CONTENTS.
I,—Uses of Great Men, 9
II.—Plato; or, the Philosopher 41
Plato; New Readings, 85
III.—Swedenborg; or, the Mystic, ...... 95
IV.—Montaigne; or, the Skeptic 151
V.—Shakspeare; or, the Poet, 191
VI.—Napoleon; or, the Man of the World, . 225
VII.—Goethe; or, the Writer, 263
USES OF GREAT MEN.
1.
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
9
lo IReprescntatíve ®en
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 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 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 to-day.
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 mien. We run all our vessel*
"Clscs ot ©reat ^en
II
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 re¬
peats 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 phil¬
osophy 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 towards others
creates a sort of vantage or purchase which noth¬
ing will supply. I can do that by another which
I cannot do alone. I can say to you what I can¬
not first say to myself. Other men are lenses
through which we read our own minds. Each
12 1Repce0cntatlx>c /Bien
man seeks those of different quality from his owH;
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 «ákir,
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
•yvho 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, j 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, "/'eu de moyens,
beaucoup cT effet." He is great who is what he is
from nature, and who never reminds us of others.
TUecs of ©reat /flScn
»3
But he must be related to us, and our life re¬
ceive from him some promise of explanation. I
cannot tell what I would know ; but I have ob¬
served there are persons, who, in their character
and actions, answer questions which I have not
skill to put. One man answers some questions
which none of his contemporaries put, and is iso¬
lated. The past and passing religions and philoso¬
phies answer some other question. Certain men
affect us as rich possibilities, but helpless to them¬
selves 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 construc¬
tive, 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.
14 IRcpresentattve ^en
Our common discourse respects two kinds of
use of 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, com¬
pared 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 represent¬
ative quality, and serve us in the intellect. Behmen
and Swedenborg saw that things were representa¬
tive. 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.
Ulses of ©reat /liben
15
electricity, magnetism, iron, lead, glass, linen,
silk, cotton ; the makers of tools ; the inventor of
decimal notation; the geometer; the engineer;
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 Linnseus, of plants; Huber, of bees; Fries,
of lichens; Van Möns, 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
i6 IRcpresentatívc ^cn
ripe and latent truth seems to have fashioned a
brain for itself. A magnet must be made man, in
some Gilbert, or Swedenborg, or Oersted, 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, hun¬
ger 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 finest 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, char¬
acter, and politics.
"ïïlseB of ©reat fiBcn 17
But this cornes 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
otlier. And to these, their ends, all things con¬
tinually ascend. The gases gather to the solid
firmament ; the chemic lump arrives at the plaht,
and grows ; arrives at the quadruped, and walks;
arrives at the man, and thinks. But also.the
constituency determines the vote of the repre¬
sentative. He is not only representative, but
participant. Like can only be known by like.
The reason why he knows about them is, tha't 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 this 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.
2
i8 IRepreacntatívc ílSen
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 atmos¬
phere holds in solution I know not what Ber-
zeliuses and Davys ?
Thus, we sit by the fire, and take hold on the
poles of the earth. This omnipresence sup¬
plies 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 debtor to Homer.
Every carpenter who shaves with a foreplane bor¬
rows the genius of a forgotten inventor. Life is
girt all around with a zodiac of sciences, the con¬
tributions 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 road-makers on every hand
Tases of ©rcat fiBen
19
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 con¬
versing 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
meas 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.
20 IReprcscntatívc /IBen
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 be¬
come 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 bet¬
ter than that other can, and by heroic encourage¬
ments, hold him to his task. What has friendship
so signaled as its sublime attraction to whatever
virtue is in us? We will never more think cheaply
tlscs of ©reat fliben
21
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, Lamar¬
tine. 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 expres¬
sion 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 lit¬
erary genius. Nothing is kept back. There is
fire enough to fuse the mountain of ore. Shak-
speare's principal merit may be conveyed, in say¬
ing that he, of all men, best understands the
English language, and can say what he will. Yet
these unchoked channels and floodgates of expres¬
sion are only health or fortunate constitution.
Shakspeare's name suggests other and purely intel¬
lectual benefits.
Senates and sovereigns have no compliment,
with their medals, swords, and armorial coats, like
22 Kcprescntatíve /DSen
the addressing to a human being thoughts out of
a certain height, and presupposing his intelligence.
This honor, which is possible in personal inter¬
course scarcely twice in a lifetime, genius perpet¬
ually pays; contented, if now and then, in a cen¬
tury, 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 on 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 concentra¬
tion, 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,
lases of ©teat ®en
■23
"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 indeter¬
minate size, and inspires an audacious mental
habit. We are as elastic as the gas of gunpow¬
der, 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 beneflt 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 in¬
tuitive habit of thought. This class serve us, so
that they have the perception of identity and the
perception of reaction. The eyes of Plato,
Shakspeare, 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.
24 IReprcscntatívc /ißen
Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our de¬
light in reason degenerates into idolatry of the
herald. Especially when a mind of powerful
method has instructed men, we find the exam¬
ples 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 1 every man is such â victim. The imbecil¬
ity of men is always inviting the impudence of
power. It is the delight of vulgar talent to dazzle
and to bind 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 assur¬
ances 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
iasc6 of ©reat fiBen
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 sales¬
man ; 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 large¬
ness of their reception, were entitled to the posi¬
tion of leaders and law-givers. These teach us the
qualities of primary nature,—admit us to the con-
26 TReprescntatlvc ^cn
stitution 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 forme into realities; Ihaveworn 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. AVith 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 man¬
kind selects these for the highest place. AVitness
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."
TIl0e6 ot ©reat /ßen
27
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 rtane,
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
28 TRcprescntattvc j®en
made immortal by apprehending my possession
of incorruptible goods. Here is great competi¬
tion 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 fc facts, and for thoughts; I like rough
and smooth, "Scourges of God," and "Darlings
of the human race." I like the first Csesar; and
Charles V., of Spain; and Charles XII., of Swe¬
den; 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, well¬
born, 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
Tllsce of ©reat fiBen
29
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 fi-om their bar¬
barous homages; an emperor, who can spare his
empire.
But I intended to specify, with a little minute¬
ness, two or three points of service. Nature
never spares the opium or nepenthe ; but wher¬
ever 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, invar¬
iably think themselves the most ill-used people
alive, and never get over their astonishment at
the ingratitude and selfishness of their contempo¬
raries. Our globe discovers its hidden virtues,
not only in heroes and archangels, but in gossips
and nurses. Is it not a rare contrivance that
30 IRcprceentative /Ißcn
lódged the due inertia in every creature, the con¬
serving, resisting energy, the anger at being
waked or changed ? Altogether independent of
the intellectual force in each, is the pride of opin¬
ion, 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 bitu
men, 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 possi¬
bility 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 un¬
limited ; 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
Ulscö of ©rcat fßen
31
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 alike ; 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 maud¬
lin 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, yon¬
der city of London, the western civilization,
would seem a bundle of insanities. We keep each
other in countenance, and exasperate by emula¬
tion the frenzy of the time. The shield against
the stingings of conscience, is the universal prac¬
tice, 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
32 IRcpresentatfvc /IBcn
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, and defend us
from our contemporaries. They are the excep¬
tions which we want, where all grows alike. 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 ap¬
pears in the excess of infiuence 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 pe¬
culiar 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 Jaco-
meca of ©rcat /iBcn
33
bin's whole speech and confutation. But it is
human nature's indispensable defence. The cen-
tripetence augments the centrifugence. We bal¬
ance 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 ap¬
proach by quantities of availableness. 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 dis¬
covery 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 trans¬
ferable," 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
34 "Kepreaentatívc /Bien
strength ; you are you, and I am I, and so we re¬
main.
For Nature wishes every thing to remain itself ;
and, whilst every individual strives to grow and
exclude, and to exclude and grow, to the extremi¬
ties 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 in¬
dividuals, in a world where every benefactor
becomes so easily a malefactor, only by continua¬
tion 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 supe¬
rior in their security from infusions of evil per¬
sons, 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.
"Clses ot ©rcat flBen
35
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 Car¬
tesian ; not a poet, but a Shaksperian. 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 micro¬
scope 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-pro¬
ceeding detachment appears not less in all thcught,
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 men :—the word is injurious. Is there
caste? is there fate? What becomes of the
promise to virtue? The thoughtful youth laments
the superfcetation of nature. " Generous and
36 IRcpresentatíve /IBen
handsome," he says, "is your hero ; but look at
yonder poor Paddy, whose country is his wheel¬
barrow ; 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 low, as that we should be low ; for we
must have society.
Is it a reply to these suggestions, to say, society
is a Pestalozzlan school : all are teachers and
pupils in turn. We are equally served by receiv¬
ing 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
"Clsea of ©rcat fßcn
37
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 con¬
fiding 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
38 TRcpresentatíve Men
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 mnemoni-
cal. 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 points com¬
pose ! pThe study of many individuals leads us to
an elemental region wherein the individual is lost,
orwherein all touchby 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 grèatest men,—their spirit dif¬
fuses 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 soulsj If the disparities of talent and position
vanish, when the individuals are seen in the dura¬
tion which is necessary to complete the career of
each; even more swiftly the seeming injustice dis¬
appears, when we ascend to the central identity of
all the individuals, and know that they are made
■fflôes of ©reat /iBen
39'
of the same 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
phœnixes : they are gone ; the world is not there¬
fore disenchanted. The vessels on which you.
read sacred emblems turn out to be common pot¬
tery ; 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 tem¬
porary 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!
4° IRepreeentatíve ^cn
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 move
as an effect. Then he appears as an exponenc 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, maybe
milder, and the germs of love and benefit may be
multiplied.
PLATO
OR,
THE PHILOSOPHER.
II
PLATO ; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER.
Among books, Plato only is entitled to Omar's
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 dis¬
cipline 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 orig¬
inalities. We have reached the mountain from
which all these drift bowlders were detached.
The Bible of the learned for twenty-two hundred
years, every brisk young man, who says in succes-
43
44 1Rcprc6cntattvc /Dien
sion 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 propor¬
tion suffer some deduction from the misfortune
(shall I say ?) of coming after this exhausting gen-
eralizer. 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 partic¬
ulars deducidle 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 chil¬
dren had he, and the thinkers of all civilized
nations are his posterity, and are tinged with his
mind. How many great men Nature is inces¬
santly 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 Mirándola. Calvinism is in his Phsedo :
Christianity is in it. Mahometanism draws all its
©lato; or, tbe ©bUosopbcr 4S
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 villagernor 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 Eng¬
land, 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, Shakspeare. 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
46 TReprcsentatíve ®en
affinities, who takes up into himself all arts,
sciences, all knowables, as his food ? He can
spare nothing; hecandispose of everything. 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 quota¬
tion 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 travelled into
Italy, to gain what Pythagoras had for him ; then
into Egypt, and perhaps still further 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
©lato; or, tbe ©biloßopbet 47
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." Everyman, 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 tbe poet, and (though
I doubt he wanted the decisive gift of lyric expres¬
sion) 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 biog¬
raphy. 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 430 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.
48 TRepreaentatíve /Bien
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 travelled 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 table-talk and
household life of every man and woman in the
European and American nations, so the writings
of Plato have preoccupied every school of learn¬
ing, 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
IPlato; or, tbe f»btlo6opbcr 49
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 wajit,
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
4
so TRcprcaentatíve Ä»en
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
©lato ; or, tbe ipbtloeopber si
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 per¬
ished, are of the immigrations from Asia, bringing
with them the dreams of barbarians; a confusion
of crude notions of morals, and of natural philos¬
ophy, gradually subsiding, through the partial
insight of single teachers.
Before Pericles, came the Seven Wise Masters ;
and we have the beginnings of geometry, meta¬
physics, and ethics: then the partialists,—dedu¬
cing the origin of things from flux or water, or frorri
air, or from fire, or from mind. All mix with
these causes mythologie pictures. At last, comes
Plato, the distributor, who needs no barbaric
paint, 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 deflne."
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.—
I. Unity, or Identity ; and, 2. Variety. We unite
all things, by perceiving the law which pervades
$2 IRepresentatívc ^en
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 asked 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 philoso¬
phy, 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 :ind 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,
IPlato; or, tbe ©bilosopbcr 53
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 chiefiy, 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 forms are unimpor¬
tant. "Youarefit" (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 man¬
kind. 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
54 IRcpreecntatíve yiBen
of true knowledge, independent, unconnected
with unrealities, with name, species, and the rest,
in time past, present, and to come. The knowl¬
edge 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 them¬
selves. 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
plato ; or, tbc Pbtloeopber S5
which all things are absorbed, action tends directly
backwards to diversity. The first is the course of
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 inter¬
penetrate 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, distribu¬
tion : 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.
56 IRepreecntatíve Äien
To this partiality the history of nations corre-
sponded. 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 dis¬
cipline ; 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 man¬
ifestation, in comprehensible results. Pericles,
Athens, Greece, had been working in this element
with the joy of genius not yet chilled by any fore¬
sight of the detriment of an excess. They saw
before them no sinister political economy; no
ominous Malthus ; no Paris or London ; no piti¬
less 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 under¬
standing was in its health and prime. Art was in
ipiato; or, tbe iPbilooopber 57
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, Byzan¬
tine legislation, English trade, the saloons of
Versailles, the cafés of Paris, the steam-mill,
steamboat, steam-coach, may all be seen in per¬
spective ; the town-meeting, the ballot-box, the
newspaper and cheap press.
Meantime, Plato, in Egypt and in Eastern pil¬
grimages, 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 natu¬
ral 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
58 TRcprescntatíve ®en
in our experience. In actual life, they are so rare,
as to be incredible ; but, primarily, there is not
onl}' no presumption against them, but the strong¬
est 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.
plato; or, tbe philosopher 59
His argument and his sentence are self-poised .and
spherical. The two poles appear ; yes, and be¬
come 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 travelling,
but in transitions from one to the other, which
must therefore be adroitly managed to present as
much transitional surface as possible ; this com¬
mand 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 sether 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 inex¬
haustibly attractive. Plato turns incessantly the
obverse and the reverse of the medal of Jove.
To take an example The physical philoso-
6o iReprcscntatívc Aen
phers 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 pro¬
duce and compose the universe. He was good ;
and he who is good has no kind of envy. Ex¬
empt 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." "All things are for the
sake of the good, and it is the cause of every
thing beautiful." This dogma animates and im¬
personates 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 de¬
scription appear incompatible. The mind of
Plato is not to be exhibited by a Chinese cata¬
logue, but is to be apprehended by an original
mind in the exercise of its original power. In
plato ; or, tbe pbilosopDet 6i
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 par¬
alyzes, 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 sick¬
ness 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 in¬
dignation 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 ten¬
der 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
62 IRcprescntatíve /HSen
not master ; that the gods never philosophize ;
but, by a celestial mania, these miracles are ac¬
complished. 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 play¬
ing 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 pre¬
cise weapon he needs. As the rich man wears no
plato ; or, tbe Pbílosopbci 63
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 is good philosophy ; and his finding
that word "coolfery," and " adulatory art," for
rhetoric, in the Gorgias, does us a substantial ser¬
vice 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 I 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 conver¬
sant 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
64 IReprcsentatíve ^en
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 ac¬
counts, and consider how I may exhibit my soul
before the judge.in a healthy condition. Where¬
fore, 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."
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 in¬
terpreter. He has reason, as all the philosophic and
poetic classhave : 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 At¬
lantis. He omits never this graduation, but slopes
his thought, however picturesque the precipice on
©lato; or, tbe philosopher 6$
one side, to an access from the plain. He never
writes in ecstasy, or catches us up into poetic rapture.
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
everything 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 naore 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 know-
able!"—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
S
66 iRcprcaentattve ^en
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 discrim¬
inating 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 intellec¬
tual 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."
" The essence or peculiarity of man is to com¬
prehend the 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." 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 law¬
giver is before the law-receiver. I give you joy,
O sons of men ! that truth is altogether whole-
IPlato; or, tbe Ipbil060pber 67
some ; 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 conjecture : 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 nothingelse 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 hisown: nay, the notion of vir¬
tue 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
68 IRcpreeentativc Elften
splendors of genius and intellectual achievement,
"The whole of life, O Socrates, said Glauco, is,
with the wise, the measure of hearing such dis¬
courses 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 I He called the
several faculties, gods, in his beautiful personation.
What value he gives to the art of gymnastics in
education; what to geometry; what to music;
what to astronomy, whose appeasing and medi¬
cinal power he celebrates! In the Tiroseus, he
indicates the highest employment of the eyes.
"By us it is asserted, that God invented and be¬
stowed 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 cir¬
culations; and that, having thus learned, and
being naturally possessed of a correct reasoning
faculty, we might, by imitating the uniform revo¬
lutions of divinity, set right our own wanderings
and blunders." And in the Republic,—"Byeach
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
Iplato ; or, tbe iPbilosopbcr 69
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 ex¬
plicit 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 Repub¬
lic, he insists on the temperaments of the youth,
as the 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 asso¬
ciating with him, no thanks are due to him ; but,
simply, whilst they were with him, they grew
lo IRepreaentattvc Men
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 convers¬
ing, 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 \Vhether 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."
©lato; or, tbe iPbflosopber 71
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 enlarge¬
ment 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 parts,—one represent¬
ing the visible, the other the intelligible world,—
and these two new sections, representing, the bright
part and the dark part of these worlds, you will
have, for one of the sections of the visible world,—
72 IRcprcaentattve /Dien
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."
To these four sections, the four operations of the
soul correspond,—conjecture, faith, understand¬
ing, 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 Phsedrus,
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 beseen,
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, in the fabri¬
cation of any work, looks to that which always
subsists according to the same ; and, employing a
©lato; or, tbe ipbílosopber 73
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 Divin¬
ity is never out of mind, and constitutes the lim¬
itation 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
74 IReprcsentatíve /IRen
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 play¬
ers 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
©lato ; or, tbe Pbíloeopber 75
any tning 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
unnameable offices, —especially if he talked with
any superfine person. He had a Franklinlike
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 ex¬
tended, 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 Bœotia, he had
shown a determination which had covered the re¬
treat of a troop ; and there was some story that,
under cover of folly, he had, in the city govern¬
ment, 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 sol¬
dier, 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 win¬
ter; and he went barefooted; and it is said that.
76 IRcprescntattvc Äien
to procure the pleasure, which he loves, of talking
at his ease all day with the most elegant and cul¬
tivated 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 conver¬
sation ] and that, under his hypocritical pretense
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 con¬
futed 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 in¬
telligence no man had ever reached ; whose tem¬
per was imperturbable ; whose dreadful logic was
always leisurely and sportive; so careless and ignor¬
ant 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
plato; or, tbc philosopher 77
to terrible choices by his dilemmas, and tosses the
Hippiases and Gorgiases, with their grand repu¬
tations, as a boy tosses his balls. The tyran-,
nous 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 con¬
ceits, 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 covej
of this play, enthusiastic in his religion. When
accused before the judges of subverting the popu¬
lar creed, he affirms the immortality of the soul,
the future reward and punishment; and, refusing
to recant, in a caprice of the popular govern¬
ment, 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. Grito 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
78 iReprceentatíve ^cn
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 his¬
tory 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 dis¬
penser of the intellectual treasures he had to com¬
municate. It was a rare fortune, that this .dEsod
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 un¬
questionably 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,
©lato; or, tbe ©bllosopber 79
therefore, in expression, literary. Mounting into
heaven, driving 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 deduc¬
tion 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
íio IReprcecntatíve /üben
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
Iplato; or, tbe iPbilosopber Si
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.
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. 1^ power of genius has ever yet had the
smallest success in explaining existence. The per¬
fect 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 1 A chief structure of human wit,
like Karnac, or the mediseval cathedrals, or the
Etrurian remains, it requires all the breadth of
human faculty to know it. I think it is truliest
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 ;
6
"82 IReprescntatívc ilßen
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.
PLATO: NEW READINGS.
The publication, in Mr. Bohn's "Serial Li¬
fe'ary," 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 bear¬
ings 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 generaliza¬
tion, 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 be-
8S
86 IReprcscntatíve /iBen
hind 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 of 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 school¬
man, or a geometer, or the prophet of a peculiar
message. He represents the privilege of the. in¬
tellect, the power, namely, of carrying up every
fact to successive platforms, and so disclosing, in
every fact, a germ of expansion. These expan¬
sions are in the essence of thought. The natu-
©lato: IRew TRcaöings 87
Talist would never help us to them by any discov¬
eries 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 or¬
ganic. The mind does not create what it per¬
ceives, 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 contin¬
uing the spiritual sight where the horizon falls on
our natural vision, and, by this second sight, dis¬
covering 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 con¬
traries, 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 signajs of a new creation ; his discernment
88 IRcpreecntatíve j®en
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 beauti¬
ful 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 them¬
selves; 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 ; his doctrine
of assimilation ; his doctrine of rerniniscence ; his
clear vision of the laws of return, or reaction,
which secure instant justice throughout the uni¬
verse, instanced every where, 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 conclu¬
sions. Plato affirms the coincidence of science
and virtue ; for vice can never know itself and
virtue ; but virtue knows both itself and vice.
©lato: IWcw IReaöings 89
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 calam¬
itous than involuntary homicide ; that the soul is
unwillingly deprived of true opinions ; and that
no man sins willingly ; that the order of proceed¬
ing 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,
tender 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 super-
go TRcpresentatlve /iBcn
sensible ; 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
moral elements.
This eldest Goethe, hating varnish and false¬
hood, delighted in revealing the real at the base
of the accidental ; in discovering connection, con¬
tinuity, 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 emolu¬
ments 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 in¬
vestigated, either in poetry or prose writings,—
how, namely, that the one is the greatest of all the
evils that the soul has within it, and justice the
greatest good."
IP lato: Bew IReaôings
91
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 olfers as the most probable particular explica¬
tion. 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 spec¬
ulation. 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 de¬
scended 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 dis¬
trict, or an island, in intellectual geography, but
that Plato first drew the sphere. He domesticates
the s®ul in nature: man is the microcosm. All
the circles of the visible heaven represent as many
92 IRcpresentatíve
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, signifi¬
cant 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 ap¬
peared 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 grada¬
tion, the Euclid of holiness, and marries the two
parts of nature. Before all men, he saw the intel¬
lectual values of the moral sentiment. Hedescribes
his own ideal, when he paints in Timgeus 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.
©lato: IRew IReaöinga
93
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,
Michel Angelo is a Platonist, in his sonnets.
Shakspeare 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 Shakspeare'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
94 "Representative ^en
the poet, too, he is only contemplative. He did
not, like Pythagoras, break himself with an institu¬
tion. All his painting in the Republic must be
esteemed mythical, with intent to bring out, some¬
times in violent colors, his thought. You cannot
institute, without peril of charlatan.
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 Michel 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, permit¬
ting the lie to governors. Plato plays Providence
a little with the baser sort, as people allow them¬
selves with their dogs and cats.
SWEDENBORG
OR,
THE MYSTIC
III.
SWEDENBORG; GR, THE MYSTIC.
Among eminent persons, those who are most
dear to men are not 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 man¬
kind, 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 short-comings of the day, and the meannesses
of labor and trafíic. Then, also, the philosopher
has his value, who flatters the intellect of this
laborer, by engaging him with subtleties which in¬
struct him in new faculties. Others may build
cities; he is to understand them, and keep them
7 97
98 IRepreeentatíve /iRen
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 shall
draw the line of relation that subsists between
Shakspeare 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, Shakspeare
is our city of refuge. Yet the instincts presently
teach, that the problem of essence must take pre¬
cedence 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 Ian-
Sweôenborg ; or, tbc /iftgetíc 99
guage 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 how,
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 par¬
lance, what one man is said to learn by experience,
a man of extraordinary sagacity is said, without
experience, to divine. The Arabians say, that
loo IRepreaentatívc illien
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 Transmi¬
gration. 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 knowl¬
edge : no wonder that she is able to-recollect, in
regard to anyone 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 course, and faint not in
the midst of his researches. lEor inquiry and learn¬
ing is reminiscence allJ3 How much more, if he
that inquires be a holy and godlike soul I For,
by being assimilated to the original soul, by
Sweöenbotß ; or, tbc /ibBötic loi
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;"
Mwffif, the closing of the eyes,—whence our
word. Mystic. The trances of Socrates, Ploti¬
nus, Porphyry, Pehmen, Bunyan, Fox, Pascal,
Guion, Swedenborg, will readily come to mind.
But what as readily comes, to mind, is, the accom¬
paniment of disease. This beatitude comes in
terror, and with shocks to the mind of the
receiver. " It o'er informs 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, some¬
what morbid has mingled, in spite of the unques¬
tionable increase of mental power. Must the
highest good drag after it a quality which neu¬
tralizes and discredits it?—
102 1Rcprc6entatíve ^en
" Indeed it takes
From our achievements, when performed at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute."
Shall we say, that the economical mother dis¬
burses so much earth and so much fire, by weight
and metre, 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 Eman¬
uel 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,
Cristierns, 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
Swc&enborg; or, tbe ^lestic 103
frame is on a larger scale, and possesses the advan¬
tage 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 ex¬
traordinary. Such a boy could not whistle or
dance, but goes grubbing into mines and moun¬
tains, prying into chemistry and optics, physiology,
mathematics, and astronomy, to flnd 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 Fre-
dericshall, 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
I04 IReprcsentatíve iÜBen
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 rèsigned 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 ac¬
quaintance 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
t.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
Sweöenborg ; or, tbe /IftBstíc 105
with the importation and publication of his reli¬
gious works ; but he seems to have kept the friend¬
ship 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; and he lived in a house
situated in a large garden : he went several times
to England, where he does not seem to have at¬
tracted 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 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 quar¬
ries 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
IC36 IRepresentatíve jíDien
his books on mines and metals are held in the
highest esteem by those who understand these
matters. It seems that he anticipated much sci¬
ence 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 mag¬
nanimously 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 re¬
mains.
A colossal soul, he lies vast abroad on his times,
uncomprehended by them, and requires a long
local distance to be seen ; suggest, as Aristotle,
Bacon, Seiden, 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 realize his own picture, in the "Principia,"
of the original integrity of man. Over and above
Sweöenborß ; or, tbe íb^stlc lo?
the merit of his particular discoveries, is the capi¬
tal 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 stal¬
wart presence would flutter the gowns of an uni¬
versity. Our books are false by being fragmentary ;
their sentences are bon mots, and not parts of
jnalural 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 pur¬
posely framed to excite surprise, as jugglers do by
concealing their means. But Swedenborg is sys¬
tematic, and respective of the world in every sen¬
tence ; all the means are orderly given ; his facul¬
ties work with astronomic punctuality, and this
admirable writing is pure from all pertness or
egotism.
Swedenborg was born into an ^atmosphere of
great ideas. 'Tis hard to say what was his own:
ío8 IReprcaentatíve Men
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 acci¬
dent, and opening by its terminology and defini¬
tion, 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 Gil¬
bert's magnet, with its vortex, spiral, and polarity,
had filled Europe with the leading thought of vor¬
tical motion, as the secret of nature. Newton, in
the year in which Swedenborg was born, published
the " Principia," and established the universal
gravity. Malpighi, following the high doctrines of
Hippocrates, Leucippus, and Lucretius, had given
emphasis to the dogma that nature works in leasts,
— " tota in minimis existit natura." Unrivalled
dissectors, Swammerdam, Leeuwenhoek, Winslow,
Eustachius, Heister, Vesalius, Boerhaave, had left
nothing for scalpel or microscope to reveal in
human or comparative anatomy: Linnaeus, his con¬
temporary, was affirming, in his beautiful science,
that " Nature is always like herself;" and, lastly,
the nobility of method, the largest application of
Sweöenbotö ; or, tbe /Tlbsötic 109
principles, had been exhibited by Leibnitz 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 original of Sweden-
borg'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 ex¬
ample 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
théologie 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
no IRcprescntattvc ®en
solid knowledge makes his style lustrous with
points and shooting spicula of thought, and re¬
sembling 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 percep¬
tion 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 uni¬
versality of each law in nature ; the Platonic doc¬
trine of the scale or degrees; the version or con¬
version of each into other, and so the correspond¬
ence 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 antago¬
nism 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-philoso¬
phy, which he held not idly, as the dreamers of
Berlin or Boston, but which he experimented
with and stablished through years of labor, with
Sweôcnborg; or, tbe ^^stic m
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 s elf-similar. In the
plant, the eye or germinative point opens to a
leaf, then to another leaf, with a power of trans¬
forming 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, deter¬
mining the form it shall assume. In the animal,
nature makes a vertebra, or a spine of vertebrse,
and helps herself still by a new spine, with a lim¬
ited 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 hori¬
zontal line, and man, being an erect line, consti¬
tute 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
112 IReprceentatíve /iften
end, sne 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 ex¬
tremities 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 Tim-
aeus. Within it, on a higher plane, all that was
done in tlie 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 gen¬
erating, in a new and ethereal element. Here,
in the brain, is all the process of alimentation re¬
peated, 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 pro¬
cess of the last. We are adapted to infinity. We
Sweöenborg; or, tbe ^sstfc "3
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 ex¬
tension of the law of masses into particles, and
that the atomic theory shows the action of chem¬
istry to be mechanical also. Metaphysics shows
us a sort of gravitation, operative also in the men¬
tal 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 grand¬
mother, then, in every twenty thousand, or thirty
thousand, is found one man who eats shoes, or
marries his grandmother. What we call gravita¬
tion, and fancy ultimate, is one fork of a mightier
stream, for which we have yet no name. Astron¬
omy is excellent ; but it must come up into life to
have its full value, and not remain there in globes
8
114 TRepreecntatíve flßen
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, rota¬
tion, 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 revolu¬
tion, 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 octaves, 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
Sweôenborg; or, tbe yiftieetíc 115
in Mr. Wilkinson, in London, a philosophic critic,
with a coequal vigor of understanding and imagi¬
nation comparable only to Lord Bacon's, who
has produced his niaster'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 re¬
markable 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 "isa book of wonder¬
ful 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
ii6 IRcpresentativc ^ftcn
" to uncover those secret recesses where nature is
sitting at the fires in the depths of her labora¬
tory ; " whilst the picture comes recommended by
the hard fidelity with which it is based on practi¬
cal 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 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 phenom¬
ena, 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."
Sweöcnborg; or, tbe ^gstíc 117
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 macro¬
cosm 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.
Lib. I. 835.
" 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 entirely in leasts,"—is a favor¬
ite thought of Swedenborg. ''It is a constant
law of the organic body, that large, compound, or
visible forms exist and subsist from smaller, sim¬
pler, and ultimately from invisible forms, which
n8 IReprcsentatíve ^en
act similarly to the larger ones, but more perfectly
and more universally, and the least forms so per¬
fectly and universally, as to involve an idea repre¬
sentative of their entire universe." The unities
of each organ are so many little organs, homoge¬
neous 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 the 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 ter¬
restrial and corporeal. The second and next
Sweöenborg; or, tbc ^gstíc ng
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 vari¬
ously circular, and have a spherical surface for
centre ; therefore it is called the perpetual-circu¬
lar. The form above this is the vortical, or per¬
petual spiral : next, the perpetual-vortical, or ce¬
lestial : last, the perpetual-celestial, or spiritual."
Was it strange that a genius so bold should
take the last step, also,—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 spir¬
itual world ; insomuch, that if we choose to ex¬
press any natural truth in physical and definite
vocal terms, and to convert these terms only into
I20 iRcpresentatíve /Bien
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 per¬
vades 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 of 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 proportions, with their translation into a
moral and political sense. Behmen, and all mys¬
tics, 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
Sweöcnborg; or, tbc Mgotfc 121
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 has 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 symbol¬
ism of things is scientifically opened. One would
say, that, as soon asmen 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,
122 IRcpresentatíve Acn
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 pro¬
found mind admitted the perilous opinion, too
frequent in religious history, that he was an
abnormal person, to whom was granted the privi¬
lege 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 con¬
stitution, 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.
Sweöcnbovg ; or, tbe /IRgotíc 123
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 à 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 alle¬
gories, or written in the angelic and ecstatic mode,
he employed his remaining years in extricating
from the literal, the universal sense. He had bor¬
rowed from Plato the fine fable 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.
124 iReprescntatívc /IRen
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 be¬
cause they exist from an influx of the Lord, through
heaven." This design of exhibiting such corre¬
spondences, 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 théologie 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
théologie notion;—a horse signifies carnal under¬
standing; 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
Sweöenborfl ; or, tbc /Hbgetíc 125
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 Christy "
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 worship¬
per, 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 dig¬
nifies every circumstance. Instead of a religion
126 iRcpreeentatíve ißcn
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 command¬
ing ; yet such grave deductions must be made.
Their immense and sandy diffiiseness is like the
prairie, or the desert, and their incongruities are
like the last deliration. He is superfluously ex¬
planatory, 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 inessential
resemblances, like the resemblance of a house to
Swcöenborg; or, tbc /Iftgstic 127
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 com¬
mon form of literary pride ! a theoretic or specu¬
lative man, but whom no practical man in the uni¬
verse could affect to scorn. Plato isagownsman :
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 correc¬
tion of popular errors, the announcement of ethi¬
cal 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 man¬
kind. 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
conflned 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
128 (Representative ^en
world has a sure chemistry, by which it attracts
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 philo¬
sophic 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 know¬
ing 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
swcôenborg ; or, tbe /ilissttc 129
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 soci¬
eties which they approach discover their quality,
and drive them away. The covetous seem to them¬
selves 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 spring¬
time 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.
9
130 IReprescntatíve /üben
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 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 He¬
braism had been omitted, and the law stated with¬
out 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 univer¬
sal, and not local ; virility in the male qualifying
every organ, act, and thought ; and the feminine
sweoenborg ; or, tbe ®gßtic 131
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 the earth, fancies a wiser choice in
heaven. But of progressive souls, all loves and
friendships are momentary. Do you love me I
means. Do you see the same truth ? If you do,
we are happy with the same happiness ; but pres¬
ently 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 exist¬
ing for me; but it is a child's clinging to his
toy; an attempt to eternize the fireside and nup¬
tial chamber ; to keep the picture-alphabet through
which our first lessons arë prettily conveyed.
The Eden of God is bare and grand : like the
out-door landscape, remembered from the evening
132 TRepcescntatíve Zilien
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" conver¬
sation, whose laws are profoundly eliminated. 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 fel¬
lowships of joy. So far from there being any
thing 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.
Representative Men s
EMANUEL SWEDENBORG
SweDenborg ; or, tbc /iBgstlc 133
Whether a self-inquisitorial habit, that he grew
into, from jealousy of the sins to which men of
thought are liable, he has acquired, in disentan¬
gling 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 inces¬
santly 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 flnd the seat of his own pain. Possibly
Swedenborg paid the penalty of introverted fac¬
ulties. 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 flxed 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 Ani-
134 IRcprcecntatíve ^en
mal 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 judg¬
ment. 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
heard there, for a long continuance, their lamenta¬
tions ; he saw their tormentors, who increase and
Sweôcnborg ; or, tbc Jübsstlc 13S
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 ex-
crementitious hells ; the hell of the revengeful,
whose faces resembled a round, broad cake, and
their arms rotate like a wheel. Except Rabelias
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 multi¬
tudes 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 educa¬
tion, 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 eigh¬
teen or twenty years, might read once these books
of Swedenborg, these mysteries of love and con¬
science, and then throw them aside for ever.
Genius is ever haunted by similar dreams, when
136 IReprescntatíve /Ißen
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 uni¬
verse, 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,
Swcöenborg; or, tbe Asatíc 137
Sir Hans Sloane, King George, II., Mahomet, or
whosoever, 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 huinan relenting,
remarks, " one whom it was given me to believç.
was Cicero;" and when the soi disant Roman
opens his mouth, Rome and eloquence have ebbed
away,—it is plain théologie Swedenborg, like
the rest. His heavens and hells are dull ; fault of
want of individualism. The thousand-fold rela¬
tion 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 classifica¬
tion, so many allowances, and contingences, 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 théologie
determination. Nothing with him has the liberal-
138 IRcprcsentatíve /Oben
ity 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 ex¬
cess 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 reani¬
mate and conserve what had already arrived at
its natural term, and, in the great secular Provi¬
dence, was retiring from its prominence, before
western modes of thought and expression. Swe¬
denborg and Behmen both failed by attaching
themselves to the Christian symbol, instead of to the
moral sentiment, which carries innumerable Christ¬
ianities, 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 flre,
dragons crowned and horned, behemoth and uni¬
corn? Good for orientals, these are nothing to
Sweöenborg ; or, tbc yiftgotic 139
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?' 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, propos¬
ing to take away my rhetoric, and substitute his
own, and amuse me with pelican and stork, instead
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 indis¬
putable secrets of moral nature,—with all these
14° ¡Representative ^en
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 contro¬
versial memory with him, in his visits to the souls,
He is like Michel 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 hailstorm passes over the
village, thinks the day of doom has come, and the
cannibals already have got the pip. Swedenbogr
confounds us not less with the pains of Melancthon,
and I.uther, and Wolfius, and his own books,
which he advertises among the angels.
Under the same théologie 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
Sweöenborg ; or, tbe /¡Bestie 141
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
théologie limitation, is this 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 it 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 the¬
ology arrived, that Swedenborg admitted no con¬
version 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 old Nickie
Ben,"
" O wad ye tak a thought, and mend ! "
142 IRcpreecntatíve /iften
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 adora¬
tion,—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 revela¬
tions 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 them¬
selves ; I reply, that the Spirit which is holy, is re¬
served, taciturn, and deals in laws. The rumors
of ghosts and hobgoblins gossip and tell fortunes.
The teaching of the high Spirit are abstemious,
and, in regard to particulars, negative. Socrates'
Genius did not advise him to act or to find, but
Swc&enborg ; or, tbe ^gstic 143
if he proposed to do somewhat not advantageous,
it dissuade^ 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 Quak¬
ers 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
144 iRepreecntatlve ißen
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 In¬
ferno is mesmeric. His spiritual world bears the
same relation to the generosities and joys of truth,
of which human souls have already made us cog¬
nizant, 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 manyan 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 heavens, 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
Sweöenborg; or, tbe /IftBstíc >45
archangels be less majestic and sweet than the fig¬
ures 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 fête champêtre,
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 Rhada-
manthus in gold-headed cane and peruke, and
with nonchalance, and the air of a referee, dis¬
tributes souls. The warm, many-weathered, pas¬
sionate-peopled world is to him a grammar of
hieroglyphs, or an emblematic freemason's proces¬
sion. 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 beau¬
tifully wise, notwithstanding the mystical narrow¬
ness and incommunicableness. Swedenborg is
lO
146 IRcpresentattve Men
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 mat¬
tock and shroud. Some minds are forever re¬
strained from descending into nature ; others are
forever 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 ap¬
paratus of poetic expression, which that percep¬
tion creates. He knew the grammar and rudi¬
ments 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 per-
Sweöenborg ; or, tbe ^gstíc 147
vades 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 accu¬
rate 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 became 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, isa 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
148 IRepreaentatíve Aen
commo;i 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 forever 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 trans¬
migrating 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 de¬
grees, from events to their summits and caiises,
he was fired with piet)' 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
Swcöenborg; or, tbe ilb^ôtic 149
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
OR,
THE SKEPTIC.
IV.
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 him¬
self 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
153
154 iRcpreeentattve Ä>en
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 philosôphy. 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 mon¬
sters ; and that of Goethe and Schiller, in our
own time, is scarcely moré kind.
íftontaígnc; or, tbe Sftcptíc iS5
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 beg¬
gars, 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 drudg-
156 IReprceentatívc Elften
eries 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 arith¬
metic, 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, incendi¬
ary, follies of young men, repudiated by the solid
portion of society : and a man comes to be val¬
ued by his athletic and animal qualities. Spence
relates, that Mr. Pope was with Sir Godfrey
Montaigne; or, tbc Sheptíc iS7
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 maybe," 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 are incendiary, revolvers
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, Weib, und 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
is8 IReprcscntattvc /IBcn
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 dis¬
gust. Life is eating us up. We shall be fables
presently. Keep cool : it will be all one a hun¬
dred 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 ofit. "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 Boling-
broke, "and so much more, as well as meanness,
in going out ofit, that 'tis hardly worth while tobe
here at all. " I knew a philosopher of this kidney,
who was accustomed briefly to sum up his experi¬
ence of human nature in saying, " Mankind is a
damned rascal : ' ' and the natural corollary is
/IBontaigne; or, tbe Sftepttc 159
pretty sure to follow,— " The world lives by hum¬
bug, and so will I."
The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutu¬
ally exasperating each other, and the scoffer ex¬
pressing 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 fac¬
ulties, 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 adament ; 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
i6o IReprcecntatívc flBen
sleep, the day a fear of interruption,—pallor,
squalor, hunger, and egotism. If you come near
them, and see what conceits tney entertain,—they
are abstractionists, and spend their days and
nights in dreaming some dreams ; in expecting the
homage of society to some precious scheme built
on a truth, but destitute of proportion in its pre¬
sentment, of justness in its application, and of all
energy of will in the schemer to embody and vital¬
ize 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 ex¬
aggerate the power of virtue? Why be an angel
before your time ? These strings, woundup 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 nnt 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
Montaigne ; or, tbe Skeptic i6i
;ase. 1 am here to consider, cKmruv, to con¬
sider how it is. I will try to keep the balance
true. Of what use to take the chair, and glibly
rattle off theories of societies, 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 sim¬
ple a game, when we know how subtle and elusive
the Proteus is? AVhy 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
repentit." Is not the state a question ? All so¬
il
i62 IRepreaentatívc /llSen
ciety 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 politics, 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 accomplishment ;
and yet, culture will instantly destroy that chiefest
beauty of spontaneousness. Excellent is culture
íBontatgne; or, tbc Sftep'tlc 163
for a savage ; but once let him read in tlie book,
and he is no longer able not to think of Plutarch's
heroes. In short, since true fortitude of under¬
standing 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 abroady let us mix in affairs ; let us
learn, and get, and have, and climb. " Menarea
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 jeer¬
ing at all that is stable and good. These are no
more his moods than are those of religion and
philosophy. He is the considérer, the prudent,
î64 IRcprcaentatíve /Bien
taking in sail, counting stock, husbanding his
means, believing that a man has too many en¬
emies, than that he can afford to be his own ; that
we cannot give ourselves too many advantages, in
this unequal conflict, with powers so vast and un-
weariable ranged on one side, and this little, con¬
ceited, 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 is the architec¬
ture of a house founded on the sea. The soul of
man must be the type of our scheme, just as the
Representative Men 2
MICHEL EYQUEM MONTAIGNE
Montaigne; ot, tbe Sfteptic 165
body 01' man is tbe type after- which a dwelling-
house is built. Adaptiveness is the peculiarity of
human nature. We are golden averages, wolitant
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 re¬
sources, 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 them¬
selves 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
i66 IRcprescntatíve j®en
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 Mon¬
taigne. 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 repre¬
sentative 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 remain¬
ing 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 le Chaise, I came to a tomb of
Augustus 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
/Montaigne; or, tbe Sfteptíc 167
the Essays of Montaigne." Some years later, I
became acquainted with an accomplished English
poet, John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my cor¬
respondence, I found that, from a love of Mon¬
taigne, he had rhade 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 Re¬
view, 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 Shakspeare 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 Elorio, which the British Museum purchased,
with a view of protecting the Shakspeare auto¬
graph (as I was informed in the Museum), turned
out to have the autograph of Ben Jonson in the
ñy-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.
168 TRepresentatívc /üben
In 1571, on the death of his father, Montaigne,
then thirty-eight years old, retired from the prac¬
tice 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 safe-keep¬
ing. 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 censures 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
Montaigne ; or, tbc Sftcptíc i6s>
nakedness of statement was permitted, which our
manners, of a literature addressed equally to both
sexes, do not allow. But, though a biblical plain¬
ness, 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 liv¬
ing." But, with all this really superfluous frank¬
ness, the opinion of an invincible probity grows
into every reader's mind.
"When I the most strictly and religiously con¬
fess myself, I find that the best virtue I have has
in it some tincture of vice; and I am afraid that
Plato, in his purest virtue (I, who am as sincere
and perfect a lover of virtue of that stamp as any
other whatever), 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
17° IRepreacntatíve ®en
color or pretence of any kind. He has been in
courts so long as to have conceived a furious dis¬
gust 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 h^s
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 bar¬
barous man is, the better he is. He likes his
saddle. You may reàd 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 emble¬
matic pair of scales, and wrote Que scats 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 wha>
iiißontaisne ; or, tbe Sheptic 171
I certainly know,—my houäe 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 rvill 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 can not
be sure of himself and his fortune an hour, but he
m^y be whisked off into some pitiable or ridicu¬
lous 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 any thing 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
172
IRepresentatívc Ä>en
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 any where 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
we have in listening to the necessary speech of
men about their work, when any unusual circum¬
stance gives momentary importance to the dia¬
logue. 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, more¬
over, 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 anni¬
hilate 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
flBontaigne ; or, tbe Sfteptlc 173
are awake. He keeps the plain ; he rarely mounts
or sinks ; likes to feel solid ground, and the
stones underneath. His writing has no enthu¬
siasms, 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 scats 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.
174 tßepreeentativc Elften
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 con¬
nection 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 ac¬
count 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 ap¬
pears whose nature is to all men's eyes conserving
and constructive : his presence supposes a well-
ordered society, agriculture, trade, large institu¬
tions, and empire. If these did not exist, they
would begin to exist through his endeavor».
Montaigne; or, tbe Slicptíc 17s
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 contem¬
plated, might be a very modest or musty pros¬
perity, 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 unbe¬
lief, the skeptical class, which Montaigne repre¬
sents, 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. So¬
ciety does not like to have any breath of question
176 1Repcc5entatlve /üben
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 re¬
mains 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 selfish¬
ness 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 popu¬
lar 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;" while 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 pau¬
per, 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 school-books
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
asontalgne; or, tbe Sftcptic 177
darkens the sun for hirn. 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 nega¬
tions. 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 hon¬
estly 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 o.xen tliink.
The first dangerous symptom I report, is, the
levity of intellect ; as if it were fatal to earnest¬
ness 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, my subtle and admirable
friend, one of the most penetrating of men, finds
12
178 iKepreöentativc /Iftcn
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
ark 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 brick, 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 nine¬
teenth century, from Byron, Goethe, and other
poets of less fame, not to mention many distin¬
guished private observers,—I confess it is not very
affecting to my imagination ; for it seems to con¬
cern 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
/Iftontaígne ; or, tbe Sftcptíc 179
unanimous ; and that, though philosophy extir¬
pates 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 alter¬
nate 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
i8o IRepreeentatíve ^cn
you,—on the whole, selfishness plants best, prunes
best, makes the best commerce, and the best citi¬
zen." 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
<jod 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 com¬
munity of sentiment discoverable in distant times
and places ? And when it shows the power of
self-interest, I accept that as a 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
/IBontaíflne ; or, tbe Sfteptíc i8i
against this ferocity which champs us up. What
front can we make against these unavoidable, vic¬
torious, 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 per-'
petual 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
i82 IRcprescntatívc /IRcn
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 recon¬
ciliation between the theory and practice of life.
Reason, the prized reality, the Law, is appre¬
hended, 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 in¬
terval, to be lost again. If we compute it in time,
we may, in fifty years, have half a dozen reasona¬
ble hours. Tut what are these cares and works
the better ? A method in the world we do not
see, but this parellelism of great and little, which
never react on each other, nor discover the small¬
est 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
/fliontaígne ; oc, tbc Sfteptfc 183
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 coöperation impossi¬
ble ? 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 enter¬
tainment for it, but mere misapprehension, dis¬
taste, 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 at¬
tempt 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
i84 1Repre0cntatívc /Ißen
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? Wlien 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
accomodation 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 divini¬
ties. 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
/ICiontaígnc ; or, tbe Sftcpttc 185
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 skepti¬
cisms. Charitable souls come with their projects,
and ask his cooperation. 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 cannot put the statement
i86 iRepteaentatíve /ßen
so that he shall affirm it. But he denies out ot
more faith, and not less. He denies out of hon¬
esty. He had rather stand charged with the
imbecility of skepticism, than with untruth. I
beU\eve, he says, in the moral design of the uni¬
verse ; 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, with¬
out 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 skepti¬
cism ; but I know that they will presently
appear to me in that order which makes skepti-
Montaigne; or, tbc Sbcptíc 187
cism 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 attrac¬
tions of man are proportioned to his destinies;"
in other words, that every desire predicts its own
satisfaction. Yet, all experience exhibits there-
verse of this ; the incompetency of power is the
universal grief of young and ardent minds. They
accuse the divine providence of a certain parsi¬
mony. It has shown the "heaven and earth to
ivery 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
i88 TRcpreecntatíve Zilien
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 soar¬
ing saint, this chasm is found,—between the larg¬
est promise of ideal power, and the shabby expe¬
rience.
The expansive nature of truth comes to our suc¬
cor, 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 pene¬
trate 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 pro¬
mote rogues, to defeat the just ; and, by knaves,
/HSontalôiK ; or, tbe Slieptíc 189
as by martyrs, the just cause is carried forwar-d.
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 govern¬
ment 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 atiaws; 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 benef=
icent tendency irresistibly streams.
Let a man learn to look for the permanent i«-
the mutable and fleeting ; let him learn to bear
the disappearance of things he was wont to rever¬
ence, 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 con¬
tained in the Eternal cause.—
"If my bark sink, 'tis to another sea."
SHAKSPEARE
OR,
THE POET",
V.
SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET.
Great men are more distinguished by range
and extent, than by originality. If we require the
originality which consists in weaving, like à 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 origin¬
ality 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 rattlebrain, 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
13 '93
194 IRepresentattvc /HSen
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 anAnarctic continent: to-day I
will square the circle : I will ransack botany, and
find a new food for man : I have a new architect¬
ure in my mind : I foresee a new mechanic
power;" nó, 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 fiour, 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
Sbaftspearc; or, tbe ipoet 195
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 riv¬
ers. 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 his¬
tory, 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, con¬
sists in not being original at all ; in being alto¬
gether receptive ; in letting the world do all, and
suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed
through the mind.
Shakspeare'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.
igó IReprcsentative ißen
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 acccount, 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 Shakspeare 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 manu-
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
Sbaftepearc; or, tbe ©oet 197
script, 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 Csesar, 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 man¬
uscripts. It is now no longer possible to say
who wrote them first. They have been the prop¬
erty 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 on 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.
Shakspeare, 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
198 IReprcsentatíve /Dien
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 arrayed with refer¬
ence 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.
sôbaftspeare ; or, tbe iPoct 199
the perilous irritability of poetic talent found in
the accumulated dramatic materials to which the
people were already wonted, and which had a cer¬
tain excellence which no single genius, however
extraordinary, could hope to create.
In point of fact, it appears that Shakspeare did
owe debts in all directions, and was able to use
whatever he found ; and the amount of indebted¬
ness may be inferred from Malone's laborious com¬
putations in regard to the First, Second, and Third
parts of Henry VL, in which, " out of 6043 lines,
1771 were written by some author preceding
Shakspeare; 2373 by him, on the foundation laid
by his predecessors ; and i8çç were entirely his
own." And the proceeding investigation hardly
leaves a single drama of his absolute invention.
Malone's sentence is an ihaportant piece of ex¬
ternal 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 Shakspeare, whose secret
is, that the thought constructs the tune, so that
reading for the sense will best bring out the
200 IReprcsentatíve ®en
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 Shakspeare'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.
Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a bet¬
ter 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 litera¬
ture 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 inspira¬
tion ; from whatever source, they are equally
welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he
borrows very near home. Other men say wise
Sbaftspeare ; or, the poet 201
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 hun¬
dred 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, 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
Provençal poets, are his benefactors : the Ro-
maunt of the Rose is only judicious translation
202 IRepresentatíve Ä>en
from William of Lorris and John of Meun:
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 Go wer 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 awk¬
wardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts ;
but, as sooir as we have learned what to do with
them, they become our own.
Thus, all originality is relative. Every thinker
it 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
Sbaiîspeare; or, tbe Ipoct 203
it will bereave his fine attitude and resistance of
something of their impressiveness. As Sir Rob¬
ert 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
thereat 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 ministra¬
tions 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
204 IRcptcscntatíve /üben
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 formsof the Catholic church,—these collected,
too, in long periods, from the prayers and medita¬
tions 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 substan¬
tial truth of the legal distinctions, are the con¬
tribution 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. Ve¬
das, .^sop's Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid,
Sbaftspcare; or, tbc poet 205
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 original¬
ity 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 Shakspeare 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 com¬
pletion of secular plays, from Eerrex and Porrex,
and Gammer Gurton's Needle, down to the pos¬
session of the stage by the very pieces which
Shakspeare 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 un¬
opened, no file of old yellow accounts to decom¬
pose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to
discover whether the boy Shakspeare poached 01
not, whether he held horses at the theatre door,
2o6 iReptfc^üntatívc ®en
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 touch
ing 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 inspira¬
tion 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 men¬
tioned his name. Ben Jonson, though we have
strained his few words of regard and panegyric,
had no suspicion of the elastic fame whose flrst
vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt
thought the praise he has conceded to him gener--
Sbaftspcare; or, tbc IPoet 207
ous, and esteemed himself, out of all question, the
better poet of the two.
If it need wit to know wit, according to the
proverb, Shakspeare's time should be capable of
recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born four
years after Shakspeare, and died twenty-three
years after him; and I find among his correspond¬
ents and acquaintances, the following persons:
Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sid¬
ney, Earl of Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter
Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane, Isaac
Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellar-
mine, Charles Cotton, John Pym, John Hales,
Kepler, Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi,
Arminius; with all of whom exist some token
of his having communicated, without enumerating
many others, whom doubtless he saw,—Shaks¬
peare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger,
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
2o8 IRepreaentatívc Acn
adequate begin to appear. It was not possible to
write the history of Shakspeare till now ; for he
is the father of German literature : it was on the
introduction of Shakspeare into German, by Les-
sing, and the translation of his works by Wieland
and Schlegel, that the rapid burst of German lit¬
erature was most intimately connected. It was
not until the nineteenth century, whose specula¬
tive genius is a sort of living Hamlet, that the
tragedy of Hamlet could find such wondering
readers. Now, literature, philosphy, and thought,
are Shakspearized. His mind is the horizon be¬
yond 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 ex¬
pressed our convictions with any adequate fidelity :
but there is in all cultivated minds a silent ap¬
preciation of his superlative power and beauty,
which, like Christianity, qualifies the period.
The Shakspeare Society have inquired in all
directions, advertised the missing facts, offered
money for any information that will lead to proof;
and with what results? 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
îSbaftepeare; or, tbe ©oet 209
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 infor¬
mation. 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 inven¬
tion which is the concealed magnet of his attrac¬
tion for us. We are very clumsy writers of
history. We tell the chronicle of parentage,
birth, birth-place, schooling, school-mates, earning
H
210 IReprcscntatíve ¿Dien
of money, marriage, publication of books, celeb¬
rity, 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, Driiry Lane, the Park, and Tre-
mont, 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 cojse, again in complete steel
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?"
Sbalîapeare; or, tbe iPoct 211
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
green-room. Can any biography shed light on
the localities into which the Midsummer Night's
Dream admits me? Did Shakspeare 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 Cyclo-
psean architecture of Egypt and India ; in the
Phidian sculpture ; the Gothic minsters; the Ital¬
ian 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, who see the works, and ask in vain for a
history.
Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shak¬
speare ; and even he can tell nothing, except to
212
1Rcpvc0cntatíve /Bien
the Shakspeare in us ; that is, to our most appre¬
hensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from
off his tripod, and give us anecdotes of his inspi¬
rations. Read the antique documents extricated,
analyzed, and compared, by the assiduous Dyce
and Collier ; and now read one of those skiey
sentences,—aerolites,—which seem to have fallen
outof 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 mea¬
gre, yet, with Shakspeare for biographer, instead
of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the in¬
formation 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 mal-
Sbahspcare; or, tbc poet 213
ice 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 mer¬
chant, answer for his great heart. So far from
Shakspeare 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 philos¬
ophy, 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 func¬
tion, or district of man'swork, has he not remem¬
bered? 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 out-
seen ? What gentleman has he not instructed in
the rudeness of his behavior?
214 IRcprcaentatíve Men
Some able and appreciating critics think no
criticism on Shakspeare valuable, that does not
rest purely on the dramatic merit j 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 vras a full man, who
liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and im¬
ages, 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 occasions 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 Shakspeare 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,
Sbaiîspeare; or, tbe f»oet 215
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 de¬
marcations 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 import¬
ance 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.
Shakspeare 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 Shaks-
peare's. We are still out of doors. For executive
faculty, for creation, Shakspeare 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
2i6 iRcpceeentatíve ^en
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
coordinates all his faculties. Give a man of talents
a story to tell, and his partiality will presently
appear. H-e 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, buthisfitness and strength.
But Shakspeare has no peculiarity, no importunate
topic ; but all is duly given j no veins, no curiosi¬
ties : no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no manner¬
ist 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.
Sbahspearc; or, tbe ipoet 217
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 representa¬
tion. 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
Shakspeare ; but the possibility of the translation
of things into song is demonstrated.
2i8 IRcpresentatlve ^cn
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 in¬
comparable 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
ön them for their euphuism, yet the sentence is so
loaded with meaning, and so linked with its fore-
goers 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 parties can name
every figure: this is Andrew, and that is Rachel.
The sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar
SbaftBpcare; or, tbe ftoct 219
with wings, and not ye-t 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 Shakspeare. 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 for¬
sake his mistress to partake of them. And the
true bards have been noted for their flrm and
cheerful temper. Homer lies in sunshine ; Chau¬
cer 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 sov¬
ereign and cheerful,—much more sovereign and
cheerful is the tone of Shakspeare. 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 ?
220 iRepresentatíve ®en
He touches nothing that does not horrow health
and longevity from his festive style.
And now, how stands the account of man with
this bard and benefactor, when in solitude, shut¬
ting 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 Shakspeare also,
and finds him to share the halfness and imperfec¬
tion of humanity.
Shakspeare, 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. Shakspe:i^re
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
Sbaftspeare; or, tbc ff>oet 221
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 pyroteclmy
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 a Winter Evening's Tale: what sig¬
nifies another picture more or less? The Egyptian
verdict of the Shakspeare 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 com-
222 "Kepreeentatívc /flien
mon 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 pro¬
fane life, using his genius for the public amuse¬
ment.
Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite,
German, and Swede, beheld the same objects:
they also saw through them that which was con¬
tained. And to what purpose? The beauty
straightway vanishes ; 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 histo¬
ries 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 trifie with Shakspeare the
Sbal?0peare ; or, tbc iPoet 223
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
OR,
THE MAN OF THE WORLD.
15
VI.
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 homo¬
geneous 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, &c. 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.
227
228 TReprcscntatívc /Iften
In our society, there is a standing antagonism
between the conservative and the democratic
classes; between those who have made their for¬
tunes, and the young and the poor who have
fortunes to make ; between the interests of dead
labor,—tliat 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 build¬
ings, and money stocks. The first class is timid,
selfish, illiberal, hating innovation, and contin¬
ually 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 through¬
out Europe ; the class of industry and skill. Na¬
poleon is its representative. The instinct of
active, brave, able men, throughout the middle
class every where, 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
Kepresentalive Men 4
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
IRapoleon; or, tbe /IBan ot tbc Hülorlö 229
most various means to that end ; conversant with
mechanical powers, highly intellectual, widely
and accurately learned and skilful, but subordi¬
nating all intellectual and spiritual forces into
means to a material success. To be the rich man,
is the end. " God has granted," says the Ko¬
ran, " 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 Bon¬
aparte 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. Na¬
poleon 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 citi¬
zen, who, by very intelligible merits, arrived at
such a commanding position, that he could in¬
dulge all those tastes which the comman man pos¬
sesses, but is obliged to conceal and deny ; good
society, good books, fast travelling, dress, dinners,
servants without number, personal weight, the exe-
230 TRcprc0cntattve ^en
cution 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 agree¬
able 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 Conven¬
tion, and heard Mirabeau make a speech. It
struck Dumont that he could fit it with a pero¬
ration, which he wrote in pencil immediately,
and showed 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
mapoleon ; or, tbe ÍBan of tbe HClorlô 231
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 expres¬
sion. 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 qual¬
ities 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
232 IReprcsentatívc /IBen
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.
mapolcon; or, tbe /iRan of tbc Morlö 233
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 gener¬
ally ; and we know how real and solid such men
appear in the presence of scholars and gramma¬
rians : 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 in¬
tellectual 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 ovvn, 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 ex-
334 IRepreeentatíve /IBen
erted his arithmetic. It consisted, according to
him, in having always more forces than the ene¬
my, on the point where the enemy is attacked, or
where he attacks : and his whole talent is strained
by endless manœuvre 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 manœuvring, 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 cir¬
cumstances, 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 thor¬
oughness 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 mod¬
ern 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
"Mapoleon; or, tbe flftan of tbe Morlö 235
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 it\ action ; a man
not embarrassed by any scruples; compact, in¬
stant, selfish, prudent, and of a perception which
did not suffer itself to be balked 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 valu¬
ing himself, like inferior men, on his opinionative-
ness 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?"
236 IReprcaentatíve ®en
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 in¬
sight. He never blundered into victory, but won
his battles in his head, before he won them on
the field. His principle 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 im¬
becility 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
inapoleon; or, tbe /IBan of tbe iiKlorlö 23:7
for bread ; and the king and his ministers, not
knowing 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 citÍ2ens. 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 to his aim,"—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
klie to come at his object. Horrible anecdotes
238 IRepccacntatíve Elften
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 wo 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
■fflapolcon; or, tbe ¿ßan of tbe "Morlb 239
up. Seeing that, I tried a simple method of
elevating light howitzers. The almost perpendic¬
ular 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" çome* "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 everything, 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
*As I quote at second hand, and cannot procure Seruzier, I
dare not adopt the high figure I find.
¿4° IRcprceentatíve /IBcn
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 ammuni¬
tion, but, on a hostile position, rained a torrent
of iron,—shells, balls, grape-shot,—to annihilate
all defence. On any point of resistance, he con¬
centrated 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, with¬
in an inch of ruin ; and his own person was all
but lost. He was flung into the marsh at Areola.
The Austrians were between him and his troops,
in the melee, and he was brought off with desper¬
ate 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.
mapoíeon ; or, tbe /Iban oí tbe TRaorlö 241
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 calcula¬
tion. His idea of the best defence consists in
being still the attacking party. "My ambition,"
he says, "was great, but was of a cold na¬
ture." In one of his conversations with Las
Casas, 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 com-
16
242 IRcprceentatíve ^cn
binations, and the stars were not more punctual
than his arithmetic. His personal attention de¬
scended to the smallest particulars. " At Monte-
bello, 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." "Be¬
fore he fought a battle, Bonaparte thought little
about what he should do in case of success, but a
great deal about what he sirould do in case of a
reverse of fortune." The same prudence and
good sense mark all his behavior. His instruc¬
tions to his secretary at the Tuilleries are worth
remembering. "During the night, enter my
chamber as seldom as possible. Do not awake
me when you have any good news to communi¬
cate ; 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 Bour-
ienne to leave all letters unopened for three
mapoleon; or, tbc iflSan of tbc IKIlorlb 243
weeks, and then observed with satisfaction how
large a part of the correspondence had thus dis¬
posed 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 Wil¬
liam 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 latter 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." Bon¬
aparte had passed through all the degrees of mili¬
tary service, but also was citizen before he was
emperor, and soAas 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
244 IRepresentative ^en
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 char¬
acter 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 biog¬
raphers 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
Bapoleon; or, tbe ®an of tbe Motlb 245
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
beep his person out of reach of fire. This decla¬
ration, 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 con¬
trolled 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 pre¬
cious blood of centuries, which was spilled by the
killing of the Due d' Enghien, he suggested "Neither
is my blood ditch-water. ' ' The people felt that no
longer the throne was occupied, and the land sucked
of its nourishment, by a small class of legitimates.
246 TRcprcscntatíve /ißen
secluded from all community with the children
of the soil, and holding the ideas and supersti¬
tions of a long-forgotten state of society. Instead
of that vampyre, a man of themselves held, in the
Tuilleries, 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 oppor¬
tunities 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
oiit 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."
IWapoleon ; or, the ^an of tbc Morlö 247
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,—Dándolo 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 impa¬
tience 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 dan¬
glers of his court ; and, in spite of the detrac¬
tion which his systematic egotism dictated to-
248 IReprcsentatívc /iBcn
ward 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 re¬
ceiving from them a seconding and support com¬
mensurate 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 offi¬
cers, are, no doubt, substantially just. And, in
fact, every species of merit was sought and ad¬
vanced 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 battle-field, they have all one rank in my eyes."
IRapoleon ; or, tbe jflftan of tbe UHlorlb 249
When a natural king becomes a titular king,
everybody is- pleased ánd satisfied. The Revolu¬
tion 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 tbe 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 énergies. 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 en¬
courages 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,
2SO IRepresentattvc ^en
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 Seaj 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 in¬
auguration 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 cannot, in the universal imbecility, inde¬
cision, and indolence of men, sufficiently congratu¬
late 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 pru¬
dence. His power does not consist in any wild
or extravagant force; in any enthusiasm, like
Mahomet's ; or singular power of persuasion ; but
IRapoleon; or, tbe ^an ot tbc UHlorlö 251
in the exercise of common sense on each emer¬
gency, instead of abiding by rules and customs.
The lesson he teaches is that which vigoi
always teaches,—that there is alwa3's 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 be¬
lief of men to-day, that nothing new can be under¬
taken 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 be¬
lief of society that the world is used up. But
Bonaparte knew better than society; and, more¬
over, knew that he knew better. I think all men
know better than they do ; know that the insti¬
tutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and
baubles ; but they dare not trust their presenfi-
ments. 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 every¬
body's novelties,—-made infinite objection; mus¬
tered 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
252 iReprescntatívc ^en
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 re¬
peating after the other, had described as impracti¬
cable. "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 appre¬
hended in the Alps. On those 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 bat¬
tles 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 oppor¬
tunity, a pretence, to restore confidence to them.
The art is to give rise to the opportunity, and to
invent the pretence. At Areola, 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
IRapoteon ; or, tbe /Iban of tbc "ÏÏGlorlô 253
that moment must be turned to advantage. When
a man has been present in many actions, he dis¬
tinguishes 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 de¬
struction of the globe, either by water or by fire ;
at another time, the truth or fallacy of presenti¬
ments, 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
2S4 IRepresentatíve ^en
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 Cor-
visart 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 anything
about. Why throw obstacles in the way of its
defence? Its own means are superior to all the
apparatus of your laboratories. Corvisart can¬
didly 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 man¬
kind. Water, air, and cleanliness, are the chief
articles in my pharmacopeia. "
IRapoleon ; or, tbe ÍBan ot tbc Udorlö 255
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
Ctesar's; his good-natured and sufficiently re¬
spectful account of Marshal Wurmser and his
other antagonists, and his own equality as a writer
to his varying subject. The most agreeable por¬
tion is the Campaign in Egypt.
, He had hours of thought and wisdom. In inter¬
vals 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
stratagem in a campaign. He delighted to fasci¬
nate 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, aim-
256 iReprcecntatíve /iBen
ing to be rich. He was the agitator, the de¬
stroyer 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 cen¬
tre of capital, and Rome and Austria, centres of
tradition and genealogy, opposed him. The con¬
sternation 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 pro¬
posed to himself simply a brilliant career, without
any stipulation or scruple concerning the means.
mapolcon; or, tee ilßan of tbe TlClorlö 257
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 faith¬
ful 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 "Moniteurs," and all his bul¬
letins, 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 doc¬
trine 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
17
25« Tßepresentatlve /IBen
farther off it is heard. Laws, institutions, mon¬
uments, nations, all fall ; but the noise continues,
and resounds in after ages." His doctrine of im¬
mortality is simply fame. His theory of influence
is not flattering. " There are two levers for moving
men,—interest and fear. Love is a silly infatua¬
tion, 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 un¬
scrupulous. 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 con-
IRapoleon; or, tbe Lilian of tbe Hïïlorlô 259
cerning 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 pinch¬
ing 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 deal¬
ing with a gentleman, at last ; but with an impos¬
tor and a rogiie : and he fully deserves the epithet
of Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter.
In describing the two parties into which mod¬
ern 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 aristo-
26o IRcpreßcntatlvc /Ißen
erat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed,—be¬
cause 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 repre¬
sentative, in a lover and a man of truly public
and universal aims.
Here was an experiment, under the most favor¬
able 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 con-
IRapolcon; or, tbe /iftan of tbe flïllorlô 261
scriptions j 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 resem¬
bled 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 cannot open his flngers; and the ani¬
mal inflicts new and more violent shocks, until he
paralyzes and kills his victim. So, this exorbi¬
tant 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;" "as¬
sez de Bonaparte. ' '
It was not Bonaparte's fault. He did all that
in him lay, to live and thrive without moral prin¬
ciple. 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 experi¬
ments, 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
362 TRepresentatívc /Ißcn
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
OR,
THE WRITER.
VII.
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
every where throbs and works. His office is a re¬
ception of the facts into the mind, and then a
selection of the eminent and characteristic expe¬
riences.
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
265
266 IRepreeentatívc /Bien
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 man¬
ners and face. The air is full of sounds ; the
sky, of tokens ; the ground 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 some¬
thing 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 which transpired do not lie in
it inert ; but some subside, and others shine ; so
that soon we 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 deliv¬
ered. But, besides the universal joy of conversa¬
tion, some men are born with exalted powers for
this second creation. Men are born to write.
The gardener saves every slip, and seed, and
©octbe; or, tbc Tiillritct
267
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 re¬
porting, 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 elo¬
quence. 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
268
IRepreseníatílJC ^cn
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;
lie 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. What¬
ever can be thought can be spoken, and still rises
for utterance, though to rude and stammering
organs. If they cannot 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 everywhere, 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 supe¬
rior 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
©octbe ; or, tbe Writer
26g
from everlasting, in the knitting and contexture
of things. Presentiments, impulses, cheer him.
There is a certain heat in the breast, which at¬
tends 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 mind, 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 mono¬
mania in its right relations. The ambitious and
mercenary bring their last new mumbo-jumbo,
whether tariff, Texas, railroad, Romanism, mes¬
merism, 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 comprehen¬
sive eye that can replace this isolated prodigy in
its right neighborhood and bearings,—the illusion
vanishes, and the returning reason of the com¬
munity thanks the reason of the monitor.
21" IRcprescntatívc Zilien
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 scholars heed it. In this country, the em¬
phasis of conversation, and of public opinion,
commends the practical man ; and the solid por¬
tion of the community is named with significant
respect in every circle. Our people are of Bona¬
parte'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.
©oetbe; or, tbe "ôïlriter
271
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 em.bodies his
aspiration in some rite or covenant, and he and
his friends cleave to the form, and lose the
aspiration. The Quaker has established Quaker¬
ism, 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 com¬
fortable and more cowardly, in actions of cun¬
ning, 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 specula¬
tive and the practical faculties as two. They are
272 Kepreacntattve ®en
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 circumstances.
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 dis¬
paragement 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 any body ? 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,
©oetbe; or, tbe IMlríter
273-
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 na¬
tions to new life. He wrote without levity, and
without choice. Every word was carved before-
his eyes, into the earth and 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 the crowd ; when he is no longer the
lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy
opinion of a reckless public ; when he must sus¬
tain with shameless advocacy some bad govern¬
ment, or must bark, all the year round, in opposi¬
tion ; or write conventional criticism, or profligate
novels ; or, at any rate, write without thought,,
10
274 IRcprcsentatíve íBen
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, aman
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 ata 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 Chat¬
ham, but any number of clever parliamentary and
forensic debaters ; no prophet or saint, but col¬
leges of divinity ; no learned man, but learned
societies, a cheap press, reading-rooms, and book-
©oetbe; or, tbe IKIlriter 275
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 com¬
munion. What is strange, too, he lived in a
small town, in a pretty 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
276 iRepresentatíve /ifcen
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 inter¬
course of the whole earth's population, researches
into Indian, Etruscan, and all Cyclopaean 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 con¬
fided 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 intelli¬
gence. 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
Keprescntative Men 4
JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE
©octbc; or, tbc Mciter 277
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 liazarded, and brought himself safe back.
There is a heart-cheering freedom in his specu¬
lation. The immense horizon which journeys
with us lends its majesties 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, accumu¬
lating a glut of facts and fruits too fast for any
hitherto-existing sa vans 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 clo.-e beside us, and
showed that the dullness and prose we ascribe to
the age was only another of his masks: —
"His very flight is presence in disguise
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
278 IReprcsentattvc /üben
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 pedi¬
gree of every usage and practice, every institu¬
tion, 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 distinc¬
tion 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 phi¬
losophers, 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 micro¬
scopes. 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
®octbe: or, tbc TOlriter
279
the eye of a leaf, is the unit of botany, and that
every part of the 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
the unit of the skeleton; the head was only the
uppermost vertebra 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. Men 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
28ó TReprcaentatíve /üben
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 beliefs, 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 gentle¬
man, and accept the manner, 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 mytho¬
logie gear, of horns, cloven foot, harpoon tail,
brimstone, and blue-ñre, 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
©octbe; ot, tbc TKnritct
found that the essence of this hobgoblin, which
had hovered in shadow about the habitations of
men, ever since they were men, was pure intel¬
lect, 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 transla¬
tions, criticism, dramas, lyric and every other
description of poems, literary journals,, and por¬
traits 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;
282 iRcptescntatlve ílbcn
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 disap¬
pointed. 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. Wc 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," m 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
©oetbc; or, tbc HClríter 283
for the rendering of the noblest benefits to the
human race, 110 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 sacri¬
fices. 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 knowl¬
edge 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. Na¬
ture and character assist, and the rank is made
real by sense and probity in the nobles. No gen¬
erous youth can escape this charm of reality in
the book, so that it is highly stimulating to intel¬
lect and courage.
284 IRepreaentattve ^en
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 won¬
derful ill'' it is expressly treated as fiction and en¬
thusiastic 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 re¬
spect 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 intel¬
lectual 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
©oetbe; or, tbc IRUtltcr 285
probity, which never rests in a superficial per¬
formance, 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 cannot 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, articula¬
tion 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
286 iRepteaentatíve /Bien
sentence, whether there be a man behind it, orno.
In the learned journal, in the influential news¬
paper, I discern no form ; only some irresponsible
shadow; oftener some monied 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 writing 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 pre¬
sumption 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 profes¬
sor can not divest himself of the fancy, that the
truths of philosophy have some application to Ber¬
lin and Munich. This earnestness enables them
to out-see men of much more talent. Hence,
almost all the valuable distinctions which are cur¬
rent in higher conversation, have been derived to
©oetbe; or, tbe HDlríter 287
us from Germany. But, whilst men distinguished
for wit and learning, in England and France,
adopt their study and their side with a certain lev¬
ity, and are not understood to be very deeply en¬
gaged, 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 some¬
what better in view. It awakens my curios¬
ity. 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
288 IRepcesentatívc Gliben
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 na¬
ture, 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,— fVÂaf 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 army 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 pur¬
est inward peace, we may attain to highest cul¬
ture." And his penetration of every secret of the
fine arts will make Goethe still more statuesque.
©oetbc; or, tbe Mrtter
289
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 any¬
body j his time is worth too much. Tempera¬
mental antagonisms may be suffered, but like feuds
of emperors, who fight dignifiedly across king¬
doms.
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 note¬
worthy result. An intellectual man can see him¬
self 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 Wahr-
«9
ago IReprcscntatíve /iBcn
heit, 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. Mean¬
time, certain love-affairs, that came to nothing, as
people say, have the strangest importance : he
crowds us with detail;—certain whimsical opin¬
ions, cosmogonies, and religions of his own in¬
vention, 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 Keplar, Roger Bacon, Galileo, Newton,
Voltaire, &c. ; 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 Keplar, from Goethe
to Bacon, from Goethe to Newton. The draw-
©octbe; or, tbc IWlrttcr 291
ing of the line is for the time and person, a solu¬
tion 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 micro¬
scopic, and interfered with the just perspective,
the seeing of the whole? He is fragmentary;
a writer of occasional poems, and of an encyclo¬
paedia 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, notwithstand¬
ing the looseness of many of his works, we
have volumes of detached paragraphs, aphorisms,
xenien, &c.
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, sa-
292 TReprescntatíve /ifócn
vans, 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 Staël 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
any body 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 heartly enjoyed the
game. In this aim of culture, which is the genius
of his works, is their power. The idea of abso¬
lute, 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 bock
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
©oetbe ; or, tbe "ïDlritct
m
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 pur¬
suits, worked on for eighty years with the steadi¬
ness 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 ex¬
treme. We shall learn to draw rents and reve¬
nues 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,
-294 IReprcscntatlve flßen
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.
THE END.