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What
I must do is all that concerns me, not what people
think. This rule, equally arduous in actual
and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole
distinction between greatness and meanness. It
is the harder, because you will always find those
who think they know what is your duty better than
you know it. It is easy in the world to live
after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to
live after our own; but the great person is the one
who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect
sweetness the independence of solitude.
The
objection to conforming to usages that have become
dead to you is, that it scatters your force.
It uses your time and blurs the impression of your
character. If you maintain a dead church,
contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a
great party either for the government or against it,
spread your table like base housekeepers,--under all
these screens I have difficulty to detect the
precise person you are. And, of course, so
much force is drawn from your proper life.
But
do your work, and I shall know you. Do your
work, and you shall reėnforce yourself. A
person must consider what a blindman's buff is this
game of conformity. If I know your sect, I
anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher
announce for his text and topic the expediency of
one of the institutions of his church. Do I
not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a
new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that,
with all this ostentation of examining the grounds
of the institution, he will do no such thing?
Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to
look but at one side,--the permitted side, not as a
man but as a parish minister. He is a retained
attorney, and these airs of the bench are the
emptiest affectation.
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Well,
most people have bound their eyes with one or
another handkerchief, and attached themselves to
some one of these communities of opinion. This
conformity makes them not false in a few
particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all
particulars. Their every truth is not quite
true. Their two is not the real two, their
four not the real four; so that every word they say
chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set
them right. Meantime nature is not slow to
equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which
we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and
figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine
expression.
There
is a mortifying experience in particular, which does
not fail to wreak itself also in the general
history; I mean "the foolish face of
praise," the forced smile which we put on in
company where we do not feel at ease in answer to
conversation which does not interest us. The
muscles, not spontaneously moved, but moved by a low
usurping willfulness, grow tight about the outline
of the face with the most disagreeable sensation.
For
nonconformity the world whips you with its
displeasure. And therefore we must know how to
estimate a sour face. The by-standers look
askance on us in the public street or in the
friend's parlor. If this aversation had its
origin in contempt and resistance like our own, we
might well go home with a sad countenance; but the
sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces,
have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the
wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is the
discontent of the multitude more formidable than
that of the senate and the college. It is easy
enough for a firm person who knows the world to
brook the rage of the cultivated classes.
Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are
timid as being very vulnerable themselves.
1841
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