To the Same.

July 25, 1875.

I see that you make “selfish” synonymous with “spontaneous.” Now the noble divinity Spontaneity is any thing but selfish, — except as children and poets and lovers are selfish. Chauncey was fond of humorously deifying “Spontaneity.” The reader of Plutarch may recall a passage from the “Life of Timoleon,” where it is said: “And having built a chapel in his house, he there sacrificed to Good Hap as a deity that had favored him, and devoted the house itself to the sacred genius.” Mr. Clough, in his revision of the earlier translations of Plutarch, appends at the word “Good Hap” this note: “Automatia in Greek; almost equivalent to spontaneousness. . . . His instinctive and apparently unreasoning decisions had been attended with such happy results as to make him unavoidably refer them to something out of himself, to some preternatural guidance.” ⁸⁶ His are actions without reflection, or what depends on reflection, — like the dictates of Duty — or of anybody else. He is, it is true, sometimes selfish, or inspires selfish acts; but oftener, in good people, he favors every duty but that of thinking of and doing to-day, in cold blood, what a glow of enthusiasm or generous feeling prompted under his influence yesterday, — like writing a poem. But Spontaneity is generally credited, and I think rightly, with a certain

elemental force, inchoate, undetermined in direction, but making its own course among accidents, like a torrent. Such is the play of children and the young of all animals. This, however, is in itself mere activity; and something of Spontaneity, its best part, is in the quieter flow of a lesser energy in the channels of habit and natural instinct, such channels as afford the least obstruction, or give to energy the least of the character of work or of energy converted to use by purpose. Don’t think this to be of necessity selfish; for to think so is to pervert the word “selfish” to what I have observed to be a peculiarly feminine meaning. . . . To be selfish does not mean to please, or to be level with, one’s self merely; but to do this at the expense of somebody’s more or less well-founded rights, or at the expense of generous feeling, at least, in one’s self. But unphilosophical women are, I have observed, apt to be miserly of this latter expense; to suppose that every generous impulse is obligatory, simply because it is generous. But generous principles, not impulses, are alone obligatory even to the best, and must conform to the higher laws of justice. A disposition to absolute and universal sacrifice, or altruism, leaves, in theory, nothing to sacrifice any thing to; and is, of course, in practice, never realized. All that is realized is a morbid, irrational self-accusation of selfishness. . . .

You ask if letter-writing is still odious to me. I think it is, but so that the good of it, the Promethean endurance and philanthropy of it, is set off on high artistic principles against its evils, the vexatious stupidities of the Cadmean invention.