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ic      LITERARY ETHICS
 
        _An Oration delivered before the Literary Societies of
Dartmouth College, July 24, 1838_

        GENTLEMEN,
        The invitation to address you this day, with which you have
honored me, wall so welcome, that I made haste to obey it.  A summons
to celebrate with scholars a literary festival, is so alluring to me,
as to overcome the doubts I might well entertain of my ability to
bring you any thought worthy of your attention.  I have reached the
middle age of man; yet I believe I am not less glad or sanguine at
the meeting of scholars, than when, a boy, I first saw the graduates
of my own College assembled at their anniversary.  Neither years nor
books have yet availed to extirpate a prejudice then rooted in me,
that a scholar is the favorite of Heaven and earth, the excellency of
his country, the happiest of men.  His duties lead him directly into
the holy ground where other men's aspirations only point.  His
successes are occasions of the purest joy to all men.  Eyes is he to
the blind; feet is he to the lame.  His failures, if he is worthy,
are inlets to higher advantages.  And because the scholar, by every
thought he thinks, extends his dominion into the general mind of men,
he is not one, but many.  The few scholars in each country, whose
genius I know, seem to me not individuals, but societies; and, when
events occur of great import, I count over these representatives of
opinion, whom they will affect, as if I were counting nations.  And,
even if his results were incommunicable; if they abode in his own
spirit; the intellect hath somewhat so sacred in its possessions,
that the fact of his existence and pursuits would be a happy omen.

        Meantime I know that a very different estimate of the scholar's
profession prevails in this country, and the importunity, with which
society presses its claim upon young men, tends to pervert the views
of the youth in respect to the culture of the intellect.  Hence the
historical failure, on which Europe and America have so freely
commented.  This country has not fulfilled what seemed the reasonable
expectation of mankind.  Men looked, when all feudal straps and
bandages were snapped asunder, that nature, too long the mother of
dwarfs, should reimburse itself by a brood of Titans, who should
laugh and leap in the continent, and run up the mountains of the West
with the errand of genius and of love.  But the mark of American
merit in painting, in sculpture, in poetry, in fiction, in eloquence,
seems to be a certain grace without grandeur, and itself not new but
derivative; a vase of fair outline, but empty, -- which whoso sees,
may fill with what wit and character is in him, but which does not,
like the charged cloud, overflow with terrible beauty, and emit
lightnings on all beholders.

        I will not lose myself in the desultory questions, what are the
limitations, and what the causes of the fact.  It suffices me to say,
in general, that the diffidence of mankind in the soul has crept over
the American mind; that men here, as elsewhere, are indisposed to
innovation, and prefer any antiquity, any usage, any livery
productive of ease or profit, to the unproductive service of thought.

        Yet, in every sane hour, the service of thought appears
reasonable, the despotism of the senses insane.  The scholar may lose
himself in schools, in words, and become a pedant; but when he
comprehends his duties, he above all men is a realist, and converses
with things.  For, the scholar is the student of the world, and of
what worth the world is, and with what emphasis it accosts the soul
of man, such is the worth, such the call of the scholar.

        The want of the times, and the propriety of this anniversary,
concur to draw attention to the doctrine of Literary Ethics.  What I
have to say on that doctrine distributes itself under the topics of
the resources, the subject, and the discipline of the scholar.

        I. The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his
confidence in the attributes of the Intellect.  The resources of the
scholar are co-extensive with nature and truth, yet can never be his,
unless claimed by him with an equal greatness of mind.  He cannot
know them until he has beheld with awe the infinitude and
impersonality of the intellectual power.  When he has seen, that it
is not his, nor any man's, but that it is the soul which made the
world, and that it is all accessible to him, he will know that he, as
its minister, may rightfully hold all things subordinate and
answerable to it.  A divine pilgrim in nature, all things attend his
steps.  Over him stream the flying constellations; over him streams
Time, as they, scarcely divided into months and years.  He inhales
the year as a vapor: its fragrant midsummer breath, its sparkling
January heaven.  And so pass into his mind, in bright
transfiguration, the grand events of history, to take a new order and
scale from him.  He is the world; and the epochs and heroes of
chronology are pictorial images, in which his thoughts are told.
There is no event but sprung somewhere from the soul of man; and
therefore there is none but the soul of man can interpret.  Every
presentiment of the mind is executed somewhere in a gigantic fact.
What else is Greece, Rome, England, France, St. Helena?  What else
are churches, literatures, and empires?  The new man must feel that
he is new, and has not come into the world mortgaged to the opinions
and usages of Europe, and Asia, and Egypt.  The sense of spiritual
independence is like the lovely varnish of the dew, whereby the old,
hard, peaked earth, and its old self-same productions, are made new
every morning, and shining with the last touch of the artist's hand.
A false humility, a complaisance to reigning schools, or to the
wisdom of antiquity, must not defraud me of supreme possession of
this hour.  If any person have less love of liberty, and less
jealousy to guard his integrity, shall he therefore dictate to you
and me?  Say to such doctors, We are thankful to you, as we are to
history, to the pyramids, and the authors; but now our day is come;
we have been born out of the eternal silence; and now will we live,
-- live for ourselves, -- and not as the pall-bearers of a funeral,
but as the upholders and creators of our age; and neither Greece nor
Rome, nor the three Unities of Aristotle, nor the three Kings of
Cologne, nor the College of the Sorbonne, nor the Edinburgh Review,
is to command any longer.  Now that we are here, we will put our own
interpretation on things, and our own things for interpretation.
Please himself with complaisance who will, -- for me, things must
take my scale, not I theirs.  I will say with the warlike king, "God
gave me this crown, and the whole world shall not take it away."

        The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my
self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do.  This is the
moral of the Plutarchs, the Cudworths, the Tennemanns, who give us
the story of men or of opinions.  Any history of philosophy fortifies
my faith, by showing me, that what high dogmas I had supposed were
the rare and late fruit of a cumulative culture, and only now
possible to some recent Kant or Fichte, -- were the prompt
improvisations of the earliest inquirers; of Parmenides, Heraclitus,
and Xenophanes.  In view of these students, the soul seems to
whisper, `There is a better way than this indolent learning of
another.  Leave me alone; do not teach me out of Leibnitz or
Schelling, and I shall find it all out myself.'

        Still more do we owe to biography the fortification of our
hope.  If you would know the power of character, see how much you
would impoverish the world, if you could take clean out of history
the lives of Milton, Shakspeare, and Plato, -- these three, and cause
them not to be.  See you not, how much less the power of man would
be?  I console myself in the poverty of my thoughts; in the paucity
of great men, in the malignity and dulness of the nations, by falling
back on these sublime recollections, and seeing what the prolific
soul could beget on actual nature; -- seeing that Plato was, and
Shakspeare, and Milton, -- three irrefragable facts.  Then I dare; I
also will essay to be.  The humblest, the most hopeless, in view of
these radiant facts, may now theorize and hope.  In spite of all the
rueful abortions that squeak and gibber in the street, in spite of
slumber and guilt, in spite of the army, the bar-room, and the jail,
_have been_ these glorious manifestations of the mind; and I will
thank my great brothers so truly for the admonition of their being,
as to endeavor also to be just and brave, to aspire and to speak.
Plotinus too, and Spinoza, and the immortal bards of philosophy, --
that which they have written out with patient courage, makes me bold.
No more will I dismiss, with haste, the visions which flash and
sparkle across my sky; but observe them, approach them, domesticate
them, brood on them, and draw out of the past, genuine life for the
present hour.

        To feel the full value of these lives, as occasions of hope and
provocation, you must come to know, that each admirable genius is but
a successful diver in that sea whose floor of pearls is all your own.
The impoverishing philosophy of ages has laid stress on the
distinctions of the individual, and not on the universal attributes
of man.  The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails
to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he
admires.  In solitude, in a remote village, the ardent youth loiters
and mourns.  With inflamed eye, in this sleeping wilderness, he has
read the story of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, until his fancy has
brought home to the surrounding woods, the faint roar of cannonades
in the Milanese, and marches in Germany.  He is curious concerning
that man's day.  What filled it? the crowded orders, the stern
decisions, the foreign despatches, the Castilian etiquette?  The soul
answers -- Behold his day here!  In the sighing of these woods, in
the quiet of these gray fields, in the cool breeze that sings out of
these northern mountains; in the workmen, the boys, the maidens, you
meet, -- in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of noon, and
sauntering of the afternoon; in the disquieting comparisons; in the
regrets at want of vigor; in the great idea, and the puny execution;
-- behold Charles the Fifth's day; another, yet the same; behold
Chatham's, Hampden's, Bayard's, Alfred's, Scipio's, Pericles's day,
-- day of all that are born of women.  The difference of circumstance
is merely costume.  I am tasting the self-same life, -- its
sweetness, its greatness, its pain, which I so admire in other men.
Do not foolishly ask of the inscrutable, obliterated past, what it
cannot tell, -- the details of that nature, of that day, called
Byron, or Burke; -- but ask it of the enveloping Now; the more
quaintly you inspect its evanescent beauties, its wonderful details,
its spiritual causes, its astounding whole, -- so much the more you
master the biography of this hero, and that, and every hero.  Be lord
of a day, through wisdom and justice, and you can put up your history
books.

        An intimation of these broad rights is familiar in the sense of
injury which men feel in the assumption of any man to limit their
possible progress.  We resent all criticism, which denies us any
thing that lies in our line of advance.  Say to the man of letters,
that he cannot paint a Transfiguration, or build a steamboat, or be a
grand-marshal, -- and he will not seem to himself depreciated.  But
deny to him any quality of literary or metaphysical power, and he is
piqued.  Concede to him genius, which is a sort of Stoical _plenum_
annulling the comparative, and he is content; but concede him talents
never so rare, denying him genius, and he is aggrieved.  What does
this mean?  Why simply, that the soul has assurance, by instincts and
presentiments, of _all_ power in the direction of its ray, as well as
of the special skills it has already acquired.

        In order to a knowledge of the resources of the scholar, we
must not rest in the use of slender accomplishments, -- of faculties
to do this and that other feat with words; but we must pay our vows
to the highest power, and pass, if it be possible, by assiduous love
and watching, into the visions of absolute truth.  The growth of the
intellect is strictly analogous in all individuals.  It is larger
reception.  Able men, in general, have good dispositions, and a
respect for justice; because an able man is nothing else than a good,
free, vascular organization, whereinto the universal spirit freely
flows; so that his fund of justice is not only vast, but infinite.
All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in
the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and
individual over the general truth.  The condition of our incarnation
in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual tendency to prefer the
private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the law
of universal being.  The hero is great by means of the predominance
of the universal nature; he has only to open his mouth, and it
speaks; he has only to be forced to act, and it acts.  All men catch
the word, or embrace the deed, with the heart, for it is verily
theirs as much as his; but in them this disease of an excess of
organization cheats them of equal issues.  Nothing is more simple
than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.  The vision of
genius comes by renouncing the too officious activity of the
understanding, and giving leave and amplest privilege to the
spontaneous sentiment.  Out of this must all that is alive and genial
in thought go.  Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and
nothing comes out but what was put in.  But the moment they desert
the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope,
virtue, learning, anecdote, all flock to their aid.  Observe the
phenomenon of extempore debate.  A man of cultivated mind, but
reserved habits, sitting silent, admires the miracle of free,
impassioned, picturesque speech, in the man addressing an assembly;
-- a state of being and power, how unlike his own!  Presently his own
emotion rises to his lips, and overflows in speech.  He must also
rise and say somewhat.  Once embarked, once having overcome the
novelty of the situation, he finds it just as easy and natural to
speak, -- to speak with thoughts, with pictures, with rhythmical
balance of sentences, -- as it was to sit silent; for, it needs not
to do, but to suffer; he only adjusts himself to the free spirit
which gladly utters itself through him; and motion is as easy as
rest.

        II. I pass now to consider the task offered to the intellect of
this country.  The view I have taken of the resources of the scholar,
presupposes a subject as broad.  We do not seem to have imagined its
riches.  We have not heeded the invitation it holds out.  To be as
good a scholar as Englishmen are; to have as much learning as our
contemporaries; to have written a book that is read; satisfies us.
We assume, that all thought is already long ago adequately set down
in books, -- all imaginations in poems; and what we say, we only
throw in as confirmatory of this supposed complete body of
literature.  A very shallow assumption.  Say rather, all literature
is yet to be written.  Poetry has scarce chanted its first song.  The
perpetual admonition of nature to us, is, `The world is new, untried.
Do not believe the past.  I give you the universe a virgin to-day.'

        By Latin and English poetry, we were born and bred in an
oratorio of praises of nature, -- flowers, birds, mountains, sun, and
moon; -- yet the naturalist of this hour finds that he knows nothing,
by all their poems, of any of these fine things; that he has
conversed with the mere surface and show of them all; and of their
essence, or of their history, knows nothing.  Further inquiry will
discover that nobody, -- that not these chanting poets themselves,
knew any thing sincere of these handsome natures they so commended;
that they contented themselves with the passing chirp of a bird, that
they saw one or two mornings, and listlessly looked at sunsets, and
repeated idly these few glimpses in their song.  But go into the
forest, you shall find all new and undescribed.  The screaming of the
wild geese flying by night; the thin note of the companionable
titmouse, in the winter day; the fall of swarms of flies, in autumn,
from combats high in the air, pattering down on the leaves like rain;
the angry hiss of the wood-birds; the pine throwing out its pollen
for the benefit of the next century; the turpentine exuding from the
tree; -- and, indeed, any vegetation; any animation; any and all, are
alike unattempted.  The man who stands on the seashore, or who
rambles in the woods, seems to be the first man that ever stood on
the shore, or entered a grove, his sensations and his world are so
novel and strange.  Whilst I read the poets, I think that nothing new
can be said about morning and evening.  But when I see the daybreak,
I am not reminded of these Homeric, or Shakspearian, or Miltonic, or
Chaucerian pictures.  No; but I feel perhaps the pain of an alien
world; a world not yet subdued by the thought; or, I am cheered by
the moist, warm, glittering, budding, melodious hour, that takes down
the narrow walls of my soul, and extends its life and pulsation to
the very horizon.  _That_ is morning, to cease for a bright hour to
be a prisoner of this sickly body, and to become as large as nature.

        The noonday darkness of the American forest, the deep, echoing,
aboriginal woods, where the living columns of the oak and fir tower
up from the ruins of the trees of the last millennium; where, from
year to year, the eagle and the crow see no intruder; the pines,
bearded with savage moss, yet touched with grace by the violets at
their feet; the broad, cold lowland, which forms its coat of vapor
with the stillness of subterranean crystallization; and where the
traveller, amid the repulsive plants that are native in the swamp,
thinks with pleasing terror of the distant town; this beauty, --
haggard and desert beauty, which the sun and the moon, the snow and
the rain, repaint and vary, has never been recorded by art, yet is
not indifferent to any passenger.  All men are poets at heart.  They
serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes.
What mean these journeys to Niagara; these pilgrims to the White
Hills?  Men believe in the adaptations of utility, always: in the
mountains, they may believe in the adaptations of the eye.
Undoubtedly, the changes of geology have a relation to the prosperous
sprouting of the corn and peas in my kitchen garden; but not less is
there a relation of beauty between my soul and the dim crags of
Agiocochook up there in the clouds.  Every man, when this is told,
hearkens with joy, and yet his own conversation with nature is still
unsung.

        Is it otherwise with civil history?  Is it not the lesson of
our experience that every man, were life long enough, would write
history for himelf?  What else do these volumes of extracts and
manuscript commentaries, that every scholar writes, indicate?  Greek
history is one thing to me; another to you.  Since the birth of
Niebuhr and Wolf, Roman and Greek History have been written anew.
Since Carlyle wrote French History, we see that no history, that we
have, is safe, but a new classifier shall give it new and more
philosophical arrangement.  Thucydides, Livy, have only provided
materials.  The moment a man of genius pronounces the name of the
Pelasgi, of Athens, of the Etrurian, of the Roman people, we see
their state under a new aspect.  As in poetry and history, so in the
other departments.  There are few masters or none.  Religion is yet
to be settled on its fast foundations in the breast of man; and
politics, and philosophy, and letters, and art.  As yet we have
nothing but tendency and indication.

        This starting, this warping of the best literary works from the
adamant of nature, is especially observable in philosophy.  Let it
take what tone of pretension it will, to this complexion must it
come, at last.  Take, for example, the French Eclecticism, which
Cousin esteems so conclusive; there is an optical illusion in it.  It
avows great pretensions.  It looks as if they had all truth, in
taking all the systems, and had nothing to do, but to sift and wash
and strain, and the gold and diamonds would remain in the last
colander.  But, Truth is such a flyaway, such a slyboots, so
untransportable and unbarrelable a commodity, that it is as bad to
catch as light.  Shut the shutters never so quick, to keep all the
light in, it is all in vain; it is gone before you can cry, Hold.
And so it happens with our philosophy.  Translate, collate, distil
all the systems, it steads you nothing; for truth will not be
compelled, in any mechanical manner.  But the first observation you
make, in the sincere act of your nature, though on the veriest
trifle, may open a new view of nature and of man, that, like a
menstruum, shall dissolve all theories in it; shall take up Greece,
Rome, Stoicism, Eclecticism, and what not, as mere data and food for
analysis, and dispose of your world-containing system, as a very
little unit.  A profound thought, anywhere, classifies all things: a
profound thought will lift Olympus.  The book of philosophy is only a
fact, and no more inspiring fact than another, and no less; but a
wise man will never esteem it anything final and transcending.  Go
and talk with a man of genius, and the first word he utters, sets all
your so-called knowledge afloat and at large.  Then Plato, Bacon,
Kant, and the Eclectic Cousin, condescend instantly to be men and
mere facts.

        I by no means aim, in these remarks, to disparage the merit of
these or of any existing compositions; I only say that any particular
portraiture does not in any manner exclude or fore-stall a new
attempt, but, when considered by the soul, warps and shrinks away.
The inundation of the spirit sweeps away before it all our little
architecture of wit and memory, as straws and straw-huts before the
torrent.  Works of the intellect are great only by comparison with
each other; Ivanhoe and Waverley compared with Castle Radcliffe and
the Porter novels; but nothing is great, -- not mighty Homer and
Milton, -- beside the infinite Reason.  It carries them away as a
flood.  They are as a sleep.

        Thus is justice done to each generation and individual, --
wisdom teaching man that he shall not hate, or fear, or mimic his
ancestors; that he shall not bewail himself, as if the world was old,
and thought was spent, and he was born into the dotage of things;
for, by virtue of the Deity, thought renews itself inexhaustibly
every day, and the thing whereon it shines, though it were dust and
sand, is a new subject with countless relations.

        III. Having thus spoken of the resources and the subject of the
scholar, out of the same faith proceeds also the rule of his ambition
and life.  Let him know that the world is his, but he must possess it
by putting himself into harmony with the constitution of things.  He
must be a solitary, laborious, modest, and charitable soul.

        He must embrace solitude as a bride.  He must have his glees
and his glooms alone.  His own estimate must be measure enough, his
own praise reward enough for him.  And why must the student be
solitary and silent?  That he may become acquainted with his
thoughts.  If he pines in a lonely place, hankering for the crowd,
for display, he is not in the lonely place; his heart is in the
market; he does not see; he does not hear; he does not think.  But go
cherish your soul; expel companions; set your habits to a life of
solitude; then, will the faculties rise fair and full within, like
forest trees and field flowers; you will have results, which, when
you meet your fellow-men, you can communicate, and they will gladly
receive.  Do not go into solitude only that you may presently come
into public.  Such solitude denies itself; is public and stale.  The
public can get public experience, but they wish the scholar to
replace to them those private, sincere, divine experiences, of which
they have been defrauded by dwelling in the street.  It is the noble,
manlike, just thought, which is the superiority demanded of you, and
not crowds but solitude confers this elevation.  Not insulation of
place, but independence of spirit is essential, and it is only as the
garden, the cottage, the forest, and the rock, are a sort of
mechanical aids to this, that they are of value.  Think alone, and
all places are friendly and sacred.  The poets who have lived in
cities have been hermits still.  Inspiration makes solitude anywhere.
Pindar, Raphael, Angelo, Dryden, De Stael, dwell in crowds, it may
be, but the instant thought comes, the crowd grows dim to their eye;
their eye fixes on the horizon, -- on vacant space; they forget the
bystanders; they spurn personal relations; they deal with
abstractions, with verities, with ideas.  They are alone with the
mind.

        Of course, I would not have any superstition about solitude.
Let the youth study the uses of solitude and of society.  Let him use
both, not serve either.  The reason why an ingenious soul shuns
society, is to the end of finding society.  It repudiates the false,
out of love of the true.  You can very soon learn all that society
can teach you for one while.  Its foolish routine, an indefinite
multiplication of balls, concerts, rides, theatres, can teach you no
more than a few can.  Then accept the hint of shame, of spiritual
emptiness and waste, which true nature gives you, and retire, and
hide; lock the door; shut the shutters; then welcome falls the
imprisoning rain, -- dear hermitage of nature.  Re-collect the
spirits.  Have solitary prayer and praise.  Digest and correct the
past experience; and blend it with the new and divine life.

        You will pardon me, Gentlemen, if I say, I think that we have
need of a more rigorous scholastic rule; such an asceticism, I mean,
as only the hardihood and devotion of the scholar himself can
enforce.  We live in the sun and on the surface, -- a thin,
plausible, superficial existence, and talk of muse and prophet, of
art and creation.  But out of our shallow and frivolous way of life,
how can greatness ever grow?  Come now, let us go and be dumb.  Let
us sit with our hands on our mouths, a long, austere, Pythagorean
lustrum.  Let us live in corners, and do chores, and suffer, and
weep, and drudge, with eyes and hearts that love the Lord.  Silence,
seclusion, austerity, may pierce deep into the grandeur and secret of
our being, and so diving, bring up out of secular darkness, the
sublimities of the moral constitution.  How mean to go blazing, a
gaudy butterfly, in fashionable or political saloons, the fool of
society, the fool of notoriety, a topic for newspapers, a piece of
the street, and forfeiting the real prerogative of the russet coat,
the privacy, and the true and warm heart of the citizen!

        Fatal to the man of letters, fatal to man, is the lust of
display, the seeming that unmakes our being.  A mistake of the main
end to which they labor, is incident to literary men, who, dealing
with the organ of language, -- the subtlest, strongest, and
longest-lived of man's creations, and only fitly used as the weapon
of thought and of justice, -- learn to enjoy the pride of playing
with this splendid engine, but rob it of its almightiness by failing
to work with it.  Extricating themselves from the tasks of the world,
the world revenges itself by exposing, at every turn, the folly of
these incomplete, pedantic, useless, ghostly creatures.  The scholar
will feel, that the richest romance, -- the noblest fiction that was
ever woven, -- the heart and soul of beauty, -- lies enclosed in
human life.  Itself of surpassing value, it is also the richest
material for his creations.  How shall he know its secrets of
tenderness, of terror, of will, and of fate?  How can he catch and
keep the strain of upper music that peals from it?  Its laws are
concealed under the details of daily action.  All action is an
experiment upon them.  He must bear his share of the common load.  He
must work with men in houses, and not with their names in books.  His
needs, appetites, talents, affections, accomplishments, are keys that
open to him the beautiful museum of human life.  Why should he read
it as an Arabian tale, and not know, in his own beating bosom, its
sweet and smart?  Out of love and hatred, out of earnings, and
borrowings, and lendings, and losses; out of sickness and pain; out
of wooing and worshipping; out of travelling, and voting, and
watching, and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition
in the serene and beautiful laws.  Let him not slur his lesson; let
him learn it by heart.  Let him endeavor exactly, bravely, and
cheerfully, to solve the problem of that life which is set before
_him_.  And this, by punctual action, and not by promises or dreams.
Believing, as in God, in the presence and favor of the grandest
influences, let him deserve that favor, and learn how to receive and
use it, by fidelity also to the lower observances.

        This lesson is taught with emphasis in the life of the great
actor of this age, and affords the explanation of his success.
Bonaparte represents truly a great recent revolution, which we in
this country, please God, shall carry to its farthest consummation.
Not the least instructive passage in modern history, seems to me a
trait of Napoleon, exhibited to the English when he became their
prisoner.  On coming on board the Bellerophon, a file of English
soldiers drawn up on deck, gave him a military salute.  Napoleon
observed, that their manner of handling their arms differed from the
French exercise, and, putting aside the guns of those nearest him,
walked up to a soldier, took his gun, and himself went through the
motion in the French mode.  The English officers and men looked on
with astonishment, and inquired if such familiarity was usual with
the Emperor.

        In this instance, as always, that man, with whatever defects or
vices, represented performance in lieu of pretension.  Feudalism and
Orientalism had long enough thought it majestic to do nothing; the
modern majesty consists in work.  He belonged to a class, fast
growing in the world, who think, that what a man can do is his
greatest ornament, and that he always consults his dignity by doing
it.  He was not a believer in luck; he had a faith, like sight, in
the application of means to ends.  Means to ends, is the motto of all
his behavior.  He believed that the great captains of antiquity
performed their exploits only by correct combinations, and by justly
comparing the relation between means and consequences; efforts and
obstacles.  The vulgar call good fortune that which really is
produced by the calculations of genius.  But Napoleon, thus faithful
to facts, had also this crowning merit; that, whilst he believed in
number and weight, and omitted no part of prudence, he believed also
in the freedom and quite incalculable force of the soul.  A man of
infinite caution, he neglected never the least particular of
preparation, of patient adaptation; yet nevertheless he had a sublime
confidence, as in his all, in the sallies of the courage, and the
faith in his destiny, which, at the right moment, repaired all
losses, and demolished cavalry, infantry, king, and kaisar, as with
irresistible thunderbolts.  As they say the bough of the tree has the
character of the leaf, and the whole tree of the bough, so, it is
curious to remark, Bonaparte's army partook of this double strength
of the captain; for, whilst strictly supplied in all its
appointments, and everything expected from the valor and discipline
of every platoon, in flank and centre, yet always remained his total
trust in the prodigious revolutions of fortune, which his reserved
Imperial Guard were capable of working, if, in all else, the day was
lost.  Here he was sublime.  He no longer calculated the chance of
the cannon-ball.  He was faithful to tactics to the uttermost, -- and
when all tactics had come to an end, then, he dilated, and availed
himself of the mighty saltations of the most formidable soldiers in
nature.

        Let the scholar appreciate this combination of gifts, which,
applied to better purpose, make true wisdom.  He is a revealer of
things.  Let him first learn the things.  Let him not, too eager to
grasp some badge of reward, omit the work to be done.  Let him know,
that, though the success of the market is in the reward, true success
is the doing; that, in the private obedience to his mind; in the
sedulous inquiry, day after day, year after year, to know how the
thing stands; in the use of all means, and most in the reverence of
the humble commerce and humble needs of life, -- to hearken what
_they_ say, and so, by mutual reaction of thought and life, to make
thought solid, and life wise; and in a contempt for the gabble of
to-day's opinions, the secret of the world is to be learned, and the
skill truly to unfold it is acquired.  Or, rather, is it not, that,
by this discipline, the usurpation of the senses is overcome, and the
lower faculties of man are subdued to docility; through which, as an
unobstructed channel, the soul now easily and gladly flows?

        The good scholar will not refuse to bear the yoke in his youth;
to know, if he can, the uttermost secret of toil and endurance; to
make his own hands acquainted with the soil by which he is fed, and
the sweat that goes before comfort and luxury.  Let him pay his
tithe, and serve the world as a true and noble man; never forgetting
to worship the immortal divinities, who whisper to the poet, and make
him the utterer of melodies that pierce the ear of eternal time.  If
he have this twofold goodness, -- the drill and the inspiration, --
then he has health; then he is a whole, and not a fragment; and the
perfection of his endowment will appear in his compositions.  Indeed,
this twofold merit characterizes ever the productions of great
masters.  The man of genius should occupy the whole space between God
or pure mind, and the multitude of uneducated men.  He must draw from
the infinite Reason, on one side; and he must penetrate into the
heart and sense of the crowd, on the other.  From one, he must draw
his strength; to the other, he must owe his aim.  The one yokes him
to the real; the other, to the apparent.  At one pole, is Reason; at
the other, Common Sense.  If he be defective at either extreme of the
scale, his philosophy will seem low and utilitarian; or it will
appear too vague and indefinite for the uses of life.

        The student, as we all along insist, is great only by being
passive to the superincumbent spirit.  Let this faith, then, dictate
all his action.  Snares and bribes abound to mislead him; let him be
true nevertheless.  His success has its perils too.  There is
somewhat inconvenient and injurious in his position.  They whom his
thoughts have entertained or inflamed, seek him before yet they have
learned the hard conditions of thought.  They seek him, that he may
turn his lamp on the dark riddles whose solution they think is
inscribed on the walls of their being.  They find that he is a poor,
ignorant man, in a white-seamed, rusty coat, like themselves, no wise
emitting a continuous stream of light, but now and then a jet of
luminous thought, followed by total darkness; moreover, that he
cannot make of his infrequent illumination a portable taper to carry
whither he would, and explain now this dark riddle, now that.  Sorrow
ensues.  The scholar regrets to damp the hope of ingenuous boys; and
the youth has lost a star out of his new flaming firmament.  Hence
the temptation to the scholar to mystify; to hear the question; to
sit upon it; to make an answer of words, in lack of the oracle of
things.  Not the less let him be cold and true, and wait in patience,
knowing that truth can make even silence eloquent and memorable.
Truth shall be policy enough for him.  Let him open his breast to all
honest inquiry, and be an artist superior to tricks of art.  Show
frankly as a saint would do, your experience, methods, tools, and
means.  Welcome all comers to the freest use of the same.  And out of
this superior frankness and charity, you shall learn higher secrets
of your nature, which gods will bend and aid you to communicate.

        If, with a high trust, he can thus submit himself, he will find
that ample returns are poured into his bosom, out of what seemed
hours of obstruction and loss.  Let him not grieve too much on
account of unfit associates.  When he sees how much thought he owes
to the disagreeable antagonism of various persons who pass and cross
him, he can easily think that in a society of perfect sympathy, no
word, no act, no record, would be.  He will learn, that it is not
much matter what he reads, what he does.  Be a scholar, and he shall
have the scholar's part of every thing.  As, in the counting-room,
the merchant cares little whether the cargo be hides or barilla; the
transaction, a letter of credit or a transfer of stocks; be it what
it may, his commission comes gently out of it; so you shall get your
lesson out of the hour, and the object, whether it be a concentrated
or a wasteful employment, even in reading a dull book, or working off
a stint of mechanical day labor, which your necessities or the
necessities of others impose.

        Gentlemen, I have ventured to offer you these considerations
upon the scholar's place, and hope, because I thought, that,
standing, as many of you now do, on the threshold of this College,
girt and ready to go and assume tasks, public and private, in your
country, you would not be sorry to be admonished of those primary
duties of the intellect, whereof you will seldom hear from the lips
of your new companions.  You will hear every day the maxims of a low
prudence.  You will hear, that the first duty is to get land and
money, place and name.  `What is this Truth you seek? what is this
Beauty?' men will ask, with derision.  If, nevertheless, God have
called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be
true.  When you shall say, `As others do, so will I: I renounce, I am
sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land, and
let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient
season;' -- then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds
of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a
thousand thousand men.  The hour of that choice is the crisis of your
history; and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect.  It is
this domineering temper of the sensual world, that creates the
extreme need of the priests of science; and it is the office and
right of the intellect to make and not take its estimate.  Bend to
the persuasion which is flowing to you from every object in nature,
to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to show the besotted world
how passing fair is wisdom.  Forewarned that the vice of the times
and the country is an excessive pretension, let us seek the shade,
and find wisdom in neglect.  Be content with a little light, so it be
your own.  Explore, and explore.  Be neither chided nor flattered out
of your position of perpetual inquiry.  Neither dogmatize, nor accept
another's dogmatism.  Why should you renounce your right to traverse
the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre,
house, and barn?  Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board.  Make
yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and
if not store of it, yet such as shall not takeaway your property in
all men's possessions, in all men's affections, in art, in nature,
and in hope.

        You will not fear, that I am enjoining too stern an asceticism.
Ask not, Of what use is a scholarship that systematically retreats?
or, Who is the better for the philosopher who conceals his
accomplishments, and hides his thoughts from the waiting world?
Hides his thoughts!  Hide the sun and moon.  Thought is all light,
and publishes itself to the universe.  It will speak, though you were
dumb, by its own miraculous organ.  It will flow out of your actions,
your manners, and your face.  It will bring you friendships.  It will
impledge you to truth by the love and expectation of generous minds.
By virtue of the laws of that Nature, which is one and perfect, it
shall yield every sincere good that is in the soul, to the scholar
beloved of earth and heaven.

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