No More Learning

Caution seldom goes far enough. It has
been thought that the prudent citizen was the citizen who applied himself
to solid gains, and did well for himself and his family, and completed a
lawful life without debt or crime. The greatest poet sees and admits these
economies as he sees the economies of food and sleep, but has higher
notions of prudence than to think he gives much when he gives a few slight
attentions at the latch of the gate. The premises of the prudence of life
are not the hospitality of it, or the ripeness and harvest of it. Beyond
the independence of a little sum laid aside for burial-money, and of a few
clapboards around and shingles overhead on a lot of American soil owned,
and the easy dollars that supply the year's plain clothing and meals, the
melancholy prudence of the abandonment of such a great being as a man is to
the toss and pallor of years of money-making, with all their scorching days
and icy nights, and all their stifling deceits and underhanded dodgings, or
infinitesimals of parlours, or shameless stuffing while others starve,--and
all the loss of the bloom and odour of the earth, and of the flowers and
atmosphere, and of the sea, and of the true taste of the women and men you
pass or have to do with in youth or middle age, and the issuing sickness
and desperate revolt at the close of a life without elevation or naivete,
and the ghastly chatter of a death without serenity or majesty,--is the
great fraud upon modern civilisation and forethought; blotching the surface
and system which civilisation undeniably drafts, and moistening with tears
the immense features it spreads and spreads with such velocity before the
reached kisses of the soul. Still the right explanation remains to be made
about prudence. The prudence of the mere wealth and respectability of the
most esteemed life appears too faint for the eye to observe at all when
little and large alike drop quietly aside at the thought of the prudence
suitable for immortality. What is wisdom that fills the thinness of a year
or seventy or eighty years, to wisdom spaced out by ages, and coming back
at a certain time with strong reinforcements and rich presents and the
clear faces of wedding-guests as far as you can look in every direction
running gaily toward you? Only the soul is of itself--all else has
reference to what ensues. All that a person does or thinks is of
consequence. Not a move can a man or woman make that affects him or her in
a day or a month, or any part of the direct lifetime or the hour of death,
but the same affects him or her onward afterward through the indirect
lifetime. The indirect is always as great and real as the direct. The
spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives to the body. Not one
name of word or deed--not of the putrid veins of gluttons or rum-drinkers--
not peculation or cunning or betrayal or murder--no serpentine poison of
those that seduce women--not the foolish yielding of women--not of the
attainment of gain by discreditable means--not any nastiness of appetite--
not any harshness of officers to men, or judges to prisoners, or fathers to
sons, or sons to fathers, or of husbands to wives, or bosses to their
boys--not of greedy looks or malignant wishes--nor any of the wiles
practised by people upon themselves--ever is or ever can be stamped on the
programme, but it is duly realised and returned, and that returned in
further performances, and they returned again. Nor can the push of charity
or personal force ever be anything else than the profoundest reason,
whether it bring arguments to hand or no.
No specification is necessary--to
add or subtract or divide is in vain. Little or big, learned or unlearned,
white or black, legal or illegal, sick or well, from the first inspiration
down the windpipe to the last expiration out of it, all that a male or
female does that is vigorous and benevolent and clean is so much sure
profit to him or her in the unshakable order of the universe and through
the whole scope of it for ever. If the savage or felon is wise, it is
well--if the greatest poet or savant is wise, it is simply the same--if the
President or chief justice is wise, it is the same--if the young mechanic
or farmer is wise, it is no more or less. The interest will come round--all
will come round. All the best actions of war and peace--all help given to
relatives and strangers, and the poor and old and sorrowful, and young
children and widows and the sick, and to all shunned persons--all
furtherance of fugitives and of the escape of slaves--all the self-denial
that stood steady and aloof on wrecks, and saw others take the seats of the
boats--all offering of substance or life for the good old cause, or for a
friend's sake or opinion's sake--all pains of enthusiasts scoffed at by
their neighbours--all the vast sweet love and precious suffering of
mothers--all honest men baffled in strifes recorded or unrecorded--all the
grandeur and good of the few ancient nations whose fragments of annals we
inherit--and all the good of the hundreds of far mightier and more ancient
nations unknown to us by name or date or location--all that was ever
manfully begun, whether it succeeded or no--all that has at any time been
well suggested out of the divine heart of man, or by the divinity of his
mouth, or by the shaping of his great hands--and all that is well thought
or done this day on any part of the surface of the globe, or on any of the
wandering stars or fixed stars by those there as we are here--or that is
henceforth to be well thought or done by you, whoever you are, or by any
one--these singly and wholly inured at their time, and inured now, and will
inure always, to the identities from which they sprung or shall spring. Did
you guess any of them lived only its moment? The world does not so exist--
no parts, palpable or impalpable, so exist--no result exists now without
being from its long antecedent result, and that from its antecedent, and so
backward without the farthest mentionable spot coining a bit nearer the
beginning than any other spot. . . . Whatever satisfies the soul is truth. The
prudence of the greatest poet answers at last the craving and glut of the
soul, is not contemptuous of less ways of prudence if they conform to its
ways, puts off nothing, permits no let-up for its own case or any case, has
no particular Sabbath or judgment-day, divides not the living from the dead
or the righteous from the unrighteous, is satisfied with the present,
matches every thought or act by its correlative, knows no possible
forgiveness or deputed atonement--knows that the young man who composedly
perilled his life and lost it has done exceeding well for himself, while
the man who has not perilled his life, and retains it to old age in riches
and ease, has perhaps achieved nothing for himself worth mentioning--and
that only that person has no great prudence to learn who has learnt to
prefer long-lived things, and favours body and soul the same, and perceives
the indirect assuredly following the direct, and what evil or good he does
leaping onward and waiting to meet him again--and who in his spirit in any
emergency whatever neither hurries nor avoids death.

The direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is to-day. If he
does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides--
and if he does not attract his own land body and soul to himself, and hang
on its neck with incomparable love--and if he be not himself the age
transfigured--and if to him is not opened the eternity which gives
similitude to all periods and locations and processes and animate and
inanimate forms, and which is the bond of time, and rises up from its
inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness in the swimming shape of to-day,
and is held by the ductile anchors of life, and makes the present spot the
passage from what was to what shall be, and commits itself to the
representation of this wave of an hour, and this one of the sixty beautiful
children of the wave--let him merge in the general run and wait his
development. . .