“What is history,”
said Napoleon,
“but a
fable agreed upon?”
"It is the spirit
and not the fact that is identical."
~(R. W. Emerson)~
Essays
by
Ralph Waldo Emerson
HISTORY
There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are
And it cometh everywhere.
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Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Caesar’s hand, and Plato’s brain,
Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakspeare’s strain.
I. HISTORY
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There is one mind common to all individual men.
Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the
same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason
is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato
has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may
feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand.
Who hath access to this universal mind is a
party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and
sovereign agent.
Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius
is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is
explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without
hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the
beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every
emotion, which belongs to it, in appropriate events. But
the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of
history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is
made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of
nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the
whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand
forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul,
Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch
after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy,
are merely the application of his manifold spirit
to the manifold world.
This human mind wrote history, and this must read it.
The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of
history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual
experience. There is a relation between the hours
of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe
is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the
light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions
of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the
equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the
hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained
by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual
man is one more incarnation. All its properties
consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience
flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done,
and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every
revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind, and
when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the
key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion,
and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve
the problem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond
to something in me to be credible or intelligible.
We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest
and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images
to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall
learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia
is as much an illustration of the mind’s powers and depravations
as what has befallen us. Each new law and political
movement has meaning for you. Stand before each
of its tablets and say, ‘Under this mask did my Proteus
nature hide itself.’ This remedies the defect of our too
great nearness to ourselves. This throws our actions into
perspective; and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance
and the waterpot lose their meanness when hung as signs
in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in
the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.
It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular
men and things. Human life, as containing this, is
mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it round with
penalties and laws. All laws derive hence their ultimate
reason; all express more or less distinctly some command
of this supreme, illimitable essence. Property also holds
of the soul, covers great spiritual facts, and instinctively
we at first hold to it with swords and laws and wide and
complex combinations. The obscure consciousness of this
fact is the light of all our day, the claim of claims; the
plea for education, for justice, for charity; the foundation
of friendship and love and of the heroism and grandeur
which belong to acts of self-reliance. It is remarkable
that involuntarily we always read as superior beings.
Universal history, the poets, the romancers, do not
in their stateliest pictures, —in the sacerdotal, the imperial
palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius,—
anywhere lose our ear, anywhere make us feel that we
intrude, that this is for better men; but rather is it true
that in their grandest strokes we feel most at home. All
that Shakspeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy
that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We
sympathize in the great moments of history, in the great
discoveries, the great resistances, the great prosperities
of men;—because there law was enacted, the sea was
searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck, for
us, as we ourselves in that place would have done or
applauded.
We have the same interest in condition and character.
We honor the rich because they have externally the freedom,
power, and grace which we feel to be proper to
man, proper to us. So all that is said of the wise man by
Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each
reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable
self. All literature writes the character of the wise
man. Books, monuments, pictures, conversation, are portraits
in which he finds the lineaments he is forming. The
silent and the eloquent praise him and accost him, and
he is stimulated wherever he moves, as by personal allusions.
A true aspirant therefore never needs look for
allusions personal and laudatory in discourse. He hears
the commendation, not of himself, but, more sweet, of
that character he seeks, in every word that is said
concerning character, yea further in every fact and circumstance,—
in the running river and the rustling corn. Praise
is looked, homage tendered, love flows, from mute nature,
from the mountains and the lights of the firmament.
These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night,
let us use in broad day. The student is to read history
actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the
text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the
Muse of history will utter oracles, as never to those who
do not respect themselves. I have no expectation that
any man will read history aright who thinks that what
was done in a remote age, by men whose names have
resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing
to-day.
The world exists for the education of each man. There
is no age or state of society or mode of action in history
to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life.
Every thing tends in a wonderful manner to abbreviate
itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that
he can live all history in his own person. He must sit
solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by
kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the
geography and all the government of the world; he must
transfer the point of view from which history is commonly
read, from Rome and Athens and London, to himself,
and not deny his conviction that he is the court,
and if England or Egypt have any thing to say to him he
will try the case; if not, let them for ever be silent. He
must attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts
yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike.
The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature, betrays
itself in the use we make of the signal narrations of history.
Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity
of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep
a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even
early Rome are passing already into fiction. The Garden
of Eden, the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward
to all nations. Who cares what the fact was, when
we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an
immortal sign? London and Paris and New York must go
the same way. “What is history,” said Napoleon, “but a
fable agreed upon?” This life of ours is stuck round with
Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonization, Church,
Court and Commerce, as with so many flowers and wild
ornaments grave and gay. I will not make more account
of them. I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia,
Italy, Spain and the Islands, —the genius and creative
principle of each and of all eras, in my own mind.
We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of
history in our private experience and verifying them here.
All history becomes subjective; in other words there is
properly no history, only biography. Every mind must know
the whole lesson for itself,—must go over the whole
ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will
not know. What the former age has epitomized into a
formula or rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all
the good of verifying for itself, by means of the wall of
that rule. Somewhere, sometime, it will demand and find
compensation for that loss, by doing the work itself.
Ferguson discovered many things in astronomy which had
long been known. The better for him.
History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which
the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is
all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of
every fact,—see how it could and must be. So stand before
every public and private work; before an oration of
Burke, before a victory of Napoleon, before a martyrdom
of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson;
before a French Reign of Terror, and a Salem hanging of
witches; before a fanatic Revival and the Animal Magnetism
in Paris, or in Providence. We assume that we under
like influence should be alike affected, and should achieve
the like; and we aim to master intellectually the steps
and reach the same height or the same degradation that
our fellow, our proxy has done.
All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the
Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio
Circles, Mexico, Memphis,—is the desire to do away this
wild, savage, and preposterous There or Then, and introduce
in its place the Here and the Now. Belzoni digs and
measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes,
until he can see the end of the difference between the
monstrous work and himself. When he has satisfied himself,
in general and in detail, that it was made by such a
person as he, so armed and so motived, and to ends to
which he himself should also have worked, the problem is
solved; his thought lives along the whole line of temples
and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through them all with
satisfaction, and they live again to the mind, or are now.
A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and
not done by us. Surely it was by man, but we find it not
in our man. But we apply ourselves to the history of its
production. We put ourselves into the place and state of
the builder. We remember the forest-dwellers, the first
temples, the adherence to the first type, and the decoration
of it as the wealth of the nation increased; the value
which is given to wood by carving led to the carving over
the whole mountain of stone of a cathedral. When we
have gone through this process, and added thereto the
Catholic Church, its cross, its music, its processions, its
Saints’ days and image-worship, we have as it were been
the man that made the minster; we have seen how it
could and must be. We have the sufficient reason.
The difference between men is in their principle of association.
Some men classify objects by color and size
and other accidents of appearance; others by intrinsic
likeness, or by the relation of cause and effect. The
progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of causes,
which neglects surface differences. To the poet, to the
philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred,
all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.
For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance.
Every chemical substance, every plant, every
animal in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety
of appearance.
Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating
nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, why should we
be such hard pedants, and magnify a few forms? Why
should we make account of time, or of magnitude, or of
figure? The soul knows them not, and genius, obeying its
law, knows how to play with them as a young child plays
with graybeards and in churches. Genius studies the causal
thought, and far back in the womb of things sees the
rays parting from one orb, that diverge, ere they fall, by
infinite diameters. Genius watches the monad through
all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of
ture. Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar,
through the grub, through the egg, the constant
individual; through countless individuals the fixed species;
through many species the genus; through all genera
the steadfast type; through all the kingdoms of organized
life the eternal unity. Nature is a mutable cloud
which is always and never the same. She casts the same
thought into troops of forms, as a poet makes twenty
fables with one moral. Through the bruteness and toughness
of matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own
will. The adamant streams into soft but precise form before
it, and whilst I look at it its outline and texture are
changed again. Nothing is so fleeting as form; yet never
does it quite deny itself. In man we still trace the remains
or hints of all that we esteem badges of servitude
in the lower races; yet in him they enhance his nobleness
and grace; as Io, in Aeschylus, transformed to a cow,
offends the imagination; but how changed when as Isis
in Egypt she meets Osiris-Jove, a beautiful woman with
nothing of the metamorphosis left but the lunar horns as
the splendid ornament of her brows!
The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity
equally obvious. There is, at the surface, infinite variety
of things; at the centre there is simplicity of cause. How
many are the acts of one man in which we recognize the
same character! Observe the sources of our information
in respect to the Greek genius. We have the civil history
of that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and
Plutarch have given it; a very sufficient account of what
manner of persons they were and what they did. We have
the same national mind expressed for us again in their
literature, in epic and lyric poems, drama, and philosophy;
a very complete form. Then we have it once more in
their architecture, a beauty as of temperance itself, limited
to the straight line and the square, —a builded geometry.
Then we have it once again in sculpture, the
“tongue on the balance of expression,” a multitude of
forms in the utmost freedom of action and never transgressing
the ideal serenity; like votaries performing some
religious dance before the gods, and, though in convulsive
pain or mortal combat, never daring to break the
figure and decorum of their dance.
Thus of the genius of...
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