A filial relation to the universe is well expressed, not in speech, but in the attitudes of her children, in their balance, tranquillity, directness, their firm and quiet grasp, look, step, tone. Confidence and joy are the only moral agents. Worship is immortal cheer. The Greeks rebuke us with their sacred festivals and games: why should we not hunt every evil as we follow gayly the buffalo and bear? Virtue cannot be wrinkled and sad; Virtue is a joy of the Right added to our earliest joy,—is refreshment and health, not fever. The Etruscan are right religious sculptures: the body will be more, not less, when the soul is most; for the body is created and perfected, not devoured by the soul. In another Eden the curves of grace and power will reappear; every wrinkle will be counted sin; goodness will be sap and blood, a growth of grapes and roses, a sacrament of energy and content.
If there be great wrongs, we cannot distrust the Maker, and postpone the security of the soul. Impatience is a wrong as great as any. Love and trust are remedies for wrong. Music is our cure for insanity, and I remember that incantation of fair reasons which Plato prescribed. What gain is in scolding and knitting the brows? The blue sky, the bright cloud, the star of night, the star of day, every creature is in its smiling place a protest of the universe against our hasty method of counter-working wrong with wrong. Let loose the Right. Go forward with martial music; never await or seek, but carry victory and win every battle in the organization of your band. Hear Beethoven:—"Nor do I fear for my works. No evil can befall them, and whosoever shall understand them shall be free from all such misery as burdens mankind."
From this security in the lap of Nature, this nest in the grass, we rise easily to every height. Gladness becomes uncontainable, a pain of fulness, for which, after all effort, there is no complete relief; for language breaks under it in delivery, and Art falls to the ground. The psalm of David, the statue of Angelo, the chorus of Handel, are inarticulate cries. These men have not justified to us their confidence. It will be shared, not justified. They have divined what they cannot orderly publish, and their meaning will be by the same greatness divined again. The work of such men remains a haunting, commanding enigma to following ages. They do but repeat the promise and obscurity of Nature, for she herself has the same largeness, is such another raptus, proceeding to no end, but to a circle or complexity of ends. Men are again and again divided over the images of Paul, of Plato, of Dante, unable to escape from their authority, more unable to give them final interpretation. They leave Nature, to puzzle over the inexhaustible book. What does it mean? What does it not mean? The poet will never wait till he can demonstrate and explain. He must hasten to convey a blessing greater than explanation, to publish, if it were only by broken hints, by signs and dumb pointing, his sense of a presence not to be comprehended or named.
For, if the seer is sustained, he is also commanded by what he sees. Genius is not religious, but religion, an opening to the conscience of the universe no less than to the joy. From this original the moral, intellectual, and æsthetic sense will each derive a conscience, and rule with equal sovereignty the man. Through an ant or an angel the first influx of reality is entertained in an attitude of worship, and the poet, in his vision, cries with Virgil to Dante:—
"Down, down, bend low
Thy knees! behold God's angel! fold thy hands!
Henceforward shalt thou see true ministers!"
Revelation is not more a new light than a new heart and will; revelation to me is the conquest and renewal of me. What is lovely will not be encountered without love, the Creator holds the key to the creature, Order and Right may freely enter to be man. He who can open any object to its source is touched therein by the finger of God, and insight is inevitable consecration. Give the coward a suspicion of our human destiny, and he is no longer coward; he would gladly be cut in pieces and burned in any flame to shed abroad that light. Life has such an irresistible tendency to extend, that it makes of the man a mere vehicle, takes him for hands and feet, wheels and wings: he is glad only when the truth runs and prevails. Enthusiasm, devotion, earnestness are names for this possession of the deep thinker by his thought. He lives in that, and has in it his prosperity, no longer in the flesh. The inspired man becomes great by absorption in a great design; he is preoccupied, and trifles, for which other men are bought and sold, shine before him as beads of glass with which savages are wheedled. We drop our playthings, our banks and coaches, crowns, swords, colleges, and sugar-plums in a heap together, when any moment opens to us the scope of our activity, and carries far forward the curve through which we have already run.
The divine authority of Genius is given in this descent and superiority to will. That which in me I must obey, that also above me all men must obey. Will is the centre of the practical man, of all force, not moral, but brute or natural, and is identified in the common thought with myself, as I am a natural cause. Will is the sum of physical forces necessary for self-preservation, is reagency against the formidable rivalry of every other organization. In this animal centre the laws are carried up, as reins are gathered to be put into the hands of a driver, and being tied in a knot just where the physical touches the celestial sphere, they seem to be moral, and Will much more than the body is in popular thought inseparable from man. It is an organ into which he has thrown himself in reckless neglect of his privilege, a grasping hand which rules the world as we see it ruled, masters and takes to itself for extension all laws below its own level, wields Nature as an instrument, breaks down a weaker will, and carries away the material mind until some God from above shall deliver it. Will is that living Fate of which exterior necessity is but the form. From it we are instantly delivered in conviction, and find it ever after the servant, not the synonyme of man.
The boy does not choose, neither does the belly choose for him, what object shall be supremely beautiful in his eyes. He has not resolved to see only this splendor of color, and neglect sound,—or to give himself to sound alone, and shut his eyes to sight. If the divine order reaches any mind, those creatures in which it appears will haunt that mind, will take lordly their own place, and hang as constellations high overhead in thought. So long as he can turn the eye hither and thither, or lightly determine what he will see, the man is conversant with form alone, and bigots who are on that plane of experience identify him with choice, hold thought to be altogether voluntary, and burn the thinker, as though his view were a fruit, not a root, of him. But truth is that which does not wait for our making, but makes us,—does not lie like water at the bottom of our wells, but comes like sunshine flooding the air, and compelling recognition. "To believe your own thought," says a master, "that is genius"; but is not genius primarily the arrival of a thought able to authenticate itself, to compel trust, and make its own value known against the sneers or anger of the world? From my own thought once reached there is but one appeal,—to my own thought: from Philip sober to Philip more sober.
The good spirit appears as a spark in our embers, and draws out these careful hands to ward itself from every gust,—sets our tasks and crowns them. We know that from first desire to last performance wisdom is altogether a grace. Wisdom is this wish for wisdom, already given in the readiness to receive. We have not cared for it, but it has cared for us.
Grown stronger, it is a guide, and needs none. Turner sees what he must love; there is no rule for such seeing: what he does not love is hid from him; there is no rule for such omission. It is in the eye, not more a happy opening than a happy closing. A private ordinance, dividing man into men, makes the same creature a wall to one, an open door to his neighbor. The value of man appears to Scott in feudalism, to Wordsworth in contemplation, to Byron in impatience, to Kant in certainty, to Calvin in authority, to Calame in landscape, to Newton in measure, to Carlyle in retribution, to Shakspeare in society, to Dante in the contrast of right and wrong.