First, that the perfect truth of the universe issues, by vital representation, into the personality of man.
Secondly, that this truth tends in every man, though often in the obscurest way, toward intellectual and artistic expression.
Now just so far as by any man's speech we feel ourselves brought into direct relationship with this ever-issuing fact, so far the impressions of originality are produced. That all his words were in the dictionary before he used them,—that all his thoughts, under some form of intimation, were in literature before he arrived at them,—matters not; it is the verity, the vital process, the depth of relationship, which concerns us.
Nay, in one sense, the older his truth, the more do the effects of originality lie open to him. The simple, central, imperial elements of human consciousness are first in order of expression, and continue forever to be first in order of power and suggestion. The great purposes, the great thoughts and melodies issue always from these. This is the quarry which every masterly thinker or poet must work. Homer is Homer because he is so simply true alike to earth and sky,—to the perpetual experience and perpetual imagination of mankind. Had he gone working around the edges, following the occasional détours and slips of consciousness, there would have been no "Iliad" or "Odyssey" for mankind to love and for Pope to spoil. The great poets tell us nothing new. They remind us. They bear speech deep into our being, and to the heart of our heart lend a tongue. They have words that correspond to facts in all men and women. But they are not newsmongers.
Yesterday, I read in a prose translation of the "Odyssey" the exquisite idyl of Nausicaa and her Maids, and the discovery of himself by Ulysses. Perhaps the picture came out more clearly than ever before; at any rate, it filled my whole day with delight, and to-day I seem to have heard some sweetest good tidings, as if word had come from an old playmate, dear and distant in memory, or a happy and wealthy letter had arrived from a noble friend. Whence this enrichment? There was nothing in this idyl, to which, even on a first reading, I could give the name of "new truth." The secret is, that I have indeed had tidings of old playmates, dear and distant in memory,—of those bright-eyed, brave, imaging playmates of all later ages, the inhabitants of Homer's world. And little can one care for novelties of thought, in comparison with these tones from the deeps of undying youth. Bring to our lips these cups of the fresh wine of life, if you would do good. Bring us these; for it is by perpetual rekindlings of the youth in us that our life grows and unfolds. Each advancing epoch of the inward life is no less than this,—a fresh efflux of adolescence from the immortal and exhaustless heart. Everywhere the law is the same,—Become as a little child, to reach the heavenly kingdoms. This, however, we become not by any return to babyhood, but by an effusion or emergence from within of pure life,—of life which takes from years only their wisdom and their chastening, and gives them in payment its perfect renewal.
This, then, is the proof of originality,—that one shall utter the pure consciousness of man. If he live, and live humanly, in his speech, the speech itself will live; for it will obtain hospitality in all wealthy and true hearts.
But if the most original speech be, as is here explained, of that which is oldest and most familiar in the consciousness of man, it nevertheless does not lack the charm of surprise and all effects of newness. For, in truth, nothing is so strange to men as the very facts they seem to confess every day of their lives. Truisms, I have said, are the corpses of truths; and they are as far from the fact they are taken to represent as the perished body from the risen soul. The mystery of truth is hidden behind them; and when next it shall come forth, it will bring astonishment, as at first. Every time the grand old truths are livingly uttered, the world thinks it never heard them before. The news of the day is hardly spoken before it is antiquated. For this an hour too late is a century, is forever, too late. But truth of life and the heart, the world-old imaginations, the root-thoughts of human consciousness,—these never lose their privilege to surprise, and at every fresh efflux are wellnigh sure to be persecuted by some as unlawful impositions upon the credence of mankind. Nay, the same often happens with the commonest truths of observation. Mr. Ruskin describes leaves and clouds, objects that are daily before all eyes; and the very artists cry, "Fie upon him!" as a propounder of childish novelties: slowly they perceive that it was leaves and clouds which were novel. Luther thunders in the ears of the Church its own creed; the Pope asks, "Is it possible that he believes all this?" and the priesthood scream, "To the stake with the heretic!" A poet prints in the "Atlantic Monthly" a simple affirmation of the indestructibility of man's true life; numbers of those who would have been shocked and exasperated to hear questioned the Church dogma of immortality exclaim against this as a ridiculous paradox. Once in a while there is grown a heart so spacious that Nature finds in it room to chant aloud the word God, and set its echoes rolling billowy through one man's being; and he, lifting up his voice to repeat it among men from that inward hearing, invariably astounds, and it may be infuriates his contemporaries. The simple proposition, GOD IS, could it once be wholly received, would shake our sphere as no earthquake ever did, and would leave not one stone upon another, I say not merely of some city of Lisbon, but of entire kingdoms and systems of civilization. The faintest inference from this cannot be vigorously announced in modern senates without sending throbs of terror over half a continent, and eliciting shrieks of remonstrance from the very shrines of worship.
The ancient perpetual truths prove, at each fresh enunciation, not only surprising, but incredible. The reason is, that they overfill the vessels of men's credence. If you pour the Atlantic Ocean into a pint basin, what can the basin do but refuse to contain it, and so spill it over? Universal truths are as spacious and profound as the universe itself; and for the cerebral capacity of most of us the universe is really somewhat large!
But as the major numbers of mankind are too little self-reverent to dispense with the services of self-conceit, they like to think themselves equal, and very easily equal, to any truth, and habitually assume their extempore, off-hand notion of its significance as a perfect measure of the fact. As if a man hollowed his hand, and, dipping it full out of Lake Superior, said, "Lake Superior just fills my hand!" To how many are the words God, Love, Immortality just such complacent handfuls! And when some mariner of God seizes them with loving mighty arms, and bears them in his bark beyond sight of their wonted shores, what wonder that they perceive not the identity of this sky-circled sea with their accustomed handful? Yet, despite egotism and narrowness of brain and every other limitation, the spirit of man will claim its privilege and assert its affinity with all truth; and in such measure as one utters the pure heart of mankind, and states the real relationships of human nature, is he sure of ultimate audience and sufficing love.