Concord Days

"Our faces were our coats of arms."

"Eyes were most characteristic. These played the prime parts in life, – eyes and voice. Eyes were a civility and a kingdom: voice a fortune. There was a culture, a fate in them, direful, divine." And he quoted, without naming the author: —

"Black eyes, in your dark orbs doth lieMy ill or happy destiny;If with clear looks you me behold,You give me wine and mounts of gold;If you dart forth disdainful rays,To your own dye you turn my days;Black eyes, in your dark orbs doth dwellMy bane or bliss, my heaven or hell."

Then added, significantly: —

Ask you my preference, what their hue?Surely the safe, celestial blue.

He said: "Voice classified us. The harmonious voice tells of the harmonious soul. Millions of fiends are evoked in a breath by an irritated one. A gentle voice converts the Furies into Muses. The highest saint is not he who strives the most violently, but he upon whom goodness sits gracefully, whose strength is gentleness, duty loved, because spontaneous, and who wastes none of his power in effort; his will being one and above temptation. True love says, 'Come to my embrace, you are safer with me than you were with yourself, since I am wise above knowledge, and tasting of the apple.' The sequel is bliss and peace. But after fascination comes sorrow, remorse. The touch of the demonized soul is poison. Read Swedenborg's Hells, he added, and beware of demonized eyes!"

I never saw any one who seemed to purify words as Mr. Alcott does; with him nothing is common or unclean.

He then spoke of temperance in its widest sense, as being that which contributed to health of the whole being, body and soul alike. He said, "We should breakfast on sunrise and sup on sunset." And he read passages from Pythagoras, recommending music as a diet. "Pythagoras composed melodies for the night and morning, to purify the brain. He forbade his disciples the using of flesh meats, or drinks which heated and disturbed the brain, or hindered the music of dreams."

At this point of the conversation, Miss Bremer and Mr. Benzon, the Swedish consul, came in, and there was a slight pause.

Mr. Alcott then resumed the subject, and read Emerson's Bacchus, to which he gave new significance. When he had finished, he said, "This is the wine we want." He then spoke of the subject proposed for the evening's conversation, which was Enthusiasm, defining it as "an abandonment to the instincts. The seer," he said, "was one in whom memory predominated, and many of his visions were recollections rather of a former than revelations of a future state." This state of clairvoyance he named "thought a-bed, or philosophy recumbent"; and in this view he spoke of "Swedenborg, who was an enthusiast in the latter sense, and revealed remarkable things." He quoted a passage from Swedenborg's diary, wherein he speaks of his being created with the power of breathing inwardly, suspending his outward breathing, and in this way conversed with angels and spirits.

Miss Bremer asked Mr. Alcott "if he called Swedenborg an enthusiast."

Mr. Alcott said, "Swedenborg was in such fine relations with nature and spirit, that many things seemed revealed to him beyond the apprehension of ordinary men. He was a seer rather of supernatural than of spiritual things; a preternaturalist, rather than spiritualist. He had wonderful insights into nature, also, which science was almost every day confirming."

"His followers claimed that he anticipated important discoveries, both in natural as in spiritual science, and that his merits were enhanced by his claim to supernatural illumination. And whatever his gifts, how assisted, whether by agencies supernatural or preternatural, their operations were of wonderful sweep, his insights surpassing, transcending the comprehension of any successor; of a kind that have led some to suspect that he staggered down under the weight of his endowments. Certainly, he stands, like Boehme, an exceptional mind, in the order of nature, and awaits an interpreter to determine his place in the world of thought. He is the most eminent example furnished in modern biography of the possibilities of the metempsychosis, as if we saw in him an ability to translate himself at will, personally, wheresoever he would, taking his residence for the while in plant, animal, mineral, atom, with the superadded faculty of ravishing its secret. Nor content with this, he ransacks the primeval elements, the limbos of chaos and night. What burglaries he perpetrates! picking of locks, slitting of mysteries, opening rents into things sacred and profane, – of these no end. Then such edifices rising from regions of vagary and shadow, a goblin world, grand, grotesque, seldom lighted from above, or tipped with azure. His heavens had no prospects; no perspective; his hells were lurid; the pit bottomless, a Stygian realm throughout. His genius plunges, seldom soars; is not fledged, but footed; his heaven but the cope of the abyss in plain sight of the doomed. His angels are spectral, unwholesome; his celestials too knowing to be innocent.

"It were a fruitless task to follow him from starting-point to goal, if goal there be, in his restless racing throughout nature. The ghost-seer of shadow-land, whereinto he smuggled all natural things as spiritual phantoms; he needs be studied with due drawback of doubt, as to the veracity of his claim to divine illumination. Still with every abatement, here is a body of truth none can gainsay nor resist; abysses not yet fathomed by any successor, naturalist, or spiritualist."

After this surprising statement of his views of Swedenborg, Miss Bremer asked more questions about Mr. Alcott's definition of an Enthusiast, adding: "Christ, then, if we speak of him as a man, was an enthusiast."

Mr. Alcott, smiling, said, "Yes, the divinest of enthusiasts, surrendering himself entirely to the instincts of the Spirit; might safely do so, being holy, whole, inspired throughout all his gifts, his whole Personality, – the divine fire pervaded every part; therefore he was the celestial man."

The conversation here turned upon Nature, in some way which I do not now recollect, and Mr. Alcott spoke of the great mission of the prophet of nature.

"The public child of earth and sky."

"Nature," he said, "was more to some persons than others; they standing in closer relations to it."

"But nature," said Miss Bremer, "is not wholly good."

"No," said Mr. Alcott; "there is something of Fate in her, too, as in some persons. She, too, is a little bitten."

The expression seemed to amuse her, for she repeated it several times, laughing.

Mr. Alcott then said, "that nature was not wholly sane. It was given to the celestial man alone to take from it only what was salutary, as it was the Nemesis of the demonic man to take what was hurtful. Bees gathered honey from all flowers."

James Russell Lowell asked "if bees did not sometimes secrete poisonous honey?"

Mr. Alcott said "he believed they did, but only when wholesome flowers were denied them."

Miss Littlehale suggested that "honey was not poisonous to the bees, but to men only, and Mr. Lowell allowed that it was not."

Miss Bremer now returned to the word Enthusiast. She said Mr. Alcott had defined it well as "divine intoxication."

I do not follow the order of time in what follows, but record some scattered sayings of the conversation.

Mr. Alcott spoke of "the celestial, or unfallen man, as not making choice of good; he was chosen rather; elected, deliberation presupposed a mixed will, a temptation and a lapse. Then, opening Plotinus, he read this beautiful passage: —

"Every soul is a Venus. And this, the nativity of Venus, and Love who was born at the same time with her, obscurely signify. The soul, therefore, when in a condition conformable to nature, loves God, wishing to be united to him, being, as it were, the desire of a beautiful virgin to be conjoined with a beautiful love. When, however, the soul descends into generation, then being, as it were, deceived by spurious nuptials, and associating herself with another and mortal love, she becomes petulant and insolent, through being absent from her father. But when she again hates wantonness and injustice, and becomes purified from the defilements which are here, and again returns to her father, she is affected in the most felicitous manner. And those, indeed, who are ignorant of this affection, may from worldly love form some conjecture of divine love, by considering how great a felicity the possession of a most beloved object is conceived to be; and also, by considering that those earthly objects of love are mortal and noxious; that the love of them is nothing more than the love of images, and that they lose their attractive power because they are not truly desirable, nor our real good, nor that which we investigate. In the ideal world, however, the object of love is to be found, with which we may be conjoined, which we may participate and truly possess, and which is not externally enveloped with flesh. He, however, who knows this, well knew what I say, and will be convinced that the soul has another life."

Miss Bremer seemed puzzled by this reading as questioning in her mind a distinction between virtue and innocence, or holiness, which Mr. Alcott had discriminated clearly.

Some one inquired, "How can we trust our instincts since these have been so differently educated?"

Mr. Alcott said "they had rather been overborne by the appetites and passions. It was the tragedy of life that these were obscured so soon, and the mind left in confusion. The child was more of an enthusiast than the man ordinarily. And then so many were born old; even in the babe one sometimes sees some ancient sinner. Youth is so attractive because still under the sway of instinct. The highest duty is musical and sings itself. Business, lusts, draw men downwards. Yet were life earnest and true to the instincts, it would be music and song. Life was too much for most. No one was always an enthusiast. It was in the golden moments that he was filled with the overflowing divinity. The blissful moments were those when one abandons himself to the Spirit, letting it do what it will with him. True, most persons were divided, there were two or more of them, – a Deuce distracting them and they in conflict with evils, or devils. But what is the bad but lapse from the good, – the good blindfolded?"

"Ah! Mr. Alcott," said Miss Bremer, laughing, "I am desperately afraid there is a little bit of a devil, after all."

"One's foes are of his own household," said Mr. Alcott. "If his house is haunted it is by himself only. Our Choices were our Saviours or Satans."

Speaking of the temperaments, Mr. Alcott discriminated these in their different elements.

The celestial man was composed more largely of light and ether. The demonic man combined more of fire and vapor. The animal man more of embers and dust.13

The sacraments might be considered symbolically, as Baptism, or purification by water.

Fasting, or temperance in outward delights.

Continence, or chastity in personal indulgences.

Prayer, or aspiring aims.

Labor, or prayer in act or pursuits.

These he considered the regimen of inspiration and thought.

Mr. Alcott closed the conversation by reading from the Paradise Regained a description of the banquet spread by Satan for Christ; also, the lines in praise of Chastity, from the Comus, whose clear statue-like beauty always affects one powerfully.

HAWTHORNEMonday, 19.

Hawthorne was of the darker temperament and tendencies. His sensitiveness and sadness were native, and he cultivated them apparently alike by solitude, the pursuits and studies in which he indulged, till he became almost fated to know gayer hours only by stealth. By disposition friendly, he seemed the victim of his temperament, as if he sought distance, if not his pen, to put himself in communication, and possible sympathy with others, – with his nearest friends, even. His reserve and imprisonment were more distant and close, while the desire for conversation was livelier, than any one I have known. There was something of strangeness even in his cherished intimacies, as if he set himself afar from all and from himself with the rest; the most diffident of men, as coy as a maiden, he could only be won by some cunning artifice, his reserve was so habitual, his isolation so entire, the solitude so vast. How distant people were from him, the world they lived in, how he came to know so much about them, by what stratagem he got into his own house or left it, was a marvel. Fancy fixed, he was not to be jostled from himself for a moment, his mood was so persistent. There he was in the twilight, there he stayed. Was he some damsel imprisoned in that manly form pleading alway for release, sighing for the freedom and companionships denied her? Or was he some Assyrian ill at ease afar from the olives and the East? Had he strayed over with William the Conqueror, and true to his Norman nature, was the baron still in republican America, secure in his castle, secure in his tower, whence he could defy all invasion of curious eyes? What neighbor of his ever caught him on the highway, or ventured to approach his threshold?

"His bolted Castle gates, what man should ope,Unless the Lord did willTo prove his skill,And tempt the fates hid in his horoscope?"

Yet if by chance admitted, welcome in a voice that a woman might own for its hesitancy and tenderness; his eyes telling the rest.

"For such the noble language of his eye,That when of words his lips were destitute,Kind eyebeams spake while yet his tongue was mute."

Your intrusion was worth the courage it cost; it emboldened to future assaults to carry this fort of bashfulness. During all the time he lived near me, our estates being separated only by a gate and shaded avenue, I seldom caught sight of him; and when I did it was but to lose it the moment he suspected he was visible; oftenest seen on his hill-top screened behind the shrubbery and disappearing like a hare into the bush when surprised. I remember of his being in my house but twice, and then he was so ill at ease that he found excuse for leaving politely forthwith, – "the stove was so hot," "the clock ticked so loud." Yet he once complained to me of his wish to meet oftener, and dwelt on the delights of fellowship, regretting he had so little. I think he seldom dined from home; nor did he often entertain any one, – once, an Englishman, when I was also his guest; but he preserved his shrinking taciturnity, and left to us the conversation. Another time I dined with a Southern guest at his table. The conversation turning on the war after dinner, he hid himself in the corner, as if a distant spectator, and fearing there was danger even there. It was due to his guest to hear the human side of the question of slavery, since she had heard only the best the South had to plead in its favor.

I never deemed Hawthorne an advocate of Southern ideas and institutions. He professed democracy, not in the party, but large sense of equality. Perhaps he loved England too well to be quite just to his native land, – was more the Old Englishman than the New. He seemed to regret the transplanting, as if reluctant to fix his roots in our soil. His book on England, entitled "Our Old Home," intimates his filial affection for that and its institutions. If his themes were American, his treatment of them was foreign, rather. He stood apart as having no stake in home affairs. While calling himself a democrat, he sympathized apparently with the absolutism of the old countries. He had not full faith in the people; perhaps feared republicanism because it had. Of our literary men, he least sympathized with the North, and was tremulously disturbed, I remember, at the time of the New-York mob. It is doubtful if he ever attended a political meeting or voted on any occasion throughout the long struggle with slavery. He stood aloof, hesitating to take a responsible part, true to his convictions, doubtless, strictly honest, if not patriotic.

He strove by disposition to be sunny and genial, traits not native to him. Constitutionally shy, recluse, melancholy, only by shafts of wit and flow of humor could he deliver himself. There was a soft sadness in his smile, a reserve in his glance, telling how isolate he was. Was he ever one of his company while in it? There was an aloofness, a besides, that refused to affiliate himself with himself, even. His readers must feel this, while unable to account for it, perhaps, or express it adequately. A believer in transmitted traits needs but read his pedigree to find the genesis of what characterized him distinctly, and made him and his writings their inevitable sequel. Everywhere you will find persons of his type and complexion similar in cast of character and opinions. His associates mostly confirm the observation.

LANDOR

Landor's Biography, edited by James Forster, and lately published here, well repays perusal. Landor seems to have been the victim of his temperament all his life long. I know not when I have read a commentary so appalling on the fate that breaks a noble mind on the wheel of its passions, precipitating it into the dungeons but to brighten its lights. Of impetuous wing, his genius was yet sure of its boldest flights, and to him, if any modern, may be applied Coleridge's epithet of "myriad mindedness," so salient, varied, so daring the sweep of his thought. More than any he reminds of Shakespeare in dramatic power; of Plato, in his mastery of dialogue; in epic force, of Æschylus. He seems to have been one of the demigods, cast down, out of place, out of his time, restless ever, and indignant at his destiny, —

"Heaven's exile straying from the orb of light."

His stormful, wayward career exemplifies in a remarkable manner the recoiling Fate pervading human affairs.

"A sharp dogmatic man," says Emerson, who met him when abroad, "with a great deal of knowledge, a great deal of worth and a great deal of pride, with a profound contempt for all that he does not understand, a master of elegant learning and capable of the utmost delicacy of sentiment, and yet prone to indulge a sort of ostentation of coarse imagery and language. He has capital enough to have furnished the brain of fifty stock authors, yet has written no good book. In these busy days of avarice and ambition, when there is so little disposition to profound thought, or to any but the most superficial intellectual entertainments, a faithful scholar, receiving from past ages the treasures of wit, and enlarging them by his own lore, is a friend and consoler of mankind. Whoever writes for the love of mirth and beauty, and not with ulterior ends, belongs to this sacred class, and among these, few men of the present age have a better claim to be numbered than Mr. Landor. Wherever genius and taste have existed, wherever freedom and justice are threatened (which he values as the element in which genius may work), his interest is here to be commanded. Nay, when we remember his rich and ample page, wherein we are always sure to find free and sustained thought, a keen and precise understanding, an affluent and ready memory familiar with all chosen books, an industrious observation in every department of life, an experience to which nothing has occurred in vain, honor for every just sentiment, and a scourge like that of the Furies for every oppressor, whether public or private, we feel how dignified is this perpetual censor in his cerule chair, and we wish to thank a benefactor of the reading world."

No writer of our time in the difficult species of composition, the dialogue, has attained a success upon so high a plane as Landor in his Conversations, wherein he has treated almost every human interest, brought his characters together, like Plato's interlocutors, from different ages and of differing opinions, using these as representatives of the world's best literature. And besides these his masterpieces, his verses have the chaste and exquisite quality of the best Greek poetry.

"His dialogues number," says his biographer, "not fewer than a hundred and fifty. Different as these were in themselves, it was not the less the distinguishing mark of their genius to be, both in their conformation and in their mass, almost strangely alike; and it is this unity in their astonishing variety, the fire of an inexpressible genius running through the whole, that gives to his books containing them their place among the books not likely to pass away; there is scarcely a form or function of the human mind, sincere or sprightly, cogitative or imaginative, historical, fanciful, or real, which has not been exercised or brought into play in this extraordinary series of writings. The world, past and present, is reproduced in them, with its variety and uniformity, its continuity and change."

What Landor says of written dialogue, holds in still wider latitude, even, in conversation.

"When a man writes a dialogue, he has it all to himself, the pro and the con, the argument and the reply. Within the shortest given space of time, he may indulge in every possible variety of mood. He may contradict himself every minute. In the same page, without any sort of violence, the most different shades of sentiment may find expression. Extravagance of statement, which in other forms could not be admitted, may be fully put forth. Dogmas of every description may be dealt in, audaciously propounded, or passionately opposed, with a result all the livelier in proportion to the mere vehemence expended on them. In no other style of composition is a writer so free from ordinary restraints upon opinion, or so absolved from self-control. Better far than any other, it adapts itself to eagerness and impatience. Dispensing with preliminaries, the jump in medias res may at once be taken safely. That one thing should be unexpectedly laid aside, and another as capriciously taken up, is quite natural to it; the subjects being few that may not permissively branch off into all the kindred topics connected with them, when the formalities held ordinarily necessary in the higher order of prose composition have disappeared in the freedom of conversation."

SLEEP AND DREAMSThursday, 22."When sleep hath closed our eyes the mind sees well,For Fate by daylight is invisible."

Things admirable for the admirable hours. The morning for thought, the afternoon for recreation, the evening for company, the night for rest. Having drank of immortality all night, the genius enters eagerly upon the day's task, impatient of any impertinences jogging the full glass. The best comes when we are at our best; and who so buoyant as to be always rider of the wave? Sleep, and see; wake, and report the nocturnal spectacle. Sleep, like travel, enriches, refreshes, by varying the day's perspective, showing us the night side of the globe we traverse day by day. We make transits too swift for our wakeful senses to follow; pass from solar to lunar consciousness in a twinkling, lapse from forehead and face to occupy our lower parts, and recover, as far as permitted, the keys of genesis and of the foreworlds. "All truth," says Porphyry, "is latent; but this the soul sometimes beholds when she is a little liberated by sleep from the employments of the body. And sometimes she extends her sight, but never perfectly reaches the objects of her vision. Hence, when she beholds, she does not see it with a free and direct light, but through an intervening veil, which the folds of darkening nature draw over her eye. This veil, when in sleep it admits the light to extend as far as truth, is said to be of horn, whose nature is such, from its tenuity, that it is pervious to the light. But when it dulls the sight and repels its vision of truth, it is said to be of ivory, which is a body so naturally dense, that, however thin it may be scraped, it cannot be penetrated by the visual rays."

Homer says, —

"Our dreams descend from Jove."

That is, from the seat of intellect, and declare their import when our will sleeps. Then are they of weighty and reliable import, yet require the like suppression of our will to make plain their significance. Only so is the oracle made reliable. The good alone dream divinely. Our dreams are characteristic of our waking thoughts and states; we are never out of character; never quite another, even when fancy seeks to metamorphose us entirely. The Person is One in all the manifold phases of the Many through which we transmigrate, and we find ourself perpetually, because we cannot lose ourself personally in the mazes of the many. 'Tis the one soul in manifold shapes, ever the old friend of the mirror in other face, old and new, yet one in endless revolution and metamorphosis, suggesting a common relationship of forms at their base, with divergent types as these range wider and farther from their central archetype, including all concrete forms in nature, each returning into other, and departing therefrom in endless revolution.14