Chapter XIV: The Quiet Revolutionist

“_The Past has baked my loaf, and in the strength of its bread I break up the old oven._”

--EMERSON’S JOURNAL.

It is not easy for some people to understand Emerson’s attitude toward the revolutionary forces that are all the time threatening the stability of society. One can appreciate the fierce energy of the revolutionist who, believing that the social structure is altogether bad, seeks to destroy it. On the other hand, there are those who look with alarm at every project that involves radical change.

But here was a quiet householder who habitually uttered the most revolutionary sentiments as if they were the most natural thoughts in the world. Of course the institutions which we see around us are not permanent. They are not the real things with which we have to do. They are the results of what took place yesterday; they are yielding to what is taking place to-day. The only reality is the force which makes and unmakes them. Laws, customs, constitutions, churches, are the results of the revolutionary impulse in man. They are the temporary embodiments of restless thought. Everything follows thought. You think of armies, and priesthoods, and courts of justice, as necessities. Yes, they are necessities of thought. Change the thought and they change their form. The temple that seems to have grown out of the solid earth has in reality grown out of the vague aspirations of the worshipper. It grew as the tree grows, through a power of working from within. It was built as the bird builds its nest, through an instinct which was irresistible.

“Know’st thou what wove yon woodbird’s nest
Of leaves, and feathers from her breast?
Or how the fish outbuilt her shell,
Painting with morn each annual cell?
Or how the sacred pine tree adds
To her old leaves new myriads?
Such and so grew these holy piles,
Whilst love and terror laid the tiles.
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon,
As the best gem upon her zone,
And morning opes with haste her lids
To gaze upon the Pyramids;
O’er England’s abbeys bends the sky,
As on its friends, with kindred eye;
For out of Thought’s interior sphere
There wonders rose to upper air.”

One might watch the face of a man in the act of thinking. As one thought follows another, the mobile features change. Nerves and muscles respond to the impulses from within. The lips curve now downward, now upward, the cheeks quiver, the eyes dilate and then close, tell-tale wrinkles appear upon the forehead, the chin grows firm and then is relaxed, the pose of the head is now defiant and again it droops. The man is lost in thought, and unconscious of how he appears. To him the thought is all.

Two painters may be watching him. One is a literalist. To him the pose and features are everything. He imagines himself to be a realist, and his ambition is to portray the man as he actually is. Now it is obviously impossible literally to put all the changing expressions on a single canvas. So what the painter does is to seize one attitude and treat it as if it were permanent. The result is something hard and unyielding. We recognize the likeness, but there is no suggestion of the possibility of a change of mood. It is not, as we say, a speaking likeness.

The other painter is a real artist. To him the features are quivering with expression, and the expression changes at every instant. He sees his subject as alive. The smile, the frown, the tense muscles all mean something. They indicate what the man is thinking about. The shape and poise of the head tell whether nature has endowed him with the capacity to have thoughts that are significant. The aim of the artist is first to get inside the man’s mind and then to interpret that mind through the outward features.

If he succeeds, we say his picture is alive. The limitation of his art demands that he shall present only the attitude of a single moment, but we perceive that attitude is about to change. He is in the act of doing something, and there is on our part a feeling of expectancy. The orator’s lips are mobile, he is about to speak. The soldier’s hand is on his sword, he is about to grasp it firmly and wield it with all his might. It is always the suggestion of something that is coming that marks the work of genius.

Now there are two ways of looking at human institutions,--from without or from within. We may look at laws and customs as if they were fixed and final. They are the features of a giant carved in stone. We may be idolaters of the existing order, worshipping the carved image. Or we may be iconoclasts, ready to give it a smashing blow.

But to one who seeks to look at it all from within, the institutions represent but the transitory glory of features of the Great Being. The Great Being is thinking, he is dreaming of things to come, he is planning his dwelling place upon earth. The thoughts come thick and fast, and the acts follow each after its kind.

Humanity, conceived of as a great composite being, of which we are parts, is all alive and quivering with aspiration. It is never satisfied with the work of its own hands, and it never gives up working. Thousands of human beings are at a given time impelled by one spirit, and cooperate to one end. Their actions are not rational in the sense that each individual is able to give a reason, or least the right reason, for what he does. And yet the process, looked at as a whole, is not irrational. There is some big thought behind it all, of which all the action is expressive. Give us time and we can see the outlines of the thought.

Humanity is thinking. It is storing up experience. It is a creative force. Even what we call matinalistic progress, is itself but the following of an idea.

“And what if Trade sow cities
Like shells along the shore,
And thatch with towns the prairie broad
With railways ironed o’er?
They are but sailing foam bells
Along Thought’s causing stream,
And take their shape and sun color
From him that sends the dream.”

The historian tells of the Roman Empire, Feudalism, the Crusades, the French Revolution. These are tremendous facts. But the facts mean nothing till we see them as the expression of successive states of mind. Royalty as an institution is incredible to the born democrat who is without imagination, and who does not take the trouble to ask how the loyal subject feels toward his anointed king. And democracy is an empty name to one who has never felt the thrill of the idea that lies behind it.

In looking back from the vantage ground of several centuries, it is possible to see how a generation of men may be obsessed by an idea that determines all their achievements. We may see that idea lose hold upon the mind of the next generation, and lo all the mighty works lose all interest. It is as if one moment we saw the face of the Great Being all aquiver with interest. Then suddenly the light fades and he turns away from the work of his own hands.

But it is not so easy to realize that the mighty works of our own day owe their existence, and depend for their security on the same transitory support of thought. They represent our present thinking, and when we come to think differently they will disappear.

“Ah,” but we say, “we go down to hard facts. We build upon the granite of actuality, not on anything so unsubstantial as mere thought.”

Emerson would answer. “You think of the granite mountain peak as unchanging. Ask the geologist to tell you what he knows about Monadnock. To him the mountain does not seem very old. Its present form is but a transitory thing. It is but a bubble upon the earth that is sailing through stars with all its history.”

The poet who has learned the lesson of geology hears the mountain confess its own instability.

“Let him heed who can and will;
Enchantment fixed me here
To stand the hurts of time, until
In loftier chant I disappear.
If thou trowest
How the chemic eddies play,
Pole to pole, and what they say;
And that these gray crags
Not on crags are hung,
But beads are of a rosary
On prayer and music strung;
And, credulous, through the granite seeming,
Seest the smile of Reason beaming;--
. . .
“Knowest thou this?
O pilgrim, wandering not amiss!
Already my rocks lie light,
And soon my cone will spin.”

Older than the mountain is the power from which it sprang. And that power is only interpreted by Thought.

“Monadnock is a mountain strong,
Tall and good my kind among;
But well I know, no mountain can,
Zion or Meru, measure with man.
For it is on zodiacs writ
Adamant is soft to wit:
And when the greater comes again
With my secret in his brain,
I shall pass, as glides my shadow
Daily over hill and meadow.”

“When the greater comes again.” That was what Emerson was always murmuring to himself. The greatness that he recognized was the greatness of thought.

He was therefore always eager to meet men who were dissatisfied with existing things and making plans for betterment. He received them hospitably, he listened sympathetically. That their schemes involved radical changes did not frighten him. It seemed to be in the order of nature.

But he always applied the same test. It was not enough that their proposal should be for something different. It must also be something greater, and the greater includes the less. When the greater thought comes, it shall make us understand and appreciate the good that already exists. It will make universal what is now partial. The “song of Human progress” he expresses in the song of nature.

“I wrote the past in characters
Of rock and fire the scroll,
The building of the coral sea,
The planting of the coal.

“Let war and trade and creeds and song
Blend, ripen race on race,
The sunburnt world a man shall breed
Of all the zones and countless days.

“No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,
My oldest force is good as new,
And the fresh rose on yonder thorn
Gives back the bending heavens in dew.”

Notice the way in which the view of nature and the hopes for human nature are blended. Out of a few ancient elements, nature is continually making new and amazing combinations. Nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed. The same conservation of energy he discerns in humanity. The elements of character are old as the race, but no one can prophesy what new perfection can be obtained from them.

One may see Emerson’s thought best by contrasting it with that of a poet whose mind turned toward the same subject. Wordsworth and Emerson both loved to personify nature, and in communion with nature they found refreshment of spirit. But Emerson, who was not accustomed to use terms of disparagement, sometimes spoke more harshly of Wordsworth than of any other modern English poet.

The fact was that the two men looked at nature with quite different eyes. To Wordsworth, nature was the arch conservative. Over against the vain commotion of humankind was the great brooding presence of a power that could be relied upon because it was ever the same. And after his first fever of revolutionary ardor, Wordsworth returned to nature as to a refuge from all innovations. Here was the calm of an established order, and the more nearly human institutions conformed to this stability, the better for them.

To Emerson, nature was not the symbol of what is unchanging; it was eager, flashing, evanescent, infinitely suggestive. It was never the same. When it seemed the same it was only because our eyes are so dull that we can not catch all the transitions.

And that which helps us in our contact with the natural world is not its soothing lullabys. It is the challenge which comes to join in the quick and rude play of the forces which are creating and recreating the world. Come out-of-doors, the voice cries, and know what it is to live.

“‘Bookworm, leave thy sloth urbane,
A greater spirit bids thee forth
Than the gray dreams that thee detain.
Mark how the climbing Oreads
Beckon thee to their arcades,
Youth, for a moment free as they,
Teach thy feet to feel the ground
Ere yet arrives the wintry day
When Time thy feet has bound.
Take the bounty of thy birth
Taste the Lordship of the earth.’

“I heard, and I obeyed,--
Assured that he who made the claim
Well known, but loving not a name,
Was not to be gainsaid.”

Nature does not rebuke our impatience when we break up old forms in order to make better. She is our accomplice, and conspires with us. We misrepresent her when we try to imitate her. Only in some stroke of originality do we accept her challenge. To see only repetition in nature is not to see at all.

“Alas, thine is the bankruptcy,
Blessed nature so to see.
“Behind thee leave thy merchandise,
Thy churches and thy charities,
And leave thy peacock wit behind.
Enough for thee the primal mind
That flows in streams, that breathes in wind.
Leave all thy pedant lore apart;
God hid the whole world in thy heart.
Love shuns the sage, the child it crowns,
Gives all to them who all renounce.
The rain comes when the wind calls,
The river knows the way to the sea,
Without a pilot it runs and falls,
Blessing all lands with its charity.
The sea tosses and foams to find
Its way up to the cloud and wind.
The shadow sits close to the flying ball,
The date fails not on the palm tree tall,
And thou,--go burn thy wormy pages,--
Shalt outsee seers and outwit sages.”

That which he saw in nature he saw in every human effort that was free and spontaneous. He loved to call it the _Newness_. The Newness is that “which reconciles impossibilities, atones for shortcomings, expiates sins or makes them virtues, buries in oblivion the crowded historical past, sinks religions, philosophies, persons to legends, reverses the score of opinion of fame, reduces science to opinion, and makes the thought of the moment the key to the universe and the egg of history to come.”

“The Divine Newness. Hoe and spade, sword and pen, pictures, gardens, laws, bibles and prizes, only they were means He sometimes used. So with astronomy, music, arithmetic, castes, feudalism--we kiss with devotion these hems of His garment. We mistake them for Him, they crumble in ashes on our lips.”

To the worshipper of the Divine Newness, there was nothing terrible in the voices of eager innovators, for innovation is in the order of nature, and “the good human race outlives them all, and forever in the heart abides the old sovereign sentiment requiring justice and good-will to all, and rebuilds the decayed temples, and with new names chants again the praises of Eternal Right.”

“The idea which now begins to agitate society has a wider scope than our daily employments, our households and the institutions of property. We are to revise the whole of our social structure, the state, the school, religion, marriage, trade, science, and explore their foundations in our own nature; we are to see that the world not only fitted the former men, but fits us, and to clear ourselves of every usage which has not its roots in our own mind. What is a man born for but to be a Reformer, a Re-maker of what man has made; a renouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good, imitating that great Nature which embosoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every hour repairs herself, yielding us every morning a new day, and with every pulsation a new life? Let him renounce everything which is not true to him, and put all his practices back on their first thoughts, and do nothing for which he has not the whole world for his reason. If there are inconveniences, and what is called ruin in the way, because we have so enervated and maimed ourselves, yet it would be like dying of perfumes to sink in the effort to re-attach the deeds of every day to the holy and mysterious recesses of life.”