In My Short Experience Of Human Life, The _Outward_ Obstacles,
If There Were Any Such, Have Not Been Living Men, But The
Institutions Of The Dead.
It is grateful to make one's way
through this latest generation as through dewy grass.
Men are
as innocent as the morning to the unsuspicious.
"And round about good morrows fly,
As if day taught humanity."
Not being Reve of this Shire,
"The early pilgrim blithe he hailed,
That o'er the hills did stray,
And many an early husbandman,
That he met on the way"; -
thieves and robbers all, nevertheless. I have not so surely
foreseen that any Cossack or Chippeway would come to disturb the
honest and simple commonwealth, as that some monster institution
would at length embrace and crush its free members in its scaly
folds; for it is not to be forgotten, that while the law holds
fast the thief and murderer, it lets itself go loose. When I
have not paid the tax which the State demanded for that
protection which I did not want, itself has robbed me; when I
have asserted the liberty it presumed to declare, itself has
imprisoned me. Poor creature! if it knows no better I will not
blame it. If it cannot live but by these means, I can. I do not
wish, it happens, to be associated with Massachusetts, either in
holding slaves or in conquering Mexico. I am a little better
than herself in these respects. - As for Massachusetts, that huge
she Briareus, Argus and Colchian Dragon conjoined, set to watch
the Heifer of the Constitution and the Golden Fleece, we would
not warrant our respect for her, like some compositions, to
preserve its qualities through all weathers. - Thus it has
happened, that not the Arch Fiend himself has been in my way, but
these toils which tradition says were originally spun to obstruct
him. They are cobwebs and trifling obstacles in an earnest man's
path, it is true, and at length one even becomes attached to his
unswept and undusted garret. I love man - kind, but I hate the
institutions of the dead un-kind. Men execute nothing so
faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and
letter. _They_ rule this world, and the living are but their
executors. Such foundation too have our lectures and our
sermons, commonly. They are all _Dudleian;_ and piety derives
its origin still from that exploit of _pius Aeneas_, who bore his
father, Anchises, on his shoulders from the ruins of Troy. Or
rather, like some Indian tribes, we bear about with us the
mouldering relics of our ancestors on our shoulders. If, for
instance, a man asserts the value of individual liberty over the
merely political commonweal, his neighbor still tolerates him,
that he who is _living near_ him, sometimes even sustains him,
but never the State. Its officer, as a living man, may have
human virtues and a thought in his brain, but as the tool of an
institution, a jailer or constable it may be, he is not a whit
superior to his prison key or his staff. Herein is the tragedy;
that men doing outrage to their proper natures, even those called
wise and good, lend themselves to perform the office of inferior
and brutal ones. Hence come war and slavery in; and what else
may not come in by this opening? But certainly there are modes
by which a man may put bread into his mouth which will not
prejudice him as a companion and neighbor.
"Now turn again, turn again, said the pinder,
For a wrong way you have gone,
For you have forsaken the king's highway,
And made a path over the corn."
Undoubtedly, countless reforms are called for, because society is
not animated, or instinct enough with life, but in the condition
of some snakes which I have seen in early spring, with alternate
portions of their bodies torpid and flexible, so that they could
wriggle neither way. All men are partially buried in the grave
of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head above
ground. Better are the physically dead, for they more lively
rot. Even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant. A man's
life should be constantly as fresh as this river. It should be
the same channel, but a new water every instant.
"Virtues as rivers pass,
But still remains that virtuous man there was."
Most men have no inclination, no rapids, no cascades, but
marshes, and alligators, and miasma instead. We read that when
in the expedition of Alexander, Onesicritus was sent forward to
meet certain of the Indian sect of Gymnosophists, and he had told
them of those new philosophers of the West, Pythagoras, Socrates,
and Diogenes, and their doctrines, one of them named Dandamis
answered, that "They appeared to him to have been men of genius,
but to have lived with too passive a regard for the laws." The
philosophers of the West are liable to this rebuke still. "They
say that Lieou-hia-hoei, and Chao-lien did not sustain to the end
their resolutions, and that they dishonored their character.
Their language was in harmony with reason and justice; while
their acts were in harmony with the sentiments of men."
Chateaubriand said: "There are two things which grow stronger in
the breast of man, in proportion as he advances in years: the
love of country and religion. Let them be never so much
forgotten in youth, they sooner or later present themselves to us
arrayed in all their charms, and excite in the recesses of our
hearts an attachment justly due to their beauty." It may be so.
But even this infirmity of noble minds marks the gradual decay of
youthful hope and faith. It is the allowed infidelity of age.
There is a saying of the Yoloffs, "He who was born first has the
greatest number of old clothes," consequently M. Chateaubriand
has more old clothes than I have.
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