Mr. President and Gentlemen:
I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and,
perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of
histories, tragedies, and odes, likethe ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the
Troubadours; nor for the advancement of science, like our contemporaries in the British and
European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love
of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign
of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be,
something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and
fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical
skill. Our day of dependence, or long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a
close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of
foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can
doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which
now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand
years?
In this hope I accept the topic which not only usage but the nature of our association seem to
prescribe to his day--the American Scholar. Year by year we come up hither to read one more
chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what light new days and events have thrown on his
character and his hopes.
It is one of those fables which out of an unknown antiquity convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that
the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as
the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.
The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, -- present to all
particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to
find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is
priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state these
functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work,
whilst each other performs his. The fable implies that the individual, to possess himself, must
sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But, unfortunately, this
original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely
subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of
society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so
many walking monsters,--a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.
Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into
the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees
his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm.
The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his
craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute-book;
the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship.
In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state he is Man
Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker,
or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his office is contained. Him Nature solicits
with all her placid, all her monitory pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites. Is not
indeed every man a student, and do not all things exist for the student's behoof? And, finally, is
not the true scholar the only true master? But the old oracle said, "All things have two handles:
beware of the wrong one." In life, too often, the scholar errs with mankind and forfeits his
privilege. Let us see him in his school, and consider him in reference to the main influences he
receives.
The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature.
Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, Night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass
grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all
men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to
him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of
God, but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose
beginning, whose ending, he never can find, -- so entire, so boundless. Far too as her splendors
shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without center, without
circumference, -- in the mass and in the particle, Nature hastens to render account of herself to the
mind. Classification begins. To the young mind every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and
by, it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand;
and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing
anomalies, discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote things cohere
and flower out from one stem. It presently learns that since the dawn of history there has been a
constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that
these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human
mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the
measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout
matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts. The
ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one after another reduces all strange
constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on forever to animate the last
fiber of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight.
Thus to him, to this schoolboy under the bending dome of day, is suggested that he and it proceed
from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is
that root? Is not that the soul of his soul? A thought too bold; a dream too wild. Yet when this
spiritual light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures, when he has learned to worship
the soul, and to see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first gropings of its gigantic
hand, he shall look forward to an ever-expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator. He shall
see that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal and one is
print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then
becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much
of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and
the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.
The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar is the mind of the Past, -- in whatever form,
whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the
influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth, -- learn the amount of this influence
more conveniently, -- by considering their value alone.
The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around;
brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into
him life; it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions; it went out from him
immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is
quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely
in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it
sing.
Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone of transmuting life into truth. In
proportion to the completeness of the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the
product be. But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum,
so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book,
or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as
to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or
rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.
Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, the act of
thought, is transferred to the record. The poet chanting was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the
chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled the book is
perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly the book becomes
noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to
the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it,
and makes an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by
thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from
accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries,
believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given;
forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these
books.
Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence the book-learned class, who
value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of
Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence the restorers of readings, the emendators, the
bibliomaniacs of all degrees.
Books are the best things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the
one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a
book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of
a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this
every man contains within him, although in almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul
active sees absolute truth and utters truth, or creates. In this action it is genius; not the privilege of
here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence it is progressive. The
book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of
genius. This is good, say they, -- let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and
not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his
hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of
the Deity is not his; cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are creative
manners, there are creative actions, and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is,
indicative of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind's own sense of
good and fair.
On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive from another mind its truth, though
it were in torrents of light, without periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a fatal
disservice is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence. The
literature of every nation bears me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakespearized now
for two hundred years.
Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not
be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God
directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings. But
when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must, -- when the sun is hid and the stars
withdraw their shining, -- we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our
steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb
says, "A fig-tree, looking on a fig-tree, becometh fruitful."...
Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that needs be evil? We, it seems, are critical;
we are embarrassed with second thoughts; we cannot enjoy anything for hankering to know
whereof the pleasure consists; we are lined with eyes; we see with our feet; the time is infected
with Hamlet's unhappiness, --
"Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."
Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be blind? Do we fear lest we
should outsee nature and God, and drink truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary class
as a mere announcement of the fact that they find themselves not in the state as untried; as a boy
dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim. If there is any period one would desire
to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side and
admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when
the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This
time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
I read with some joy of the auspicious signs of the coming days, as they glimmer already through
poetry and art, through philosophy and science, through church and state.
One of these signs is the fact that the same movement which effected the elevation of what was
called the lowest class in the state, assumed in literature a very marked and as benign an aspect.
Instead of the sublime and beautiful, the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized.
That which had been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and
provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all
foreign parts. The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the
meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign, is it not? of
new vigor when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands
and the feet. I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia;
what is Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of
the familiar, the low. Give me insight into today, and you may have the antique and future worlds.
What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad
in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; --
show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest
spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me
see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop,
the plough, and the ledger referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; --
and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room but has form and order; there is
no trifle, there is no puzzle, but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the
lowest trench...Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political movement, is the
new importance given to the single person. Everything that tends to insulate the individual, -- to
surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man
shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state, -- tends to true union as well as
greatness. "I learned," said the melancholy Pestalozzi, "that no man in God's wide earth is either
willing or able to help any other man." Help must come from the bosom alone. The scholar is that
man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all
the hopes of the future. He must be a university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more than
another which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the
law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the
whole of Reason; it is for you to know all; it is for you to dare all.
Mr. President and gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all
motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long
to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be
timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The
scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this
country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous
and the complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated
by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison
with these, but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is
managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of them suicides. What is the remedy?
They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the
career do not yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there
abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience; patience; with the shades of all the good
and great for company; and for solace the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work the
study and the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of
the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be a unit, not to be reckoned one
character, not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned
in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and
our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and
friends,--please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our
own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity,
for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of
defence and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each
believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.
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