Men found
that his absorbing egotism was deadly to all other men.
that his absorbing egotism was deadly to all other men.
Emerson - Representative Men
We are always in peril, always
in a bad plight, just on the edge of destruction, and only to be saved
by invention and courage.
This vigor was guarded and tempered by the coldest prudence and
punctuality. A thunderbolt in the attack, he was found invulnerable
in his intrenchments. His very attack was never the inspiration of
courage, but the result of calculation. His idea of the best defense
consists in being still the attacking party. "My ambition," he says,
"was great, but was of a cold nature. " In one of his conversations
with Las 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. "
Everything depended on the nicety of his combinations, and the stars
were not more punctual than his arithmetic. His personal attention
descended to the smallest particulars. "At Montebello, I ordered
Kellermann to attack with eight hundred horse, and with these he
separated the six thousand Hungarian grenadiers, before the very eyes
of the Austrian cavalry. This cavalry was half a league off, and
required a quarter of an hour to arrive on the field of action; and
I have observed, that it is always these quarters of an hour that
decide the fate of a battle. " "Before he fought a battle, Bonaparte
thought little about what he should do in case of success, but a great
deal about what he should do in case of a reverse of fortune. "The
same prudence and good sense mark all his behavior. His instructions
to his secretary at the Tuilleries are worth remembering. "During the
night, enter my chamber as seldom as possible. Do not wake me when you
have any good news to communicate; with that there is no hurry. But
when you bring bad news, rouse me instantly, for then there is not a
moment to be lost. " It was a whimsical economy of the same kind which
dictated his practice, when general in Italy, in regard to his
burdensome correspondence. He directed Bourienne to leave all letters
unopened for three weeks, and then observed with satisfaction how large
a part of the correspondence had thus disposed of itself, and no longer
required an answer. His achievement of business was immense, and
enlarges the known powers of man. There have been many working kings,
from Ulysses to William of Orange, but none who accomplished a tithe
of this man's performance.
To these gifts of nature, Napoleon added the advantage of having been
born to a private and humble fortune. In his 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. "
Bonaparte had passed through all the degrees of military service, but
also was citizen before he was emperor, and so had the key to
citizenship. His remarks and estimates discover the information and
justness of measurement of the middle class. Those who had to deal
with him found that he was not to be imposed upon, but could cipher
as well as another man. This appears in all parts of his Memoirs,
dictated at St. Helena. When the expenses of the empress, of his
household, of his palaces, had accumulated great debts, Napoleon
examined the bills of the creditors himself, detected overcharges and
errors, and reduced the claims by considerable sums.
His grand weapon, namely, the millions whom he directed, he owed to
the representative character which clothed him. He interests us as he
stands for France and for Europe; and he exists as captain and king,
only as far as the Revolution, or the interest of the industrious
masses found an organ and a leader in him. In the social interests,
he knew the meaning and value of labor, and threw himself naturally
on that side. I like an incident mentioned by one of his biographers
at St. Helena. "When walking with Mrs. Balcombe, some servants, carrying
heavy boxes, passed by on the road, and Mrs. Balcombe desired them,
in rather an angry tone, to keep back. Napoleon interfered, saying,
'Respect the burden, Madam. '" In the time of the empire, he directed
attention to the improvement and embellishment of the market of the
capital. "The market-place," he said, "is the Louvre of the common
people. " The principal works that have survived him are his magnificent
roads. He filled the troops with his spirit, and a sort of freedom and
companionship grew up between him and them, which the forms of his
court never permitted between the officers and himself. They performed,
under his eye, that which no others could do. The best document of his
relation to his troops is the order of the day on the morning of the
battle of Austerlitz, in which Napoleon promises the troops that he
will keep his person out of reach of fire. This declaration, which is
the reverse of that ordinarily made by generals and sovereigns on the
eve of a battle, sufficiently explains the devotion of the army to
their leader.
But though there is in particulars this identity between Napoleon and
the mass of the people, his real strength lay in their conviction that
he was their representative in his genius and aims, not only when he
courted, but when he controlled, and even when he decimated them by
his conscriptions. He knew, as well as any Jacobin in France, how to
philosophize on liberty and equality; and, when allusion was made to
the precious blood of centuries, which was spilled by the killing of
the Duc d'Enghien, he suggested, "Neither is my blood 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, secluded from all
community with the children of the soil, and holding the ideas and
superstitions of a long-forgotten state of society. Instead of that
vampire, 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 opportunities of young men, was ended, and a
day of expansion and demand was come. A market for all the powers and
productions of man was opened: brilliant prizes glittered in the eyes
of youth and talent. The old, iron-bound, feudal France was changed
into a young Ohio or New York; and those who smarted under the immediate
rigors of the new monarch, pardoned them as the necessary severities
of the military system which had driven out the oppressor. And even
when the majority of the people had begun to ask, whether they had
really gained anything under the exhausting levies of men and money
of the new master,--the whole talent of the country, in every rank and
kindred, took his part, and defended him as its natural patron. In
1814, when advised to rely on the higher classes, Napoleon said to
those around him, "Gentlemen, in the situation in which I stand, my
only nobility is the rabble of the Faubourgs. "
Napoleon met this natural expectation. The necessity of his position
required a hospitality to every sort of talent, and its appointment
to trusts; and his feelings went along with this policy. Like every
superior person, he undoubtedly felt a desire for men and compeers,
and a wish to measure his power with other masters, and an impatience
of fools and underlings. In Italy, he sought for men, and found none.
"Good God! " he said, "how rare men are! There are eighteen millions
in Italy, and I have with difficulty found two,--Dandolo and Melzi. "
In later years, with larger experience, his respect for mankind was
not increased. In a moment of bitterness, he said to one of his oldest
friends, "Men deserve the contempt with which they inspire me. I have
only to put some gold lace on the coat of my virtuous republicans, and
they immediately become just what I wish them. " This impatience at
levity was, however, an oblique tribute of respect to those able persons
who commanded his regard, not only when he found them friends and
coadjutors, but also when they resisted his will. He could not confound
Fox and Pitt, Carnot, Lafayette, and Bernadotte, with the danglers of
his court; and, in spite of the detraction which his systematic egotism
dictated toward the great captains who conquered with and for him,
ample acknowledgements are made by him to Lannes Duroc, Kleber, Dessaix,
Massena, Murat, Ney, and Augereau. If he felt himself their patron,
and founder of their fortunes, as when he said, "I made my generals
out of mud," he could not hide his satisfaction in receiving from them
a seconding and support commensurate with the grandeur of his
enterprise. In the Russian campaign, he was so much impressed by the
courage and resources of Marshal Ney, that he said, "I have two hundred
millions in my coffers, and I would give them all for Ney. " The
characters which he has drawn of several of his marshals are
discriminating, and, though they did not content the insatiable vanity
of French officers, are, no doubt, substantially just. And, in fact,
every species of merit was sought and advanced under his government.
"I know," he said, "the depth and draught of water of every one of my
generals. " Natural power was sure to be well received at his court.
Seventeen men, in his time, were raised from common soldiers to the
rank of king, marshal, duke, or general; and the crosses of his Legion
of Honor were given to personal valor, and not to family connection.
"When soldiers have been baptized in the fire of a battle-field, they
have all one rank in my eyes. "
When a natural king becomes a titular king, everybody is pleased and
satisfied. The Revolution entitled the strong populace of the Faubourg
St. Antoine, and every horse-boy and powder-monkey in the army, to
look on Napoleon as flesh of his flesh, and the creature of his party:
but there is something in the success of grand talent which enlists
an universal sympathy. For, in the prevalence of sense and spirit over
stupidity and malversation, all reasonable men have an interest; and,
as intellectual beings, we feel the air purified by the electric shock,
when material force is overthrown by intellectual energies. As soon
as we are removed out of the reach of local and accidental partialities,
man feels that Napoleon fights for him; these are honest victories;
this strong steam-engine does our work. Whatever appeals to the
imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of human ability,
wonderfully encourages and liberates us. This capacious head, revolving
and disposing sovereignly trains of affairs, and animating such
multitudes of agents; this eye, which looked through Europe; this
prompt invention; this inexhaustible resource;--what events! what
romantic pictures! what strange situations! --when spying the Alps, by
a sunset in the Sicilian sea; drawing up his army for battle, in sight
of the Pyramids, and saying to his troops, "From the tops of those
pyramids, forty centuries look down on you;" fording the Red Sea;
wading in the gulf of the Isthmus of Suez. On the shore of Ptolemais,
gigantic projects agitated him. "Had Acre fallen, I should have changed
the face of the world. " His army, on the night of the battle of
Austerlitz, which was the anniversary of his inauguration as Emperor,
presented him with a bouquet of forty standards taken in the fight.
Perhaps it is a little puerile, the pleasure he took in making these
contrasts glaring; as when he pleased himself with making kings wait
in his antechambers, at Tilsit, at Paris, and at Erfurt.
We cannot, in the universal imbecility, indecision, and indolence of
men, sufficiently congratulate ourselves on this strong and ready
actor, who took occasion by the beard, and showed us how much may be
accomplished by the mere force of such virtues as all men possess in
less degrees; namely, by punctuality, by personal attention, by courage,
and thoroughness. "The Austrians," he said, "do not know the value of
time. " I should cite him, in his earlier years, as a model of prudence.
His power does not consist in any wild or extravagant force; in any
enthusiasm, like Mahomet's; or singular power of persuasion; but in
the exercise of common sense on each emergency, instead of abiding by
rules and customs. The lesson he teaches is that which vigor always
teaches,--that there is always room for it. To what heaps of cowardly
doubts is not that man's life an answer. When he appeared, it was the
belief of all military men that there could be nothing new in war; as
it is the belief of men to-day, that nothing new can be undertaken in
politics, or in church, or in letters, or in trade, or in farming, or
in our social manners and customs; and as it is, at all times, the
belief of society that the world is used up. But Bonaparte knew better
than society; and, moreover, knew that he knew better. I think all men
know better than they do; know that the institutions we so volubly
commend are go-carts and baubles; but they dare not trust their
presentiments. Bonaparte relied on his own sense, and did not care a
bean for other people's. The world treated his novelties just as it
treats everybody's novelties,--made infinite objection: mustered all
the impediments; but he snapped his finger at their objections. "What
creates great difficulty," he remarks, "in the profession of the land
commander, is the necessity of feeding so many men and animals. If he
allows himself to be guided by the commissaries, he will never stir,
and all his expeditions will fail. " An example of his common sense is
what he says of the passage of the Alps in winter, which all writers,
one repeating after the other, had described as impracticable. "The
winter," says Napoleon, "is not the most unfavorable season for the
passage of lofty mountains. The snow is then firm, the weather settled,
and there is nothing to fear from avalanches, the real and only danger
to be apprehended in the Alps. On 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 battles are gained.
"In all battles, a moment occurs, when the bravest troops, after having
made the greatest efforts, feel inclined to run. That terror proceeds
from a want of confidence in their own courage; and it only requires
a slight opportunity, a pretense, to restore confidence to them. The
art is to give rise to the opportunity, and to invent the pretense.
At Arcola, I won the battle with twenty-five horsemen. I seized that
moment of lassitude, gave every man a trumpet, and gained the day with
this handful. You see that two armies are two bodies which meet, and
endeavor to frighten each other: a moment of panic occurs, and that
moment must be turned to advantage. When a man has been present in
many actions, he distinguishes that moment without difficulty; it is
as easy as casting up an addition. "
This deputy of the nineteenth century added to his gifts a capacity
for speculation on general topics. He delighted in running through the
range of practical, of literary, and of abstract questions. His opinion
is always original, and to the purpose. On the voyage to Egypt, he
liked, after dinner, to fix on three or four persons to support a
proposition, and as many to oppose it. He gave a subject, and the
discussions turned on questions of religion, the different kinds of
government, and the art of war. One day, he asked, whether the planets
were inhabited? On another, what was the age of the world? Then he
proposed to consider the probability of the destruction of the globe,
either by water or by fire; at another time, the truth or fallacy of
presentiments, and the interpretation of dreams. He was very fond of
talking of religion. In 1806, he conversed with Fournier, bishop of
Montpelier, on matters of theology. There were two points on which
they could not agree, viz. , that of hell, and that of salvation out
of the pale of the church. The Emperor told Josephine, that he disputed
like a devil on these two points, on which the bishop was inexorable.
To the philosophers he readily yielded all that was proved against
religion as the work of men and time; but he would not hear of
materialism. One fine night, on deck, amid a clatter of materialism,
Bonaparte pointed to the stars, and said, "You may talk as long as you
please, gentlemen, but who made all that? " He delighted in the
conversation of men of science, particularly of Monge and Berthollet;
but the men of letters he slighted; "they were manufacturers of
phrases. " Of medicine, too, he was fond of talking, and with those of
its practitioners whom he most esteemed,-with Corvisart at Paris, and
with Antonomarchi at St. Helena. "Believe me, "he said to the last,
"we had better leave off all these remedies: life is a fortress which
neither you nor I know anything about. Why throw obstacles in the way
of its defense? Its own means are superior to all the apparatus of
your laboratories. Corvisart candidly agreed with me, that all your
filthy mixtures are good for nothing. Medicine is a collection of
uncertain prescriptions, the results of which, taken collectively, are
more fatal than useful to mankind. Water, air, and cleanliness, are
the chief articles in my pharmacopeia. "
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 goodnature of strength and conscious superiority. I admire his
simple, clear narrative of his battles;--good as Caesar's; his
good-natured and sufficiently respectful account of Marshal Wurmser
and his other antagonists, and his own equality as a writer to his
varying subject. The most agreeable portion is the Campaign in Egypt.
He had hours of thought and wisdom. In intervals of leisure, either
in the camp or the palace, Napoleon appears as a man of genius,
directing on abstract questions the native appetite for truth, and the
impatience of words, he was wont to show in war. He could enjoy every
play of invention, a romance, a _bon mot_, as well as a stratagem
in a campaign. He delighted to fascinate Josephine and her ladies, in
a dim-lighted apartment, by the terrors of a fiction, to which his
voice and dramatic power lent every addition.
I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern
society; of the throng who fill the markets, shops, counting-houses,
manufactories, ships, of the modern world, aiming to be rich. He was
the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the internal improver,
the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the opener of doors
and markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse. Of course, the rich
and aristocratic did not like him. England, the center of capital, and
Rome and Austria, centers of tradition and genealogy, opposed him. The
consternation of the dull and conservative classes, the terror of the
foolish old men and old women of the Roman conclave,--who in their
despair took hold of anything, 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, everywhere, which pointed him out as the giant of the middle
class, make his history bright and commanding. He had the virtues of
the masses of his constituents; he had also their vices. I am sorry
that the brilliant picture has its reverse. But that is the fatal
quality which we discover in our pursuit of wealth, that it is
treacherous, and is bought by the breaking or weakening of the
sentiments; and it is inevitable that we should find the same fact in
the history of this champion, who proposed to himself simply a brilliant
career, without any stipulation or scruple concerning the means.
Bonaparte was singularly destitute of generous sentiments. The
highest-placed individual in the most cultivated age and population
of the world,--he has not the merit of common truth and honesty. He
is unjust to his generals; egotistic, and monopolizing; meanly stealing
the credit of their great actions from Kellermann, from Bernadotte;
intriguing to involve his faithful Junot in hopeless bankruptcy, in
order to drive him to a distance from Paris, because the familiarity
of his manners offends the new pride of his throne. He is a boundless
liar. The official paper, his "Moniteurs," and all his bulletins, are
proverbs for saying what he wished to be believed; and worse,--he sat,
in his premature old age, in his lonely island, coldly falsifying
facts, and dates, and characters, and giving to history, a theatrical
eclat. Like all Frenchmen, he has a passion for stage effect. Every
action that breathes of generosity is poisoned by this calculation.
His star, his love of glory, his doctrine of the immortality of the
soul, are all French. "I must dazzle and astonish. If I were to give
the liberty of the press, my power could not last three days. " To make
a great noise is his favorite design. "A great reputation is a great
noise; the more there is made, the farther off it is heard. Laws,
institutions, monuments, nations, all fall; but the noise continues,
and resounds in after ages. " His doctrine of immortality is simply
fame. His theory of influence is not flattering. "There are two levers
for moving men,--interest and fear. Love is a silly infatuation, depend
upon it. Friendship is but a name. I love nobody. I do not even love
my brothers; perhaps Joseph, a little, from habit, and because he is
my elder; and Duroc, I love him too; but why? --because his character
pleases me; he is stern and resolute, and, I believe, the fellow never
shed a tear. For my part, I know very well that I have no true friends.
As long as I continue to be what I am, I may have as many pretended
friends as I please. Leave sensibility to women; but men should be
firm in heart and purpose, or they should have nothing to do with war
and government. " He was thoroughly unscrupulous. He would steal,
slander, assassinate, drown, and poison, as his interest dictated. He
had no generosity; but mere vulgar hatred; he was intensely selfish;
he was perfidious; he cheated at cards; he was a prodigious gossip;
and opened letters; and delighted in his infamous police; and rubbed
his hands with joy when he had intercepted some morsel of intelligence
concerning the men and women about him, boasting that "he knew
everything;" and interfered with the cutting the dresses of the women;
and listened after the hurrahs and the compliments of the street,
incognito. His manners were coarse. He treated women with low
familiarity. He had the habit of pulling their ears and pinching their
cheeks, when he was in good humor, and of pulling the ears and whiskers
of men, and of striking and horse-play with them, to his last days.
It does not appear that he listened at keyholes, or, at least, that
he "was caught at it". In short, when you have penetrated through all
the circles of power and splendor, you were not dealing with a
gentleman, at last; but with an impostor and a rogue; and he fully
deserves the epithet of Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter.
In describing the two parties into which modern society divides
itself,--the democrat and the conservative,--I said, Bonaparte
represents the democrat, or the party of men of business, against the
stationary or conservative party. I omitted then to say, what is
material to the statement, namely, that these two parties differ only
as young and old. The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative
is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to
seed,--because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme
value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep.
Bonaparte may be said to represent the whole history of this party,
its youth and its age; yes, and with poetic justice, its fate, in his
own. The counter-revolution, the counter-party, still waits for its
organ and representative, in a lover and a man of truly public and
universal aims.
Here was an experiment, under the most favorable conditions, of the
powers of intellect without conscience. Never was such a leader so
endowed, and so weaponed; never leader found such aids and followers.
And what was the result of this vast talent and power, of these immense
armies, burned cities, squandered treasures, immolated millions of
men, of this demoralized Europe? It came to no result. All passed away,
like the smoke of his artillery and left no trace. He left France
smaller, poorer, feebler, than he found it; and the whole contest for
freedom was to be begun again. The attempt was, in principle, suicidal.
France served him with life, and limb, and estate, as long as it could
identify its interest with him; but when men saw that after victory
was another war; after the destruction of armies, new conscriptions;
and they who had toiled so desperately were never nearer to the
reward,--they could not spend what they had earned, nor repose on their
down-beds, nor strut in their chateaux,--they deserted him.
Men found
that his absorbing egotism was deadly to all other men. It resembled
the torpedo, which inflicts a succession of shocks on any one who takes
hold of it, producing spasms which contract the muscles of the hand,
so that the man cannot open his fingers; and the animal inflicts new
and more violent shocks, until he paralyzes and kills his victim. So,
this exorbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished, and absorbed the power
and existence of those who served him; and the universal cry of France,
and of Europe, in 1814, was, "enough of him;" "assez de Bonaparte. "
It was not Bonaparte's fault. He did all that in him lay, to live and
thrive without moral principle. It was the nature of things, the eternal
law of man and of the world, which baulked and ruined him; and the
result, in a million experiments, will be the same. Every experiment,
by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim,
will fail. The pacific Fourier will be as inefficient as the pernicious
Napoleon. As long as our civilization is essentially one of property,
of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches
will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our
wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste
with all doors open, and which serves all men.
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 everywhere throbs and works. His office is a reception of
the facts into the mind, and then a selection of the eminent and
characteristic experiences.
Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their
history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The
rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its
channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern
and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its
sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow,
or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting,
a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself in the
memories of his fellows, and in his own manners and face. The air is
full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the 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 something more
than print of the seal. It is a new and finer form of the original.
The record is alive, as that which it recorded is alive. In man, the
memory is a kind of looking-glass, which, having received the images
of surrounding objects, is touched with life, and disposes them in a
new order. The facts 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 delivered. But, besides the universal joy of conversation, some men
are born with exalted powers for this second creation. Men are born
to write. The gardener saves every slip, and seed, and peach-stone;
his vocation is to be a planter of plants. Not less does the writer
attend his affairs. Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him
as a model, and sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense that
they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes that all
that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report
the Holy Ghost, or attempt it. Nothing so broad, so subtle, or so dear,
but comes therefore commended to his pen,--and he will write. In his
eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the
possibility of being reported. In conversation, in calamity, he finds
new materials; as our German poet said, "some god gave me the power
to paint what I suffer. " He draws his rents from rage and pain. By
acting rashly, he buys the power of talking wisely. Vexations, and a
tempest of passion, only fill his sails; as the good Luther writes,
"When I am angry I can pray well, and preach well;" and if we knew the
genesis of fine-strokes of eloquence, they might recall the complaisance
of Sultan Amurath, who struck off some Persian heads, that his
physician, Vesalius, might see the spasms in the muscles of the neck.
His failures are the preparation of his victories. A new thought, or
a crisis of passion, apprises him that all that he has yet learned and
written is exoteric--is not the fact, but some rumor of the fact. What
then? Does he throw away the pen? No; he begins again to describe in
the new light which has shined on him,--if, by some means, he may yet
save some true word. Nature conspires. Whatever can be thought can be
spoken, and still rises for utterance, though to rude and stammering
organs. If they 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 superior office; for the class of scholars or
writers, who see connection where the multitude see fragments, and who
are impelled to exhibit the facts in order, and so to supply the axis
on which the frame of things turns. Nature has dearly at heart the
formation of the speculative man, or scholar. It is an end never lost
sight of, and is prepared in the original casting of things. He is no
permissive or accidental appearance, but an organic agent, one of the
estates of the realm, provided and prepared from of old and from
everlasting, in the knitting and contexture of things. Presentiments,
impulses, cheer him. There is a certain heat in the breast, which
attends the perception of a primary truth, which is the shining of the
spiritual sun down into the shaft of the mine. Every thought which
dawns on the mind, in the moment of its emergency 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 held up
each object of monomania in its right relation. The ambitious and
mercenary bring their last new mumbo-jumbo, whether tariff, Texas,
railroad, Romanism, mesmerism, or California; and, by detaching the
object from its relations, easily succeed in making it seen in a glare;
and a multitude go mad about it, and they are not to be reproved or
cured by the opposite multitude, who are kept from this particular
insanity by an equal frenzy on another crochet. But let one man have
the comprehensive eye that can replace this isolated prodigy in its
right neighborhood and bearings,--the illusion vanishes, and the
returning reason of the community thanks the reason of the monitor.
The scholar is the man of the ages, but he must also wish, with other
men, to stand well with his contemporaries. But there is a certain
ridicule, among superficial people, thrown on the scholars or clerisy,
which is of no import, unless the scholars heed it. In this country,
the emphasis of conversation, and of public opinion, commends the
practical man; and the solid portion of the community is named with
significant respect in every circle. Our people are of Bonaparte's
opinion concerning ideologists. Ideas are subversive of social order
and comfort, and at last make a fool of the possessor. It is believed,
the ordering a cargo of goods from New York to Smyrna; or, the running
up and down to procure a company of subscribers to set a-going five
or ten thousand spindles; or, the negotiations of a caucus, and the
practising on the prejudices and facility of country-people, to secure
their votes in November,--is practical and commendable.
If I were to compare action of a much higher strain with a life of
contemplation, I should not venture to pronounce with much confidence
in favor of the former. Mankind have such a deep stake in inward
illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or monk in
defense of his life of thought and prayer. A certain partiality, a
headiness, and loss of balance, is the tax which all action must pay.
Act, if you like,--but you do it at your peril. Men's actions are too
strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the
victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces
them to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment,
becomes a sacrament. The fiery reformer embodies his aspiration in
some rite or covenant, and he and his friends cleave to the form and
lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established Quakerism, the Shaker
has established his monastery and his dance; and, although each prates
of spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, which is anti-spiritual.
But where are his new things of today? In actions of enthusiasm, this
drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no higher
aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly, in actions of
cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the
speculative from the practical faculty, and put a ban on reason and
sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback and negation. The Hindoos
write in their sacred books, "Children only, and not the learned, speak
of the speculative and the practical faculties as two. They are but
one, for both obtain the selfsame end, and the place which is gained
by the followers of the one is gained by the followers of the other.
That man seeth, who seeth that the speculative and the practical
doctrines are one. " For great action must draw on the spiritual nature.
The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The
greatest action may easily be one of the most private 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
disparagement of any other is to be looked for. With such, Talleyrand's
question is ever the main one; not, is he rich? is he committed? is
he well-meaning? has he this or that faculty? is he of the movement?
is he of the establishment? --but, Is he anybody? does he stand for
something? He must be good of his kind. That is all that Talleyrand,
all that State-street, all that the common sense of mankind asks. Be
real and admirable, not as we know, but as you know. Able men do not
care in what kind a man is able, so only that he is able. A master
likes a master, and does not stipulate whether it be orator, artist,
craftsman, or king.
Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the
literary class. And it is not to be denied that men are cordial in
their recognition and welcome of intellectual accomplishments. Still
the writer does not stand with us on any commanding ground. I think
this to be his own fault. A pound passes for a pound. There have been
times when he was a sacred person; he wrote Bibles; the first hymns;
the codes; the epics; tragic songs; Sibylline verses; Chaldean oracles;
Laconian sentences inscribed on temple walls. Every word was true, and
woke the nations to new life. He wrote without levity, and without
choice. Every word was carved, before his eyes, into the earth and
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 sustain with shameless advocacy some bad
government, or must bark, all the year round, in opposition; or write
conventional criticism, or profligate novels; or, at any rate, write
without thought, and without recurrence, by day and 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 power
and duties of the scholar or writer.
I described Bonaparte as a representative of the popular external life
and aims of the nineteenth century. Its other half, its poet, is Goethe,
a man quite domesticated in the century, breathing its air, enjoying
its fruits, impossible at any earlier time, and taking away, by his
colossal parts, the reproach of weakness, which, but for him, would
lie on the intellectual works of the period. He appears at a time when
a general culture has spread itself, and has smoothed down all sharp
individual traits; when, in the absence of heroic characters, a social
comfort and cooperation have come in. There is no poet, but scores of
poetic writers; no Columbus, but hundreds of post-captains, with
transit-telescope, barometer, and concentrated soup and pemmican; no
Demosthenes, no Chatham, but any number of clever parliamentary and
forensic debaters; no prophet or saint, but colleges of divinity; no
learned man, but learned societies, a cheap press, reading-rooms, and
book-clubs, without number. There was never such a miscellany of facts.
The world extends itself like American trade. We conceive Greek or
Roman life,--life in the middle ages--to be a simple and comprehensive
affair; but modern life to respect a multitude of things, which is
distracting.
Goethe was the philosopher of this multiplicity; hundred-handed,
Argus-eyed, able and happy to cope with this rolling miscellany of
facts and sciences, and, by his own versatility, to dispose of them
with ease; a manly mind, unembarrassed by the variety of coats of
convention with which life had got encrusted, easily able by his
subtlety to pierce these, and to draw his strength from nature, with
which he lived in full communion. What is strange, too, he lived in
a small town, in a petty state, in a defeated state, and in a time
when Germany played no such leading part in the world's affairs as to
swell the bosom of her sons with any metropolitan pride, such as might
have cheered a French, or English, or, once, a Roman or Attic genius.
Yet there is no trace of provincial limitation in his muse. He is not
a debtor to his position, but was born with a free and controlling
genius.
The Helena, or the second part of Faust, is a philosophy of literature
set in poetry; the work of one who found himself the master of
histories, mythologies, philosophies, sciences, and national
literatures, in the encyclopaedical manner in which modern erudition,
with its international intercourse of the whole earth's population,
researches into Indian, Etruscan, and all 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 confided the results of eighty years of observation. This
reflective and critical wisdom makes the poem more truly the flower
of this time. It dates itself. Still he is a poet,--poet of a prouder
laurel than any contemporary, and under this plague of microscopes
(for he seems to see out of every pore of his skin), strikes the harp
with a hero's strength and grace.
The wonder of the book is its superior intelligence. In the menstruum
of this man's wit, the past and the present ages, and their religions,
politics, and modes of thinking, are dissolved into archetypes and
ideas. What new mythologies sail through his head! The Greeks said,
that Alexander went as far as Chaos; Goethe went, only the other day,
as far; and one step farther he hazarded, and brought himself safe
back. There is a heart-cheering freedom in his speculation. The immense
horizon which journeys with us lends its 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, accumulating a glut of facts and fruits
too fast for any hitherto-existing savants to classify, this man's
mind had ample chambers for the distribution of all. He had a power
to unite the detached atoms again by their own law. He has clothed our
modern existence with poetry. Amid littleness and detail, he detected
the Genius of life, the old cunning Proteus, nestling close beside us,
and showed that the 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 and main streets, in
boulevards and hotels; and, in the solidest kingdom of routine and the
senses, he showed the lurking daemonic power; that, in actions of
routine, a thread of mythology and fable spins itself; and this, by
tracing the pedigree of every usage and practice, every institution,
utensil, and means, home to its origin in the structure of man. He had
an extreme impatience of conjecture, and of rhetoric. "I have guesses
enough of my own; if a man write a book, let him set down only what
he knows. " He writes in the plainest and lowest tone, omitting a great
deal more than he writes, and putting ever a thing for a word. He has
explained the distinction between the antique and the modern spirit
and art. He has defined art, its scope and laws. He has said the best
things about nature that ever were said. He treats nature as the old
philosophers, as the seven wise masters did,--and, with whatever loss
of French tabulation and dissection, poetry and humanity remain to us;
and they have some doctorial skill. Eyes are better, on the whole,
than telescopes or microscopes. He has contributed a key to many parts
of nature, through the rare turn for unity and simplicity in his mind.
Thus Goethe suggested the leading idea of modern botany, that a leaf,
or the eye of a leaf, is the unit of botany, and that every part of
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
toward truth. He will realize what you say. He hates to be trifled
with, and to be made to say over again some old wife's fable, that has
had possession of men's faith these thousand years. He may as well see
if it is true as another. He sifts it. I am here, he would say, to be
the measure and judge of these things. Why should I take them on trust?
And, therefore, what he says of religion, of passion, of marriage, of
manners, property, of paper money, of periods or 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 gentleman, 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 mythologic gear, of horns, cloven foot, harpoon tail,
brimstone, and blue-fire, and, instead of looking in books and pictures,
looked for him in his own mind, in every shade of coldness, selfishness,
and unbelief that, in crowds, or in solitude, darkens over the human
thought,--and found that the portrait gained reality and terror by
everything he added, and by everything he took away. He found that the
essence of this hobgoblin, which had hovered in shadow about the
habitations of men, ever since they were men, was pure intellect,
applied,--as always there is a tendency,--to the service of the senses:
and he flung into literature, in his Mephistopheles, the first organic
figure that has been added for some ages, and which will remain as
long as the Prometheus. I have no design to enter into any analysis
of his numerous works. They consist of translations, criticisms, dramas,
lyric and every other description of poems, literary journals, and
portraits of distinguished men. Yet I cannot omit to specify the Wilhelm
Meister.
Wilhelm Meister is a novel in every sense, the first of its kind,
called by its admirers the only delineation of modern society,--as if
other novels, those of Scott, for example, dealt with costume and
condition, this with the spirit of life. It is a book over which some
veil is still drawn. It is read by very intelligent persons with wonder
and delight. It is preferred by some such to Hamlet, as a work of
genius. I suppose no book of this century can compare with it in its
delicious sweetness, so new, so provoking to the mind, gratifying it
with so many and so solid thoughts, just insights into life, and
manners, and characters; so many good hints for the conduct of life,
so many unexpected glimpses into a higher sphere, and never a trace
of rhetoric or dullness. A very provoking book to the curiosity of
young men of genius, but a very unsatisfactory one. Lovers of light
reading, those who look in it for the entertainment they find in a
romance, are disappointed. On the other hand, those who begin it with
the higher hope to read in it a worthy history of genius, and the just
award of the laurels to its toils and denials, have also reason to
complain. We had an English romance here, not long ago, professing to
embody the hope of a new age, and to unfold the political hope of the
party called "Young England," in which the only reward of virtue is
a seat in parliament, and a peerage. Goethe's romance has a conclusion
as lame and immoral. George Sand, in Consuelo and its continuation,
has sketched a truer and more dignified picture. In the progress of
the story, the characters of the hero and heroine expand at a rate
that shivers the porcelain chess-table of aristocratic convention:
they quit the society and habits of their rank; they lose their wealth;
they become the servants of great ideas, and of the most generous
social ends; until, at last, the hero, who is the center and fountain
of an association for the rendering of the noblest benefits to the
human race, no longer answers to his own titled name: it sounds foreign
and remote in his ear.
"I am only man," he says; "I breathe and work for man," and this in
poverty and extreme sacrifices. Goethe's hero, on the contrary, has
so many weaknesses and impurities, and keeps such bad company, that
the sober English public, when the book was translated, were disgusted.
And yet it is so crammed with wisdom, with knowledge of the world, and
with knowledge of laws; the persons so truly and subtly drawn, and
with such few strokes, and not a word too much, the book remains ever
so new and unexhausted, that we must even let it go its way, and be
willing to get what good from it we can, assured that it has only begun
its office, and has millions of readers yet to serve.
The argument is the passage of a democrat to the aristocracy, using
both words in their best sense. And this passage is not made in any
mean or creeping way, but through the hall door. Nature and character
assist, and the rank is made real by sense and probity in the nobles.
No generous youth can escape this charm of reality in the book, so
that it is highly stimulating to intellect and courage. The ardent and
holy Novalis characterized the book as "thoroughly modern and prosaic;
the romantic is completely leveled 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.
in a bad plight, just on the edge of destruction, and only to be saved
by invention and courage.
This vigor was guarded and tempered by the coldest prudence and
punctuality. A thunderbolt in the attack, he was found invulnerable
in his intrenchments. His very attack was never the inspiration of
courage, but the result of calculation. His idea of the best defense
consists in being still the attacking party. "My ambition," he says,
"was great, but was of a cold nature. " In one of his conversations
with Las 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. "
Everything depended on the nicety of his combinations, and the stars
were not more punctual than his arithmetic. His personal attention
descended to the smallest particulars. "At Montebello, I ordered
Kellermann to attack with eight hundred horse, and with these he
separated the six thousand Hungarian grenadiers, before the very eyes
of the Austrian cavalry. This cavalry was half a league off, and
required a quarter of an hour to arrive on the field of action; and
I have observed, that it is always these quarters of an hour that
decide the fate of a battle. " "Before he fought a battle, Bonaparte
thought little about what he should do in case of success, but a great
deal about what he should do in case of a reverse of fortune. "The
same prudence and good sense mark all his behavior. His instructions
to his secretary at the Tuilleries are worth remembering. "During the
night, enter my chamber as seldom as possible. Do not wake me when you
have any good news to communicate; with that there is no hurry. But
when you bring bad news, rouse me instantly, for then there is not a
moment to be lost. " It was a whimsical economy of the same kind which
dictated his practice, when general in Italy, in regard to his
burdensome correspondence. He directed Bourienne to leave all letters
unopened for three weeks, and then observed with satisfaction how large
a part of the correspondence had thus disposed of itself, and no longer
required an answer. His achievement of business was immense, and
enlarges the known powers of man. There have been many working kings,
from Ulysses to William of Orange, but none who accomplished a tithe
of this man's performance.
To these gifts of nature, Napoleon added the advantage of having been
born to a private and humble fortune. In his 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. "
Bonaparte had passed through all the degrees of military service, but
also was citizen before he was emperor, and so had the key to
citizenship. His remarks and estimates discover the information and
justness of measurement of the middle class. Those who had to deal
with him found that he was not to be imposed upon, but could cipher
as well as another man. This appears in all parts of his Memoirs,
dictated at St. Helena. When the expenses of the empress, of his
household, of his palaces, had accumulated great debts, Napoleon
examined the bills of the creditors himself, detected overcharges and
errors, and reduced the claims by considerable sums.
His grand weapon, namely, the millions whom he directed, he owed to
the representative character which clothed him. He interests us as he
stands for France and for Europe; and he exists as captain and king,
only as far as the Revolution, or the interest of the industrious
masses found an organ and a leader in him. In the social interests,
he knew the meaning and value of labor, and threw himself naturally
on that side. I like an incident mentioned by one of his biographers
at St. Helena. "When walking with Mrs. Balcombe, some servants, carrying
heavy boxes, passed by on the road, and Mrs. Balcombe desired them,
in rather an angry tone, to keep back. Napoleon interfered, saying,
'Respect the burden, Madam. '" In the time of the empire, he directed
attention to the improvement and embellishment of the market of the
capital. "The market-place," he said, "is the Louvre of the common
people. " The principal works that have survived him are his magnificent
roads. He filled the troops with his spirit, and a sort of freedom and
companionship grew up between him and them, which the forms of his
court never permitted between the officers and himself. They performed,
under his eye, that which no others could do. The best document of his
relation to his troops is the order of the day on the morning of the
battle of Austerlitz, in which Napoleon promises the troops that he
will keep his person out of reach of fire. This declaration, which is
the reverse of that ordinarily made by generals and sovereigns on the
eve of a battle, sufficiently explains the devotion of the army to
their leader.
But though there is in particulars this identity between Napoleon and
the mass of the people, his real strength lay in their conviction that
he was their representative in his genius and aims, not only when he
courted, but when he controlled, and even when he decimated them by
his conscriptions. He knew, as well as any Jacobin in France, how to
philosophize on liberty and equality; and, when allusion was made to
the precious blood of centuries, which was spilled by the killing of
the Duc d'Enghien, he suggested, "Neither is my blood 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, secluded from all
community with the children of the soil, and holding the ideas and
superstitions of a long-forgotten state of society. Instead of that
vampire, 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 opportunities of young men, was ended, and a
day of expansion and demand was come. A market for all the powers and
productions of man was opened: brilliant prizes glittered in the eyes
of youth and talent. The old, iron-bound, feudal France was changed
into a young Ohio or New York; and those who smarted under the immediate
rigors of the new monarch, pardoned them as the necessary severities
of the military system which had driven out the oppressor. And even
when the majority of the people had begun to ask, whether they had
really gained anything under the exhausting levies of men and money
of the new master,--the whole talent of the country, in every rank and
kindred, took his part, and defended him as its natural patron. In
1814, when advised to rely on the higher classes, Napoleon said to
those around him, "Gentlemen, in the situation in which I stand, my
only nobility is the rabble of the Faubourgs. "
Napoleon met this natural expectation. The necessity of his position
required a hospitality to every sort of talent, and its appointment
to trusts; and his feelings went along with this policy. Like every
superior person, he undoubtedly felt a desire for men and compeers,
and a wish to measure his power with other masters, and an impatience
of fools and underlings. In Italy, he sought for men, and found none.
"Good God! " he said, "how rare men are! There are eighteen millions
in Italy, and I have with difficulty found two,--Dandolo and Melzi. "
In later years, with larger experience, his respect for mankind was
not increased. In a moment of bitterness, he said to one of his oldest
friends, "Men deserve the contempt with which they inspire me. I have
only to put some gold lace on the coat of my virtuous republicans, and
they immediately become just what I wish them. " This impatience at
levity was, however, an oblique tribute of respect to those able persons
who commanded his regard, not only when he found them friends and
coadjutors, but also when they resisted his will. He could not confound
Fox and Pitt, Carnot, Lafayette, and Bernadotte, with the danglers of
his court; and, in spite of the detraction which his systematic egotism
dictated toward the great captains who conquered with and for him,
ample acknowledgements are made by him to Lannes Duroc, Kleber, Dessaix,
Massena, Murat, Ney, and Augereau. If he felt himself their patron,
and founder of their fortunes, as when he said, "I made my generals
out of mud," he could not hide his satisfaction in receiving from them
a seconding and support commensurate with the grandeur of his
enterprise. In the Russian campaign, he was so much impressed by the
courage and resources of Marshal Ney, that he said, "I have two hundred
millions in my coffers, and I would give them all for Ney. " The
characters which he has drawn of several of his marshals are
discriminating, and, though they did not content the insatiable vanity
of French officers, are, no doubt, substantially just. And, in fact,
every species of merit was sought and advanced under his government.
"I know," he said, "the depth and draught of water of every one of my
generals. " Natural power was sure to be well received at his court.
Seventeen men, in his time, were raised from common soldiers to the
rank of king, marshal, duke, or general; and the crosses of his Legion
of Honor were given to personal valor, and not to family connection.
"When soldiers have been baptized in the fire of a battle-field, they
have all one rank in my eyes. "
When a natural king becomes a titular king, everybody is pleased and
satisfied. The Revolution entitled the strong populace of the Faubourg
St. Antoine, and every horse-boy and powder-monkey in the army, to
look on Napoleon as flesh of his flesh, and the creature of his party:
but there is something in the success of grand talent which enlists
an universal sympathy. For, in the prevalence of sense and spirit over
stupidity and malversation, all reasonable men have an interest; and,
as intellectual beings, we feel the air purified by the electric shock,
when material force is overthrown by intellectual energies. As soon
as we are removed out of the reach of local and accidental partialities,
man feels that Napoleon fights for him; these are honest victories;
this strong steam-engine does our work. Whatever appeals to the
imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of human ability,
wonderfully encourages and liberates us. This capacious head, revolving
and disposing sovereignly trains of affairs, and animating such
multitudes of agents; this eye, which looked through Europe; this
prompt invention; this inexhaustible resource;--what events! what
romantic pictures! what strange situations! --when spying the Alps, by
a sunset in the Sicilian sea; drawing up his army for battle, in sight
of the Pyramids, and saying to his troops, "From the tops of those
pyramids, forty centuries look down on you;" fording the Red Sea;
wading in the gulf of the Isthmus of Suez. On the shore of Ptolemais,
gigantic projects agitated him. "Had Acre fallen, I should have changed
the face of the world. " His army, on the night of the battle of
Austerlitz, which was the anniversary of his inauguration as Emperor,
presented him with a bouquet of forty standards taken in the fight.
Perhaps it is a little puerile, the pleasure he took in making these
contrasts glaring; as when he pleased himself with making kings wait
in his antechambers, at Tilsit, at Paris, and at Erfurt.
We cannot, in the universal imbecility, indecision, and indolence of
men, sufficiently congratulate ourselves on this strong and ready
actor, who took occasion by the beard, and showed us how much may be
accomplished by the mere force of such virtues as all men possess in
less degrees; namely, by punctuality, by personal attention, by courage,
and thoroughness. "The Austrians," he said, "do not know the value of
time. " I should cite him, in his earlier years, as a model of prudence.
His power does not consist in any wild or extravagant force; in any
enthusiasm, like Mahomet's; or singular power of persuasion; but in
the exercise of common sense on each emergency, instead of abiding by
rules and customs. The lesson he teaches is that which vigor always
teaches,--that there is always room for it. To what heaps of cowardly
doubts is not that man's life an answer. When he appeared, it was the
belief of all military men that there could be nothing new in war; as
it is the belief of men to-day, that nothing new can be undertaken in
politics, or in church, or in letters, or in trade, or in farming, or
in our social manners and customs; and as it is, at all times, the
belief of society that the world is used up. But Bonaparte knew better
than society; and, moreover, knew that he knew better. I think all men
know better than they do; know that the institutions we so volubly
commend are go-carts and baubles; but they dare not trust their
presentiments. Bonaparte relied on his own sense, and did not care a
bean for other people's. The world treated his novelties just as it
treats everybody's novelties,--made infinite objection: mustered all
the impediments; but he snapped his finger at their objections. "What
creates great difficulty," he remarks, "in the profession of the land
commander, is the necessity of feeding so many men and animals. If he
allows himself to be guided by the commissaries, he will never stir,
and all his expeditions will fail. " An example of his common sense is
what he says of the passage of the Alps in winter, which all writers,
one repeating after the other, had described as impracticable. "The
winter," says Napoleon, "is not the most unfavorable season for the
passage of lofty mountains. The snow is then firm, the weather settled,
and there is nothing to fear from avalanches, the real and only danger
to be apprehended in the Alps. On 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 battles are gained.
"In all battles, a moment occurs, when the bravest troops, after having
made the greatest efforts, feel inclined to run. That terror proceeds
from a want of confidence in their own courage; and it only requires
a slight opportunity, a pretense, to restore confidence to them. The
art is to give rise to the opportunity, and to invent the pretense.
At Arcola, I won the battle with twenty-five horsemen. I seized that
moment of lassitude, gave every man a trumpet, and gained the day with
this handful. You see that two armies are two bodies which meet, and
endeavor to frighten each other: a moment of panic occurs, and that
moment must be turned to advantage. When a man has been present in
many actions, he distinguishes that moment without difficulty; it is
as easy as casting up an addition. "
This deputy of the nineteenth century added to his gifts a capacity
for speculation on general topics. He delighted in running through the
range of practical, of literary, and of abstract questions. His opinion
is always original, and to the purpose. On the voyage to Egypt, he
liked, after dinner, to fix on three or four persons to support a
proposition, and as many to oppose it. He gave a subject, and the
discussions turned on questions of religion, the different kinds of
government, and the art of war. One day, he asked, whether the planets
were inhabited? On another, what was the age of the world? Then he
proposed to consider the probability of the destruction of the globe,
either by water or by fire; at another time, the truth or fallacy of
presentiments, and the interpretation of dreams. He was very fond of
talking of religion. In 1806, he conversed with Fournier, bishop of
Montpelier, on matters of theology. There were two points on which
they could not agree, viz. , that of hell, and that of salvation out
of the pale of the church. The Emperor told Josephine, that he disputed
like a devil on these two points, on which the bishop was inexorable.
To the philosophers he readily yielded all that was proved against
religion as the work of men and time; but he would not hear of
materialism. One fine night, on deck, amid a clatter of materialism,
Bonaparte pointed to the stars, and said, "You may talk as long as you
please, gentlemen, but who made all that? " He delighted in the
conversation of men of science, particularly of Monge and Berthollet;
but the men of letters he slighted; "they were manufacturers of
phrases. " Of medicine, too, he was fond of talking, and with those of
its practitioners whom he most esteemed,-with Corvisart at Paris, and
with Antonomarchi at St. Helena. "Believe me, "he said to the last,
"we had better leave off all these remedies: life is a fortress which
neither you nor I know anything about. Why throw obstacles in the way
of its defense? Its own means are superior to all the apparatus of
your laboratories. Corvisart candidly agreed with me, that all your
filthy mixtures are good for nothing. Medicine is a collection of
uncertain prescriptions, the results of which, taken collectively, are
more fatal than useful to mankind. Water, air, and cleanliness, are
the chief articles in my pharmacopeia. "
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 goodnature of strength and conscious superiority. I admire his
simple, clear narrative of his battles;--good as Caesar's; his
good-natured and sufficiently respectful account of Marshal Wurmser
and his other antagonists, and his own equality as a writer to his
varying subject. The most agreeable portion is the Campaign in Egypt.
He had hours of thought and wisdom. In intervals of leisure, either
in the camp or the palace, Napoleon appears as a man of genius,
directing on abstract questions the native appetite for truth, and the
impatience of words, he was wont to show in war. He could enjoy every
play of invention, a romance, a _bon mot_, as well as a stratagem
in a campaign. He delighted to fascinate Josephine and her ladies, in
a dim-lighted apartment, by the terrors of a fiction, to which his
voice and dramatic power lent every addition.
I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern
society; of the throng who fill the markets, shops, counting-houses,
manufactories, ships, of the modern world, aiming to be rich. He was
the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the internal improver,
the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the opener of doors
and markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse. Of course, the rich
and aristocratic did not like him. England, the center of capital, and
Rome and Austria, centers of tradition and genealogy, opposed him. The
consternation of the dull and conservative classes, the terror of the
foolish old men and old women of the Roman conclave,--who in their
despair took hold of anything, 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, everywhere, which pointed him out as the giant of the middle
class, make his history bright and commanding. He had the virtues of
the masses of his constituents; he had also their vices. I am sorry
that the brilliant picture has its reverse. But that is the fatal
quality which we discover in our pursuit of wealth, that it is
treacherous, and is bought by the breaking or weakening of the
sentiments; and it is inevitable that we should find the same fact in
the history of this champion, who proposed to himself simply a brilliant
career, without any stipulation or scruple concerning the means.
Bonaparte was singularly destitute of generous sentiments. The
highest-placed individual in the most cultivated age and population
of the world,--he has not the merit of common truth and honesty. He
is unjust to his generals; egotistic, and monopolizing; meanly stealing
the credit of their great actions from Kellermann, from Bernadotte;
intriguing to involve his faithful Junot in hopeless bankruptcy, in
order to drive him to a distance from Paris, because the familiarity
of his manners offends the new pride of his throne. He is a boundless
liar. The official paper, his "Moniteurs," and all his bulletins, are
proverbs for saying what he wished to be believed; and worse,--he sat,
in his premature old age, in his lonely island, coldly falsifying
facts, and dates, and characters, and giving to history, a theatrical
eclat. Like all Frenchmen, he has a passion for stage effect. Every
action that breathes of generosity is poisoned by this calculation.
His star, his love of glory, his doctrine of the immortality of the
soul, are all French. "I must dazzle and astonish. If I were to give
the liberty of the press, my power could not last three days. " To make
a great noise is his favorite design. "A great reputation is a great
noise; the more there is made, the farther off it is heard. Laws,
institutions, monuments, nations, all fall; but the noise continues,
and resounds in after ages. " His doctrine of immortality is simply
fame. His theory of influence is not flattering. "There are two levers
for moving men,--interest and fear. Love is a silly infatuation, depend
upon it. Friendship is but a name. I love nobody. I do not even love
my brothers; perhaps Joseph, a little, from habit, and because he is
my elder; and Duroc, I love him too; but why? --because his character
pleases me; he is stern and resolute, and, I believe, the fellow never
shed a tear. For my part, I know very well that I have no true friends.
As long as I continue to be what I am, I may have as many pretended
friends as I please. Leave sensibility to women; but men should be
firm in heart and purpose, or they should have nothing to do with war
and government. " He was thoroughly unscrupulous. He would steal,
slander, assassinate, drown, and poison, as his interest dictated. He
had no generosity; but mere vulgar hatred; he was intensely selfish;
he was perfidious; he cheated at cards; he was a prodigious gossip;
and opened letters; and delighted in his infamous police; and rubbed
his hands with joy when he had intercepted some morsel of intelligence
concerning the men and women about him, boasting that "he knew
everything;" and interfered with the cutting the dresses of the women;
and listened after the hurrahs and the compliments of the street,
incognito. His manners were coarse. He treated women with low
familiarity. He had the habit of pulling their ears and pinching their
cheeks, when he was in good humor, and of pulling the ears and whiskers
of men, and of striking and horse-play with them, to his last days.
It does not appear that he listened at keyholes, or, at least, that
he "was caught at it". In short, when you have penetrated through all
the circles of power and splendor, you were not dealing with a
gentleman, at last; but with an impostor and a rogue; and he fully
deserves the epithet of Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter.
In describing the two parties into which modern society divides
itself,--the democrat and the conservative,--I said, Bonaparte
represents the democrat, or the party of men of business, against the
stationary or conservative party. I omitted then to say, what is
material to the statement, namely, that these two parties differ only
as young and old. The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative
is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to
seed,--because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme
value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep.
Bonaparte may be said to represent the whole history of this party,
its youth and its age; yes, and with poetic justice, its fate, in his
own. The counter-revolution, the counter-party, still waits for its
organ and representative, in a lover and a man of truly public and
universal aims.
Here was an experiment, under the most favorable conditions, of the
powers of intellect without conscience. Never was such a leader so
endowed, and so weaponed; never leader found such aids and followers.
And what was the result of this vast talent and power, of these immense
armies, burned cities, squandered treasures, immolated millions of
men, of this demoralized Europe? It came to no result. All passed away,
like the smoke of his artillery and left no trace. He left France
smaller, poorer, feebler, than he found it; and the whole contest for
freedom was to be begun again. The attempt was, in principle, suicidal.
France served him with life, and limb, and estate, as long as it could
identify its interest with him; but when men saw that after victory
was another war; after the destruction of armies, new conscriptions;
and they who had toiled so desperately were never nearer to the
reward,--they could not spend what they had earned, nor repose on their
down-beds, nor strut in their chateaux,--they deserted him.
Men found
that his absorbing egotism was deadly to all other men. It resembled
the torpedo, which inflicts a succession of shocks on any one who takes
hold of it, producing spasms which contract the muscles of the hand,
so that the man cannot open his fingers; and the animal inflicts new
and more violent shocks, until he paralyzes and kills his victim. So,
this exorbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished, and absorbed the power
and existence of those who served him; and the universal cry of France,
and of Europe, in 1814, was, "enough of him;" "assez de Bonaparte. "
It was not Bonaparte's fault. He did all that in him lay, to live and
thrive without moral principle. It was the nature of things, the eternal
law of man and of the world, which baulked and ruined him; and the
result, in a million experiments, will be the same. Every experiment,
by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim,
will fail. The pacific Fourier will be as inefficient as the pernicious
Napoleon. As long as our civilization is essentially one of property,
of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches
will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our
wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste
with all doors open, and which serves all men.
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 everywhere throbs and works. His office is a reception of
the facts into the mind, and then a selection of the eminent and
characteristic experiences.
Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their
history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The
rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its
channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern
and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its
sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow,
or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting,
a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself in the
memories of his fellows, and in his own manners and face. The air is
full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the 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 something more
than print of the seal. It is a new and finer form of the original.
The record is alive, as that which it recorded is alive. In man, the
memory is a kind of looking-glass, which, having received the images
of surrounding objects, is touched with life, and disposes them in a
new order. The facts 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 delivered. But, besides the universal joy of conversation, some men
are born with exalted powers for this second creation. Men are born
to write. The gardener saves every slip, and seed, and peach-stone;
his vocation is to be a planter of plants. Not less does the writer
attend his affairs. Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him
as a model, and sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense that
they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes that all
that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report
the Holy Ghost, or attempt it. Nothing so broad, so subtle, or so dear,
but comes therefore commended to his pen,--and he will write. In his
eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the
possibility of being reported. In conversation, in calamity, he finds
new materials; as our German poet said, "some god gave me the power
to paint what I suffer. " He draws his rents from rage and pain. By
acting rashly, he buys the power of talking wisely. Vexations, and a
tempest of passion, only fill his sails; as the good Luther writes,
"When I am angry I can pray well, and preach well;" and if we knew the
genesis of fine-strokes of eloquence, they might recall the complaisance
of Sultan Amurath, who struck off some Persian heads, that his
physician, Vesalius, might see the spasms in the muscles of the neck.
His failures are the preparation of his victories. A new thought, or
a crisis of passion, apprises him that all that he has yet learned and
written is exoteric--is not the fact, but some rumor of the fact. What
then? Does he throw away the pen? No; he begins again to describe in
the new light which has shined on him,--if, by some means, he may yet
save some true word. Nature conspires. Whatever can be thought can be
spoken, and still rises for utterance, though to rude and stammering
organs. If they 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 superior office; for the class of scholars or
writers, who see connection where the multitude see fragments, and who
are impelled to exhibit the facts in order, and so to supply the axis
on which the frame of things turns. Nature has dearly at heart the
formation of the speculative man, or scholar. It is an end never lost
sight of, and is prepared in the original casting of things. He is no
permissive or accidental appearance, but an organic agent, one of the
estates of the realm, provided and prepared from of old and from
everlasting, in the knitting and contexture of things. Presentiments,
impulses, cheer him. There is a certain heat in the breast, which
attends the perception of a primary truth, which is the shining of the
spiritual sun down into the shaft of the mine. Every thought which
dawns on the mind, in the moment of its emergency 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 held up
each object of monomania in its right relation. The ambitious and
mercenary bring their last new mumbo-jumbo, whether tariff, Texas,
railroad, Romanism, mesmerism, or California; and, by detaching the
object from its relations, easily succeed in making it seen in a glare;
and a multitude go mad about it, and they are not to be reproved or
cured by the opposite multitude, who are kept from this particular
insanity by an equal frenzy on another crochet. But let one man have
the comprehensive eye that can replace this isolated prodigy in its
right neighborhood and bearings,--the illusion vanishes, and the
returning reason of the community thanks the reason of the monitor.
The scholar is the man of the ages, but he must also wish, with other
men, to stand well with his contemporaries. But there is a certain
ridicule, among superficial people, thrown on the scholars or clerisy,
which is of no import, unless the scholars heed it. In this country,
the emphasis of conversation, and of public opinion, commends the
practical man; and the solid portion of the community is named with
significant respect in every circle. Our people are of Bonaparte's
opinion concerning ideologists. Ideas are subversive of social order
and comfort, and at last make a fool of the possessor. It is believed,
the ordering a cargo of goods from New York to Smyrna; or, the running
up and down to procure a company of subscribers to set a-going five
or ten thousand spindles; or, the negotiations of a caucus, and the
practising on the prejudices and facility of country-people, to secure
their votes in November,--is practical and commendable.
If I were to compare action of a much higher strain with a life of
contemplation, I should not venture to pronounce with much confidence
in favor of the former. Mankind have such a deep stake in inward
illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or monk in
defense of his life of thought and prayer. A certain partiality, a
headiness, and loss of balance, is the tax which all action must pay.
Act, if you like,--but you do it at your peril. Men's actions are too
strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the
victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces
them to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment,
becomes a sacrament. The fiery reformer embodies his aspiration in
some rite or covenant, and he and his friends cleave to the form and
lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established Quakerism, the Shaker
has established his monastery and his dance; and, although each prates
of spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, which is anti-spiritual.
But where are his new things of today? In actions of enthusiasm, this
drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no higher
aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly, in actions of
cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the
speculative from the practical faculty, and put a ban on reason and
sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback and negation. The Hindoos
write in their sacred books, "Children only, and not the learned, speak
of the speculative and the practical faculties as two. They are but
one, for both obtain the selfsame end, and the place which is gained
by the followers of the one is gained by the followers of the other.
That man seeth, who seeth that the speculative and the practical
doctrines are one. " For great action must draw on the spiritual nature.
The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The
greatest action may easily be one of the most private 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
disparagement of any other is to be looked for. With such, Talleyrand's
question is ever the main one; not, is he rich? is he committed? is
he well-meaning? has he this or that faculty? is he of the movement?
is he of the establishment? --but, Is he anybody? does he stand for
something? He must be good of his kind. That is all that Talleyrand,
all that State-street, all that the common sense of mankind asks. Be
real and admirable, not as we know, but as you know. Able men do not
care in what kind a man is able, so only that he is able. A master
likes a master, and does not stipulate whether it be orator, artist,
craftsman, or king.
Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the
literary class. And it is not to be denied that men are cordial in
their recognition and welcome of intellectual accomplishments. Still
the writer does not stand with us on any commanding ground. I think
this to be his own fault. A pound passes for a pound. There have been
times when he was a sacred person; he wrote Bibles; the first hymns;
the codes; the epics; tragic songs; Sibylline verses; Chaldean oracles;
Laconian sentences inscribed on temple walls. Every word was true, and
woke the nations to new life. He wrote without levity, and without
choice. Every word was carved, before his eyes, into the earth and
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 sustain with shameless advocacy some bad
government, or must bark, all the year round, in opposition; or write
conventional criticism, or profligate novels; or, at any rate, write
without thought, and without recurrence, by day and 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 power
and duties of the scholar or writer.
I described Bonaparte as a representative of the popular external life
and aims of the nineteenth century. Its other half, its poet, is Goethe,
a man quite domesticated in the century, breathing its air, enjoying
its fruits, impossible at any earlier time, and taking away, by his
colossal parts, the reproach of weakness, which, but for him, would
lie on the intellectual works of the period. He appears at a time when
a general culture has spread itself, and has smoothed down all sharp
individual traits; when, in the absence of heroic characters, a social
comfort and cooperation have come in. There is no poet, but scores of
poetic writers; no Columbus, but hundreds of post-captains, with
transit-telescope, barometer, and concentrated soup and pemmican; no
Demosthenes, no Chatham, but any number of clever parliamentary and
forensic debaters; no prophet or saint, but colleges of divinity; no
learned man, but learned societies, a cheap press, reading-rooms, and
book-clubs, without number. There was never such a miscellany of facts.
The world extends itself like American trade. We conceive Greek or
Roman life,--life in the middle ages--to be a simple and comprehensive
affair; but modern life to respect a multitude of things, which is
distracting.
Goethe was the philosopher of this multiplicity; hundred-handed,
Argus-eyed, able and happy to cope with this rolling miscellany of
facts and sciences, and, by his own versatility, to dispose of them
with ease; a manly mind, unembarrassed by the variety of coats of
convention with which life had got encrusted, easily able by his
subtlety to pierce these, and to draw his strength from nature, with
which he lived in full communion. What is strange, too, he lived in
a small town, in a petty state, in a defeated state, and in a time
when Germany played no such leading part in the world's affairs as to
swell the bosom of her sons with any metropolitan pride, such as might
have cheered a French, or English, or, once, a Roman or Attic genius.
Yet there is no trace of provincial limitation in his muse. He is not
a debtor to his position, but was born with a free and controlling
genius.
The Helena, or the second part of Faust, is a philosophy of literature
set in poetry; the work of one who found himself the master of
histories, mythologies, philosophies, sciences, and national
literatures, in the encyclopaedical manner in which modern erudition,
with its international intercourse of the whole earth's population,
researches into Indian, Etruscan, and all 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 confided the results of eighty years of observation. This
reflective and critical wisdom makes the poem more truly the flower
of this time. It dates itself. Still he is a poet,--poet of a prouder
laurel than any contemporary, and under this plague of microscopes
(for he seems to see out of every pore of his skin), strikes the harp
with a hero's strength and grace.
The wonder of the book is its superior intelligence. In the menstruum
of this man's wit, the past and the present ages, and their religions,
politics, and modes of thinking, are dissolved into archetypes and
ideas. What new mythologies sail through his head! The Greeks said,
that Alexander went as far as Chaos; Goethe went, only the other day,
as far; and one step farther he hazarded, and brought himself safe
back. There is a heart-cheering freedom in his speculation. The immense
horizon which journeys with us lends its 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, accumulating a glut of facts and fruits
too fast for any hitherto-existing savants to classify, this man's
mind had ample chambers for the distribution of all. He had a power
to unite the detached atoms again by their own law. He has clothed our
modern existence with poetry. Amid littleness and detail, he detected
the Genius of life, the old cunning Proteus, nestling close beside us,
and showed that the 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 and main streets, in
boulevards and hotels; and, in the solidest kingdom of routine and the
senses, he showed the lurking daemonic power; that, in actions of
routine, a thread of mythology and fable spins itself; and this, by
tracing the pedigree of every usage and practice, every institution,
utensil, and means, home to its origin in the structure of man. He had
an extreme impatience of conjecture, and of rhetoric. "I have guesses
enough of my own; if a man write a book, let him set down only what
he knows. " He writes in the plainest and lowest tone, omitting a great
deal more than he writes, and putting ever a thing for a word. He has
explained the distinction between the antique and the modern spirit
and art. He has defined art, its scope and laws. He has said the best
things about nature that ever were said. He treats nature as the old
philosophers, as the seven wise masters did,--and, with whatever loss
of French tabulation and dissection, poetry and humanity remain to us;
and they have some doctorial skill. Eyes are better, on the whole,
than telescopes or microscopes. He has contributed a key to many parts
of nature, through the rare turn for unity and simplicity in his mind.
Thus Goethe suggested the leading idea of modern botany, that a leaf,
or the eye of a leaf, is the unit of botany, and that every part of
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
toward truth. He will realize what you say. He hates to be trifled
with, and to be made to say over again some old wife's fable, that has
had possession of men's faith these thousand years. He may as well see
if it is true as another. He sifts it. I am here, he would say, to be
the measure and judge of these things. Why should I take them on trust?
And, therefore, what he says of religion, of passion, of marriage, of
manners, property, of paper money, of periods or 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 gentleman, 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 mythologic gear, of horns, cloven foot, harpoon tail,
brimstone, and blue-fire, and, instead of looking in books and pictures,
looked for him in his own mind, in every shade of coldness, selfishness,
and unbelief that, in crowds, or in solitude, darkens over the human
thought,--and found that the portrait gained reality and terror by
everything he added, and by everything he took away. He found that the
essence of this hobgoblin, which had hovered in shadow about the
habitations of men, ever since they were men, was pure intellect,
applied,--as always there is a tendency,--to the service of the senses:
and he flung into literature, in his Mephistopheles, the first organic
figure that has been added for some ages, and which will remain as
long as the Prometheus. I have no design to enter into any analysis
of his numerous works. They consist of translations, criticisms, dramas,
lyric and every other description of poems, literary journals, and
portraits of distinguished men. Yet I cannot omit to specify the Wilhelm
Meister.
Wilhelm Meister is a novel in every sense, the first of its kind,
called by its admirers the only delineation of modern society,--as if
other novels, those of Scott, for example, dealt with costume and
condition, this with the spirit of life. It is a book over which some
veil is still drawn. It is read by very intelligent persons with wonder
and delight. It is preferred by some such to Hamlet, as a work of
genius. I suppose no book of this century can compare with it in its
delicious sweetness, so new, so provoking to the mind, gratifying it
with so many and so solid thoughts, just insights into life, and
manners, and characters; so many good hints for the conduct of life,
so many unexpected glimpses into a higher sphere, and never a trace
of rhetoric or dullness. A very provoking book to the curiosity of
young men of genius, but a very unsatisfactory one. Lovers of light
reading, those who look in it for the entertainment they find in a
romance, are disappointed. On the other hand, those who begin it with
the higher hope to read in it a worthy history of genius, and the just
award of the laurels to its toils and denials, have also reason to
complain. We had an English romance here, not long ago, professing to
embody the hope of a new age, and to unfold the political hope of the
party called "Young England," in which the only reward of virtue is
a seat in parliament, and a peerage. Goethe's romance has a conclusion
as lame and immoral. George Sand, in Consuelo and its continuation,
has sketched a truer and more dignified picture. In the progress of
the story, the characters of the hero and heroine expand at a rate
that shivers the porcelain chess-table of aristocratic convention:
they quit the society and habits of their rank; they lose their wealth;
they become the servants of great ideas, and of the most generous
social ends; until, at last, the hero, who is the center and fountain
of an association for the rendering of the noblest benefits to the
human race, no longer answers to his own titled name: it sounds foreign
and remote in his ear.
"I am only man," he says; "I breathe and work for man," and this in
poverty and extreme sacrifices. Goethe's hero, on the contrary, has
so many weaknesses and impurities, and keeps such bad company, that
the sober English public, when the book was translated, were disgusted.
And yet it is so crammed with wisdom, with knowledge of the world, and
with knowledge of laws; the persons so truly and subtly drawn, and
with such few strokes, and not a word too much, the book remains ever
so new and unexhausted, that we must even let it go its way, and be
willing to get what good from it we can, assured that it has only begun
its office, and has millions of readers yet to serve.
The argument is the passage of a democrat to the aristocracy, using
both words in their best sense. And this passage is not made in any
mean or creeping way, but through the hall door. Nature and character
assist, and the rank is made real by sense and probity in the nobles.
No generous youth can escape this charm of reality in the book, so
that it is highly stimulating to intellect and courage. The ardent and
holy Novalis characterized the book as "thoroughly modern and prosaic;
the romantic is completely leveled 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.
