Conversation on Enthusiasm12
Wednesday, 14.
Mr. Alcott began the conversation by referring to that of Monday before, on the subject of Temperament and Complexion, and added other fine thoughts about it.
He said, perhaps he had dwelt too much on the symbol of color, but conceived himself borne out in all he had said. “The Greeks held that a brown complexion betokened courage, and those who had fair skins were called children of light and favorites of the gods. And the gods themselves were demonic or divine, as tempered by darkness or light,—the gods Infernal, the Midgods, the Celestials. So Christian art has painted Satan dark, the Christ fair. And late experiments on the sunbeam showed that dark substances imprison the rays,—these absorbing more and delivering less. The more of sun, so much the more of soul; the less of sun, of passion more, and the strange fire.” He fancied black eyes were of Oriental descent, were tinged less or more with fairer hues in crossing West. People of sandy hair and florid complexions were of Northern ancestry. The fusion of the various races was now taking place, blending all, doubtless, into a more harmonious and beautiful type.
He asked if there did not lurk in the fancy, if not in our atoms, a persuasion that complexion, like features, voice, gait, typified and emblazoned personal traits of their possessors, if the rhetoric of morals and religion did not revel in like distinctions. “Handsome is that handsome does.” Beauty was the birthright of all, if not their inheritance. It was shame that brought deformity into the world. Every child accused, he knew not whom, for any blemish of his. “Why not mine the happy star, too?” Still some trait was insinuated into the least favored, and stamped upon the embryonic clay. Ebony, alabaster, indigo, vermilion, the pigments were all mingled as purity or passion decreed. Types were persistent, family features standing strong for centuries and perpetuating themselves from generation to generation. Place the portraits of a long line of ancestors on the walls, one’s features were all there, with the slight variations arising from intermarriage, degrees of culture, calling, climate.
“Our faces were our coats of arms.”
“Eyes were most characteristic. These played the prime parts in life,—eyes and voice. Eyes were a civility and a kingdom: voice a fortune. There was a culture, a fate in them, direful, divine.” And he quoted, without naming the author:—
“Black eyes, in your dark orbs doth lie
My ill or happy destiny;
If with clear looks you me behold,
You give me wine and mounts of gold;
If you dart forth disdainful rays,
To your own dye you turn my days;
Black eyes, in your dark orbs doth dwell
My bane or bliss, my heaven or hell.”
Then added, significantly:—
Ask you my preference, what their hue?
Surely the safe, celestial blue.
He said: “Voice classified us. The harmonious voice tells of the harmonious soul. Millions of fiends are evoked in a breath by an irritated one. A gentle voice converts the Furies into Muses. The highest saint is not he who strives the most violently, but he upon whom goodness sits gracefully, whose strength is gentleness, duty loved, because spontaneous, and who wastes none of his power in effort; his will being one and above temptation. True love says, ‘Come to my embrace, you are safer with me than you were with yourself, since I am wise above knowledge, and tasting of the apple.’ The sequel is bliss and peace. But after fascination comes sorrow, remorse. The touch of the demonized soul is poison. Read Swedenborg’s Hells, he added, and beware of demonized eyes!”
I never saw any one who seemed to purify words as Mr. Alcott does; with him nothing is common or unclean.
He then spoke of temperance in its widest sense, as being that which contributed to health of the whole being, body and soul alike. He said, “We should breakfast on sunrise and sup on sunset.” And he read passages from Pythagoras, recommending music as a diet. “Pythagoras composed melodies for the night and morning, to purify the brain. He forbade his disciples the using of flesh meats, or drinks which heated and disturbed the brain, or hindered the music of dreams.”
At this point of the conversation, Miss Bremer and Mr. Benzon, the Swedish consul, came in, and there was a slight pause.
Mr. Alcott then resumed the subject, and read Emerson’s Bacchus, to which he gave new significance. When he had finished, he said, “This is the wine we want.” He then spoke of the subject proposed for the evening’s conversation, which was Enthusiasm, defining it as “an abandonment to the instincts. The seer,” he said, “was one in whom memory predominated, and many of his visions were recollections rather of a former than revelations of a future state.” This state of clairvoyance he named “thought a-bed, or philosophy recumbent”; and in this view he spoke of “Swedenborg, who was an enthusiast in the latter sense, and revealed remarkable things.” He quoted a passage from Swedenborg’s diary, wherein he speaks of his being created with the power of breathing inwardly, suspending his outward breathing, and in this way conversed with angels and spirits.
Miss Bremer asked Mr. Alcott “if he called Swedenborg an enthusiast.”
Mr. Alcott said, “Swedenborg was in such fine relations with nature and spirit, that many things seemed revealed to him beyond the apprehension of ordinary men. He was a seer rather of supernatural than of spiritual things; a preternaturalist, rather than spiritualist. He had wonderful insights into nature, also, which science was almost every day confirming.”
“His followers claimed that he anticipated important discoveries, both in natural as in spiritual science, and that his merits were enhanced by his claim to supernatural illumination. And whatever his gifts, how assisted, whether by agencies supernatural or preternatural, their operations were of wonderful sweep, his insights surpassing, transcending the comprehension of any successor; of a kind that have led some to suspect that he staggered down under the weight of his endowments. Certainly, he stands, like Boehme, an exceptional mind, in the order of nature, and awaits an interpreter to determine his place in the world of thought. He is the most eminent example furnished in modern biography of the possibilities of the metempsychosis, as if we saw in him an ability to translate himself at will, personally, wheresoever he would, taking his residence for the while in plant, animal, mineral, atom, with the superadded faculty of ravishing its secret. Nor content with this, he ransacks the primeval elements, the limbos of chaos and night. What burglaries he perpetrates! picking of locks, slitting of mysteries, opening rents into things sacred and profane,—of these no end. Then such edifices rising from regions of vagary and shadow, a goblin world, grand, grotesque, seldom lighted from above, or tipped with azure. His heavens had no prospects; no perspective; his hells were lurid; the pit bottomless, a Stygian realm throughout. His genius plunges, seldom soars; is not fledged, but footed; his heaven but the cope of the abyss in plain sight of the doomed. His angels are spectral, unwholesome; his celestials too knowing to be innocent.
“It were a fruitless task to follow him from starting-point to goal, if goal there be, in his restless racing throughout nature. The ghost-seer of shadow-land, whereinto he smuggled all natural things as spiritual phantoms; he needs be studied with due drawback of doubt, as to the veracity of his claim to divine illumination. Still with every abatement, here is a body of truth none can gainsay nor resist; abysses not yet fathomed by any successor, naturalist, or spiritualist.”
After this surprising statement of his views of Swedenborg, Miss Bremer asked more questions about Mr. Alcott’s definition of an Enthusiast, adding: “Christ, then, if we speak of him as a man, was an enthusiast.”
Mr. Alcott, smiling, said, “Yes, the divinest of enthusiasts, surrendering himself entirely to the instincts of the Spirit; might safely do so, being holy, whole, inspired throughout all his gifts, his whole Personality,—the divine fire pervaded every part; therefore he was the celestial man.”
The conversation here turned upon Nature, in some way which I do not now recollect, and Mr. Alcott spoke of the great mission of the prophet of nature.
“The public child of earth and sky.”
“Nature,” he said, “was more to some persons than others; they standing in closer relations to it.”
“But nature,” said Miss Bremer, “is not wholly good.”
“No,” said Mr. Alcott; “there is something of Fate in her, too, as in some persons. She, too, is a little bitten.”
The expression seemed to amuse her, for she repeated it several times, laughing.
Mr. Alcott then said, “that nature was not wholly sane. It was given to the celestial man alone to take from it only what was salutary, as it was the Nemesis of the demonic man to take what was hurtful. Bees gathered honey from all flowers.”
James Russell Lowell asked “if bees did not sometimes secrete poisonous honey?”
Mr. Alcott said “he believed they did, but only when wholesome flowers were denied them.”
Miss Littlehale suggested that “honey was not poisonous to the bees, but to men only, and Mr. Lowell allowed that it was not.”
Miss Bremer now returned to the word Enthusiast. She said Mr. Alcott had defined it well as “divine intoxication.”
I do not follow the order of time in what follows, but record some scattered sayings of the conversation.
Mr. Alcott spoke of “the celestial, or unfallen man, as not making choice of good; he was chosen rather; elected, deliberation presupposed a mixed will, a temptation and a lapse. Then, opening Plotinus, he read this beautiful passage:—
“Every soul is a Venus. And this, the nativity of Venus, and Love who was born at the same time with her, obscurely signify. The soul, therefore, when in a condition conformable to nature, loves God, wishing to be united to him, being, as it were, the desire of a beautiful virgin to be conjoined with a beautiful love. When, however, the soul descends into generation, then being, as it were, deceived by spurious nuptials, and associating herself with another and mortal love, she becomes petulant and insolent, through being absent from her father. But when she again hates wantonness and injustice, and becomes purified from the defilements which are here, and again returns to her father, she is affected in the most felicitous manner. And those, indeed, who are ignorant of this affection, may from worldly love form some conjecture of divine love, by considering how great a felicity the possession of a most beloved object is conceived to be; and also, by considering that those earthly objects of love are mortal and noxious; that the love of them is nothing more than the love of images, and that they lose their attractive power because they are not truly desirable, nor our real good, nor that which we investigate. In the ideal world, however, the object of love is to be found, with which we may be conjoined, which we may participate and truly possess, and which is not externally enveloped with flesh. He, however, who knows this, well knew what I say, and will be convinced that the soul has another life.”
Miss Bremer seemed puzzled by this reading as questioning in her mind a distinction between virtue and innocence, or holiness, which Mr. Alcott had discriminated clearly.
Some one inquired, “How can we trust our instincts since these have been so differently educated?”
Mr. Alcott said “they had rather been overborne by the appetites and passions. It was the tragedy of life that these were obscured so soon, and the mind left in confusion. The child was more of an enthusiast than the man ordinarily. And then so many were born old; even in the babe one sometimes sees some ancient sinner. Youth is so attractive because still under the sway of instinct. The highest duty is musical and sings itself. Business, lusts, draw men downwards. Yet were life earnest and true to the instincts, it would be music and song. Life was too much for most. No one was always an enthusiast. It was in the golden moments that he was filled with the overflowing divinity. The blissful moments were those when one abandons himself to the Spirit, letting it do what it will with him. True, most persons were divided, there were two or more of them,—a Deuce distracting them and they in conflict with evils, or devils. But what is the bad but lapse from the good,—the good blindfolded?”
“Ah! Mr. Alcott,” said Miss Bremer, laughing, “I am desperately afraid there is a little bit of a devil, after all.”
“One’s foes are of his own household,” said Mr. Alcott. “If his house is haunted it is by himself only. Our Choices were our Saviours or Satans.”
Speaking of the temperaments, Mr. Alcott discriminated these in their different elements.
The celestial man was composed more largely of light and ether. The demonic man combined more of fire and vapor. The animal man more of embers and dust.13
The sacraments might be considered symbolically, as Baptism, or purification by water.
Fasting, or temperance in outward delights.
Continence, or chastity in personal indulgences.
Prayer, or aspiring aims.
Labor, or prayer in act or pursuits.
These he considered the regimen of inspiration and thought.
Mr. Alcott closed the conversation by reading from the Paradise Regained a description of the banquet spread by Satan for Christ; also, the lines in praise of Chastity, from the Comus, whose clear statue-like beauty always affects one powerfully.
12. Printed from notes taken by a lady (Miss Ariana Walker) at the time. The conversation was held in Boston in December, 1849.
13. THE TEMPERAMENTS AND COMPLEXIONS. The Sanguine or Aeriform is Fair; The Choleric or Fiery is Florid; The Lymphatic or Aqueous is Olive; The Melancholic or Earthy is Dark. The four are mostly blended in life, the fusion being frequently indeterminable.