Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). The Complete Works. 1904.
Vol. I. Nature, Addresses and Lectures
II. Power
T
All successful men have agreed in one thing,—they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things. A belief in causality, or strict connection between every pulse-beat and the principle of being, and, in consequence, belief in compensation, or that nothing is got for nothing,—characterizes all valuable minds, and must control every effort that is made by an industrious one. The most valiant men are the best believers in the tension of the laws. “All the great captains,” said Bonaparte, “have performed vast achievements by conforming with the rules of the art,—by adjusting efforts to obstacles.”
The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe; the key to all ages is—Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men at all times, and even in heroes in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom and fear. This gives force to the strong,—that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.
We must reckon success a constitutional trait. Courage, the old physicians taught (and their meaning holds, if their physiology is a little mythical),—courage, or the degree of life, is as the degree of circulation of the blood in the arteries. “During passion, anger, fury, trials of strength, wrestling, fighting, a large amount of blood is collected in the arteries, the maintenance of bodily strength requiring it, and but little is sent into the veins. This condition is constant with intrepid persons.” Where the arteries hold their blood, is courage and adventure possible. Where they pour it unrestrained into the veins, the spirit is low and feeble. For performance of great mark, it needs extraordinary health. If Eric is in robust health, and has slept well, and is at the top of his condition, and thirty years old, at his departure from Greenland he will steer west, and his ships will reach Newfoundland. But take out Eric and put in a stronger and bolder man,—Biorn, or Thorfin,—and the ships will, with just as much ease, sail six hundred, one thousand, fifteen hundred miles further, and reach Labrador and New England. There is no chance in results. With adults, as with children, one class enter cordially into the game and whirl with the whirling world; the others have cold hands and remain bystanders; or are only dragged in by the humor and vivacity of those who can carry a dead weight. The first wealth is health. Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve any one: it must husband its resources to live. But health or fulness answers its own ends and has to spare, runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men’s necessities.
All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world. The mind that is parallel with the laws of nature will be in the current of events and strong with their strength. One man is made of the same stuff of which events are made; is in sympathy with the course of things; can predict it. Whatever befalls, befalls him first; so that he is equal to whatever shall happen. A man who knows men, can talk well on politics, trade, law, war, religion. For everywhere men are led in the same manners.
The advantage of a strong pulse is not to be supplied by any labor, art or concert. It is like the climate, which easily rears a crop which no glass, or irrigation, or tillage, or manures can elsewhere rival. It is like the opportunity of a city like New York or Constantinople, which needs no diplomacy to force capital or genius or labor to it. They come of themselves, as the waters flow to it. So a broad, healthy, massive understanding seems to lie on the shore of unseen rivers, of unseen oceans, which are covered with barks that night and day are drifted to this point. That is poured into its lap which other men lie plotting for. It is in everybody’s secret; anticipates everybody’s discovery; and if it do not command every fact of the genius and the scholar, it is because it is large and sluggish, and does not think them worth the exertion which you do.
This affirmative force is in one and is not in another, as one horse has the spring in him, and another in the whip. “On the neck of the young man,” said Hafiz, “sparkles no gem so gracious as enterprise.” Import into any stationary district, as into an old Dutch population in New York or Pennsylvania, or among the planters of Virginia, a colony of hardy Yankees, with seething brains, heads full of steam-hammer, pulley, crank and toothed wheel,—and everything begins to shine with values. What enhancement to all the water and land in England is the arrival of James Watt or Brunel! In every company there is not only the active and passive sex, but in both men and women a deeper and more important sex of mind, namely the inventive or creative class of both men and women, and the uninventive or accepting class. Each plus man represents his set, and if he have the accidental advantage of personal ascendency,—which implies neither more nor less of talent, but merely the temperamental or taming eye of a soldier or a schoolmaster (which one has, and one has not, as one has a black mustache and one a blond),—then quite easily and without envy or resistance all his coadjutors and feeders will admit his right to absorb them. The merchant works by bookkeeper and cashier; the lawyer’s authorities are hunted up by clerks; the geologist reports the surveys of his subalterns; Commander Wilkes appropriates the results of all the naturalists attached to the Expedition; Thorwaldsen’s statue is finished by stone-cutters; Dumas has journeymen; and Shakspeare was theatre-manager and used the labor of many young men, as well as the playbooks.
There is always room for a man of force, and he makes room for many. Society is a troop of thinkers, and the best heads among them take the best places. A feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. His eye makes estates, as fast as the sun breeds clouds.
When a new boy comes into school, when a man travels and encounters strangers every day, or when into any old club a new-comer is domesticated,—that happens which befalls when a strange ox is driven into a pen or pasture where cattle are kept; there is at once a trial of strength between the best pair of horns and the new-comer, and it is settled thenceforth which is the leader. So now, there is a measuring of strength, very courteous but decisive, and an acquiescence thenceforward when these two meet. Each reads his fate in the other’s eyes. The weaker party finds that none of his information or wit quite fits the occasion. He thought he knew this or that; he finds that he omitted to learn the end of it. Nothing that he knows will quite hit the mark, whilst all the rival’s arrows are good, and well thrown. But if he knew all the facts in the encyclopedia, it would not help him; for this is an affair of presence of mind, of attitude, of aplomb: the opponent has the sun and wind, and, in every cast, the choice of weapon and mark; and when he himself is matched with some other antagonist, his own shafts fly well and hit. ’T is a question of stomach and constitution. The second man is as good as the first,—perhaps better; but has not stoutness or stomach, as the first has, and so his wit seems over-fine or under-fine.
Health is good,—power, life, that resists disease, poison and all enemies, and is conservative as well as creative. Here is question, every spring, whether to graft with wax, or whether with clay; whether to whitewash, or to potash, or to prune; but the one point is the thrifty tree. A good tree that agrees with the soil will grow in spite of blight, or bug, or pruning, or neglect, by night and by day, in all weathers and all treatments. Vivacity, leadership, must be had, and we are not allowed to be nice in choosing. We must fetch the pump with dirty water, if clean cannot be had. If we will make bread, we must have contagion, yeast, emptyings, or what not, to induce fermentation into the dough; as the torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine. And we have a certain instinct that where is great amount of life, though gross and peccant, it has its own checks and purifications, and will be found at last in harmony with moral laws.
We watch in children with pathetic interest the degree in which they possess recuperative force. When they are hurt by us, or by each other, or go to the bottom of the class, or miss the annual prizes, or are beaten in the game,—if they lose heart and remember the mischance in their chamber at home, they have a serious check. But if they have the buoyancy and resistance that preoccupies them with new interest in the new moment,—the wounds cicatrize and the fibre is the tougher for the hurt.
One comes to value this plus health when he sees that all difficulties vanish before it. A timid man, listening to the alarmists in Congress and in the newspapers, and observing the profligacy of party,—sectional interests urged with a fury which shuts its eyes to consequences, with a mind made up to desperate extremities, ballot in one hand and rifle in the other,—might easily believe that he and his country have seen their best days, and he hardens himself the best he can against the coming ruin. But after this has been foretold with equal confidence fifty times, and government six per cents have not declined a quarter of a mill, he discovers that the enormous elements of strength which are here in play make our politics unimportant. Personal power, freedom, and the resources of nature strain every faculty of every citizen. We prosper with such vigor that like thrifty trees, which grow in spite of ice, lice, mice and borers, so we do not suffer from the profligate swarms that fatten on the national treasury. The huge animals nourish huge parasites, and the rancor of the disease attests the strength of the constitution. The same energy in the Greek Demos drew the remark that the evils of popular government appear greater than they are; there is compensation for them in the spirit and energy it awakens. The rough-and-ready style which belongs to a people of sailors, foresters, farmers and mechanics, has its advantages. Power educates the potentate. As long as our people quote English standards they dwarf their own proportions. A Western lawyer of eminence said to me he wished it were a penal offence to bring an English law-book into a court in this country, so pernicious had he found in his experience our deference to English precedent. The very word ‘commerce’ has only an English meaning, and is pinched to the cramp exigencies of English experience. The commerce of rivers, the commerce of railroads, and who knows but the commerce of air-balloons, must add an American extension to the pond-hole of admiralty. As long as our people quote English standards they will miss the sovereignty of power; but let these rough riders—legislators in shirt-sleeves, Hoosier, Sucker, Wolverine, Badger, or whatever hard head Arkansas, Oregon or Utah sends, half orator, half assassin, to represent its wrath and cupidity at Washington,—let these drive as they may, and the disposition of territories and public lands, the necessity of balancing and keeping at bay the snarling majorities of German, Irish and of native millions, will bestow promptness, address and reason, at last, on our buffalo-hunter, and authority and majesty of manners. The instinct of the people is right. Men expect from good whigs put into office by the respectability of the country, much less skill to deal with Mexico, Spain, Britain, or with our own malcontent members, than from some strong transgressor, like Jefferson or Jackson, who first conquers his own government and then uses the same genius to conquer the foreigner. The senators who dissented from Mr. Polk’s Mexican war were not those who knew better, but those who from political position could afford it; not Webster, but Benton and Calhoun.
This power, to be sure, is not clothed in satin. ’T is the power of Lynch law, of soldiers and pirates; and it bullies the peaceable and loyal. But it brings its own antidote; and here is my point,—that all kinds of power usually emerge at the same time; good energy and bad; power of mind with physical health; the ecstasies of devotion with the exasperations of debauchery. The same elements are always present, only sometimes these conspicuous, and sometimes those; what was yesterday foreground, being to-day background;—what was surface, playing now a not less effective part as basis. The longer the drought lasts the more is the atmosphere surcharged with water. The faster the ball falls to the sun, the force to fly off is by so much augmented. And in morals, wild liberty breeds iron conscience; natures with great impulses have great resources, and return from far. In politics, the sons of democrats will be whigs; whilst red republicanism in the father is a spasm of nature to engender an intolerable tyrant in the next age. On the other hand, conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.
Those who have most of this coarse energy—the ‘bruisers,’ who have run the gauntlet of caucus and tavern through the country or the state—have their own vices, but they have the good nature of strength and courage. Fierce and unscrupulous, they are usually frank and direct and above falsehood. Our politics fall into bad hands, and churchmen and men of refinement, it seems agreed, are not fit persons to send to Congress. Politics is a deleterious profession, like some poisonous handicrafts. Men in power have no opinions, but may be had cheap for any opinion, for any purpose; and if it be only a question between the most civil and the most forcible, I lean to the last. These Hoosiers and Suckers are really better than the snivelling opposition. Their wrath is at least of a bold and manly cast. They see, against the unanimous declarations of the people, how much crime the people will bear; they proceed from step to step, and they have calculated but too justly upon their Excellencies the New England governors, and upon their Honors the New England legislators. The messages of the governors and the resolutions of the legislatures are a proverb for expressing a sham virtuous indignation, which, in the course of events, is sure to be belied.
In trade also this energy usually carries a trace of ferocity. Philanthropic and religious bodies do not commonly make their executive officers out of saints. The communities hitherto founded by socialists,—the Jesuits, the Port-Royalists, the American communities at New Harmony, at Brook Farm, at Zoar, are only possible by installing Judas as steward. The rest of the offices may be filled by good burgesses. The pious and charitable proprietor has a foreman not quite so pious and charitable. The most amiable of country gentlemen has a certain pleasure in the teeth of the bull-dog which guards his orchard. Of the Shaker society it was formerly a sort of proverb in the country that they always sent the devil to market. And in representations of the Deity, painting, poetry, and popular religion have ever drawn the wrath from Hell. It is an esoteric doctrine of society that a little wickedness is good to make muscle; as if conscience were not good for hands and legs; as if poor decayed formalists of law and order cannot run like wild goats, wolves, and conies; that as there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues; that public spirit and the ready hand are as well found among the malignants. ’T is not very rare, the coincidence of sharp private and political practice with public spirit and good neighborhood. I knew a burly Boniface who for many years kept a public-house in one of our rural capitals. He was a knave whom the town could ill spare. He was a social, vascular creature, grasping and selfish. There was no crime which he did not or could not commit. But he made good friends of the selectmen, served them with his best chop when they supped at his house, and also with his honor the Judge he was very cordial, grasping his hand. He introduced all the fiends, male and female, into the town, and united in his person the functions of bully, incendiary, swindler, barkeeper, and burglar. He girdled the trees and cut off the horses’ tails of the temperance people, in the night. He led the ‘rummies’ and radicals in town-meeting with a speech. Meantime he was civil, fat, and easy, in his house, and precisely the most public-spirited citizen. He was active in getting the roads repaired and planted with shade-trees; he subscribed for the fountains, the gas, and the telegraph; he introduced the new horse-rake, the new scraper, the baby-jumper, and what not, that Connecticut sends to the admiring citizens. He did this the easier that the peddler stopped at his house, and paid his keeping by setting up his new trap on the landlord’s premises.
Whilst thus the energy for originating and executing work deforms itself by excess, and so our axe chops off our own fingers,—this evil is not without remedy. All the elements whose aid man calls in will sometimes become his masters, especially those of most subtle force. Shall he then renounce steam, fire and electricity, or shall he learn to deal with them? The rule for this whole class of agencies is,—all plus is good; only put it in the right place.
Men of this surcharge of arterial blood cannot live on nuts, herb-tea, and elegies; cannot read novels and play whist; cannot satisfy all their wants at the Thursday Lecture or the Boston Athenæum. They pine for adventure, and must go to Pike’s Peak; had rather die by the hatchet of a Pawnee than sit all day and every day at a counting-room desk. They are made for war, for the sea, for mining, hunting and clearing; for hair-breadth adventures, huge risks and the joy of eventful living. Some men cannot endure an hour of calm at sea. I remember a poor Malay cook on board a Liverpool packet, who, when the wind blew a gale, could not contain his joy; “Blow!” he cried, “me do tell you, blow!” Their friends and governors must see that some vent for their explosive complexion is provided. The roisters who are destined for infamy at home, if sent to Mexico will “cover you with glory,” and come back heroes and generals. There are Oregons, Californias and Exploring Expeditions enough appertaining to America to find them in files to gnaw and in crocodiles to eat. The young English are fine animals, full of blood, and when they have no wars to breathe their riotous valors in, they seek for travels as dangerous as war, diving into Maelstroms; swimming Hellesponts; wading up the snowy Himmaleh; hunting lion, rhinoceros, elephant, in South Africa; gypsying with Borrow in Spain and Algiers; riding alligators in South America with Waterton; utilizing Bedouin, Sheik and Pacha, with Layard; yachting among the icebergs of Lancaster Sound; peeping into craters on the equator; or running on the creases of Malays in Borneo.
The excess of virility has the same importance in general history as in private and industrial life. Strong race or strong individual rests at last on natural forces, which are best in the savage, who, like the beasts around him, is still in reception of the milk from the teats of Nature. Cut off the connection between any of our works and this aboriginal source, and the work is shallow. The people lean on this, and the mob is not quite so bad an argument as we sometimes say, for it has this good side. “March without the people,” said a French deputy from the tribune, “and you march into night: their instincts are a finger-pointing of Providence, always turned toward real benefit. But when you espouse an Orleans party, or a Bourbon or a Montalembert party, or any other but an organic party, though you mean well, you have a personality instead of a principle, which will inevitably drag you into a corner.”
The best anecdotes of this force are to be had from savage life, in explorers, soldiers and buccaneers. But who cares for fallings-out of assassins and fights of bears or grindings of ice-bergs? Physical force has no value where there is nothing else. Snow in snow-banks, fire in volanoes and solfataras is cheap. The luxury of ice is in tropical countries and midsummer days. The luxury of fire is to have a little on our hearth; and of electricity, not volleys of the charged cloud, but the manageable stream on the battery-wires. So of spirit, or energy; the rests or remains of it in the civil and moral man are worth all the cannibals in the Pacific.
In history the great moment is when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty:—and you have Pericles and Phidias, not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astringency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.
The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated: the compression and tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war.
We say that success is constitutional; depends on a plus condition of mind and body, on power of work, on courage; that it is of main efficacy in carrying on the world, and though rarely found in the right state for an article of commerce, but oftener in the super-saturate or excess which makes it dangerous and destructive,—yet it cannot be spared, and must be had in that form, and absorbents provided to take off its edge.
The affirmative class monopolize the homage of mankind. They originate and execute all the great feats. What a force was coiled up in the skull of Napoleon! Of the sixty thousand men making his army at Eylau, it seems some thirty thousand were thieves and burglars. The men whom in peaceful communities we hold if we can with iron at their legs, in prisons, under the muskets of sentinels,—this man dealt with hand to hand, dragged them to their duty, and won his victories by their bayonets.
This aboriginal might gives a surprising pleasure when it appears under conditions of supreme refinement, as in the proficients in high art. When Michel Angelo was forced to paint the Sistine Chapel in fresco, of which art he knew nothing, he went down into the Pope’s gardens behind the Vatican, and with a shovel dug out ochres, red and yellow, mixed them with glue and water with his own hands, and having after many trials at last suited himself, climbed his ladders, and painted away, week after week, month after month, the sibyls and prophets. He surpassed his successors in rough vigor, as much as in purity of intellect and refinement. He was not crushed by his one picture left unfinished at last. Michel was wont to draw his figures first in skeleton, then to clothe them with flesh, and lastly to drape them. “Ah!” said a brave painter to me, thinking on these things, “if a man has failed, you will find he has dreamed instead of working. There is no way to success in our art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.”
Success goes thus invariably with a certain plus or positive power: an ounce of power must balance an ounce of weight. And though a man cannot return into his mother’s womb and be born with new amounts of vivacity, yet there are two economies which are the best succedanea which the case admits. The first is the stopping off decisively our miscellaneous activity and concentrating our force on one or a few points; as the gardener, by severe pruning, forces the sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs, instead of suffering it to spindle into a sheaf of twigs.
“Enlarge not thy destiny,” said the oracle, “endeavor not to do more than is given thee in charge.” The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation; and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work. Friends, books, pictures, lower duties, talents, flatteries, hopes,—all are distractions which cause oscillations in our giddy balloon, and make a good poise and a straight course impossible. You must elect your work; you shall take what your brain can, and drop all the rest. Only so can that amount of vital force accumulate which can make the step from knowing to doing. No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken. ’T is a step out of a chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness. Many an artist, lacking this, lacks all; he sees the masculine Angelo or Cellini with despair. He too is up to nature and the First Cause in his thought. But the spasm to collect and swing his whole being into one act, he has not. The poet Campbell said that “a man accustomed to work, was equal to any achievement he resolved on, and that for himself, necessity, not inspiration, was the prompter of his muse.”
Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs. One of the high anecdotes of the world is the reply of Newton to the inquiry “how he had been able to achieve his discoveries?”—“By always intending my mind.” Or if you will have a text from politics, take this from Plutarch: “There was, in the whole city, but one street in which Pericles was ever seen, the street which led to the market-place and the council house. He declined all invitations to banquets, and all gay assemblies and company. During the whole period of his administration he never dined at the table of a friend.” Or if we seek an example from trade,—“I hope,” said a good man to Rothschild, “your children are not too fond of money and business; I am sure you would not wish that.”—“I am sure I should wish that; I wish them to give mind, soul, heart and body to business,—that is the way to be happy. It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune, and when you have got it, it requires ten times as much wit to keep it. If I were to listen to all the projects proposed to me, I should ruin myself very soon. Stick to one business, young man. Stick to your brewery (he said this to young Buxton), and you will be the great brewer of London. Be brewer, and banker, and merchant, and manufacturer, and you will soon be in the Gazette.”
Many men are knowing, many are apprehensive and tenacious, but they do not rush to a decision. But in our flowing affairs a decision must be made,—the best, if you can, but any is better than none. There are twenty ways of going to a point, and one is the shortest; but set out at once on one. A man who has that presence of mind which can bring to him on the instant all he knows, is worth for action a dozen men who know as much but can only bring it to light slowly. The good Speaker in the House is not the man who knows the theory of parliamentary tactics, but the man who decides off-hand. The good judge is not he who does hair-splitting justice to every allegation, but who, aiming at substantial justice, rules something intelligible for the guidance of suitors. The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily that he can get you out of a scrape. Dr. Johnson said, in one of his flowing sentences, “Miserable beyond all names of wretchedness is that unhappy pair, who are doomed to reduce beforehand to the principles of abstract reason all the details of each domestic day. There are cases where little can be said, and much must be done.”
The second substitute for temperament is drill, the power of use and routine. The hack is a better roadster than the Arab barb. In chemistry, the galvanic stream, slow but continuous, is equal in power to the electric spark, and is, in our arts, a better agent. So in human action, against the spasm of energy we offset the continuity of drill. We spread the same amount of force over much time, instead of condensing it into a moment. ’T is the same ounce of gold here in a ball, and there in a leaf. At West Point, Colonel Buford, the chief engineer, pounded with a hammer on the trunnions of a cannon until he broke them off. He fired a piece of ordnance some hundred times in swift succession, until it burst. Now which stroke broke the trunnion? Every stroke. Which blast burst the piece? Every blast. “Diligence passe sens,” Henry VIII. was wont to say, or great is drill. John Kemble said that the worst provincial company of actors would go through a play better than the best amateur company. Basil Hall likes to show that the worst regular troops will beat the best volunteers. Practice is nine tenths. A course of mobs is good practice for orators. All the great speakers were bad speakers at first. Stumping it through England for seven years made Cobden a consummate debater. Stumping it through New England for twice seven trained Wendell Phillips. The way to learn German is to read the same dozen pages over and over a hundred times, till you know every word and particle in them and can pronounce and repeat them by heart. No genius can recite a ballad at first reading so well as mediocrity can at the fifteenth or twentieth reading. The rule for hospitality and Irish ‘help’ is to have the same dinner every day throughout the year. At last, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy learns to cook it to a nicety, the host learns to carve it, and the guests are well served. A humorous friend of mine thinks that the reason why Nature is so perfect in her art, and gets up such inconceivably fine sunsets, is that she has learned how, at last, by dint of doing the same thing so very often. Cannot one converse better on a topic on which he has experience, than on one which is new? Men whose opinion is valued on ’Change are only such as have a special experience, and off that ground their opinion is not valuable. “More are made good by exercitation than by nature,” said Democritus. The friction in nature is so enormous that we cannot spare any power. It is not question to express our thought, to elect our way, but to overcome resistances of the medium and material in everything we do. Hence the use of drill, and the worthlessness of amateurs to cope with practitioners. Six hours every day at the piano, only to give facility of touch; six hours a day at painting, only to give command of the odious materials, oil, ochres and brushes. The masters say that they know a master in music, only by seeing the pose of the hands on the keys;—so difficult and vital an act is the command of the instrument. To have learned the use of the tools, by thousands of manipulations; to have learned the arts of reckoning, by endless adding and dividing, is the power of the mechanic and the clerk.
I remarked in England, in confirmation of a frequent experience at home, that in literary circles, the men of trust and consideration, book-makers, editors, university deans and professors, bishops too, were by no means men of the largest literary talent, but usually of a low and ordinary intellectuality, with a sort of mercantile activity and working talent. Indifferent hacks and mediocrities tower, by pushing their forces to a lucrative point or by working power, over multitudes of superior men, in Old as in New England.
I have not forgotten that there are sublime considerations which limit the value of talent and superficial success. We can easily over-praise the vulgar hero. There are sources on which we have not drawn. I know what I abstain from. I adjourn what I have to say on this topic to the chapters on Culture and Worship. But this force or spirit, being the means relied on by Nature for bringing the work of the day about,—as far as we attach importance to household life and the prizes of the world, we must respect that. And I hold that an economy may be applied to it; it is as much a subject of exact law and arithmetic as fluids and gases are; it may be husbanded or wasted; every man is efficient only as he is a container or vessel of this force, and never was any signal act or achievement in history but by this expenditure. This is not gold, but the gold-maker; not the fame, but the exploit.
If these forces and this husbandry are within reach of our will, and the laws of them can be read, we infer that all success and all conceivable benefit for man, is also, first or last, within his reach, and has its own sublime economies by which it may be attained. The world is mathematical, and has no casualty in all its vast and flowing curve. Success has no more eccentricity than the gingham and muslin we weave in our mills. I know no more affecting lesson to our busy, plotting New England brains, than to go into one of the factories with which we have lined all the watercourses in the States. A man hardly knows how much he is a machine until he begins to make telegraph, loom, press and locomotive, in his own image. But in these he is forced to leave out his follies and hindrances, so that when we go to the mill, the machine is more moral than we. Let a man dare go to a loom and see if he be equal to it. Let machine confront machine, and see how they come out. The world-mill is more complex than the calico-mill, and the architect stooped less. In the gingham-mill, a broken thread or a shred spoils the web through a piece of a hundred yards, and is traced back to the girl that wove it, and lessens her wages. The stockholder, on being shown this, rubs his hands with delight. Are you so cunning, Mr. Profitloss, and do you expect to swindle your master and employer, in the web you weave? A day is a more magnificent cloth than any muslin, the mechanism that makes it is infinitely cunninger, and you shall not conceal the sleezy, fraudulent, rotten hours you have slipped into the piece; nor fear that any honest thread, or straighter steel, or more inflexible shaft, will not testify in the web.