Excursions in Art and Letters

by William Wetmore Story

The hand is but dust, yet the thoughts that it recorded are fresh and living as ever. Since he passed from this world, how little progress have we made in philosophy and morality! Here in this little book are rules for the conduct of life which might shame almost any Christian. Here are meditations which go to the root of things, and explore the dim secret world which surrounds us, and return again, as all our explorations do, unsatisfied. All these centuries have passed, and we still ask the same questions and find no answer. Where he is now he knows the secret, or he is beyond the desire to know it. The mystery is solved for him which we are guessing, and his is either a larger, sweeter life, growing on and on—or everlasting rest. A stoic, he found comfort in his philosophy, as great perhaps as we Christians find in our faith. He believed in his gods as we believe in ours. How could they satisfy a mind like his? How could these impure and passionate existences, given to human follies and weaknesses, to low intrigues, to vulgar jealousies, to degraded loves, satisfy a nature so high, so self-denying, so earnest, so pure? Yet they were his gods; to them he sacrificed, in them he trusted, looking forward to a calm future with a serenity at least equal to ours, undisturbed by misgivings; believing in justice, and in unjust gods; believing in purity, and in impure gods.

“No!” said a mild voice, “I did not believe in impure and unjust gods.”

And looking up, I saw before me the calm face of the emperor and philosopher of whom I was thinking. There he stood before me as I knew him from his busts and statues, with his full brow and eyes, his sweet mouth, his curling hair, now a little grizzled with age, and a deep meditative look of tender earnestness upon his face.

I know not why I was not startled to see him there, but I was not. It seemed to me natural, as events seem in a dream. The realities, as we call those facts which are merely visionary and transitory, vanished; and the unrealities, as we call those of thought and being, usurped their place. Nothing seemed more fitting than that he should be there. To the mind all things are possible and simple, and there is no time or space in thought which annihilates them.

I arose to greet my guest with the reverence due to such a presence.

“Do not disturb yourself,” he said, smiling; “I will sit here, if you please;” and so speaking, he took the seat opposite me at the fire. “Sit you,” he continued, “and I will endeavor to answer some of the questions you were asking of yourself.”

“Had I known your presence I should hardly, perhaps, have dared to ask such questions, or at least in such a form,” I said.

“Why not ask them of me if you ask them of yourself?” he responded. “They were just and natural in themselves, and the forms of things are of little use to one who cares for the essence—just as the forms of the divinities I believed in are of no consequence compared to their essences. What we call thoughts are but too often mere formulas, which by dint of repetition we finally get to believe are in themselves truths, while they are in fact mere dead husks, having no life in them, and which by their very rigidity prevent life. No single statement, however plausible, can contain truth, which is infinite in form and in spirit. If we are to talk together, let us free ourselves, if we can, from formulas, since they only check growth in the spirit, and, so to speak, are mere inns at which we rest for a moment on account of our weariness and weakness. If we stay permanently in them we narrow our minds, dwarf our experience, and make no more progress. For what is truth but a continual progression towards the divine?”

“Yet would you say that formulas are of no use? that we should not sum up in them the best of our thought?”

“Undoubtedly they are useful. They are trunks in which we pack our goods; but as we acquire more goods, we must have larger and ever larger trunks. It is only dead formulas which kill, and the tendency of formulas is to die and thus to repress thought. Look at the nutshell that holds the precious germ of the future tree. It is a necessary prison of a moment; but as that germ quickens and spreads, the shell must give way, or death is the consequence. The infinite truth can be comprehended in no formula and no system. All attempts to do this have resulted in the same end—death. Every religious creed should be living, but every Church formalizes it into barren words and shapes, and erelong, Faith—that is, the living, aspiring principle—dies, wrapped up in its formal observances or rigid statements, and becomes like the dead mummies of the Egyptians—the form of life, not the reality.”