Compensation : Being an essay as written

By Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Title: Compensation
        Being an essay as written by Ralph Waldo Emerson


Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Release date: February 26, 2024 [eBook #73035]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Roycroft, 1903

Credits: Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COMPENSATION ***





Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
notes will be found near the end of this ebook.




[Illustration: THE OLD MANSE--CONCORD]




                              COMPENSATION

                             BEING AN ESSAY
                             AS WRITTEN BY

                              RALPH WALDO
                                EMERSON

                             [Illustration]

                      DONE INTO A PRINTED BOOK BY
                     THE ROYCROFTERS, AT THE SHOP,
                     WHICH IS IN EAST AURORA, ERIE
                     COUNTY, NEW YORK, U.S.A. MCMIV




Copyright, 1903, by The Roycrofters, East Aurora, N. Y.




In this God’s world, with its wild-whirling eddies and mad foam-oceans,
where men and nations perish as if without law, and judgment for
an unjust thing is sternly delayed, dost thou think that there is
therefore no justice? * * * * I tell thee again there is nothing else
but justice. One strong thing I find here below: the just thing, the
true thing.--_Thomas Carlyle._




COMPENSATION




Ever since I was a boy I have wished to write a discourse on
Compensation; for it had seemed to me when very young that on this
subject Life was ahead of theology and the people knew more than the
preachers taught. The documents, too, from which the doctrine is to
be drawn, charmed my fancy by their endless variety, and lay always
before me, even in sleep; for they are the tools in our hands, the
bread in our basket, the transactions of the street, the farm and the
dwelling-house; the greetings, the relations, the debts and credits,
the influence of character, the nature and endowment of all men. It
seemed to me also that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the
present action of the Soul of this world, clean from all vestige of
tradition; and so the heart of man might be bathed by an inundation of
eternal love, conversing with that which he knows was always and always
must be, because it really is now. It appeared moreover that if this
doctrine could be stated in terms with any resemblance to those bright
intuitions in which this truth is sometimes revealed to us, it would
be a star in many dark hours and crooked passages in our journey, that
would not suffer us to lose our way.

I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon at church.
The preacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy, unfolded in the
ordinary manner the doctrine of the Last Judgment. He assumed that
judgment is not executed in this world; that the wicked are successful;
that the good are miserable; and then urged from reason and from
Scripture a compensation to be made to both parties in the next life.
No offence appeared to be taken by the congregation at this doctrine.
As far as I could observe, when the meeting broke up they separated
without remark on the sermon.

Yet what was the import of this teaching? What did the preacher mean
by saying that the good are miserable in the present life? Was it that
houses and lands, offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are had by
unprincipled men, whilst the saints are poor and despised; and that a
compensation is to be made to these last hereafter, by giving them the
like gratifications another day,--bank-stock and doubloons, venison and
champagne? This must be the compensation intended; for what else? Is
it that they are to have leave to pray and praise? to love and serve
men? Why, that they can do now. The legitimate inference the disciple
would draw was, “We are to have _such_ a good time as the sinners have
now;”--or, to push it to its extreme import,--“You sin now, we shall
sin by-and-by; we would sin now, if we could; not being successful we
expect our revenge to-morrow.”

The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad are successful;
that justice is not done now. The blindness of the preacher consisted
in deferring to the base estimate of the market of what constitutes a
manly success, instead of confronting and convicting the world from
the truth; announcing the Presence of the Soul; the omnipotence of the
Will; and so establishing the standard of good and ill, of success and
falsehood, and summoning the dead to its present tribunal.

I find a similar base tone in the popular religious works of the day,
and the same doctrines assumed by the literary men when occasionally
they treat the related topics. I think that our popular theology has
gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the superstitions it has
displaced. But men are better than this theology. Their daily life
gives it the lie. Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the doctrine
behind him in his own experience, and all men feel sometimes the
falsehood which they cannot demonstrate. For men are wiser than they
know. That which they hear in schools and pulpits without afterthought,
if said in conversation would probably be questioned in silence. If a
man dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the divine laws,
he is answered by a silence which conveys well enough to an observer
the dissatisfaction of the hearer, but his incapacity to make his own
statement.

I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to record some facts
that indicate the path of the law of Compensation; happy beyond my
expectation if I shall truly draw the smallest arc of this circle.

Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in
darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters;
in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and
animals; in the systole and diastole of the heart; in the undulations
of fluids and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal gravity; in
electricity, galvanism and chemical affinity. Superinduce magnetism
at one end of a needle, the opposite magnetism takes place at the
other end. If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here, you
must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that
each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole; as,
spirit, matter; man, woman; subjective, objective; in, out; upper,
under; motion, rest; yea, nay.

Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. The
entire system of things gets represented in every particle. There is
somewhat that resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and night,
man and woman, in a single needle of the pine, in a kernel of corn, in
each individual of every animal tribe. The reaction, so grand in the
elements, is repeated within these small boundaries. For example, in
the animal kingdom the physiologist has observed that no creatures are
favorites, but a certain compensation balances every gift and every
defect. A surplusage given to one part is paid out of a reduction from
another part of the same creature. If the head and neck are enlarged,
the trunk and extremities are cut short.

The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What we gain in
power is lost in time, and the converse. The periodic or compensating
errors of the planets is another instance. The influences of
climate and soil in political history are another. The cold climate
invigorates. The barren soil does not breed fevers, crocodiles, tigers,
or scorpions.

The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man. Every
excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath
its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of
pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for
its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain
of folly. For every thing you have missed, you have gained something
else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something. If riches
increase, they are increased that use them. If the gatherer gathers
too much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest;
swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and
exceptions. The waves of the sea do not more speedily seek a level from
their loftiest tossing than the varieties of condition tend to equalize
themselves. There is always some leveling circumstance that puts down
the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate, substantially on
the same ground with all others. Is a man too strong and fierce for
society, and by temper and position a bad citizen,--a morose ruffian,
with a dash of the pirate in him?--nature sends him a troop of pretty
sons and daughters who are getting along in the dame’s classes at the
village school, and love and fear for them smooths his grim scowl to
courtesy. Thus she contrives to intenerate the granite and feldspar,
takes the boar out and puts the lamb in, and keeps her balance true.

The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President
has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his
peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short
time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to
eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne. Or
do men desire the more substantial and permanent grandeur of genius?
Neither has this an immunity. He, who by force of will or of thought is
great, and overlooks thousands, has the responsibility of overlooking.
With every influx of light comes new danger. Has he light? he must
bear witness to the light, and always outrun that sympathy which gives
him such keen satisfaction, by his fidelity to new revelations of the
incessant soul. He must hate father and mother, wife and child. Has he
all that the world loves and admires and covets?--he must cast behind
him their admiration and afflict them by faithfulness to his truth and
become a byword and a hissing.

This Law writes the laws of cities and nations. It will not be balked
of its end in the smallest iota. It is in vain to build or plot
or combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. _Res
nolunt diu male administrari._ Though no checks to a new evil appear,
the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is cruel, the
governor’s life is not safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will
yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will
not convict. Nothing arbitrary, nothing artificial can endure. The
true life and satisfactions of man seem to elude the utmost rigors
or felicities of condition, and to establish themselves with great
indifferency under all varieties of circumstance. Under all governments
the influence of character remains the same,--in Turkey and New England
about alike. Under the primeval despots of Egypt, history honestly
confesses that man must have been as free as culture could make him.

These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented
in every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the
powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the
naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a
horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying
man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main
character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims,
furtherances, hindrances, energies and whole system of every other.
Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world
and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human
life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its
end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man and recite all
his destiny.

The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The microscope cannot find
the animalcule which is less perfect for being little. Eyes, ears,
taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduction
that take hold on eternity,--all find room to consist in the small
creature. So do we put our life into every act. The true doctrine of
omnipresence is that God reappears with all his parts in every moss
and cobweb. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into
every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity,
so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation. ¶ Thus is the
universe alive. All things are moral. That soul which within us is a
sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspirations; out there
in history we can see its fatal strength. It is almighty. All nature
feels its grasp. “It is in the world, and the world was made by it.”
It is eternal, but it enacts itself in time and space. Justice is not
postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life.
“The dice of God are always ready to fall.” The dice of God are always
loaded. The world looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical
equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself. Take what
figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still returns
to you. Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue
rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty. What we
call retribution is the universal necessity by which the whole appears
wherever a part appears. If you see smoke, there must be fire. If you
see a hand or a limb, you know that the trunk to which it belongs is
there behind.

Every act rewards itself, or in other words, integrates itself, in a
twofold manner: first, in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly,
in the circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance
the retribution. The causal retribution is in the thing and is seen
by the soul. The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the
understanding; it is inseparable from the thing, but is often spread
over a long time and so does not become distinct until after many
years. The specific stripes may follow late after the offence, but they
follow because they accompany it. Crime and punishment grow out of one
stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens within the flower
of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends,
seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the
cause, the end pre-exists in the means, the fruit in the seed.

Whilst thus the world will be whole and refuses to be disparted, we
seek to act partially, to sunder, to appropriate; for example,--to
gratify the senses we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs
of the character. The ingenuity of man has been dedicated to the
solution of one problem,--how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual
strong, the sensual bright, etc., from the moral sweet, the moral deep,
the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean off this upper
surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a _one end_, without
an _other end_. The soul says, Eat; the body would feast. The soul
says, The man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul; the body would
join the flesh only. The soul says, Have dominion over all things to
the ends of virtue; the body would have the power over things to its
own ends.

The soul strives amain to live and work through all things. It would
be the only fact. All things shall be added unto it,--power, pleasure,
knowledge, beauty. The particular man aims to be somebody; to set
up for himself; to truck and higgle for a private good; and, in
particulars, to ride that he may ride; to dress that he may be dressed;
to eat that he may eat; and to govern, that he may be seen. Men seek to
be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think
that to be great is to get only one side of nature,--the sweet, without
the other side,--the bitter.

Steadily is this dividing and detaching counteracted. Up to this day
it must be owned no projector has had the smallest success. The parted
water re-unites behind our hand. Pleasure is taken out of pleasant
things, profit out of profitable things, power out of strong things,
the moment we seek to separate them from the whole. We can no more
halve things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get an
inside that shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow. “Drive
out nature with a fork, she comes running back.”

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise
seek to dodge, which one and another brags that he does not know,
brags that they do not touch him;--but the brag is on his lips, the
conditions are in his soul. If he escapes them in one part they attack
him in another more vital part. If he has escaped them in form and
in the appearance, it is because he has resisted his life and fled
from himself, and the retribution is so much death. So signal is the
failure of all attempts to make this separation of the good from the
tax, that the experiment would not be tried,--since to try it is to be
mad,--but for the circumstance that when the disease began in the will,
of rebellion and separation, the intellect is at once infected, so that
the man ceases to see God whole in each object, but is able to see the
sensual allurement of an object and not see the sensual hurt; he sees
the mermaid’s head but not the dragon’s tail, and thinks he can cut
off that which he would have from that which he would not have. “How
secret art thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in silence, O thou
only great God, sprinkling with an unwearied providence certain penal
blindnesses upon such as have unbridled desires!” ¶ The human soul is
true to these facts in the painting of fable, of history, of law, of
proverbs, of conversation. It finds a tongue in literature unawares.
Thus the Greeks called Jupiter, Supreme Mind; but having traditionally
ascribed to him many base actions, they involuntarily made amends to
Reason by tying up the hands of so bad a god. He is made as helpless as
a king of England. Prometheus knows one secret which Jove must bargain
for; Minerva, another. He cannot get his own thunders; Minerva keeps
the key of them:

      “Of all the gods, I only know the keys
      That ope the solid doors within whose vaults
      His thunders sleep.”

A plain confession of the in-working of the All, and of its moral aim.
The Indian mythology ends in the same ethics; and indeed it would seem
impossible for any fable to be invented and get any currency which was
not moral. Aurora forgot to ask youth for her lover, and though so
Tithonus is immortal, he is old. Achilles is not quite invulnerable;
for Thetis held him by the heel when she dipped him in the Styx,
and the sacred waters did not wash that part. Siegfried, in the
Nibelungen, is not quite immortal, for a leaf fell on his back whilst
he was bathing in the Dragon’s blood, and that spot which it covered
is mortal. And so it always is. There is a crack in every thing God
has made. Always it would seem there is this vindictive circumstance
stealing in at unawares even into the wild poesy in which the human
fancy attempted to make bold holiday and to shake itself free of the
old laws,--this back-stroke, this kick of the gun, certifying that
the law is fatal; that in nature nothing can be given, all things
are sold. ¶ This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps watch
in the Universe, and lets no offence go unchastised. The Furies, they
said, are attendants on Justice, and if the sun in heaven should
transgress his path, they would punish him. The poets related that
stone walls and iron swords and leathern thongs had an occult sympathy
with the wrongs of their owners; that the belt which Ajax gave Hector
dragged the Trojan hero over the field at the wheels of the car of
Achilles, and the sword which Hector gave Ajax was that on whose point
Ajax fell. They recorded that when the Thasians erected a statue to
Theogenes, a victor in the games, one of his rivals went to it by night
and endeavored to throw it down by repeated blows, until at last he
moved it from its pedestal and was crushed to death beneath its fall.

This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It came from thought
above the will of the writer. That is the best part of each writer
which has nothing private in it; that is the best part of each which
he does not know; that which flowed out of his constitution and not
from his too-active invention; that which in the study of a single
artist you might not easily find, but in the study of many you would
abstract as the spirit of them all. Phidias it is not, but the work
of man in that early Hellenic world that I would know. The name and
circumstance of Phidias, however convenient for history, embarasses
when we come to the highest criticism. We are to see that which man was
tending to do in a given period, and was hindered, or, if you will,
modified in doing, by the interfering volitions of Phidias, of Dante,
of Shakespeare, the organ whereby man at the moment wrought. ¶ Still
more striking is the expression of this fact in the proverbs of all
nations, which are always the literature of Reason, or the statements
of an absolute truth without qualification. Proverbs, like the sacred
books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the Intuitions. That which
the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist
to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs, without
contradiction. And this law of laws, which the pulpit, the senate and
the college deny, is hourly preached in all markets and all languages
by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as omnipresent as
that of birds and flies.

All things are double, one against another.--Tit for tat; an eye for an
eye; a tooth for a tooth; blood for blood; measure for measure; love
for love.--Give, and it shall be given you.--He that watereth shall be
watered himself.--What will you have? quoth God; pay for it and take
it.--Nothing venture, nothing have.--Thou shalt be paid exactly for
what thou hast done, no more, no less.--Who doth not work shall not
eat.--Harm watch, harm catch.--Curses always recoil on the head of him
who imprecates them.--If you put a chain around the neck of a slave,
the other end fastens itself around your own.--Bad counsel confounds
the adviser.--The devil is an ass. ¶ It is thus written, because it is
thus in life. Our action is overmastered and characterized above our
will by the law of nature. We aim at a petty end quite aside from the
public good, but our act arranges itself by irresistible magnetism in a
line with the poles of the world.




A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will, or against his
will, he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word.
Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a thread-ball thrown
at a mark, but the other end remains in the thrower’s bag. Or, rather,
it is a harpoon thrown at the whale, unwinding, as it flies, a coil of
cord in the boat, and, if the harpoon is not good, or not well thrown,
it will go nigh to cut the steersman in twain or to sink the boat.

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. “No man had ever a point
of pride that was not injurious to him,” said Burke. The exclusive in
fashionable life does not see that he excludes himself from enjoyment,
in the attempt to appropriate it. The exclusionist in religion does
not see that he shuts the door of heaven on himself, in striving to
shut out others. Treat men as pawns and ninepins, and you shall suffer
as well as they. If you leave out their heart, you shall lose your own.
The senses would make things of all persons; of women, of children, of
the poor. The vulgar proverb, “I will get it from his purse or get it
from his skin,” is sound philosophy.

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are
speedily punished. They are punished by Fear. Whilst I stand in simple
relations to my fellow-man, I have no displeasure in meeting him. We
meet as water meets water, or as two currents of air mix, with perfect
diffusion and inter-penetration of nature. But as soon as there is any
departure from simplicity and attempt at halfness, or good for me that
is not good for him, my neighbor feels the wrong; he shrinks from me as
far as I have shrunk from him; his eyes no longer seek mine; there is
war between us; there is hate in him and fear in me.

All the old abuses in society, the great and universal and the petty
and particular, all unjust accumulations of property and power, are
avenged in the same manner. Fear is an instructor of great sagacity,
and the herald of all revolutions. One thing he always teaches: that
there is rottenness where he appears. He is a carrion crow, and though
you see not well what he hovers for, there is death somewhere. Our
property is timid, our laws are timid, our cultivated classes are
timid. Fear for ages has boded and mowed and gibbered over government
and property. That obscene bird is not there for nothing. He indicates
great wrongs which must be revised.

Of the like nature is that expectation of change which instantly
follows the suspension of our voluntary activity. The terror of
cloudless noon, the emerald of Polycrates, the awe of prosperity, the
instinct which leads every generous soul to impose on itself tasks
of a noble asceticism and vicarious virtue, are the tremblings of the
balance of justice through the heart and mind of man. ¶ Experienced
men of the world know very well that it is best to pay scot and lot as
they go along, and that a man often pays dear for a small frugality.
The borrower runs in his own debt. Has a man gained anything who
has received a hundred favors and rendered none? Has he gained by
borrowing, through indolence or cunning, his neighbor’s wares, or
horses, or money? There arises on the deed the instant acknowledgment
of benefit on the one part and of debt on the other; that is, of
superiority and inferiority. The transaction remains in the memory of
himself and his neighbor; and every new transaction alters according
to its nature their relation to each other. He may soon come to see
that he had better have broken his own bones than to have ridden in his
neighbor’s coach, and that “the highest price he can pay for a thing is
to ask for it.”

A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of life, and know that
it is always the part of prudence to face every claimant, and pay
every just demand on your time, your talents, or your heart. Always
pay; for, first or last, you must pay your entire debt. Persons and
events may stand for a time between you and justice, but it is only
a postponement. You must pay at last your own debt. If you are wise,
you will dread a prosperity which only loads you with more. Benefit is
the end of nature. But for every benefit which you receive, a tax is
levied. He is great who confers the most benefits. He is base--and that
is the one base thing in the universe--to receive favors and render
none. In the order of nature we cannot render benefits to those from
whom we receive them, or only seldom. But the benefit we receive must
be rendered again, line for line, deed for deed, cent for cent, to
somebody. Beware of too much good staying in your hand. It will fast
corrupt and worm worms. Pay it away quickly in some sort. ¶ Labor is
watched over by the same pitiless laws. Cheapest, say the prudent, is
the dearest labor. What we buy in a broom, a mat, a wagon, a knife,
is some application of good sense to a common want. It is best to
pay in your land a skilful gardener, or to buy good sense applied to
gardening; in your sailor, good sense applied to navigation; in the
house, good sense applied to cooking, sewing, serving; in your agent,
good sense applied to accounts and affairs. So do you multiply your
presence, or spread yourself throughout your estate. But because of
the dual constitution of things, in labor as in life there can be no
cheating. The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself.
For the real price of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and
credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited
or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and
virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen. These ends of labor cannot
be answered but by real exertions of the mind, and in obedience to
pure motives. The cheat, the defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the
benefit, cannot extort the knowledge of material and moral nature which
his honest care and pains yield to the operative. The law of nature is,
Do the thing, and you shall have the power; but they who do not the
thing have not the power.

Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a stake to
the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of
the perfect compensation of the universe. Everywhere and always this
law is sublime. The absolute balance of Give and Take, the doctrine
that every thing has its price, and if that price is not paid, not
that thing, but something else, is obtained, and that it is impossible
to get anything without its price, is not less sublime in the columns
of a ledger than in the budgets of states, in the laws of light and
darkness, in all the action and reaction of nature. I cannot doubt that
the high laws which each man sees ever implicated in those processes
with which he is conversant, the stern ethics which sparkle on his
chisel-edge, which are measured out by his plumb and foot-rule, which
stand as manifest in the footing of the shop-bill as in the history of
a state,--do recommend to him his trade, and though seldom named, exalt
his business to his imagination.

The league between virtue and nature engages all things to assume a
hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and substances of the world
persecute and whip the traitor. He finds that things are arranged for
truth and benefit, but there is no den in the wide world to hide a
rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. There is no
such thing as concealment. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat
of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track
of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole. You cannot recall
the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the foot-track, you cannot draw
up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clew. Always some damning
circumstance transpires. The laws and substances of nature, water,
snow, wind, gravitation, become penalties to the thief.

On the other hand, the law holds with equal sureness for all right
action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just,
as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation. The good man has
absolute good, which, like fire, turns every thing to its own nature,
so that you cannot do him any harm; but as the royal armies sent
against Napoleon, when he approached, cast down their colors, and from
enemies became friends, so do disasters of all kinds, as sickness,
offence, poverty, prove benefactors.

              “Winds blow and waters roll
      Strength to the brave and power and deity,
      Yet in themselves are nothing.”

¶ The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As no man had
ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had ever
a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him. The stag in the
fable admired his horns and blamed his feet, but when the hunter came,
his feet saved him, and afterwards, caught in the thicket, his horns
destroyed him. Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.
As no man thoroughly understands a truth until first he has contended
against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with the hindrances
or talents of men until he has suffered from the one and seen the
triumph of the other over his own want of the same. Has he a defect
of temper that unfits him to live in society? Thereby he is driven to
entertain himself alone and acquire habits of self-help; and thus, like
the wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.

Our strength grows out of our weakness. Not until we are pricked and
stung and sorely shot at, awakens the indignation which arms itself
with secret forces. A great man is always willing to be little. Whilst
he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he is
pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he
has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns
his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation
and real skill. The wise man always throws himself on the side of his
assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak
point. The wound cicatrizes and falls off from him like a dead skin,
and when they would triumph, lo! he has passed on invulnerable. Blame
is safer than praise. I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long
as all that is said, is said against me, I feel a certain assurance
of success. But as soon as honied words of praise are spoken for me,
I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies. In general,
every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor. As the Sandwich
Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills
passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we
resist.

The same guards which protect us from disaster, defect and enmity,
defend us, if we will, from selfishness and fraud. Bolts and bars are
not the best of our institutions, nor is shrewdness in trade a mark of
wisdom. Men suffer all their life long under the foolish superstition
that they can be cheated. But it is as impossible for a man to be
cheated by any one but himself, as for a thing to be and not to be
at the same time. There is a third silent party to all our bargains.
The nature and soul of things takes on itself the guaranty of the
fulfilment of every contract, so that honest service cannot come to
loss. If you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God
in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer the payment
is withholden, the better for you; for compound interest on compound
interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature,
to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no
difference whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A
mob is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason
and traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending to the
nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions
are insane, like its whole constitution. It persecutes a principle; it
would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting
fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these.
It resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to put out
the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The inviolate spirit turns
their spite against the wrongdoers. The martyr cannot be dishonored.
Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more
illustrious abode; every burned book or house enlightens the world;
every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from
side to side. The minds of men are at last aroused; reason looks out
and justifies her own, and malice finds all her work in vain. It is
the whipper who is whipped, and the tyrant who is undone.

Thus do all things preach the indifferency of circumstances. The man
is all. Every thing has two sides, a good and an evil. Every advantage
has its tax. I learn to be content. But the doctrine of compensation
is not the doctrine of indifferency. The thoughtless say, on hearing
these representations: “What boots it to do well? there is one event
to good and evil; if I gain any good, I must pay for it; if I lose any
good, I gain some other; all actions are indifferent.” ¶ There is a
deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit: its own nature. The
soul is not a compensation, but a life. The soul _is_. Under all this
running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect
balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Existence, or God, is
not a relation or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative,
excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations,
parts and times within itself. Nature, truth, virtue, are the influx
from thence. Vice is the absence or departure of the same. Nothing,
Falsehood, may indeed stand as the great Night or shade on which, as
a background, the living universe paints itself forth; but no fact is
begotten by it; it cannot work, for it is not. It cannot work any good;
it cannot work any harm. It is harm, inasmuch as it is worse not to be
than to be.

We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil acts, because the
criminal adheres to his vice and contumacy, and does not come to a
crisis or judgment anywhere in visible nature. There is no stunning
confutation of his nonsense before men and angels. Has he, therefore,
outwitted the law? Inasmuch as he carries the malignity and the lie
with him, he so far deceases from nature. In some manner there will
be a demonstration of the wrong to the understanding also; but,
should we not see it, this deadly deduction makes square the eternal
account. ¶ Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain
of rectitude must be bought by any loss. There is no penalty to
virtue; no penalty to wisdom; they are proper additions of being. In
a virtuous action, I properly _am_; in a virtuous act, I add to the
world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and
see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon. There can
be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty, when these
attributes are considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses all
limits. It affirms in man always an Optimism, never a Pessimism.
¶ His life is a progress, and not a station. His instinct is trust.
Our instinct uses “more” and “less” in application to man, always of
the _presence of the soul_, and not of its absence; the brave man is
greater than the coward; the true, the benevolent, the wise, is more
a man, and not less, than the fool and knave. There is, therefore, no
tax on the good of virtue, for that is the incoming of God himself,
or absolute existence, without any comparative. All external good has
its tax, and if it came without desert or sweat, has no root in me,
and the next wind will blow it away. But all the good of nature is the
soul’s, and may be had if paid for in nature’s lawful coin, that is, by
labor which the heart and the head allow. I no longer wish to meet a
good I do not earn; for example, to find a pot of buried gold, knowing
that it brings with it new responsibility. I do not wish more external
goods,--neither possessions, nor honors, nor powers, nor persons.
The gain is apparent; the tax is certain. But there is no tax on the
knowledge that the compensation exists, and that it is not desirable
to dig up treasure. Herein I rejoice with a serene eternal peace. I
contract the boundaries of possible mischief. I learn the wisdom of
St. Bernard: “Nothing can work me damage except myself; the harm that
I sustain, I carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer but by
my own fault.” ¶ In the nature of the soul is the compensation for
the inequalities of condition. The radical tragedy of nature seems to
be the distinction of More and Less. How can Less not feel the pain;
how not feel indignation or malevolence towards More? Look at those
who have less faculty, and one feels sad, and knows not well what to
make of it. Almost he shuns their eye; he fears they will upbraid God.
What should they do? It seems a great injustice. But see the facts
nearly, and these mountainous inequalities vanish. Love reduces them
as the sun melts the iceberg in the sea. The heart and soul of all
men being one, this bitterness of _His_ and _Mine_ ceases. His is
mine. I am my brother and my brother is me. If I feel overshadowed
and outdone by great neighbors, I can yet love; I can still receive;
and he that loveth, maketh his own the grandeur he loves. Thereby I
make the discovery that my brother is my guardian, acting for me with
the friendliest designs, and the estate I so admired and envied is my
own. It is the eternal nature of the soul to appropriate and make all
things its own. Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and
by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His
virtue,--is not that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is
not wit.

Such, also, is the natural history of calamity. The changes, which
break up at short intervals the prosperity of men, are advertisements
of a nature whose law is growth. Evermore it is the order of nature
to grow; and every soul is, by this intrinsic necessity, quitting its
whole system of things, its friends and home and laws and faith, as
the shell-fish crawls out of its beautiful but stony case, because
it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new house.
In proportion to the vigor of the individual, these revolutions
are frequent, until in some happier mind they are incessant, and
all worldly relations hang very loosely about him, becoming, as it
were, a transparent fluid membrane, through which the living form
is always seen, and not, as in most men, an indurated heterogeneous
fabric of many dates and of no settled character, in which the man
is imprisoned. Then there can be enlargement, and the man of to-day
scarcely recognizes the man of yesterday. And such should be the
outward biography of man in time, a putting off of dead circumstances
day by day, as he renews his raiment day by day. But to us, in our
lapsed estate, resting, not advancing, resisting, not co-operating with
the divine expansion, this growth comes by shocks.

We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go. We do not
see that they only go out that archangels may come in. We are idolators
of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in its proper
eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe there is any force in
to-day to rival or re-create that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the
ruins of the old tent where once we had bread and shelter and organs,
nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover, and nerve us again. We
cannot again find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful. But we sit
and weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty saith, “Up and onward
forevermore!” We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither will we rely on
the New; and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, like those monsters
who look backwards.

And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the
understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a
mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of
friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure
years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The
death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but
privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for
it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an
epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up
a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows
the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.
It permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances and the
reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to
the next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny
garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for
its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener,
is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide
neighborhoods of men.




HERE ENDETH THE ENNOBLING ESSAY ON COMPENSATION, AS WRITTEN BY RALPH
WALDO EMERSON, BORDERS AND INITIALS DESIGNED BY ROYCROFT ARTISTS, AND
THE WHOLE DONE INTO A PRINTED BOOK BY THE ROYCROFTERS, AT THEIR SHOP
WHICH IS IN EAST AURORA, NEW YORK, U.S.A., IN JANUARY, ANNO CHRISTI,
MCMIV


[Illustration: ROYCROFT]




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