What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the 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 man is he 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 loses 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 man you are. And, of course, so much
force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know
you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man 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.
Well, most men 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 wilfulness, grow
tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable sensation.
For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.
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. Yet is the discontent of the multitude more formidable
than that of the senate and the college. It is easy enough for a firm man 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.
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 to-morrow speak what
to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing 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, and
Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit
that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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