SELF-RELIANCE -- 3

And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face.

The by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlour.

If this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own, he 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.

Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid as being very vulnerable themselves.

But

when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added,

when the ignorant and the poor are aroused,

when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow,

it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment.

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency;

a reverence for our past act or word,

because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and

we are loath to disappoint them.

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder?

Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place?

Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then?

It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.

In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity:

yet when the devout motions of the soul come,

yield to them heart and life,

though they should clothe God with shape and color.

Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.

Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to-day.

"Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood."

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?

Pythagoras was misunderstood,

and

Socrates, and

Jesus,

Luther, and

Copernicus, and

Galileo, and

Newton, and

every pure

and wise spirit that ever took flesh.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

I suppose no man can violate his nature.

All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere.

Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him.

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.

The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also.

We pass for what we are.

Character teaches above our wills.

Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that

Virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour.

For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem.

These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought.

One tendency unites them all.

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.

See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency.

Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions.

Your conformity explains nothing.

Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now.

Greatness appeals to the future.

If I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now.

Be it how it will, do right now.

Always scorn appearances, and you always may.

The force of character is cumulative.

All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this.

What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination?

The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind.

They shed a united light on the advancing actor.

He is attended as by a visible escort of angels.

That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity into Washington's port, and America into Adams's eye.

Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris.

It is always ancient virtue.

We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day.

We love it and pay it homage,

because it is not a trap for our love and homage,

but is

self-dependent,

self-derived,

and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.