One man by grandeur sees mountains in the coals of his grate; another by gentleness only sunshine and grasses on Monadnock. You will not say that he chooses, but that he is chosen so to see. Light opens the eye without our intention, and we are at no trouble to paint on the retina what must there appear. Success is fidelity to that which must appear. Weak men discuss forever the laws of Art, and contrive how to paint, questioning whether this or that element should have emphasis or be shown. If there is any question, there will be no Art. The man must feel to do, and what he does from overmastering feeling will convince and be forever right. The work is organic which grows so above composition or plan. After you are engaged by the symphony, there is no escape, no pause; each note springs out of each as branch from branch of a tree. It could be no otherwise; it cannot be otherwise conceived. Why could not I have found this sequence inevitable, as well as another? Plainly, the symphony was discovered, not made,—was written before man, like astronomy in the sky.
Only the mastery of one who is mastered by Nature will control and renovate mankind. It is easy to recognize the habit of conviction, freedom from within, and personal motive, the man bending himself as for life or death to show exactly what he sees. The inspired man we know who appeals to a divine necessity, and says, "I can do no otherwise; God be my help! amen!"—for whom praise and property and comfortable continuance on this planet are trifles, so great an object has opened to him in the inviolable moral law.
Every perception takes hold at last on duty as well as desire, claims and carries away the man entire, though it were to danger or death. The system, grown friendly, has grown sacred also; departure from it is shame and guilt, as well as loss. An artist, therefore, like the Greek, is busy with portraits of the gods, and every celebration of Beauty is another Missa Solemnis, Te Deum, and Gloria.
Whatever object becomes transparent to a man will be his medium of communication with the Maker and with mankind. He hurries to show therein what he has seen, as children run for their companions and point their discoveries. These are his unsolicited angels, higher above his reach than above that of the crowd; for every good thought is more a surprise to the thinker than to any other. The seer points always from himself as a telescope to the sky; he is no creator, but a bit of broken glass in the sun. What is any man in the presence of haunting Perfection, never to be shown without mutilation and dishonor? Is it ours? In Him we live and move.
While the Ego is pronounced and fills consciousness, man seems to be and do somewhat of himself; but when the universal Soul is manifest above will, his eyes turn away from that old battery; he is absorbed in what he sees,—forgets himself, his deeds, wants, gains. He is rapt; stands like Socrates a day and a night in contemplation; sits like Newton for twelve hours half dressed on the edge of his bed, arrested in rising. He is that madman to the world who neglects his meat, postpones his private enterprise, regards honor and comfort as so much interruption to this commerce with reality. We are all tired of property which is exclusion, of goods which must be taken from another to serve me. Good should grow with sharing,—more for me when all is given. In the spirit there are no fences, boxes, or bags.
Presenting truth, I declare it as freely yours as mine. Every act of genius proclaims that the highest gift is no monopoly or singularity, no privilege of one, but the birthright of the race. Shakspeare knows well that we shall easily see what he sees; he considers it no secret. We are always feeling beforehand for every right word now about to be spoken in the world; many men give tokens of the general habit of thought before he is born who clearly knows what all were dreaming. Wisdom has only gone before us on our own path, and we overtake our guide in every perception. Yet we are lifted quite off our feet by any new possibility revealed in life: every circle drawn round our own astonishes, though it be drawn from our centre. The poet in his certainty appears a child of the heavens, and we strike another foolish line through the crowd, as though every man were not his own poet as truly as he is his own priest and governor, as though each were not entitled to see whatever is to be seen. The masters of thought may teach us better. They address their loftiest power in us, and never sing to oxen or dogs. The painting, poem, statue, oratorio, calls to me by name; the morning is an eye that solicits mine. Shall I take only the husks, and leave to another, contented, always, the life of life?
He is supreme poet who can make me a poet, able to reach the same supplies after he is gone. We are bits of iron charged by this magnet, and lose our quality when it is removed; we are not quite made magnets as we should be by this magnetic planet and the revolutions of the sun; yet the great polarity of our globe is a sum of little polarities, and every scrap of metal has its own. We are made musical by the passing band; we go on humming and marching to the air; but he who wrote it was made musical by silence and sunshine. Soon our own vibrations will be more easily induced, as old instruments sound with a touch or breath. We shall throb with inarticulate rhythms, and understand the bard who sings,—
"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter."
The poet is one who has detected this latency of power in every breast. His delight is a feeling that all doors are open to all, that he is no favorite, but the rest are late sleepers, and he only earlier awake. Depth of genius is measured by depth of this conviction. Egotism is incurable greenness. An artist is one who has more, not less, respect for the common eye. The seer points always from his own to a public privilege,—says never, "I, Jesus, have so received," but, "The Son of Man must so receive"; and Shakspeare cuts himself into fragments till there is no Shakspeare left behind, as if expressly to testify that this wonderful wisdom is not his, but ours, is not that of the thinker and penman in his study, but of priests and kings, ladies and courtiers, lovers and warriors, knaves and fools. Paul sees that Moses read his law from tables of the heart. Every wise word is an echo of the wisdom inarticulate in our neighbors which sends them confident about their work and play. The faith of healthy men and women is amazing when we learn how incapable they are of showing grounds for it. In speculation they hold horrible theories, blackening the day; yet they trust the good which their lips unwittingly deny.
In discourse we are moved, not by what a man says, but by what he takes for granted. The undertow of power is something unstated to which all his facts and laws refer. But our resource seems to be rather a reversion, is not quite available; we have blood and a beat at the heart, yet it does not circulate freely, and Nature to every man is a double of himself, so that the universe seems also cold in extremities, as though there were too little original life to fill her veins. The poet is not fire on the hearth to thaw this numbness by foreign heat. He rubs and rouses us to activity, drags us to the open air, puts us on a glowing chase, provokes us to race and climb with him till we also are thoroughly alive. No other gift of his is worth much beside this hope of reaching his side. The great know well that all men are approaching their view even in departing from it, as travellers going from one port turn their backs on each other here and their faces together toward the antipodal point: they can leave their discoveries and fame to the race. There is one object of sight. Every piece of wisdom is no less my thought because another has found it in my mind. It is more mine than any perception I called my own, for really with that I have unconsciously been living in deeps below thought. The rest I have known, that in all these years I am.