I do not press the
skepticism
skepticism
of the materialist.
Emerson - Representative Men
Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years
hence. Life's well enough; but we shall be glad to get out of it, and
they will all be glad to have us. Why should we fret and drudge? Our
meat will taste to-morrow as it did yesterday, and we may at last have
had enough of it. "Ah," said my languid gentleman at Oxford, "there's
nothing new or true,--and no matter. "
With a little more bitterness, the cynic moans: our life is like an
ass led to market by a bundle of hay being carried before him: he sees
nothing but the bundle of hay. "There is so much trouble in coming
into the world," said Lord Bolingbroke, "and so much more, as well as
meanness, in going out of it, that 'tis hardly worth while to be here
at all. " I knew a philosopher of this kidney, who was accustomed briefly
to sum up his experience of human nature in saying, "Mankind is a
damned rascal:" and the natural corollary is pretty sure to
follow,--"The world lives by humbug, and so will I. "
The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each
other, and the scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there
arises a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two,
the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by being in extremes. He
labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance. He will not
go beyond his card. He sees the one-sidedness of these men of the
street; he will not be a Gibeonite; he stands for the intellectual
faculties, a cool head, and whatever serves to keep it cool; no
unadvised industry, no unrewarded self-devotion, no loss of the brains
in toil. Am I an ox, or a dray? --You are both in extremes, he says.
You that will have all solid, and a world of pig-lead, deceive
yourselves grossly. You believe yourselves rooted and grounded on
adamant; and, yet, if we uncover the last facts of our knowledge, you
are spinning like bubbles in a river, you know not whither or whence,
and you are bottomed and capped and wrapped in delusions.
Neither will he be betrayed to a book, and wrapped in a gown. The
studious class are their own victims; they are thin and pale, their
feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the
day a fear of interruption,--pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism. If
you come near them, and see what conceits they entertain,--they are
abstractionists, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some
dreams; in expecting the homage of society to some precious scheme
built on a truth, but destitute of proportion in its presentment, of
justness in its application, and of all energy of will in the schemer
to embody and vitalize it.
But I see plainly, he says, that I cannot see. I know that human
strength is not in extremes, but in avoiding extremes. I, at least,
will shun the weakness of philosophizing beyond my depth. What is the
use of pretending to powers we have not? What is the use of pretending
to assurances we have not, respecting the other life? Why exaggerate
the power of virtue? Why be an angel before your time? These strings,
wound up too high, will snap. If there is a wish for immortality, and
no evidence, why not say just that? If there are conflicting evidences,
why not state them? If there is not ground for a candid thinker to
make up his mind, yea or nay,--why not suspend the judgment? I weary
of these dogmatizers. I tire of these hacks of routine, who deny the
dogmas. I neither affirm nor deny. I stand here to try the case. I am
here to consider,--to consider how it is. I will try to keep the balance
true. Of what use to take the chair, and glibly rattle off theories
of societies, religion, and nature, when I know that practical
objections lie in the way, insurmountable by me and by my mates? Why
so talkative in public, when each of my neighbors can pin me to my
seat by arguments I cannot refute? Why pretend that life is so simple
a game, when we know how subtle and elusive the Proteus is? Why think
to shut up all things in your narrow coop, when we know there are not
one or two only, but ten, twenty, a thousand things, and unlike? Why
fancy that you have all the truth in your keeping? There is much to
say on all sides.
Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical
question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be
had? Is not marriage an open question when it is alleged, from the
beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to
get out, and such as are out wish to get in? And the reply of Socrates,
to him who asked whether he should choose a wife, still remains
reasonable, "that, whether he should choose one or not, he would repent
it. " Is not the state a question? All society is divided in opinion
on the subject of the state. Nobody loves it; great numbers dislike
it, and suffer conscientious scruples to allegiance: and the only
defense set up, is, the fear of doing worse in disorganizing. Is it
otherwise with the church? Or, to put any of the questions which touch
mankind nearest,--shall the young man aim at a leading part in law,
in politics, in trade? It will not be pretended that a success in
either of these kinds is quite coincident with what is best and inmost
in his mind. Shall he, then, cutting the stays that hold him fast to
the social state, put out to sea with no guidance but his genius? There
is much to say on both sides. Remember the open question between the
present order of "competition," and the friends of "attractive and
associated labor. " The generous minds embrace the proposition of labor
shared by all; it is the only honesty; nothing else is safe. It is
from the poor man's hut alone, that strength and virtue come; and yet,
on the other side, it is alleged that labor impairs the form, and
breaks the spirit of man, and the laborers cry unanimously, "We have
no thoughts. " Culture, how indispensable! I cannot forgive you the
want of accomplishment; and yet, culture will instantly destroy that
chiefest beauty of spontaneousness. Excellent is culture for a savage;
but once let him read in the book, and he is no longer able not to
think of Plutarch's heroes. In short, since true fortitude of
understanding consists "in not letting what we know be embarrassed by
what we do not know," we ought to secure those advantages which we can
command, and not risk them by clutching after the airy and unattainable.
Come, no chimeras! Let us go abroad; let us mix in affairs; let us
learn, and get, and have, and climb. "Men are a sort of moving plants,
and, like trees, receive a great part of their nourishment from the
air. If they keep too much at home, they pine. " Let us have a robust,
manly life; let us know what we know, for certain; what we have, let
it be solid, and seasonable, and our own. A world in the hand is worth
two in the bush. Let us have to do with real men and women, and not
with skipping ghosts.
This, then, is the right ground of the skeptic,--this of consideration,
of self-containing; not at all of unbelief; not at all of universal
denying, nor of universal doubting,--doubting even that he doubts;
least of all, of scoffing and profligate jeering at all that is stable
and good. These are no more his moods than are those of religion and
philosophy. He is the considerer, the prudent, taking in sail, counting
stock, husbanding his means, believing that a man has too many enemies,
than that he can afford to be his own; that we cannot give ourselves
too many advantages, in this unequal conflict, with powers so vast and
unweariable ranged on one side, and this little, conceited, vulnerable
popinjay that a man is, bobbing up and down into every danger, on the
other. It is a position taken up for better defense, as of more safety,
and one that can be maintained; and it is one of more opportunity and
range; as, when we build a house, the rule is, to set it not too high
nor too low, under the wind, but out of the dirt.
The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mobility. The Spartan
and Stoic schemes are too stark and stiff for our occasion. A theory
of Saint John, and of non-resistance, seems, on the other hand, too
thin and aerial. We want some coat woven of elastic steel, stout as
the first, and limber as the second. We want a ship in these billows
we inhabit. An angular, dogmatic house would be rent to chips and
splinters, in this storm of many elements. No, it must be tight, and
fit to the form of man, to live at all; as a shell is the architecture
of a house founded on the sea. The soul of man must be the type of our
scheme, just as the body of man is the type after which a dwelling-house
is built. Adaptiveness is the peculiarity of human nature. We are
golden averages, volitant stabilities, compensated or periodic errors,
houses founded on the sea. The wise skeptic wishes to have a near view
of the best game, and the chief players; what is best in the planet;
art and nature, places and events, but mainly men. Everything that is
excellent in mankind,--a form of grace, an arm of iron, lips of
persuasion, a brain of resources, every one skilful to play and win,--he
will see and judge.
The terms of admission to this spectacle are, that he have a certain
solid and intelligible way of living of his own; some method of
answering the inevitable needs of human life; proof that he has played
with skill and success; that he has evinced the temper, stoutness, and
the range of qualities which, among his contemporaries and countrymen,
entitle him to fellowship and trust. For, the secrets of life are not
shown except to sympathy and likeness. Men do not confide themselves
to boys, or coxcombs, or pedants, but to their peers. Some wise
limitation, as the modern phrase is; some condition between the
extremes, and having itself a positive quality; some stark and
sufficient man, who is not salt or sugar, but sufficiently related to
the world to do justice to Paris or London, and, at the same time, a
vigorous and original thinker, whom cities cannot overawe, but who
uses them,--is the fit person to occupy this ground of speculation.
These qualities meet in the character of Montaigne. And yet, since the
personal regard which I entertain for Montaigne may be unduly great,
I will, under the shield of this prince of egotists, offer, as an
apology for electing him as the representative of skepticism, a word
or two to explain how my love began and grew for this admirable gossip.
A single odd volume of Cotton's translation of the Essays remained to
me from my father's library, when a boy. It lay long neglected, until,
after many years, when I was newly escaped from college, I read the
book, and procured the remaining volumes. I remember the delight and
wonder in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I had myself
written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my
thought and experience. It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in
the cemetery of Pere le Chaise, I came to a tomb of Augustus Collignon,
who died in 1830, aged sixty-eight years, and who, said the monument,
"lived to do right, and had formed himself to virtue on the Essays of
Montaigne. " Some years later, I became acquainted with an accomplished
English poet, John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my correspondence,
I found that, from a love of Montaigne, he had made a pilgrimage to
his chateau, still standing near Castellan, in Perigord, and, after
two hundred and fifty years, had copied from the walls of his library
the inscriptions which Montaigne had written there. That Journal of
Mr. Sterling's, published in the Westminster Review, Mr. Hazlitt has
reprinted in the Prolegomenae to his edition of the Essays. I heard
with pleasure that one of the newly-discovered autographs of William
Shakspeare was in a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne. It is
the only book which we certainly know to have been in the poet's
library. And, oddly enough, the duplicate copy of Florio, which the
British Museum purchased, with a view of protecting the Shakspeare
autograph (as I was informed in the Museum), turned out to have the
autograph of Ben Jonson in the fly-leaf. Leigh Hunt relates of Lord
Byron, that Montaigne was the only great writer of past times whom he
read with avowed satisfaction. Other coincidences, not needful to be
mentioned here, concurred to make this old Gascon still new and immortal
for me.
In 1571, on the death of his father, Montaigne, then thirty-eight years
old, retired from the practice of law, at Bordeaux, and settled himself
on his estate. Though he had been a man of pleasure, and sometimes a
courtier, his studious habits now grew on him, and he loved the compass,
staidness, and independence of the country gentleman's life. He took
up his economy in good earnest, and made his farms yield the most.
Downright and plain-dealing, and abhorring to be deceived or to
deceive, he was esteemed in the country for his sense and probity. In
the civil wars of the League, which converted every house into a fort,
Montaigne kept his gates open, and his house without defense. All
parties freely came and went, his courage and honor being universally
esteemed. The neighboring lords and gentry brought jewels and papers
to him for safekeeping. Gibbon reckons, in these bigoted times, but
two men of liberality in France,--Henry IV. and Montaigne.
Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers. His French
freedom runs into grossness; but he has anticipated all censures by
the bounty of his own confessions. In his times, books were written
to one sex only, and almost all were written in Latin; so that, in a
humorist, a certain nakedness of statement was permitted, which our
manners, of a literature addressed equally to both sexes, do not allow.
But, though a biblical plainness, coupled with a most uncanonical
levity, may shut his pages to many sensitive readers, yet the offence
is superficial. He parades it: he makes the most of it; nobody can
think or say worse of him than he does. He pretends to most of the
vices; and, if there be any virtue in him, he says, it got in by
stealth. There is no man, in his opinion, who has not deserved hanging
five or six times; and he pretends no exception in his own behalf.
"Five or six as ridiculous stories," too, he says, "can be told of me,
as of any man living. " But, with all this really superfluous frankness,
the opinion of an invincible probity grows into every reader's mind.
"When I the most strictly and religiously confess myself, I find that
the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice; and I am afraid
that Plato, in his purest virtue (I, who am as sincere and perfect a
lover of virtue of that stamp as any other whatever), if he had
listened, and laid his ear close to himself, would have heard some
jarring sound of human mixture; but faint and remote, and only to be
perceived by himself. "
Here is an impatience and fastidiousness at color or pretense of any
kind. He has been in courts so long as to have conceived a furious
disgust at appearances; he will indulge himself with a little cursing
and swearing; he will talk with sailors and gypsies, use flash and
street ballads; he has stayed indoors till he is deadly sick; he will
to the open air, though it rain bullets. He has seen too much of
gentlemen of the long robe, until he wishes for cannibals; and is so
nervous, by factitious life, that he thinks, the more barbarous man
is, the better he is. He likes his saddle. You may read theology, and
grammar, and metaphysics elsewhere. Whatever you get here, shall smack
of the earth and of real life, sweet, or smart, or stinging. He makes
no hesitation to entertain you with the records of his disease; and
his journey to Italy is quite full of that matter. He took and kept
this position of equilibrium. Over his name, he drew an emblematic
pair of scales, and wrote, _Que sais-je? _ under it. As I look at
his effigy opposite the title-page, I seem to hear him say, "You may
play old Poz, if you will; you may rail and exaggerate,--I stand here
for truth, and will not, for all the states, and churches, and revenues,
and personal reputations of Europe, overstate the dry fact, as I see
it; I will rather mumble and prose about what I certainly know,--my
house and barns; my father, my wife, and my tenants; my old lean bald
pate; my knives and forks; what meats I eat, and what drinks I prefer;
and a hundred straws just as ridiculous,--than I will write, with a
fine crow-quill, a fine romance. I like gray days, and autumn and
winter weather. I am gray and autumnal myself, and think an undress,
and old shoes that do not pinch my feet, and old friends who do not
constrain me, and plain topics where I do not need to strain myself
and pump my brains, the most suitable. Our condition as men is risky
and ticklish enough. One cannot be sure of himself and his fortune an
hour, but he may be whisked off into some pitiable or ridiculous plight.
Why should I vapor and play the philosopher, instead of ballasting,
the best I can, this dancing balloon? So, at least, I live within
compass, keep myself ready for action, and can shoot the gulf, at last,
with decency. If there be anything farcical in such a life, the blame
is not mine; let it lie at fate's and nature's door. "
The Essays, therefore, are an entertaining soliloquy on every random
topic that comes into his head; treating everything without ceremony,
yet with masculine sense. There have been men with deeper insight;
but, one would say, never a man with such abundance of thoughts; he
is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader
care for all that he cares for.
The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know
not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of
conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would
bleed; they are vascular and alive. One has the same pleasure in it
that we have in listening to the necessary speech of men about their
work, when any unusual circumstance give momentary importance to the
dialogue. For blacksmiths and teamsters do not trip in their speech;
it is a shower of bullets. It is Cambridge men who correct themselves,
and begin again at every half-sentence, and, moreover, will pun, and
refine too much, and swerve from the matter to the expression. Montaigne
talks with shrewdness, knows the world, and books, and himself, and
uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests, or prays; no
weakness, no convulsion, no superlative; does not wish to jump out of
his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or time; but is stout
and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes pain, because it makes
him feel himself, and realize things; as we pinch ourselves to know
that we are awake. He keeps the plain; he rarely mounts or sinks; likes
to feel solid ground, and the stones underneath. His writing has no
enthusiasms, no aspiration; contented, self-respecting, and keeping
the middle of the road. There is but one exception,--in his love for
Socrates. In speaking of him, for once his cheek flushes, and his style
rises to passion.
Montaigne died of a quinsy, at the age of sixty, in 1592. When he came
to die, he caused the mass to be celebrated in his chamber. At the age
of thirty-three, he had been married. "But," he says, "might I have
had my own will, I would not have married Wisdom herself, if she would
have had me; but 'tis to much purpose to evade it, the common custom
and use of life will have it so. Most of my actions are guided by
example, not choice. " In the hour of death he gave the same weight to
custom. _Que sais-je? _ What do I know.
This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed, by translating it into
all tongues, and printing seventy-five editions of it in Europe; and
that, too, a circulation somewhat chosen, namely, among courtiers,
soldiers, princes, men of the world, and men of wit and generosity.
Shall we say that Montaigne has spoken wisely, and given the right and
permanent expression of the human mind, on the conduct of life?
We are natural believers. Truth, or the connection between cause and
effect, alone interests us. We are persuaded that a thread runs through
all things; all worlds are strung on it, as beads; and men, and events,
and life, come to us, only because of that thread; they pass and repass,
only that we may know the direction and continuity of that line. A
book or statement which goes to show that there is no line, but random
and chaos, a calamity out of nothing, a prosperity and no account of
it, a hero born from a fool, a fool from a hero,--dispirits us. Seen
or unseen, we believe the tie exists. Talent makes counterfeit ties;
genius finds the real ones. We hearken to the man of science, because
we anticipate the sequence in natural phenomena which he uncovers. We
love whatever affirms, connects, preserves; and dislike what scatters
or pulls down. One man appears whose nature is to all men's eyes
conserving and constructive; his presence supposes a well-ordered
society, agriculture, trade, large institutions, and empire. If these
did not exist, they would begin to exist through his endeavors.
Therefore, he cheers and comforts men, who feel all this in him very
readily. The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable
things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no
plan of house or state of their own. Therefore, though the town, and
state, and way of living, which our counselor contemplated, might be
a very modest or musty prosperity, yet men rightly go for him, and
reject the reformer, so long as he comes only with axe and crowbar.
But though we are natural conservers and causationists, and reject a
sour, dumpish unbelief, the skeptical class, which Montaigne represents,
have reason, and every man, at some time, belongs to it. Every superior
mind will pass through this domain of equilibration,--I should rather
say, will know how to avail himself of the checks and balances in
nature, as a natural weapon against the exaggeration and formalism of
bigots and blockheads.
Skepticism is the attitude assumed by the student in relation to the
particulars which society adores, but which he sees to be reverent
only in their tendency and spirit. The ground occupied by the skeptic
is the vestibule of the temple. Society does not like to have any
breath of question blown on the existing order. But the interrogation
of custom at all points is an inevitable stage in the growth of every
superior mind, and is the evidence of its perception of the flowing
power which remains itself in all changes.
The superior mind will find itself equally at odds with the evils of
society, and with the projects that are offered to relieve them. The
wise skeptic is a bad citizen; no conservative; he sees the selfishness
of property, and the drowsiness of institutions. But neither is he fit
to work with any democratic party that ever was constituted; for parties
wish every one committed, and he penetrates the popular patriotism.
His politics are those of the "Soul's Errand" of Sir Walter Raleigh;
or of Krishna, in the Bhagavat, "There is none who is worthy of my
love or hatred;" while he sentences law, physic, divinity, commerce,
and custom. He is a reformer: yet he is no better member of the
philanthropic association. It turns out that he is not the champion
of the operative, the pauper, the prisoner, the slave. It stands in
his mind, that our life in this world is not of quite so easy
interpretation as churches and school-books say. He does not wish to
take ground against these benevolences, to play the part of devil's
attorney, and blazon every doubt and sneer that darkens the sun for
him. But he says, There are doubts.
I mean to use the occasion, and celebrate the calendar-day of our Saint
Michel de Montaigne, by counting and describing these doubts or
negations. I wish to ferret them out of their holes, and sun them a
little. We must do with them as the police do with old rogues, who are
shown up to the public at the marshal's office. They will never be so
formidable, when once they have been identified and registered. But
I mean honestly by them--that justice shall be done to their terrors.
I shall not take Sunday objections, made up on purpose to be put down.
I shall take the worst I can find, whether I can dispose of them, or
they of me.
I do not press the skepticism of the materialist. I know the quadruped
opinion will not prevail. 'Tis of no importance what bats and oxen
think. The first dangerous symptom I report is, the levity of intellect;
as if it were fatal to earnestness to know much. Knowledge is the
knowing that we cannot know. The dull pray; the geniuses are light
mockers. How respectable is earnestness on every platform! but intellect
kills it. Nay, San Carlo, my subtle and admirable friend, one of the
most penetrating of men, finds that all direct ascension, even of lofty
piety, leads to this ghastly insight, and sends back the votary
orphaned. My astonishing San Carlo thought the lawgivers and saints
infected. They found the ark empty; saw, and would not tell; and tried
to choke off their approaching followers, by saying, "Action, action,
my dear fellows, is for you! " Bad as was to me this detection by San
Carlo, this frost in July, this blow from a brick, there was still a
worse, namely, the cloy or satiety of the saints. In the mount of
vision, ere they have yet risen from their knees, they say, "We discover
that this our homage and beatitude is partial and deformed; we must
fly for relief to the suspected and reviled Intellect, to the
Understanding, the Mephistopheles, to the gymnastics of latent. "
This is hobgoblin the first; and, though it has been the subject of
much elegy, in our nineteenth century, from Byron, Goethe, and other
poets of less fame, not to mention many distinguished private
observers,--I confess it is not very affecting to my imagination; for
it seems to concern the shattering of baby-houses and crockery-shops.
What flutters the church of Rome, or of England, or of Geneva, or of
Boston, may yet be very far from touching any principle of faith. I
think that the intellect and moral sentiment are unanimous; and that,
though philosophy extirpates bugbears, yet it supplies the natural
checks of vice, and polarity to the soul. I think that the wiser a man
is, the more stupendous he finds the natural and moral economy, and
lifts himself to a more absolute reliance.
There is the power of moods, each setting at nought all but its own
tissue of facts and beliefs. There is the power of complexions,
obviously modifying the dispositions and sentiments. The beliefs and
unbeliefs appear to be structural; and, as soon as each man attains
the poise and vivacity which allow the whole machinery to play, he
will not need extreme examples, but will rapidly alternate all opinions
in his own life. Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one
hour. We go forth austere, dedicated, believing in the iron links of
Destiny, and will not turn on our heel to save our life; but a book,
or a bust, or only the sound of a name, shoots a spark through the
nerves, and we suddenly believe in will: my finger-ring shall be the
seal of Solomon: fate is for imbeciles: all is possible to the resolved
mind. Presently, a new experience gives a new turn to our thoughts:
common sense resumes its tyranny: we say, "Well, the army, after all,
is the gate to fame, manners, and poetry: and, look you,--on the whole,
selfishness plants best, prunes best, makes the best commerce, and the
best citizen. " Are the opinions of a man on right and wrong, on fate
and causation, at the mercy of a broken sleep or an indigestion? Is
his belief in God and Duty no deeper than a stomach evidence? And what
guaranty for the permanence of his opinions? I like not the French
celerity,--a new church and state once a week. --This is the second
negation; and I shall let it pass for what it will. As far as it asserts
rotation of states of mind, I suppose it suggests its own remedy,
namely, in the record of larger periods. What is the mean of many
states; of all the states? Does the general voice of ages affirm any
principle, or is no community of sentiment discoverable in distant
times and places? And when it shows the power of self-interest, I
accept that as a part of the divine law, and must reconcile it with
aspiration the best I can.
The word Fate, or Destiny, expresses the sense of mankind, in all
ages,--that the laws of the world do not always befriend, but often
hurt and crush us. Fate, in the shape of Kinde or nature, grows over
us like grass. We paint Time with a scythe; Love and Fortune, blind;
and Destiny, deaf. We have too little power of resistance against this
ferocity which champs us up. What front can we make against these
unavoidable, victorious, maleficent forces? What can I do against the
influence of Race, in my history? What can I do against hereditary and
constitutional habits, against scrofula, lymph, impotence? against
climate, against barbarism, in my country? I can reason down or deny
everything, except this perpetual Belly; feed he must and will, and
I cannot make him respectable.
But the main resistance which the affirmative impulse finds, and one
including all others, is in the doctrine of the Illusionists. There
is a painful rumor in circulation, that we have been practiced upon
in all the principal performances of life, and free agency is the
emptiest name. We have been sopped and drugged with the air, with food,
with woman, with children, with sciences, with events which leave us
exactly where they found us. The mathematics, 'tis complained, leave
the mind where they find it: so do all sciences; and so do all events
and actions. I find a man who has passed through all the sciences, the
churl he was; and, through all the offices, learned, civil, and social,
can detect the child. We are not the less necessitated to dedicate
life to them. In fact, we may come to accept it as the fixed rule and
theory of our state of education, that God is a substance, and his
method is illusion. The eastern sages owned the goddess Yoganidra, the
great illusory energy of Vishnu, by whom, as utter ignorance, the whole
world is beguiled.
Or, shall I state it thus? --The astonishment of life, is, the absence
of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and practice
of life. Reason, the prized reality, the Law, is apprehended, now and
then, for a serene and profound moment, amidst the hubbub of cares and
works which have no direct bearing on it;--is then lost, for months
or years, and again found, for an interval, to be lost again. If we
compute it in time, we may, in fifty years, have half a dozen reasonable
hours. But what are these cares and works the better? A method in the
world we do not see, but this parallelism of great and little, which
never react on each other, nor discover the smallest tendency to
converge. Experiences, fortunes, governings, readings, writings are
nothing to the purpose; as when a man comes into the room, it does not
appear whether he has been fed on yams or buffalo,--he has contrived
to get so much bone and fibre as he wants, out of rice or out of snow.
So vast is the disproportion between the sky of law and the pismire
of performance under it, that, whether he is a man of worth or a sot,
is not so great a matter as we say. Shall I add, as one juggle of this
enchantment, the stunning non-intercourse law which makes cooperation
impossible? The young spirit pants to enter society. But all the ways
of culture and greatness lead to solitary imprisonment. He has been
often baulked. He did not expect a sympathy with his thought from the
village, but he went with it to the chosen and intelligent, and found
no entertainment for it, but mere misapprehension, distaste, and
scoffing. Men are strangely mistimed and misapplied; and the excellence
of each is an inflamed individualism which separates him more.
There are these, and more than these diseases of thought, which our
ordinary teachers do not attempt to remove. Now shall we, because a
good nature inclines us to virtue's side, say, There are no doubts,--and
lie for the right? Is life to be led in a brave or in a cowardly manner?
and is not the satisfaction of the doubts essential to all manliness?
Is the name of virtue to be a barrier to that which is virtue? Can you
not believe that a man of earnest and burly habit may find small good
in tea, essays, and catechism, and want a rougher instruction, want
men, labor, trade, farming, war, hunger, plenty, love, hatred, doubt,
and terror, to make things plain to him; and has he not a right to
insist on being convinced in his own way? When he is convinced, he
will be worth the pains.
Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief
in denying them. Some minds are incapable of skepticism. The doubts
they profess to entertain are rather a civility or accommodation to
the common discourse of their company. They may well give themselves
leave to speculate, for they are secure of a return. Once admitted to
the heaven of thought, they see no relapse into night, but infinite
invitation on the other side. Heaven is within heaven, and sky over
sky, and they are encompassed with divinities. Others there are, to
whom the heaven is brass, and it shuts down to the surface of the
earth. It is a question of temperament, or of more or less immersion
in nature. The last class must needs have a reflex or parasite faith;
not a sight of realities, but an instinctive reliance on the seers and
believers of realities. The manners and thoughts of believers astonish
them, and convince them that these have seen something which is hid
from themselves. But their sensual habit would fix the believer to his
last position, whilst he as inevitably advances; and presently the
unbeliever, for love of belief, burns the believer.
Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic,
atheistic, and really men of no account. The spiritualist finds himself
driven to express his faith by a series of skepticisms. Charitable
souls come with their projects, and ask his cooperation. How can he
hesitate? It is the rule of mere comity and courtesy to agree where
you can, and to turn your sentence with something auspicious, and not
freezing and sinister. But he is forced to say, "O, these things will
be as they must be: what can you do? These particular griefs and crimes
are the foliage and fruit of such trees as we see growing. It is vain
to complain of the leaf or the berry: cut it off; it will bear another
just as bad. You must begin your cure lower down. " The generosities
of the day prove an intractable element for him. The people's questions
are not his; their methods are not his; and, against all the dictates
of good nature, he is driven to say, he has no pleasure in them.
Even the doctrines dear to the hope of man, of the divine Providence,
and of the immortality of the soul, his neighbors cannot put the
statement so that he shall affirm it. But he denies out of more faith,
and not less. He denies out of honesty. He had rather stand charged
with the imbecility of skepticism, than with untruth. I believe, he
says, in the moral design of the universe; it exists hospitably for
the weal of the souls; but your dogmas seem to me caricatures; why
should I make believe them? Will any say, this is cold and infidel?
The wise and magnanimous will not say so. They will exult in his
far-sighted good-will, that can abandon to the adversary all the ground
of tradition and common belief, without losing a jot of strength. It
sees to the end of all transgression. George Fox saw "that there was
an ocean of darkness and death; but withal, an infinite ocean of light
and love which flowed over that of darkness. "
The final solution in which skepticism is lost is in the moral
sentiment, which never forfeits its supremacy. All moods may be safely
tried, and their weight allowed to all objections: the moral sentiment
as easily outweighs them all, as any one. This is the drop which
balances the sea. I play with the miscellany of facts, and take those
superficial views which we call skepticism; but I know that they will
presently appear to me in that order which makes skepticism impossible.
A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of the universe,
that the masses of nature do undulate and flow.
This faith avails to the whole emergency of life and objects. The world
is saturated with deity and with law. He is content with just and
unjust, with sots and fools, with the triumph of folly and fraud. He
can behold with serenity the yawning gulf between the ambition of man
and his power of performance, between the demand and supply of power,
which makes the tragedy of all souls.
Charles Fourier announced that "the attractions of man are proportioned
to his destinies;" in other words, that every desire predicts its own
satisfaction. Yet, all experience exhibits the reverse of this; the
incompetency of power is the universal grief of young and ardent minds.
They accuse the divine Providence of a certain parsimony. It has shown
the heaven and earth to every child, and filled him with a desire for
the whole; a desire raging, infinite; a hunger, as of space to be
filled with planets; a cry of famine, as of devils for souls. Then for
the satisfaction,--to each man is administered a single drop, a bead
of dew of vital power per day,--a cup as large as space, and one drop
of the water of life in it. Each man woke in the morning, with an
appetite that could eat the solar system like a cake; a spirit for
action and passion without bounds; he could lay his hand on the morning
star; he could try conclusions with gravitation or chemistry; but, on
the first motion to prove his strength--hands, feet, senses, gave way,
and would not serve him. He was an emperor deserted by his states, and
left to whistle by himself, or thrust into a mob of emperors, all
whistling: and still the sirens sang, "The attractions are proportioned
to the destinies. " In every house, in the heart of each maiden, and
of each boy, in the soul of the soaring saint, this chasm is found,--
between the largest promise of ideal power, and the shabby experience.
The expansive nature of truth comes to our succor, elastic, not to be
surrounded. Man helps himself by larger generalizations. The lesson
of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and
the centuries say against the hours; to resist the usurpation of
particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense. Things seem to say
one thing, and say the reverse. The appearance is immoral; the result
is moral. Things seem to tend downward, to justify despondency, to
promote rogues, to defeat the just; and, by knaves, as by martyrs, the
just cause is carried forward. Although knaves win in every political
struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands
of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals,
as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization
is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered. We
see, now, events forced on, which seem to retard or retrograde the
civility of ages. But the world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms
and waves cannot drown him. He snaps his finger at laws; and so,
throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through
the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and
atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.
Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting;
let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to
reverence, without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here,
not to work, but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under
abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the
Eternal cause. --
"If my bark sink, 'tis to another sea. "
V. SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET.
Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by
originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving,
like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and
making bricks and building the house, no great men are original. Nor
does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero
is in the press of knights, and the thick of events; and, seeing what
men want, and sharing their desire, he adds the needful length of sight
and of arm, to come at the desired point. The greatest genius is the
most indebted man. A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes
uppermost, and, because he says everything, saying, at last, something
good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is nothing
whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest,
freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with the most
determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.
The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not have
any individual great, except through the general. There is no choice
to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning, and say,
"I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic continent:
to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and find a new
food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a new
mechanic power;" no, but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts
and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his
contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and
their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. The
church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out the
advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by her
chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him by
trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two
counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of
production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad.
Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in
his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he
wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the
shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him
thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the
hills, filled the hollows, and bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets,
artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into their
labors. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out of
the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do for
himself: his powers would be expended in the first preparations. Great
genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at
all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and
suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.
Shakspeare's youth fell in a time when the English people were
importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily
at political allusions, and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans,
a growing and energetic party, and the religious among the Anglican
church, would suppress them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards,
houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs,
were the ready theatres of strolling players. The people had tasted
this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress newspapers now,--no,
not by the strongest party,--neither then could king, prelate, or
puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ, which was ballad, epic,
newspaper, caucus, lecture, punch, and library, at the same time.
Probably king, prelate and puritan, all found their own account in it.
It had become, by all causes, a national interest,--by no means
conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of treating
it in an English history,--but not a whit less considerable, because
it was cheap, and of no account, like a baker's-shop. The best proof
of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this
field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene, Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood,
Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont, and Fletcher.
The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the
first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in
idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the
case of Shakespeare there is much more. At the time when he left
Stratford, and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays, of
all dates and writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn produced
on the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy, which the audience will bear
hearing some part of every week; the Death of Julius Caesar, and other
stories out of Plutarch, which they never tire of; a shelf full of
English history, from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur, down to the
royal Henries, which men hear eagerly; and a string of doleful
tragedies, merry Italian tales, and Spanish voyages, which all the
London 'prentices know. All the mass has been treated, with more or
less skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has the soiled and
tattered manuscripts. It is now no longer possible to say who wrote
them first. They have been the property of the Theatre so long, and
so many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered them, inserting a
speech, or a whole scene, or adding a song, that no man can any longer
claim copyright on this work of numbers. Happily, no man wishes to.
They are not yet desired in that way. We have few readers, many
spectators and hearers. They had best lie where they are.
Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old
plays, waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had
the _prestige_ which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing
could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living England
circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he
wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a ground in
popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain
his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies
a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to
his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities
of his imagination. In short, the poet owes to his legend what sculpture
owed to the temple. Sculpture in Egypt, and in Greece, grew up in
subordination to architecture. It was the ornament of the temple wall:
at first, a rude relief carved on pediments, then the relief became
bolder, and a head or arm was projected from the wall, the groups being
still arrayed with reference to the building, which serves also as a
frame to hold the figures; and when, at last, the greatest freedom of
style and treatment was reached, the prevailing genius of architecture
still enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As
soon as the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the
temple or palace, the art began to decline: freak, extravagance, and
exhibition, took the place of the old temperance. This balance-wheel,
which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irritability
of poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which
the people were already wonted, and which had a certain excellence
which no single genius, however extraordinary, could hope to create.
In point of fact, it appears that Shakspeare did owe debts in all
directions, and was able to use whatever he found; and the amount of
indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's laborious computations in
regard to the First, Second, and Third parts of Henry VI. , in which,
"out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding
Shakspeare; 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors;
and 1899 were entirely his own. " And the preceding investigation hardly
leaves a single drama of his absolute invention. Malone's sentence is
an important piece of external history. In Henry VIII. , I think I see
plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his own finer
stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior, thoughtful
man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know well their
cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy, and the following scene with Cromwell,
where,--instead of the metre of Shakspeare, whose secret is, that the
thought constructs the tune, so that reading for the sense will best
bring out the rhythm,--here the lines are constructed on a given tune,
and the verse has even a trace of pulpit eloquence. But the play
contains, through all its length, unmistakable traits of Shakspeare's
hand, and some passages, as the account of the coronation, are like
autographs. What is odd, the compliment to Queen Elizabeth is in the
bad rhythm.
Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable that any
invention can.
hence. Life's well enough; but we shall be glad to get out of it, and
they will all be glad to have us. Why should we fret and drudge? Our
meat will taste to-morrow as it did yesterday, and we may at last have
had enough of it. "Ah," said my languid gentleman at Oxford, "there's
nothing new or true,--and no matter. "
With a little more bitterness, the cynic moans: our life is like an
ass led to market by a bundle of hay being carried before him: he sees
nothing but the bundle of hay. "There is so much trouble in coming
into the world," said Lord Bolingbroke, "and so much more, as well as
meanness, in going out of it, that 'tis hardly worth while to be here
at all. " I knew a philosopher of this kidney, who was accustomed briefly
to sum up his experience of human nature in saying, "Mankind is a
damned rascal:" and the natural corollary is pretty sure to
follow,--"The world lives by humbug, and so will I. "
The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each
other, and the scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there
arises a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two,
the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by being in extremes. He
labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance. He will not
go beyond his card. He sees the one-sidedness of these men of the
street; he will not be a Gibeonite; he stands for the intellectual
faculties, a cool head, and whatever serves to keep it cool; no
unadvised industry, no unrewarded self-devotion, no loss of the brains
in toil. Am I an ox, or a dray? --You are both in extremes, he says.
You that will have all solid, and a world of pig-lead, deceive
yourselves grossly. You believe yourselves rooted and grounded on
adamant; and, yet, if we uncover the last facts of our knowledge, you
are spinning like bubbles in a river, you know not whither or whence,
and you are bottomed and capped and wrapped in delusions.
Neither will he be betrayed to a book, and wrapped in a gown. The
studious class are their own victims; they are thin and pale, their
feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the
day a fear of interruption,--pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism. If
you come near them, and see what conceits they entertain,--they are
abstractionists, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some
dreams; in expecting the homage of society to some precious scheme
built on a truth, but destitute of proportion in its presentment, of
justness in its application, and of all energy of will in the schemer
to embody and vitalize it.
But I see plainly, he says, that I cannot see. I know that human
strength is not in extremes, but in avoiding extremes. I, at least,
will shun the weakness of philosophizing beyond my depth. What is the
use of pretending to powers we have not? What is the use of pretending
to assurances we have not, respecting the other life? Why exaggerate
the power of virtue? Why be an angel before your time? These strings,
wound up too high, will snap. If there is a wish for immortality, and
no evidence, why not say just that? If there are conflicting evidences,
why not state them? If there is not ground for a candid thinker to
make up his mind, yea or nay,--why not suspend the judgment? I weary
of these dogmatizers. I tire of these hacks of routine, who deny the
dogmas. I neither affirm nor deny. I stand here to try the case. I am
here to consider,--to consider how it is. I will try to keep the balance
true. Of what use to take the chair, and glibly rattle off theories
of societies, religion, and nature, when I know that practical
objections lie in the way, insurmountable by me and by my mates? Why
so talkative in public, when each of my neighbors can pin me to my
seat by arguments I cannot refute? Why pretend that life is so simple
a game, when we know how subtle and elusive the Proteus is? Why think
to shut up all things in your narrow coop, when we know there are not
one or two only, but ten, twenty, a thousand things, and unlike? Why
fancy that you have all the truth in your keeping? There is much to
say on all sides.
Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical
question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be
had? Is not marriage an open question when it is alleged, from the
beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to
get out, and such as are out wish to get in? And the reply of Socrates,
to him who asked whether he should choose a wife, still remains
reasonable, "that, whether he should choose one or not, he would repent
it. " Is not the state a question? All society is divided in opinion
on the subject of the state. Nobody loves it; great numbers dislike
it, and suffer conscientious scruples to allegiance: and the only
defense set up, is, the fear of doing worse in disorganizing. Is it
otherwise with the church? Or, to put any of the questions which touch
mankind nearest,--shall the young man aim at a leading part in law,
in politics, in trade? It will not be pretended that a success in
either of these kinds is quite coincident with what is best and inmost
in his mind. Shall he, then, cutting the stays that hold him fast to
the social state, put out to sea with no guidance but his genius? There
is much to say on both sides. Remember the open question between the
present order of "competition," and the friends of "attractive and
associated labor. " The generous minds embrace the proposition of labor
shared by all; it is the only honesty; nothing else is safe. It is
from the poor man's hut alone, that strength and virtue come; and yet,
on the other side, it is alleged that labor impairs the form, and
breaks the spirit of man, and the laborers cry unanimously, "We have
no thoughts. " Culture, how indispensable! I cannot forgive you the
want of accomplishment; and yet, culture will instantly destroy that
chiefest beauty of spontaneousness. Excellent is culture for a savage;
but once let him read in the book, and he is no longer able not to
think of Plutarch's heroes. In short, since true fortitude of
understanding consists "in not letting what we know be embarrassed by
what we do not know," we ought to secure those advantages which we can
command, and not risk them by clutching after the airy and unattainable.
Come, no chimeras! Let us go abroad; let us mix in affairs; let us
learn, and get, and have, and climb. "Men are a sort of moving plants,
and, like trees, receive a great part of their nourishment from the
air. If they keep too much at home, they pine. " Let us have a robust,
manly life; let us know what we know, for certain; what we have, let
it be solid, and seasonable, and our own. A world in the hand is worth
two in the bush. Let us have to do with real men and women, and not
with skipping ghosts.
This, then, is the right ground of the skeptic,--this of consideration,
of self-containing; not at all of unbelief; not at all of universal
denying, nor of universal doubting,--doubting even that he doubts;
least of all, of scoffing and profligate jeering at all that is stable
and good. These are no more his moods than are those of religion and
philosophy. He is the considerer, the prudent, taking in sail, counting
stock, husbanding his means, believing that a man has too many enemies,
than that he can afford to be his own; that we cannot give ourselves
too many advantages, in this unequal conflict, with powers so vast and
unweariable ranged on one side, and this little, conceited, vulnerable
popinjay that a man is, bobbing up and down into every danger, on the
other. It is a position taken up for better defense, as of more safety,
and one that can be maintained; and it is one of more opportunity and
range; as, when we build a house, the rule is, to set it not too high
nor too low, under the wind, but out of the dirt.
The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mobility. The Spartan
and Stoic schemes are too stark and stiff for our occasion. A theory
of Saint John, and of non-resistance, seems, on the other hand, too
thin and aerial. We want some coat woven of elastic steel, stout as
the first, and limber as the second. We want a ship in these billows
we inhabit. An angular, dogmatic house would be rent to chips and
splinters, in this storm of many elements. No, it must be tight, and
fit to the form of man, to live at all; as a shell is the architecture
of a house founded on the sea. The soul of man must be the type of our
scheme, just as the body of man is the type after which a dwelling-house
is built. Adaptiveness is the peculiarity of human nature. We are
golden averages, volitant stabilities, compensated or periodic errors,
houses founded on the sea. The wise skeptic wishes to have a near view
of the best game, and the chief players; what is best in the planet;
art and nature, places and events, but mainly men. Everything that is
excellent in mankind,--a form of grace, an arm of iron, lips of
persuasion, a brain of resources, every one skilful to play and win,--he
will see and judge.
The terms of admission to this spectacle are, that he have a certain
solid and intelligible way of living of his own; some method of
answering the inevitable needs of human life; proof that he has played
with skill and success; that he has evinced the temper, stoutness, and
the range of qualities which, among his contemporaries and countrymen,
entitle him to fellowship and trust. For, the secrets of life are not
shown except to sympathy and likeness. Men do not confide themselves
to boys, or coxcombs, or pedants, but to their peers. Some wise
limitation, as the modern phrase is; some condition between the
extremes, and having itself a positive quality; some stark and
sufficient man, who is not salt or sugar, but sufficiently related to
the world to do justice to Paris or London, and, at the same time, a
vigorous and original thinker, whom cities cannot overawe, but who
uses them,--is the fit person to occupy this ground of speculation.
These qualities meet in the character of Montaigne. And yet, since the
personal regard which I entertain for Montaigne may be unduly great,
I will, under the shield of this prince of egotists, offer, as an
apology for electing him as the representative of skepticism, a word
or two to explain how my love began and grew for this admirable gossip.
A single odd volume of Cotton's translation of the Essays remained to
me from my father's library, when a boy. It lay long neglected, until,
after many years, when I was newly escaped from college, I read the
book, and procured the remaining volumes. I remember the delight and
wonder in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I had myself
written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my
thought and experience. It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in
the cemetery of Pere le Chaise, I came to a tomb of Augustus Collignon,
who died in 1830, aged sixty-eight years, and who, said the monument,
"lived to do right, and had formed himself to virtue on the Essays of
Montaigne. " Some years later, I became acquainted with an accomplished
English poet, John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my correspondence,
I found that, from a love of Montaigne, he had made a pilgrimage to
his chateau, still standing near Castellan, in Perigord, and, after
two hundred and fifty years, had copied from the walls of his library
the inscriptions which Montaigne had written there. That Journal of
Mr. Sterling's, published in the Westminster Review, Mr. Hazlitt has
reprinted in the Prolegomenae to his edition of the Essays. I heard
with pleasure that one of the newly-discovered autographs of William
Shakspeare was in a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne. It is
the only book which we certainly know to have been in the poet's
library. And, oddly enough, the duplicate copy of Florio, which the
British Museum purchased, with a view of protecting the Shakspeare
autograph (as I was informed in the Museum), turned out to have the
autograph of Ben Jonson in the fly-leaf. Leigh Hunt relates of Lord
Byron, that Montaigne was the only great writer of past times whom he
read with avowed satisfaction. Other coincidences, not needful to be
mentioned here, concurred to make this old Gascon still new and immortal
for me.
In 1571, on the death of his father, Montaigne, then thirty-eight years
old, retired from the practice of law, at Bordeaux, and settled himself
on his estate. Though he had been a man of pleasure, and sometimes a
courtier, his studious habits now grew on him, and he loved the compass,
staidness, and independence of the country gentleman's life. He took
up his economy in good earnest, and made his farms yield the most.
Downright and plain-dealing, and abhorring to be deceived or to
deceive, he was esteemed in the country for his sense and probity. In
the civil wars of the League, which converted every house into a fort,
Montaigne kept his gates open, and his house without defense. All
parties freely came and went, his courage and honor being universally
esteemed. The neighboring lords and gentry brought jewels and papers
to him for safekeeping. Gibbon reckons, in these bigoted times, but
two men of liberality in France,--Henry IV. and Montaigne.
Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers. His French
freedom runs into grossness; but he has anticipated all censures by
the bounty of his own confessions. In his times, books were written
to one sex only, and almost all were written in Latin; so that, in a
humorist, a certain nakedness of statement was permitted, which our
manners, of a literature addressed equally to both sexes, do not allow.
But, though a biblical plainness, coupled with a most uncanonical
levity, may shut his pages to many sensitive readers, yet the offence
is superficial. He parades it: he makes the most of it; nobody can
think or say worse of him than he does. He pretends to most of the
vices; and, if there be any virtue in him, he says, it got in by
stealth. There is no man, in his opinion, who has not deserved hanging
five or six times; and he pretends no exception in his own behalf.
"Five or six as ridiculous stories," too, he says, "can be told of me,
as of any man living. " But, with all this really superfluous frankness,
the opinion of an invincible probity grows into every reader's mind.
"When I the most strictly and religiously confess myself, I find that
the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice; and I am afraid
that Plato, in his purest virtue (I, who am as sincere and perfect a
lover of virtue of that stamp as any other whatever), if he had
listened, and laid his ear close to himself, would have heard some
jarring sound of human mixture; but faint and remote, and only to be
perceived by himself. "
Here is an impatience and fastidiousness at color or pretense of any
kind. He has been in courts so long as to have conceived a furious
disgust at appearances; he will indulge himself with a little cursing
and swearing; he will talk with sailors and gypsies, use flash and
street ballads; he has stayed indoors till he is deadly sick; he will
to the open air, though it rain bullets. He has seen too much of
gentlemen of the long robe, until he wishes for cannibals; and is so
nervous, by factitious life, that he thinks, the more barbarous man
is, the better he is. He likes his saddle. You may read theology, and
grammar, and metaphysics elsewhere. Whatever you get here, shall smack
of the earth and of real life, sweet, or smart, or stinging. He makes
no hesitation to entertain you with the records of his disease; and
his journey to Italy is quite full of that matter. He took and kept
this position of equilibrium. Over his name, he drew an emblematic
pair of scales, and wrote, _Que sais-je? _ under it. As I look at
his effigy opposite the title-page, I seem to hear him say, "You may
play old Poz, if you will; you may rail and exaggerate,--I stand here
for truth, and will not, for all the states, and churches, and revenues,
and personal reputations of Europe, overstate the dry fact, as I see
it; I will rather mumble and prose about what I certainly know,--my
house and barns; my father, my wife, and my tenants; my old lean bald
pate; my knives and forks; what meats I eat, and what drinks I prefer;
and a hundred straws just as ridiculous,--than I will write, with a
fine crow-quill, a fine romance. I like gray days, and autumn and
winter weather. I am gray and autumnal myself, and think an undress,
and old shoes that do not pinch my feet, and old friends who do not
constrain me, and plain topics where I do not need to strain myself
and pump my brains, the most suitable. Our condition as men is risky
and ticklish enough. One cannot be sure of himself and his fortune an
hour, but he may be whisked off into some pitiable or ridiculous plight.
Why should I vapor and play the philosopher, instead of ballasting,
the best I can, this dancing balloon? So, at least, I live within
compass, keep myself ready for action, and can shoot the gulf, at last,
with decency. If there be anything farcical in such a life, the blame
is not mine; let it lie at fate's and nature's door. "
The Essays, therefore, are an entertaining soliloquy on every random
topic that comes into his head; treating everything without ceremony,
yet with masculine sense. There have been men with deeper insight;
but, one would say, never a man with such abundance of thoughts; he
is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader
care for all that he cares for.
The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know
not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of
conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would
bleed; they are vascular and alive. One has the same pleasure in it
that we have in listening to the necessary speech of men about their
work, when any unusual circumstance give momentary importance to the
dialogue. For blacksmiths and teamsters do not trip in their speech;
it is a shower of bullets. It is Cambridge men who correct themselves,
and begin again at every half-sentence, and, moreover, will pun, and
refine too much, and swerve from the matter to the expression. Montaigne
talks with shrewdness, knows the world, and books, and himself, and
uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests, or prays; no
weakness, no convulsion, no superlative; does not wish to jump out of
his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or time; but is stout
and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes pain, because it makes
him feel himself, and realize things; as we pinch ourselves to know
that we are awake. He keeps the plain; he rarely mounts or sinks; likes
to feel solid ground, and the stones underneath. His writing has no
enthusiasms, no aspiration; contented, self-respecting, and keeping
the middle of the road. There is but one exception,--in his love for
Socrates. In speaking of him, for once his cheek flushes, and his style
rises to passion.
Montaigne died of a quinsy, at the age of sixty, in 1592. When he came
to die, he caused the mass to be celebrated in his chamber. At the age
of thirty-three, he had been married. "But," he says, "might I have
had my own will, I would not have married Wisdom herself, if she would
have had me; but 'tis to much purpose to evade it, the common custom
and use of life will have it so. Most of my actions are guided by
example, not choice. " In the hour of death he gave the same weight to
custom. _Que sais-je? _ What do I know.
This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed, by translating it into
all tongues, and printing seventy-five editions of it in Europe; and
that, too, a circulation somewhat chosen, namely, among courtiers,
soldiers, princes, men of the world, and men of wit and generosity.
Shall we say that Montaigne has spoken wisely, and given the right and
permanent expression of the human mind, on the conduct of life?
We are natural believers. Truth, or the connection between cause and
effect, alone interests us. We are persuaded that a thread runs through
all things; all worlds are strung on it, as beads; and men, and events,
and life, come to us, only because of that thread; they pass and repass,
only that we may know the direction and continuity of that line. A
book or statement which goes to show that there is no line, but random
and chaos, a calamity out of nothing, a prosperity and no account of
it, a hero born from a fool, a fool from a hero,--dispirits us. Seen
or unseen, we believe the tie exists. Talent makes counterfeit ties;
genius finds the real ones. We hearken to the man of science, because
we anticipate the sequence in natural phenomena which he uncovers. We
love whatever affirms, connects, preserves; and dislike what scatters
or pulls down. One man appears whose nature is to all men's eyes
conserving and constructive; his presence supposes a well-ordered
society, agriculture, trade, large institutions, and empire. If these
did not exist, they would begin to exist through his endeavors.
Therefore, he cheers and comforts men, who feel all this in him very
readily. The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable
things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no
plan of house or state of their own. Therefore, though the town, and
state, and way of living, which our counselor contemplated, might be
a very modest or musty prosperity, yet men rightly go for him, and
reject the reformer, so long as he comes only with axe and crowbar.
But though we are natural conservers and causationists, and reject a
sour, dumpish unbelief, the skeptical class, which Montaigne represents,
have reason, and every man, at some time, belongs to it. Every superior
mind will pass through this domain of equilibration,--I should rather
say, will know how to avail himself of the checks and balances in
nature, as a natural weapon against the exaggeration and formalism of
bigots and blockheads.
Skepticism is the attitude assumed by the student in relation to the
particulars which society adores, but which he sees to be reverent
only in their tendency and spirit. The ground occupied by the skeptic
is the vestibule of the temple. Society does not like to have any
breath of question blown on the existing order. But the interrogation
of custom at all points is an inevitable stage in the growth of every
superior mind, and is the evidence of its perception of the flowing
power which remains itself in all changes.
The superior mind will find itself equally at odds with the evils of
society, and with the projects that are offered to relieve them. The
wise skeptic is a bad citizen; no conservative; he sees the selfishness
of property, and the drowsiness of institutions. But neither is he fit
to work with any democratic party that ever was constituted; for parties
wish every one committed, and he penetrates the popular patriotism.
His politics are those of the "Soul's Errand" of Sir Walter Raleigh;
or of Krishna, in the Bhagavat, "There is none who is worthy of my
love or hatred;" while he sentences law, physic, divinity, commerce,
and custom. He is a reformer: yet he is no better member of the
philanthropic association. It turns out that he is not the champion
of the operative, the pauper, the prisoner, the slave. It stands in
his mind, that our life in this world is not of quite so easy
interpretation as churches and school-books say. He does not wish to
take ground against these benevolences, to play the part of devil's
attorney, and blazon every doubt and sneer that darkens the sun for
him. But he says, There are doubts.
I mean to use the occasion, and celebrate the calendar-day of our Saint
Michel de Montaigne, by counting and describing these doubts or
negations. I wish to ferret them out of their holes, and sun them a
little. We must do with them as the police do with old rogues, who are
shown up to the public at the marshal's office. They will never be so
formidable, when once they have been identified and registered. But
I mean honestly by them--that justice shall be done to their terrors.
I shall not take Sunday objections, made up on purpose to be put down.
I shall take the worst I can find, whether I can dispose of them, or
they of me.
I do not press the skepticism of the materialist. I know the quadruped
opinion will not prevail. 'Tis of no importance what bats and oxen
think. The first dangerous symptom I report is, the levity of intellect;
as if it were fatal to earnestness to know much. Knowledge is the
knowing that we cannot know. The dull pray; the geniuses are light
mockers. How respectable is earnestness on every platform! but intellect
kills it. Nay, San Carlo, my subtle and admirable friend, one of the
most penetrating of men, finds that all direct ascension, even of lofty
piety, leads to this ghastly insight, and sends back the votary
orphaned. My astonishing San Carlo thought the lawgivers and saints
infected. They found the ark empty; saw, and would not tell; and tried
to choke off their approaching followers, by saying, "Action, action,
my dear fellows, is for you! " Bad as was to me this detection by San
Carlo, this frost in July, this blow from a brick, there was still a
worse, namely, the cloy or satiety of the saints. In the mount of
vision, ere they have yet risen from their knees, they say, "We discover
that this our homage and beatitude is partial and deformed; we must
fly for relief to the suspected and reviled Intellect, to the
Understanding, the Mephistopheles, to the gymnastics of latent. "
This is hobgoblin the first; and, though it has been the subject of
much elegy, in our nineteenth century, from Byron, Goethe, and other
poets of less fame, not to mention many distinguished private
observers,--I confess it is not very affecting to my imagination; for
it seems to concern the shattering of baby-houses and crockery-shops.
What flutters the church of Rome, or of England, or of Geneva, or of
Boston, may yet be very far from touching any principle of faith. I
think that the intellect and moral sentiment are unanimous; and that,
though philosophy extirpates bugbears, yet it supplies the natural
checks of vice, and polarity to the soul. I think that the wiser a man
is, the more stupendous he finds the natural and moral economy, and
lifts himself to a more absolute reliance.
There is the power of moods, each setting at nought all but its own
tissue of facts and beliefs. There is the power of complexions,
obviously modifying the dispositions and sentiments. The beliefs and
unbeliefs appear to be structural; and, as soon as each man attains
the poise and vivacity which allow the whole machinery to play, he
will not need extreme examples, but will rapidly alternate all opinions
in his own life. Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one
hour. We go forth austere, dedicated, believing in the iron links of
Destiny, and will not turn on our heel to save our life; but a book,
or a bust, or only the sound of a name, shoots a spark through the
nerves, and we suddenly believe in will: my finger-ring shall be the
seal of Solomon: fate is for imbeciles: all is possible to the resolved
mind. Presently, a new experience gives a new turn to our thoughts:
common sense resumes its tyranny: we say, "Well, the army, after all,
is the gate to fame, manners, and poetry: and, look you,--on the whole,
selfishness plants best, prunes best, makes the best commerce, and the
best citizen. " Are the opinions of a man on right and wrong, on fate
and causation, at the mercy of a broken sleep or an indigestion? Is
his belief in God and Duty no deeper than a stomach evidence? And what
guaranty for the permanence of his opinions? I like not the French
celerity,--a new church and state once a week. --This is the second
negation; and I shall let it pass for what it will. As far as it asserts
rotation of states of mind, I suppose it suggests its own remedy,
namely, in the record of larger periods. What is the mean of many
states; of all the states? Does the general voice of ages affirm any
principle, or is no community of sentiment discoverable in distant
times and places? And when it shows the power of self-interest, I
accept that as a part of the divine law, and must reconcile it with
aspiration the best I can.
The word Fate, or Destiny, expresses the sense of mankind, in all
ages,--that the laws of the world do not always befriend, but often
hurt and crush us. Fate, in the shape of Kinde or nature, grows over
us like grass. We paint Time with a scythe; Love and Fortune, blind;
and Destiny, deaf. We have too little power of resistance against this
ferocity which champs us up. What front can we make against these
unavoidable, victorious, maleficent forces? What can I do against the
influence of Race, in my history? What can I do against hereditary and
constitutional habits, against scrofula, lymph, impotence? against
climate, against barbarism, in my country? I can reason down or deny
everything, except this perpetual Belly; feed he must and will, and
I cannot make him respectable.
But the main resistance which the affirmative impulse finds, and one
including all others, is in the doctrine of the Illusionists. There
is a painful rumor in circulation, that we have been practiced upon
in all the principal performances of life, and free agency is the
emptiest name. We have been sopped and drugged with the air, with food,
with woman, with children, with sciences, with events which leave us
exactly where they found us. The mathematics, 'tis complained, leave
the mind where they find it: so do all sciences; and so do all events
and actions. I find a man who has passed through all the sciences, the
churl he was; and, through all the offices, learned, civil, and social,
can detect the child. We are not the less necessitated to dedicate
life to them. In fact, we may come to accept it as the fixed rule and
theory of our state of education, that God is a substance, and his
method is illusion. The eastern sages owned the goddess Yoganidra, the
great illusory energy of Vishnu, by whom, as utter ignorance, the whole
world is beguiled.
Or, shall I state it thus? --The astonishment of life, is, the absence
of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and practice
of life. Reason, the prized reality, the Law, is apprehended, now and
then, for a serene and profound moment, amidst the hubbub of cares and
works which have no direct bearing on it;--is then lost, for months
or years, and again found, for an interval, to be lost again. If we
compute it in time, we may, in fifty years, have half a dozen reasonable
hours. But what are these cares and works the better? A method in the
world we do not see, but this parallelism of great and little, which
never react on each other, nor discover the smallest tendency to
converge. Experiences, fortunes, governings, readings, writings are
nothing to the purpose; as when a man comes into the room, it does not
appear whether he has been fed on yams or buffalo,--he has contrived
to get so much bone and fibre as he wants, out of rice or out of snow.
So vast is the disproportion between the sky of law and the pismire
of performance under it, that, whether he is a man of worth or a sot,
is not so great a matter as we say. Shall I add, as one juggle of this
enchantment, the stunning non-intercourse law which makes cooperation
impossible? The young spirit pants to enter society. But all the ways
of culture and greatness lead to solitary imprisonment. He has been
often baulked. He did not expect a sympathy with his thought from the
village, but he went with it to the chosen and intelligent, and found
no entertainment for it, but mere misapprehension, distaste, and
scoffing. Men are strangely mistimed and misapplied; and the excellence
of each is an inflamed individualism which separates him more.
There are these, and more than these diseases of thought, which our
ordinary teachers do not attempt to remove. Now shall we, because a
good nature inclines us to virtue's side, say, There are no doubts,--and
lie for the right? Is life to be led in a brave or in a cowardly manner?
and is not the satisfaction of the doubts essential to all manliness?
Is the name of virtue to be a barrier to that which is virtue? Can you
not believe that a man of earnest and burly habit may find small good
in tea, essays, and catechism, and want a rougher instruction, want
men, labor, trade, farming, war, hunger, plenty, love, hatred, doubt,
and terror, to make things plain to him; and has he not a right to
insist on being convinced in his own way? When he is convinced, he
will be worth the pains.
Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief
in denying them. Some minds are incapable of skepticism. The doubts
they profess to entertain are rather a civility or accommodation to
the common discourse of their company. They may well give themselves
leave to speculate, for they are secure of a return. Once admitted to
the heaven of thought, they see no relapse into night, but infinite
invitation on the other side. Heaven is within heaven, and sky over
sky, and they are encompassed with divinities. Others there are, to
whom the heaven is brass, and it shuts down to the surface of the
earth. It is a question of temperament, or of more or less immersion
in nature. The last class must needs have a reflex or parasite faith;
not a sight of realities, but an instinctive reliance on the seers and
believers of realities. The manners and thoughts of believers astonish
them, and convince them that these have seen something which is hid
from themselves. But their sensual habit would fix the believer to his
last position, whilst he as inevitably advances; and presently the
unbeliever, for love of belief, burns the believer.
Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic,
atheistic, and really men of no account. The spiritualist finds himself
driven to express his faith by a series of skepticisms. Charitable
souls come with their projects, and ask his cooperation. How can he
hesitate? It is the rule of mere comity and courtesy to agree where
you can, and to turn your sentence with something auspicious, and not
freezing and sinister. But he is forced to say, "O, these things will
be as they must be: what can you do? These particular griefs and crimes
are the foliage and fruit of such trees as we see growing. It is vain
to complain of the leaf or the berry: cut it off; it will bear another
just as bad. You must begin your cure lower down. " The generosities
of the day prove an intractable element for him. The people's questions
are not his; their methods are not his; and, against all the dictates
of good nature, he is driven to say, he has no pleasure in them.
Even the doctrines dear to the hope of man, of the divine Providence,
and of the immortality of the soul, his neighbors cannot put the
statement so that he shall affirm it. But he denies out of more faith,
and not less. He denies out of honesty. He had rather stand charged
with the imbecility of skepticism, than with untruth. I believe, he
says, in the moral design of the universe; it exists hospitably for
the weal of the souls; but your dogmas seem to me caricatures; why
should I make believe them? Will any say, this is cold and infidel?
The wise and magnanimous will not say so. They will exult in his
far-sighted good-will, that can abandon to the adversary all the ground
of tradition and common belief, without losing a jot of strength. It
sees to the end of all transgression. George Fox saw "that there was
an ocean of darkness and death; but withal, an infinite ocean of light
and love which flowed over that of darkness. "
The final solution in which skepticism is lost is in the moral
sentiment, which never forfeits its supremacy. All moods may be safely
tried, and their weight allowed to all objections: the moral sentiment
as easily outweighs them all, as any one. This is the drop which
balances the sea. I play with the miscellany of facts, and take those
superficial views which we call skepticism; but I know that they will
presently appear to me in that order which makes skepticism impossible.
A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of the universe,
that the masses of nature do undulate and flow.
This faith avails to the whole emergency of life and objects. The world
is saturated with deity and with law. He is content with just and
unjust, with sots and fools, with the triumph of folly and fraud. He
can behold with serenity the yawning gulf between the ambition of man
and his power of performance, between the demand and supply of power,
which makes the tragedy of all souls.
Charles Fourier announced that "the attractions of man are proportioned
to his destinies;" in other words, that every desire predicts its own
satisfaction. Yet, all experience exhibits the reverse of this; the
incompetency of power is the universal grief of young and ardent minds.
They accuse the divine Providence of a certain parsimony. It has shown
the heaven and earth to every child, and filled him with a desire for
the whole; a desire raging, infinite; a hunger, as of space to be
filled with planets; a cry of famine, as of devils for souls. Then for
the satisfaction,--to each man is administered a single drop, a bead
of dew of vital power per day,--a cup as large as space, and one drop
of the water of life in it. Each man woke in the morning, with an
appetite that could eat the solar system like a cake; a spirit for
action and passion without bounds; he could lay his hand on the morning
star; he could try conclusions with gravitation or chemistry; but, on
the first motion to prove his strength--hands, feet, senses, gave way,
and would not serve him. He was an emperor deserted by his states, and
left to whistle by himself, or thrust into a mob of emperors, all
whistling: and still the sirens sang, "The attractions are proportioned
to the destinies. " In every house, in the heart of each maiden, and
of each boy, in the soul of the soaring saint, this chasm is found,--
between the largest promise of ideal power, and the shabby experience.
The expansive nature of truth comes to our succor, elastic, not to be
surrounded. Man helps himself by larger generalizations. The lesson
of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and
the centuries say against the hours; to resist the usurpation of
particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense. Things seem to say
one thing, and say the reverse. The appearance is immoral; the result
is moral. Things seem to tend downward, to justify despondency, to
promote rogues, to defeat the just; and, by knaves, as by martyrs, the
just cause is carried forward. Although knaves win in every political
struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands
of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals,
as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization
is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered. We
see, now, events forced on, which seem to retard or retrograde the
civility of ages. But the world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms
and waves cannot drown him. He snaps his finger at laws; and so,
throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through
the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and
atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.
Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting;
let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to
reverence, without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here,
not to work, but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under
abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the
Eternal cause. --
"If my bark sink, 'tis to another sea. "
V. SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET.
Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by
originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving,
like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and
making bricks and building the house, no great men are original. Nor
does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero
is in the press of knights, and the thick of events; and, seeing what
men want, and sharing their desire, he adds the needful length of sight
and of arm, to come at the desired point. The greatest genius is the
most indebted man. A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes
uppermost, and, because he says everything, saying, at last, something
good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is nothing
whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest,
freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with the most
determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.
The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not have
any individual great, except through the general. There is no choice
to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning, and say,
"I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic continent:
to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and find a new
food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a new
mechanic power;" no, but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts
and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his
contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and
their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. The
church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out the
advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by her
chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him by
trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two
counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of
production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad.
Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in
his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he
wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the
shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him
thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the
hills, filled the hollows, and bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets,
artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into their
labors. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out of
the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do for
himself: his powers would be expended in the first preparations. Great
genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at
all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and
suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.
Shakspeare's youth fell in a time when the English people were
importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily
at political allusions, and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans,
a growing and energetic party, and the religious among the Anglican
church, would suppress them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards,
houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs,
were the ready theatres of strolling players. The people had tasted
this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress newspapers now,--no,
not by the strongest party,--neither then could king, prelate, or
puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ, which was ballad, epic,
newspaper, caucus, lecture, punch, and library, at the same time.
Probably king, prelate and puritan, all found their own account in it.
It had become, by all causes, a national interest,--by no means
conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of treating
it in an English history,--but not a whit less considerable, because
it was cheap, and of no account, like a baker's-shop. The best proof
of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this
field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene, Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood,
Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont, and Fletcher.
The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the
first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in
idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the
case of Shakespeare there is much more. At the time when he left
Stratford, and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays, of
all dates and writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn produced
on the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy, which the audience will bear
hearing some part of every week; the Death of Julius Caesar, and other
stories out of Plutarch, which they never tire of; a shelf full of
English history, from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur, down to the
royal Henries, which men hear eagerly; and a string of doleful
tragedies, merry Italian tales, and Spanish voyages, which all the
London 'prentices know. All the mass has been treated, with more or
less skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has the soiled and
tattered manuscripts. It is now no longer possible to say who wrote
them first. They have been the property of the Theatre so long, and
so many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered them, inserting a
speech, or a whole scene, or adding a song, that no man can any longer
claim copyright on this work of numbers. Happily, no man wishes to.
They are not yet desired in that way. We have few readers, many
spectators and hearers. They had best lie where they are.
Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old
plays, waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had
the _prestige_ which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing
could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living England
circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he
wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a ground in
popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain
his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies
a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to
his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities
of his imagination. In short, the poet owes to his legend what sculpture
owed to the temple. Sculpture in Egypt, and in Greece, grew up in
subordination to architecture. It was the ornament of the temple wall:
at first, a rude relief carved on pediments, then the relief became
bolder, and a head or arm was projected from the wall, the groups being
still arrayed with reference to the building, which serves also as a
frame to hold the figures; and when, at last, the greatest freedom of
style and treatment was reached, the prevailing genius of architecture
still enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As
soon as the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the
temple or palace, the art began to decline: freak, extravagance, and
exhibition, took the place of the old temperance. This balance-wheel,
which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irritability
of poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which
the people were already wonted, and which had a certain excellence
which no single genius, however extraordinary, could hope to create.
In point of fact, it appears that Shakspeare did owe debts in all
directions, and was able to use whatever he found; and the amount of
indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's laborious computations in
regard to the First, Second, and Third parts of Henry VI. , in which,
"out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding
Shakspeare; 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors;
and 1899 were entirely his own. " And the preceding investigation hardly
leaves a single drama of his absolute invention. Malone's sentence is
an important piece of external history. In Henry VIII. , I think I see
plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his own finer
stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior, thoughtful
man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know well their
cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy, and the following scene with Cromwell,
where,--instead of the metre of Shakspeare, whose secret is, that the
thought constructs the tune, so that reading for the sense will best
bring out the rhythm,--here the lines are constructed on a given tune,
and the verse has even a trace of pulpit eloquence. But the play
contains, through all its length, unmistakable traits of Shakspeare's
hand, and some passages, as the account of the coronation, are like
autographs. What is odd, the compliment to Queen Elizabeth is in the
bad rhythm.
Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable that any
invention can.
