English Prose | Page 5

solitude to live after our own; but the great

man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness
the independence of solitude.
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is
that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of
your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead
Bible Society, vote with a great party either for the Government or
against it, spread your table like base housekeepers,--under all these
screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. And of
course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your
thing, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce
yourself. A man must consider what a blindman's-bluff is this game of
conformity. If I know your sect I anticipate your argument. I hear a
preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the
institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly
can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that with all
this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution he will do
no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look
but at one side, the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister?
He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest
affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another
handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these
communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few
particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every
truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the
real four: so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not
where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip
us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to
wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest
asinine expression. There is a mortifying experience in particular,
which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean
"the foolish face of praise," the forced smile which we put on in
company where we do not feel at ease, in answer to conversation which
does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved but moved
by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face,
and make the most disagreeable sensation; a sensation of rebuke and
warning which no brave young man will suffer twice.
For non-conformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And

therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The bystanders
look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlor. If this
aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own he
might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the
multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause,--disguise no god,
but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is
the discontent of the multitude more formidable than that of the senate
and the college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the world
to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and
prudent, for they are timid, as being very vulnerable themselves. But
when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added,
when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent
brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow,
it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a
trifle of no concernment.
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a
reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no
other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath
to disappoint them.
But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag
about this monstrous corpse of your memory, lest you contradict
somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you
should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom
never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure
memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed
present, and live ever in a new day. Trust your emotion. In your
metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity, yet when the
devout motions of the soul come,