Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 12, October, 1858

Nations, like individual men, birds, and many quadrupeds and fishes, are house-builders. They wall and roof themselves in with symbols, creeds, codes, customs, etiquettes, and the like; they stigmatize by the terms heresy, high-treason, and names of milder import, any attempt to quit this edifice; and send such offenders into purgatory, penitentiary, coventry, as the case may be. Some nations omit to insert either door or window; they make penal even the desire to look out of doors, even the assertion that a sky exists other than the roof of their building, or that there is any other than a very unblessed out-of-doors beyond its walls. Such are countries where free speech is forbidden, where free thought is racked and thumb-screwed, and where not only a man's overt actions, but his very hopes, his faith, his prayers, are prescribed. Here man is put into his own institutions, as into a box; and a very bad box it proves. Now these blank walls not only encompass society as a mass, but also run between individuals, cutting off bosom from bosom, and rendering impossible that streaming of heart-fires, that mounting flame from meeting brands, out of whose wondrous baptism come the consecrate deeds of mankind. Go to China, and to any living soul you obtain no access, or next to none,—such disastrous roods of etiquette are interposed between. It is as if one very cordially shook hands with you by means of a pair of tongs or a ten-foot pole. Indeed, it is hardly a man that you meet; it is a piece of automatic ceremony. Nor is it in China alone that men may be found who can hardly be accredited with proper personality. As one dying may distribute his property in legacies to various institutions and organizations,—so much, for example, to the Tract Society, so much to the Colonization Society, and the like,—in the same manner do many make wills at the outset of life for the disposal of their own personal powers, and do nothing afterward but execute this testament,—executing themselves in another sense at the same time. They parcel out themselves, their judgment, their conscience, and whatsoever pertains to their spiritual being, among the customs, traditions, institutions, etiquettes of their time, and renounce all claim to a free existence. After such a piece of spiritual felo-de-se , the man is nothing but one wheel in a machine, or even but one cog upon a wheel. Thenceforth he merely hangs together;—simple cohesion is the utmost approximation to action which can be truly attributed to him.

And as nothing is so ridiculous, so, few things are so mischievous, as the sincere insincerity, the estrangement from fact, of those who have thus parted with themselves. It is worse, if anything can be worse, than hypocrisy itself. The hypocrite sees two things,—the fact and the fiction, the gold and its counterfeit; he has virtue enough to know that he is a hypocrite. But the post-mortem man, the walking legacy, does not recognize the existence of eternal Fact; it has never occurred to his mind that anything could be more serious than "spiritual taking-on" and make-belief. An innocent old gentleman, being at a play where the heroine is represented as destroyed in attempting to cross a broken bridge, rose, upon seeing her approach it, and in tones of the deepest concern offered his opinion that said bridge was unsafe! The post-mortem man reverses this harmless blunder, and makes it anything but harmless by the change; as that one took theatricals to be earnest fact, so this conceives virtue itself to consist in posturing; he thinks gold a clever imitation of brass, and the azure of the sky to be a kind of celestial cosmetic; in fine, formalities are the realest things he knows. It is said, that, in the later days of Rome, the augurs and inspectors of entrails could not look each other in the face during their ceremonies, for fear of bursting into a laugh. But still worse off than these pitiful peddlers of fraud is he who feigns without knowing that he feigns,—feigns unfeignedly, and calls God to witness that he is faithful in the performance of his part. This is ape's earnest, and is, perhaps, the largest piece of waste that ever takes place upon this earth. Ape's earnest ,—it is a pit that swallows whole nations, whole ages; and the extent to which it may be carried is wellnigh incredible, even with the fact before our eyes. A Chinese gentleman spends an hour in imploring a relative to dine with him,—utterly refusing, so urgent is his desire of company, to accept No for an answer,—and then flies into a rage because the cousin commits the faux pas of yielding to his importunity, and agreeing to dine. Louis Napoleon perpetrates the king-joke of the century by solemnly presenting the Russian Czar with a copy of Thomas à Kempis's "Imitation of Christ,"—a book whose great inculcation is to renounce the world!

Now no sooner do men lose hold upon fact than they inevitably begin to wither. They resemble a tree drawn with all its roots from the earth; the juices already imbibed may sustain it awhile, but with every passing day will sustain it less. If Louis Napoleon is so removed from conversation with reality as not to perceive the colossal satire implied in his gift, it will soon require more vigor than he possesses to keep astride the Gallic steed. That Chinese etiquette explains the condition of the Chinese nation. Indeed, it is easy to give a recipe for mummying men alive. Take one into keeping, prescribe everything, thoughts, actions, manners, so that he never shall find either permission or opportunity to ask his own intellect, What is true? nor his own heart, What is right? nor to consider within himself what is intrinsically good and worthy of a man; and if he does not rebel, you will make him as good a mummy as Egyptian catacombs can boast.

The capital art of life is to renew and augment your power by its expenditure. It was intimated some eighteen centuries since that the highest are obtained only by loss of the same; and the transmutation of loss into gain is the essence and perfection of all spiritual economies. Now of this art of arts he is already master who steadily draws upon his own spiritual resources. The soul is an extraordinary well; the way to replenish is to draw from it. It is more miraculous than the widow's cruse;—that simply continued unexhausted,—never less, indeed, but also never more; while from this the more you take, the more remains in it. Were it, therefore, desired to arrange with forethought a scheme of life that should afford the highest invigoration, in such scheme there should be the minimum of prescription, and nothing be so sedulously avoided as the superseding of inward and active principles by outward and passive rules ;—that is, life would be made as much moral and spontaneous, as little political and mechanical, as possible.

And this does not ill describe our own case. No civilized nation is so little imprisoned in precedents and traditions. Our national maxim is, "The world is too much governed." In the degree of this release we are, of course, thrown back upon underlying principles and universal persuasions,—since these of necessity become, in the absence of more artificial ties, the chief bond of such peace and coöperation as obtain. Leave two men to deal with each other, not merely as subjects or citizens, but as men, and they must recur to that which is at once native and common to both, to the universal elements in their consciousness, that is, to principles; and thus the most ordinary mutual dealing becomes, in some degree, a spiritual discipline. Harness these men in precedents, and whip them through the same action with penalties, and they will gain only such discipline as the ox obtains in the furrow and the horse between the thills. Statutes serve men, but lame them. They render morality mechanical. Men learn to say not, "It is right," but, "It is enacted." And the difference is immense. "Right" sends one to his own soul, and requires him to produce the living law out of that; "Enacted" sends him to the Revised Statutes, or the Reports, and there it ends. The latter gives a bit of information; the former a step in development. Laws are necessary; but laws which are not necessary are more and worse than unnecessary;—they pilfer power from the soul; they intercept the absolute uses of life; they incarcerate men, and make Caspar Hausers of them. Now in America not only is there already much emancipation from those outside regulations which supersede moral and private judgment, but the tendency toward a fresh life daily gains impetus. That repeal of the Missouri Compromise, however blamable, has several happy features, and prominent among these must be reckoned the illustration it affords of a growing disposition to say, "No putting To-day into Yesterday's coffin; let the Present live and be its own lord."