Much more man is microcosmic and macrocosmic. Natural and supernatural meet concealedly in the out-world, but openly in him, and his early desires grow into a future surpassing all desire. The poet sees his destiny in our wishes,—sees right and wrong, kindness and greediness, deepening into incalculable grandeurs of heaven and hell. He sees the man never yet arrived, but now arriving, to inhabit each breast. "Far off his coming" shines. We have many little gleams of generosity; we have conviction, and can strike for the right. Nature is a fixed quantity, a solid; but life is reinforced by life. Truth begets truth, love kindles love, every end is a new beginning.
Therefore the perception of genius is prophetic,—an anticipation of manhood for this boy, who is the King's son, child of Eternity, and only changeling of Time. Wherever any magnanimity is revealed, I lay claim to it. The courage of heroes, the purity of angels, the generosity of God, is no more than I need. Only show virtue unmixed at the heart of this system, and you open my destiny in that. If there be but the least spark of pure benignity, it is a fire will spread through all and fill the breast; for Good makes good, and what it is I must become. Man is heir not to any possession or commodity, though it were a homestead in all heavens, but to the moral power which we ache to exercise. To-day I am a poor starveling of Nature, sucking many a dry straw, but so sure as God I shall stream like the sun. The meanest creature is a promise of such power, for in each is some radiation as well as suction. Man grows, indeed, faster than he can be filled, and so is forever empty; but if power is never a plenum, it is never drawn dry, and at least the mantling foam of it fills the cup. Our expectation is that bead on the draught of being, and boils over the brim.
Imagination is the spiritual sight, working upward from the fact, downward from the law. In low experience it divines the tendency of order, and descends on the other arc of this rainbow to construct the world, and the man that must be. Imagination is the projection of each beyond himself. A man shall not lift his meat to his lips without prophecy and a consulting of this oracle: he shall first extend him to think the savor and satisfaction of the meat. Shut into the horizon and the moment, we have this only organ of communication with all that is beyond; yet having here in rudiments and beginnings all that is beyond, we laugh at the old limits, and explore the universe through every dimension, through spaces beyond Space and times beyond Time.
If this old ball on which we are carried be no apple of Sodom, but sound and sweet to the core, insight must be confidence and satisfaction. In the beginning of thought we enjoy mere glimpses and guesses, our hopes are rather wishes than hopes; we mount into flame when they come, we sink into ashes when they burn out and desert us. The first glimmerings only beget a noble discontent. Children are tired of matter before they know where to seek their own power; they seem to be cheated of themselves, their worthiness is unrecognized and unfed. Companions, tasks, prospects are insufficient, they are bored and isolated, they sigh and mope; yet they are proud of this lukewarm longing, which does not quite avail, and keep diaries to record with protest the dulness of every day. Sentimentality is initial genius. Its complaint seems to contradict the cheerfulness of wisdom, yet it enjoys complaining; though life be not worth having on these conditions, it bottles every tear. A weak sadness fills great space in literature, stocks the circulating library, and counts its Werthers by the thousand in every age. Now we expect this malady, as we look for mumps and measles in the growing child. It is feminine,—unwilling to be weak, yet not able to stand and go. The strong quickly leave it behind.
In his first novel Goethe burned out for himself this girlish green-sickness, and by a more vigorous demand began to take what he wanted from the world. To the young, life seems splendid but inaccessible. Its remoteness is the theme of every complaint; but when these windy wishes grow stern, inexorable, when a man will no longer beg, but gets on his feet to try a tussle with the world, he throws resolute arms around the Greatest, and finds in his bosom all that was so vast and so far.
Then we open paths, renew our society, enlarge our work, make elbow-room and head-room enough in the world. Criticism is the shadow of the mind. Insight is not sadness, but invigoration,—is no sob or spasm, but clearness in the eye and calmness in the breast. We misjudge it from partial examples: the light of day is confidence, yet sudden bursts of light distress and blind. The poet is rapt, and follows thought; he leaves his meat, and by some transubstantiation feeds on the wind; he no longer sees the pillars of Hercules on a sixpence; he is mad for the hour, if a majority shall say what is madness. Meanwhile his field is unploughed; and if he falls from this ecstasy, look to see an harassed, embittered man. The birds sing as they pick up the corn, but wisdom is not so quickly convertible into meal, and if he cannot feed always on it, let him never seek the Muse. Our poor half-genius vibrates miserably between truth and the dinner-pot, comes back from his apocalypse, and cries for admiration, gold-lace, hair-powder, and wine. That is no apocalypse from which a man returns to whine and beg. Burns complains of Scotland and poverty, Byron of England and respectability, and they are both so far paupers unfed at home. Wordsworth finds London a wilderness, and goes more than content to good company in lonely Cumberland, to eat a crust and drink water with the gods. Socrates is barefooted. He has one want so pressing that he can have no other want, and has set his lips to a cup which hides his bare feet from his eyes: with a single garment for winter and summer, he draws the universe around him a garment for the mind.
If the first flashes of perception dazzle, they are rays of daylight to one emerging from the cave of sense. The eye becomes wonted to truth, and that is now the least of his convictions which yesterday struck Paul from his horse, and rebuked him as fire from the sky. Truth is breath, and only for the first uncertain moment of life we use it to cry and complain. Inspiration is morning, not a flash to deepen the dark.
Popular literature is some description of a state which men think they might enjoy: it is no record of joy. But the fool's paradise would be dreary even for the fool; he is his own paradise, and will be. Our early fancy is no transcript of the divine method, and is sternly rejected by all who suspect a perfection hidden in the day. A few works are great which celebrate the charm of actual effort, and the furtherance of Nature for the brave. Homer, Shakspeare, Goethe, need never exaggerate or leave the earth behind: in their experience it carries well the sky. Every vital thought is some pleasure in running, waking, loving, contending, helping,—is valor dealing gayly with the homely old forces and needs. The marrow is sweet for him who can crack it, in the roughest or the smoothest bone. One is born with a key to the gladness of Nature, and glows with the day's work, the touch of hands, the prospect of to-morrow,—love's production and husbandry, the old worn grass and sunshine, the winter wind, the games and squabbles of children and of men. Why is life for John weariness, for James every moment fresh fire out of the sky? He who finds what he wants, or makes what he wants, is a god. I know well the hope of saints and sages, how they connect this life with endless stages beyond, how they look for the same dignity in all action, the same motive in every companion; I see what they have signified by heaven, a state wherein the best loved is the best: but we must not be scornful, or miss to-day the common delight of living, the moderate hopes of the healthy multitude. For no exceptional joy is so wonderful as the universality of joy, the love of life under every burden and stroke. The beginning of all beatitude and ground of all is good digestion, good sleep, good-nature, and the cheer undeniable of an average human day.
But genius hurries on to expand our hope and dread to incalculable dimensions. Hell is its first sudden down-look from uncertain flight, is earth and animalty seen from the sky. The bad neither so see nor fear. Few men ever reach a height from which they can sound such depth, and the popular talk is repetition without corresponding experience. Hope and fear rise alike to sublimity before the boundless scope of our future. Give the hour to folly, and you set back the dial-hand of destiny, you are so much behind your privilege in every following hour. Eternity is displaced by the stumbling present as the earth by a falling pebble, and the act of this low morning is a stone cast in the sea of universal Being, which shakes and shoulders every drop of the deep. The immensity of the universe does not dwarf, but magnifies our activity: man is multiplied into the sum of all. This deed, this breath dilates to the proportions of Spirit, and upheaves the low roof of Time, which is no sky for the soul. Life becomes awful by its reaches: its span from zenith to nadir, by moral parallax. From gods we sound down to beasts and devils, from sky and fire to ice and mud. Here are the true and final spaces: in their startling contrast appears the grandeur of the moral law, like Chimborazo carrying all zones. It offers hell and heaven, advancing inevitable, and leaves us never a dodge from choice. Our dodge is a choice. Man overtaken by inexorable need must do or go under in the tread-mill of Fate. Not a fault, not a lack, but is so far damnation, with consequences not to be set forth in any prospect of fire. When you begin to look down, the fear of centuries seems not exaggerated. The remedy is in looking so vigorously and far as to see, beyond depth, again the sky and stars. Look through; for toward that centre which is everywhere, we look. Hell was situated under the earth; our first voyage teaches that there is no under-the-earth. The widening of every path gives boundless dimension to sin, till we learn that the evil impulse alone does not extend. It is soon exhausted both in attraction and effect,—is no power, but some suspense of life.
The first moral perception is always a shudder. Carlyle sees the lifted judgment of a lie; his eye is filled, and he sees nothing beyond; but Nemesis is surgeon with probe and knife. Our poisons are medicines and homoeopathic, the fumes of fear a remedy of sulphur for cutaneous sin. The thought in which our terrors arrive is always at last a gospel, is glad tidings. Dante, Paul, Swedenborg, Edwards have seen the pit. It opens only in the holiness of such men,—is a thunder out of clear sky, before which generations of the impure, like brute beasts, tremble and cower. An equal moral genius will see that the ascension of an immortal Love has left behind this vacuum, mitigated, not deepened, by the furniture of devils and their flame. Men strive in vain to be afflicted by a revelation of the best and worst. The mind is naturally a form of gladness, and every window in us takes the sun. Our genuine trouble is not extreme dread, but a perpetual restlessness and discontent.