1849 REPRESENTATIVE MEN by Ralph Waldo Emerson USES OF GREAT MEN

IT IS NATURAL to believe in great men. If the companions of our
childhood should turn out to be heroes, and their condition regal it
would not surprise us. All mythology opens with demigods, and the
circumstance is high and poetic; that is, their genius is paramount.
In the legends of the Gautama, the first men ate the earth and found
it deliciously sweet.
Nature seems to exist for the excellent. The world is upheld by
the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who
lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and
tolerable only in our belief in such society; and, actually or
ideally, we manage to live with superiors. We call our children and
our lands by their names. Their names are wrought into the verbs of
language, their works and effigies are in our houses, and every
circumstance of the day recalls an anecdote of them.
The search after the great man is the dream of youth and the most
serious occupation of manhood. We travel into foreign parts to find
his works,- if possible, to get a glimpse of him. But we are put off
with fortune instead. You say, the English are practical; the
Germans are hospitable; in Valencia the climate is delicious; and in
the hills of the Sacramento there is gold for the gathering. Yes,
but I do not travel to find comfortable, rich and hospitable people,
or clear sky, or ingots that cost too much. But if there were any
magnet that would point to the countries and houses where are the
persons who are intrinsically rich and powerful, I would sell all
and buy it, and put myself on the road today.
The race goes with us on their credit. The knowledge that in the
city is a man who invented the railroad, raises the credit of all
the citizens. But enormous populations, if they be beggars, are
disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants or of fleas,- the
more, the worse.
Our religion is the love and cherishing of these patrons. The gods
of fable are the shining moments of great men. We run all our
vessels into one mould. Our colossal theologies of Judaism, Christism,
Buddhism, Mahometism, are the necessary and structural action of the
human mind. The student of history is like a man going into a
warehouse to buy cloths or carpets. He fancies he has a new article.
If he go to the factory, he shall find that his new stuff still
repeats the scrolls and rosettes which are found on the interior walls
of the pyramids of Thebes. Our theism is the purification of the human
mind. Man can paint, or make, or think, nothing but man. He believes
that the great material elements had their origin from his thought.
And our philosophy finds one essence collected or distributed.
If now we proceed to inquire into the kinds of service we derive
from others, let us be warned of the danger of modern studies, and
begin low enough. We must not contend against love, or deny the
substantial existence of other people. I know not what would happen to
us. We have social strengths. Our affection toward others creates a
sort of vantage or purchase which nothing will supply. I can do that
by another which I cannot do alone. I can say to you what I cannot
first say to myself. Other men are lenses through which we read our
own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and
such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the
otherest. The stronger the nature, the more it is reactive. Let us
have the quality pure. A little genius let us leave alone. A main
difference betwixt men is, whether they attend their own affair or
not. Man is that noble endogenous plant which grows, like the palm,
from within outward. His own affair, though impossible to others, he
can open with celerity and in sport. It is easy to sugar to be sweet
and to nitre to be salt. We take a great deal of pains to waylay and
entrap that which of itself will fall into our hands. I count him a
great man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other
men rise with labor and difficulty; he has but to open his eyes to see
things in a true light and in large relations, whilst they must make
painful corrections and keep a vigilant eye on many sources of
error. His service to us is of like sort. It costs a beautiful
person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes; yet how splendid is
that benefit! It costs no more for a wise soul to convey his quality
to other men. And every one can do his best thing easiest. "Peu de
moyens, beaucoup d'effet." He is great who is what he is from
nature, and who never reminds us of others.
But he must be related to us, and our life receive from him some
promise of explanation. I cannot tell what I would know; but I have
observed there are persons who, in their character and actions, answer
questions which I have not skill to put. One man answers some question
which none of his contemporaries put, and is isolated. The past and
passing religions and philosophies answer some other questions.
Certain men affect us as rich possibilities, but helpless to
themselves and to their times,- the sport perhaps of some instinct
that rules in the air;- they do not speak to our want. But the great
are near; we know them at sight. They satisfy expectation and fall
into place. What is good is effective, generative; makes for itself
room, food and allies. A sound apple produces seed,- a hybrid does
not. Is a man in his place, he is constructive, fertile, magnetic,
inundating armies with his purpose, which is thus executed. The
river makes its own shores, and each legitimate idea makes its own
channels and welcome,- harvests for food, institutions for expression,
weapons to fight with and disciples to explain it. The true artist has
the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife,
has nothing broader than his own shoes.
Our common discourse respects two kinds of use or service from
superior men. Direct giving is agreeable to the early belief of men;
direct giving of material or metaphysical aid, as of health, eternal
youth, fine senses, arts of healing, magical power and prophecy. The
boy believes there is a teacher who can sell him wisdom. Churches
believe in imputed merit. But, in strictness, we are not much
cognizant of direct serving. Man is endogenous, and education is his
unfolding. The aid we have from others is mechanical compared with the
discoveries of nature in us. What is thus learned is delightful in the
doing, and the effect remains. Right ethics are central and go from
the soul outward. Gift is contrary to the law of the universe. Serving
others is serving us. I must absolve me to myself. "Mind thy
affair," says the spirit:- "coxcomb, would you meddle with the
skies, or with other people?" Indirect service is left. Men have a
pictorial or representative quality, and serve us in the intellect.
Behmen* and Swedenborg saw that things were representative. Men are
also representative; first, of things, and secondly, of ideas.
As plants convert the minerals into food for animals, so each man
converts some raw material in nature to human use. The inventors of
fire, electricity, magnetism, iron, lead, glass, linen, silk,
cotton; the makers of tools; the inventor of decimal notation; the
geometer; the engineer; the musician,- severally make an easy way
for all, through unknown and impossible confusions. Each man is by
secret liking connected with some district of nature, whose agent
and interpreter he is; as Linnaeus, of plants; Huber, of bees;
Fries, of lichens; Van Mons, of pears; Dalton, of atomic forms;
Euclid, of lines; Newton, of fluxions.
A man is a centre for nature, running out threads of relation
through every thing, fluid and solid, material and elemental. The
earth rolls; every clod and stone comes to the meridian: so every
organ, function, acid, crystal, grain of dust, has its relation to the
brain. It waits long, but its turn comes. Each plant has its parasite,
and each created thing its lover and poet. Justice has already been
done to steam, to iron, to wood, to coal, to loadstone, to iodine,
to corn and cotton; but how few materials are yet used by our arts The
mass of creatures and of qualities are still hid and expectant. It
would seem as if each waited, like the enchanted princess in fairy
tales, for a destined human deliverer. Each must be disenchanted and
walk forth to the day in human shape. In the history of discovery, the
ripe and latent truth seems to have fashioned a brain for itself. A
magnet must be made man in some Gilbert*(2), or Swedenborg, or
Oerstad, before the general mind can come to entertain its powers.
If we limit ourselves to the first advantages, a sober grace adheres
to the mineral and botanic kingdoms, which, in the highest moments,
comes up as the charm of nature,- the glitter of the spar, the
sureness of affinity, the veracity of angles. Light and darkness, heat
and cold, hunger and food, sweet and sour, solid, liquid and gas,
circle us round in a wreath of pleasures, and, by their agreeable
quarrel, beguile the day of life. The eye repeats every day the
first eulogy on things,- "He saw that they were good." We know where
to find them; and these performers are relished all the more, after
a little experience of the pretending races. We are entitled also to
higher advantages. Something is wanting to science until it has been
humanized. The table of logarithms is one thing, and its vital play in
botany, music, optics and architecture, another. There are
advancements to numbers, anatomy, architecture, astronomy, little
suspected at first, when, by union with intellect and will, they
ascend into the life and reappear in conversation, character and
politics.
But this comes later. We speak now only of our acquaintance with
them in their own sphere and the way in which they seem to fascinate
and draw to them some genius who occupies himself with one thing,
all his life long. The possibility of interpretation lies in the
identity of the observer with the observed. Each material thing has
its celestial side; has its translation, through humanity, into the
spiritual and necessary sphere where it plays a part as indestructible
as any other. And to these, their ends, all things continually ascend.
The gases gather to the solid firmament: the chemic lump arrives at
the plant, and grows; arrives at the quadruped, and walks; arrives
at the man, and thinks. But also the constituency determines the
vote of the representative. He is not only representative, but
participant. Like can only be known by like. The reason why he knows
about them is that he is of them; he has just come out of nature, or
from being a part of that thing. Animated chlorine knows of
chlorine, and incarnate zinc, of zinc. Their quality makes his career;
and he can variously publish their virtues, because they compose
him. Man, made of the dust of the world, does not forget his origin;
and all that is yet inanimate will one day speak and reason.
Unpublished nature will have its whole secret told. Shall we say
that quartz mountains will pulverize into innumerable Werners, Von
Buchs and Beaumonts, and the laboratory of the atmosphere holds in
solution I know not what Berzeliuses and Davys?
Thus we sit by the fire and take hold on the poles of the earth.
This quasi omnipresence supplies the imbecility of our condition. In
one of those celestial days when heaven and earth meet and adorn
each other, it seems a poverty that we can only spend it once: we wish
for a thousand heads, a thousand bodies, that we might celebrate its
immense beauty in many ways and places. Is this fancy? Well, in good
faith, we are multiplied by our proxies. How easily we adopt their
labors! Every ship that comes to America got its chart from
Columbus. Every novel is a debtor to Homer. Every carpenter who shaves
with a fore-plane borrows the genius of a forgotten inventor. Life
is girt all round with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of
men who have perished to add their point of light to our sky.
Engineer, broker, jurist, physician, moralist, theologian, and every
man, inasmuch as he has any science,- is a definer and map-maker of
the latitudes and longitudes of our condition. These roadmakers on
every hand enrich us. We must extend the area of life and multiply our
relations. We are as much gainers by finding a new property in the old
earth as by acquiring a new planet.
We are too passive in the reception of these material or
semi-material aids. We must not be sacks and stomachs. To ascend one
step,- we are better served through our sympathy. Activity is
contagious. Looking where others look, and conversing with the same
things, we catch the charm which lured them. Napoleon said, "You
must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all
your art of war." Talk much with any man of vigorous mind, and we
acquire very fast the habit of looking at things in the same light,
and on each occurrence we anticipate his thought.
Men are helpful through the intellect and the affections. Other help
I find a false appearance. If you affect to give me bread and fire,
I perceive that I pay for it the full price, and at last it leaves
me as it found me, neither better nor worse: but all mental and
moral force is a positive good. It goes out from you, whether you will
or not, and profits me whom you never thought of. I cannot even hear
of personal vigor of any kind, great power of performance, without
fresh resolution. We are emulous of all that man can do. Cecil's
saying of Sir Walter Raleigh, "I know that he can toil terribly," is
an electric touch. So are Clarendon's portraits,- of Hampden, "who was
of an industry and vigilance not to be tired out or wearied by the
most laborious, and of parts not to be imposed on by the most subtle
and sharp, and of a personal courage equal to his best parts";- of
Falkland, "who was so severe an adorer of truth, that he could as
easily have given himself leave to steal, as to dissemble." We
cannot read Plutarch without a tingling of the blood; and I accept the
saying of the Chinese Mencius: "A sage is the instructor of a
hundred ages. When the manners of Loo are heard of, the stupid
become intelligent, and the wavering, determined."
This is the moral of biography; yet it is hard for departed men to
touch the quick like our own companions, whose names may not last as
long. What is he whom I never think of? Whilst in every solitude are
those who succor our genius and stimulate us in wonderful manners.
There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than
that other can, and, by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task.
What has friendship so signal as its sublime attraction to whatever
virtue is in us? We will never more think cheaply of ourselves, or
of life. We are piqued to some purpose, and the industry of the
diggers on the railroad will not again shame us.
Under this head too falls that homage, very pure as I think, which
all ranks pay to the hero of the day, from Coriolanus and Gracchus
down to Pitt, Lafayette, Wellington, Webster, Lamartine. Hear the
shouts in the street! The people cannot see him enough. They delight
in a man. Here is a head and a trunk! What a front! what eyes!
Atlantean shoulders, and the whole carriage heroic, with equal
inward force to guide the great machine! This pleasure of full
expression to that which, in their private experience, is usually
cramped and obstructed, runs also much higher, and is the secret of
the reader's joy in literary genius. Nothing is kept back. There is
fire enough to fuse the mountain of ore. Shakespeare's principal merit
may be conveyed in saying that he of all men best understands the
English language, and can say what he will. Yet these unchoked
channels and floodgates of expression are only health or fortunate
constitution. Shakespeare's name suggests other and purely
intellectual benefits.
Senates and sovereigns have no compliment, with their medals, swords
and armorial coats, like the addressing to a human being thoughts
out of a certain height, and presupposing his intelligence. This
honor, which is possible in personal intercourse scarcely twice in a
lifetime, genius perpetually pays; contented if now and then in a
century the proffer is accepted. The indicators of the values of
matter are degraded to a sort of cooks and confectioners, on the
appearance of the indicators of ideas. Genius is the naturalist or
geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws their map; and,
by acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for
the old. These are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world
we have conversed with is the show.
We go to the gymnasium and the swimming-school to see the power
and beauty of the body; there is the like pleasure and a higher
benefit from witnessing intellectual feats of all kinds; as feats of
memory, of mathematical combination, great power of abstraction, the
transmutings of the imagination, even versatility and
concentration,- as these acts expose the invisible organs and
members of the mind, which respond, member for member, to the parts of
the body. For we thus enter a new gymnasium, and learn to choose men
by their truest marks, taught, with Plato, "to choose those who can,
without aid from the eyes or any other sense, proceed to truth and
to being." Foremost among these activities are the summersaults,
spells and resurrections wrought by the imagination. When this
wakes, a man seems to multiply ten times or a thousand times his
force. It opens the delicious sense of indeterminate size and inspires
an audacious mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas of
gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a word dropped in
conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are
bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the Pit. And
this benefit is real because we are entitled to these enlargements,
and once having passed the bounds shall never again be quite the
miserable pedants we were.
The high functions of the intellect are so allied that some
imaginative power usually appears in all eminent minds, even in
arithmeticians of the first class, but especially in meditative men of
an intuitive habit of thought. This class serve us, so that they
have the perception of identity and the perception of reaction. The
eyes of Plato, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either
of these laws. The perception of these laws is a kind of metre of
the mind. Little minds are little through failure to see them.
Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our delight in reason
degenerates into idolatry of the herald. Especially when a mind of
powerful method has instructed men, we find the examples of
oppression. The dominion of Aristotle, the Ptolemaic astronomy, the
credit of Luther, of Bacon, of Locke;- in religion the history of
hierarchies, of saints, and the sects which have taken the name of
each founder, are in point. Alas! every man is such a victim. The
imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power. It is the
delight of vulgar talent to dazzle and to blind the beholder. But true
genius seeks to defend us from itself. True genius will not
impoverish, but will liberate, and add new senses. If a wise man
should appear in our village he would create, in those who conversed
with him, a new consciousness of wealth, by opening their eyes to
unobserved advantages; he would establish a sense of immovable
equality, calm us with assurances that we could not be cheated; as
every one would discern the checks and guaranties of condition. The
rich would see their mistakes and poverty, the poor their escapes
and their resources.
But nature brings all this about in due time. Rotation is her
remedy. The soul is impatient of masters and eager for change.
Housekeepers say of a domestic who has been valuable, "She had lived
with me long enough." We are tendencies, or rather, symptoms, and none
of us complete. We touch and go, and sip the foam of many lives.
Rotation is the law of nature. When nature removes a great man, people
explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will.
His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite
different field the next man will appear; not Jefferson, not Franklin,
but now a great salesman, then a road-contractor, then a student of
fishes, then a buffalo-hunting explorer, or a semi-savage Western
general. Thus we make a stand against our rougher masters; but against
the best there is a finer remedy. The power which they communicate
is not theirs. When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to
Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.
I must not forget that we have a special debt to a single class.
Life is a scale of degrees. Between rank and rank of our great men are
wide intervals. Mankind have in all ages attached themselves to a
few persons who either by the quality of that idea they embodied or by
the largeness of their reception were entitled to the position of
leaders and law-givers. These teach us the qualities of primary
nature,- admit us to the constitution of things. We swim, day by
day, on a river of delusions and are effectually amused with houses
and towns in the air, of which the men about us are dupes. But life is
a sincerity. In lucid intervals we say, "Let there be an entrance
opened for me into realities;*(3) I have worn the fool's cap too
long." We will know the meaning of our economies and politics. Give us
the cipher, and if persons and things are scores of a celestial music,
let us read off the strains. We have been cheated of our reason; yet
there have been sane men, who enjoyed a rich and related existence.
What they know, they know for us. With each new mind, a new secret
of nature transpires; nor can the Bible be closed until the last great
man is born. These men correct the delirium of the animal spirits,
make us considerate and engage us to new aims and powers. The
veneration of mankind selects these for the highest place. Witness the
multitude of statues, pictures and memorials which recall their genius
in every city, village, house and ship:-

"Ever their phantoms arise before us,
Our loftier brothers, but one in blood;
At bed and table they lord it o'er us
With looks of beauty and words of good."

How to illustrate the distinctive benefit of ideas, the service
rendered by those who introduce moral truths into the general mind?- I
am plagued, in all my living, with a perpetual tariff of prices. If
I work in my garden and prune an apple-tree, I am well enough
entertained, and could continue indefinitely in the like occupation.
But it comes to mind that a day is gone, and I have got this
precious nothing done. I go to Boston or New York and run up and
down on my affairs: they are sped, but so is the day. I am vexed by
the recollection of this price I have paid for a trifling advantage. I
remember the peau d'ane on which whoso sat should have his desire, but
a piece of the skin was gone for every wish. I go to a convention of
philanthropists. Do what I can, I cannot keep my eyes off the clock.
But if there should appear in the company some gentle soul who knows
little of persons or parties, of Carolina or Cuba, but who announces a
law that disposes these particulars, and so certifies me of the equity
which checkmates every false player, bankrupts every self-seeker,
and apprises me of my independence on any conditions of country, or
time, or human body,- that man liberates me; I forget the clock. I
pass out of the sore relation to persons. I am healed of my hurts. I
am made immortal by apprehending my possession of incorruptible goods.
Here is great competition of rich and poor. We live in a market, where
is only so much wheat, or wool, or land; and if I have so much more,
every other must have so much less. I seem to have no good without
breach of good manners. Nobody is glad in the gladness of another, and
our system is one of war, of an injurious superiority. Every child
of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is our system;
and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies and
hatreds of his competitors. But in these new fields there is room:
here are no self-esteems, no exclusions.
I admire great men of all classes, those who stand for facts, and
for thoughts; I like rough and smooth, "Scourges of God," and
"Darlings of the human race." I like the first Caesar; and Charles
V, of Spain; and Charles XII, of Sweden; Richard Plantagenet; and
Bonaparte, in France. I applaud a sufficient man, an officer equal
to his office; captains, ministers, senators. I like a master standing
firm on legs of iron, wellborn, rich, handsome, eloquent, loaded
with advantages, drawing all men by fascination into tributaries and
supporters of his power. Sword and staff, or talents sword-like or
staff-like, carry on the work of the world. But I find him greater
when he can abolish himself and all heroes, by letting in this element
of reason, irrespective of persons, this subtilizer and irresistible
upward force, into our thought, destroying individualism; the power so
great that the potentate is nothing. Then he is a monarch who gives
a constitution to his people; a pontiff who preaches the equality of
souls and releases his servants from their barbarous homages; an
emperor who can spare his empire.
But I intended to specify, with a little minuteness, two or three
points of service. Nature never spares the opium or nepenthe, but
wherever she mars her creature with some deformity or defect, lays her
poppies plentifully on the bruise, and the sufferer goes joyfully
through life, ignorant of the ruin and incapable of seeing it,
though all the world point their finger at it every day. The worthless
and offensive members of society, whose existence is a social pest,
invariably think themselves the most ill-used people alive, and
never get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness
of their contemporaries. Our globe discovers its hidden virtues, not
only in heroes and archangels, but in gossips and nurses. Is it not
a rare contrivance that lodged the due inertia in every creature,
the conserving, resisting energy, the anger at being waked or changed?
Altogether independent of the intellectual force in each is the
pride of opinion, the security that we are right. Not the feeblest
grandame, not a mowing idiot, but uses what spark of perception and
faculty is left, to chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion over the
absurdities of all the rest. Difference from me is the measure of
absurdity. Not one has a misgiving of being wrong. Was it not a bright
thought that made things cohere with this bitumen, fastest of cements?
But, in the midst of this chuckle of self-gratulation, some figure
goes by which Thersites too can love and admire. This is he that
should marshal us the way we were going. There is no end to his aid.
Without Plato we should almost lose our faith in the possibility of
a reasonable book. We seem to want but one, but we want one. We love
to associate with heroic persons, since our receptivity is
unlimited; and, with the great, our thoughts and manners easily become
great. We are all wise in capacity, though so few in energy. There
needs but one wise man in a company and all are wise, so rapid is
the contagion.
Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism and
enable us to see other people and their works. But there are vices and
follies incident to whole populations and ages. Men resemble their
contemporaries even more than their progenitors. It is observed in old
couples, or in persons who have been housemates for a course of years,
that they grow like, and if they should live long enough we should not
be able to know them apart. Nature abhors these complaisances which
threaten to melt the world into a lump, and hastens to break up such
maudlin agglutinations. The like assimilation goes on between men of
one town, of one sect, of one political party; and the ideas of the
time are in the air, and infect all who breathe it. Viewed from any
high point, this city of New York, yonder city of London, the
Western civilization, would seem a bundle of insanities. We keep
each other in countenance and exasperate by emulation the frenzy of
the time. The shield against the stingings of conscience is the
universal practice, or our contemporaries. Again, it is very easy to
be as wise and good as your companions. We learn of our contemporaries
what they know without effort, and almost through the pores of the
skin. We catch it by sympathy, or as a wife arrives at the
intellectual and moral elevations of her husband. But we stop where
they stop. Very hardly can we take another step. The great, or such as
hold of nature and transcend fashions by their fidelity to universal
ideas, are saviors from these federal errors,*(4) and defend us from
our contemporaries. They are the exceptions which we want, where all
grows like. A foreign greatness is the antidote for cabalism.
Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves from too much
conversation with our mates, and exult in the depth of nature in
that direction in which he leads us. What indemnification is one great
man for populations of pigmies! Every mother wishes one son a
genius, though all the rest should be mediocre. But a new danger
appears in the excess of influence of the great man. His attractions
warp us from our place. We have become underlings and intellectual
suicides. Ah! yonder in the horizon is our help;- other great men, new
qualities, counterweights and checks on each other. We cloy of the
honey of each peculiar greatness. Every hero becomes a bore at last.
Perhaps Voltaire was not bad-hearted, yet he said of the good Jesus,
even, "I pray you, let me never hear that man's name again." They
cry up the virtues of George Washington,- "Damn George Washington!" is
the poor Jacobin's whole speech and confutation. But it is human
nature's indispensable defence. The centripetence augments the
centrifugence. We balance one man with his opposite, and the health of
the state depends on the see-saw.
There is however a speedy limit to the use of heroes. Every genius
is defended from approach by quantities of unavailableness. They are
very attractive, and seem at a distance our own: but we are hindered
on all sides from approach. The more we are drawn, the more we are
repelled. There is something not solid in the good that is done for
us. The best discovery the discoverer makes for himself. It has
something unreal for his companion until he too has substantiated
it. It seems as if the Deity dressed each soul which he sends into
nature in certain virtues and powers not communicable to other men,
and sending it to perform one more turn through the circle of
beings, wrote, "Not transferable" and "Good for this trip only," on
these garments of the soul. There is somewhat deceptive about the
intercourse of minds. The boundaries are invisible, but they are never
crossed. There is such good will to impart, and such good will to
receive, that each threatens to become the other; but the law of
individuality collects its secret strength: you are you, and I am I,
and so we remain.
For nature wishes every thing to remain itself; and whilst every
individual strives to grow and exclude and to exclude and grow, to the
extremities of the universe, and to impose the law of its being on
every other creature, Nature steadily aims to protect each against
every other. Each is self-defended. Nothing is more marked than the
power by which individuals are guarded from individuals, in a world
where every benefactor becomes so easily a malefactor only by
continuation of his activity into places where it is not due; where
children seem so much at the mercy of their foolish parents, and where
almost all men are too social and interfering. We rightly speak of the
guardian angels of children. How superior in their security from
infusions of evil persons, from vulgarity and second thought! They
shed their own abundant beauty on the objects they behold. Therefore
they are not at the mercy of such poor educators as we adults. If we
huff and chide them they soon come not to mind it and get a
self-reliance; and if we indulge them to folly, they learn the
limitation elsewhere.
We need not fear excessive influence. A more generous trust is
permitted. Serve the great. Stick at no humiliation. Grudge no
office thou canst render. Be the limb of their body, the breath of
their mouth. Compromise thy egotism. Who cares for that, so thou
gain aught wider and nobler? Never mind the taunt of Boswellism: the
devotion may easily be greater than the wretched pride which is
guarding its own skirts. Be another: not thyself, but a Platonist; not
a soul, but a Christian; not a naturalist, but a Cartesian; not a
poet, but a Shakespearean. In vain, the wheels of tendency will not
stop, nor will all the forces of inertia, fear, or of love itself hold
thee there. On, and forever onward! The microscope observes a monad or
wheel-insect among the infusories circulating in water. Presently a
dot appears on the animal, which enlarges to a slit, and it becomes
two perfect animals. The ever-proceeding detachment appears not less
in all thought and in society. Children think they cannot live without
their parents. But, long before they are aware of it, the black dot
has appeared and the detachment taken place. Any accident will now
reveal to them their independence.
But great men:- the word is injurious. Is there caste? Is there
fate? What becomes of the promise to virtue? The thoughtful youth
laments the superfoetation of nature. "Generous and handsome," he
says, "is your hero; but look at yonder poor Paddy, whose country is
his wheelbarrow; look at his whole nation of Paddies." Why are the
masses, from the dawn of history down, food for knives and powder? The
idea dignifies a few leaders, who have sentiment, opinion, love,
self-devotion; and they make war and death sacred;- but what for the
wretches whom they hire and kill? The cheapness of man is every
day's tragedy. It is as real a loss that others should be as low as
that we should be low; for we must have society.
Is it a reply to these suggestions to say, Society is a Pestalozzian
school: all are teachers and pupils in turn? We are equally served
by receiving and by imparting. Men who know the same things are not
long the best company for each other. But bring to each an intelligent
person of another experience, and it is as if you let off water from a
lake by cutting a lower basin. It seems a mechanical advantage, and
great benefit it is to each speaker, as he can now paint out his
thought to himself. We pass very fast, in our personal moods, from
dignity to dependence. And if any appear never to assume the chair,
but always to stand and serve, it is because we do not see the company
in a sufficiently long period for the whole rotation of parts to
come about. As to what we call the masses, and common men,- there
are no common men. All men are at last of a size; and true art is only
possible on the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis
somewhere. Fair play and an open field and freshest laurels to all who
have won them! But heaven reserves an equal scope for every creature.
Each is uneasy until he has produced his private ray unto the concave
sphere and beheld his talent also in its last nobility and exaltation.
The heroes of the hour are relatively great; of a faster growth;
or they are such in whom, at the moment of success, a quality is
ripe which is then in request. Other days will demand other qualities.
Some rays escape the common observer, and want a finely adapted eye.
Ask the great man if there be none greater. His companions are; and
not the less great but the more that society cannot see them. Nature
never sends a great man into the planet without confiding the secret
to another soul.
One gracious fact emerges from these studies,- that there is true
ascension in our love. The reputations of the nineteenth century
will one day be quoted to prove its barbarism. The genius of
humanity is the real subject whose biography is written in our annals.
We must infer much, and supply many chasms in the record. The
history of the universe is symptomatic, and life is mnemonical. No
man, in all the procession of famous men, is reason or illumination or
that essence we were looking for; but is an exhibition, in some
quarter, of new possibilities. Could we one day complete the immense
figure which these flagrant*(5) points compose! The study of many
individuals leads us to an elemental region wherein the individual
is lost, or wherein all touch by their summits. Thought and feeling
that break out there cannot be impounded by any fence of
personality. This is the key to the power of the greatest men,-
their spirit diffuses itself. A new quality of mind travels by night
and by day, in concentric circles from its origin, and publishes
itself by unknown methods: the union of all minds appears intimate;
what gets admission to one, cannot be kept out of any other; the
smallest acquisition of truth or of energy, in any quarter, is so much
good to the commonwealth of souls. If the disparities of talent and
position vanish when the individuals are seen in the duration which is
necessary to complete the career of each, even more swiftly the
seeming injustice disappears when we ascend to the central identity of
all the individuals, and know that they are made of the substance
which ordaineth and doeth.
The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The
qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less, and
pass away; the qualities remain on another brow. No experience is more
familiar. Once you saw phoenixes: they are gone; the world is not
therefore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read sacred emblems
turn out to be common pottery; but the sense of the pictures is
sacred, and you may still read them transferred to the walls of the
world. For a time our teachers serve us personally, as metres or
milestones of progress. Once they were angels of knowledge and their
figures touched the sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, culture
and limits; and they yielded their place to other geniuses. Happy,
if a few names remain so high that we have not been able to read
them nearer, and age and comparison have not robbed them of a ray. But
at last we shall cease to look in men for completeness, and shall
content ourselves with their social and delegated quality. All that
respects the individual is temporary and prospective, like the
individual himself, who is ascending out of his limits into a catholic
existence. We have never come at the true and best benefit of any
genius so long as we believe him an original force. In the moment when
he ceases to help us as a cause, he begins to help us more as an
effect. Then he appears as an exponent of a vaster mind and will.
The opaque self becomes transparent with the light of the First Cause.
Yet, within the limits of human education and agency, we may say
great men exist that there may be greater men. The destiny of
organized nature is amelioration, and who can tell its limits? It is
for man to tame the chaos; on every side, whilst he lives, to
scatter the seeds of science and of song, that climate, corn,
animals, men, may be milder, and the germs of love and benefit may be
multiplied.*(6)
PLATO
PLATO
or, The Philosopher

AMONG secular*(7) books, Plato only is entitled to Omar's*(8)
fanatical compliment to the Koran, when he said, "Burn the
libraries; for their value is in this book." These sentences contain
the culture of nations; these are the corner-stone of schools; these
are the fountain-head of literatures. A discipline it is in logic,
arithmetic, taste, symmetry, poetry, language, rhetoric, ontology,
morals or practical wisdom. There was never such range of speculation.
Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated
among men of thought. Great havoc makes he among our originalities. We
have reached the mountain from which all these drift boulders were
detached. The Bible of the learned for twenty-two hundred years, every
brisk young man who says in succession fine things to each reluctant
generation,- Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, Rousseau,
Alfieri, Coleridge,- is some reader of Plato, translating into the
vernacular, wittily, his good things. Even the men of grander
proportion suffer some deduction from the misfortune (shall I say?) of
coming after this exhausting generalizer. St. Augustine, Copernicus,
Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg, Goethe, are likewise his debtors and
must say after him. For it is fair to credit the broadest
generalizer with all the particulars deducible from his thesis.
Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,- at once the glory and
the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to
add any idea to his categories. No wife, no children had he, and the
thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity and are tinged
with his mind. How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out
of night, to be his men,- Platonists! the Alexandrians, a
constellation of genius; the Elizabethans, not less; Sir Thomas
More, Henry More, John Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor,
Ralph Cudworth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; Marcilius Ficinus and Picus
Mirandola. Calvinism is in his Phaedo: Christianity is in it.
Mahometanism draws all its philosophy, in its hand-book of morals, the
Akhlak-y-Jalaly, from him. Mysticism finds in Plato all its texts.
This citizen of a town in Greece is no villager nor patriot. An
Englishman reads and says, "how English!" a German- "how Teutonic!" an
Italian- "how Roman and how Greek!" As they say that Helen of Argos
had that universal beauty that every body felt related to her, so
Plato seems to a reader in New England an American genius. His broad
humanity transcends all sectional lines.
This range of Plato instructs us what to think of the vexed question
concerning his reputed works,- what are genuine, what spurious. It
is singular that wherever we find a man higher by a whole head than
any of his contemporaries, it is sure to come into doubt what are
his real works. Thus Homer, Plato, Raffaelle, Shakespeare. For these
men magnetize their contemporaries, so that their companions can do
for them what they can never do for themselves; and the great man does
thus live in several bodies, and write, or paint or act, by many
hands; and after some time it is not easy to say what is the authentic
work of the master and what is only of his school.
Plato, too, like every great man, consumed his own times. What is
a great man but one of great affinities, who takes up into himself all
arts, sciences, all knowables, as his food? He can spare nothing; he
can dispose of every thing. What is not good for virtue, is good for
knowledge. Hence his contemporaries tax him with plagiarism. But the
inventor only knows how to borrow; and society is glad to forget the
innumerable laborers who ministered to this architect, and reserves
all its gratitude for him. When we are praising Plato, it seems we are
praising quotations from Solon and Sophron and Philolaus. Be it so.
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all
forests and mines and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation
from all his ancestors. And this grasping inventor puts all nations
under contribution.
Plato absorbed the learning of his times,- Philolaus, Timaeus,
Heraclitus, Parmenides, and what else; then his master, Socrates;
and finding himself still capable of a larger synthesis,- beyond all
example then or since,- he traveled into Italy, to gain what
Pythagoras had for him; then into Egypt, and perhaps still farther
East, to import the other element, which Europe wanted, into the
European mind. This breadth entitles him to stand as the
representative of philosophy. He says, in the Republic, "Such a genius
as philosophers must of necessity have, is wont but seldom in all
its parts to meet in one man, but its different parts generally spring
up in different persons." Every man who would do anything well, must
come to it from a higher ground. A philosopher must be more than a
philosopher. Plato is clothed with the powers of a poet, stands upon
the highest place of the poet, and (though I doubt he wanted the
decisive gift of lyric expression), mainly is not a poet because he
chose to use the poetic gift to an ulterior purpose.
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell
you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their
house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know
their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers
most resembles them. Plato especially has no external biography. If he
had lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing of them. He ground
them all into paint. As a good chimney burns its smoke, so a
philosopher converts the value of all his fortunes into his
intellectual performances.
He was born 427 A.C., about the time of the death of Pericles; was
of patrician connection in his times and city, and is said to have had
an early inclination for war, but, in his twentieth year, meeting with
Socrates, was easily dissuaded from this pursuit and remained for
ten years his scholar, until the death of Socrates. He then went to
Megara, accepted the invitations of Dion and of Dionysius to the court
of Sicily, and went thither three times, though very capriciously
treated. He traveled into Italy; then into Egypt, where he stayed a
long time; some say three,- some say thirteen years. It is said he
went farther, into Babylonia: this is uncertain. Returning to
Athens, he gave lessons in the Academy to those whom his fame drew
thither; and died, as we have received it, in the act of writing, at
eighty-one years.
But the biography of Plato is interior. We are to account for the
supreme elevation of this man in the intellectual history of our
race,- how it happens that in proportion to the culture of men they
become his scholars; that, as our Jewish Bible has implanted itself in
the tabletalk and household life of every man and woman in the
European and American nations, so the writings of Plato have
preoccupied every school of learning, every lover of thought, every
church, every poet,- making it impossible to think, on certain levels,
except through him. He stands between the truth and every man's
mind, and has almost impressed language and the primary forms of
thought with his name and seal. I am struck, in reading him, with
the extreme modernness of his style and spirit. Here is the germ of
that Europe we know so well, in its long history of arts and arms;
here are all its traits, already discernible in the mind of Plato,-
and in none before him. It has spread itself since into a hundred
histories, but has added no new element. This perpetual modernness
is the measure of merit in every work of art; since the author of it
was not misled by any thing short-lived or local, but abode by real
and abiding traits. How Plato came thus to be Europe, and
philosophy, and almost literature, is the problem for us to solve.
This could not have happened without a sound, sincere and catholic
man, able to honor, at the same time, the ideal, or laws of the
mind, and fate, or the order of nature. The first period of a
nation, as of an individual, is the period of unconscious strength.
Children cry, scream and stamp with fury, unable to express their
desires. As soon as they can speak and tell their want and the
reason of it, they become gentle. In adult life, whilst the
perceptions are obtuse, men and women talk vehemently and
superlatively, blunder and quarrel: their manners are full of
desperation; their speech is full of oaths. As soon as, with
culture, things have cleared up a little, and they see them no
longer in lumps and masses but accurately distributed, they desist
from that weak vehemence and explain their meaning in detail. If the
tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a
beast in the forest. The same weakness and want, on a higher plane,
occurs daily in the education of ardent young men and women. "Ah!
you don't understand me; I have never met with any one who comprehends
me": and they sigh and weep, write verses and walk alone,- fault of
power to express their precise meaning. In a month or two, through the
favor of their good genius, they meet some one so related as to assist
their volcanic estate, and, good communication being once established,
they are thenceforward good citizens. It is ever thus. The progress is
to accuracy, to skill, to truth, from blind force.
There is a moment in the history of every nation, when, proceeding
out of this brute youth, the perceptive powers reach their ripeness
and have not yet become microscopic: so that man, at that instant,
extends across the entire scale, and, with his feet still planted on
the immense forces of night, converses by his eyes and brain with
solar and stellar creation. That is the moment of adult health, the
culmination of power.
Such is the history of Europe, in all points; and such in
philosophy. Its early records, almost perished, are of the
immigrations from Asia, bringing with them the dreams of barbarians; a
confusion of crude notions of morals and of natural philosophy,
gradually subsiding through the partial insight of single teachers.
Before Pericles came the Seven Wise Masters, and we have the
beginnings of geometry, metaphysics and ethics: then the partialists,-
deducing the origin of things from flux or water, or from air, or from
fire, or from mind. All mix with these causes mythologic pictures.
At last comes Plato, the distributor, who needs no barbaric point,
or tattoo, or whooping; for he can define. He leaves with Asia the
vast and superlative; he is the arrival of accuracy and
intelligence. "He shall be as a god to me, who can rightly divide
and define."
This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the account which the
human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world. Two
cardinal facts lie forever at the base; the one, and the two: 1.
Unity, or Identity; and, 2. Variety. We unite all things by perceiving
the law which pervades them; by perceiving the superficial differences
and the profound resemblances. But every mental act,- this very
perception of identity or oneness, recognizes the difference of
things. Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to speak or to think
without embracing both.
The mind is urged to ask for one cause of many effects; then for the
cause of that; and again the cause, diving still into the profound:
self-assured that it shall arrive at an absolute and sufficient
one,- a one that shall be all. "In the midst of the sun is the
light, in the midst of the light is truth, and in the midst of truth
is the imperishable being," say the Vedas. All philosophy, of East and
West, has the same centripetence. Urged by an opposite necessity,
the mind returns from the one to that which is not one, but other or
many; from cause to effect; and affirms the necessary existence of
variety, the self-existence of both, as each is involved in the other.
These strictly-blended elements it is the problem of thought to
separate and to reconcile. Their existence is mutually contradictory
and exclusive; and each so fast slides into the other that we can
never say what is one, and what it is not. The Proteus is as nimble in
the highest as in the lowest grounds; when we contemplate the one, the
true, the good,- as in the surfaces and extremities of matter.
In all nations there are minds which incline to dwell in the
conception of the fundamental Unity. The raptures of prayer and
ecstasy of devotion lose all being in one Being. This tendency finds
its highest expression in the religious writings of the East, and
chiefly in the Indian Scriptures, in the Vedas, the Bhagavat Geeta,
and the Vishnu Purana. Those writings contain little else than this
idea, and they rise to pure and sublime strains in celebrating it.
The Same, the Same: friend and foe are of one stuff; the
ploughman, the plough and the furrow are of one stuff; and the stuff
is such and so much that the variations of form are unimportant.
"You are fit" (says the supreme Krishna to a sage) "to apprehend
that you are not distinct from me. That which I am, thou art, and that
also is this world, with its gods and heroes and mankind. Men
contemplate distinctions, because they are stupefied with
ignorance." "The words I and mine constitute ignorance. What is the
great end of all, you shall now learn from me. It is soul,- one in all
bodies, pervading, uniform, perfect, preeminent over nature, exempt
from birth, growth and decay, omnipresent, made up of true
knowledge, independent, unconnected with unrealities, with name,
species and the rest, in time past, present and to come. The knowledge
that this spirit, which is essentially one, is in one's own and in all
other bodies, is the wisdom of one who knows the unity of things. As
one diffusive air, passing through the perforations of a flute, is
distinguished as the notes of a scale, so the nature of the Great
Spirit is single, though its forms be manifold, arising from the
consequences of acts. When the difference of the investing form, as
that of god or the rest, is destroyed, there is no distinction."
"The whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu, who is identical
with all things, and is to be regarded by the wise as not differing
from, but as the same as themselves. I neither am going nor coming;
nor is my dwelling in any one place; nor art thou, thou; nor are
others, others; nor am I, I." As if he had said, "All is for the soul,
and the soul is Vishnu; and animals and stars are transient paintings;
and light is whitewash; and durations are deceptive; and form is
imprisonment; and heaven itself a decoy." That which the soul seeks is
resolution into being above form, out of Tartarus and out of
heaven,- liberation from nature.
If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things
are absorbed, action tends directly backwards to diversity. The
first is the course or gravitation of mind; the second is the power of
nature. Nature is the manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or
reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and
interpenetrate all things, all thought; the one, the many. One is
being; the other, intellect: one is necessity; the other, freedom:
one, rest; the other, motion: one, power; the other, distribution:
one, strength; the other, pleasure: one, consciousness; the other,
definition: one, genius; the other, talent: one, earnestness; the
other, knowledge: one, possession; the other, trade: one, caste; the
other, culture: one, king; the other, democracy: and, if we dare carry
these generalizations a step higher, and name the last tendency of
both, we might say, that the end of the one is escape from
organization,- pure science; and the end of the other is the highest
instrumentality, or use of means, or executive deity.
Each student adheres, by temperament and by habit, to the first or
to the second of these gods of the mind. By religion, he tends to
unity; by intellect, or by the senses, to the many. A too rapid
unification, and an excessive appliance to parts and particulars,
are the twin dangers of speculation.
To this partiality the history of nations corresponded. The
country of unity, of immovable institutions, the seat of a
philosophy delighting in abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and
in practice to the idea of a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is
Asia; and it realizes this faith in the social institution of caste.
On the other side, the genius of Europe is active and creative: it
resists caste by culture; its philosophy was a discipline; it is a
land of arts, inventions, trade, freedom. If the East loved
infinity, the West delighted in boundaries.
European civility is the triumph of talent, the extension of system,
the sharpened understanding, adaptive skill, delight in forms, delight
in manifestation, in comprehensible results. Pericles, Athens, Greece,
had been working in this element with the joy of genius not yet
chilled by any foresight of the detriment of an excess. They saw
before them no sinister political economy; no ominous Malthus; no
Paris or London; no pitiless subdivision of classes,- the doom of
the pin-makers, the doom of the weavers, of dressers, of
stockingers, of carders, of spinners, of colliers; no Ireland; no
Indian caste, superinduced by the efforts of Europe to throw it off.
The understanding was in its health and prime. Art was in its splendid
novelty. They cut the Pentelican marble as if it were snow, and
their perfect works in architecture and sculpture seemed things of
course, not more difficult than the completion of a new ship at the
Medford yards, or new mills at Lowell. These things are in course, and
may be taken for granted. The Roman legion, Byzantine legislation,
English trade, the saloons of Versailles, the cafes of Paris, the
steam-mill, steamboat, steam-coach, may all be seen in perspective;
the town-meeting, the ballot-box, the newspaper and cheap press.
Meantime, Plato, in Egypt and in Eastern pilgrimages, imbibed the
idea of one Deity, in which all things are absorbed. The unity of Asia
and the detail of Europe; the infinitude of the Asiatic soul and the
defining, result-loving, machine-making, surface-seeking,
opera-going Europe,- Plato came to join, and, by contact, to enhance
the energy of each. The excellence of Europe and Asia are in his
brain. Metaphysics and natural philosophy expressed the genius of
Europe; he substructs the religion of Asia, as the base.
In short, a balanced soul was born, perceptive of the two
elements. It is as easy to be great as to be small. The reason why
we do not at once believe in admirable souls is because they are not
in our experience. In actual life, they are so rare as to be
incredible; but primarily there is not only no presumption against
them, but the strongest presumption in favor of their appearance.
But whether voices were heard in the sky, or not; whether his mother
or his father dreamed that the infant man-child was the son of Apollo;
whether a swarm of bees settled on his lips, or not;- a man who
could see two sides of a thing was born. The wonderful synthesis so
familiar in nature; the upper and the under side of the medal of Jove;
the union of impossibilities, which reappears in every object; its
real and its ideal power,- was now also transferred entire to the
consciousness of a man.
The balanced soul came. If he loved abstract truth, he saved himself
by propounding the most popular of all principles, the absolute
good, which rules rulers, and judges the judge. If he made
transcendental distinctions, he fortified himself by drawing all his
illustrations from sources disdained by orators and polite conversers;
from mares and puppies; from pitchers and soup-ladles; from cooks
and criers; the shops of potters, horse-doctors, butchers and
fishmongers. He cannot forgive in himself a partiality, but is
resolved that the two poles of thought shall appear in his
statement. His argument and his sentence are self-imposed and
spherical. The two poles appear; yes, and become two hands, to grasp
and appropriate their own.
Every great artist has been such by synthesis. Our strength is
transitional, alternating; or, shall I say, a thread of two strands.
The sea-shore, sea seen from shore, shore seen from sea; the taste
of two metals in contact; and our enlarged powers at the approach
and at the departure of a friend; the experience of poetic
creativeness, which is not found in staying at home, nor yet in
traveling, but in transitions from one to the other, which must
therefore be adroitly managed to present as much transitional
surface as possible; this command of two elements must explain the
power and the charm of Plato. Art expresses the one or the same by the
different. Thought seeks to know unity in unity; poetry to show it
by variety; that is, always by an object or symbol. Plato keeps the
two vases, one of aether and one of pigment, at his side, and
invariably uses both. Things added to things, as statistics, civil
history, are inventories. Things used as language are inexhaustibly
attractive. Plato turns incessantly the obverse and the reverse of the
medal of Jove.
To take an example:- The physical philosophers had sketched each his
theory of the world; the theory of atoms, of fire, of flux, of spirit;
theories mechanical and chemical in their genius. Plato, a master of
mathematics, studious of all natural laws and causes, feels these,
as second causes, to be no theories of the world but bare
inventories and lists. To the study of nature he therefore prefixes
the dogma,- "Let us declare the cause which led the Supreme Ordainer
to produce and compose the universe. He was good; and he who is good
has no kind of envy. Exempt from envy, he wished that all things
should be as much as possible like himself. Whosoever, taught by
wise men, shall admit this as the prime cause of the origin and
foundation of the world, will be in the truth."*(9) "All things are
for the sake of the good, and it is the cause of every thing
beautiful." This dogma animates and impersonates his philosophy.
The synthesis which makes the character of his mind appears in all
his talents. Where there is great compass of wit, we usually find
excellencies that combine easily in the living man, but in description
appear incompatible. The mind of Plato is not to be exhibited by a
Chinese catalogue, but is to be apprehended by an original mind in the
exercise of its original power. In him the freest abandonment is
united with the precision of a geometer. His daring imagination
gives him the more solid grasp of facts; as the birds of highest
flight have the strongest alar bones. His patrician polish, his
intrinsic elegance, edged by an irony so subtle that it stings and
paralyzes, adorn the soundest health and strength of frame.
According to the old sentence, "If Jove should descend to the earth,
he would speak in the style of Plato."
With this palatial air there is, for the direct aim of several of
his works and running through the tenor of them all, a certain
earnestness, which mounts, in the Republic and in the Phaedo, to
piety. He has been charged with feigning sickness at the time of the
death of Socrates. But the anecdotes that have come down from the
times attest his manly interference before the people in his
master's behalf, since even the savage cry of the assembly to Plato is
preserved; and the indignation towards popular government, in many
of his pieces, expresses a personal exasperation. He has a probity,
a native reverence for justice and honor, and a humanity which makes
him tender for the superstitions of the people. Add to this, he
believes that poetry, prophecy and the high insight are from a
wisdom of which man is not master; that the gods never philosophize,
but by a celestial mania these miracles are accomplished. Horsed on
these winged steeds, he sweeps the dim regions, visits worlds which
flesh cannot enter; he saw the souls in pain, he hears the doom of the
judge, he beholds the penal metempsychosis, the Fates, with the rock
and shears, and hears the intoxicating hum of their spindle.
But his circumspection never forsook him. One would say he had
read the inscription on the gates of Busyrane,- "Be bold"; and on
the second gate,- "Be bold, be bold, and evermore be bold"; and then
again had paused well at the third gate,- "Be not too bold." His
strength is like the momentum of a falling planet, and his
discretion the return of its due and perfect curve,- so excellent is
his Greek love of boundary and his skill in definition. In reading
logarithms one is not more secure than in following Plato in his
flights. Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of
his imagination are playing in the sky. He has finished his thinking
before he brings it to the reader, and he abounds in the surprises
of a literary master. He has that opulence which furnishes, at every
turn, the precise weapon he needs. As the rich man wears no more
garments, drives no more horses, sits in no more chambers than the
poor,- but has that one dress, or equipage, or instrument, which is
fit for the hour and the need; so Plato, in his plenty, is never
restricted, but has the fit word. There is indeed no weapon in all the
armory of wit which he did not possess and use,- epic, analysis,
mania, intuition, music, satire and irony, down to the customary and
polite. His illustrations are poetry and his jests illustrations.
Socrates' profession of obstetric art*(10) is good philosophy; and his
finding that word "cookery," and "adulatory art," for rhetoric, in the
Gorgias, does us a substantial service still. No orator can measure in
effect with him who can give good nicknames.
What moderation and understatement and checking his thunder in mid
volley! He has good-naturedly furnished the courtier and citizen
with all that can be said against the schools. "For philosophy is an
elegant thing, if any one modestly meddles with it; but if he is
conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts the man." He
could well afford to be generous,- he, who from the sunlike centrality
and reach of his vision, had a faith without cloud. Such as his
perception, was his speech: he plays with the doubt and makes the most
of it: he paints and quibbles; and by and by comes a sentence that
moves the sea and land. The admirable earnest comes not only at
intervals, in the perfect yes and no of the dialogue, but in bursts of
light. "I, therefore, Callicles, am persuaded by these accounts, and
consider how I may exhibit my soul before the judge in a healthy
condition. Wherefore, disregarding the honors that most men value, and
looking to the truth, I shall endeavor in reality to live as
virtuously as I can; and when I die, to die so. And I invite all other
men, to the utmost of my power; and you too I in turn invite to this
contest, which, I affirm, surpasses all contests here."*(11)
He is a great average man; one who, to the best thinking, adds a
proportion and equality in his faculties, so that men see in him their
own dreams and glimpses made available and made to pass for what
they are. A great common-sense is his warrant and qualification to
be the world's interpreter. He has reason, as all the philosophic
and poetic class have: but he has also what they have not,- this
strong solving sense to reconcile his poetry with the appearances of
the world, and build a bridge from the streets of cities to the
Atlantis. He omits never this graduation, but slopes his thought,
however picturesque the precipice on one side, to an access from the
plain. He never writes in ecstasy, or catches us up into poetic
raptures.
Plato apprehended the cardinal facts. He could prostrate himself
on the earth and cover his eyes whilst he adored that which cannot
be numbered, or gauged, or known, or named: that of which every
thing can be affirmed and denied: that "which is entity and
nonentity." He called it super-essential. He even stood ready, as in
the Parmenides, to demonstrate that it was so,- that this Being
exceeded the limits of intellect. No man ever more fully
acknowledged the Ineffable. Having paid his homage, as for the human
race, to the Illimitable, he then stood erect, and for the human
race affirmed, "And yet things are knowable!"- that is, the Asia in
his mind was first heartily honored,- the ocean of love and power,
before form, before will, before knowledge, the Same, the Good, the
One; and now, refreshed and empowered by this worship, the instinct of
Europe, namely, culture, returns; and he cries, "Yet things are
knowable!" They are knowable, because being from one, things
correspond. There is a scale; and the correspondence of heaven to
earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As
there is a science of stars, called astronomy; a science of
quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called
chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,- I call it Dialectic,-
which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true. It rests
on the observation of identity and diversity; for to judge is to unite
to an object the notion which belongs to it. The sciences, even the
best,- mathematics and astronomy,- are like sportsmen, who seize
whatever prey offers, even without being able to make any use of it.
Dialectic must teach the use of them. "This is of that rank that no
intellectual man will enter on any study for its own sake, but only
with a view to advance himself in that one sole science which embraces
all."*(12)
"The essence or peculiarity of man is to comprehend a whole; or that
which in the diversity of sensations can be comprised under a rational
unity." "The soul which has never perceived the truth, cannot pass
into the human form."*(13) I announce to men the Intellect. I announce
the good of being interpenetrated by the mind that made nature: this
benefit, namely, that it can understand nature, which it made and
maketh. Nature is good, but intellect is better: as the lawgiver is
before the law-receiver. I give you joy, O sons of men! that truth
is altogether wholesome; that we have hope to search out what might be
the very self of everything. The misery of man is to be baulked of the
sight of essence and to be stuffed with conjectures; but the supreme
good is reality; the supreme beauty is reality; and all virtue and all
felicity depend on this science of the real: for courage is nothing
else than knowledge; the fairest fortune that can befall man is to
be guided by his daemon to that which is truly his own. This also is
the essence of justice,- to attend every one his own: nay, the
notion of virtue is not to be arrived at except through direct
contemplation of the divine essence. Courage then for "the
persuasion that we must search that which we do not know, will
render us, beyond comparison, better, braver and more industrious than
if we thought it impossible to discover what we do not know, and
useless to search for it." He secures a position not to be
commanded, by his passion for reality; valuing philosophy only as it
is the pleasure of conversing with real being.
Thus, full of the genius of Europe, he said, Culture. He saw the
institutions of Sparta and recognized, more genially one would say
than any since, the hope of education. He delighted in every
accomplishment, in every graceful and useful and truthful performance;
above all in the splendors of genius and intellectual achievement.
"The whole of life, O Socrates," said Glauco, "is, with the wise,
the measure of hearing such discourses as these." What a price he sets
on the feats of talent, on the powers of Pericles, of Isocrates, of
Parmenides! What price above price on the talents themselves! He
called the several faculties, gods, in his beautiful personation. What
value he gives to the art of gymnastic in education; what to geometry;
what to music; what to astronomy, whose appeasing and medicinal
power he celebrates! In the Timaeus he indicates the highest
employment of the eyes. "By us it is asserted that God invented and
bestowed sight on us for this purpose,- that on surveying the
circles of intelligence in the heavens, we might properly employ those
of our own minds, which, though disturbed when compared with the
others that are uniform, are still allied to their circulations; and
that having thus learned, and being naturally possessed of a correct
reasoning faculty, we might, by imitating the uniform revolutions of
divinity, set right our own wanderings and blunders." And in the
Republic,- "By each of these disciplines a certain organ of the soul
is both purified and reanimated which is blinded and buried by studies
of another kind; an organ better worth saving than ten thousand
eyes, since truth is perceived by this alone."
He said, Culture; but he first admitted its basis, and gave
immeasurably the first place to advantages of nature. His patrician
tastes laid stress on the distinctions of birth. In the doctrine of
the organic character and disposition is the origin of caste. "Such as
were fit to govern, into their composition the informing Deity mingled
gold; into the military, silver; iron and brass for husbandmen and
artificers." The East confirms itself, in all ages, in this faith. The
Koran is explicit on this point of caste. "Men have their metal, as of
gold and silver. Those of you who were the worthy ones in the state of
ignorance, will be the worthy ones in the state of faith, as soon as
you embrace it." Plato was not less firm. "Of the five orders of
things, only four can be taught to the generality of men." In the
Republic he insists on the temperaments of the youth, as first of
the first.
A happier example of the stress laid on nature is in the dialogue
with the young Theages, who wishes to receive lessons from Socrates.
Socrates declares that if some have grown wise by associating with
him, no thanks are due to him; but, simply, whilst they were with
him they grew wise, not because of him; he pretends not to know the
way of it. "It is adverse to many, nor can those be benefited by
associating with me whom the Daemon opposes; so that it is not
possible for me to live with these. With many however he does not
prevent me from conversing, who yet are not at all benefited by
associating with me. Such, O Theages, is the association with me; for,
if it pleases the God, you will make great and rapid proficiency:
you will not, if he does not please. Judge whether it is not safer
to be instructed by some one of those who have power over the
benefit which they impart to men, than by me, who benefit or not, just
as it may happen." As if he had said, "I have no system. I cannot be
answerable for you. You will be what you must. If there is love
between us, inconceivably delicious and profitable will our
intercourse be; if not, your time is lost and you will only annoy
me. I shall seem to you stupid, and the reputation I have, false.
Quite above us, beyond the will of you or me, is this secret
affinity or repulsion laid. All my good is magnetic, and I educate,
not by lessons, but by going about my business."
He said, Culture; he said, Nature; and he failed not to add,
"There is also the divine." There is no thought in any mind but it
quickly tends to convert itself into a power and organizes a huge
instrumentality of means. Plato, lover of limits, loved the
illimitable, saw the enlargement and nobility which come from truth
itself and good itself, and attempted as if on the part of the human
intellect, once for all to do it adequate homage,- homage fit for
the immense soul to receive, and yet homage becoming the intellect
to render. He said then, "Our faculties run out into infinity, and
return to us thence. We can define but a little way; but here is a
fact which will not be skipped, and which to shut our eyes upon is
suicide. All things are in a scale; and, begin where we will, ascend
and ascend. All things are symbolical; and what we call results are
beginnings."
A key to the method and completeness of Plato is his twice
bisected line. After he has illustrated the relation between the
absolute good and true and the forms of the intelligible world, he
says: "Let there be a line cut in two unequal parts. Cut again each of
these two main parts,- one representing the visible, the other the
intelligible world,- and let these two new sections represent the
bright part and the dark part of each of these worlds. You will
have, for one of the sections of the visible world, images, that is,
both shadows and reflections;- for the other section, the objects of
these images, that is, plants, animals, and the works of art and
nature. Then divide the intelligible world in like manner; the one
section will be of opinions and hypotheses, and the other section of
truths."*(14) To these four sections, the four operations of the
soul correspond,- conjecture, faith, understanding, reason. As every
pool reflects the image of the sun, so every thought and thing
restores us an image and creature of the supreme Good. The universe is
perforated by a million channels for his activity. All things mount
and mount.
All his thought has this ascension; in Phaedrus, teaching that
beauty is the most lovely of all things, exciting hilarity and
shedding desire and confidence through the universe wherever it
enters, and it enters in some degree into all things:- but that
there is another, which is as much more beautiful than beauty as
beauty is than chaos; namely, wisdom, which our wonderful organ of
sight cannot reach unto, but which, could it be seen, would ravish
us with its perfect reality. He has the same regard to it as the
source of excellence in works of art. When an artificer, he says, in
the fabrication of any work, looks to that which always subsists
according to the same; and, employing a model of this kind,
expresses its idea and power in his work,- it must follow that his
production should be beautiful. But when he beholds that which is born
and dies, it will be far from beautiful.
Thus ever: the Banquet is a teaching in the same spirit, familiar
now to all the poetry and to all the sermons of the world, that the
love of the sexes is initial, and symbolizes at a distance the passion
of the soul for that immense lake of beauty it exists to seek. This
faith in the Divinity is never out of mind, and constitutes the ground
of all his dogmas. Body cannot teach wisdom;- God only. In the same
mind he constantly affirms that virtue cannot be taught; that it is
not a science, but an inspiration; that the greatest goods are
produced to us through mania and are assigned to us by a divine gift.
This leads me to that central figure which he has established in his
Academy as the organ through which every considered opinion shall be
announced, and whose biography he has likewise so labored that the
historic facts are lost in the light of Plato's mind. Socrates and
Plato are the double star which the most powerful instruments will not
entirely separate. Socrates again, in his traits and genius, is the
best example of that synthesis which constitutes Plato's extraordinary
power. Socrates, a man of humble stem, but honest enough; of the
commonest history; of a personal homeliness so remarkable as to be a
cause of wit in others:- the rather that his broad good nature and
exquisite taste for a joke invited the sally, which was sure to be
paid. The players personated him on the stage; the potters copied
his ugly face on their stone jugs. He was a cool fellow, adding to his
humor a perfect temper and a knowledge of his man, be he who he
might whom he talked with, which laid the companion open to certain
defeat in any debate,- and in debate he immoderately delighted. The
young men are prodigiously fond of him and invite him to their feasts,
whither he goes for conversation. He can drink, too; has the strongest
head in Athens; and after leaving the whole party under the table,
goes away as if nothing had happened, to begin new dialogues with
somebody that is sober. In short, he was what our country-people
call an old one.
He affected a good many citizen-like tastes, was monstrously fond of
Athens, hated trees, never willingly went beyond the walls, knew the
old characters, valued the bores and philistines, thought every
thing in Athens a little better than anything in any other place. He
was plain as a Quaker in habit and speech, affected low phrases, and
illustrations from cocks and quails, soup-pans and sycamore-spoons,
grooms and farriers, and unnamable offices,- especially if he talked
with any superfine person. He had a Franklin-like wisdom. Thus he
showed one who was afraid to go on foot to Olympia, that it was no
more than his daily walk within doors, if continuously extended, would
easily reach.
Plain old uncle as he was, with his great ears, an immense
talker,- the rumor ran that on one or two occasions, in the war with
Boeotia, he had shown a determination which had covered the retreat of
a troop; and there was some story that under cover of folly, he had,
in the city government, when one day he chanced to hold a seat
there, evinced a courage in opposing singly the popular voice, which
had well-nigh ruined him. He is very poor; but then he is hardy as a
soldier, and can live on a few olives; usually, in the strictest
sense, on bread and water, except when entertained by his friends. His
necessary expenses were exceedingly small, and no one could live as he
did. He wore no under garment; his upper garment was the same for
summer and winter, and he went barefooted; and it is said that to
procure the pleasure, which he loves, of talking at his ease all day
with the most elegant and cultivated young men, he will now and then
return to his shop and carve statues, good or bad, for sale. However
that be, it is certain that he had grown to delight in nothing else
than this conversation; and that, under his hypocritical pretence of
knowing nothing, he attacks and brings down all the fine speakers, all
the fine philosophers of Athens, whether natives or strangers from
Asia Minor and the islands. Nobody can refuse to talk with him, he
is so honest and really curious to know; a man who was willingly
confuted if he did not speak the truth, and who willingly confuted
others asserting what was false; and not less pleased when confuted
than when confuting; for he thought not any evil happened to men of
such a magnitude as false opinion respecting the just and unjust. A
pitiless disputant, who knows nothing, but the bounds of whose
conquering intelligence no man had ever reached; whose temper was
imperturbable; whose dreadful logic was always leisurely and sportive;
so careless and ignorant as to disarm the wariest and draw them, in
the pleasantest manner, into horrible doubts and confusion. But he
always knew the way out; knew it, yet would not tell it. No escape; he
drives them to terrible choices by his dilemmas, and tosses the
Hippiases and Gorgiases with their grand reputations, as a boy
tosses his balls. The tyrannous realist!- Meno has discoursed a
thousand times, at length, on virtue, before many companies, and
very well, as it appeared to him; but at this moment he cannot even
tell what it is,- this cramp-fish of a Socrates has so bewitched him.
This hard-headed humorist, whose strange conceits, drollery and
bonhommie diverted the young patricians, whilst the rumor of his
sayings and quibbles gets abroad every day,- turns out, in the sequel,
to have a probity as invincible as his logic, and to be either insane,
or at least, under cover of this play, enthusiastic in his religion.
When accused before the judges of subverting the popular creed, he
affirms the immortality of the soul, the future reward and punishment;
and refusing to recant, in a caprice of the popular government was
condemned to die, and sent to the prison. Socrates entered the
prison and took away all ignominy from the place, which could not be a
prison whilst he was there. Crito bribed the jailer; but Socrates
would not go out by treachery. "Whatever inconvenience ensue,
nothing is to be preferred before justice. These things I hear like
pipes and drums, whose sound makes me deaf to every thing you say."
The fame of this prison, the fame of the discourses there and the
drinking of the hemlock are one of the most precious passages in the
history of the world.
The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, of the droll and the martyr,
the keen street and market debater with the sweetest saint known to
any history at that time, had forcibly struck the mind of Plato, so
capacious of these contrasts; and the figure of Socrates by a
necessity placed itself in the foreground of the scene, as the fittest
dispenser of the intellectual treasures he had to communicate. It
was a rare fortune that this Aesop of the mob and this robed scholar
should meet, to make each other immortal in their mutual faculty.
The strange synthesis in the character of Socrates capped the
synthesis in the mind of Plato. Moreover by this means he was able, in
the direct way and without envy to avail himself of the wit and weight
of Socrates, to which unquestionably his own debt was great; and these
derived again their principal advantage from the perfect art of Plato.
It remains to say that the defect of Plato in power is only that
which results inevitably from his quality. He is intellectual in his
aim; and therefore, in expression, literary. Mounting into heaven,
diving into the pit, expounding the laws of the state, the passion
of love, the remorse of crime, the hope of the parting soul,- he is
literary, and never otherwise. It is almost the sole deduction from
the merit of Plato that his writings have not,- what is no doubt
incident to this regnancy of intellect in his work,- the vital
authority which the screams of prophets and the sermons of
unlettered Arabs and Jews possess. There is an interval; and to
cohesion, contact is necessary.
I know not what can be said in reply to this criticism but that we
have come to a fact in the nature of things: an oak is not an
orange. The qualities of sugar remain with sugar, and those of salt
with salt.
In the second place, he has not a system. The dearest defenders
and disciples are at fault. He attempted a theory of the universe, and
his theory is not complete or self-evident. One man thinks he means
this, and another that; he has said one thing in one place, and the
reverse of it in another place. He is charged with having failed to
make the transition from ideas to matter. Here is the world, sound
as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a
stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second
thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.
The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea. Plato would willingly
have a Platonism, a known and accurate expression for the world, and
it should be accurate. It shall be the world passed through the mind
of Plato,- nothing less. Every atom shall have the Platonic tinge;
every atom, every relation or quality you knew before, you shall
know again and find here, but now ordered; not nature, but art. And
you shall feel that Alexander indeed overran, with men and horses,
some countries of the planet; but countries, and things of which
countries are made, elements, planet itself, laws of planet and of
men, have passed through this man as bread into his body, and become
no longer bread, but body: so all this mammoth morsel has become
Plato. He has clapped copyright on the world. This is the ambition
of individualism. But the mouthful proves too large. Boa constrictor
has good will to eat it, but he is foiled. He falls abroad in the
attempt; and biting, gets strangled: the bitten world holds the
biter fast by his own teeth. There he perishes: unconquered nature
lives on and forgets him. So it fares with all: so must it fare with
Plato. In view of eternal nature, Plato turns out to be
philosophical exercitations. He argues on this side and on that. The
acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never tell what
Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on both sides
of every great question from him.*(15)
These things we are forced to say if we must consider the effort
of Plato or of any philosopher to dispose of nature,- which will not
be disposed of. No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest
success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains. But there
is an injustice in assuming this ambition for Plato. Let us not seem
to treat with flippancy his venerable name. Men, in proportion to
their intellect, have admitted his transcendent claims. The way to
know him is to compare him, not with nature, but with other men. How
many ages have gone by, and he remains unapproached! A chief structure
of human wit, like Karnac, or the medieval cathedrals, or the Etrurian
remains, it requires all the breath of human faculty to know it. I
think it is trueliest seen when seen with the most respect. His
sense deepens, his merits multiply, with study. When we say, Here is a
fine collection of fables; or when we praise the style, or the
common sense, or arithmetic, we speak as boys, and much of our
impatient criticism of the dialectic, I suspect, is no better.
The criticism is like our impatience of miles, when we are in a
hurry; but it is still best that a mile should have seventeen
hundred and sixty yards. The great-eyed Plato proportioned the
lights and shades after the genius of our life.

PLATO: NEW READINGS

The publication, in Mr. Bohn's "Serial Library," of the excellent
translations of Plato, which we esteem one of the chief benefits the
cheap press has yielded, gives us an occasion to take hastily a few
more notes of the elevation and bearings of this fixed star; or to add
a bulletin, like the journals, of Plato at the latest dates.

Modern science, by the extent of its generalization, has learned
to indemnify the student of man for the defects of individuals by
tracing growth and ascent in races; and, by the simple expedient of
lighting up the vast background, generates a feeling of complacency
and hope. The human being has the saurian and the plant in his rear.
His arts and sciences, the easy issue of his brain, look glorious when
prospectively beheld from the distant brain of ox, crocodile and fish.
It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her,
when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six
men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu and Columbus, was no wise discontented
with the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree.
These were a clear amelioration of trilobite and saurus, and a good
basis for further proceeding. With this artist, time and space are
cheap, and she is insensible to what you say of tedious preparation.
She waited tranquilly the flowing periods of paleontology, for the
hour to be struck when man should arrive. Then periods must pass
before the motion of the earth can be suspected; then before the map
of the instincts and the cultivable powers can be drawn. But as of
races, so the succession of individual men is fatal and beautiful, and
Plato has the fortune in the history of mankind to mark an epoch.
Plato's fame does not stand on a syllogism, or on any masterpieces
of the Socratic reasoning, or on any thesis, as for example the
immortality of the soul. He is more than an expert, or a schoolman, or
a geometer, or the prophet of a peculiar message. He represents the
privilege of the intellect, the power, namely, of carrying up every
fact to successive platforms and so disclosing in every fact a germ of
expansion. These expansions are in the essence of thought. The
naturalist would never help us to them by any discoveries of the
extent of the universe, but is as poor when cataloguing the resolved
nebula of Orion, as when measuring the angles of an acre. But the
Republic of Plato, by these expansions, may be said to require and
so to anticipate the astronomy of Laplace. The expansions are organic.
The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye
creates the rose. In ascribing to Plato the merit of announcing
them, we only say, Here was a more complete man, who could apply to
nature the whole scale of the senses, the understanding and the
reason. These expansions or extensions consist in continuing the
spiritual sight where the horizon falls on our natural vision, and
by this second sight discovering the long lines of law which shoot
in every direction. Everywhere he stands on a path which has no end,
but runs continuously round the universe. Therefore every word becomes
an exponent of nature. Whatever he looks upon discloses a second
sense, and ulterior senses. His perception of the generation of
contraries, of death out of life and life out of death,- that law by
which, in nature, decomposition is recomposition, and putrefaction and
cholera are only signals of a new creation; his discernment of the
little in the large and the large in the small; studying the state
in the citizen and the citizen in the state; and leaving it doubtful
whether he exhibited the Republic as an allegory on the education of
the private soul; his beautiful definitions of ideas, of time, of
form, of figure, of the line, sometimes hypothetically given, as his
defining of virtue, courage, justice, temperance; his love of the
apologue, and his apologues themselves; the cave of Trophonius; the
ring of Gyges; the charioteer and two horses; the golden, silver,
brass and iron temperaments; Theuth and Thamus; and the visions of
Hades and the Fates,- fables which have imprinted themselves in the
human memory like the signs of the zodiac; his soliform eye and his
boniform soul;*(16) his doctrine of assimilation; his doctrine of
reminiscence; his clear vision of the laws of return, or reaction,
which secure instant justice throughout the universe, instanced
everywhere, but specially in the doctrine, "what comes from God to us,
returns from us to God," and in Socrates' belief that the laws below
are sisters of the laws above.
More striking examples are his moral conclusions. Plato affirms
the coincidence of science and virtue; for vice can never know
itself and virtue, but virtue knows both itself and vice. The eye
attested that justice was best, as long as it was profitable; Plato
affirms that it is profitable throughout; that the profit is
intrinsic, though the just conceal his justice from gods and men; that
it is better to suffer injustice than to do it; that the sinner
ought to covet punishment; that the lie was more hurtful than
homicide; and that ignorance, or the involuntary lie, was more
calamitous than involuntary homicide; that the soul is unwillingly
deprived of true opinions, and that no man sins willingly; that the
order or proceeding of nature was from the mind to the body, and,
though a sound body cannot restore an unsound mind, yet a good soul
can, by its virtue, render the body the best possible. The intelligent
have a right over the ignorant, namely, the right of instructing them.
The right punishment of one out of tune is to make him play in tune;
the fine which the good, refusing to govern, ought to pay, is, to be
governed by a worse man; that his guards shall not handle gold and
silver, but shall be instructed that there is gold and silver in their
souls, which will make men willing to give them every thing which they
need.
This second sight explains the stress laid on geometry. He saw
that the globe of earth was not more lawful and precise than was the
supersensible; that a celestial geometry was in place there, as a
logic of lines and angles here below; that the world was throughout
mathematical; the proportions are constant of oxygen, azote and
lime; there is just so much water and slate and magnesia; not less are
the proportions constant of the moral elements.
This eldest Goethe, hating varnish and falsehood, delighted in
revealing the real at the base of the accidental; in discovering
connection, continuity and representation everywhere, hating
insulation; and appears like the god of wealth among the cabins of
vagabonds, opening power and capability in everything he touches.
Ethical science was new and vacant when Plato could write thus:- "Of
all whose arguments are left to the men of the present time, no one
has ever yet condemned injustice, or praised justice, otherwise than
as respects the repute, honors and emoluments arising therefrom;
while, as respects either of them in itself, and subsisting by its own
power in the soul of the possessor, and concealed both from gods and
men, no one has yet sufficiently investigated, either in poetry or
prose writings,- how, namely, that injustice is the greatest of all
the evils that the soul has within it, and justice the greatest good."
His definition of ideas, as what is simple, permanent, uniform and
self-existent, forever discriminating them from the notions of the
understanding, marks an era in the world. He was born to behold the
self-evolving power of spirit, endless, generator of new ends; a power
which is the key at once to the centrality and the evanescence of
things. Plato is so centred that he can well spare all his dogmas.
Thus the fact of knowledge and ideas reveals to him the fact of
eternity; and the doctrine of reminiscence he offers as the most
probable particular explication. Call that fanciful,- it matters
not: the connection between our knowledge and the abyss of being is
still real, and the explication must be not less magnificent.
He has indicated every eminent point in speculation. He wrote on the
scale of the mind itself, so that all things have symmetry in his
tablet. He put in all the past, without weariness, and descended
into detail with a courage like that he witnessed in nature. One would
say that his forerunners had mapped out each a farm or a district or
an island, in intellectual geography, but that Plato first drew the
sphere. He domesticates the soul in nature: man is the microcosm.
All the circles of the visible heaven represent as many circles in the
rational soul. There is no lawless particle, and there is nothing
casual in the action of the human mind. The names of things, too,
are fatal, following the nature of things. All the gods of the
Pantheon are, by their names, significant of a profound sense. The
gods are the ideas. Pan is speech, or manifestation; Saturn, the
contemplative; Jove, the regal soul; and Mars, passion. Venus is
proportion; Calliope, the soul of the world; Aglaia, intellectual
illustration.
These thoughts, in sparkles of light, had appeared often to pious
and to poetic souls; but this well-bred, all-knowing Greek geometer
comes with command, gathers them all up into rank and gradation, the
Euclid of holiness, and marries the two parts of nature. Before all
men, he saw the intellectual values of the moral sentiment. He
describes his own ideal, when he paints, in Timaeus, a god leading
things from disorder into order. He kindled a fire so truly in the
centre that we see the sphere illuminated, and can distinguish
poles, equator and lines of latitude, every arc and node: a theory
so averaged, so modulated, that you would say the winds of ages had
swept through this rhythmic structure, and not that it was the brief
extempore blotting of one short-lived scribe. Hence it has happened
that a very well-marked class of souls, namely those who delight in
giving a spiritual, that is, an ethico-intellectual expression to
every truth, by exhibiting an ulterior end which is yet legitimate
to it,- are said to Platonize. Thus, Michael Angelo is a Platonist
in his sonnets: Shakespeare is a Platonist when he writes,-

"Nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean,"

or,-

"He, that can endure
To follow with allegiance a fallen lord,
Does conquer him that did his master conquer,
And earns a place in the story."

Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and 'tis the magnitude only of
Shakespeare's proper genius that hinders him from being classed as the
most eminent of this school. Swedenborg, throughout his prose poem
of "Conjugal Love," is a Platonist.
His subtlety commended him to men of thought. The secret of his
popular success is the moral aim which endeared him to mankind.
"Intellect," he said, "is king of heaven and of earth"; but in
Plato, intellect is always moral. His writings have also the
sempiternal youth of poetry. For their arguments, most of them,
might have been couched in sonnets: and poetry has never soared higher
than in the Timaeus and the Phaedrus. As the poet, too, he is only
contemplative. He did not, like Pythagoras, break himself with an
institution. All his painting in the Republic must be esteemed
mythical, with intent to bring out, sometimes in violent colors, his
thought. You cannot institute, without peril of charlatanism.
It was a high scheme, his absolute privilege for the best (which, to
make emphatic, he expressed by community of women), as the premium
which he would set on grandeur. There shall be exempts of two kinds:
first, those who by demerit have put themselves below protection,-
outlaws; and secondly, those who by eminence of nature and desert
are out of the reach of your rewards. Let such be free of the city and
above the law. We confide them to themselves; let them do with us as
they will. Let none presume to measure the irregularities of Michael
Angelo and Socrates by village scales.
In his eighth book of the Republic, he throws a little
mathematical dust in our eyes. I am sorry to see him, after such noble
superiorities, permitting the lie to governors. Plato plays Providence
a little with the baser sort, as people allow themselves with their
dogs and cats.
SWEDENBORG
SWEDENBORG
or, The Mystic

AMONG eminent persons, those who are most dear to men are not of the
class which the economist calls producers: they have nothing in
their hands; they have not cultivated corn, nor made bread; they
have not led out a colony, nor invented a loom. A higher class, in the
estimation and love of this city-building market-going race of
mankind, are the poets, who, from the intellectual kingdom, feed the
thought and imagination with ideas and pictures which raise men out of
the world of corn and money, and console them for the shortcomings
of the day and the meanness of labor and traffic. Then, also, the
philosopher has his value, who flatters the intellect of this
laborer by engaging him with subtleties which instruct him in new
faculties. Others may build cities; he is to understand them and
keep them in awe. But there is a class who lead us into another
region,- the world of morals or of will. What is singular about this
region of thought is its claim. Wherever the sentiment of right
comes in, it takes precedence of every thing else. For other things, I
make poetry of them; but the moral sentiment makes poetry of me.
I have sometimes thought that he would render the greatest service
to modern criticism, who should draw the line of relation that
subsists between Shakespeare and Swedenborg. The human mind stands
ever in perplexity, demanding intellect, demanding sanctity, impatient
equally of each without the other. The reconciler has not yet
appeared. If we tire of the saints, Shakespeare is our city of refuge.
Yet the instincts presently teach that the problem of essence must
take precedence of all others;- the questions of Whence? What? and
Whither? and the solution of these must be in a life, and not in a
book. A drama or poem is a proximate or oblique reply; but Moses,
Menu, Jesus, work directly on this problem. The atmosphere of moral
sentiment is a region of grandeur which reduces all material
magnificence to toys, yet opens to every wretch that has reason the
doors of the universe. Almost with a fierce haste it lays its empire
on the man. In the language of the Koran, "God said, The heaven and
the earth and all that is between them, think ye that we created
them in jest, and that ye shall not return to us?" It is the kingdom
of the will, and by inspiring the will, which is the seat of
personality, seems to convert the universe into a person;-

"The realms of being to no other bow,
Not only all are thine, but all are Thou."

All men are commanded by the saint. The Koran makes a distinct class
of those who are by nature good, and whose goodness has an influence
on others, and pronounces this class to be the aim of creation: the
other classes are admitted to the feast of being, only as following in
the train of this. And the Persian poet exclaims to a soul of this
kind,-

"Go boldly forth, and feast on being's banquet;
Thou art the called,- the rest admitted with thee."

The privilege of this caste is an access to the secrets and
structure of nature by some higher method than by experience. In
common parlance, what one man is said to learn by experience, a man of
extraordinary sagacity is said, without experience, to divine. The
Arabians say, that Abul Khain, the mystic, and Abu Ali Seena, the
philosopher, conferred together; and, on parting, the philosopher
said, "All that he sees, I know"; and the mystic said, "All that he
knows, I see." If one should ask the reason of this intuition, the
solution would lead us into that property which Plato denoted as
Reminiscence, and which is implied by the Bramins in the tenet of
Transmigration. The soul having been often born, or, as the Hindoos
say, "travelling the path of existence through thousands of births,"
having beheld the things which are here, those which are in heaven and
those which are beneath, there is nothing of which she has not
gained the knowledge: no wonder that she is able to recollect, in
regard to any one thing, what formerly she knew. "For, all things in
nature being linked and related, and the soul having heretofore
known all, nothing hinders but that any man who has recalled to
mind, or according to the common phrase has learned, one thing only,
should of himself recover all his ancient knowledge, and find out
again all the rest, if he have but courage and faint not in the
midst of his researches. For inquiry and learning is reminiscence
all."*(17) How much more, if he that inquires be a holy and godlike
soul For by being assimilated to the original soul, by whom and
after whom all things subsist, the soul of man does then easily flow
into all things, and all things flow into it: they mix; and he is
present and sympathetic with their structure and law.
This path is difficult, secret and beset with terror. The ancients
called it ecstasy or absence,- a getting out of their bodies to think.
All religious history contains traces of the trance of saints,- a
beatitude, but without any sign of joy; earnest, solitary, even sad;
"the flight," Plotinus called it, "of the alone to the alone"; Muesiz,
the closing of the eyes,- whence our word, Mystic. The trances of
Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Behmen, Bunyan, Fox, Pascal, Guyon,
Swedenborg, will readily come to mind. But what as readily comes to
mind is the accompaniment of disease. This beatitude comes in
terror, and with shocks to the mind of the receiver.

"It o'erinforms the tenement of clay,"

and drives the man mad; or gives a certain violent bias which taints
his judgment. In the chief examples of religious illumination somewhat
morbid has mingled, in spite of the unquestionable increase of
mental power. Must the highest good drag after it a quality which
neutralizes and discredits it?-

"Indeed, it takes
From our achievements, when performed at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute."

Shall we say, that the economical mother disburses so much earth and
so much fire, by weight and meter, to make a man, and will not add a
pennyweight, though a nation is perishing for a leader? Therefore
the men of God purchased their science by folly or pain. If you will
have pure carbon, carbuncle, or diamond, to make the brain
transparent, the trunk and organs shall be so much the grosser:
instead of porcelain they are potter's earth, clay, or mud.
In modern times no such remarkable example of this introverted
mind has occurred as in Emanuel Swedenborg, born in Stockholm, in
1688. This man, who appeared to his contemporaries a visionary and
elixir of moonbeams, no doubt led the most real life of any man then
in the world: and now, when the royal and ducal Frederics,
Christians and Brunswicks of that day have slid into oblivion, he
begins to spread himself into the minds of thousands. As happens in
great men, he seemed, by the variety and amount of his powers, to be a
composition of several persons,- like the giant fruits which are
matured in gardens by the union of four or five single blossoms. His
frame is on a larger scale and possesses the advantages of size. As it
is easier to see the reflection of the great sphere in large globes,
though defaced by some crack or blemish, than in drops of water, so
men of large calibre, though with some eccentricity or madness, like
Pascal or Newton, help us more than balanced mediocre minds.
His youth and training could not fail to be extraordinary. Such a
boy could not whistle or dance, but goes grubbing into mines and
mountains, prying into chemistry and optics, physiology, mathematics
and astronomy, to find images fit for the measure of his versatile and
capacious brain. He was a scholar from a child, and was educated at
Upsala. At the age of twenty-eight he was made Assessor of the Board
of Mines by Charles XII. In 1716, he left home for four years and
visited the universities of England, Holland, France and Germany. He
performed a notable feat of engineering in 1718, at the siege of
Frederikshald, by hauling two galleys, five boats and a sloop, some
fourteen English miles overland, for the royal service. In 1721 he
journeyed over Europe to examine mines and smelting works. He
published in 1716 his Daedalus Hyperboreus, and from this time for the
next thirty years was employed in the composition and publication of
his scientific works. With the like force he threw himself into
theology. In 1743, when he was fifty-four years old, what is called
his illumination began. All his metallurgy and transportation of ships
overland was absorbed into this ecstasy. He ceased to publish any more
scientific books, withdrew from his practical labors and devoted
himself to the writing and publication of his voluminous theological
works, which were printed at his own expense, or at that of the Duke
of Brunswick or other prince, at Dresden, Leipsic, London, or
Amsterdam. Later, he resigned his office of Assessor: the salary
attached to this office continued to be paid to him during his life.
His duties had brought him into intimate acquaintance with King
Charles XII, by whom he was much consulted and honored. The like favor
was continued to him by his successor. At the Diet of 1751, Count
Hopken says, the most solid memorials on finance were from his pen. In
Sweden he appears to have attracted a marked regard. His rare
science and practical skill, and the added fame of second sight and
extraordinary religious knowledge and gifts, drew to him queens,
nobles, clergy, shipmasters and people about the ports through which
he was wont to pass in his many voyages. The clergy interfered a
little with the importation and publication of his religious works,
but he seems to have kept the friendship of men in power. He was never
married. He had great modesty and gentleness of bearing. His habits
were simple; he lived on bread, milk and vegetables; he lived in a
house situated in a large garden; he went several times to England,
where he does not seem to have attracted any attention whatever from
the learned or the eminent; and died at London, March 29, 1772, of
apoplexy, in his eighty-fifth year. He is described, when in London,
as a man of a quiet, clerical habit, not averse to tea and coffee, and
kind to children. He wore a sword when in full velvet dress, and,
whenever he walked out, carried a gold-headed cane. There is a
common portrait of him in antique coat and wig, but the face has a
wandering or vacant air.
The genius which was to penetrate the science of the age with a
far more subtle science; to pass the bounds of space and time, venture
into the dim spirit-realm, and attempt to establish a new religion
in the world,- began its lessons in quarries and forges, in the
smelting-pot and crucible, in ship-yards and dissecting-rooms. No
one man is perhaps able to judge of the merits of his works on so many
subjects. One is glad to learn that his books on mines and metals
are held in the highest esteem by those who understand these
matters. It seems that he anticipated much science of the nineteenth
century; anticipated, in astronomy, the discovery of the seventh
planet,- but, unhappily, not also of the eighth; anticipated the views
of modern astronomy in regard to the generation of earths by the
sun; in magnetism, some important experiments and conclusions of later
students; in chemistry, the atomic theory; in anatomy, the discoveries
of Schlichting, Monro and Wilson; and first demonstrated the office of
the lungs. His excellent English editor magnanimously lays no stress
on his discoveries, since he was too great to care to be original; and
we are to judge, by what he can spare, of what remains.
A colossal soul, he lies vast abroad on his times, uncomprehended by
them, and requires a long focal distance to be seen; suggests, as
Aristotle, Bacon, Selden,*(18) Humboldt, that a certain vastness of
learning, or quasi omnipresence of the human soul in nature, is
possible. His superb speculation, as from a tower, over nature and
arts, without ever losing sight of the texture and sequence of things,
almost realizes his own picture, in the "Principia," of the original
integrity of man. Over and above the merit of his particular
discoveries, is the capital merit of his self-equality. A drop of
water has the properties of the sea, but cannot exhibit a storm. There
is beauty of a concert, as well as of a flute; strength of a host,
as well as of a hero; and, in Swedenborg, those who are best
acquainted with modern books will most admire the merit of mass. One
of the missouriums and mastodons of literature, he is not to be
measured by whole colleges of ordinary scholars. His stalwart presence
would flutter the gowns of an university. Our books are false by being
fragmentary: their sentences are bonmots, and not parts of natural
discourse; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure in nature; or,
worse, owing a brief notoriety to their petulance, or aversion from
the order of nature;- being some curiosity or oddity, designedly not
in harmony with nature and purposely framed to excite surprise, as
jugglers do by concealing their means. But Swedenborg is systematic
and respective of the world in every sentence; all the means are
orderly given; his faculties work with astronomic punctuality, and
this admirable writing is pure from all pertness or egotism.
Swedenborg was born into an atmosphere of great ideas. It is hard to
say what was his own: yet his life was dignified by noblest pictures
of the universe. The robust Aristotelian method, with its breadth
and adequateness, shaming our sterile and linear logic by its genial
radiation, conversant with series and degree, with effects and ends,
skilful to discriminate power from form, essence from accident, and
opening, by its terminology and definition, high roads into nature,
had trained a race of athletic philosophers. Harvey had shown the
circulation of the blood; Gilbert had shown that the earth was a
magnet; Descartes, taught by Gilbert's magnet, with its vortex, spiral
and polarity, had filled Europe with the leading thought of vortical
motion, as the secret of nature. Newton, in the year in which
Swedenborg was born, published the "Principia," and established the
universal gravity. Malpighi,*(19) following the high doctrines of
Hippocrates, Leucippus*(20) and Lucretius, had given emphasis to the
dogma that nature works in leasts,- "tota in minimis existit
natura." Unrivalled dissectors, Swammerdam, Leuwenhoek, Winslow,
Eustachius, Heister, Vesalius, Boerhaave,*(21) had left nothing for
scalpel or microscope to reveal in human or comparative anatomy:
Linnaeus, his contemporary, was affirming, in his beautiful science,
that "Nature is always like herself"; and, lastly, the nobility of
method, the largest application of principles, had been exhibited by
Leibnitz*(22) and Christian Wolff, in cosmology; whilst Locke and
Grotius had drawn the moral argument. What was left for a genius of
the largest calibre but to go over their ground and verify and
unite? It is easy to see, in these minds, the origin of Swedenborg's
studies, and the suggestion of his problems. He had a capacity to
entertain and vivify these volumes of thought. Yet the proximity of
these geniuses, one or other of whom had introduced all his leading
ideas, makes Swedenborg another example of the difficulty, even in a
highly fertile genius, of proving originality, the first birth and
annunciation of one of the laws of nature.
He named his favorite views the doctrine of Forms, the doctrine of
Series and Degrees, the doctrine of Influx, the doctrine of
Correspondence. His statement of these doctrines deserves to be
studied in his books. Not every man can read them, but they will
reward him who can. His theologic works are valuable to illustrate
these. His writings would be a sufficient library to a lonely and
athletic student; and the "Economy of the Animal Kingdom" is one of
those books which, by the sustained dignity of thinking, is an honor
to the human race. He had studied spars and metals to some purpose.
His varied and solid knowledge makes his style lustrous with points
and shooting spiculae of thought, and resembling one of those winter
mornings when the air sparkles with crystals. The grandeur of the
topics makes the grandeur of the style. He was apt for cosmology,
because of that native perception of identity which made mere size
of no account to him. In the atom of magnetic iron he saw the
quality which would generate the spiral motion of sun and planet.
The thoughts in which he lived were, the universality of each law in
nature; the Platonic doctrine of the scale or degrees; the version
or conversion of each into other, and so the correspondence of all the
parts; the fine secret that little explains large, and large,
little; the centrality of man in nature, and the connection that
subsists throughout all things: he saw that the human body was
strictly universal, or an instrument through which the soul feeds
and is fed by the whole of matter; so that he held, in exact
antagonism to the skeptics, that "the wiser a man is, the more will he
be a worshipper of the Deity." In short, he was a believer in the
Identity-philosophy, which he held not idly, as the dreamers of Berlin
or Boston, but which he experimented with and established through
years of labor, with the heart and strength of the rudest Viking
that his rough Sweden ever sent to battle.
This theory dates from the oldest philosophers, and derives
perhaps its best illustration from the newest. It is this, that Nature
iterates her means perpetually on successive planes. In the old
aphorism, nature is always self-similar. In the plant, the eye or
germinative point opens to a leaf, then to another leaf, with a
power of transforming the leaf into radicle, stamen, pistil, petal,
bract, sepal, or seed. The whole art of the plant is still to repeat
leaf on leaf without end, the more or less of heat, light, moisture
and food determining the form it shall assume. In the animal, nature
makes a vertebra, or a spine of vertebrae, and helps herself still
by a new spine, with a limited power of modifying its form,- spine
on spine, to the end of the world. A poetic anatomist, in our own day,
teaches that a snake, being a horizontal line, and man, being an erect
line, constitute a right angle; and between the lines of this mystical
quadrant all animated beings find their place: and he assumes the
hair-worm, the span-worm, or the snake, as the type or prediction of
the spine. Manifestly, at the end of the spine, Nature puts out
smaller spines, as arms; at the end of the arms, new spines, as hands;
at the other end, she repeats the process, as legs and feet. At the
top of the column she puts out another spine, which doubles or loops
itself over, as a span-worm, into a ball, and forms the skull, with
extremities again: the hands being now the upper jaw, the feet the
lower jaw, the fingers and toes being represented this time by upper
and lower teeth. This new spine is destined to high uses. It is a
new man on the shoulders of the last. It can almost shed its trunk and
manage to live alone, according to the Platonic idea in the Timaeus.
Within it, on a higher plane, all that was done in the trunk repeats
itself. Nature recites her lesson once more in a higher mood. The mind
is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting,
absorbing, excluding and generating, in a new and ethereal element.
Here in the brain is all the process of alimentation repeated, in
the acquiring, comparing, digesting and assimilating of experience.
Here again is the mystery of generation repeated. In the brain are
male and female faculties; here is marriage, here is fruit. And
there is no limit to this ascending scale, but series on series. Every
thing, at the end of one use, is taken up into the next, each series
punctually repeating every organ and process of the last. We are
adapted to infinity. We are hard to please, and love nothing which
ends; and in nature is no end, but every thing at the end of one use
is lifted into a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs
into daemonic and celestial natures. Creative force, like a musical
composer, goes on unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme, now
high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten thousand times reverberated,
till it fills earth and heaven with the chant.
Gravitation, as explained by Newton, is good, but grander when we
find chemistry only an extension of the law of masses into
particles, and that the atomic theory shows the action of chemistry to
be mechanical also. Metaphysics shows us a sort of gravitation
operative also in the mental phenomena; and the terrible tabulation of
the French statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be
reducible also to exact numerical ratios. If one man in twenty
thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes or marries his
grandmother, then in every twenty thousand or thirty thousand is found
one man who eats shoes or marries his grandmother. What we call
gravitation, and fancy ultimate, is one fork of a mightier stream
for which we have yet no name. Astronomy is excellent; but it must
come up into life to have its full value, and not remain there in
globes and spaces. The globule of blood gyrates around its own axis in
the human veins, as the planet in the sky; and the circles of
intellect relate to those of the heavens. Each law of nature has the
like universality; eating, sleep or hybernation, rotation, generation,
metamorphosis, vortical motion, which is seen in eggs as in planets.
These grand rhymes or returns in nature,- the dear, best-known face
startling us at every turn, under a mask so unexpected that we think
it the face of a stranger, and carrying up the semblance into divine
forms,- delighted the prophetic eye of Swedenborg; and he must be
reckoned a leader in that revolution, which, by giving to science an
idea, has given to an aimless accumulation of experiments, guidance
and form and a beating heart.
I own with some regret that his printed works amount to about
fifty stout octavos, his scientific works being about half of the
whole number; and it appears that a mass of manuscript still
unedited remains in the royal library at Stockholm. The scientific
works have just now been translated into English, in an excellent
edition.
Swedenborg printed these scientific books in the ten years from 1734
to 1744, and they remained from that time neglected; and now, after
their century is complete, he has at last found a pupil in Mr.
Wilkinson, in London, a philosophic critic, with a coequal vigor of
understanding and imagination comparable only to Lord Bacon's, who has
restored his master's buried books to the day, and transferred them,
with every advantage, from their forgotten Latin into English, to go
round the world in our commercial and conquering tongue. This
startling reappearance of Swedenborg, after a hundred years, in his
pupil, is not the least remarkable fact in his history. Aided it is
said by the munificence of Mr. Clissold, and also by his literary
skill, this piece of poetic justice is done. The admirable preliminary
discourses with which Mr. Wilkinson has enriched these volumes,
throw all the contemporary philosophy of England into shade, and leave
me nothing to say on their proper grounds.
The "Animal Kingdom" is a book of wonderful merits. It was written
with the highest end,- to put science and the soul, long estranged
from each other, at one again. It was an anatomist's account of the
human body, in the highest style of poetry. Nothing can exceed the
bold and brilliant treatment of a subject usually so dry and
repulsive. He saw nature "wreathing through an everlasting spiral,
with wheels that never dry, on axles that never creak," and
sometimes sought "to uncover those secret recesses where Nature is
sitting at the fires in the depths of her laboratory"; whilst the
picture comes recommended by the hard fidelity with which it is
based on practical anatomy. It is remarkable that this sublime
genius decides peremptorily for the analytic, against the synthetic
method; and, in a book whose genius is a daring poetic synthesis,
claims to confine himself to a rigid experience.
He knows, if he only, the flowing of nature, and how wise was that
old answer of Amasis*(23) to him who bade him drink up the sea,- "Yes,
willingly, if you will stop the rivers that flow in." Few knew as much
about nature and her subtle manners, or expressed more subtly her
goings. He thought as large a demand is made on our faith by nature,
as by miracles. "He noted that in her proceeding from first principles
through her several subordinations, there was no state through which
she did not pass, as if her path lay through all things." "For as
often as she betakes herself upward from visible phenomena, or, in
other words, withdraws herself inward, she instantly as it were
disappears, while no one knows what has become of her, or whither
she is gone: so that it is necessary to take science as a guide in
pursuing her steps."
The pursuing the inquiry under the light of an end or final cause
gives wonderful animation, a sort of personality to the whole writing.
This book announces his favorite dogmas. The ancient doctrine of
Hippocrates, that the brain is a gland; and of Leucippus, that the
atom may be known by the mass; or, in Plato, the macrocosm by the
microcosm; and, in the verses of Lucretius,-

Ossa videlicet e pauxillis atque minutis
Ossibus sic et de pauxillis atque minutis
Visceribus viscus gigni, sanguenque creari
Sanguinis inter se multis coeuntibus guttis;
Ex aurique putat micis consistere posse
Aurum, et de terris terram concrescere parvis;
Ignibus ex igneis, humorem humoribus esse.

"The principle of all things, entrails made
Of smallest entrails; bone, of smallest bone;
Blood, of small sanguine drops reduced to one;
Gold, of small grains; earth, of small sands compacted;
Small drops to water, sparks to fire contracted";

and which Malpighi had summed in his maxim that "nature exists
entire in leasts,"- is a favorite thought of Swedenborg. "It is a
constant law of the organic body that large, compound, or visible
forms exist and subsist from smaller, simpler and ultimately from
invisible forms, which act similarly to the larger ones, but more
perfectly and more universally; and the least forms so perfectly and
universally as to involve an idea representative of their entire
universe." The unities of each organ are so many little organs,
homogeneous with their compound: the unities of the tongue are
little tongues; those of the stomach, little stomachs; those of the
heart are little hearts. This fruitful idea furnishes a key to every
secret. What was too small for the eye to detect was read by the
aggregates; what was too large, by the units. There is no end to his
application of the thought. "Hunger is an aggregate of very many
little hungers, or losses of blood by the little veins all over the
body." It is a key to his theology also. "Man is a kind of very minute
heaven, corresponding to the world of spirits and to heaven. Every
particular idea of man, and every affection, yea, every smallest
part of his affection, is an image and effigy of him. A spirit may
be known from only a single thought. God is the grand man."
The hardihood and thoroughness of his study of nature required a
theory of forms also. "Forms ascend in order from the lowest to the
highest. The lowest form is angular, or the terrestrial and corporeal.
The second and next higher form is the circular, which is also
called the perpetual-angular, because the circumference of a circle is
a perpetual angle. The form above this is the spiral, parent and
measure of circular forms: its diameters are not rectilinear, but
variously circular, and have a spherical surface for centre; therefore
it is called the perpetual-circular. The form above this is the
vortical, or perpetual-spiral: next, the perpetual-vortical, or
celestial: last, the perpetual-celestial, or spiritual."
Was it strange that a genius so bold should take the last step also,
should conceive that he might attain the science of all sciences, to
unlock the meaning of the world? In the first volume of the "Animal
Kingdom," he broaches the subject in a remarkable note:- "In our
doctrine of Representations and Correspondences we shall treat of both
these symbolical and typical resemblances, and of the astonishing
things which occur, I will not say in the living body only, but
throughout nature, and which correspond so entirely to supreme and
spiritual things that one would swear that the physical world was
purely symbolical of the spiritual world; insomuch that if we choose
to express any natural truth in physical and definite vocal terms, and
to convert these terms only into the corresponding and spiritual
terms, we shall by this means elicit a spiritual truth or
theological dogma, in place of the physical truth or precept: although
no mortal would have predicted that any thing of the kind could
possibly arise by bare literal transposition; inasmuch as the one
precept, considered separately from the other, appears to have
absolutely no relation to it. I intend hereafter to communicate a
number of examples of such correspondences, together with a vocabulary
containing the terms of spiritual things, as well as of the physical
things for which they are to be substituted. This symbolism pervades
the living body."
The fact thus explicitly stated is implied in all poetry, in
allegory, in fable, in the use of emblems and in the structure of
language. Plato knew it, as is evident from his twice bisected line in
the sixth book of the Republic. Lord Bacon had found that truth and
nature differed only as seal and print; and he instanced some physical
propositions, with their translation into a moral or political
sense. Behmen, and all mystics, imply this law in their dark
riddle-writing. The poets, in as far as they are poets, use it; but it
is known to them only as the magnet was known for ages, as a toy.
Swedenborg first put the fact into a detached and scientific
statement, because it was habitually present to him, and never not
seen. It was involved, as we explained already, in the doctrine of
identity and iteration, because the mental series exactly tallies with
the material series. It required an insight that could rank things
in order and series; or rather it required such rightness of
position that the poles of the eye should coincide with the axis of
the world. The earth had fed its mankind through five or six
millenniums, and they had sciences, religions, philosophies, and yet
had failed to see the correspondence of meaning between every part and
every other part. And, down to this hour, literature has no book in
which the symbolism of things is scientifically opened. One would
say that as soon as men had the first hint that every sensible
object,- animal, rock, river, air,- nay, space and time, subsists
not for itself, nor finally to a material end, but as a
picture-language to tell another story of beings and duties, other
science would be put by, and a science of such grand presage would
absorb all faculties: that each man would ask of all objects what they
mean: Why does the horizon hold me fast, with my joy and grief, in
this centre? Why hear I the same sense from countless differing
voices, and read one never quite expressed fact in endless
picture-language? Yet whether it be that these things will not be
intellectually learned, or that many centuries must elaborate and
compose so rare and opulent a soul,- there is no comet,
rock-stratum, fossil, fish, quadruped, spider, or fungus, that, for
itself, does not interest more scholars and classifiers than the
meaning and upshot of the frame of things.
But Swedenborg was not content with the culinary use of the world.
In his fifty-fourth year these thoughts held him fast, and his
profound mind admitted the perilous opinion, too frequent in religious
history, that he was an abnormal person, to whom was granted the
privilege of conversing with angels and spirits; and this ecstasy
connected itself with just this office of explaining the moral
import of the sensible world. To a right perception, at once broad and
minute, of the order of nature, he added the comprehension of the
moral laws in their widest social aspects; but whatever he saw,
through some excessive determination to form in his constitution, he
saw not abstractly, but in pictures, heard it in dialogues,
constructed it in events. When he attempted to announce the law most
sanely, he was forced to couch it in parable.
Modern psychology offers no similar example of a deranged balance.
The principal powers continued to maintain a healthy action, and to
a reader who can make due allowance in the report for the reporter's
peculiarities, the results are still instructive, and a more
striking testimony to the sublime laws he announced than any that
balanced dulness could afford. He attempts to give some account of the
modus of the new state, affirming that "his presence in the
spiritual world is attended with a certain separation, but only as
to the intellectual part of his mind, not as to the will part"; and he
affirms that "he sees, with the internal sight, the things that are in
another life, more clearly than he sees the things which are here in
the world."
Having adopted the belief that certain books of the Old and New
Testaments were exact allegories, or written in the angelic and
ecstatic mode, he employed his remaining years in extricating from the
literal, the universal sense. He had borrowed from Plato the fine
fable*(24) of "a most ancient people, men better than we and
dwelling nigher to the gods"; and Swedenborg added that they used
the earth symbolically; that these, when they saw terrestrial objects,
did not think at all about them, but only about those which they
signified. The correspondence between thoughts and things henceforward
occupied him. "The very organic form resembles the end inscribed on
it." A man is in general and in particular an organized justice or
injustice, selfishness or gratitude. And the cause of this harmony
he assigned in the Arcana: "The reason why all and single things, in
the heavens and on earth, are representative, is because they exist
from an influx of the Lord, through heaven." This design of exhibiting
such correspondences, which, if adequately executed, would be the poem
of the world, in which all history and science would play an essential
part, was narrowed and defeated by the exclusively theologic direction
which his inquiries took. His perception of nature is not human and
universal, but is mystical and Hebraic. He fastens each natural object
to a theologic notion;- a horse signifies carnal understanding; a
tree, perception; the moon, faith; a cat means this; an ostrich
that; an artichoke this other;- and poorly tethers every symbol to a
several ecclesiastic sense. The slippery Proteus is not so easily
caught. In nature, each individual symbol plays innumerable parts,
as each particle of matter circulates in turn through every system.
The central identity enables any one symbol to express successively
all the qualities and shades of real being. In the transmission of the
heavenly waters, every hose fits every hydrant. Nature avenges herself
speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no
literalist. Every thing must be taken genially, and we must be at
the top of our condition to understand any thing rightly.
His theological bias thus fatally narrowed his interpretation of
nature, and the dictionary of symbols is yet to be written. But the
interpreter whom mankind must still expect, will find no predecessor
who has approached so near to the true problem.
Swedenborg styles himself in the title-page of his books, "Servant
of the Lord Jesus Christ"; and by force of intellect, and in effect,
he is the last Father in the Church, and is not likely to have a
successor. No wonder that his depth of ethical wisdom should give
him influence as a teacher. To the withered traditional church,
yielding dry catechisms, he let in nature again, and the worshipper,
escaping from the vestry of verbs and texts, is surprised to find
himself a party to the whole of his religion. His religion thinks
for him and is of universal application. He turns it on every side; it
fits every part of life, interprets and dignifies every
circumstance. Instead of a religion which visited him diplomatically
three or four times,- when he was born, when he married, when he
fell sick and when he died, and, for the rest, never interfered with
him,- here was a teaching which accompanied him all day, accompanied
him even into sleep and dreams; into his thinking, and showed him
through what a long ancestry his thoughts descend; into society, and
showed by what affinities he was girt to his equals and his
counterparts; into natural objects, and showed their origin and
meaning, what are friendly, and what are hurtful; and opened the
future world by indicating the continuity of the same laws. His
disciples allege that their intellect is invigorated by the study of
his books.
There is no such problem for criticism as his theological
writings, their merits are so commanding, yet such grave deductions
must be made. Their immense and sandy diffuseness is like the
prairie or the desert, and their incongruities are like the last
deliration. He is superfluously explanatory, and his feeling of the
ignorance of men, strangely exaggerated. Men take truths of this
nature very fast. Yet he abounds in assertions, he is a rich
discoverer, and of things which most import us to know. His thought
dwells in essential resemblances, like the resemblance of a house to
the man who built it. He saw things in their law, in likeness of
function, not of structure. There is an invariable method and order in
his delivery of his truth, the habitual proceeding of the mind from
inmost to outmost. What earnestness and weightiness,- his eye never
roving, without one swell of vanity, or one look to self in any common
form of literary pride! a theoretic or speculative man, but whom no
practical man in the universe could affect to scorn. Plato is a
gownsman; his garment, though of purple, and almost sky-woven, is an
academic robe and hinders action with its voluminous folds. But this
mystic is awful to Caesar. Lycurgus himself would bow.
The moral insight of Swedenborg, the correction of popular errors,
the announcement of ethical laws, take him out of comparison with
any other modern writer and entitle him to a place, vacant for some
ages, among the lawgivers of mankind. That slow but commanding
influence which he has acquired, like that of other religious
geniuses, must be excessive also, and have its tides, before it
subsides into a permanent amount. Of course what is real and universal
cannot be confined to the circle of those who sympathize strictly with
his genius, but will pass forth into the common stock of wise and just
thinking. The world has a sure chemistry, by which it extracts what is
excellent in its children and lets fall the infirmities and
limitations of the grandest mind.
That metempsychosis which is familiar in the old mythology of the
Greeks, collected in Ovid and in the Indian Transmigration, and is
there objective, or really takes place in bodies by alien will,- in
Swedenborg's mind has a more philosophic character. It is
subjective, or depends entirely upon the thought of the person. All
things in the universe arrange themselves to each person anew,
according to his ruling love. Man is such as his affection and thought
are. Man is man by virtue of willing, not by virtue of knowing and
understanding. As he is, so he sees. The marriages of the world are
broken up. Interiors associate all in the spiritual world. Whatever
the angels looked upon was to them celestial. Each Satan appears to
himself a man; to those as bad as he, a comely man; to the purified, a
heap of carrion. Nothing can resist states: every thing gravitates:
like will to like: what we call poetic justice takes effect on the
spot. We have come into a world which is a living poem. Every thing is
as I am. Bird and beast is not bird and beast, but emanation and
effluvia of the minds and wills of men there present. Every one
makes his own house and state. The ghosts are tormented with the
fear of death and cannot remember that they have died. They who are in
evil and falsehood are afraid of all others. Such as have deprived
themselves of charity, wander and flee: the societies which they
approach discover their quality and drive them away. The covetous seem
to themselves to be abiding in cells where their money is deposited,
and these to be infested with mice. They who place merit in good works
seem to themselves to cut wood. "I asked such, if they were not
wearied? They replied, that they have not yet done work enough to
merit heaven."
He delivers golden sayings which express with singular beauty the
ethical laws; as when he uttered that famed sentence, that "In
heaven the angels are advancing continually to the springtime of their
youth, so that the oldest angel appears the youngest": "The more
angels, the more room": "The perfection of man is the love of use":
"Man, in his perfect form, is heaven": "What is from Him, is Him":
"Ends always ascend as nature descends." And the truly poetic
account of the writing in the inmost heaven, which, as it consists
of inflexions according to the form of heaven, can be read without
instruction. He almost justifies his claim to preternatural vision, by
strange insights of the structure of the human body and mind. "It is
never permitted to any one, in heaven, to stand behind another and
look at the back of his head; for then the influx which is from the
Lord is disturbed." The angels, from the sound of the voice, know a
man's love; from the articulation of the sound, his wisdom; and from
the sense of the words, his science.
In the "Conjugal Love," he has unfolded the science of marriage.
Of this book one would say that with the highest elements it has
failed of success. It came near to be the Hymn of Love, which Plato
attempted in the "Banquet"; the love, which, Dante says,
Casella*(25) sang among the angels in Paradise; and which, as
rightly celebrated, in its genesis, fruition and effect, might well
entrance the souls, as it would lay open the genesis of all
institutions, customs and manners. The book had been grand if the
Hebraism had been omitted and the law stated without Gothicism, as
ethics, and with that scope for ascension of state which the nature of
things requires. It is a fine Platonic development of the science of
marriage; teaching that sex is universal, and not local; virility in
the male qualifying every organ, act, and thought; and the feminine in
woman. Therefore in the real or spiritual world the nuptial union is
not momentary, but incessant and total; and chastity not a local,
but a universal virtue; unchastity being discovered as much in the
trading, or planting, or speaking, or philosophizing, as in
generation; and that, though the virgins he saw in heaven were
beautiful, the wives were incomparably more beautiful, and went on
increasing in beauty evermore.
Yet Swedenborg, after his mode, pinned his theory to a temporary
form. He exaggerates the circumstance of marriage; and though he finds
false marriages on earth, fancies a wiser choice in heaven. But of
progressive souls, all loves and friendships are momentary. Do you
love me? means, Do you see the same truth? If you do, we are happy
with the same happiness: but presently one of us passes into the
perception of new truth;- we are divorced, and no tension in nature
can hold us to each other. I know how delicious is this cup of
love,- I existing for you, you existing for me; but it is a child's
clinging to his toy; an attempt to eternize the fireside and nuptial
chamber; to keep the picture-alphabet through which our first
lessons are prettily conveyed. The Eden of God is bare and grand: like
the out-door landscape remembered from the evening fireside, it
seems cold and desolate whilst you cower over the coals, but once
abroad again, we pity those who can forego the magnificence of
nature for candle-light and cards. Perhaps the true subject of the
"Conjugal Love" is Conversation whose laws are profoundly set forth.
It is false, if literally applied to marriage. For God is the bride or
bridegroom of the soul. Heaven is not the pairing of two, but the
communion of all souls. We meet, and dwell an instant under the temple
of one thought, and part, as though we parted not, to join another
thought in other fellowships of joy. So far from there being
anything divine in the low and proprietary sense of Do you love me? it
is only when you leave and lose me by casting yourself on a
sentiment which is higher than both of us, that I draw near and find
myself at your side; and I am repelled if you fix your eye on me and
demand love. In fact, in the spiritual world we change sexes every
moment. You love the worth in me; then I am your husband: but it is
not me, but the worth, that fixes the love; and that worth is a drop
of the ocean of worth that is beyond me. Meantime I adore the
greater worth in another, and so become his wife. He aspires to a
higher worth in another spirit, and is wife or receiver of that
influence.
Whether from a self-inquisitorial habit that he grew into from
jealousy of the sins to which men of thought are liable, he has
acquired, in disentangling and demonstrating that particular form of
moral disease, an acumen which no conscience can resist. I refer to
his feeling of the profanation of thinking to what is good, "from
scientifics." "To reason about faith, is to doubt and deny." He was
painfully alive to the difference between knowing and doing, and
this sensibility is incessantly expressed. Philosophers are,
therefore, vipers, cockatrices, asps, hemorrhoids, presters, and
flying serpents; literary men are conjurors and charlatans.
But this topic suggests a sad afterthought, that here we find the
seat of his own pain. Possibly Swedenborg paid the penalty of
introverted faculties. Success, or a fortunate genius, seems to depend
on a happy adjustment of heart and brain; on a due proportion, hard to
hit, of moral and mental power, which perhaps obeys the law of those
chemical ratios which make a proportion in volumes necessary to
combination, as when gases will combine in certain fixed rates, but
not at any rate. It is hard to carry a full cup; and this man,
profusely endowed in heart and mind, early fell into dangerous discord
with himself. In his Animal Kingdom he surprised us by declaring
that he loved analysis, and not synthesis; and now, after his fiftieth
year, he falls into jealousy of his intellect; and though aware that
truth is not solitary nor is goodness solitary, but both must ever mix
and marry, he makes war on his mind, takes the part of the
conscience against it, and, on all occasions, traduces and
blasphemes it. The violence is instantly avenged. Beauty is disgraced,
love is unlovely, when truth, the half part of heaven, is denied, as
much as when a bitterness in men of talent leads to satire and
destroys the judgment. He is wise, but wise in his own despite.
There is an air of infinite grief and the sound of wailing all over
and through this lurid universe. A vampyre sits in the seat of the
prophet and turns with gloomy appetite to the images of pain.
Indeed, a bird does not more readily weave its nest, or a mole bore
into the ground, than this seer of the souls substructs a new hell and
pit, each more abominable than the last, round every new crew of
offenders. He was let down through a column that seemed of brass,
but it was formed of angelic spirits, that he might descend safely
amongst the unhappy, and witness the vastation of souls and hear
there, for a long continuance, their lamentations: he saw their
tormentors, who increase and strain pangs to infinity; he saw the hell
of the jugglers, the hell of the assassins, the hell of the
lascivious; the hell of robbers, who kill and boil men; the infernal
tun of the deceitful; the excrementitious hells; the hell of the
revengeful, whose faces resembled a round, broad cake, and their
arms rotate like a wheel. Except Rabelais and Dean Swift nobody ever
had such science of filth and corruption.
These books should be used with caution. It is dangerous to
sculpture these evanescing images of thought. True in transition, they
become false if fixed. It requires, for his just apprehension,
almost a genius equal to his own. But when his visions become the
stereotyped language of multitudes of persons of all degrees of age
and capacity, they are perverted. The wise people of the Greek race
were accustomed to lead the most intelligent and virtuous young men,
as part of their education, through the Eleusinian mysteries, wherein,
with much pomp and graduation, the highest truths known to ancient
wisdom were taught. An ardent and contemplative young man, at eighteen
or twenty years, might read once these books of Swedenborg, these
mysteries of love and conscience, and then throw them aside for
ever. Genius is ever haunted by similar dreams, when the hells and the
heavens are opened to it. But these pictures are to be held as
mystical, that is, as a quite arbitrary and accidental picture of
the truth,- not as the truth. Any other symbol would be as good;
then this is safely seen.
Swedenborg's system of the world wants central spontaneity; it is
dynamic, not vital, and lacks power to generate life. There is no
individual in it. The universe is a gigantic crystal, all whose
atoms and laminae lie in uninterrupted order and with unbroken
unity, but cold and still. What seems an individual and a will, is
none. There is an immense chain of intermediation, extending from
centre to extremes, which bereaves every agency of all freedom and
character. The universe, in his poem, suffers under a magnetic
sleep, and only reflects the mind of the magnetizer. Every thought
comes into each mind by influence from a society of spirits that
surround it, and into these from a higher society, and so on. All
his types mean the same few things. All his figures speak one
speech. All his interlocutors Swedenborgize. Be they who they may,
to this complexion must they come at last. This Charon ferries them
all over in his boat; kings, counsellors, cavaliers, doctors, Sir
Isaac Newton, Sir Hans Sloane, King George II, Mahomet, or whomsoever,
and all gather one grimness of hue and style. Only when Cicero comes
by, our gentle seer sticks a little at saying he talked with Cicero,
and with a touch of human relenting remarks, "one whom it was given me
to believe was Cicero"; and when the soi disant Roman opens his mouth,
Rome and eloquence have ebbed away,- it is plain theologic
Swedenborg like the rest. His heavens and hells are dull; fault of
want of individualism. The thousand-fold relation of men is not there.
The interest that attaches in nature to each man, because he is
right by his wrong, and wrong by his right; because he defies all
dogmatizing and classification, so many allowances and contingencies
and futurities are to be taken into account; strong by his vices,
often paralyzed by his virtues;- sinks into entire sympathy with his
society. This want reacts to the centre of the system. Though the
agency of "the Lord" is in every line referred to by name, it never
becomes alive. There is no lustre in that eye which gazes from the
centre and which should vivify the immense dependency of beings.
The vice of Swedenborg's mind is its theological determination.
Nothing with him has the liberality of universal wisdom, but we are
always in a church. That Hebrew muse, which taught the lore of right
and wrong to men, had the same excess of influence for him it has
had for the nations. The mode, as well as the essence, was sacred.
Palestine is ever the more valuable as a chapter in universal history,
and ever the less an available element in education. The genius of
Swedenborg, largest of all modern souls in this department of thought,
wasted itself in the endeavor to reanimate and conserve what had
already arrived at its natural term, and, in the great secular
Providence, was retiring from its prominence, before Western modes
of thought and expression. Swedenborg and Behmen both failed by
attaching themselves to the Christian symbol, instead of to the
moral sentiment, which carries innumerable christianities, humanities,
divinities, in its bosom.
The excess of influence shows itself in. the incongruous importation
of a foreign rhetoric. "What have I to do," asks the impatient reader,
"with jasper and sardonyx, beryl and chalcedony; what with arks and
passovers, ephahs and ephods; what with lepers and emerods; what
with heave-offerings and unleavened bread, chariots of fire, dragons
crowned and horned, behemoth and unicorn? Good for Orientals, these
are nothing to me. The more learning you bring to explain them, the
more glaring the impertinence. The more coherent and elaborate the
system, the less I like it. I say, with the Spartan, 'Why do you speak
so much to the purpose, of that which is nothing to the purpose?'*(26)
My learning is such as God gave me in my birth and habit, in the
delight and study of my eyes and not of another man's. Of all
absurdities, this of some foreigner proposing to take away my rhetoric
and substitute his own, and amuse me with pelican and stork, instead
of thrush and robin; palm-trees and shittim-wood, instead of sassafras
and hickory,- seems the most needless."
Locke said, "God, when he makes the prophet, does not unmake the
man." Swedenborg's history points the remark. The parish disputes in
the Swedish church between the friends and foes of Luther and
Melancthon, concerning "faith alone" and "works alone," intrude
themselves into his speculations upon the economy of the universe, and
of the celestial societies. The Lutheran bishop's son, for whom the
heavens are opened, so that he sees with eyes and in the richest
symbolic forms the awful truth of things, and utters again in his
books, as under a heavenly mandate, the indisputable secrets of
moral nature,- with all these grandeurs resting upon him, remains
the Lutheran bishop's son; his judgments are those of a Swedish
polemic, and his vast enlargements purchased by adamantine
limitations. He carries his controversial memory with him in his
visits to the souls. He is like Michael Angelo, who, in his
frescoes, put the cardinal who had offended him to roast under a
mountain of devils; or like Dante, who avenged, in vindictive
melodies, all his private wrongs; or perhaps still more like
Montaigne's parish priest, who, if a hail-storm passes over the
village, thinks the day of doom is come, and the cannibals already
have got the pip. Swedenborg confounds us not less with the pains of
Melancthon and Luther and Wolfius, and his own books, which he
advertises among the angels.
Under the same theologic cramp, many of his dogmas are bound. His
cardinal position in morals is that evils should be shunned as sins.
But he does not know what evil is, or what good is, who thinks any
ground remains to be occupied, after saying that evil is to be shunned
as evil. I doubt not he was led by the desire to insert the element of
personality of Deity. But nothing is added. One man, you say, dreads
erysipelas,- show him that this dread is evil: or, one dreads hell,-
show him that dread is evil. He who loves goodness, harbors angels,
reveres reverence and lives with God. The less we have to do with
our sins the better. No man can afford to waste his moments in
compunctions. "That is active duty," say the Hindoos, "which is not
for our bondage; that is knowledge, which is for our liberation: all
other duty is good only unto weariness."
Another dogma, growing out of this pernicious theologic
limitation, is his Inferno. Swedenborg has devils. Evil, according
to old philosophers, is good in the making. That pure malignity can
exist is the extreme proposition of unbelief. It is not to be
entertained by a rational agent; it is atheism; it is the last
profanation. Euripides rightly said,-

"Goodness and being in the gods are one;
He who imputes ill to them makes them none."

To what a painful perversion had Gothic theology arrived, that
Swedenborg admitted no conversion for evil spirits! But the divine
effort is never relaxed; the carrion in the sun will convert itself to
grass and flowers; and man, though in brothels, or jails, or on
gibbets, is on his way to all that is good and true. Burns, with the
wild humor of his apostrophe to poor "auld Nickie Ben,"

"O wad ye tak a thought, and mend!"

has the advantage of the vindictive theologian. Every thing is
superficial and perishes but love and truth only. The largest is
always the truest sentiment, and we feel the more generous spirit of
the Indian Vishnu,- "I am the same to all mankind. There is not one
who is worthy of my love or hatred. They who serve me with adoration,-
I am in them, and they in me. If one whose ways are altogether evil
serve me alone, he is as respectable as the just man; he is altogether
well employed; he soon becometh of a virtuous spirit and obtaineth
eternal happiness."
For the anomalous pretension of Revelations of the other world,-
only his probity and genius can entitle it to any serious regard.
His revelations destroy their credit by running into detail. If a
man say that the Holy Ghost has informed him that the Last judgment
(or the last of the judgments) took place in 1757; or that the
Dutch, in the other world, live in a heaven by themselves, and the
English in a heaven by themselves; I reply that the Spirit which is
holy is reserved, taciturn, and deals in laws. The rumors of ghosts
and hobgoblins gossip and tell fortunes. The teachings of the high
Spirit are abstemious, and, in regard to particulars, negative.
Socrates's Genius did not advise him to act or to find, but if he
purposed to do somewhat not advantageous, it dissuaded him. "What
God is," he said, "I know not; what he is not, I know." The Hindoos
have denominated the Supreme Being, the "Internal Check." The
illuminated Quakers explained their Light, not as somewhat which leads
to any action, but it appears as an obstruction to any thing unfit.
But the right examples are private experiences, which are absolutely
at one on this point. Strictly speaking, Swedenborg's revelation is
a confounding of planes,- a capital offence in so learned a
categorist. This is to carry the law of surface into the plane of
substance, to carry individualism and its fopperies into the realm
of essences and generals,- which is dislocation and chaos.
The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. No imprudent, no
sociable angel ever dropt an early syllable to answer the longings
of saints, the fears of mortals. We should have listened on our
knees to any favorite, who, by stricter obedience, had brought his
thoughts into parallelism with the celestial currents and could hint
to human ears the scenery and circumstance of the newly parted soul.
But it is certain that it must tally with what is best in nature. It
must not be inferior in tone to the already known works of the
artist who sculptures the globes of the firmament and writes the moral
law. It must be fresher than rainbows, stabler than mountains,
agreeing with flowers, with tides and the rising and setting of
autumnal stars. Melodious poets shall be hoarse as street ballads when
once the penetrating key-note of nature and spirit is sounded,- the
earth-beat, sea-beat, heart-beat, which makes the tune to which the
sun rolls, and the globule of blood, and the sap of trees.
In this mood we hear the rumor that the seer has arrived, and his
tale is told. But there is no beauty, no heaven: for angels,
goblins. The sad muse loves night and death and the pit. His Inferno
is mesmeric. His spiritual world bears the same relation to the
generosities and joys of truth of which human souls have already
made us cognizant, as a man's bad dreams bear to his ideal life. It is
indeed very like, in its endless power of lurid pictures, to the
phenomena of dreaming, which nightly turns many an honest gentleman,
benevolent but dyspeptic, into a wretch, skulking like a dog about the
outer yards and kennels of creation. When he mounts into the heaven, I
do not hear its language. A man should not tell me that he has
walked among the angels; his proof is that his eloquence makes me one.
Shall the archangels be less majestic and sweet than the figures
that have actually walked the earth? These angels that Swedenborg
paints give us no very high idea of their discipline and culture: they
are all country parsons: their heaven is a fete champetre, an
evangelical picnic, or French distribution of prizes to virtuous
peasants. Strange, scholastic, didactic, passionless, bloodless man,
who denotes classes of souls as a botanist disposes of a carex, and
visits doleful hells as a stratum of chalk or hornblende! He has no
sympathy. He goes up and down the world of men, a modern
Rhadamanthus in gold-headed cane and peruke, and with nonchalance
and the air of a referee, distributes souls. The warm, many-weathered,
passionate-peopled world is to him a grammar of hieroglyphs, or an
emblematic freemason's procession. How different is Jacob Behmen! he
is tremulous with emotion and listens awe-struck, with the gentlest
humanity, to the Teacher whose lessons he conveys; and when he asserts
that, "in some sort, love is greater than God," his heart beats so
high that the thumping against his leathern coat is audible across the
centuries. 'Tis a great difference. Behmen is healthily and
beautifully wise, notwithstanding the mystical narrowness and
incommunicableness. Swedenborg is disagreeably wise, and with all
his accumulated gifts, paralyzes and repels.
It is the best sign of a great nature that it opens a foreground,
and, like the breath of morning landscapes, invites us onward.
Swedenborg is retrospective, nor can we divest him of his mattock
and shroud. Some minds are for ever restrained from descending into
nature; others are for ever prevented from ascending out of it. With a
force of many men, he could never break the umbilical cord which
held him to nature, and he did not rise to the platform of pure
genius.
It is remarkable that this man, who, by his perception of symbols,
saw the poetic construction of things and the primary relation of mind
to matter, remained entirely devoid of the whole apparatus of poetic
expression, which that perception creates. He knew the grammar and
rudiments of the Mother-Tongue,- how could he not read off one
strain into music? Was he like Saadi, who, in his vision, designed
to fill his lap with the celestial flowers, as presents for his
friends; but the fragrance of the roses so intoxicated him that the
skirt dropped from his hands? or is reporting a breach of the
manners of that heavenly society? or was it that he saw the vision
intellectually, and hence that chiding of the intellectual that
pervades his books? Be it as it may, his books have no melody, no
emotion, no humor, no relief to the dead prosaic level. In his profuse
and accurate imagery is no pleasure, for there is no beauty. We wander
forlorn in a lack-lustre landscape. No bird ever sang in all these
gardens of the dead. The entire want of poetry in so transcendent a
mind betokens the disease, and like a hoarse voice in a beautiful
person, is a kind of warning. I think, sometimes, he will not be
read longer. His great name will turn a sentence. His books have
become a monument. His laurel so largely mixed with cypress, a
charnel-breath so mingles with the temple incense, that boys and maids
will shun the spot.
Yet in this immolation of genius and fame at the shrine of
conscience, is a merit sublime beyond praise. He lived to purpose:
he gave a verdict. He elected goodness as the clue to which the soul
must cling in all this labyrinth of nature. Many opinions conflict
as to the true centre. In the shipwreck, some cling to running
rigging, some to cask and barrel, some to spars, some to mast; the
pilot chooses with science,- I plant myself here; all will sink before
this; "he comes to land who sails with me." Do not rely on heavenly
favor, or on compassion to folly, or on prudence, on common sense, the
old usage and main chance of men: nothing can keep you,- not fate, nor
health, nor admirable intellect; none can keep you, but rectitude
only, rectitude for ever and ever! And with a tenacity that never
swerved in all his studies, inventions, dreams, he adheres to this
brave choice. I think of him as of some transmigrating votary of
Indian legend, who says "Though I be dog, or jackal, or pismire, in
the last rudiments of nature, under what integument or ferocity, I
cleave to right, as the sure ladder that leads up to man and to God."
Swedenborg has rendered a double service to mankind, which is now
only beginning to be known. By the science of experiment and use, he
made his first steps: he observed and published the laws of nature;
and ascending by just degrees from events to their summits and causes,
he was fired with piety at the harmonies he felt, and abandoned
himself to his joy and worship. This was his first service. If the
glory was too bright for his eyes to bear, if he staggered under the
trance of delight, the more excellent is the spectacle he saw, the
realities of being which beam and blaze through him, and which no
infirmities of the prophet are suffered to obscure; and he renders a
second passive service to men, not less than the first, perhaps, in
the great circle of being,- and, in the retributions of spiritual
nature, not less glorious or less beautiful to himself.
MONTAIGNE
MONTAIGNE
or, The Skeptic

EVERY FACT is related on one side to sensation, and on the other
to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these
two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.
Nothing so thin but has these two faces, and when the observer has
seen the obverse, he turns it over to see the reverse. Life is a
pitching of this penny,- heads or tails. We never tire of this game,
because there is still a slight shudder of astonishment at the
exhibition of the other face, at the contrast of the two faces. A
man is flushed with success, and bethinks himself what this good
luck signifies. He drives his bargain in the street; but it occurs
that he also is bought and sold. He sees the beauty of a human face,
and searches the cause of that beauty, which must be more beautiful.
He builds his fortunes, maintains the laws, cherishes his children;
but he asks himself, Why? and whereto? This head and this tail are
called, in the language of philosophy, Infinite and Finite; Relative
and Absolute; Apparent and Real; and many fine names beside.
Each man is born with a predisposition to one or the other of
these sides of nature; and it will easily happen that men will be
found devoted to one or the other. One class has the perception of
difference, and is conversant with facts and surfaces, cities and
persons, and the bringing certain things to pass;- the men of talent
and action. Another class have the perception of identity, and are men
of faith and philosophy, men of genius.
Each of these riders drives too fast. Plotinus believes only in
philosophers; Fenelon, in saints; Pindar and Byron, in poets. Read the
haughty language in which Plato and the Platonists speak of all men
who are not devoted to their own shining abstractions: other men are
rats and mice. The literary class is usually proud and exclusive.
The correspondence of Pope and Swift describes mankind around them
as monsters; and that of Goethe and Schiller, in our own time, is
scarcely more kind.
It is easy to see how this arrogance comes. The genius is a genius
by the first look he casts on any object. Is his eye creative? Does he
not rest in angles and colors, but beholds the design?- he will
presently undervalue the actual object. In powerful moments, his
thought has dissolved the works of art and nature into their causes,
so that the works appear heavy and faulty. He has a conception of
beauty which the sculptor cannot embody. Picture, statue, temple,
railroad, steam-engine, existed first in an artist's mind, without
flaw, mistake, or friction, which impair the executed models. So did
the Church, the State, college, court, social circle, and all the
institutions. It is not strange that these men, remembering what
they have seen and hoped of ideas, should affirm disdainfully the
superiority of ideas. Having at some time seen that the happy soul
will carry all the arts in power, they say, Why cumber ourselves
with superfluous realizations? and like dreaming beggars they assume
to speak and act as if these values were already substantiated.
On the other part, the men of toil and trade and luxury,- the animal
world, including the animal in the philosopher and poet also, and
the practical world, including the painful drudgeries which are
never excused to philosopher or poet any more than to the rest,- weigh
heavily on the other side. The trade in our streets believes in no
metaphysical causes, thinks nothing of the force which necessitated
traders and a trading planet to exist: no, but sticks to cotton,
sugar, wool and salt. The ward meetings, on election days, are not
softened by any misgiving of the value of these ballotings. Hot life
is streaming in a single direction. To the men of this world, to the
animal strength and spirits, to the men of practical power, whilst
immersed in it, the man of ideas appears out of his reason. They alone
have reason.
Things always bring their own philosophy with them, that is,
prudence. No man acquires property without acquiring with it a
little arithmetic also. In England, the richest country that ever
existed, property stands for more, compared with personal ability,
than in any other. After dinner, a man believes less, denies more:
verities have lost some charm. After dinner, arithmetic is the only
science: ideas are disturbing, incendiary, follies of young men,
repudiated by the solid portion of society: and a man comes to be
valued by his athletic and animal qualities. Spence relates that Mr.
Pope was with Sir Godfrey Kneller one day, when his nephew, a Guinea
trader, came in. "Nephew," said Sir Godfrey, "you have the honor of
seeing the two greatest men in the world." "I don't know how great men
you may be," said the Guinea man, "but I don't like your looks. I have
often bought a man much better than both of you, all muscles and
bones, for ten guineas." Thus the men of the senses revenge themselves
on the professors and repay scorn for scorn. The first had leaped to
conclusions not yet ripe, and say more than is true; the others make
themselves merry with the philosopher, and weigh man by the pound.
They believe that mustard bites the tongue, that pepper is hot,
friction-matches incendiary, revolvers are to be avoided, and
suspenders hold up pantaloons; that there is much sentiment in a chest
of tea; and a man will be eloquent, if you give him good wine. Are you
tender and scrupulous,- you must eat more mince-pie. They hold that
Luther had milk in him when he said,-

"Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weiber, Gesang,
Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang";-

and when he advised a young scholar, perplexed with fore-ordination
and free-will, to get well drunk. "The nerves," says Cabanis, "they
are the man." My neighbor, a jolly farmer, in the tavern bar-room,
thinks that the use of money is sure and speedy spending. For his
part, he says, he puts his down his neck and gets the good of it.
The inconvenience of this way of thinking is that it runs into
indifferentism and then into disgust. Life is eating us up. We shall
be fables presently. Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years
hence. Life's well enough, but we shall be glad to get out of it,
and they will all be glad to have us. Why should we fret and drudge?
Our meat will taste to-morrow as it did yesterday, and we may at
last have had enough of it. "Ah," said my languid gentleman at Oxford,
"there's nothing new or true,- and no matter."
With a little more bitterness, the cynic moans; our life is like
an ass led to market by a bundle of hay being carried before him; he
sees nothing but the bundle of hay. "There is so much trouble in
coming into the world," said Lord Bolingbroke, "and so much more, as
well as meanness, in going out of it, that 'tis hardly worthwhile to
be here at all." I knew a philosopher of this kidney who was
accustomed briefly to sum up his experience of human nature in saying,
"Mankind is a damned rascal":*(27) and the natural corollary is pretty
sure to follow,- "The world lives by humbug, and so will I."
The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating
each other, and the scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there
arises a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two,
the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by being in extremes. He
labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance. He will not
go beyond his card. He sees the one-sidedness of these men of the
street; he will not be a Gibeonite; he stands for the intellectual
faculties, a cool head and whatever serves to keep it cool; no
unadvised industry, no unrewarded self-devotion, no loss of the brains
in toil. Am I an ox, or a dray?- You are both in extremes, he says.
You that will have all solid, and a world of pig-lead, deceive
yourselves grossly. You believe yourselves rooted and grounded on
adamant; and yet, if we uncover the last facts of our knowledge, you
are spinning like bubbles in a river, you know not whither or
whence, and you are bottomed and capped and wrapped in delusions.
Neither will he be betrayed to a book and wrapped in a gown. The
studious class are their own victims; they are thin and pale, their
feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the
day a fear of interruption,- pallor, squalor, hunger and egotism. If
you come near them and see what conceits they entertain,- they are
abstractionists, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some
dream; in expecting the homage of society to some precious scheme,
built on a truth, but destitute of proportion in its presentment, of
justness in its application, and of all energy of will in the
schemer to embody and vitalize it.
But I see plainly, he says, that I cannot see. I know that human
strength is not in extremes, but in avoiding extremes. I, at least,
will shun the weakness of philosophizing beyond my depth. What is
the use of pretending to powers we have not? What is the use of
pretending to assurances we have not, respecting the other life? Why
exaggerate the power of virtue? Why be an angel before your time?
These strings, wound up too high, will snap. If there is a wish for
immortality, and no evidence, why not say just that? If there are
conflicting evidences, why not state them? If there is not ground
for a candid thinker to make up his mind, yea or nay,- why not suspend
the judgment? I weary of these dogmatizers. I tire of these hacks of
routine, who deny the dogmas. I neither affirm nor deny. I stand
here to try the case. I am here to consider, skopein, to consider
how it is. I will try to keep the balance true. Of what use to take
the chair and glibly rattle off theories of society, religion and
nature, when I know that practical objections lie in the way,
insurmountable by me and by my mates? Why so talkative in public, when
each of my neighbors can pin me to my seat by arguments I cannot
refute? Why pretend that life is so simple a game, when we know how
subtle and elusive the Proteus*(28) is? Why think to shut up all
things in your narrow coop, when we know there are not one or two
only, but ten, twenty, a thousand things, and unlike? Why fancy that
you have all the truth in your keeping? There is much to say on all
sides.
Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no
practical question on which any thing more than an approximate
solution can be had? Is not marriage an open question, when it is
alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the
institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in? And
the reply of Socrates, to him who asked whether he should choose a
wife, still remains reasonable, that "whether he should choose one
or not, he would repent it." Is not the State a question? All
society is divided in opinion on the subject of the State. Nobody
loves it; great numbers dislike it and suffer conscientious scruples
to allegiance; and the only defence set up, is the fear of doing worse
in disorganizing. Is it otherwise with the Church? Or, to put any of
the questions which touch mankind nearest,- shall the young man aim at
a leading part in law, in polities, in trade? It will not be pretended
that a success in either of these kinds is quite coincident with
what is best and inmost in his mind. Shall he then, cutting the
stays that hold him fast to the social state, put out to sea with no
guidance but his genius? There is much to say on both sides.
Remember the open question between the present order of
"competition" and the friends of "attractive and associated labor."
The generous minds embrace the proposition of labor shared by all;
it is the only honesty; nothing else is safe. It is from the poor
man's hut alone that strength and virtue come: and yet, on the other
side, it is alleged that labor impairs the form and breaks the
spirit of man, and the laborers cry unanimously, "We have no
thoughts." Culture, how indispensable! I cannot forgive you the want
of accomplishments; and yet culture will instantly impair that
chiefest beauty of spontaneousness. Excellent is culture for a savage;
but once let him read in the book, and he is no longer able not to
think of Plutarch's heroes. In short, since true fortitude of
understanding consists "in not letting what we know be embarrassed
by what we do not know," we ought to secure those advantages which
we can command, and not risk them by clutching after the airy and
unattainable. Come, no chimeras! Let us go abroad; let us mix in
affairs; let us learn and get and have and climb. "Men are a sort of
moving plants, and, like trees, receive a great part of their
nourishment from the air. If they keep too much at home, they pine."
Let us have a robust, manly life; let us know what we know, for
certain; what we have, let it be solid and seasonable and our own. A
world in the hand is worth two in the bush. Let us have to do with
real men and women, and not with skipping ghosts.
This then is the right ground of the skeptic,- this of
consideration, of self-containing; not at all of unbelief; not at
all of universal denying, nor of universal doubting,- doubting even
that he doubts; least of all of scoffing and profligate jeering at all
that is stable and good. These are no more his moods than are those of
religion and philosophy. He is the considerer, the prudent, taking
in sail, counting stock, husbanding his means, believing that a man
has too many enemies than that he can afford to be his own foe; that
we cannot give ourselves too many advantages in this unequal conflict,
with powers so vast and unweariable ranged on one side, and this
little conceited vulnerable popinjay that a man is, bobbing up and
down into every danger, on the other. It is a position taken up for
better defence, as of more safety, and one that can be maintained; and
it is one of more opportunity and range: as, when we build a house,
the rule is to set it not too high nor too low, under the wind, but
out of the dirt.
The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mobility. The
Spartan and Stoic schemes are too stark and stiff for our occasion.
A theory of Saint John, and of non-resistance, seems, on the other
hand, too thin and aerial. We want some coat woven of elastic steel,
stout as the first and limber as the second. We want a ship in these
billows we inhabit. An angular, dogmatic house would be rent to
chips and splinters in this storm of many elements. No, it must be
tight, and fit to the form of man, to live at all; as a shell must
dictate the architecture of a house founded on the sea. The soul of
man must be the type of our scheme, just as the body of man is the
type after which a dwelling-house is built. Adaptiveness is the
peculiarity of human nature. We are golden averages, volitant
stabilities, compensated or periodic errors, houses founded on the
sea. The wise skeptic wishes to have a near view of the best game
and the chief players; what is best in the planet; art and nature,
places and events; but mainly men. Every thing that is excellent in
mankind,- a form of grace, an arm of iron, lips of persuasion, a brain
of resources, every one skilful to play and win,- he will see and
judge.
The terms of admission to this spectacle are, that he have a certain
solid and intelligible way of living of his own; some method of
answering the inevitable needs of human life; proof that he has played
with skill and success; that he has evinced the temper, stoutness
and the range of qualities which, among his contemporaries and
countrymen, entitle him to fellowship and trust. For the secrets of
life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness. Men do not confide
themselves to boys, or coxcombs, or pedants, but to their peers.
Some wise limitation, as the modern phrase is; some condition
between the extremes, and having, itself, a positive quality; some
stark and sufficient man, who is not salt or sugar, but sufficiently
related to the world to do justice to Paris or London, and, at the
same time, a vigorous and original thinker, whom cities can not
overawe, but who uses them,- is the fit person to occupy this ground
of speculation.
These qualities meet in the character of Montaigne. And yet, since
the personal regard which I entertain for Montaigne may be unduly
great, I will, under the shield of this prince of egotists, offer,
as an apology for electing him as the representative of skepticism,
a word or two to explain how my love began and grew for this admirable
gossip.
A single odd volume of Cotton's translation of the Essays remained
to me from my father's library, when a boy. It lay long neglected,
until, after many years, when I was newly escaped from college, I read
the book, and procured the remaining volumes. I remember the delight
and wonder in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I had
myself written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to
my thought and experience. It happened, when in Paris, in 1833,
that, in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise, I came to a tomb of Auguste
Collignon, who died in 1830, aged sixty-eight years, and who, said the
monument, "lived to do right, and had formed himself to virtue on
the Essays of Montaigne." Some years later, I became acquainted with
an accomplished English poet, John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my
correspondence, I found that, from a love of Montaigne, he had made
a pilgrimage to his chateau, still standing near Castellan, in
Perigord, and, after two hundred and fifty years, had copied from
the walls of his library the inscriptions which Montaigne had
written there. That Journal of Mr. Sterling's, published in the
Westminster Review, Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted in the Prolegomena to
his edition of the Essays. I heard with pleasure that one of the
newly-discovered autographs of William Shakespeare was in a copy of
Florio's translation of Montaigne. It is the only book which we
certainly know to have been in the poet's library. And, oddly
enough, the duplicate copy of Florio, which the British Museum
purchased with a view of protecting the Shakespeare autograph (as I
was informed in the Museum), turned out to have the autograph of Ben
Jonson in the fly-leaf. Leigh Hunt relates of Lord Byron, that
Montaigne was the only great writer of past times whom he read with
avowed satisfaction. Other coincidences, not needful to be mentioned
here, concurred to make this old Gascon still new and immortal for me.
In 1571, on the death of his father, Montaigne, then thirty-eight
years old, retired from the practice of law at Bordeaux, and settled
himself on his estate. Though he had been a man of pleasure and
sometimes a courtier, his studious habits now grew on him, and he
loved the compass, staidness and independence of the country
gentleman's life. He took up his economy in good earnest, and made his
farms yield the most. Downright and plain-dealing, and abhorring to be
deceived or to deceive, he was esteemed in the country for his sense
and probity. In the civil wars of the League, which converted every
house into a fort, Montaigne kept his gates open and his house without
defence. All parties freely came and went, his courage and honor being
universally esteemed. The neighboring lords and gentry brought
jewels and papers to him for safekeeping. Gibbon reckons, in these
bigoted times, but two men of liberality in France,- Henry IV and
Montaigne.
Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers. His French
freedom runs into grossness; but he has anticipated all censure by the
bounty of his own confessions. In his times, books were written to one
sex only, and almost all were written in Latin; so that in a
humorist a certain nakedness of statement was permitted, which our
manners, of a literature addressed equally to both sexes, do not
allow. But though a biblical plainness coupled with a most uncanonical
levity may shut his pages to many sensitive readers, yet the offence
is superficial. He parades it: he makes the most of it: nobody can
think or say worse of him than he does. He pretends to most of the
vices; and, if there be any virtue in him, he says, it got in by
stealth. There is no man, in his opinion, who has not deserved hanging
five or six times; and he pretends no exception in his own behalf.
"Five or six as ridiculous stories," too, he says, "can be told of me,
as of any man living." But, with all this really superfluous
frankness, the opinion of an invincible probity grows into every
reader's mind. "When I the most strictly and religiously confess
myself, I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture
of vice; and I, who am as sincere and perfect a lover of virtue of
that stamp as any other whatever, am afraid that Plato, in his
purest virtue, if he had listened and laid his ear close to himself,
would have heard some jarring sound of human mixture; but faint and
remote and only to be perceived by himself."
Here is an impatience and fastidiousness at color or pretence of any
kind. He has been in courts so long as to have conceived a furious
disgust at appearances; he will indulge himself with a little
cursing and swearing; he will talk with sailors and gipsies, use flash
and street ballads; he has stayed in-doors till he is deadly sick;
he will to the open air, though it rain bullets. He has seen too
much of gentlemen of the long robe, until he wishes for cannibals; and
is so nervous, by factitious life, that he thinks the more barbarous
man is, the better he is. He likes his saddle. You may read
theology, and grammar, and metaphysics elsewhere. Whatever you get
here shall smack of the earth and of real life, sweet, or smart, or
stinging. He makes no hesitation to entertain you with the records
of his disease, and his journey to Italy is quite full of that matter.
He took and kept this position of equilibrium. Over his name he drew
an emblematic pair of scales, and wrote Que scais je? under it. As I
look at his effigy opposite the title-page, I seem to hear him say,
"You may play old Poz, if you will; you may rail and exaggerate,- I
stand here for truth, and will not, for all the states and churches
and revenues and personal reputations of Europe, overstate the dry
fact, as I see it; I will rather mumble and prose about what I
certainly know,- my house and barns; my father, my wife and my
tenants; my old lean bald pate; my knives and forks; what meats I
eat and what drinks I prefer, and a hundred straws just as
ridiculous,- than I will write, with a fine crow-quill, a fine
romance. I like gray days, and autumn and winter weather. I am gray
and autumnal myself, and think an undress and old shoes that do not
pinch my feet, and old friends who do not constrain me, and plain
topics where I do not need to strain myself and pump my brains, the
most suitable. Our condition as men is risky and ticklish enough.
One cannot be sure of himself and his fortune an hour, but he may be
whisked off into some pitiable or ridiculous plight. Why should I
vapor and play the philosopher, instead of ballasting, the best I can,
this dancing balloon? So, at least, I live within compass, keep myself
ready for action, and can shoot the gulf at last with decency. If
there be anything farcical in such a life, the blame is not mine;
let it lie at fate's and nature's door."
The Essays, therefore, are an entertaining soliloquy on every random
topic that comes into his head; treating every thing without ceremony,
yet with masculine sense. There have been men with deeper insight;
but, one would say, never a man with such abundance of thoughts: he is
never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader
care for all that he cares for.
The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know
not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of
conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would
bleed; they are vascular and alive. One has the same pleasure in it
that he feels in listening to the necessary speech of men about
their work, when any unusual circumstance gives momentary importance
to the dialogue. For blacksmiths and teamsters do not trip in their
speech; it is a shower of bullets. It is Cambridge men who correct
themselves and begin again at every half sentence, and, moreover, will
pun, and refine too much, and swerve from the matter to the
expression. Montaigne talks with shrewdness, knows the world and books
and himself, and uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests,
or prays: no weakness, no convulsion, no superlative: does not wish to
jump out of his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or time,
but is stout and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes pain
because it makes him feel himself and realize things; as we pinch
ourselves to know that we are awake. He keeps the plain; he rarely
mounts or sinks; likes to feel solid ground and the stones underneath.
His writing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration; contented,
self-respecting and keeping the middle of the road. There is but one
exception,- in his love for Socrates. In speaking of him, for once his
cheek flushes and his style rises to passion.
Montaigne died of a quinsy, at the age of sixty, in 1592. When he
came to die he caused the mass to be celebrated in his chamber. At the
age of thirty-three, he had been married. "But," he says, "might I
have had my own will, I would not have married Wisdom herself, if
she would have had me: but 'tis to much purpose to evade it, the
common custom and use of life will have it so. Most of my actions
are guided by example, not choice." In the hour of death, he gave
the same weight to custom. Que scais je? What do I know?
This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed by translating it into
all tongues and printing seventy-five editions of it in Europe; and
that, too, a circulation somewhat chosen, namely among courtiers,
soldiers, princes, men of the world and men of wit and generosity.
Shall we say that Montaigne has spoken wisely, and given the right
and permanent expression of the human mind, on the conduct of life?
We are natural believers. Truth, or the connection between cause and
effect, alone interests us. We are persuaded that a thread runs
through all things: all worlds are strung on it, as beads; and men,
and events, and life, come to us only because of that thread: they
pass and repass only that we may know the direction and continuity
of that line. A book or statement which goes to show that there is
no line, but random and chaos, a calamity out of nothing, a prosperity
and no account of it, a hero born from a fool, a fool from a hero,-
dispirits us. Seen or unseen, we believe the tie exists. Talent
makes counterfeit ties; genius finds the real ones. We hearken to
the man of science, because we anticipate the sequence in natural
phenomena which he uncovers. We love whatever affirms, connects,
preserves; and dislike what scatters or pulls down. One man appears
whose nature is to all men's eyes conserving and constructive; his
presence supposes a well-ordered society, agriculture, trade, large
institutions and empire. If these did not exist, they would begin to
exist through his endeavors. Therefore he cheers and comforts men, who
feel all this in him very readily. The nonconformist and the rebel say
all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but
discover to our sense no plan of house or state of their own.
Therefore, though the town and state and way of living, which our
counsellor contemplated, might be a very modest or musty prosperity,
yet men rightly go for him, and reject the reformer so long as he
comes only with axe and crowbar.
But though we are natural conservers and causationists, and reject a
sour, dumpish unbelief, the skeptical class, which Montaigne
represents, have reason, and every man, at some time, belongs to it.
Every superior mind will pass through this domain of equilibration,- I
should rather say, will know how to avail himself of the checks and
balances in nature, as a natural weapon against the exaggeration and
formalism of bigots and blockheads.
Skepticism is the attitude assumed by the student in relation to the
particulars which society adores, but which he sees to be reverend
only in their tendency and spirit. The ground occupied by the
skeptic is the vestibule of the temple. Society does not like to
have any breath of question blown on the existing order. But the
interrogation of custom at all points is an inevitable stage in the
growth of every superior mind, and is the evidence of its perception
of the flowing power which remains itself in all changes.
The superior mind will find itself equally at odds with the evils of
society and with the projects that are offered to relieve them. The
wise skeptic is a bad citizen; no conservative, he sees the
selfishness of property and the drowsiness of institutions. But
neither is he fit to work with any democratic party that ever was
constituted; for parties wish every one committed, and he penetrates
the popular patriotism. His politics are those of the "Soul's
Errand" of Sir Walter Raleigh; or of Krishna, in the Bhagavat,
"There is none who is worthy of my love or hatred"; whilst he
sentences law, physic, divinity, commerce and custom. He is a
reformer; yet he is no better member of the philanthropic association.
It turns out that he is not the champion of the operative, the pauper,
the prisoner, the slave. It stands in his mind that our life in this
world is not of quite so easy interpretation as churches and
schoolbooks say. He does not wish to take ground against these
benevolences, to play the part of devil's attorney, and blazon every
doubt and sneer that darkens the sun for him. But he says, There are
doubts.
I mean to use the occasion, and celebrate the calendar-day of our
Saint Michel de Montaigne, by counting and describing these doubts
or negations. I wish to ferret them out of their holes and sun them
a little. We must do with them as the police do with old rogues, who
are shown up to the public at the marshal's office. They will never be
so formidable when once they have been identified and registered.
But I mean honestly by them,- that justice shall be done to their
terrors. I shall not take Sunday objections, made up on purpose to
be put down. I shall take the worst I can find, whether I can
dispose of them or they of me.
I do not press the skepticism of the materialist. I know the
quadruped opinion will not prevail. 'Tis of no importance what bats
and oxen think. The first dangerous symptom I report is, the levity of
intellect; as if it were fatal to earnestness to know much.
Knowledge is the knowing that we can not know. The dull pray; the
geniuses are light mockers. How respectable is earnestness on every
platform! but intellect kills it. Nay, San Carlo,*(29) my subtle and
admirable friend, one of the most penetrating of men, finds that all
direct ascension, even of lofty piety, leads to this ghastly insight
and sends back the votary orphaned. My astonishing San Carlo thought
the lawgivers and saints infected. They found the are empty; saw,
and would not tell; and tried to choke off their approaching
followers, by saying, "Action, action, my dear fellows, is for you!"
Bad as was to me this detection by San Carlo, this-frost in July, this
blow from a bride, there was still a worse, namely the cloy or satiety
of the saints. In the mount of vision, ere they have yet risen from
their knees, they say, "We discover that this our homage and beatitude
is partial and deformed: we must fly for relief to the suspected and
reviled Intellect, to the Understanding, the Mephistopheles, to the
gymnastics of talent."
This is hobgoblin the first; and though it has been the subject of
much elegy in our nineteenth century, from Byron, Goethe and other
poets of less fame, not to mention many distinguished private
observers,- I confess it is not very affecting to my imagination;
for it seems to concern the shattering of baby-houses and
crockery-shops. What flutters the Church of Rome, or of England, or of
Geneva, or of Boston, may yet be very far from touching any
principle of faith. I think that the intellect and moral sentiment are
unanimous; and that though philosophy extirpates bugbears, yet it
supplies the natural checks of vice, and polarity to the soul. I think
that the wiser a man is, the more stupendous he finds the natural
and moral economy, and lifts himself to a more absolute reliance.
There is the power of moods, each setting at nought all but its
own tissue of facts and beliefs. There is the power of complexions,
obviously modifying the dispositions and sentiments. The beliefs and
unbeliefs appear to be structural; and as soon as each man attains the
poise and vivacity which allow the whole machinery to play, he will
not need extreme examples, but will rapidly alternate all opinions
in his own life. Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one
hour. We go forth austere, dedicated, believing in the iron links of
Destiny, and will not turn on our heel to save our life: but a book,
or a bust, or only the sound of a name, shoots a spark through the
nerves, and we suddenly believe in will: my finger-ring shall be the
seal of Solomon; fate is for imbeciles; all is possible to the
resolved mind. Presently a new experience gives a new turn to our
thoughts: common sense resumes its tyranny; we say, "Well, the army,
after all, is the gate to fame, manners and poetry: and, look you,- on
the whole, selfishness plants best, prunes best, makes the best
commerce and the best citizen." Are the opinions of a man on right and
wrong, on fate and causation, at the mercy of a broken sleep or an
indigestion? Is his belief in God and Duty no deeper than a stomach
evidence? And what guaranty for the permanence of his opinions? I like
not the French celerity,- a new Church and State once a week. This
is the second negation; and I shall let it pass for what it will. As
far as it asserts rotation of states of mind, I suppose it suggests
its own remedy, namely in the record of larger periods. What is the
mean of many states; of all the states? Does the general voice of ages
affirm any principle, or is no community of sentiment discoverable
in distant times and places? And when it shows the power of
self-interest, I accept that as part of the divine law and must
reconcile it with aspiration the best I can.
The word Fate, or Destiny, expresses the sense of mankind, in all
ages, that the laws of the world do not always befriend, but often
hurt and crush us. Fate, in the shape of Kinde or nature, grows over
us like grass. We paint Time with a scythe; Love and Fortune, blind;
and Destiny, deaf. We have too little power of resistance against this
ferocity which champs us up. What front can we make against these
unavoidable, victorious, maleficent forces? What can I do against
the influence of Race, in my history? What can I do against hereditary
and constitutional habits; against scrofula, lymph, impotence? against
climate, against barbarism, in my country? I can reason down or deny
every thing, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I
cannot make him respectable.
But the main resistance which the affirmative impulse finds, and one
including all others, is in the doctrine of the Illusionists. There is
a painful rumor in circulation that we have been practised upon in all
the principal performances of life, and free agency is the emptiest
name. We have been sopped and drugged with the air, with food, with
woman, with children, with sciences, with events, which leave us
exactly where they found us. The mathematics, 'tis complained, leave
the mind where they find it: so do all sciences; and so do all
events and actions. I find a man who has passed through all the
sciences, the churl he was; and, through all the offices, learned,
civil and social, can detect the child. We are not the less
necessitated to dedicate life to them. In fact we may come to accept
it as the fixed rule and theory of our state of education, that God is
a substance, and his method is illusion. The Eastern sages owned the
goddess Yoganidra, the great illusory energy of Vishnu, by whom, as
utter ignorance, the whole world is beguiled.
Or shall I state it thus?- The astonishment of life is the absence
of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and practice of
life. Reason, the prized reality, the Law, is apprehended, now and
then, for a serene and profound moment amidst the hubbub of cares
and works which have no direct bearing on it;- is then lost for months
or years, and again found for an interval, to be lost again. If we
compute it in time, we may, in fifty years, have half a dozen
reasonable hours. But what are these cares and works the better? A
method in the world we do not see, but this parallelism of great and
little, which never react on each other, nor discover the smallest
tendency to converge. Experiences, fortunes, governings, readings,
writings, are nothing to the purpose; as when a man comes into the
room it does not appear whether he has been fed on yams or buffalo,-
he has contrived to get so much bone and fibre as he wants, out of
rice or out of snow. So vast is the disproportion between the sky of
law and the pismire of performance under it, that whether he is a
man of worth or a sot is not so great a matter as we say. Shall I add,
as one juggle of this enchantment, the stunning non-intercourse law
which makes co-operation impossible? The young spirit pants to enter
society. But all the ways of culture and greatness lead to solitary
imprisonment. He has been often baulked. He did not expect a sympathy,
with his thought from the village, but he went with it to the chosen
and intelligent, and found no entertainment for it, but mere
misapprehension, distaste and scoffing. Men are strangely mistimed and
misapplied; and the excellence of each is an inflamed individualism
which separates him more.
There are these, and more than these diseases of thought, which
our ordinary teachers do not attempt to remove. Now shall we,
because a good nature inclines us to virtue's side, say, There are
no doubts,- and lie for the right? Is life to be led in a brave or
in a cowardly manner? and is not the satisfaction of the doubts
essential to all manliness? Is the name of virtue to be a barrier to
that which is virtue? Can you not believe that a man of earnest and
burly habit may find small good in tea, essays and catechism, and want
a rougher instruction, want men, labor, trade, farming, war, hunger,
plenty, love, hatred, doubt and terror to make things plain to him;
and has he not a right to insist on being convinced in his own way?
When he is convinced, he will be worth the pains.
Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief,
in denying them. Some minds are incapable of skepticism. The doubts
they profess to entertain are rather a civility or accommodation to
the common discourse of their company. They may well give themselves
leave to speculate, for they are secure of a return. Once admitted
to the heaven of thought, they see no relapse into night, but infinite
invitation on the other side. Heaven is within heaven, and sky over
sky, and they are encompassed with divinities. Others there are to
whom the heaven is brass, and it shuts down to the surface of the
earth. It is a question of temperament, or of more or less immersion
in nature. The last class must needs have a reflex or parasite
faith; not a sight of realities, but an instinctive reliance on the
seers and believers of realities. The manners and thoughts of
believers astonish them and convince them that these have seen
something which is hid from themselves. But their sensual habit
would fix the believer to his last position, whilst he as inevitably
advances; and presently the unbeliever, for love of belief, burns
the believer.
Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable,
fantastic, atheistic, and really men of no account. The spiritualist
finds himself driven to express his faith by a series of
skepticisms. Charitable souls come with their projects and ask his
co-operation. How can he hesitate? It is the rule of mere comity and
courtesy to agree where you can, and to turn your sentence with
something auspicious, and not freezing and sinister. But he is
forced to say, "O, these things will be as they must be: what can
you do? These particular griefs and crimes are the foliage and fruit
of such trees as we see growing. It is vain to complain of the leaf or
the berry; cut it off, it will bear another just as bad. You must
begin your cure lower down." The generosities of the day prove an
intractable element for him. The people's questions are not his; their
methods are not his; and against all the dictates of good nature he is
driven to say he has no pleasure in them.
Even the doctrines dear to the hope of man, of the divine Providence
and of the immortality of the soul, his neighbors can not put the
statement so that he shall affirm it. But he denies out of more faith,
and not less. He denies out of honesty. He had rather stand charged
with the imbecility of skepticism, than with untruth. I believe, he
says, in the moral design of the universe; it exists hospitably for
the weal of souls; but your dogmas seem to me caricatures: why
should I make believe them? Will any say, This is cold and infidel?
The wise and magnanimous will not say so. They will exult in his
far-sighted good-will that can abandon to the adversary all the ground
of tradition and common belief, without losing a jot of strength. It
sees to the end of all transgression. George Fox saw that there was
"an ocean of darkness and death; but withal an infinite ocean of light
and love which flowed over that of darkness."
The final solution in which skepticism is lost, is in the moral
sentiment, which never forfeits its supremacy. All moods may be safely
tried, and their weight allowed to all objections: the moral sentiment
as easily outweighs them all, as any one. This is the drop which
balances the sea. I play with the miscellany of facts, and take
those superficial views which we call skepticism; but I know that they
will presently appear to me in that order which makes skepticism
impossible. A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of
the universe; that the masses of nature do undulate and flow.
This faith avails to the whole emergency of life and objects. The
world is saturated with deity and with law. He is content with just
and unjust, with sots and fools, with the triumph of folly and
fraud. He can behold with serenity the yawning gulf between the
ambition of man and his power of performance, between the demand and
supply of power, which makes the tragedy of all souls.
Charles Fourier announced that "the attractions of man are
proportioned to his destinies"; in other words, that every desire
predicts its own satisfaction. Yet all experience exhibits the reverse
of this; the incompetency of power is the universal grief of young and
ardent minds. They accuse the divine Providence of a certain
parsimony. It has shown the heaven and earth to every child and filled
him with a desire for the whole; a desire raging, infinite; a
hunger, as of space to be filled with planets; a cry of famine, as
of devils for souls. Then for the satisfaction,- to each man is
administered a single drop, a bead of dew of vital power, per day,-
a cup as large as space, and one drop of the water of life in it. Each
man woke in the morning with an appetite that could eat the solar
system like a cake; a spirit for action and passion without bounds; he
could lay his hand on the morning star; he could try conclusions
with gravitation or chemistry; but, on the first motion to prove his
strength,- hands, feet, senses, gave way and would not serve him. He
was an emperor deserted by his states, and left to whistle by himself,
or thrust into a mob of emperors, all whistling: and still the
sirens sang, "The attractions are proportioned to the destinies." In
every house, in the heart of each maiden and of each boy, in the
soul of the soaring saint, this chasm is found,- between the largest
promise of ideal power, and the shabby experience.
The expansive nature of truth comes to our succor, elastic, not to
be surrounded. Man helps himself by larger generalizations. The lesson
of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and
the centuries say, against the hours; to resist the usurpation of
particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense. Things seem to
say one thing, and say the reverse. The appearance is immoral; the
result is moral. Things seem to tend downward, to justify despondency,
to promote rogues, to defeat the just; and by knaves as by martyrs the
just cause is carried forward. Although knaves win in every
political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from
the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of
criminals, as fast as the government is changed, and the march of
civilization is a train of felonies,- yet, general ends are somehow
answered. We see, now, events forced on which seem to retard or
retrograde the civility of ages. But the world-spirit is a good
swimmer, and storms and waves cannot drown him. He snaps his finger at
laws: and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and
poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil
agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency
irresistibly streams.
Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and
fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was
wont to reverence without losing his reverence; let him learn that
he is here, not to work but to be worked upon; and that, though
abyss open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at
last contained in the Eternal Cause:-

"If my bark sink, 'tis to another sea."
SHAKESPEARE
SHAKESPEARE
or, The Poet

GREAT MEN are more distinguished by range and tent than by
originality. If we require the originality which consists in
weaving, like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding
clay and making bricks and building the house; no great men are
original. Nor does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other
men. The hero is in the press of knights and the thick of events;
and seeing what men want and sharing their desire, he adds the needful
length of sight and of arm, to come at the desired point. The greatest
genius is the most indebted man. A poet is no rattle-brain, saying
what comes uppermost, and, because he says every thing, saying at last
something good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There
is nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and
sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions and pointed
with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his
times.
The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not
have any individual great, except through the general. There is no
choice to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning
and say, "I am full of life, I will go to sea and find an Antarctic
continent: to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany
and find a new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I
foresee a new mechanic power": no, but he finds himself in the river
of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities
of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one
way, and their hands all point in the direction in which he should go.
The Church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out
the advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed
by her chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him,
by trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds
two counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the
place of production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a
railroad. Every master has found his materials collected, and his
power lay in his sympathy with his people and in his love of the
materials he wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a
compensation for the shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The
world has brought him thus far on his way. The human race has gone out
before him, sunk the hills, filled the hollows and bridged the rivers.
Men, nations, poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and
he enters into their labors. Choose any other thing, out of the line
of tendency, out of the national feeling and history, and he would
have all to do for himself: his powers would be expended in the
first preparations. Great genial power, one would almost say, consists
in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in
letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass
unobstructed through the mind.
Shakespeare's youth fell in a time when the English people were
importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily
at political allusions and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans, a
growing and energetic party, and the religious among the Anglican
church, would suppress them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards,
houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs
were the ready theatres of strolling players. The people had tasted
this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress newspapers now,-
no, not by the strongest party,- neither then could king, prelate,
or puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ which was ballad, epic,
newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch and library, at the same time.
Probably king, prelate and puritan, all found their own account in it.
It had become, by all causes, a national interest,- by no means
conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of treating
it in an English history,- but not a whit less considerable because it
was cheap and of no account, like a baker's-shop. The best proof of
its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this
field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene, Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood,
Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher.
The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the
first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in
idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the
case of Shakespeare there is much more. At the time when he left
Stratford and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays of all
dates and writers existed in manuscript and were in turn produced on
the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy, which the audience will bear
hearing some part of, every week; the Death of Julius Caesar, and
other stories out of Plutarch, which they never tire of; a shelf
full of English history, from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur,
down to the royal Henries, which men hear eagerly; and a string of
doleful tragedies, merry Italian tales and Spanish voyages, which
all the London 'prentices know. All the mass has been treated, with
more or less skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has the
soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now no longer possible to say
who wrote them first. They have been the property of the Theatre so
long, and so many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered them,
inserting a speech or a whole scene, or adding a song, that no man can
any longer claim copyright in this work of numbers. Happily, no man
wishes to. They are not yet desired in that way. We have few
readers, many spectators and hearers. They had best lie where they
are.
Shakespeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old
plays waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried.
Had the prestige which hedges about a modern tragedy existed,
nothing could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living
England circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body
which he wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a
ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again,
may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the
people, supplies a foundation for his edifice, and in furnishing so
much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure and in full strength
for the audacities of his imagination. In short, the poet owes to
his legend what sculpture owed to the temple. Sculpture in Egypt and
in Greece grew up in subordination to architecture. It was the
ornament of the temple wall: at first a rude relief carved on
pediments, then the relief became bolder and a head or arm was
projected from the wall; the groups being still arranged with
reference to the building, which serves also as a frame to hold the
figures; and when at last the greatest freedom of style and
treatment was reached, the prevailing genius of architecture still
enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As soon as
the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the temple
or palace, the art began to decline: freak, extravagance and
exhibition took the place of the old temperance. This balance-wheel,
which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irritability of
poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which the
people were already wonted, and which had a certain excellence which
no single genius, however extraordinary, could hope to create.
In point of fact it appears that Shakespeare did owe debts in all
directions, and was able to use whatever he found; and the amount of
indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's laborious computations in
regard to the First, Second and Third parts of Henry VI, in which,
"out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding
Shakespeare, 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his
predecessors, and 1899 were entirely his own." And the proceeding
investigation hardly leaves a single drama of his absolute
invention. Malone's sentence is an important piece of external
history. In Henry VIII I think I see plainly the cropping out of the
original rock on which his own finer stratum was laid. The first
play was written by a superior, thoughtful man, with a vicious ear.
I can mark his lines, and know well their cadence. See Wolsey's
soliloquy, and the following scene with Cromwell, where instead of the
metre of Shakespeare, whose secret is that the thought constructs
the tune, so that reading for the sense will best bring out the
rhythm,- here the lines are constructed on a given tune, and the verse
has even a trace of pulpit eloquence. But the play contains through
all its length unmistakable traits of Shakespeare's hand, and some
passages, as the account of the coronation, are like autographs.
What is odd, the compliment to Queen Elizabeth is in the bad rhythm.
Shakespeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any
invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his
resources; and, at that day, our petulant demand for originality was
not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The
universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet who
appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light
which is any where radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower
of sentiment it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he
comes to value his memory equally with his invention. He is
therefore little solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived;
whether through translation, whether through tradition, whether by
travel in distant countries, whether by inspiration; from whatever
source, they are equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he
borrows very near home. Other men say wise things as well as he;
only they say a good many foolish things, and do not know when they
have spoken wisely. He knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts
it in high place, wherever he finds it. Such is the happy position
of Homer perhaps; of Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that all wit was
their wit. And they are librarians and historiographers, as well as
poets. Each romancer was heir and dispenser of all the hundred tales
of the world,-

"Presenting Thebes' and Pelops' line
And the tale of Troy divine."

The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature;
and more recently not only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to
him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large
unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence
which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower.
Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgate and
Caxton,*(30) from Guido di Colonna, whose Latin romance of the
Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Dares Phrygius, Ovid and
Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio and the Provencal poets are his
benefactors: the Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious translation
from William of Lorris and John of Meung: Troilus and Creseide, from
Lollius of Urbino: The Cock and the Fox, from the Lais of Marie: The
House of Fame, from the French or Italian: and poor Gower he uses as
if he were only a brick-kiln or stone-quarry out of which to build his
house. He steals by this apology,- that what he takes has no worth
where he finds it and the greatest where he leaves it. It has come
to be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man having once
shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth
to steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the
property of him who can entertain it and of him who can adequately
place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts;
but as soon as we have learned what to do with them they become our
own.
Thus all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective.
The learned member of the legislature, at Westminster or at
Washington, speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the
constituency, and the now invisible channels by which the senator is
made aware of their wishes; the crowd of practical and knowing men,
who, by correspondence or conversation, are feeding him with evidence,
anecdotes and estimates, and it will bereave his fine attitude and
resistance of something of their impressiveness. As Sir Robert Peel
and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke and Rousseau think, for thousands;
and so there were fountains all around Homer, Menu, Saadi, or
Milton, from which they drew; friends, lovers, books, traditions,
proverbs,- all perished- which, if seen, would go to reduce the
wonder. Did the bard speak with authority? Did he feel himself
overmatched by any companion? The appeal is to the consciousness of
the writer. Is there at last in his breast a Delphi whereof to ask
concerning any thought or thing, whether it be verily so, yea or
nay? and to have answer, and to rely on that? All the debts which such
a man could contract to other wit would never disturb his
consciousness of originality; for the ministrations of books and of
other minds are a whiff of smoke to that most private reality with
which he has conversed.
It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius in the
world, was no man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a
thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English Bible
is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English
language. But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but
centuries and churches brought it to perfection. There never was a
time when there was not some translation existing. The Liturgy,
admired for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of
ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the
Catholic church,- these collected, too, in long periods, from the
prayers and meditations of every saint and sacred writer all over
the world. Grotius makes the like remark in respect to the Lord's
Prayer, that the single clauses of which it is composed were already
in use in the time of Christ, in the Rabbinical forms. He picked out
the grains of gold. The nervous language of the Common Law, the
impressive forms of our courts and the precision and substantial truth
of the legal distinctions, are the contribution of all the
sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived in the countries where
these laws govern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence
by being translation on translation. There never was a time when there
was none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and
all others successively picked out and thrown away. Something like the
same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these
books. The world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas, Aesop's
Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish
Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men. In the composition of such
works the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter,
the merchant, the farmer, the fop, all think for us. Every book
supplies its time with one good word; every municipal law, every
trade, every folly of the day; and the generic catholic genius who
is not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the originality
of all, stands with the next age as the recorder and embodiment of his
own.
We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the
Shakespeare Society, for ascertaining the steps of the English
drama, from the Mysteries celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and
the final detachment from the church, and the completion of secular
plays, from Ferrex and Porrex, and Gammer Gurton's Needle, down to the
possession of the stage by the very pieces which Shakespeare
altered, remodelled and finally made his own. Elated with success
and piqued by the growing interest of the problem, they have left no
book-stall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file of old
yellow accounts to decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope
to discover whether the boy Shakespeare poached or not, whether he
held horses at the theatre door, whether he kept school, and why he
left in his will only his second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.
There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing age
mischooses the object on which all candles shine and all eyes are
turned; the care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen
Elizabeth and King James, and the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs and
Buckinghams; and lets pass without a single valuable note the
founder of another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty
to be remembered,- the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the
inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the foremost people
of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to
receive this and not another bias. A popular player;- nobody suspected
he was the poet of the human race; and the secret was kept as
faithfully from poets and intellectual men as from courtiers and
frivolous people. Bacon, who took the inventory of the human
understanding for his times, never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson,
though we have strained his few words of regard and panegyric, had
no suspicion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he was
attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has conceded to him
generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question, the better poet
of the two.
If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb,
Shakespeare's time should be capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry
Wotton was born four years after Shakespeare, and died twenty-three
years after him; and I find, among his correspondents and
acquaintances, the following persons: Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon,
Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter
Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham
Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton, John Pym, John Hales, Kepler,
Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Arminius; with all of whom
exists some token of his having communicated, without enumerating many
others whom doubtless he saw,- Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont,
Massinger, the two Herberts, Marlow, Chapman and the rest. Since the
constellation of great men who appeared in Greece in the time of
Pericles, there was never any such society;- yet their genius failed
them to find out the best head in the universe. Our poet's mask was
impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain near. It took a century to
make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed, after his
death, did any criticism which we think adequate begin to appear. It
was not possible to write the history of Shakespeare till now; for
he is the father of German literature: it was with the introduction of
Shakespeare into German, by Lessing, and the translation of his
works by Wieland and Schlegel, that the rapid burst of German
literature was most intimately connected. It was not until the
nineteenth century, whose speculative genius is a sort of living
Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet could find such wondering
readers.*(31) Now, literature, philosophy and thought are
Shakespearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we
do not see. Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge
and Goethe are the only critics who have expressed our convictions
with any adequate fidelity: but there is in all cultivated minds a
silent appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, which, like
Christianity, qualifies the period.
The Shakespeare Society have inquired in all directions,
advertised the missing facts, offered money for any information that
will lead to proof,- and with what result? Beside some important
illustration of the history of the English stage, to which I have
adverted, they have gleaned a few facts touching the property, and
dealings in regard to property, of the poet. It appears that from year
to year he owned a larger share in the Blackfriars' Theatre: its
wardrobe and other appurtenances were his: that he bought an estate in
his native village with his earnings as writer and shareholder; that
he lived in the best house in Stratford; was intrusted by his
neighbors with their commissions in London, as of borrowing money, and
the like; that he was a veritable farmer. About the time when he was
writing Macbeth, he sues Philip Rogers, in the borough-court of
Stratford, for thirty-five shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to
him at different times; and in all respects appears as a good husband,
with no reputation for eccentricity or excess. He was a good-natured
sort of man, an actor and shareholder in the theatre, not in any
striking manner distinguished from other actors and managers. I
admit the importance of this information. It was well worth the
pains that have been taken to procure it.
But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these
researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite
invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. We
are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of
parentage, birth, birth-place, schooling, school-mates, earning of
money, marriage, publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we
have come to an end of this gossip, no ray of relation appears between
it and the goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped at random
into the "Modern Plutarch," and read any other life there, it would
have fitted the poems as well. It is the essence of poetry to
spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to
abolish the past and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce and
Collier have wasted their oil. The famed theatres, Covent Garden,
Drury Lane, the Park and Tremont have vainly assisted. Betterton,
Garrick, Kemble, Kean and Macready dedicate their lives to this
genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey and express. The genius
knows them not. The recitation begins; one golden word leaps out
immortal from all this painted pedantry and sweetly torments us with
invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I remember I went once to
see the Hamlet of a famed performer, the pride of the English stage;
and all I then heard and all I now remember of the tragedian was
that in which the tragedian had no part; simply Hamlet's question to
the ghost:-

"What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?"

That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the
world's dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly
reduces the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks
of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the greenroom. Can any
biography shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer
Night's Dream admits me? Did Shakespeare confide to any notary or
parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate in Stratford, the genesis
of that delicate creation? The forest of Arden, the nimble air of
Scone Castle, the moonlight of Portia's villa, "the antres vast and
desarts idle" of Othello's captivity,- where is the third cousin, or
grand-nephew, the chancellor's file of accounts, or private letter,
that has kept one word of those transcendent secrets? In fine, in this
drama, as in all great works of art,- in the Cyclopean architecture of
Egypt and India, in the Phidian sculpture, the Gothic minsters, the
Italian painting, the Ballads of Spain and Scotland,- the Genius draws
up the ladder after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven,
and gives way to a new age, which sees the works and asks in vain
for a history.
Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can
tell nothing, except to the Shakespeare in us, that is, to our most
apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his
tripod and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique
documents extricated, analyzed and compared by the assiduous Dyce
and Collier, and now read one of these skyey sentences,- aerolites,-
which seem to have fallen out of heaven, and which not your experience
but the man within the breast has accepted as words of fate, and
tell me if they match; if the former account in any manner for the
latter; or which gives the most historical insight into the man.
Hence, though our external history is so meagre, yet, with
Shakespeare for biographer, instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really
the information which is material; that which describes character
and fortune, that which, if we were about to meet the man and deal
with him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded
convictions on those questions which knock for answer at every heart,-
on life and death, on love, on wealth and poverty, on the prizes of
life and the ways whereby we come at them; on the characters of men,
and the influences, occult and open, which affect their fortunes;
and on those mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy our science
and which yet interweave their malice and their gift in our
brightest hours. Who ever read the volume of the Sonnets without
finding that the poet had there revealed, under masks that are no
masks to the intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love; the
confusion of sentiments in the most susceptible, and, at the same
time, the most intellectual of men? What trait of his private mind has
he hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his ample pictures of the
gentleman and the king, what forms and humanities pleased him; his
delight in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful
giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let Antonio the merchant answer for
his great heart. So far from Shakespeare's being the least known, he
is the one person, in all modern history, known to us. What point of
morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of
taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he
not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, or
district of man's work, has he not remembered? What king has he not
taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found
him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage
has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the
rudeness of his behavior?
Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakespeare
valuable that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is
falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly as these
critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He was
a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images,
which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been less,
we should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how
good a dramatist he was,- and he is the best in the world. But it
turns out that what he has to say is of that weight as to withdraw
some attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose
history is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose,
into songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the
occasion which gave the saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or
of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial compared with the
universality of its application. So it fares with the wise Shakespeare
and his book of life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music: he
wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of
England and Europe; the father of the man in America; he drew the man,
and described the day, and what is done in it: he read the hearts of
men and women, their probity, and their second thought and wiles;
the wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which virtues and vices
slide into their contraries: he could divide the mother's part from
the father's part in the face of the child, or draw the fine
demarcations of freedom and of fate: he knew the laws of repression
which make the police of nature: and all the sweets and all the
terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the
landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life
sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic, out of notice. 'Tis like making a
question concerning the paper on which a king's message is written.
Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he
is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others,
conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain
and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare's. We are still out of
doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique.
No man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety
compatible with an individual self,- the subtilest of authors, and
only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of
life is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He
clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments as if
they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have
left such distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in
language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him
into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent
humanity co-ordinates all his faculties. Give a man of talents a story
to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He has certain
observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental prominence,
and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part and starves
that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his
fitness and strength. But Shakespeare has no peculiarity, no
importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities; no
cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no
discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small
subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong,
as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without
effort and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and
likes as well to do the one as the other. This makes that equality
of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so
incessant that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other
readers.
This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of
things into music and verse, makes him the type of the poet and has
added a new problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws him into
natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as
announcing new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his
poetry without loss or blur: he could paint the fine with precision,
the great with compass, the tragic and the comic indifferently and
without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution
into minute details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a
dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature's,
will bear the scrutiny of the solar microscope.
In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of
production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the
power to make one picture. Daguerre learned how to let one flower etch
its image on his plate of iodine, and then proceeds at leisure to etch
a million. There are always objects; but there was never
representation. Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let
the world of figures sit for their portraits. No recipe can be given
for the making of a Shakespeare; but the possibility of the
translation of things into song is demonstrated.
His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. The sonnets, though
their excellence is lost in the splendor of the dramas, are as
inimitable as they; and it is not a merit of lines, but a total
merit of the piece; like the tone of voice of some incomparable
person, so is this a speech of poetic beings, and any clause as
unproducible now as a whole poem.
Though the speeches in the plays, and single lines, have a beauty
which tempts the ear to pause on them for their euphuism, yet the
sentence is so loaded with meaning and so linked with its foregoers
and followers, that the logician is satisfied. His means are as
admirable as his ends; every subordinate invention, by which he
helps himself to connect some irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too.
He is not reduced to dismount and walk because his horses are
running off with him in some distant direction: he always rides.
The finest poetry was first experience; but the thought has suffered
a transformation since it was an experience. Cultivated men often
attain a good degree of skill in writing verses; but it is easy to
read, through their poems, their personal history: any one
acquainted with the parties can name every figure; this is Andrew
and that is Rachel. The sense thus remains prosaic. It is a
caterpillar with wings, and not yet a butterfly. In the poet's mind
the fact has gone quite over into the new element of thought, and
has lost all that is exuvial. This generosity abides with Shakespeare.
We say, from the truth and closeness of his pictures, that he knows
the lesson by heart. Yet there is not a trace of egotism.
One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his
cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,- for beauty is his
aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation but for its grace: he
delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that
sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds
over the universe. Epicurus relates that poetry hath such charms
that a lover might forsake his mistress to partake of them. And the
true bards have been noted for their firm and cheerful temper. Homer
lies in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi says, "It was
rumored abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with
repentance?" Not less sovereign and cheerful,- much more sovereign and
cheerful, is the tone of Shakespeare. His name suggests joy and
emancipation to the heart of men. If he should appear in any company
of human souls, who would not march in his troop? He touches nothing
that does not borrow health and longevity from his festal style.
And now, how stands the account of man with this bard and
benefactor, when, in solitude, shutting our ears to the reverberations
of his fame, we seek to strike the balance? Solitude has austere
lessons; it can teach us to spare both heroes and poets; and it weighs
Shakespeare also, and finds him to share the halfness and imperfection
of humanity.
Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendor of meaning that
plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had another use than
for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of the earth,
than for tillage and roads: that these things bore a second and
finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and
conveying in all their natural history a certain mute commentary on
human life. Shakespeare employed them as colors to compose his
picture. He rested in their beauty; and never took the step which
seemed inevitable to such genius, namely to explore the virtue which
resides in these symbols and imparts this power:- what is that which
they themselves say? He converted the elements which waited on his
command, into entertainments. He was master of the revels to
mankind. Is it not as if one should have, through majestic powers of
science, the comets given into his hand, or the planets and their
moons, and should draw them from their orbits to glare with the
municipal fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise in all towns,
"Very superior pyrotechny this evening"? Are the agents of nature, and
the power to understand them, worth no more than a street serenade, or
the breath of a cigar? One remembers again the trumpet-text in the
Koran,- "The heavens and the earth and all that is between them, think
ye we have created them in jest?" As long as the question is of talent
and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show. But when
the question is, to life and its materials and its auxiliaries, how
does he profit me? What does it signify? It is but a Twelfth Night, or
Midsummer-Night's Dream, or Winter Evening's Tale: what signifies
another picture more or less? The Egyptian verdict of the
Shakespeare Societies comes to mind; that he was a jovial actor and
manager. I can not marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable men
have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought; but this
man, in wide contrast. Had he been less, had he reached only the
common measure of great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes,
we might leave the fact in the twilight of human fate: but that this
man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger
subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity
some furlongs forward into Chaos,- that he should not be wise for
himself;- it must even go into the world's history that the best
poet led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for the
public amusement.
Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite, German and Swede,
beheld the same objects: they also saw through them that which was
contained. And to what purpose? The beauty straightway vanished;
they read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an obligation,
a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life became
ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim's progress, a probation, beleaguered round
with doleful histories of Adam's fall and curse behind us; with
doomsdays and purgatorial and penal fires before us; and the heart
of the seer and the heart of the listener sank in them.
It must be conceded that these are half-views of half-men. The world
still wants its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle,
with Shakespeare the player, nor shall grope in graves, with
Swedenborg the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act, with
equal inspiration. For knowledge will brighten the sunshine; right
is more beautiful than private affection; and love is compatible
with universal wisdom.
NAPOLEON
NAPOLEON
or, The Man of the World

AMONG the eminent persons of the nineteenth century, Bonaparte is
far the best known and the most powerful; and owes his predominance to
the fidelity with which he expresses the tone of thought and belief,
the aims of the masses of active and cultivated men. It is
Swedenborg's theory that every organ is made up of homogeneous
particles; or as it is sometimes expressed, every whole is made of
similars; that is, the lungs are composed of infinitely small lungs;
the liver, of infinitely small livers; the kidney, of little
kidneys, etc. Following this analogy, if any man is found to carry
with him the power and affections of vast numbers, if Napoleon is
France, if Napoleon is Europe, it is because the people whom he
sways are little Napoleons.
In our society there is a standing antagonism between the
conservative and the democratic classes; between those who have made
their fortunes, and the young and the poor who have fortunes to
make; between the interests of dead labor,- that is, the labor of
hands long ago still in the grave, which labor is now entombed in
money stocks, or in land and buildings owned by idle capitalists,- and
the interests of living labor, which seeks to possess itself of land
and buildings and money stocks. The first class is timid, selfish,
illiberal, hating innovation, and continually losing numbers by death.
The second class is selfish also, encroaching, bold, self-relying,
always outnumbering the other and recruiting its numbers every hour by
births. It desires to keep open every avenue to the competition of
all, and to multiply avenues: the class of business men in America, in
England, in France and throughout Europe; the class of industry and
skill. Napoleon is its representative. The instinct of active,
brave, able men, throughout the middle class everywhere, has pointed
out Napoleon as the incarnate Democrat. He had their virtues and their
vices; above all, he had their spirit or aim. That tendency is
material, pointing at a sensual success and employing the richest
and most various means to that end; conversant with mechanical powers,
highly intellectual, widely and accurately learned and skilful, but
subordinating all intellectual and spiritual forces into means to a
material success. To be the rich man, is the end. "God has granted,"
says the Koran, "to every people a prophet in its own tongue." Paris
and London and New York, the spirit of commerce, of money and material
power, were also to have their prophet; and Bonaparte was qualified
and sent.
Every one of the million readers of anecdotes or memoirs or lives of
Napoleon, delights in the page, because he studies in it his own
history. Napoleon is thoroughly modern, and, at the highest point of
his fortunes, has the very spirit of the newspapers. He is no
saint,- to use his own word, "no capuchin," and he is no hero, in
the high sense. The man in the street finds in him the qualities and
powers of other men in the street. He finds him, like himself, by
birth a citizen, who, by very intelligible merits, arrived at such a
commanding position that he could indulge all those tastes which the
common man possesses but is obliged to conceal and deny: good society,
good books, fast travelling, dress, dinners, servants without
number, personal weight, the execution of his ideas, the standing in
the attitude of a benefactor to all persons about him, the refined
enjoyments of pictures, statues, music, palaces and conventional
honors,- precisely what is agreeable to the heart of every man in
the nineteenth century, this powerful man possessed.
It is true that a man of Napoleon's truth of adaptation to the
mind of the masses around him, becomes not merely representative but
actually a monopolizer and usurper of other minds. Thus Mirabeau
plagiarized every good thought, every good word that was spoken in
France. Dumont relates that he sat in the gallery of the Convention
and heard Mirabeau make a speech. It struck Dumont that he could fit
it with a peroration, which he wrote in pencil immediately, and showed
it to Lord Elgin, who sat by him. Lord Elgin approved it, and
Dumont, in the evening, showed it to Mirabeau. Mirabeau read it,
pronounced it admirable, and declared he would incorporate it into his
harangue to-morrow, to the Assembly. "It is impossible," said
Dumont, "as, unfortunately, I have shown it to Lord Elgin." "If you
have shown it to Lord Elgin and to fifty persons beside, I shall still
speak it to-morrow": and he did speak it, with much effect, at the
next day's session. For Mirabeau, with his overpowering personality,
felt that these things which his presence inspired were as much his
own as if he had said them, and that his adoption of them gave them
their weight. Much more absolute and centralizing was the successor to
Mirabeau's popularity and to much more than his predominance in
France. Indeed, a man of Napoleon's stamp almost ceases to have a
private speech and opinion. He is so largely receptive, and is so
placed, that he comes to be a bureau for all the intelligence, wit and
power of the age and country. He gains the battle; he makes the
code; he makes the system of weights and measures; he levels the Alps;
he builds the road. All distinguished engineers, savans, statists,
report to him: so likewise do all good heads in every kind: he
adopts the best measures, sets his stamp on them, and not these alone,
but on every happy and memorable expression. Every sentence spoken
by Napoleon and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it
is the sense of France.
Bonaparte was the idol of common men because he had in
transcendent degree the qualities and powers of common men. There is a
certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of
politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy. Bonaparte wrought,
in common with that great class he represented, for power and wealth,-
but Bonaparte, specially, without any scruple as to the means. All the
sentiments which embarrass men's pursuit of these objects, he set
aside. The sentiments were for women and children. Fontanes, in
1804, expressed Napoleon's own sense, when in behalf of the Senate
he addressed him,- "Sire, the desire of perfection is the worst
disease that ever afflicted the human mind." The advocates of
liberty and of progress are "ideologists";- a word of contempt often
in his mouth;- "Necker is an ideologist": "Lafayette is an
ideologist."
An Italian proverb, too well known, declares that "if you would
succeed, you must not be too good." It is an advantage, within certain
limits, to have renounced the dominion of the sentiments of piety,
gratitude and generosity; since what was an impassable bar to us,
and still is to others, becomes a convenient weapon for our
purposes; just as the river which was a formidable barrier, winter
transforms into the smoothest of roads.
Napoleon renounced, once for all, sentiments and affections, and
would help himself with his hands and his head. With him is no miracle
and no magic. He is a worker in brass, in iron, in wood, in earth,
in roads, in buildings, in money and in troops, and a very
consistent and wise master-workman. He is never weak and literary, but
acts with the solidity and the precision of natural agents. He has not
lost his native sense and sympathy with things. Men give way before
such a man, as before natural events. To be sure there are men
enough who are immersed in things, as farmers, smiths, sailors and
mechanics generally; and we know how real and solid such men appear in
the presence of scholars and grammarians: but these men ordinarily
lack the power of arrangement, and are like hands without a head.
But Bonaparte superadded to this mineral and animal force, insight and
generalization, so that men saw in him combined the natural and the
intellectual power, as if the sea and land had taken flesh and begun
to cipher. Therefore the land and sea seem to presuppose him. He
came unto his own and they received him. This ciphering operative
knows what he is working with and what is the product. He knew the
properties of gold and iron, of wheels and ships, of troops and
diplomatists, and required that each should do after its kind.
The art of war was the game in which he exerted his arithmetic. It
consisted, according to him, in having always more forces than the
enemy, on the point where the enemy is attacked, or where he
attacks: and his whole talent is strained by endless manoeuvre and
evolution, to march always on the enemy at an angle, and destroy his
forces in detail. It is obvious that a very small force, skilfully and
rapidly manoeuvring so as always to bring two men against one at the
point of engagement, will be an overmatch for a much larger body of
men.
The times, his constitution and his early circumstances combined
to develop this pattern democrat. He had the virtues of his class
and the conditions for their activity. That common-sense which no
sooner respects any end than it finds the means to effect it; the
delight in the use of means; in the choice, simplification and
combining of means; the directness and thoroughness of his work; the
prudence with which all was seen and the energy with which all was
done, make him the natural organ and head of what I may almost call,
from its extent, the modern party.
Nature must have far the greatest share in every success, and so
in his. Such a man was wanted, and such a man was born; a man of stone
and iron, capable of sitting on horseback sixteen or seventeen
hours, of going many days together without rest or food except by
snatches, and with the speed and spring of a tiger in action; a man
not embarrassed by any scruples; compact, instant, selfish, prudent,
and of a perception which did not suffer itself to be baulked or
misled by any pretences of others, or any superstition or any heat
or haste of his own. "My hand of iron," he said, "was not at the
extremity of my arm, it was immediately connected with my head." He
respected the power of nature and fortune, and ascribed to it his
superiority, instead of valuing himself, like inferior men, on his
opinionativeness, and waging war with nature. His favorite rhetoric
lay in allusion to his star; and he pleased himself, as well as the
people, when he styled himself the "Child of Destiny." "They charge
me," he said, "with the commission of great crimes: men of my stamp do
not commit crimes. Nothing has been more simple than my elevation,
'tis in vain to ascribe it to intrigue or crime; it was owing to the
peculiarity of the times and to my reputation of having fought well
against the enemies of my country. I have always marched with the
opinion of great masses and with events. Of what use then would crimes
be to me?" Again he said, speaking of his son, "My son can not replace
me; I could not replace myself. I am the creature of circumstances."
He had a directness of action never before combined with so much
comprehension. He is a realist, terrific to all talkers and confused
truth-obscuring persons. He sees where the matter hinges, throws
himself on the precise point of resistance, and slights all other
considerations. He is strong in the right manner, namely by insight.
He never blundered into victory, but won his battles in his head
before he won them on the field. His principal means are in himself.
He asks counsel of no other. In 1796 he writes to the Directory: "I
have conducted the campaign without consulting any one. I should
have done no good if I had been under the necessity of conforming to
the notions of another person. I have gained some advantages over
superior forces and when totally destitute of every thing, because, in
the persuasion that your confidence was reposed in me, my actions were
as prompt as my thoughts."
History is full, down to this day, of the imbecility of kings and
governors. They are a class of persons much to be pitied, for they
know not what they should do. The weavers strike for bread, and the
king and his ministers, knowing not what to do, meet them with
bayonets. But Napoleon understood his business. Here was a man who
in each moment and emergency knew what to do next. It is an immense
comfort and refreshment to the spirits, not only of kings, but of
citizens. Few men have any next; they live from hand to mouth, without
plan, and are ever at the end of their line, and after each action
wait for an impulse from abroad. Napoleon had been the first man of
the world, if his ends had been purely public. As he is, he inspires
confidence and vigor by the extraordinary unity of his action. He is
firm, sure, self-denying, self-postponing, sacrificing every thing,-
money, troops, generals, and his own safety also, to his aim; not
misled, like common adventurers, by the splendor of his own means.
"Incidents ought not to govern policy," he said, "but policy,
incidents." "To be hurried away by every event is to have no political
system at all." His victories were only so many doors, and he never
for a moment lost sight of his way onward, in the dazzle and uproar of
the present circumstance. He knew what to do, and he flew to his mark.
He would shorten a straight line to come at his object. Horrible
anecdotes may no doubt be collected from his history, of the price
at which he bought his successes; but he must not therefore be set
down as cruel, but only as one who knew no impediment to his will; not
bloodthirsty, not cruel,- but woe to what thing or person stood in his
way! Not bloodthirsty, but not sparing of blood,- and pitiless. He saw
only the object: the obstacle must give way. "Sire, General Clarke can
not combine with General Junot, for the dreadful fire of the
Austrian battery."- "Let him carry the battery."- "Sire, every
regiment that approaches the heavy artillery is sacrificed: Sire, what
orders?"- "Forward, forward!" Seruzier, a colonel of artillery, gives,
in his "Military Memoirs," the following sketch of a scene after the
battle of Austerlitz.- "At the moment in which the Russian army was
making its retreat, painfully, but in good order, on the ice of the
lake, the Emperor Napoleon came riding at full speed toward the
artillery. 'You are losing time,' he cried; 'fire upon those masses;
they must be engulfed: fire upon the ice!' The order remained
unexecuted for ten minutes. In vain several officers and myself were
placed on the slope of a hill to produce the effect: their balls and
mine rolled upon the ice without breaking it up. Seeing that, I
tried a simple method of elevating light howitzers. The almost
perpendicular fall of the heavy projectiles produced the desired
effect. My method was immediately followed by the adjoining batteries,
and in less than no time we buried" some "thousands of Russians and
Austrians under the waters of the lake."
In the plenitude of his resources, every obstacle seemed to
vanish. "There shall be no Alps," he said; and he built his perfect
roads, climbing by graded galleries their steepest precipices, until
Italy was as open to Paris as any town in France. He laid his bones
to, and wrought for his crown. Having decided what was to be done,
he did that with might and main. He put out all his strength. He
risked every thing and spared nothing, neither ammunition, nor
money, nor troops, nor generals, nor himself.
We like to see every thing do its office after its kind, whether
it be a milch-cow or a rattlesnake; and if fighting be the best mode
of adjusting national differences, (as large majorities of men seem to
agree,) certainly Bonaparte was right in making it thorough. The grand
principle of war, he said, was that an army ought always to be
ready, by day and by night and at all hours, to make all the
resistance it is capable of making. He never economized his
ammunition, but, on a hostile position, rained a torrent of iron,-
shells, balls, grape-shot,- to annihilate all defence. On any point of
resistance he concentrated squadron on squadron in overwhelming
numbers until it was swept out of existence. To a regiment of
horse-chasseurs at Lobenstein, two days before the battle of Jena,
Napoleon said, "My lads, you must not fear death; when soldiers
brave death, they drive him into the enemy's ranks." In the fury of
assault, he no more spared himself. He went to the edge of his
possibility. It is plain that in Italy he did what he could, and all
that he could. He came, several times, within an inch of ruin; and his
own person was all but lost. He was flung into the marsh at Arcola.
The Austrians were between him and his troops, in the melee, and he
was brought off with desperate efforts. At Lonato, and at other
places, he was on the point of being taken prisoner. He fought sixty
battles. He had never enough. Each victory was a new weapon. "My power
would fall, were I not to support it by new achievements. Conquest has
made me what I am, and conquest must maintain me." He felt, with every
wise man, that as much life is needed for conservation as for
creation. We are always in peril, always in a bad plight, just on
the edge of destruction and only to be saved by invention and courage.
This vigor was guarded and tempered by the coldest prudence and
punctuality. A thunderbolt in the attack, he was found invulnerable in
his intrenchments. His very attack was never the inspiration of
courage, but the result of calculation. His idea of the best defence
consists in being still the attacking party. "My ambition," he says,
"was great, but was of a cold nature." In one of his conversations
with Las Cases, he remarked, "As to moral courage, I have rarely met
with the two-o'clock-in-the-morning kind: I mean unprepared courage;
that which is necessary on an unexpected occasion, and which, in spite
of the most unforeseen events, leaves full freedom of judgment and
decision": and he did not hesitate to declare that he was himself
eminently endowed with this two-o'clock-in-the-morning courage, and
that he had met with few persons equal to himself in this respect.
Every thing depended on the nicety of his combinations, and the
stars were not more punctual than his arithmetic. His personal
attention descended to the smallest particulars. "At Montebello, I
ordered Kellermann to attack with eight hundred horse, and with
these he separated the six thousand Hungarian grenadiers, before the
very eyes of the Austrian cavalry. This cavalry was half a league
off and required a quarter of an hour to arrive on the field of
action, and I have observed that it is always these quarters of an
hour that decide the fate of a battle." "Before he fought a battle,
Bonaparte thought little about what he should do in case of success,
but a great deal about what he should do in case of a reverse of
fortune." The same prudence and good sense mark all his behavior.
His instructions to his secretary at the Tuileries are worth
remembering. "During the night, enter my chamber as seldom as
possible. Do not awake me when you have any good news to
communicate; with that there is no hurry. But when you bring bad news,
rouse me instantly, for then there is not a moment to be lost." It was
a whimsical economy of the same kind which dictated his practice, when
general in Italy, in regard to his burdensome correspondence. He
directed Bourrienne to leave all letters unopened for three weeks, and
then observed with satisfaction how large a part of the correspondence
had thus disposed of itself and no longer required an answer. His
achievement of business was immense, and enlarges the known powers
of man. There have been many working kings, from Ulysses to William of
Orange, but none who accomplished a tithe of this man's performance.
To these gifts of nature, Napoleon added the advantage of having
been born to a private and humble fortune. In his later days he had
the weakness of wishing to add to his crowns and badges the
prescription of aristocracy; but he knew his debt to his austere
education, and made no secret of his contempt for the born kings,
and for "the hereditary asses," as he coarsely styled the Bourbons. He
said that "in their exile they had learned nothing, and forgot
nothing." Bonaparte had passed through all the degrees of military
service, but also was citizen before he was emperor, and so has the
key to citizenship. His remarks and estimates discover the information
and justness of measurement of the middle class. Those who had to deal
with him found that he was not to be imposed upon, but could cipher as
well as another man. This appears in all parts of his Memoirs,
dictated at St. Helena. When the expenses of the empress, of his
household, of his palaces, had accumulated great debts, Napoleon
examined the bills of the creditors himself, detected overcharges
and errors, and reduced the claims by considerable sums.
His grand weapon, namely the millions whom he directed, he owed to
the representative character which clothed him. He interests us as
he stands for France and for Europe; and he exists as captain and king
only as far as the Revolution, or the interest of the industrious
masses, found an organ and a leader in him. In the social interests,
he knew the meaning and value of labor, and threw himself naturally on
that side. I like an incident mentioned by one of his biographers at
St. Helena. "When walking with Mrs. Balcombe, some servants,
carrying heavy boxes, passed by on the road, and Mrs. Balcombe desired
them, in rather an angry tone, to keep back. Napoleon interfered,
saying 'Respect the burden, Madam.'" In the time of the empire he
directed attention to the improvement and embellishment of the markets
of the capital. "The market-place," he said, "is the Louvre of the
common people." The principal works that have survived him are his
magnificent roads. He filled the troops with his spirit, and a sort of
freedom and companionship grew up between him and them, which the
forms of his court never permitted between the officers and himself.
They performed, under his eye, that which no others could do. The best
document of his relation to his troops is the order of the day on
the morning of the battle of Austerlitz, in which Napoleon promises
the troops that he will keep his person out of reach of fire. This
declaration, which is the reverse of that ordinarily made by
generals and sovereigns on the eve of a battle, sufficiently
explains the devotion of the army to their leader.
But though there is in particulars this identity between Napoleon
and the mass of the people, his real strength lay in their
conviction that he was their representative in his genius and aims,
not only when he courted, but when he controlled, and even when he
decimated them by his conscriptions. He knew, as well as any Jacobin
in France, how to philosophize on liberty and equality; and when
allusion was made to the precious blood of centuries, which was
spilled by the killing of the Duc d'Enghien, he suggested, "Neither is
my blood ditchwater." The people felt that no longer the throne was
occupied and the land sucked of its nourishment, by a small class of
legitimates, secluded from all community with the children of the
soil, and holding the ideas and superstitions of a long-forgotten
state of society. Instead of that vampyre, a man of themselves held,
in the Tuileries, knowledge and ideas like their own, opening of
course to them and their children all places of power and trust. The
day of sleepy, selfish policy, ever narrowing the means and
opportunities of young men, was ended, and a day of expansion and
demand was come. A market for all the powers and productions of man
was opened; brilliant prizes glittered in the eyes of youth and
talent. The old, iron-bound, feudal France was changed into a young
Ohio or New York; and those who smarted under the immediate rigors
of the new monarch, pardoned them as the necessary severities of the
military system which had driven out the oppressor. And even when
the majority of the people had begun to ask whether they had really
gained any thing under the exhausting levies of men and money of the
new master, the whole talent of the country, in every rank and
kindred, took his part and defended him as its natural patron. In
1814, when advised to rely on the higher classes, Napoleon said to
those around him, "Gentlemen, in the situation in which I stand, my
only nobility is the rabble of the Faubourgs."
Napoleon met this natural expectation. The necessity of his position
required a hospitality to every sort of talent, and its appointment to
trusts; and his feeling went along with this policy. Like every
superior person, he undoubtedly felt a desire for men and compeers,
and a wish to measure his power with other masters, and an
impatience of fools and underlings. In Italy, he sought for men and
found none. "Good God!" he said, "how rare men are! There are eighteen
millions in Italy, and I have with difficulty found two,- Dandolo
and Melzi." In later years, with larger experience, his respect for
mankind was not increased. In a moment of bitterness he said to one of
his oldest friends, "Men deserve the contempt with which they
inspire me. I have only to put some gold-lace on the coat of my
virtuous republicans and they immediately become just what I wish
them." This impatience at levity was, however, an oblique tribute of
respect to those able persons who commanded his regard not only when
he found them friends and coadjutors but also when they resisted his
will. He could not confound Fox and Pitt, Carnot, Lafayette and
Bernadotte, with the danglers of his court; and in spite of the
detraction which his systematic egotism dictated toward the great
captains who conquered with and for him, ample acknowledgments are
made by him to Lannes, Duroc, Kleber, Dessaix, Massena, Murat, Ney and
Augereau. If he felt himself their patron and the founder of their
fortunes, as when he said, "I made my generals out of mud,"- he
could not hide his satisfaction in receiving from them a seconding and
support commensurate with the grandeur of his enterprise. In the
Russian campaign he was so much impressed by the courage and resources
of Marshal Ney, that he said, "I have two hundred millions in my
coffers, and I would give them all for Ney." The characters which he
has drawn of several of his marshals are discriminating, and though
they did not content the insatiable vanity of French officers, are
no doubt substantially just. And in fact every species of merit was
sought and advanced under his government. "I know," he said, "the
depth and draught of water of every one of my generals." Natural power
was sure to be well received at his court. Seventeen men in his time
were raised from common soldiers to the rank of king, marshal, duke,
or general; and the crosses of his Legion of Honor were given to
personal valor, and not to family connexion. "When soldiers have
been baptized in the fire of a battlefield, they have all one rank
in my eyes."
When a natural king becomes a titular king, every body is pleased
and satisfied. The Revolution entitled the strong populace of the
Faubourg St. Antoine, and every horse-boy and powder-monkey in the
army, to look on Napoleon as flesh of his flesh and the creature of
his party: but there is something in the success of grand talent which
enlists an universal sympathy. For in the prevalence of sense and
spirit over stupidity and malversation, all reasonable men have an
interest; and as intellectual beings we feel the air purified by the
electric shock, when material force is overthrown by intellectual
energies. As soon as we are removed out of the reach of local and
accidental partialities, Man feels that Napoleon fights for him; these
are honest victories; this strong steam-engine does our work. Whatever
appeals to the imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of
human ability, wonderfully encourages us and liberates us. This
capacious head, revolving and disposing sovereignly trains of affairs,
and animating such multitudes of agents; this eye, which looked
through Europe; this prompt invention; this inexhaustible resource:-
what events! what romantic pictures! what strange situations!- when
spying the Alps, by a sunset in the Sicilian sea; drawing up his
army for battle in sight of the Pyramids, and saying to his troops,
"From the tops of those pyramids, forty centuries look down on you";
fording the Red Sea; wading in the gulf of the Isthmus of Suez. On the
shore of Ptolemais, gigantic projects agitated him. "Had Acre
fallen, I should have changed the face of the world." His army, on the
night of the battle of Austerlitz, which was the anniversary of his
inauguration as Emperor, presented him with a bouquet of forty
standards taken in the fight. Perhaps it is a little puerile, the
pleasure he took in making these contrasts glaring; as when he pleased
himself with making kings wait in his antechambers, at Tilsit, at
Paris and at Erfurt.
We can not, in the universal imbecility, indecision and indolence of
men, sufficiently congratulate ourselves on this strong and ready
actor, who took occasion by the beard, and showed us how much may be
accomplished by the mere force of such virtues as all men possess in
less degrees; namely, by punctuality, by personal attention, by
courage and thoroughness. "The Austrians," he said, "do not know the
value of time." I should cite him, in his earlier years, as a model of
prudence. His power does not consist in any wild or extravagant force;
in any enthusiasm like Mahomet's, or singular power of persuasion; but
in the exercise of common-sense on each emergency, instead of
abiding by rules and customs. The lesson he teaches is that which
vigor always teaches;- that there is always room for it. To what heaps
of cowardly doubts is not that man's life an answer. When he
appeared it was the belief of all military men that there could be
nothing new in war; as it is the belief of men to-day that nothing new
can be undertaken in politics, or in church, or in letters, or in
trade, or in farming, or in our social manners and customs; and as
it is at all times the belief of society that the world is used up.
But Bonaparte knew better than society; and moreover knew that he knew
better. I think all men know better than they do; know that the
institutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles; but
they dare not trust their presentiments. Bonaparte relied on his own
sense, and did not care a bean for other people's. The world treated
his novelties just as it treats everybody's novelties,- made
infinite objection, mustered all the impediments; but he snapped his
finger at their objections. "What creates great difficulty," he
remarks, "in the profession of the land-commander, is the necessity of
feeding so many men and animals. If he allows himself to be guided
by the commissaries he will never stir, and all his expeditions will
fail." An example of his common-sense is what he says of the passage
of the Alps in winter, which all writers, one repeating after the
other, had described as impracticable. "The winter," says Napoleon,
"is not the most unfavorable season for the passage of lofty
mountains. The snow is then firm, the weather settled, and there is
nothing to fear from avalanches, the real and only danger to be
apprehended in the Alps. On these high mountains there are often
very fine days in December, of a dry cold, with extreme calmness in
the air." Read his account, too, of the way in which battles are
gained. "In all battles a moment occurs when the bravest troops, after
having made the greatest efforts, feel inclined to run. That terror
proceeds from a want of confidence in their own courage, and it only
requires a slight opportunity, a pretence, to restore confidence to
them. The art is, to give rise to the opportunity and to invent the
pretence. At Arcola I won the battle with twenty-five horsemen. I
seized that moment of lassitude, gave every man a trumpet, and
gained the day with this handful. You see that two armies are two
bodies which meet and endeavor to frighten each other; a moment of
panic occurs, and that moment must be turned to advantage. When a
man has been present in many actions, he distinguishes that moment
without difficulty: it is as easy as casting up an addition."
This deputy of the nineteenth century added to his gifts a
capacity for speculation on general topics. He delighted in running
through the range of practical, of literary and of abstract questions.
His opinion is always original and to the purpose. On the voyage to
Egypt he liked, after dinner, to fix on three or four persons to
support a proposition, and as many to oppose it. He gave a subject,
and the discussions turned on questions of religion, the different
kinds of government, and the art of war. One day he asked whether
the planets were inhabited? On another, what was the age of the world?
Then he proposed to consider the probability of the destruction of the
globe, either by water or by fire: at another time, the truth or
fallacy of presentiments, and the interpretation of dreams. He was
very fond of talking of religion. In 1806 he conversed with
Fournier, bishop of Montpellier, on matters of theology. There were
two points on which they could not agree, viz. that of hell, and
that of salvation out of the pale of the church. The Emperor told
Josephine that he disputed like a devil on these two points, on
which the bishop was inexorable. To the philosophers he readily
yielded all that was proved against religion as the work of men and
time, but he would not hear of materialism. One fine night, on deck,
amid a clatter of materialism, Bonaparte pointed to the stars, and
said, "You may talk as long as you please, gentlemen, but who made all
that?" He delighted in the conversation of men of science,
particularly of Monge and Berthollet; but the men of letters he
slighted; they were "manufacturers of phrases." Of medicine too he was
fond of talking, and with those of its practitioners whom he most
esteemed,- with Corvisart at Paris, and with Antonomarchi at St.
Helena. "Believe me," he said to the last, "we had better leave off
all these remedies: life is a fortress which neither you nor I know
any thing about. Why throw obstacles in the way of its defence? Its
own means are superior to all the apparatus of your laboratories.
Corvisart candidly agreed with me that all your filthy mixtures are
good for nothing. Medicine is a collection of uncertain prescriptions,
the results of which, taken collectively, are more fatal than useful
to mankind. Water, air and cleanliness are the chief articles in my
pharmacopoeia."
His memoirs, dictated to Count Montholon and General Gourgaud at St.
Helena, have great value, after all the deduction that it seems is
to be made from them on account of his known disingenuousness. He
has the good-nature of strength and conscious superiority. I admire
his simple, clear narrative of his battles;- good as Caesar's; his
good-natured and sufficiently respectful account of Marshal Wurmser
and his other antagonists; and his own equality as a writer to his
varying subject. The most agreeable portion is the Campaign in Egypt.
He had hours of thought and wisdom. In intervals of leisure,
either in the camp or the palace, Napoleon appears as a man of
genius directing on abstract questions the native appetite for truth
and the impatience of words he was wont to show in war. He could enjoy
every play of invention, a romance, a bon mot, as well as a
strategem in a campaign. He delighted to fascinate Josephine and her
ladies, in a dim-lighted apartment, by the terrors of a fiction to
which his voice and dramatic power lent every addition.
I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of
modern society; of the throng who fill the markets, shops,
counting-houses, manufactories, ships, of the modern world, aiming
to be rich. He was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the
internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means,
the opener of doors and markets, the subverter of monopoly and
abuse. Of course the rich and aristocratic did not like him.
England, the centre of capital, and Rome and Austria, centres of
tradition and genealogy, opposed him. The consternation of the dull
and conservative classes, the terror of the foolish old men and old
women of the Roman conclave, who in their despair took hold of any
thing, and would cling to red-hot iron,- the vain attempts of statists
to amuse and deceive him, of the emperor of Austria to bribe him;
and the instinct of the young, ardent and active men every where,
which pointed him out as the giant of the middle class, make his
history bright and commanding. He had the virtues of the masses of his
constituents: he had also their vices. I am sorry that the brilliant
picture has its reverse. But that is the fatal quality which we
discover in our pursuit of wealth, that it is treacherous, and is
bought by the breaking or weakening of the sentiments; and it is
inevitable that we should find the same fact in the history of this
champion, who proposed to himself simply a brilliant career, without
any stipulation or scruple concerning the means.
Bonaparte was singularly destitute of generous sentiments. The
highest-placed individual in the most cultivated age and population of
the world,- he has not the merit of common truth and honesty. He is
unjust to his generals; egotistic and monopolizing; meanly stealing
the credit of their great actions from Kellermann, from Bernadotte;
intriguing to involve his faithful Junot in hopeless bankruptcy, in
order to drive him to a distance from Paris, because the familiarity
of his manners offends the new pride of his throne. He is a
boundless liar. The official paper, his "Moniteur," and all his
bulletins, are proverbs for saying what he wished to be believed;
and worse,- he sat, in his premature old age, in his lonely island,
coldly falsifying facts and dates and characters, and giving to
history a theatrical eclat. Like all Frenchmen he has a passion for
stage effect. Every action that breathes of generosity is poisoned
by this calculation. His star, his love of glory, his doctrine of
the immortality of the soul, are all French. "I must dazzle and
astonish. If I were to give the liberty of the press, my power could
not last three days." To make a great noise is his favorite design. "A
great reputation is a great noise: the more there is made, the farther
off it is heard. Laws, institutions, monuments, nations, all fall; but
the noise continues, and resounds in after ages." His doctrine of
immortality is simply fame. His theory of influence is not flattering.
"There are two levers for moving men,- interest and fear. Love is a
silly infatuation, depend upon it. Friendship is but a name. I love
nobody. I do not even love my brothers: perhaps Joseph a little,
from habit, and because he is my elder; and Duroc, I love him too; but
why?- because his character pleases me: he is stern and resolute,
and I believe the fellow never shed a tear. For my part I know very
well that I have no true friends. As long as I continue to be what I
am, I may have as many pretended friends as I please. Leave
sensibility to women; but men should be firm in heart and purpose,
or they should have nothing to do with war and government." He was
thoroughly unscrupulous. He would steal, slander, assassinate, drown
and poison, as his interest dictated. He had no generosity, but mere
vulgar hatred; he was intensely selfish; he was perfidious; he cheated
at cards; he was a prodigious gossip, and opened letters, and
delighted in his infamous police, and rubbed his hands with joy when
he had intercepted some morsel of intelligence concerning the men
and women about him, boasting that "he knew every thing"; and
interfered with the cutting the dresses of the women; and listened
after the hurrahs and the compliments of the street, incognito. His
manners were coarse. He treated women with low familiarity. He had the
habit of pulling their ears and pinching their cheeks when he was in
good humor, and of pulling the ears and whiskers of men, and of
striking and horse-play with them, to his last days. It does not
appear that he listened at key-holes, or at least that he was caught
at it. In short, when you have penetrated through all the circles of
power and splendor, you were not dealing with a gentleman, at last;
but with an impostor and a rogue; and he fully deserves the epithet of
Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter.
In describing the two parties into which modern society divides
itself,- the democrat and the conservative,- I said, Bonaparte
represents the democrat, or the party of men of business, against
the stationary or conservative party. I omitted then to say, what is
material to the statement, namely that these two parties differ only
as young and old. The democrat is a young conservative; the
conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe
and gone to seed;- because both parties stand on the one ground of the
supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other
to keep. Bonaparte may be said to represent the whole history of
this party, its youth and its age; yes, and with poetic justice its
fate, in his own. The counter-revolution, the counter-party, still
waits for its organ and representative, in a lover and a man of
truly public and universal aims.
Here was an experiment, under the most favorable conditions, of
the powers of intellect without conscience. Never was such a leader so
endowed and so weaponed; never leader found such aids and followers.
And what was the result of this vast talent and power, of these
immense armies, burned cities, squandered treasures, immolated
millions of men, of this demoralized Europe? It came to no result. All
passed away like the smoke of his artillery, and left no trace. He
left France smaller, poorer, feebler, than he found it; and the
whole contest for freedom was to be begun again. The attempt was in
principle suicidal. France served him with life and limb and estate,
as long as it could identify its interest with him; but when men saw
that after victory was another war; after the destruction of armies,
new conscriptions; and they who had toiled so desperately were never
nearer to the reward,- they could not spend what they had earned,
nor repose on their down-beds, nor strut in their chateaux,- they
deserted him. Men found that his absorbing egotism was deadly to all
other men. It resembled the torpedo, which inflicts a succession of
shocks on any one who takes hold of it, producing spasms which
contract the muscles of the hand, so that the man can not open his
fingers; and the animal inflicts new and more violent shocks, until he
paralyzes and kills his victim. So this exorbitant egotist narrowed,
impoverished and absorbed the power and existence of those who
served him; and the universal cry of France and of Europe in 1814 was,
"Enough of him"; "Assez de Bonaparte."
It was not Bonaparte's fault. He did all that in him lay to live and
thrive without moral principle. It was the nature of things, the
eternal law of man and of the world which baulked and ruined him;
and the result, in a million experiments, will be the same. Every
experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and
selfish aim, will fail. The pacific Fourier will be as inefficient
as the pernicious Napoleon. As long as our civilization is essentially
one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by
delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness
in our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good
profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all
men.
GOETHE
GOETHE
or, The Writer

I FIND a provision in the constitution of the world for the
writer, or secretary, who is to report the doings of the miraculous
spirit of life that everywhere throbs and works. His office is a
reception of the facts into the mind, and then a selection of the
eminent and characteristic experiences.
Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their
history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The
rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river its
channel in the soil; the animal its bones in the stratum; the fern and
leaf their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its
sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow
or along the ground, but prints, in characters more or less lasting, a
map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself in the
memories of his fellows and in his own manners and face. The air is
full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the round is all memoranda and
signatures, and every object covered over with hints which speak to
the intelligent.
In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is
the print of the seal. It neither exceeds nor comes short of the fact.
But nature strives upward; and, in man, the report is something more
than print of the seal. It is a new and finer form of the original.
The record is alive, as that which it recorded is alive. In man, the
memory is a kind of looking-glass, which, having received the images
of surrounding objects, is touched with life, and disposes them in a
new order. The facts do not lie in it inert; but some subside and
others shine; so that we soon have a new picture, composed of the
eminent experiences. The man cooperates. He loves to communicate;
and that which is for him to say lies as a load on his heart until
it is delivered. But, besides the universal joy of conversation,
some men are born with exalted powers for this second creation. Men
are born to write. The gardener saves every slip and seed and
peach-stone: his vocation is to be a planter of plants. Not less
does the writer attend his affair. Whatever he beholds or experiences,
comes to him as a model and sits for its picture. He counts it all
nonsense that they say, that some things are undescribable. He
believes that all that can be thought can be written, first or last;
and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it. Nothing so broad,
so subtle, or so dear, but comes therefore commended to his pen, and
he will write. In his eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the
universe is the possibility of being reported. In conversation, in
calamity, he finds new materials; as our German poet said, "Some god
gave me the power to paint what I suffer." He draws his rents from
rage and pain. By acting rashly, he buys the power of talking
wisely. Vexations and a tempest of passion only fill his sail; as
the good Luther writes, "When I am angry, I can pray well and preach
well": and, if we knew the genesis of fine strokes of eloquence,
they might recall the complaisance of Sultan Amurath, who struck off
some Persian heads, that his physician, Vesalius, might see the spasms
in the muscles of the neck. His failures are the preparation of his
victories. A new thought or a crisis of passion apprises him that
all that he has yet learned and written is exoteric,- is not the fact,
but some rumor of the fact. What then? Does he throw away the pen? No;
he begins again to describe in the new light which has shined on him,-
if, by some means, he may yet save some true word. Nature conspires.
Whatever can be thought can be spoken, and still rises for
utterance, though to rude and stammering organs. If they can not
compass it, it waits and works, until at last it moulds them to its
perfect will and is articulated.
This striving after imitative expression, which one meets every
where, is significant of the aim of nature, but is mere stenography.
There are higher degrees, and nature has more splendid endowments
for those whom she elects to a superior office; for the class of
scholars or writers, who see connection where the multitude see
fragments, and who are impelled to exhibit the facts in order, and
so to supply the axis on which the frame of things turns. Nature has
dearly at heart the formation of the speculative man, or scholar. It
is an end never lost sight of, and is prepared in the original casting
of things. He is no permissive or accidental appearance, but an
organic agent, one of the estates of the realm, provided and
prepared from of old and from everlasting, in the knitting and
contexture of things. Presentiments, impulses, cheer him. There is a
certain heat in the breast which attends the perception of a primary
truth, which is the shining of the spiritual sun down into the shaft
of the mine. Every thought which dawns on the mine, in the moment of
its emergence announces its own rank,- whether it is some whimsy, or
whether it is a power.
If he have his incitements, there is, on the other side,
invitation and need enough of his gift. Society has, at all times, the
same want, namely of one sane man with adequate powers of expression
to hold up each object of monomania in its right relations. The
ambitious and mercenary bring their last new mumbo-jumbo, whether
tariff, Texas, railroad, Romanism, mesmerism, or California; and, by
detaching the object from its relations, easily succeed in making it
seen in a glare; and a multitude go mad about it, and they are not
to be reproved or cured by the opposite multitude who are kept from
this particular insanity by an equal frenzy on another crotchet. But
let one man have the comprehensive eye that can replace this
isolated prodigy in its right neighborhood and bearings,- the illusion
vanishes, and the returning reason of the community thanks the
reason of the monitor.
The scholar is the man of the ages, but he must also wish with other
men to stand well with his contemporaries. But there is a certain
ridicule, among superficial people, thrown on the scholars or clerisy,
which is of no import unless the scholar heed it. In this country, the
emphasis of conversation and of public opinion commends the
practical man; and the solid portion of the community is named with
significant respect in every circle. Our people are of Bonaparte's
opinion concerning ideologists. Ideas are subversive of social order
and comfort, and at last make a fool of the possessor. It is believed,
the ordering a cargo of goods from New York to Smyrna, or the
running up and down to procure a company of subscribers to set a-going
five or ten thousand spindles, or the negotiations of a caucus and the
practising on the prejudices and facility of country-people to
secure their votes in November,- is practical and commendable.
If I were to compare action of a much higher strain with a life of
contemplation, I should not venture to pronounce with much
confidence in favor of the former. Mankind have such a deep stake in
inward illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or
monk in defence of his life of thought and prayer. A certain
partiality, a headiness and loss of balance, is the tax which all
action must pay. Act, if you like,- but you do it at your peril. Men's
actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted and who
has not been the victim and slave of his action. What they have done
commits and enforces them to do the same again. The first act, which
was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament. The fiery reformer
embodies his aspiration in some rite or covenant, and he and his
friends cleave to the form and lose the aspiration. The Quaker has
established Quakerism, the Shaker has established his monastery and
his dance; and although each prates of spirit, there is no spirit, but
repetition, which is anti-spiritual. But where are his new things of
to-day? In actions of enthusiasm this drawback appears, but in those
lower activities, which have no higher aim than to make us more
comfortable and more cowardly; in actions of cunning, actions that
steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative from the practical
faculty and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is nothing else
but drawback and negation. The Hindoos write in their sacred books,
"Children only, and not the learned, speak of the speculative and
the practical faculties as two. They are but one, for both obtain
the selfsame end, and the place which is gained by the followers of
the one is gained by the followers of the other. That man seeth, who
seeth that the speculative and the practical doctrines are one." For
great action must draw on the spiritual nature. The measure of
action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action
may easily be one of the most private circumstance.
This disparagement will not come from the leaders, but from inferior
persons. The robust gentlemen who stand at the head of the practical
class, share the ideas of the time, and have too much sympathy with
the speculative class. It is not from men excellent in any kind that
disparagement of any other is to be looked for. With such,
Talleyrand's question is ever the main one; not, is he rich? is he
committed? is he well-meaning? has he this or that faculty? is he of
the movement? is he of the establishment?- but, Is he anybody? does he
stand for something? He must be good of his kind. That is all that
Talleyrand, all that State-street, all that the common-sense of
mankind asks. Be real and admirable, not as we know, but as you
know. Able men do not care in what kind a man is able, so only that he
is able. A master likes a master, and does not stipulate whether it be
orator, artist, craftsman, or king.
Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the
literary class. And it is not to be denied that men are cordial in
their recognition and welcome of intellectual accomplishments. Still
the writer does not stand with us on any commanding ground. I think
this to be his own fault. A pound passes for a pound. There have
been times when he was a sacred person: he wrote Bibles, the first
hymns, the codes, the epics, tragic songs, Sibylline verses,
Chaldean oracles, Laconian sentences, inscribed on temple walls. Every
word was true, and woke the nations to new life. He wrote without
levity and without choice. Every word was carved before his eyes
into the earth and the sky; and the sun and stars were only letters of
the same purport and of no more necessity. But how can he be honored
when he does not honor himself; when he loses himself in a crowd; when
he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the
giddy opinion of a reckless public; when he must sustain with
shameless advocacy some bad government, or must bark, all the year
round, in opposition; or write conventional criticism, or profligate
novels, or at any rate write without thought, and without recurrence
by day and by night to the sources of inspiration?
Some reply to these questions may be furnished by looking over the
list of men of literary genius in our age. Among these no more
instructive name occurs than that of Goethe to represent the powers
and duties of the scholar or writer.
I described Bonaparte as a representative of the popular external
life and aims of the nineteenth century. Its other half, its poet,
is Goethe, a man quite domesticated in the century, breathing its air,
enjoying its fruits, impossible at any earlier time, and taking
away, by his colossal parts, the reproach of weakness which but for
him would lie on the intellectual works of the period. He appears at a
time when a general culture has spread itself and has smoothed down
all sharp individual traits; when, in the absence of heroic
characters, a social comfort and cooperation have come in. There is no
poet, but scores of poetic writers; no Columbus, but hundreds of
post-captains, with transit-telescope, barometer and concentrated soup
and pemmican; no Demosthenes, no Chatham, but any number of clever
parliamentary and forensic debaters; no prophet or saint, but colleges
of divinity; no learned man, but learned societies, a cheap press,
reading-rooms and book-clubs without number. There was never such a
miscellany of facts. The world extends itself like American trade.
We conceive Greek or Roman life, life in the Middle Ages, to be a
simple and comprehensible affair; but modern life to respect a
multitude of things, which is distracting.
Goethe was the philosopher of this multiplicity; hundred-handed,
Argus-eyed, able and happy to cope with this rolling miscellany of
facts and sciences, and by his own versatility to dispose of them with
ease; a manly mind, unembarrassed by the variety of coats of
convention with which life had got encrusted, easily able by his
subtlety to pierce these and to draw his strength from nature, with
which he lived in full communion. What is strange too, he lived in a
small town, in a petty state, in a defeated state, and in a time
when Germany played no such leading part in the world's affairs as
to swell the bosom of her sons with any metropolitan pride, such as
might have cheered a French, or English, or once, a Roman or Attic
genius. Yet there is no trace of provincial limitation in his muse. He
is not a debtor to his position, but was born with a free and
controlling genius.
The Helena, or the second part of Faust, is a philosophy of
literature set in poetry; the work of one who found himself the master
of histories, mythologies, philosophies, sciences and national
literatures, in the encyclopaedical manner in which modern
erudition, with its international intercourse of the whole earth's
population, researches into Indian, Etruscan and all Cyclopean arts;
geology, chemistry, astronomy; and every one of these kingdoms
assuming a certain aerial and poetic character, by reason of the
multitude. One looks at a king with reverence; but if one should
chance to be at a congress of kings, the eye would take liberties with
the peculiarities of each. These are not wild miraculous songs, but
elaborate forms to which the poet has confided the results of eighty
years of observation. This reflective and critical wisdom makes the
poem more truly the flower of this time. It dates itself. Still, he is
a poet,- poet of a prouder laurel than any contemporary, and, under
this plague of microscopes (for he seems to see out of every pore of
his skin), strikes the harp with a hero's strength and grace.
The wonder of the book is its superior intelligence. In the
menstruum of this man's wit, the past and the present ages, and
their religions, politics and modes of thinking, are dissolved into
archetypes and ideas. What new mythologies sail through his head!
The Greeks said that Alexander went as far as Chaos; Goethe went, only
the other day, as far; and one step farther he hazarded, and brought
himself safe back.
There is a heart-cheering freedom in his speculation. The immense
horizon which journeys with us lends its majesty to trifles and to
matters of convenience and necessity, as to solemn and festal
performances. He was the soul of his century. If that was learned, and
had become, by population, compact organization and drill of parts,
one great Exploring Expedition, accumulating a glut of facts and
fruits too fast for any hitherto-existing savans to classify,- this
man's mind had ample chambers for the distribution of all. He had a
power to unite the detached atoms again by their own law. He has
clothed our modern existence with poetry. Amid littleness and
detail, he detected the Genius of life, the old cunning Proteus,
nestling close beside us, and showed that the dulness and prose we
ascribe to the age was only another of his masks:-

"His very flight is presence in disguise":*(32)

-that he had put off a gay uniform for a fatigue dress, and was not
a whit less vivacious or rich in Liverpool or the Hague than once in
Rome or Antioch. He sought him in public squares and main streets,
in boulevards and hotels; and, in the solidest kingdom of routine
and the senses, he showed the lurking daemonic power; that, in actions
of routine, a thread of mythology and fable spins itself: and this, by
tracing the pedigree of every usage and practice, every institution,
utensil and means, home to its origin in the structure of man. He
had an extreme impatience of conjecture and of rhetoric. "I have
guesses enough of my own; if a man write a book, let him set down only
what he knows." He writes in the plainest and lowest tone, omitting
a great deal more than he writes, and putting ever a thing for a word.
He has explained the distinction between the antique and the modern
spirit and art. He has defined art, its scope and laws. He has said
the best things about nature that ever were said. He treats nature
as the old philosophers, as the seven wise masters did,- and, with
whatever loss of French tabulation and dissection, poetry and humanity
remain to us; and they have some doctoral skill. Eyes are better on
the whole than telescopes or microscopes. He has contributed a key
to many parts of nature, through the rare turn for unity and
simplicity in his mind. Thus Goethe suggested the leading idea of
modern botany, that a leaf or the eye of a leaf is the unit of botany,
and that every part of a plant is only a transformed leaf to meet a
new condition; and, by varying the conditions, a leaf may be converted
into any other organ, and any other organ into a leaf. In like manner,
in osteology, he assumed that one vertebra of the spine might be
considered as the unit of the skeleton: the head was only the
uttermost vertebrae transformed. "The plant goes from knot to knot,
closing at last with the flower and the seed. So the tape-worm, the
caterpillar, goes from knot to knot and closes with the head. Man
and the higher animals are built up through the vertebrae, the
powers being concentrated in the head." In optics again he rejected
the artificial theory of seven colors, and considered that every color
was the mixture of light and darkness in new proportions. It is really
of very little consequence what topic he writes upon. He sees at every
pore, and has a certain gravitation towards truth. He will realize
what you say. He hates to be trifled with and to be made to say over
again some old wife's fable that has had possession of men's faith
these thousand years. He may as well see if it is true as another.
He sifts it. I am here, he would say, to be the measure and judge of
these things. Why should I take them on trust? And therefore what he
says of religion, of passion, of marriage, of manners, of property, of
paper-money, of periods of belief, of omens, of luck, or whatever
else, refuses to be forgotten.
Take the most remarkable example that could occur of this tendency
to verify every term in popular use. The Devil had played an important
part in mythology in all times. Goethe would have no word that does
not cover a thing. The same measure will still serve: "I have never
heard of any crime which I might not have committed." So he flies at
the throat of this imp. He shall be real; he shall be modern; he shall
be European; he shall dress like a gentleman, and accept the
manners, and walk in the streets, and be well initiated in the life of
Vienna and of Heidelberg in 1820,- or he shall not exist. Accordingly,
he stripped him of mythologic gear, of horns, cloven foot, harpoon
tail, brimstone and blue-fire, and instead of looking in books and
pictures, looked for him in his own mind, in every shade of
coldness, selfishness and unbelief that, in crowds or in solitude,
darkens over the human thought,- and found that the portrait gained
reality and terror by every thing he added and by every thing he
took away. He found that the essence of this hobgoblin which had
hovered in shadow about the habitations of men ever since there were
men, was pure intellect, applied,- as always there is a tendency,-
to the service of the senses: and he flung into literature, in his
Mephistopheles, the first organic figure that has been added for
some ages, and which will remain as long as the Prometheus.
I have no design to enter into any analysis of his numerous works.
They consist of translations, criticism, dramas, lyric and every other
description of poems, literary journals and portraits of distinguished
men. Yet I cannot omit to specify the Wilhelm Meister.
Wilhelm Meister is a novel in every sense, the first of its kind,
called by its admirers the only delineation of modern society,- as
if other novels, those of Scott for example, dealt with costume and
condition, this with the spirit of life. It is a book over which
some veil is still drawn. It is read by very intelligent persons
with wonder and delight. It is preferred by some such to Hamlet, as
a work of genius. I suppose no book of this century can compare with
it in its delicious sweetness, so new, so provoking to the mind,
gratifying it with so many and so solid thoughts, just insights into
life and manners and characters; so many good hints for the conduct of
life, so many unexpected glimpses into a higher sphere, and never a
trace of rhetoric or dulness. A very provoking book to the curiosity
of young men of genius, but a very unsatisfactory one. Lovers of light
reading, those who look in it for the entertainment they find in a
romance, are disappointed. On the other hand, those who begin it
with the higher hope to read in it a worthy history of genius, and the
just award of the laurel to its toils and denials, have also reason to
complain. We had an English romance here, not long ago, professing
to embody the hope of a new age and to unfold the political hope of
the party called "Young England,"- in which the only reward of
virtue is a seat in Parliament and a peerage. Goethe's romance has a
conclusion as lame and immoral. George Sand, in Consuelo and its
continuation, has sketched a truer and more dignified picture. In
the progress of the story, the characters of the hero and heroine
expand at a rate that shivers the porcelain chess-table of
aristocratic convention: they quit the society and habits of their
rank, they lose their wealth, they become the servants of great
ideas and of the most generous social ends; until at last the hero,
who is the centre and fountain of an association for the rendering
of the noblest benefits to the human race, no longer answers to his
own titled name; it sounds foreign and remote in his ear. "I am only
man," he says; "I breathe and work for man"; and this in poverty and
extreme sacrifices. Goethe's hero, on the contrary, has so many
weaknesses and impurities and keeps such bad company, that the sober
English public, when the book was translated, were disgusted. And
yet it is so crammed with wisdom, with knowledge of the world and with
knowledge of laws; the persons so truly and subtly drawn, and with
such few strokes, and not a word too much,- the book remains ever so
new and unexhausted, that we must even let it go its way and be
willing to get what good from it we can, assured that it has only
begun its office and has millions of readers yet to serve.
The argument is the passage of a democrat to the aristocracy,
using both words in their best sense. And this passage is not made
in any mean or creeping way, but through the hall door. Nature and
character assist, and the rank is made real by sense and probity in
the nobles. No generous youth can escape this charm of reality in
the book, so that it is highly stimulating to intellect and courage.
The ardent and holy Novalis characterized the book as "thoroughly
modern and prosaic; the romantic is completely levelled in it; so is
the poetry of nature; the wonderful. The book treats only of the
ordinary affairs of men: it is a poeticized civic and domestic
story. The wonderful in it is expressly treated as fiction and
enthusiastic dreaming":- and yet, what is also characteristic, Novalis
soon returned to this book, and it remained his favorite reading to
the end of his life.
What distinguishes Goethe for French and English readers is a
property which he shares with his nation,- a habitual reference to
interior truth. In England and in America there is a respect for
talent; and, if it is exerted in support of any ascertained or
intelligible interest or party, or in regular opposition to any, the
public is satisfied. In France there is even a greater delight in
intellectual brilliancy for its own sake. And in all these
countries, men of talent write from talent. It is enough if the
understanding is occupied, the taste propitiated,- so many columns, so
many hours, filled in a lively and creditable way. The German
intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical
understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a
certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but
asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling
sincerity. Here is activity of thought; but what is it for? What
does the man mean? Whence, whence all these thoughts?
Talent alone can not make a writer. There must be a man behind the
book; a personality which by birth and quality is pledged to the
doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things
so, and not otherwise; holding things because they are things. If he
can not rightly express himself to-day, the same things subsist and
will open themselves to-morrow. There lies the burden on his mind,-
the burden of truth to be declared,- more or less understood; and it
constitutes his business and calling in the world to see those facts
through, and to make them known. What signifies that he trips and
stammers; that his voice is harsh or hissing; that his method or his
tropes are inadequate? That message will find method and imagery,
articulation and melody. Though he were dumb it would speak. If
not,- if there be no such God's word in the man,- what care we how
adroit, how fluent, how brilliant he is?
It makes a great difference to the force of any sentence whether
there be a man behind it or no. In the learned journal, in the
influential newspaper, I discern no form; only some irresponsible
shadow; oftener some moneyed corporation, or some dangler who hopes,
in the mask and robes of his paragraph, to pass for somebody. But
through every clause and part of speech of a right book I meet the
eyes of the most determined of men; his force and terror inundate
every word; the commas and dashes are alive; so that the writing is
athletic and nimble,- can go far and live long.
In England and America, one may be an adept in the writings of a
Greek or Latin poet, without any poetic taste or fire. That a man
has spent years on Plato and Proclus, does not afford a presumption
that he holds heroic opinions, or under-values the fashions of his
town. But the German nation have the most ridiculous good faith on
these subjects: the student, out of the lecture-room, still broods
on the lessons; and the professor can not divest himself of the
fancy that the truths of philosophy have some application to Berlin
and Munich. This earnestness enables them to outsee men of much more
talent. Hence almost all the valuable distinctions which are current
in higher conversation have been derived to us from Germany. But
whilst men distinguished for wit and learning, in England and
France, adopt their study and their side with a certain levity, and
are not understood to be very deeply engaged, from grounds of
character, to the topic or the part they espouse,- Goethe, the head
and body of the German nation, does not speak from talent, but the
truth shines through: he is very wise, though his talent often veils
his wisdom. However excellent his sentence is, he has somewhat
better in view. It awakens my curiosity. He has the formidable
independence which converse with truth gives: hear you, or forbear,
his fact abides; and your interest in the writer is not confined to
his story and he dismissed from memory when he has performed his
task creditably, as a baker when he has left his loaf; but his work is
the least part of him. The old Eternal Genius who built the world
has confided himself more to this man than to any other.
I dare not say that Goethe ascended to the highest grounds from
which genius has spoken. He has not worshipped the highest unity; he
is incapable of a self-surrender to the moral sentiment. There are
nobler strains in poetry than any he has sounded. There are writers
poorer in talent, whose tone is purer, and more touches the heart.
Goethe can never be dear to men. His is not even the devotion to
pure truth; but to truth for the sake of culture. He has no aims
less large than the conquest of universal nature, of universal
truth, to be his portion: a man not to be bribed, nor deceived, nor
overawed; of a stoical self-command and self-denial, and having one
test for all men,- What can you teach me? All possessions are valued
by him for that only; rank, privileges, health, time, Being itself.
He is the type of culture, the amateur of all arts and sciences
and events; artistic, but not artist; spiritual, but not spiritualist.
There is nothing he had not right to know: there is no weapon in the
armory of universal genius he did not take into his hand, but with
peremptory heed that he should not be for a moment prejudiced by his
instruments. He lays a ray of light under every fact, and between
himself and his dearest property. From him nothing was hid, nothing
withholden. The lurking daemons sat to him, and the saint who saw
the daemons; and the metaphysical elements took form. "Piety itself is
no aim, but only a means whereby through purest inward peace we may
attain to highest culture." And his penetration of every secret of the
fine arts will make Goethe still more statuesque. His affections
help him, like women employed by Cicero to worm out the secret of
conspirators. Enmities he has none. Enemy of him you may be,- if so
you shall teach him aught which your good-will can not, were it only
what experience will accrue from your ruin. Enemy and welcome, but
enemy on high terms. He can not hate anybody; his time is worth too
much. Temperamental antagonisms may be suffered, but like feuds of
emperors, who fight dignifiedly across kingdoms.
His autobiography, under the title of Poetry and Truth out of my
Life, is the expression of the idea- now familiar to the world through
the German mind, but a novelty to England, Old and New, when that book
appeared- that a man exists for culture; not for what he can
accomplish, but for what can be accomplished in him. The reaction of
things on the man is the only noteworthy result. An intellectual man
can see himself as a third person; therefore his faults and
delusions interest him equally with his successes. Though he wishes to
prosper in affairs, he wishes more to know the history and destiny
of man; whilst the clouds of egotists drifting about him are only
interested in a low success.
This idea reigns in the Dichtung und Wahrheit and directs the
selection of the incidents; and nowise the external importance of
events, the rank of the personages, or the bulk of incomes. Of
course the book affords slender materials for what would be reckoned
with us a Life of Goethe;- few dates, no correspondence, no details of
offices or employments, no light on his marriage; and a period of
ten years, that should be the most active in his life, after his
settlement at Weimar, is sunk in silence. Meantime certain love
affairs that came to nothing, as people say, have the strangest
importance: he crowds us with details:- certain whimsical opinions,
cosmogonies and religions of his own invention, and especially his
relations to remarkable minds and to critical epochs of thought:-
these he magnifies. His Daily and Yearly Journal, his Italian Travels,
his Campaign in France and the historical part of his Theory of
Colors, have the same interest. In the last, he rapidly notices
Kepler, Roger Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Voltaire, etc.; and the charm of
this portion of the book consists in the simplest statement of the
relation betwixt these grandees of European scientific history and
himself; the mere drawing of the lines from Goethe to Kepler, from
Goethe to Bacon, from Goethe to Newton. The drawing of the line is,
for the time and person, a solution of the formidable problem, and
gives pleasure when Iphigenia and Faust do not, without any cost of
invention comparable to that of Iphigenia and Faust.
This lawgiver of art is not an artist. Was it that he knew too much,
that his sight was microscopic and interfered with the just
perspective, the seeing of the whole? He is fragmentary; a writer of
occasional poems and of an encyclopaedia of sentences. When he sits
down to write a drama or a tale, he collects and sorts his
observations from a hundred sides, and combines them into the body
as fitly as he can. A great deal refuses to incorporate: this he
adds loosely as letters of the parties, leaves from their journals, or
the like. A great deal still is left that will not find any place.
This the bookbinder alone can give any cohesion to; and hence,
notwithstanding the looseness of many of his works, we have volumes of
detached paragraphs, aphorisms, Xenien,*(33) etc.
I suppose the worldly tone of his tales grew out of the calculations
of self-culture. It was the infirmity of an admirable scholar, who
loved the world out of gratitude; who knew where libraries, galleries,
architecture, laboratories, savans and leisure were to be had, and who
did not quite trust the compensations of poverty and nakedness.
Socrates loved Athens; Montaigne, Paris; and Madame de Stael said
she was only vulnerable on that side (namely, of Paris). It has its
favorable aspect. All the geniuses are usually so ill-assorted and
sickly that one is ever wishing them somewhere else. We seldom see
anybody who is not uneasy or afraid to live. There is a slight blush
of shame on the cheek of good men and aspiring men, and a spice of
caricature. But this man was entirely at home and happy in his century
and the world. None was so fit to live, or more heartily enjoyed the
game. In this aim of culture, which is the genius of his works, is
their power. The idea of absolute, eternal truth, without reference to
my own enlargement by it, is higher. The surrender to the torrent of
poetic inspiration is higher; but compared with any motives on which
books are written in England and America, this is very truth, and
has the power to inspire which belongs to truth. Thus has he brought
back to a book some of its ancient might and dignity.
Goethe, coming into an over-civilized time and country, when
original talent was oppressed under the load of books and mechanical
auxiliaries and the distracting variety of claims, taught men how to
dispose of this mountainous miscellany and make it subservient. I join
Napoleon with him, as being both representatives of the impatience and
reaction of nature against the morgue of conventions,- two stern
realists, who, with their scholars, have severally set the axe at
the root of the tree of cant and seeming, for this time and for all
time. This cheerful laborer, with no external popularity or
provocation, drawing his motive and his plan from his own breast,
tasked himself with stints for a giant, and without relaxation or
rest, except by alternating his pursuits, worked on for eighty years
with the steadiness of his first zeal.
It is the last lesson of modern science that the highest
simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the
highest complexity. Man is the most composite of all creatures; the
wheel-insect, volvox globator, is at the other extreme. We shall learn
to draw rents and revenues from the immense patrimony of the old and
the recent ages. Goethe teaches courage, and the equivalence of all
times; that the disadvantages of any epoch exist only to the
faint-hearted. Genius hovers with his sunshine and music close by
the darkest and deafest eras. No mortgage, no attainder, will hold
on men or hours. The world is young: the former great men call to us
affectionately. We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens
and the earthly world. The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to
exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of
modern life, in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good
faith, reality and a purpose; and first, last, midst and without
end, to honor every truth by use.
NOTES TO THE TEXT

[Notes from the Centenary Edition of Emerson's Complete Works,
edited by his son, Edward Waldo Emerson.]

* Jacob Behmen, or Boehme, a Silesian of humble birth in the
sixteenth century, a mystic whose writings later attracted much
attention. Mr. Emerson was early interested in his works and often
mentions them.

*(2) William Gilbert (1540-1603), the greatest man of science of
Queen Elizabeth's reign, especially noted for his discovery that the
earth is a great magnet.

*(3) That is, the ideal, instead of the outward shows of things.

*(4) federal errors: a Latinism for mistakes sanctioned by custom.

*(5) flagrant: a Latinism suggesting that, in the general dimness,
the outlines of the human world may be found in its blazing beacon
lights.

*(6) The constant security of Mr Emerson's belief in Evolution in
its highest sense appears hear as elsewhere in his prose and verse,
and also his belief in the genius of mankind, which is another word
for Universal Mind.

*(7) The less usual use of "secular," in its strict classical sense,
to mean "that live through the ages."

*(8) Omar the Caliph was Mahomet's cousin and second successor.

*(9) From the Timaeus.

*(10) From the Theaetetus.

*(11) From the Gorgias.

*(12) Compare the Republic, Book VII.

*(13) From the Phaedrus.

*(14) See the Republic, Book VI.

*(15) What Mr. Emerson says here of Plato, and also earlier, "He
cannot forgive in himself a partiality, but is resolved that the two
poles of thought shall appear in his statement," cannot but recall his
own method of presenting in turn different facets of the gem of truth.
Churchman and Agnostic can easily find good weapons for argument in
his works. Dr. Holmes says of this passage, "Some will smile at
hearing him say this of another." It illustrates the felicity of the
Doctor's remark that Emerson holds up the mirror to his characters
at just such an angle that we see his own face as well as that of
his hero.

*(16) ...his soliform eye and his boniform soul: Dr. Holmes says,
"These two quaint adjectives are from the mint of Cudworth."

*(17) From Plato's Meno, where, as also in the Phaedrus, the
doctrines of Reminiscence is brought forward, and here is reconciled
with that of the Universal Mind.

*(18) John Selden (1584-1654), jurist, antiquarian, orientalist,
author. His Table-Talk was published in 1681.

*(19) Marcello Malpighi of Bologna (1628-1694) is considered a
founder of microscopic anatomy.

*(20) Leucippus: in the 5th century B.C. Leucippus held an atomic
theory later expounded by Lucretius in his poem De Rerum Natura.

*(21) Swammerdam... Boerhaave: Swammerdam, a brilliant Dutch
naturalist of the 17th century, was especially noted for his minute
studies of the viscera and system of injection of vessels. Leuwenhoek,
his countryman and contemporary, made notable discoveries with
regard to capillary circulation and the blood corpuscles of man and
animals... Winslow was a Dane, but worked in Paris, and wrote on
purely descriptive anatomy. Eustachius of Salerno was a brilliant
investigator of human structure, especially of the ear and viscera,
though less reputed that the great Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius,
who was persecuted for daring to teach the real facts of human anatomy
in face of the mistaken authority of Galen. Heister was also an
anatomist. Herman Boerhaave (1688-1738), born in Holland and
educated at the University of Leyden... He studied philosophy and
medicine and became a distinguished practitioner and writer mainly
on medical subjects.

*(22) Leibnitz: the maxim of the broad and high-minded Leibnitz
(1646-1715), "Everything is for the best in the best of possible
worlds," would have recommended him.

*(23) The "flowing of nature" is the old doctrine of Heracleitus.
The answer of Amasis, King of Egypt, is related in "The Banquet" in
Plutarch's Morals.

*(24) In the Timaeus it is told that Solon heard from Egyptian
priests this account of the great Athenians of the first State,
which was destroyed by an earthquake thousands of years earlier.

*(25) Casella: Dante's friend, the beautiful singer, whom meeting,
in Purgatory, he besought to sing. Casella began "Amor che nella mente
mi ragiona," and all the souls flocked to hear.

*(26) One of the examples of Laconic speech given by Plutarch in the
Life of Lycurgus.

*(27) I knew a philosopher... "Mankind is a damned rascal": this was
the remark of Emerson's neighbor, a laborer.

*(28) The Proteus: Mr. Emerson recognized Nature's secret of
Identity through all fugitive forms in the fable of the sea-god
Proteus, who, when caught sleeping by a mortal, took shapes of beasts,
of serpents, of fire, to disconcert his captor, yet, if held fast in
spite of all, must answer his questions.

*(29) San Carlo: the valued friend here alluded to, Mr. Charles K.
Newcomb, was of a sensitive and beautiful character, a mystic, but
with the Hamlet temperament to such an extent that he was paralyzed
for all action by the tenderness of his conscience and the power
with which all sides of a question presented themselves to him in
turn. He was a member of the Brooks Farm Community, a welcome but rare
visitor at Mr. Emerson's house, and when he came he brought his
writings, which interested his host greatly. I think they never came
to publication, except a few papers in the Dial. His sense of duty
sent him to the war for the Union in the ranks. He remained a bachelor
all his life and in his last years lived much abroad.

*(30) The dates of Lydgate and Caxton show a mistake as to Emerson's
use of them. Caxton, following Chaucer, when he introduced the
printing press to England, printed his poems and those of Lydgate, who
was younger than Chaucer.

*(31) While writing this, Mr. Emerson was surrounded by persons
paralyzed for active life in the common world by the doubts of
conscience or entangled in over-fine-spun webs of their intellect.

*(32) This line is probably a translation from some Arabic or
Persian source, from the connection in which it appears in Emerson's
notebook.

*(33) Xenien: from the Greek, was used by Goethe and Schiller to
denote epigrams.


THE END