of it? The lesson of value which money
teaches, which the Author of the Universe has taken so much pains to
teach us, we are inclined to skip altogether. As for the means of
living, it is wonderful how indifferent men of all classes are about it,
even reformers, so called,—whether they inherit, or earn, or steal it. I
think that society has done nothing for us in this respect, or at least
has undone what she has done. Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my
nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them
off.
The title wise is, for the most part, falsely applied.
How can one be a wise man, if he does not know any better how to live
than other men?—if he is only more cunning and intellectually subtle?
Does Wisdom work in a tread-mill? or does she teach how to succeed by
her example? Is there any such thing as wisdom not applied to life? Is
she merely the miller who grinds the finest logic? It is pertinent to
ask if Plato got his living in a better way or more successfully than
his contemporaries,—or did he succumb to the difficulties of life like
other men? Did he seem to prevail over some of them merely by
indifference, or by assuming grand airs? or find it easier to live,
because his aunt remembered him in her will? The ways in which most men
get their living, that is, live, are mere make-shifts, and a shirking of
the real business of life,—chiefly because they do not know, but partly
because they do not mean, any better.
The rush to California, for instance, and the attitude, not merely of
merchants, but of philosophers and prophets, so called, in relation to
it, reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind. That so many are ready to
live by luck, and so get the means of commanding the labor of others
less lucky, without contributing any value to society! And that is
called enterprise! I know of no more startling development of the
immorality of trade, and all the common modes of getting a living. The
philosophy and poetry and religion of such a mankind are not worth the
dust of a puff-ball. The hog that gets his living by rooting, stirring
up the soil so, would be ashamed of such company. If I could command the
wealth of all the worlds by lifting my finger, I would not pay such a
price for it. Even Mahomet knew that God did not make this world in
jest. It makes God to be a moneyed gentleman who scatters a handful of
pennies in order to see mankind scramble for them. The world's raffle! A
subsistence in the domains of Nature a thing to be raffled for! What a
comment, what a satire on our institutions! The conclusion will be, that
mankind will hang itself upon a tree. And have all the precepts in all
the Bibles taught men only this? and is the last and most admirable
invention of the human race only an improved muck-rake? Is this the
ground on which Orientals and Occidentals meet? Did God direct us so to
get our living, digging where we never planted,—and He would, perchance,
reward us with lumps of gold?
God gave the righteous man a certificate entitling him to food and
raiment, but the unrighteous man found a facsimile of the same in God's
coffers, and appropriated it, and obtained food and raiment like the
former. It is one of the most extensive systems of counterfeiting that
the world has seen. I did not know that mankind were suffering for want
of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable,
but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface,
but not so much as a grain of wisdom.
The gold-digger in the ravines of the mountains is as much a gambler as
his fellow in the saloons of San Francisco. What difference does it
make, whether you shake dirt or shake dice? If you win, society is the
loser. The gold-digger is the enemy of the honest laborer, whatever
checks and compensations there may be. It is not enough to tell me that
you worked hard to get your gold. So does the Devil work hard. The way
of transgressors may be hard in many respects. The humblest observer who
goes to the mines sees and says that gold-digging is of the character of
a lottery; the gold thus obtained is not the same thing with the wages
of honest toil. But, practically, he forgets what he has seen, for he
has seen only the fact, not the principle, and goes into trade there,
that is, buys a ticket in what commonly proves another lottery, where
the fact is not so obvious.
After reading Howitt's account of the Australian gold-diggings one
evening, I had in my mind's eye, all night, the numerous valleys, with
their streams, all cut up with foul pits, from ten to one hundred feet
deep, and half a dozen feet across, as close as they can be dug, and
partly filled with water,—the locality to which men furiously rush to
probe for their fortunes,—uncertain where they shall break ground,—not
knowing but the gold is under their camp itself;—sometimes digging one
hundred and sixty feet before they strike the vein, or then missing it
by a foot,—turned into demons, and regardless of each other's rights, in
their thirst for riches,—whole valleys, for thirty miles, suddenly
honey-combed by the pits of the miners, so that even hundreds are
drowned in them,—standing in water, and covered with mud and clay, they
work night and day, dying of exposure and disease. Having read this, and
partly forgotten it, I was thinking, accidentally, of my own
unsatisfactory life, doing as others do; and with that vision of the
diggings still before me, I asked myself, why I might not be washing
some gold daily, though it were only the finest particles,—why I might
not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine. There
is a Ballarat, a Bendigo for you,—what though it were a sulky-gully? At
any rate, I might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and
crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence. Wherever a man
separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood, there
indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travellers may see only a
gap in the paling. His solitary path across-lots will turn out the
higher way of the two.
Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be
found in that direction; but that is to go to the very opposite extreme
to where it lies. They go prospecting farther and farther away from the
true lead, and are most unfortunate when they think themselves most
successful. Is not our native soil auriferous? Does not a stream from
the golden mountains flow through our native valley? and has not this
for more than geologic ages been bringing down the shining particles and
forming the nuggets for us? Yet, strange to tell, if a digger steal
away, prospecting for this true gold, into the unexplored solitudes
around us, there is no danger that any will dog his steps, and endeavor
to supplant him. He may claim and undermine the whole valley even, both
the cultivated and the uncultivated portions, his whole life long in
peace, for no one will ever dispute his claim. They will not mind his
cradles or his toms. He is not confined to a claim twelve feet square,
as at Ballarat, but may mine anywhere, and wash the whole wide world in
his tom.
Howitt says of the man who found the great nugget which weighed
twenty-eight pounds, at the Bendigo diggings in Australia:—"He soon
began to drink; got a horse, and rode all about, generally at full
gallop, and, when he met people, called out to inquire if they knew who
he was, and then kindly informed them that he was 'the bloody wretch
that had found the nugget.' At last he rode full speed against a tree,
and nearly knocked his brains out." I think, however, there was no
danger of that, for he had already knocked his brains out against the
nugget. Howitt adds, "He is a hopelessly ruined man." But he is a type
of the class. They are all fast men. Hear some of the names of the
places where they dig:—"Jackass Flat,"—"Sheep's-Head Gully,"—"Murderer's
Bar," etc. Is there no satire in these names? Let them carry their
ill-gotten wealth where they will, I am thinking it will still be
"Jackass Flat," if not "Murderer's Bar," where they live.
The last resource of our energy has been the robbing of graveyards on
the Isthmus of Darien, an enterprise which appears to be but in its
infancy; for, according to late accounts, an act has passed its second
reading in the legislature of New Granada, regulating this kind of
mining: and a correspondent of the "Tribune" writes:—"In the dry season,
when the weather will permit of the country being properly prospected,
no doubt other rich `guacas' [that is, graveyards] will be found." To
emigrants he says:—"Do not come before December; take the Isthmus route
in preference to the Boca del Toro one; bring no useless baggage, and do
not cumber yourself with a tent; but a good pair of blankets will be
necessary; a pick, shovel, and axe of good material will be almost all
that is required": advice which might have been taken from the "Burker's
Guide." And he concludes with this line in Italics and small capitals:
"If you are doing well at home, STAY THERE," which may fairly be
interpreted to mean, "If you are getting a good living by robbing
graveyards at home, stay there."
But why go to California for a text? She is the child of New England,
bred at her own school and church.
It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral
teachers. The prophets are employed in excusing the ways of men. Most
reverend seniors, the illuminati of the age, tell me, with a gracious,
reminiscent smile, betwixt an aspiration and a shudder, not to be too
tender about these things,—to lump all that, that is, make a lump of
gold of it. The highest advice I have heard on these subjects was
grovelling. The burden of it was,—It is not worth your while to
undertake to reform the world in this particular. Do not ask how your
bread is buttered; it will make you sick, if you do,—and the like. A man
had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of
getting his bread. If within the sophisticated man there is not an
unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the Devil's angels. As we
grow old, we live more coarsely, we relax a little in our disciplines,
and, to some extent, cease to obey our finest instincts. But we should
be fastidious to the extreme of sanity, disregarding the gibes of those
who are more unfortunate than ourselves.
In our science and philosophy, even, there is commonly no true and
absolute account of things. The spirit of sect and bigotry has planted
its hoof amid the stars. You have only to discuss the problem, whether
the stars are inhabited or not, in order to discover it. Why must we
daub the heavens as well as the earth? It was an unfortunate discovery
that Dr. Kane was a Mason, and that Sir John Franklin was another. But
it was a more cruel suggestion that possibly that was the reason why the
former went in search of the latter. There is not a popular magazine in
this country that would dare to print a child's thought on important
subjects without comment. It must be submitted to the D. D.s. I would it
were the chickadee-dees.
You come from attending the funeral of mankind to attend to a natural
phenomenon. A little thought is sexton to all the world.
I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly
liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you
endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which
they appear to hold stock,—that is, some particular, not universal, way
of viewing things. They will continually thrust their own low roof, with
its narrow skylight, between you and the sky, when it is the
unobstructed heavens you would view.
Get out of the way with your cobwebs, wash your windows, I say! In some
lyceums they tell me that they have voted to exclude the subject of
religion. But how do I know what their religion is, and when I am near
to or far from it? I have walked into such an arena and done my best to
make a clean breast of what religion I have experienced, and the
audience never suspected what I was about. The lecture was as harmless
as moonshine to them. Whereas, if I had read to them the biography of
the greatest scamps in history, they might have thought that I had
written the lives of the deacons of their church. Ordinarily, the
inquiry is, Where did you come from? or, Where are you going? That was a
more pertinent question which I overheard one of my auditors put to
another once,—"What does he lecture for?" It made me quake in my shoes.
To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not serene, a world
in themselves. For the most part, they dwell in forms, and flatter and
study effect only more finely than the rest. We select granite for the
underpinning of our houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we
do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granitic truth, the lowest
primitive rock. Our sills are rotten. What stuff is the man made of who
is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and subtilest truth? I
often accuse my finest acquaintances of an immense frivolity; for, while
there are manners and compliments we do not meet, we do not teach one
another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of
steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. The fault is commonly mutual,
however; for we do not habitually demand any more of each other.
That excitement about Kossuth, consider how characteristic, but
superficial, it was!—only another kind of politics or dancing. Men were
making speeches to him all over the country, but each expressed only the
thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stood on
truth. They were merely banded together, as usual, leaning on another,
and all together on nothing; as the Hindoos made the world rest on an
elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent, and
had nothing to put under the serpent. For all fruit of that stir we have
the Kossuth hat.
Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary
conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward
and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a
man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or
been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference
between us and our fellow is, that he has seen the newspaper, or been
out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we
go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on
it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of
letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from
himself this long while.
I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have
tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt
in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so
much to me. You cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day's
devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day.
We may well be ashamed to tell what things we have read or heard in our
day. I do not know why my news should be so trivial,—considering what
one's dreams and expectations are, why the developments should be so
paltry.
The news we hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius. It is
the stalest repetition. You are often tempted to ask, why such stress is
laid on a particular experience which you have had,—that, after
twenty-five years, you should meet Hobbins, Registrar of Deeds, again on
the sidewalk. Have you not budged an inch, then? Such is the daily news.
Its facts appear to float in the atmosphere, insignificant as the
sporules of fungi, and impinge on some neglected thallus, or surface of
our minds, which affords a basis for them, and hence a parasitic growth.
We should wash ourselves clean of such news. Of what consequence, though
our planet explode, if there is no character involved in the explosion?
In health we have not the least curiosity about such events. We do not
live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world
blow up.
All summer, and far into the autumn, perchance, you unconsciously went
by the newspapers and the news, and now you find it was because the
morning and the evening were full of news to you. Your walks were full
of incidents. You attended, not to the affairs of Europe, but to your
own affairs in Massachusetts fields. If you chance to live and move and
have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the
news transpire,—thinner than the paper on which it is printed,—then
these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive
below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them. Really to
see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a
universal fact, would preserve us sane forever. Nations! What are
nations? Tartars, and Huns, and Chinamen! Like insects, they swarm. The
historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a
man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the
world. Any man thinking may say with the Spirit of Lodin,—
"I look down from my height on nations,
And they become ashes before me;—
Calm is my dwelling in the clouds;
Pleasant are the great fields of my rest."
Pray, let us live without being drawn by dogs, Esquimaux-fashion,
tearing over hill and dale, and biting each other's ears.
Not without a slight shudder at the danger, I often perceive how near I
had come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial
affair,—the news of the street; and I am astonished to observe how
willing men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish,—to permit idle
rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground
which should be sacred to thought. Shall the mind be a public arena,
where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly
are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself,—an hypæthral
temple, consecrated to the service of the gods? I find it so difficult
to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate
to burden my attention with those which are insignificant, which only a
divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in
newspapers and conversation. It is important to preserve the mind's
chastity in this respect.
Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court
into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum
sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very bar-room of
the mind's inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street
had occupied us,—the very street itself, with all its travel, its
bustle, and filth had passed through our thoughts' shrine! Would it not
be an intellectual and moral suicide? When I have been compelled to sit
spectator and auditor in a court-room for some hours, and have seen my
neighbors, who were not compelled, stealing in from time to time, and
tiptoeing about with washed hands and faces, it has appeared to my
mind's eye, that, when they took off their hats, their ears suddenly
expanded into vast hoppers for sound, between which even their narrow
heads were crowded. Like the vanes of windmills, they caught the broad,
but shallow stream of sound, which, after a few titillating gyrations in
their coggy brains, passed out the other side. I wondered if, when they
got home, they were as careful to wash their ears as before their hands
and faces. It has seemed to me, at such a time, that the auditors and
the witnesses, the jury and the counsel, the judge and the criminal at
the bar,—if I may presume him guilty before he is convicted,—were all
equally criminal, and a thunderbolt might be expected to descend and
consume them all together.
By all kinds of traps and sign-boards, threatening the extreme penalty
of the divine law, exclude such trespassers from the only ground which
can be sacred to you. It is so hard to forget what it is worse than
useless to remember! If I am to be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be
of the mountain-brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town-sewers.
There is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the
attentive mind from the courts of heaven. There is the profane and stale
revelation of the bar-room and the police court. The same ear is fitted
to receive both communications. Only the character of the hearer
determines to which it shall be open, and to which closed. I believe
that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to
trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with
triviality. Our very intellect shall be macadamized, as it were,—its
foundation broken into fragments for the wheels of travel to roll over;
and if you would know what will make the most durable pavement,
surpassing rolled stones, spruce blocks, and asphaltum, you have only to
look into some of our minds which have been subjected to this treatment
so long.
If we have thus desecrated ourselves,—as who has not?—the remedy will be
by wariness and devotion to reconsecrate ourselves, and make once more a
fane of the mind. We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as
innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful
what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not
the Times. Read the Eternities. Conventionalities are at length as bad
as impurities. Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their
dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather
rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. Knowledge does
not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven. Yes,
every thought that passes through the mind helps to wear and tear it,
and to deepen the ruts, which, as in the streets of Pompeii, evince how
much it has been used.
How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate,
whether we had better know them,—had better let their peddling-carts be
driven, even at the slowest trot or walk, over that bridge of glorious
span by which we trust to pass at last from the farthest brink of time
to the nearest shore of eternity! Have we no culture, no refinement,—but
skill only to live coarsely and serve the Devil?—to acquire a little
worldly wealth, or fame, or liberty, and make a false show with it, as
if we were all husk and shell, with no tender and living kernel to us?
Shall our institutions be like those chestnut-burs which contain
abortive nuts, perfect only to prick the fingers?
America is said to be the arena on which the battle of freedom is to be
fought; but surely it cannot be freedom in a merely political sense that
is meant. Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from a
political tyrant, he is still the slave of an economical and moral
tyrant. Now that the republic—the res-publica—has been settled, it is
time to look after the res-privata,—the private state,—to see, as the
Roman senate charged its consuls, "ne quid res-PRIVATA detrimenti
caperet," that the private state receive no detriment.
Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King
George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born
free and not to live free? What is the value of any political freedom,
but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a
freedom to be free, of which we boast? We are a nation of politicians,
concerned about the outmost defences only of freedom. It is our
children's children who may perchance be really free. We tax ourselves
unjustly. There is a part of us which is not represented. It is taxation
without representation. We quarter troops, we quarter fools and cattle
of all sorts upon ourselves. We quarter our gross bodies on our poor
souls, till the former eat up all the latter's substance.
With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially
provincial still, not metropolitan,—mere Jonathans. We are provincial,
because we do not find at home our standards,—because we do not worship
truth, but the reflection of truth,—because we are warped and narrowed
by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures and
agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.
So is the English Parliament provincial. Mere country-bumpkins, they
betray themselves, when any more important question arises for them to
settle, the Irish question, for instance,—the English question why did I
not say? Their natures are subdued to what they work in. Their "good
breeding" respects only secondary objects. The finest manners in the
world are awkwardness and fatuity, when contrasted with a finer
intelligence. They appear but as the fashions of past days,—mere
courtliness, knee-buckles and small-clothes, out of date. It is the
vice, but not the excellence of manners, that they are continually being
deserted by the character; they are cast-off clothes or shells, claiming
the respect which belonged to the living creature. You are presented
with the shells instead of the meat, and it is no excuse generally,
that, in the case of some fishes, the shells are of more worth than the
meat. The man who thrusts his manners upon me does as if he were to
insist on introducing me to his cabinet of curiosities, when I wished to
see himself. It was not in this sense that the poet Decker called Christ
"the first true gentleman that ever breathed." I repeat that in this
sense the most splendid court in Christendom is provincial, having
authority to consult about Transalpine interests only, and not the
affairs of Rome.
A prætor or proconsul would suffice to settle the questions which absorb
the attention of the English Parliament and the American Congress.
Government and legislation! these I thought were respectable
professions. We have heard of heaven-born Numas, Lycurguses, and Solons,
in the history of the world, whose names at least may stand for ideal
legislators; but think of legislating to regulate the breeding of
slaves, or the exportation of tobacco! What have divine legislators to
do with the exportation or the importation of tobacco? what humane ones
with the breeding of slaves? Suppose you were to submit the question to
any son of God,—and has He no children in the nineteenth century? is it
a family which is extinct?—in what condition would you get it again?
What shall a State like Virginia say for itself at the last day, in
which these have been the principal, the staple productions? What ground
is there for patriotism in such a State? I derive my facts from
statistical tables which the States themselves have published.
A commerce that whitens every sea in quest of nuts and raisins, and
makes slaves of its sailors for this purpose! I saw, the other day, a
vessel which had been wrecked, and many lives lost, and her cargo of
rags, juniper-berries, and bitter almonds were strewn along the shore.
It seemed hardly worth the while to tempt the dangers of the sea between
Leghorn and New York for the sake of a cargo of juniper-berries and
bitter almonds. America sending to the Old World for her bitters! Is not
the seabrine, is not shipwreck, bitter enough to make the cup of life go
down here? Yet such, to a great extent, is our boasted commerce; and
there are those who style themselves statesmen and philosophers who are
so blind as to think that progress and civilization depend on precisely
this kind of interchange and activity,—the activity of flies about a
molasses-hogshead. Very well, observes one, if men were oysters. And
very well, answer I, if men were mosquitoes.
Lieutenant Herndon, whom our Government sent to explore the Amazon, and,
it is said, to extend the area of Slavery, observed that there was
wanting there "an industrious and active population, who know what the
comforts of life are, and who have artificial wants to draw out the
great resources of the country." But what are the "artificial wants" to
be encouraged? Not the love of luxuries, like the tobacco and slaves of,
I believe, his native Virginia, nor the ice and granite and other
material wealth of our native New England; nor are "the great resources
of a country" that fertility or barrenness of soil which produces these.
The chief want, in every State that I have been into, was a high and
earnest purpose in its inhabitants. This alone draws out "the great
resources" of Nature, and at last taxes her beyond her resources; for
man naturally dies out of her. When we want culture more than potatoes,
and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a
world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is,
not slaves, nor operatives, but men,—those rare fruits called heroes,
saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.
In short, as a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in the wind,
so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution
springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at
length blows it down.
What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and
inhuman, that, practically, I have never fairly recognized that it
concerns me at all. The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their
columns specially to politics or government without charge; and this,
one would say, is all that saves it; but, as I love literature, and, to
some extent, the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I
do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much. I have not got to answer
for having read a single President's Message. A strange age of the world
this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to a private
man's door, and utter their complaints at his elbow! I cannot take up a
newspaper but I find that some wretched government or other, hard
pushed, and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to
vote for it,—more importunate than an Italian beggar; and if I have a
mind to look at its certificate, made, perchance, by some benevolent
merchant's clerk, or the skipper that brought it over, for it cannot
speak a word of English itself, I shall probably read of the eruption of
some Vesuvius, or the overflowing of some Po, true or forged, which
brought it into this condition. I do not hesitate, in such a case, to
suggest work, or the almshouse; or why not keep its castle in silence,
as I do commonly? The poor President, what with preserving his
popularity and doing his duty, is completely bewildered. The newspapers
are the ruling power. Any other government is reduced to a few marines
at Fort Independence. If a man neglects to read the Daily Times,
Government will go down on its knees to him, for this is the only
treason in these days.
Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and
the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society,
but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions
of the physical body. They are infra-human, a kind of vegetation. I
sometimes awake to a half-consciousness of them going on about me, as a
man may become conscious of some of the processes of digestion in a
morbid state, and so have the dyspepsia, as it is called. It is as if a
thinker submitted himself to be rasped by the great gizzard of creation.
Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and
gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite
halves,—sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each
other. Not only individuals, but States, have thus a confirmed
dyspepsia, which expresses itself, you can imagine by what sort of
eloquence. Thus our life is not altogether a forgetting, but also, alas!
to a great extent, a remembering of that which we should never have been
conscious of, certainly not in our waking hours. Why should we not meet,
not always as dyspeptics, to tell our bad dreams, but sometimes as
eupeptics, to congratulate each other on the ever glorious morning? I do
not make an exorbitant demand, surely.