There is but one thing which can honorably draw the heart out of an American in Europe. He has wrought for himself the white ideal of government; he belongs to a growing, not a decaying society; there is much without, upon which he looks with wonder and even with pity; for he is, as the monkish chroniclers would say, filius hujus sæculi, a child of to-day and to-morrow. In "that state of life to which it has pleased God to call" him, he should be the proclaimed brother of mankind, and the outrider of civilization; he has an heroic post and outlook, and these bring their responsibilities: why should he, how can he, forego them for the accidental pleasure to be had in alien capitals? But one thing he sees far away which he can never live to call his, in the west; he cannot transfer hither the yesterday of his own race, the dark charm of London, the glamour of Paris, the majesty and melancholy of Rome. If he has a nature which looks deep and walks slowly, he shall not pass the image of any old kingdom unbeguiled; either to his living senses, or to his distant and hopeless meditations, that world beyond wide waters will seem to him the fairest of created things, like the unbought lamp worth all that Aladdin ever cherished in his narrow youth. For yesterday is ours also, to have and to hold, though it be an oak which grows not within our own garden walls, and is to be reached only by a going forth, and a wrenching of the heart-strings. And that which makes the worthy pilgrim into an exile and a cosmopolite is no vanity, no ambition, no mere restless energy: it is truly the love of man which calleth over seas, and from towers a great way off. His shrine is some common and unregarded place, a mediæval stair, it may be, worn hollow as a gourd by the long procession of mortality. That concave stone touches him, and makes his blood tingle: it has magic in it, of itself, without a record; for it speaks of the transit of human worth and human vices, both of which Dante makes his Ulysses long for, and seek to understand. It is our sunken footfall, ages ere we were born, while we were on forgotten errands, nursing irrecoverable thoughts. To have marked it, with perhaps the largest emotion of our lives, is to walk Broadway or a Texan tow-path humbler and better ever after.
Who is to be blamed if he do indeed go "abroad," or stay abroad, so strangely finding there, rather than here, the soul's peace? for the soul has rights which may cancel even the duties of the ballot. Of what avail is Americanism, unless it earn for a man the freedom of rival cities, wrap him in a good dream, taking rancor from him, and put him in harmony with all master events gone by? The young Republic has children who come into the field of historic Christendom, to bathe themselves in the dignity and roominess of life, and to walk gladly among the evergreen traditions, which surge like tall June grass about their knees. What they never had, natural piety teaches them to desire and to worship, and their happy Parthian faces are bright with the setting sun. There are hundreds such, and blessed are they; for they move meanwhile under an innocent spell, and ignobler visions cannot touch them. It is their vocation to make a thronged spiritual solitude of their own. Under the self-same night of stars, they are changed: they have found other minds, more reverent, more chastened, more sensitized. Because they are converts, they cannot always be judged fairly. You shall meet them in summertime at Bruges and Nuremberg, and in the transept of Westminster Abbey, elbowed by pilgrims of another clay, but ever rapt and mute: "whether in the body, or out of the body, I know not; God knoweth."
1894.
[THE PRECEPT OF PEACE]
A CERTAIN sort of voluntary abstraction is the oddest and choicest of social attitudes. In France, where all æsthetic discoveries are made, it was crowned long ago: la sainte indifférence is, or may be, a cult, and le saint indifférent an articled practitioner. For the Gallic mind, brought up at the knee of a consistent paradox, has found that not to appear concerned about a desired good is the only method to possess it; full happiness is given, in other words, to the very man who will never sue for it. This is a secret neat as that of the Sphinx: to "go softly" among events, yet domineer them. Without fear: not because we are brave, but because we are exempt; we bear so charmed a life that not even Baldur's mistletoe can touch us to harm us. Without solicitude: for the essential thing is trained, falcon-like, to light from above upon our wrists, and it has become with us an automatic motion to open the hand, and drop what appertains to us no longer. Be it renown or a new hat, the shorter stick of celery, or
"The friends to whom we had no natural right,
The homes that were not destined to be ours,"
it is all one: let it fall away! since only so, by depletions, can we buy serenity and a blithe mien. It is diverting to study, at the feet of Antisthenes and of Socrates his master, how many indispensables man can live without; or how many he can gather together, make over into luxuries, and so abrogate them. Thoreau somewhere expresses himself as full of divine pity for the "mover," who on May-Day clouds city streets with his melancholy household caravans: fatal impedimenta for an immortal. No: furniture is clearly a superstition. "I have little, I want nothing; all my treasure is in Minerva's tower." Not that the novice may not accumulate. Rather, let him collect beetles and Venetian interrogation-marks; if so be that he may distinguish what is truly extrinsic to him, and bestow these toys, eventually, on the children of Satan who clamor at the monastery gate. Of all his store, unconsciously increased, he can always part with sixteen-seventeenths, by way of concession to his individuality, and think the subtraction so much concealing marble chipped from the heroic figure of himself. He would be a donor from the beginning; before he can be seen to own, he will disencumber, and divide. Strange and fearful is his discovery, amid the bric-à-brac of the world, that this knowledge, or this material benefit, is for him alone. He would fain beg off from the acquisition, and shake the touch of the tangible from his imperious wings. It is not enough to cease to strive for personal favor; your true indifférent is Early Franciscan: caring not to have, he fears to hold. Things useful need never become to him things desirable. Towards all commonly-accounted sinecures, he bears the coldest front in Nature, like a magician walking a maze, and scornful of its flower-bordered detentions. "I enjoy life," says Seneca, "because I am ready to leave it." Ja wohl! and they who act with jealous respect for their morrow of civilized comfort, reap only indigestion, and crow's-foot traceries for their deluded eye-corners.