Part 14

In calling Mr. Weiss essentially a poet, I am far from implying that he was not a thinker. Perhaps he was more subtle and more brilliant a thinker for being also a poet--that is, for seeing truth through the medium of the imagination, for following the path of analogy. At any rate, his being a poet did not in the least interfere with the acuteness or the precision of his thinking, as any one can see who reads his chapters--those, for example, which compose the volume entitled "American Religion." I had marked for citation so many passages that it would be necessary to quote half the book to illustrate my thesis. When I first knew him, he was a strict Transcendentalist. Dr. Orestes Brownson, no mean judge on such matters, spoke of him as the most promising philosophical mind in the country. To a native talent for metaphysics, his early studies at Heidelberg probably contributed congenial training. His knowledge of German philosophy may well have been stimulated and matured by his residence in that centre of active thought; while his intimacy, on his return, with the keenest intellects in this country may well have sharpened his original predilection for abstract speculation. However this may have been, the tendency of his genius was decidedly toward metaphysical problems and the interpretation of the human consciousness. This he erected as a barrier against materialism; and this he probed with a depth and a fearlessness which were truly extraordinary, and would have been remarkable in any disciple of the school to which he belonged. No one that I can think of was so fine, so profound, so analytical. His volume on "American Religion" was full of nice discriminations; so was his volume on the "Immortal Life"; so were his articles and lectures. His "Life of Theodore Parker" abounded in curious learning as well as in vigorous thinking. He could follow, step by step, the great leader of reformatory ideas, and went far beyond him in subtlety and accuracy of mental delineation. He could not rest in sentiment, must have demonstration, and never stopped till he reached the ultimate ground of truth as he regarded it. Ideas, when he found them, were usually, not always, expressed in symbolical forms. His alert fancy detected likenesses that would have been concealed from common eyes; and often the splendor of the exposition hid the keenness of the logical temper, as a sword wreathed with roses lies unperceived. But the tempered steel was there and they who examined closely felt its edge.

He was a man of undaunted courage, being an idealist who lived out of the world, and a living soul animated by overwhelming convictions, which he was anxious to convey to others as of immense importance. He believed, with all his heart, in the doctrines he had arrived at, and, like a soldier in battle, was unconscious of the danger he incurred or of the wounds he received, being unaware of his own daring or fortitude. He was an anti-slavery man from the beginning. At a large meeting held in Waltham in 1845, to protest against the admission of Texas as a slave State, Mr. Weiss, then a minister at Watertown, Mass., delivered a speech in which he said: "Our Northern apathy heated the iron, forged the manacles, and built the pillory," declared that man was more than constitutions (borrowing a phrase from James Russell Lowell), and that Christ was greater than Hancock and Adams. To his unflinching devotion to free thought in religion, he owed something of his unpopularity with the masses of the people, who were orthodox in opinion, though his failure to touch the general mind was probably due to other causes. The class of disbelievers was pretty large in his day and very self-asserting. Boldness never fails to attract; and brilliancy, if it be on the plane of ordinary vision, draws the eyes of the multitude, who are on the watch for a sensation.

The chief trouble was that his brilliancy was not on the plane of ordinary vision, but was recondite, ingenious, fanciful. He was too learned, too fond of allusions--literary, scientific, historical,--too swift in his mental processes. His addresses were delivered to an audience of his friends, not to a miscellaneous company. They were of the nature of soliloquies spoken out of his own mind, instead of being speeches intended to meet the needs of others. His lectures and sermons were not easy to follow, even if the listener was more than usually cultivated. Shall it be added that his sincerity of speech, running into brusqueness, startled a good many? He was theological and philosophical, and he could not keep his hands off when what he considered as errors in theology or philosophy came into view. His wit was sharper than he thought, while the laugh it raised was frequently overbalanced by the sting it left behind in some breasts. It was too often a "wicked wit," barbed and poisoned, which one must be in league with to enjoy. They who were in sympathy with the speaker were delighted with it, but they who were not went off aggrieved. No doubt this attested the earnestness of the man, who scorned to cloak his convictions; but it wounded the self-love of such as were in search of pleasure or instruction, and interfered with his general acceptableness. A broad, genial, good-natured, truculent style of ventilating even heresies may not be repulsive to people of a conventional, believing turn; in fact, it is not, as we know. But the thrusts of a rapier, especially when unexpected, are not forgiven. Mr. Weiss drew larger audiences as a preacher on religious themes than he did as a lecturer on secular subjects, where one hardly knew what to look for, because he was known to be outspoken and capable of introducing heresies on the platform.

Then he was in all respects unconventional. His spontaneous exuberance of animal spirits, which led him to roll on the grass, join in frolicsome games, play all sorts of antics, indulge in jokes, mimicry, boisterous mirthfulness, was inconsistent with the staid, proper demeanor required by social usage. How he kept himself within limits as he did was a surprise to his friends. Ordinary natures can form no conception of the weight such a man must have put upon his temperament to press it down to the level of common experience. Temptations to which he was liable every day do not visit average minds in their whole lifetime, and cannot by such minds be comprehended. The stiff, upright, careful old man cannot understand the jocund pliability of the boy, who, nevertheless, simply expends the superfluity of his natural vigor, and relieves his excess of nervous excitability. On thinking it all over, remembering his appetite for life, his joy in existence, his nervous exhilaration, his love of beauty, his passionate ardor of temperament, I am surprised that he preserved, as he did, so much dignity and soberness of character. I have seen him in his wildest mood, yet I never saw him thrown off his balance. With as much brilliancy as Sydney Smith, he had, as Sydney Smith had not, a breadth of knowledge, a depth of feeling, a soaring energy of soul that kept him above vulgar seductions, and did for him, in a nobler way, what ambition, love of place, conventional associations did for the famous Englishman.

The difficulty was that he was too far removed from the common ground of sympathy. He could not endure routine, or behave as other people behaved, and as it was generally fancied he should. If Sydney Smith's jocularity interfered with his promotion, how much more did he have to contend with who to the jocularity added an enthusiastic devotion to heresy, a partiality for metaphysical speculation, and a poetic glow that removed him from ordinary comprehension! With an unworldliness worthy of all praise, but fatal to the provision of daily bread, he left the ministry, a fixed income, a confirmed social position, ample leisure for study and for literary pursuits, and launched forth on the uncertain career of lecturer. He was not the first who failed in attempting to harness Pegasus to a cart, in the hope of making him useful in mundane ways. Neither discharged his full function. The cart would not run smoothly, and the steed was not happy. The old profession has this advantage: that to all practical purposes, the wagon goes over the celestial pavement where there is no mud nor clangor, and Pegasus can seem to be harnessed to a chariot of the sun.

Weiss simply disappeared from view. His books were scattered; his lectures and sermons were worked over and over, the best of them being published in his several volumes. A few relics of the author remain in the hands of his widow, who is grateful for any recognition of his genius, any help to diffuse his writings, and tribute to his memory. They who knew him can never forget him. Perhaps the very vividness of their recollection makes them indifferent to the possession of visible memorials of their friend.

Samuel Johnson should be known as the apostle of individualism. The apostle I say, for this with him was a religion, and the preaching of individualism was a gospel message. He would not belong to any church, or subscribe to any creed, or connect himself with any sect, or be a member of any organization whatever, however wide or elastic, however consonant with convictions that he held, with beliefs that he entertained, with purposes that he cherished, with plans that were dear to him. He never joined the "Anti-Slavery Society," though he was an Abolitionist; or the "Free Religious Association," though its aims were essentially his own, and he spoke on its platform. He made it a principle to act alone, herein being a true disciple of Emerson, whose mission was to individual minds. He wrote a long letter to me on the occasion of establishing the "Free Religious Association," of which I wished him to become a member, that recalls the letter written by Mr. Emerson in reply to George Ripley when asked to join the community of Brook Farm, and whereof the following is an extract:

My feeling is that the community is not good for me, that it has little to offer me which with resolution I cannot procure for myself.... It seems to me a circuitous and operose way of relieving myself to put upon your community the emancipation which I ought to take on myself. I must assume my own vows.... I ought to say that I do not put much trust in any arrangements or combinations, only in the spirit which dictates them. Is that benevolent and divine, they will answer their end. Is there any alloy in that, it will certainly appear in the result.... Nor can I insist with any heat on new methods when I am at work in my study on any literary composition.... The result of our secretest attempts will certainly have as much renown as shall be due to it.

Johnson ended by discarding the church entirely. In 1881 he wrote:

For my part, every day I live the name _Christian_ seems less and less to express my thought and tendency. I suspect it will be so with the Free-thinking world generally.

In a sermon, "Living by Faith," he says:

There is no irony so great as to call this "flight out of nature" and the creeds that come of it, "faith." The purity of heart that really sees God will have a mighty idealization of humanity at the very basis of its creed, and act on it in all its treatment of the vicious, the morally incapable and diseased. It is time Christendom was on the search for it.

In the paper on "Transcendentalism," he says:

Christianity inherited the monarchical idea of a God separate from man, and a contempt for natural law and human faculty which crippled its faith in the spiritual and moral ideal. It became more and more a materialism of miracle, Bible, church. Even its essay to realize immanent Deity yielded a more or less exclusive, mediatorial God-man; and it treated personality as the mere consequence of one prescriptive, historical force, just as philosophical materialism treats it as mere product of sensations.

Mr. Johnson abhorred the monarchical principle. It was his endeavor to track it from its origin, through all its forms of institution, ceremonial, dogma, symbol, from the earliest times to the latest, through the whole East to the farthest West. This was the burden of his studies in Oriental religions, the sum of his criticism, the aim of his public teaching. He was profoundly, intensely, absorbingly religious, but the form of his religion was not "Christian" in any recognized sense, Romanist, Protestant, or Unitarian. The most radical thought did not altogether please him. His was a worship of Law, Order, Cause, Harmony, impersonal, living, natural; a recognition of mind as the supreme power in the universe; a cosmic, eternal, absolute faith in intellectual principles as the substance and soul of the world. God was, to him, a spiritual being, alive, vital, flowing in every mode.

All power of growth and service depends, know it or not as we may, on an ideal faith in somewhat all-sufficient, unerring, infinitely wise and tender, inseparable from the inmost of life, bent on our good as we are not, set against our failures as we cannot be. It means that there can in fact be no philosophy of life, no law of good, no belief in duty, no aspiration, but must have such in-dwelling perfection, as being alone reliable to guarantee its word. This only is my God; infinite ground of all finite being; essence of reason and good.... When you see a function of memory, or a law of perfection, let your natural piety recognize it as wise and just and good and fair. Be loyal to the moral authority that affirms it ought to be, and somehow must be. Let your _soul_ bring in the leap of your mind to grasp it. Then, if you cannot see God in perfect, absolute essence, you will know the Infinite and Eternal in their relation to real and positive existence; feel their freedom in your own; know their inseparableness from every movement of your spiritual being.... The love we feel, the truth we pursue, the honor we cherish, the moral beauty we revere, blend in with the eternity of the principles they flow from, and then, glad as in the baptism of a harvest morning, expanding towards human need and the universal life of man, our souls walk free, breathing immortal air. That is God,--not an object but an experience. Words are but symbols, they do not define. We say "Him," "It" were as well, if thereby we mean life, wisdom, love.... Must we bind our communion with the just, the good, the true, the humanly adequate and becoming to some personal life, some special body of social circumstances, some individual's work in human progress and upon human idealism? How should that be, when the principles into which the moral sense flowers out in its maturity as spiritual liberty, essentially involve a freely advancing ideal at every new stage revealing more of God, whom nothing but such universal energy can adequately reveal?... If then, we cannot see the eternal substance and life of the universe, it is not because Deity is too far, but because it is too near. We can measure a statue or a star, and look round and beyond it; but the Life, Light, Liberty, Love, Peace, whereby we live and know, and are helpful and calm and free, which measures and surrounds and even animates us, is itself the very mystery of our being, and known only as felt and lived. God stands in all ideal thought, conviction, aim, which ever reach into the infinite; and thence, as if an angel should stand in the sun, come attractions that draw forth the divine capabilities within us, as the sun the life and beauty of the earth. God is the inmost motive, the common path, the infinite import of all work we respect, honor, purely rejoice in, and fulfil; of art, science, philosophy, intercourse,--whatsoever function befits the soul and the day.

These quotations, which might be multiplied indefinitely, in fact, which it is difficult not to multiply, are probably enough to satisfy any who really wish to know that here was a truly religious man, a really devout man, the possessor of a living faith; one who held fast to more Deity than the multitude cherished, and welcomed him in a much more cordial, comprehensive, natural manner; one who fairly drenched the world and man with a divine spirit, but who was all the more spiritual on this account, as a man attests his vigor by his ability to lay aside his crutches, and put the medicine-chest, bottles, and boxes on the shelf, to walk in cold weather without an overcoat, or lie naked on the ice and melt it through.

Of course, the only justification of a pretension of this kind is the actual vitality necessary for such a feat, the sanity demanded by one who would stand or go alone. In Samuel Johnson's case there was no question of this. Spiritually, he was a whole man, self-poised, self-contained, strong, clear, alert, a hero and a saint. His conversation, his bearing, conduct, entire attitude and manner indicated the most jubilant faith. He never faltered in his confidence, never wavered in his conviction, never abated a jot of hope that in the order of Providence all good things would come. There was something staggering to the ordinary mind, in his assurance of the divine wisdom and love. There was something altogether admirable in the elevation of his character above the trials and vexations that are incident to the human lot, and that seemed heaped upon him. For his own was not a smooth or fortunate life, as men estimate felicity. His health was far from satisfactory. He was not rich or famous or popular or sought after. He lived a life of labor, in some respects, of denial and sacrifice. Not until after his death was the full amount of his renunciation apparent even to those who thought they knew him well.

He was a Transcendentalist--that is to say, he believed in the intuitive powers of the mind; he was sure that all primary truths, such ideas as those of unity, universe, law, cause, substance, will, duty, obligation, permanence, were perceived directly, and are not to be accounted for by any data of observation or inference, but must be ascribed at once to an organic or constitutional relation of the mind with truth.

That the name "Transcendentalism" was given, a century ago, to a method in philosophy opposed to the theory of Locke--that all knowledge comes from the senses,--is more widely known than the fact that what this method affirmed or involved is of profound import for all generations. It emphasized Mind as a formative force behind all definable contents or acts of consciousness--as that which makes it possible to speak of anything as _known_. It recognized, as primal condition of knowing, the transmutation of sense-impressions by original laws of mind, whose constructive power is not to be explained or measured by the data of sensation; just as they use the eye or ear to transform unknown spatial notions into the obviously human conceptions which we call color and sound. All this the Lockian system overlooked--a very serious omission, as regards both science and common-sense.

And again, in the same article--that on "Transcendentalism," first printed in the _Radical Review_ for November, 1877, and afterwards included in the volume of "Lectures, Sermons, and Essays":

What we conceive these schools to have misprized is the living substance and function of mind itself, conscious of its own energy, productive of its own processes, active even in receiving, giving its own construction to its incomes from the unknown through sense, thus involved in those very contents of time and space which, as historical antecedents, _appear_ to create it; mind is obviously the exponent of forces more spontaneous and original than any special product of its own experience. Behind all these products must be that substance in and through which they are produced.

And again, for we cannot be too explicit on this point:

It is certain that knowledge involves not only a sense of union with the nature of that which we know, but a real participation of the knowing faculty therein. When, therefore, I have learned to conceive truths, principles, ideas, or aims which transcend life-times and own no physical limits to their endurance, the aforesaid law of mind associates me with their immortal nature. And this is the indubitable perception or intuition of permanent mind which no experience of impermanence can nullify and no Nirvana excludes.

It will be observed that Mr. Johnson does not make himself answerable for specific articles of belief on God or immortality, but confines his faith to the persuasion of indwelling mind, sovereign, eternal, imperial. "Immortality," he says, "is immeasurable chance for all. In its light, all strong, blameless, heroic lives--divine plants by the wayside--tell for the nature they express. God has made no blunder in our spiritual constitution. Power is in faith." This intense belief in the soul, in all the native capacities of our spiritual constitution, in the supremacy of organic feelings, ideas, expectations over merely private desires, this burning confidence in divinely implanted instincts, this absolute certainty that every promise made by God will be fulfilled, explains the tone of exulting hope in which he writes to bereaved friends.

I wish I could tell you how firmly I believe that feelings like these (that the absent one cannot be dead), so often treated as illusion, are _true_, are of God's own tender giving; that in them is the very heart of his teaching through the mystery that we call death. Our affections are _forbidden by their maker_ to doubt their own immortality.... Immortal years, beside which our little lives are but an hour--what possibilities of full satisfaction they open! And we sit in patience, knowing that they must bring us back our holiest possessions--those which have ever stood under the shield of our noblest love and conscience and so are under God's blessing forever.

How far such a declaration as this comports with the demand for general immortality made in behalf of those who are conscious of no noble love, who have attained to no conscience, and have no holy possessions, we are not told. Perhaps Mr. Johnson would seize on the faintest intimations of mind as evidencing the presence of moral being, as Mr. Weiss does. But he did not dwell on that side of the problem. Plainly he ascribed little value to mere personality, viewed abstractly and apart from its spiritual development. He wrote to those whom he knew and loved, to remarkable people.

Yet it would not be fair to conclude that immortality was denied to the basest. If immortality is "opportunity," a "chance for all," it is for those who can profit by it or enjoy it. If any are debarred, the cause must be their own incompetence. They simply decease. There is no torment in store for them; no hell is possible.