They are the
exceptions
which we want, where all grows
alike.
alike.
Emerson - Representative Men
It would seem as if each
waited, like the enchanted princess in fairy tales, for a destined
human deliverer. Each must be disenchanted, and walk forth to the day
in human shape. In the history of discovery, the ripe and latent truth
seems to have fashioned a brain for itself. A magnet must be made man,
in some Gilbert, or Swedenborg, or Oersted, before the general mind
can come to entertain its powers.
If we limit ourselves to the first advantages;--a sober grace adheres
to the mineral and botanic kingdoms, which, in the highest moments,
comes up as the charm of nature,--the glitter of the spar, the sureness
of affinity, the veracity of angles. Light and darkness, heat and cold,
hunger and food, sweet and sour, solid, liquid, and gas, circle us
round in a wreath of pleasures, and, by their agreeable quarrel, beguile
the day of life. The eye repeats every day the finest eulogy on
things--"He saw that they were good. " We know where to find them; and
these performers are relished all the more, after a little experience
of the pretending races. We are entitled, also, to higher advantages.
Something is wanting to science, until it has been humanized. The table
of logarithms is one thing, and its vital play, in botany, music,
optics, and architecture, another. There are advancements to numbers,
anatomy, architecture, astronomy, little suspected at first, when, by
union with intellect and will, they ascend into the life, and re-appear
in conversation, character and politics.
But this comes later. We speak now only of our acquaintance with them
in their own sphere, and the way in which they seem to fascinate and
draw to them some genius who occupies himself with one thing, all his
life long. The possibility of interpretation lies in the identity of
the observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial
side; has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and
necessary sphere, where it plays a part as indestructible as any other.
And to these, their ends, all things continually ascend. The gases
gather to the solid firmament; the chemic lump arrives at the plant,
and grows; arrives at the quadruped, and walks; arrives at the man,
and thinks. But also the constituency determines the vote of the
representative. He is not only representative, but participant. Like
can only be known by like. The reason why he knows about them is, that
he is of them; he has just come out of nature, or from being a part
of that thing. Animated chlorine knows of chlorine, and incarnate zinc,
of zinc. Their quality makes this career; and he can variously publish
their virtues, because they compose him. Man, made of the dust of the
world, does not forget his origin; and all that is yet inanimate will
one day speak and reason. Unpublished nature will have its whole secret
told. Shall we say that quartz mountains will pulverize into innumerable
Werners, Von Buchs, and Beaumonts; and the laboratory of the atmosphere
holds in solution I know not what Berzeliuses and Davys?
Thus, we sit by the fire, and take hold on the poles of the earth.
This quasi omnipresence supplies the imbecility of our condition. In
one of those celestial days, when heaven and earth meet and adorn each
other, it seems a poverty that we can only spend it once; we wish for
a thousand heads, a thousand bodies, that we might celebrate its immense
beauty in many ways and places. Is this fancy? Well, in good faith,
we are multiplied by our proxies. How easily we adopt their labors!
Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus. Every
novel is debtor to Homer. Every carpenter who shaves with a foreplane
borrows the genius of a forgotten inventor. Life is girt all around
with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished
to add their point of light to our sky. Engineer, broker, jurist,
physician, moralist, theologian, and every man, inasmuch as he has any
science, is a definer and map-maker of the latitudes and longitudes
of our condition. These road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must
extend the area of life, and multiply our relations. We are as much
gainers by finding a new property in the old earth, as by acquiring
a new planet.
We are too passive in the reception of these material or semi-material
aids. We must not be sacks and stomachs. To ascend one step,--we are
better served through our sympathy. Activity is contagious. Looking
where others look, and conversing with the same things, we catch the
charm which lured them. Napoleon said, "you must not fight too often
with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war. " Talk much
with any man of vigorous mind, and we acquire very fast the habit of
looking at things in the same light, and, on each occurrence, we
anticipate his thought.
Men are helpful through the intellect and the affections. Other help,
I find a false appearance. If you affect to give me bread and fire,
I perceive that I pay for it the full price, and at last it leaves me
as it found me, neither better nor worse: but all mental and moral
force is a positive good. It goes out from you whether you will or
not, and profits me whom you never thought of. I cannot even hear of
personal vigor of any kind, great power of performance, without fresh
resolution. We are emulous of all that man can do. Cecil's saying of
Sir Walter Raleigh, "I know that he can toil terribly," is an electric
touch. So are Clarendon's portraits,--of Hampden; "who was of an
industry and vigilance not to be tired out or wearied by the most
laborious, and of parts not to be imposed on by the most subtle and
sharp, and of a personal courage equal to his best parts"--of Falkland;
"who was so severe an adorer of truth, that he could as easily have
given himself leave to steal, as to dissemble. " We cannot read Plutarch,
without a tingling of the blood; and I accept the saying of the Chinese
Mencius: "As age is the instructor of a hundred ages. When the manners
of Loo are heard of, the stupid become intelligent, and the wavering,
determined. "
This is the moral of biography; yet it is hard for departed men to
touch the quick like our own companions, whose names may not last as
long. What is he whom I never think of? whilst in every solitude are
those who succor our genius, and stimulate us in wonderful manners.
There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than that
other can, and by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What
has friendship so signaled as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue
is in us? We will never more think cheaply of ourselves, or of life.
We are piqued to some purpose, and the industry of the diggers on the
railroad will not again shame us.
Under this head, too, falls that homage, very pure, as I think, which
all ranks pay to the hero of the day, from Coriolanus and Gracchus,
down to Pitt, Lafayette, Wellington, Webster, Lamartine. Hear the
shouts in the street! The people cannot see him enough. They delight
in a man. Here is a head and a trunk! What a front! What eyes! Atlantean
shoulders, and the whole carriage heroic, with equal inward force to
guide the great machine! This pleasure of full expression to that
which, in their private experience, is usually cramped and obstructed,
runs, also, much higher, and is the secret of the reader's joy in
literary genius. Nothing is kept back. There is fire enough to fuse
the mountain of ore. Shakspeare's principal merit may be conveyed, in
saying that he, of all men, best understands the English language, and
can say what he will. Yet these unchoked channels and floodgates of
expression are only health or fortunate constitution. Shakspeare's
name suggests other and purely intellectual benefits.
Senates and sovereigns have no compliment, with their medals, swords,
and armorial coats, like the addressing to a human being thoughts out
of a certain height, and presupposing his intelligence. This honor,
which is possible in personal intercourse scarcely twice in a lifetime,
genius perpetually pays; contented, if now and then, in a century, the
proffer is accepted. The indicators of the values of matter are degraded
to a sort of cooks and confectioners, on the appearance of the
indicators of ideas. Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the
supersensible regions, and draws on their map; and, by acquainting us
with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These
are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have
conversed with is the show.
We go to the gymnasium and the swimming-school to see the power and
beauty of the body; there is the like pleasure, and a higher benefit,
from witnessing intellectual feats of all kinds; as, feats of memory,
of mathematical combination, great power of abstraction, the
transmutings of the imagination, even versatility, and concentration,
as these acts expose the invisible organs and members of the mind,
which respond, member for member, to the parts of the body. For, we
thus enter a new gymnasium, and learn to choose men by their truest
marks, taught, with Plato, "to choose those who can, without aid from
the eyes, or any other sense, proceed to truth and to being. " Foremost
among these activities, are the summersaults, spells, and resurrections,
wrought by the imagination. When this wakes, a man seems to multiply
ten times or a thousand times his force. It opens the delicious sense
of indeterminate size, and inspires an audacious mental habit. We are
as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a
word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our
heads are bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the
Pit. And this benefit is real, because we are entitled to these
enlargements, and, once having passed the bounds, shall never again
be quite the miserable pedants we were.
The high functions of the intellect are so allied, that some imaginative
power usually appears in all eminent minds, even in arithmeticians of
the first class, but especially in meditative men of an intuitive habit
of thought. This class serve us, so that they have the perception of
identity and the perception of reaction. The eyes of Plato, Shakespeare,
Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either of these laws. The perception
of these laws is a kind of metre of the mind. Little minds are little,
through failure to see them.
Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our delight in reason degenerates
into idolatry of the herald. Especially when a mind of powerful method
has instructed men, we find the examples of oppression. The dominion
of Aristotle, the Ptolemaic astronomy, the credit of Luther, of Bacon,
of Locke,--in religion the history of hierarchies, of saints, and the
sects which have taken the name of each founder, are in point. Alas!
every man is such a victim. The imbecility of men is always inviting
the impudence of power. It is the delight of vulgar talent to dazzle
and to bind the beholder. But true genius seeks to defend us from
itself. True genius will not impoverish, but will liberate, and add
new senses. If a wise man should appear in our village, he would create,
in those who conversed with him, a new consciousness of wealth, by
opening their eyes to unobserved advantages; he would establish a sense
of immovable equality, calm us with assurances that we could not be
cheated; as every one would discern the checks and guaranties of
condition. The rich would see their mistakes and poverty, the poor
their escapes and their resources.
But nature brings all this about in due time. Rotation is her remedy.
The soul is impatient of masters, and eager for change. Housekeepers
say of a domestic who has been valuable, "She has lived with me long
enough. " We are tendencies, or rather, symptoms, and none of us
complete. We touch and go, and sip the foam of many lives. Rotation
is the law of nature. When nature removes a great man, people explore
the horizon for a successor; but none comes and none will. His class
is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field, the
next man will appear; not Jefferson, nor Franklin, but now a great
salesman; then a road-contractor; then a student of fishes; then a
buffalo-hunting explorer, or a semi-savage western general. Thus we
make a stand against our rougher masters; but against the best there
is a finer remedy. The power which they communicate is not theirs.
When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the
idea, to which, also, Plato was debtor.
I must not forget that we have a special debt to a single class. Life
is a scale of degrees. Between rank and rank of our great men are wide
intervals. Mankind have, in all ages, attached themselves to a few
persons, who, either by the quality of that idea they embodied, or by
the largeness of their reception, were entitled to the position of
leaders and law-givers. These teach us the qualities of primary
nature,--admit us to the constitution of things. We swim, day by day,
on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and
towns in the air, of which the men about us are dupes. But life is a
sincerity. In lucid intervals we say, "Let there be an entrance opened
for me into realities; I have worn the fool's cap too long. " We will
know the meaning of our economies and politics. Give us the cipher,
and, if persons and things are scores of a celestial music, let us
read off the strains. We have been cheated of our reason; yet there
have been sane men, who enjoyed a rich and related existence. What
they know, they know for us. With each new mind, a new secret of nature
transpires; nor can the Bible be closed, until the last great man is
born. These men correct the delirium of the animal spirits, make us
considerate, and engage us to new aims and powers. The veneration of
mankind selects these for the highest place. Witness the multitude of
statues, pictures, and memorials which recall their genius in every
city, village, house, and ship:--
"Ever their phantoms arise before us.
Our loftier brothers, but one in blood;
At bed and table they lord it o'er us,
With looks of beauty, and words of good. "
How to illustrate the distinctive benefit of ideas, the service rendered
by those who introduce moral truths into the general mind? --I am
plagued, in all my living, with a perpetual tariff of prices. If I
work in my garden, and prune an apple-tree, I am well enough
entertained, and could continue indefinitely in the like occupation.
But it comes to mind that a day is gone, and I have got this precious
nothing done. I go to Boston or New York, and run up and down on my
affairs: they are sped, but so is the day. I am vexed by the
recollection of this price I have paid for a trifling advantage. I
remember the _peau d'ane_, on which whoso sat should have his desire,
but a piece of the skin was gone for every wish. I go to a convention of
philanthropists. Do what I can, I cannot keep my eyes off the clock. But
if there should appear in the company some gentle soul who knows little
of persons or parties, of Carolina or Cuba, but who announces a law that
disposes these particulars, and so certifies me of the equity which
checkmates every false player, bankrupts every self-seeker, and apprises
me of my independence on any conditions of country, or time, or human
body, that man liberates me; I forget the clock.
I pass out of the sore relation to persons. I am healed of my hurts.
I am made immortal by apprehending my possession of incorruptible
goods. Here is great competition of rich and poor. We live in a market,
where is only so much wheat, or wool, or land; and if I have so much
more, every other must have so much less. I seem to have no good,
without breach of good manners. Nobody is glad in the gladness of
another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious superiority.
Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is
our system; and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets,
envies, and hatreds of his competitors. But in these new fields there
is room: here are no self-esteems, no exclusions.
I admire great men of all classes, those who stand for facts, and for
thoughts; I like rough and smooth "Scourges of God," and "Darlings of
the human race. " I like the first Caesar; and Charles V. , of Spain;
and Charles XII. , of Sweden; Richard Plantagenet; and Bonaparte, in
France. I applaud a sufficient man, an officer, equal to his office;
captains, ministers, senators. I like a master standing firm on legs
of iron, well-born, rich, handsome, eloquent, loaded with advantages,
drawing all men by fascination into tributaries and supporters of his
power. Sword and staff, or talents sword-like or staff-like, carry on
the work of the world. But I find him greater, when he can abolish
himself, and all heroes, by letting in this element of reason,
irrespective of persons; this subtilizer, and irresistible upward
force, into our thought, destroying individualism; the power so great,
that the potentate is nothing. Then he is a monarch, who gives a
constitution to his people; a pontiff, who preaches the equality of
souls, and releases his servants from their barbarous homages; an
emperor, who can spare his empire.
But I intended to specify, with a little minuteness, two or three
points of service. Nature never spares the opium or nepenthe; but
wherever she mars her creature with some deformity or defect, lays her
poppies plentifully on the bruise, and the sufferer goes joyfully
through life, ignorant of the ruin, and incapable of seeing it, though
all the world point their finger at it every day. The worthless and
offensive members of society, whose existence is a social pest,
invariably think themselves the most ill-used people alive, and never
get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their
contemporaries. Our globe discovers its hidden virtues, not only in
heroes and archangels, but in gossips and nurses. Is it not a rare
contrivance that lodged the due inertia in every creature, the
conserving, resisting energy, the anger at being waked or changed?
Altogether independent of the intellectual force in each, is the pride
of opinion, the security that we are right. Not the feeblest grandame,
not a mowing idiot, but uses what spark of perception and faculty is
left, to chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion over the absurdities
of all the rest. Difference from me is the measure of absurdity. Not
one has a misgiving of being wrong. Was it not a bright thought that
made things cohere with this bitumen, fastest of cements? But, in the
midst of this chuckle of self-gratulation, some figure goes by, which
Thersites too can love and admire. This is he that should marshal us
the way we were going. There is no end to his aid. Without Plato, we
should almost lose our faith in the possibility of a reasonable book.
We seem to want but one, but we want one. We love to associate with
heroic persons, since our receptivity is unlimited; and, with the
great, our thoughts and manners easily become great. We are all wise
in capacity, though so few in energy. There needs but one wise man in
a company, and all are wise, so rapid is the contagion.
Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism, and
enable us to see other people and their works. But there are vices and
follies incident to whole populations and ages. Men resemble their
contemporaries, even more than their progenitors. It is observed in
old couples, or in persons who have been housemates for a course of
years, that they grow alike; and, if they should live long enough, we
should not be able to know them apart. Nature abhors these
complaisances, which threaten to melt the world into a lump, and hastens
to break up such maudlin agglutinations. The like assimilation goes
on between men of one town, of one sect, of one political party; and
the ideas of the time are in the air, and infect all who breathe it.
Viewed from any high point, the city of New York, yonder city of London,
the western civilization, would seem a bundle of insanities. We keep
each other in countenance, and exasperate by emulation the frenzy of
the time. The shield against the stingings of conscience, is the
universal practice, or our contemporaries. Again; it is very easy to
be as wise and good as your companions. We learn of our contemporaries,
what they know, without effort, and almost through the pores of the
skin. We catch it by sympathy, or, as a wife arrives at the intellectual
and moral elevations of her husband. But we stop where they stop. Very
hardly can we take another step. The great, or such as hold of nature,
and transcend fashions, by their fidelity to universal ideas, are
saviors from these federal errors, and defend us from our
contemporaries.
They are the exceptions which we want, where all grows
alike. A foreign greatness is the antidote for cabalism.
Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves from too much conversation
with our mates, and exult in the depth of nature in that direction in
which he leads us. What indemnification is one great man for populations
of pigmies! Every mother wishes one son a genius, though all the rest
should be mediocre. But a new danger appears in the excess of influence
of the great man. His attractions warp us from our place. We have
become underlings and intellectual suicides. Ah! yonder in the horizon
is our help:--other great men, new qualities, counterweights and
checks on each other. We cloy of the honey of each peculiar greatness.
Every hero becomes a bore at last. Perhaps Voltaire was not bad-hearted,
yet he said of the good Jesus, even, "I pray you, let me never hear
that man's name again. " They cry up the virtues of George
Washington,--"Damn George Washington! " is the poor Jacobin's whole
speech and confutation. But it is human nature's indispensable defense.
The centripetence augments the centrifugence. We balance one man with
his opposite, and the health of the state depends on the see-saw.
There is, however, a speedy limit to the use of heroes. Every genius
is defended from approach by quantities of availableness. They are
very attractive, and seem at a distance our own: but we are hindered
on all sides from approach. The more we are drawn, the more we are
repelled. There is something not solid in the good that is done for
us. The best discovery the discoverer makes for himself. It has
something unreal for his companion, until he too has substantiated it.
It seems as if the Deity dressed each soul which he sends into nature
in certain virtues and powers not communicable to other men, and,
sending it to perform one more turn through the circle of beings, wrote
"Not transferable," and "Good for this trip only," on these garments
of the soul. There is somewhat deceptive about the intercourse of
minds. The boundaries are invisible, but they are never crossed. There
is such good will to impart, and such good will to receive, that each
threatens to become the other; but the law of individuality collects
its secret strength: you are you, and I am I, and so we remain.
For Nature wishes every thing to remain itself; and, whilst every
individual strives to grow and exclude, and to exclude and grow, to
the extremities of the universe, and to impose the law of its being
on every other creature, Nature steadily aims to protect each against
every other. Each is self-defended. Nothing is more marked than the
power by which individuals are guarded from individuals, in a world
where every benefactor becomes so easily a malefactor, only by
continuation of his activity into places where it is not due; where
children seem so much at the mercy of their foolish parents, and where
almost all men are too social and interfering. We rightly speak of the
guardian angels of children. How superior in their security from
infusions of evil persons, from vulgarity and second thought! They
shed their own abundant beauty on the objects they behold. Therefore,
they are not at the mercy of such poor educators as we adults. If we
huff and chide them, they soon come not to mind it, and get a
self-reliance; and if we indulge them to folly, they learn the
limitation elsewhere.
We need not fear excessive influence. A more generous trust is
permitted. Serve the great. Stick at no humiliation. Grudge no office
thou canst render. Be the limb of their body, the breath of their
mouth. Compromise thy egotism. Who cares for that, so thou gain aught
wider and nobler? Never mind the taunt of Boswellism: the devotion may
easily be greater than the wretched pride which is guarding its own
skirts. Be another: not thyself, but a Platonist; not a soul, but a
Christian; not a naturalist, but a Cartesian; not a poet, but a
Shakspearian. In vain, the wheels of tendency will not stop, nor will
all the forces of inertia, fear, or love itself, hold thee there. On,
and forever onward! The microscope observes a monad or wheel-insect
among the infusories circulating in water. Presently, a dot appears
on the animal, which enlarges to a slit, and it becomes two perfect
animals. The ever-proceeding detachment appears not less in all thought,
and in society. Children think they cannot live without their parents.
But, long before they are aware of it, the black dot has appeared, and
the detachment taken place. Any accident will now reveal to them their
independence.
But great men:--the word is injurious. Is there caste? is there fate?
What becomes of the promise to virtue? The thoughtful youth laments
the superfoetation of nature. "Generous and handsome," he says, "is
your hero; but look at yonder poor Paddy, whose country is his
wheelbarrow; look at his whole nation of Paddies. " Why are the masses,
from the dawn of history down, food for knives and powder? The idea
dignifies a few leaders, who have sentiment, opinion, love,
self-devotion; and they make war and death sacred;--but what for the
wretches whom they hire and kill? The cheapness of man is every day's
tragedy. It is as real a loss that others should be low, as that we
should be low; for we must have society.
Is it a reply to these suggestions, to say, society is a Pestalozzian
school; all are teachers and pupils in turn. We are equally served by
receiving and by imparting. Men who know the same things, are not long
the best company for each other. But bring to each an intelligent
person of another experience, and it is as if you let off water from
a lake, by cutting a lower basin. It seems a mechanical advantage, and
great benefit it is to each speaker, as he can now paint out his thought
to himself. We pass very fast, in our personal moods, from dignity to
dependence. And if any appear never to assume the chair, but always
to stand and serve, it is because we do not see the company in a
sufficiently long period for the whole rotation of parts to come about.
As to what we call the masses, and common men;--there are no common
men. All men are at last of a size; and true art is only possible, on
the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis somewhere. Fair
play, and an open field, and freshest laurels to all who have won them!
But heaven reserves an equal scope for every creature. Each is uneasy
until he has produced his private ray unto the concave sphere, and
beheld his talent also in its last nobility and exaltation.
The heroes of the hour are relatively great: of a faster growth; or
they are such, in whom, at the moment of success, a quality is ripe
which is then in request. Other days will demand other qualities. Some
rays escape the common observer, and want a finely adapted eye. Ask
the great man if there be none greater. His companions are; and not
the less great, but the more, that society cannot see them. Nature
never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret
to another soul.
One gracious fact emerges from these studies,--that there is true
ascension in our love. The reputations of the nineteenth century will
one day be quoted to prove its barbarism. The genius of humanity is
the real subject whose biography is written in our annals. We must
infer much, and supply many chasms in the record. The history of the
universe is symptomatic, and life is mnemonical. No man, in all the
procession of famous men, is reason or illumination, or that essence
we were looking for; but is an exhibition, in some quarter, of new
possibilities. Could we one day complete the immense figure which these
flagrant points compose! The study of many individuals leads us to an
elemental region wherein the individual is lost, or wherein all touch
by their summits. Thought and feeling, that break out there, cannot
be impounded by any fence of personality. This is the key to the power
of the greatest men,--their spirit diffuses itself. A new quality of
mind travels by night and by day, in concentric circles from its origin,
and publishes itself by unknown methods: the union of all minds appears
intimate: what gets admission to one, cannot be kept out of any other:
the smallest acquisition of truth or of energy, in any quarter, is so
much good to the commonwealth of souls. If the disparities of talent
and position vanish, when the individuals are seen in the duration
which is necessary to complete the career of each; even more swiftly
the seeming injustice disappears, when we ascend to the central identity
of all the individuals, and know that they are made of the same
substance which ordaineth and doeth.
The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The
qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less, and
pass away; the qualities remain on another brow. No experience is more
familiar. Once you saw phoenixes: they are gone; the world is not
therefore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read sacred emblems
turn out to be common pottery; but the sense of the pictures is sacred,
and you may still read them transferred to the walls of the world. For
a time, our teachers serve us personally, as metres or milestones of
progress. Once they were angels of knowledge, and their figures touched
the sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, culture, and limits; and
they yielded their places to other geniuses. Happy, if a few names
remain so high, that we have not been able to read them nearer, and
age and comparison have not robbed them of a ray. But, at last, we
shall cease to look in men for completeness, and shall content ourselves
with their social and delegated quality. All that respects the
individual is temporary and prospective, like the individual himself,
who is ascending out of his limits, into a catholic existence. We have
never come at the true and best benefit of any genius, so long as we
believe him an original force. In the moment when he ceases to help
us as a cause, he begins to help us move as an effect. Then he appears
as an exponent of a vaster mind and will. The opaque self becomes
transparent with the light of the First Cause.
Yet, within the limits of human education and agency, we may say, great
men exist that there may be greater men. The destiny of organized
nature is amelioration, and who can tell its limits? It is for man to
tame the chaos; on every side, whilst he lives, to scatter the seeds
of science and of song, that climate, corn, animals, men, may be milder,
and the germs of love and benefit may be multiplied.
II. PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER.
Among books, Plato only is entitled to Omar's fanatical compliment to
the Koran, when he said, "Burn the libraries; for, their value is in
this book. " These sentences contain the culture of nations; these are
the corner-stone of schools; these are the fountain-head of literatures.
A discipline it is in logic, arithmetic, taste, symmetry, poetry,
language, rhetoric, ontology, morals, or practical wisdom. There was
never such range of speculation. Out of Plato come all things that are
still written and debated among men of thought. Great havoc makes he
among our originalities. We have reached the mountain from which all
these drift bowlders were detached. The Bible of the learned for twenty-
two hundred years, every brisk young man, who says in succession fine
things to each reluctant generation,--Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus,
Bruno, Locke, Rousseau, Alfieri, Coleridge,--is some reader of Plato,
translating into the vernacular, wittily, his good things. Even the
men of grander proportion suffer some deduction from the misfortune
(shall I say? ) of coming after this exhausting generalizer. St.
Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg, Goethe, are likewise
his debtors, and must say after him. For it is fair to credit the
broadest generalizer with all the particulars deducible from his thesis.
Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the
shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add
any idea to his categories. No wife, no children had he, and the
thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity, and are tinged
with his mind. How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out
of night, to be his men,--Platonists! the Alexandrians, a constellation
of genius; the Elizabethans, not less; Sir Thomas More, Henry More,
John Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Ralph Cudworth,
Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; Marcilius Ficinus, and Picus Mirandola.
Calvinism is in his Phaedo: Christianity is in it. Mahometanism draws
all its philosophy, in its hand-book of morals, the Akhlak-y-Jalaly,
from him. Mysticism finds in Plato all its texts. This citizen of a
town in Greece is no villager nor patriot. An Englishman reads and
says, "how English! " a German--"how Teutonic! " an Italian--"how Roman
and how Greek! " As they say that Helen of Argos had that universal
beauty that everybody felt related to her, so Plato seems, to a reader
in New England, an American genius. His broad humanity transcends all
sectional lines.
This range of Plato instructs us what to think of the vexed question
concerning his reputed works,--what are genuine, what spurious. It is
singular that wherever we find a man higher, by a whole head, than any
of his contemporaries, it is sure to come into doubt, what are his
real works. Thus, Homer, Plato, Raffaelle, Shakspeare. For these men
magnetize their contemporaries, so that their companions can do for
them what they can never do for themselves; and the great man does
thus live in several bodies; and write, or paint, or act, by many
hands; and after some time, it is not easy to say what is the authentic
work of the master, and what is only of his school.
Plato, too, like every great man, consumed his own times. What is a
great man, but one of great affinities, who takes up into himself all
arts, sciences, all knowables, as his food? He can spare nothing; he
can dispose of everything. What is not good for virtue is good for
knowledge. Hence his contemporaries tax him with plagiarism. But the
inventor only knows how to borrow; and society is glad to forget the
innumerable laborers who ministered to this architect, and reserves
all its gratitude for him. When we are praising Plato, it seems we are
praising quotations from Solon, and Sophron, and Philolaus. Be it so.
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all
forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation
from all his ancestors. And this grasping inventor puts all nations
under contribution.
Plato absorbed the learning of his times,--Philolaus, Timaeus,
Heraclitus, Parmenides, and what else; then his master, Socrates; and
finding himself still capable of a larger synthesis,--beyond all example
then or since,--he traveled into Italy, to gain what Pythagoras had
for him; then into Egypt, and perhaps still further east, to import
the other element, which Europe wanted, into the European mind. This
breadth entitles him to stand as the representative of philosophy. He
says, in the Republic, "Such a genius as philosophers must of necessity
have, is wont but seldom, in all its parts, to meet in one man; but
its different parts generally spring up in different persons. " Every
man, who would do anything well, must come to it from a higher ground.
A philosopher must be more than a philosopher. Plato is clothed with
the powers of a poet, stands upon the highest place of the poet, and
(though I doubt he wanted the decisive gift of lyric expression) mainly
is not a poet, because he chose to use the poetic gift to an ulterior
purpose.
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell
you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their
house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know
their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most
resembles them. Plato, especially, has no external biography. If he
had lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing of them. He ground them
all into paint. As a good chimney burns its smoke, so a philosopher
converts the value of all his fortunes into his intellectual
performances.
He was born 430 A. C. , about the time of the death of Pericles; was
of patrician connection in his times and city; and is said to have had
an early inclination for war; but in his twentieth year, meeting with
Socrates, was easily dissuaded from this pursuit, and remained for ten
years his scholar, until the death of Socrates. He then went to Megara;
accepted the invitations of Dion and of Dionysius, to the court of
Sicily; and went thither three times, though very capriciously treated.
He traveled into Italy; then into Egypt, where he stayed a long time;
some say three,--some say thirteen years. It is said, he went farther,
into Babylonia: this is uncertain. Returning to Athens, he gave lessons,
in the Academy, to those whom his fame drew thither; and died, as we
have received it, in the act of writing, at eighty-one years.
But the biography of Plato is interior. We are to account for the
supreme elevation of this man, in the intellectual history of our
race,--how it happens that, in proportion to the culture of men, they
become his scholars; that, as our Jewish Bible has implanted itself
in the table-talk and household life of every man and woman in the
European and American nations, so the writings of Plato have
pre-occupied every school of learning, every lover of thought, every
church, every poet,--making it impossible to think, on certain levels,
except through him. He stands between the truth and every man's mind,
and has almost impressed language, and the primary forms of thought,
with his name and seal. I am struck, in reading him, with the extreme
modernness of his style and spirit. Here is the germ of that Europe
we know so well, in its long history of arts and arms; here are all
its traits, already discernible in the mind of Plato,--and in none
before him. It has spread itself since into a hundred histories, but
has added no new element. This perpetual modernness is the measure of
merit, in every work of art; since the author of it was not misled by
anything shortlived or local, but abode by real and abiding traits.
How Plato came thus to be Europe, and philosophy, and almost literature,
is the problem for us to solve.
This could not have happened, without a sound, sincere, and catholic
man, able to honor, at the same time, the ideal, or laws of the mind,
and fate, or the order of nature. The first period of a nation, as of
an individual, is the period of unconscious strength. Children cry,
scream and stamp with fury, unable to express their desires. As soon
as they can speak and tell their want, and the reason of it, they
become gentle. In adult life, whilst the perceptions are obtuse, men
and women talk vehemently and superlatively, blunder and quarrel; their
manners are full of desperation; their speech is full of oaths. As
soon as, with culture, things have cleared up a little, and they see
them no longer in lumps and masses, but accurately distributed, they
desist from that weak vehemence, and explain their meaning in detail.
If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still
be a beast in the forest. The same weakness and want, on a higher
plane, occurs daily in the education of ardent young men and women.
"Ah! you don't understand me; I have never met with any one who
comprehends me:" and they sigh and weep, write verses, and walk
alone,--fault of power to express their precise meaning. In a month
or two, through the favor of their good genius, they meet some one so
related as to assist their volcanic estate; and, good communication
being once established, they are thenceforward good citizens. It is
ever thus. The progress is to accuracy, to skill, to truth, from blind
force.
There is a moment, in the history of every nation, when, proceeding
out of this brute youth, the perceptive powers reach their ripeness,
and have not yet become microscopic: so that man, at that instant,
extends across the entire scale; and, with his feet still planted on
the immense forces of night, converses, by his eyes and brain, with
solar and stellar creation. That is the moment of adult health, the
culmination of power.
Such is the history of Europe, in all points; and such in philosophy.
Its early records, almost perished, are of the immigrations from Asia,
bringing with them the dreams of barbarians; a confusion of crude
notions of morals, and of natural philosophy, gradually subsiding,
through the partial insight of single teachers.
waited, like the enchanted princess in fairy tales, for a destined
human deliverer. Each must be disenchanted, and walk forth to the day
in human shape. In the history of discovery, the ripe and latent truth
seems to have fashioned a brain for itself. A magnet must be made man,
in some Gilbert, or Swedenborg, or Oersted, before the general mind
can come to entertain its powers.
If we limit ourselves to the first advantages;--a sober grace adheres
to the mineral and botanic kingdoms, which, in the highest moments,
comes up as the charm of nature,--the glitter of the spar, the sureness
of affinity, the veracity of angles. Light and darkness, heat and cold,
hunger and food, sweet and sour, solid, liquid, and gas, circle us
round in a wreath of pleasures, and, by their agreeable quarrel, beguile
the day of life. The eye repeats every day the finest eulogy on
things--"He saw that they were good. " We know where to find them; and
these performers are relished all the more, after a little experience
of the pretending races. We are entitled, also, to higher advantages.
Something is wanting to science, until it has been humanized. The table
of logarithms is one thing, and its vital play, in botany, music,
optics, and architecture, another. There are advancements to numbers,
anatomy, architecture, astronomy, little suspected at first, when, by
union with intellect and will, they ascend into the life, and re-appear
in conversation, character and politics.
But this comes later. We speak now only of our acquaintance with them
in their own sphere, and the way in which they seem to fascinate and
draw to them some genius who occupies himself with one thing, all his
life long. The possibility of interpretation lies in the identity of
the observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial
side; has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and
necessary sphere, where it plays a part as indestructible as any other.
And to these, their ends, all things continually ascend. The gases
gather to the solid firmament; the chemic lump arrives at the plant,
and grows; arrives at the quadruped, and walks; arrives at the man,
and thinks. But also the constituency determines the vote of the
representative. He is not only representative, but participant. Like
can only be known by like. The reason why he knows about them is, that
he is of them; he has just come out of nature, or from being a part
of that thing. Animated chlorine knows of chlorine, and incarnate zinc,
of zinc. Their quality makes this career; and he can variously publish
their virtues, because they compose him. Man, made of the dust of the
world, does not forget his origin; and all that is yet inanimate will
one day speak and reason. Unpublished nature will have its whole secret
told. Shall we say that quartz mountains will pulverize into innumerable
Werners, Von Buchs, and Beaumonts; and the laboratory of the atmosphere
holds in solution I know not what Berzeliuses and Davys?
Thus, we sit by the fire, and take hold on the poles of the earth.
This quasi omnipresence supplies the imbecility of our condition. In
one of those celestial days, when heaven and earth meet and adorn each
other, it seems a poverty that we can only spend it once; we wish for
a thousand heads, a thousand bodies, that we might celebrate its immense
beauty in many ways and places. Is this fancy? Well, in good faith,
we are multiplied by our proxies. How easily we adopt their labors!
Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus. Every
novel is debtor to Homer. Every carpenter who shaves with a foreplane
borrows the genius of a forgotten inventor. Life is girt all around
with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished
to add their point of light to our sky. Engineer, broker, jurist,
physician, moralist, theologian, and every man, inasmuch as he has any
science, is a definer and map-maker of the latitudes and longitudes
of our condition. These road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must
extend the area of life, and multiply our relations. We are as much
gainers by finding a new property in the old earth, as by acquiring
a new planet.
We are too passive in the reception of these material or semi-material
aids. We must not be sacks and stomachs. To ascend one step,--we are
better served through our sympathy. Activity is contagious. Looking
where others look, and conversing with the same things, we catch the
charm which lured them. Napoleon said, "you must not fight too often
with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war. " Talk much
with any man of vigorous mind, and we acquire very fast the habit of
looking at things in the same light, and, on each occurrence, we
anticipate his thought.
Men are helpful through the intellect and the affections. Other help,
I find a false appearance. If you affect to give me bread and fire,
I perceive that I pay for it the full price, and at last it leaves me
as it found me, neither better nor worse: but all mental and moral
force is a positive good. It goes out from you whether you will or
not, and profits me whom you never thought of. I cannot even hear of
personal vigor of any kind, great power of performance, without fresh
resolution. We are emulous of all that man can do. Cecil's saying of
Sir Walter Raleigh, "I know that he can toil terribly," is an electric
touch. So are Clarendon's portraits,--of Hampden; "who was of an
industry and vigilance not to be tired out or wearied by the most
laborious, and of parts not to be imposed on by the most subtle and
sharp, and of a personal courage equal to his best parts"--of Falkland;
"who was so severe an adorer of truth, that he could as easily have
given himself leave to steal, as to dissemble. " We cannot read Plutarch,
without a tingling of the blood; and I accept the saying of the Chinese
Mencius: "As age is the instructor of a hundred ages. When the manners
of Loo are heard of, the stupid become intelligent, and the wavering,
determined. "
This is the moral of biography; yet it is hard for departed men to
touch the quick like our own companions, whose names may not last as
long. What is he whom I never think of? whilst in every solitude are
those who succor our genius, and stimulate us in wonderful manners.
There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than that
other can, and by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What
has friendship so signaled as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue
is in us? We will never more think cheaply of ourselves, or of life.
We are piqued to some purpose, and the industry of the diggers on the
railroad will not again shame us.
Under this head, too, falls that homage, very pure, as I think, which
all ranks pay to the hero of the day, from Coriolanus and Gracchus,
down to Pitt, Lafayette, Wellington, Webster, Lamartine. Hear the
shouts in the street! The people cannot see him enough. They delight
in a man. Here is a head and a trunk! What a front! What eyes! Atlantean
shoulders, and the whole carriage heroic, with equal inward force to
guide the great machine! This pleasure of full expression to that
which, in their private experience, is usually cramped and obstructed,
runs, also, much higher, and is the secret of the reader's joy in
literary genius. Nothing is kept back. There is fire enough to fuse
the mountain of ore. Shakspeare's principal merit may be conveyed, in
saying that he, of all men, best understands the English language, and
can say what he will. Yet these unchoked channels and floodgates of
expression are only health or fortunate constitution. Shakspeare's
name suggests other and purely intellectual benefits.
Senates and sovereigns have no compliment, with their medals, swords,
and armorial coats, like the addressing to a human being thoughts out
of a certain height, and presupposing his intelligence. This honor,
which is possible in personal intercourse scarcely twice in a lifetime,
genius perpetually pays; contented, if now and then, in a century, the
proffer is accepted. The indicators of the values of matter are degraded
to a sort of cooks and confectioners, on the appearance of the
indicators of ideas. Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the
supersensible regions, and draws on their map; and, by acquainting us
with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These
are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have
conversed with is the show.
We go to the gymnasium and the swimming-school to see the power and
beauty of the body; there is the like pleasure, and a higher benefit,
from witnessing intellectual feats of all kinds; as, feats of memory,
of mathematical combination, great power of abstraction, the
transmutings of the imagination, even versatility, and concentration,
as these acts expose the invisible organs and members of the mind,
which respond, member for member, to the parts of the body. For, we
thus enter a new gymnasium, and learn to choose men by their truest
marks, taught, with Plato, "to choose those who can, without aid from
the eyes, or any other sense, proceed to truth and to being. " Foremost
among these activities, are the summersaults, spells, and resurrections,
wrought by the imagination. When this wakes, a man seems to multiply
ten times or a thousand times his force. It opens the delicious sense
of indeterminate size, and inspires an audacious mental habit. We are
as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a
word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our
heads are bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the
Pit. And this benefit is real, because we are entitled to these
enlargements, and, once having passed the bounds, shall never again
be quite the miserable pedants we were.
The high functions of the intellect are so allied, that some imaginative
power usually appears in all eminent minds, even in arithmeticians of
the first class, but especially in meditative men of an intuitive habit
of thought. This class serve us, so that they have the perception of
identity and the perception of reaction. The eyes of Plato, Shakespeare,
Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either of these laws. The perception
of these laws is a kind of metre of the mind. Little minds are little,
through failure to see them.
Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our delight in reason degenerates
into idolatry of the herald. Especially when a mind of powerful method
has instructed men, we find the examples of oppression. The dominion
of Aristotle, the Ptolemaic astronomy, the credit of Luther, of Bacon,
of Locke,--in religion the history of hierarchies, of saints, and the
sects which have taken the name of each founder, are in point. Alas!
every man is such a victim. The imbecility of men is always inviting
the impudence of power. It is the delight of vulgar talent to dazzle
and to bind the beholder. But true genius seeks to defend us from
itself. True genius will not impoverish, but will liberate, and add
new senses. If a wise man should appear in our village, he would create,
in those who conversed with him, a new consciousness of wealth, by
opening their eyes to unobserved advantages; he would establish a sense
of immovable equality, calm us with assurances that we could not be
cheated; as every one would discern the checks and guaranties of
condition. The rich would see their mistakes and poverty, the poor
their escapes and their resources.
But nature brings all this about in due time. Rotation is her remedy.
The soul is impatient of masters, and eager for change. Housekeepers
say of a domestic who has been valuable, "She has lived with me long
enough. " We are tendencies, or rather, symptoms, and none of us
complete. We touch and go, and sip the foam of many lives. Rotation
is the law of nature. When nature removes a great man, people explore
the horizon for a successor; but none comes and none will. His class
is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field, the
next man will appear; not Jefferson, nor Franklin, but now a great
salesman; then a road-contractor; then a student of fishes; then a
buffalo-hunting explorer, or a semi-savage western general. Thus we
make a stand against our rougher masters; but against the best there
is a finer remedy. The power which they communicate is not theirs.
When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the
idea, to which, also, Plato was debtor.
I must not forget that we have a special debt to a single class. Life
is a scale of degrees. Between rank and rank of our great men are wide
intervals. Mankind have, in all ages, attached themselves to a few
persons, who, either by the quality of that idea they embodied, or by
the largeness of their reception, were entitled to the position of
leaders and law-givers. These teach us the qualities of primary
nature,--admit us to the constitution of things. We swim, day by day,
on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and
towns in the air, of which the men about us are dupes. But life is a
sincerity. In lucid intervals we say, "Let there be an entrance opened
for me into realities; I have worn the fool's cap too long. " We will
know the meaning of our economies and politics. Give us the cipher,
and, if persons and things are scores of a celestial music, let us
read off the strains. We have been cheated of our reason; yet there
have been sane men, who enjoyed a rich and related existence. What
they know, they know for us. With each new mind, a new secret of nature
transpires; nor can the Bible be closed, until the last great man is
born. These men correct the delirium of the animal spirits, make us
considerate, and engage us to new aims and powers. The veneration of
mankind selects these for the highest place. Witness the multitude of
statues, pictures, and memorials which recall their genius in every
city, village, house, and ship:--
"Ever their phantoms arise before us.
Our loftier brothers, but one in blood;
At bed and table they lord it o'er us,
With looks of beauty, and words of good. "
How to illustrate the distinctive benefit of ideas, the service rendered
by those who introduce moral truths into the general mind? --I am
plagued, in all my living, with a perpetual tariff of prices. If I
work in my garden, and prune an apple-tree, I am well enough
entertained, and could continue indefinitely in the like occupation.
But it comes to mind that a day is gone, and I have got this precious
nothing done. I go to Boston or New York, and run up and down on my
affairs: they are sped, but so is the day. I am vexed by the
recollection of this price I have paid for a trifling advantage. I
remember the _peau d'ane_, on which whoso sat should have his desire,
but a piece of the skin was gone for every wish. I go to a convention of
philanthropists. Do what I can, I cannot keep my eyes off the clock. But
if there should appear in the company some gentle soul who knows little
of persons or parties, of Carolina or Cuba, but who announces a law that
disposes these particulars, and so certifies me of the equity which
checkmates every false player, bankrupts every self-seeker, and apprises
me of my independence on any conditions of country, or time, or human
body, that man liberates me; I forget the clock.
I pass out of the sore relation to persons. I am healed of my hurts.
I am made immortal by apprehending my possession of incorruptible
goods. Here is great competition of rich and poor. We live in a market,
where is only so much wheat, or wool, or land; and if I have so much
more, every other must have so much less. I seem to have no good,
without breach of good manners. Nobody is glad in the gladness of
another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious superiority.
Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is
our system; and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets,
envies, and hatreds of his competitors. But in these new fields there
is room: here are no self-esteems, no exclusions.
I admire great men of all classes, those who stand for facts, and for
thoughts; I like rough and smooth "Scourges of God," and "Darlings of
the human race. " I like the first Caesar; and Charles V. , of Spain;
and Charles XII. , of Sweden; Richard Plantagenet; and Bonaparte, in
France. I applaud a sufficient man, an officer, equal to his office;
captains, ministers, senators. I like a master standing firm on legs
of iron, well-born, rich, handsome, eloquent, loaded with advantages,
drawing all men by fascination into tributaries and supporters of his
power. Sword and staff, or talents sword-like or staff-like, carry on
the work of the world. But I find him greater, when he can abolish
himself, and all heroes, by letting in this element of reason,
irrespective of persons; this subtilizer, and irresistible upward
force, into our thought, destroying individualism; the power so great,
that the potentate is nothing. Then he is a monarch, who gives a
constitution to his people; a pontiff, who preaches the equality of
souls, and releases his servants from their barbarous homages; an
emperor, who can spare his empire.
But I intended to specify, with a little minuteness, two or three
points of service. Nature never spares the opium or nepenthe; but
wherever she mars her creature with some deformity or defect, lays her
poppies plentifully on the bruise, and the sufferer goes joyfully
through life, ignorant of the ruin, and incapable of seeing it, though
all the world point their finger at it every day. The worthless and
offensive members of society, whose existence is a social pest,
invariably think themselves the most ill-used people alive, and never
get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their
contemporaries. Our globe discovers its hidden virtues, not only in
heroes and archangels, but in gossips and nurses. Is it not a rare
contrivance that lodged the due inertia in every creature, the
conserving, resisting energy, the anger at being waked or changed?
Altogether independent of the intellectual force in each, is the pride
of opinion, the security that we are right. Not the feeblest grandame,
not a mowing idiot, but uses what spark of perception and faculty is
left, to chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion over the absurdities
of all the rest. Difference from me is the measure of absurdity. Not
one has a misgiving of being wrong. Was it not a bright thought that
made things cohere with this bitumen, fastest of cements? But, in the
midst of this chuckle of self-gratulation, some figure goes by, which
Thersites too can love and admire. This is he that should marshal us
the way we were going. There is no end to his aid. Without Plato, we
should almost lose our faith in the possibility of a reasonable book.
We seem to want but one, but we want one. We love to associate with
heroic persons, since our receptivity is unlimited; and, with the
great, our thoughts and manners easily become great. We are all wise
in capacity, though so few in energy. There needs but one wise man in
a company, and all are wise, so rapid is the contagion.
Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism, and
enable us to see other people and their works. But there are vices and
follies incident to whole populations and ages. Men resemble their
contemporaries, even more than their progenitors. It is observed in
old couples, or in persons who have been housemates for a course of
years, that they grow alike; and, if they should live long enough, we
should not be able to know them apart. Nature abhors these
complaisances, which threaten to melt the world into a lump, and hastens
to break up such maudlin agglutinations. The like assimilation goes
on between men of one town, of one sect, of one political party; and
the ideas of the time are in the air, and infect all who breathe it.
Viewed from any high point, the city of New York, yonder city of London,
the western civilization, would seem a bundle of insanities. We keep
each other in countenance, and exasperate by emulation the frenzy of
the time. The shield against the stingings of conscience, is the
universal practice, or our contemporaries. Again; it is very easy to
be as wise and good as your companions. We learn of our contemporaries,
what they know, without effort, and almost through the pores of the
skin. We catch it by sympathy, or, as a wife arrives at the intellectual
and moral elevations of her husband. But we stop where they stop. Very
hardly can we take another step. The great, or such as hold of nature,
and transcend fashions, by their fidelity to universal ideas, are
saviors from these federal errors, and defend us from our
contemporaries.
They are the exceptions which we want, where all grows
alike. A foreign greatness is the antidote for cabalism.
Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves from too much conversation
with our mates, and exult in the depth of nature in that direction in
which he leads us. What indemnification is one great man for populations
of pigmies! Every mother wishes one son a genius, though all the rest
should be mediocre. But a new danger appears in the excess of influence
of the great man. His attractions warp us from our place. We have
become underlings and intellectual suicides. Ah! yonder in the horizon
is our help:--other great men, new qualities, counterweights and
checks on each other. We cloy of the honey of each peculiar greatness.
Every hero becomes a bore at last. Perhaps Voltaire was not bad-hearted,
yet he said of the good Jesus, even, "I pray you, let me never hear
that man's name again. " They cry up the virtues of George
Washington,--"Damn George Washington! " is the poor Jacobin's whole
speech and confutation. But it is human nature's indispensable defense.
The centripetence augments the centrifugence. We balance one man with
his opposite, and the health of the state depends on the see-saw.
There is, however, a speedy limit to the use of heroes. Every genius
is defended from approach by quantities of availableness. They are
very attractive, and seem at a distance our own: but we are hindered
on all sides from approach. The more we are drawn, the more we are
repelled. There is something not solid in the good that is done for
us. The best discovery the discoverer makes for himself. It has
something unreal for his companion, until he too has substantiated it.
It seems as if the Deity dressed each soul which he sends into nature
in certain virtues and powers not communicable to other men, and,
sending it to perform one more turn through the circle of beings, wrote
"Not transferable," and "Good for this trip only," on these garments
of the soul. There is somewhat deceptive about the intercourse of
minds. The boundaries are invisible, but they are never crossed. There
is such good will to impart, and such good will to receive, that each
threatens to become the other; but the law of individuality collects
its secret strength: you are you, and I am I, and so we remain.
For Nature wishes every thing to remain itself; and, whilst every
individual strives to grow and exclude, and to exclude and grow, to
the extremities of the universe, and to impose the law of its being
on every other creature, Nature steadily aims to protect each against
every other. Each is self-defended. Nothing is more marked than the
power by which individuals are guarded from individuals, in a world
where every benefactor becomes so easily a malefactor, only by
continuation of his activity into places where it is not due; where
children seem so much at the mercy of their foolish parents, and where
almost all men are too social and interfering. We rightly speak of the
guardian angels of children. How superior in their security from
infusions of evil persons, from vulgarity and second thought! They
shed their own abundant beauty on the objects they behold. Therefore,
they are not at the mercy of such poor educators as we adults. If we
huff and chide them, they soon come not to mind it, and get a
self-reliance; and if we indulge them to folly, they learn the
limitation elsewhere.
We need not fear excessive influence. A more generous trust is
permitted. Serve the great. Stick at no humiliation. Grudge no office
thou canst render. Be the limb of their body, the breath of their
mouth. Compromise thy egotism. Who cares for that, so thou gain aught
wider and nobler? Never mind the taunt of Boswellism: the devotion may
easily be greater than the wretched pride which is guarding its own
skirts. Be another: not thyself, but a Platonist; not a soul, but a
Christian; not a naturalist, but a Cartesian; not a poet, but a
Shakspearian. In vain, the wheels of tendency will not stop, nor will
all the forces of inertia, fear, or love itself, hold thee there. On,
and forever onward! The microscope observes a monad or wheel-insect
among the infusories circulating in water. Presently, a dot appears
on the animal, which enlarges to a slit, and it becomes two perfect
animals. The ever-proceeding detachment appears not less in all thought,
and in society. Children think they cannot live without their parents.
But, long before they are aware of it, the black dot has appeared, and
the detachment taken place. Any accident will now reveal to them their
independence.
But great men:--the word is injurious. Is there caste? is there fate?
What becomes of the promise to virtue? The thoughtful youth laments
the superfoetation of nature. "Generous and handsome," he says, "is
your hero; but look at yonder poor Paddy, whose country is his
wheelbarrow; look at his whole nation of Paddies. " Why are the masses,
from the dawn of history down, food for knives and powder? The idea
dignifies a few leaders, who have sentiment, opinion, love,
self-devotion; and they make war and death sacred;--but what for the
wretches whom they hire and kill? The cheapness of man is every day's
tragedy. It is as real a loss that others should be low, as that we
should be low; for we must have society.
Is it a reply to these suggestions, to say, society is a Pestalozzian
school; all are teachers and pupils in turn. We are equally served by
receiving and by imparting. Men who know the same things, are not long
the best company for each other. But bring to each an intelligent
person of another experience, and it is as if you let off water from
a lake, by cutting a lower basin. It seems a mechanical advantage, and
great benefit it is to each speaker, as he can now paint out his thought
to himself. We pass very fast, in our personal moods, from dignity to
dependence. And if any appear never to assume the chair, but always
to stand and serve, it is because we do not see the company in a
sufficiently long period for the whole rotation of parts to come about.
As to what we call the masses, and common men;--there are no common
men. All men are at last of a size; and true art is only possible, on
the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis somewhere. Fair
play, and an open field, and freshest laurels to all who have won them!
But heaven reserves an equal scope for every creature. Each is uneasy
until he has produced his private ray unto the concave sphere, and
beheld his talent also in its last nobility and exaltation.
The heroes of the hour are relatively great: of a faster growth; or
they are such, in whom, at the moment of success, a quality is ripe
which is then in request. Other days will demand other qualities. Some
rays escape the common observer, and want a finely adapted eye. Ask
the great man if there be none greater. His companions are; and not
the less great, but the more, that society cannot see them. Nature
never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret
to another soul.
One gracious fact emerges from these studies,--that there is true
ascension in our love. The reputations of the nineteenth century will
one day be quoted to prove its barbarism. The genius of humanity is
the real subject whose biography is written in our annals. We must
infer much, and supply many chasms in the record. The history of the
universe is symptomatic, and life is mnemonical. No man, in all the
procession of famous men, is reason or illumination, or that essence
we were looking for; but is an exhibition, in some quarter, of new
possibilities. Could we one day complete the immense figure which these
flagrant points compose! The study of many individuals leads us to an
elemental region wherein the individual is lost, or wherein all touch
by their summits. Thought and feeling, that break out there, cannot
be impounded by any fence of personality. This is the key to the power
of the greatest men,--their spirit diffuses itself. A new quality of
mind travels by night and by day, in concentric circles from its origin,
and publishes itself by unknown methods: the union of all minds appears
intimate: what gets admission to one, cannot be kept out of any other:
the smallest acquisition of truth or of energy, in any quarter, is so
much good to the commonwealth of souls. If the disparities of talent
and position vanish, when the individuals are seen in the duration
which is necessary to complete the career of each; even more swiftly
the seeming injustice disappears, when we ascend to the central identity
of all the individuals, and know that they are made of the same
substance which ordaineth and doeth.
The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The
qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less, and
pass away; the qualities remain on another brow. No experience is more
familiar. Once you saw phoenixes: they are gone; the world is not
therefore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read sacred emblems
turn out to be common pottery; but the sense of the pictures is sacred,
and you may still read them transferred to the walls of the world. For
a time, our teachers serve us personally, as metres or milestones of
progress. Once they were angels of knowledge, and their figures touched
the sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, culture, and limits; and
they yielded their places to other geniuses. Happy, if a few names
remain so high, that we have not been able to read them nearer, and
age and comparison have not robbed them of a ray. But, at last, we
shall cease to look in men for completeness, and shall content ourselves
with their social and delegated quality. All that respects the
individual is temporary and prospective, like the individual himself,
who is ascending out of his limits, into a catholic existence. We have
never come at the true and best benefit of any genius, so long as we
believe him an original force. In the moment when he ceases to help
us as a cause, he begins to help us move as an effect. Then he appears
as an exponent of a vaster mind and will. The opaque self becomes
transparent with the light of the First Cause.
Yet, within the limits of human education and agency, we may say, great
men exist that there may be greater men. The destiny of organized
nature is amelioration, and who can tell its limits? It is for man to
tame the chaos; on every side, whilst he lives, to scatter the seeds
of science and of song, that climate, corn, animals, men, may be milder,
and the germs of love and benefit may be multiplied.
II. PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER.
Among books, Plato only is entitled to Omar's fanatical compliment to
the Koran, when he said, "Burn the libraries; for, their value is in
this book. " These sentences contain the culture of nations; these are
the corner-stone of schools; these are the fountain-head of literatures.
A discipline it is in logic, arithmetic, taste, symmetry, poetry,
language, rhetoric, ontology, morals, or practical wisdom. There was
never such range of speculation. Out of Plato come all things that are
still written and debated among men of thought. Great havoc makes he
among our originalities. We have reached the mountain from which all
these drift bowlders were detached. The Bible of the learned for twenty-
two hundred years, every brisk young man, who says in succession fine
things to each reluctant generation,--Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus,
Bruno, Locke, Rousseau, Alfieri, Coleridge,--is some reader of Plato,
translating into the vernacular, wittily, his good things. Even the
men of grander proportion suffer some deduction from the misfortune
(shall I say? ) of coming after this exhausting generalizer. St.
Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg, Goethe, are likewise
his debtors, and must say after him. For it is fair to credit the
broadest generalizer with all the particulars deducible from his thesis.
Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the
shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add
any idea to his categories. No wife, no children had he, and the
thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity, and are tinged
with his mind. How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out
of night, to be his men,--Platonists! the Alexandrians, a constellation
of genius; the Elizabethans, not less; Sir Thomas More, Henry More,
John Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Ralph Cudworth,
Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; Marcilius Ficinus, and Picus Mirandola.
Calvinism is in his Phaedo: Christianity is in it. Mahometanism draws
all its philosophy, in its hand-book of morals, the Akhlak-y-Jalaly,
from him. Mysticism finds in Plato all its texts. This citizen of a
town in Greece is no villager nor patriot. An Englishman reads and
says, "how English! " a German--"how Teutonic! " an Italian--"how Roman
and how Greek! " As they say that Helen of Argos had that universal
beauty that everybody felt related to her, so Plato seems, to a reader
in New England, an American genius. His broad humanity transcends all
sectional lines.
This range of Plato instructs us what to think of the vexed question
concerning his reputed works,--what are genuine, what spurious. It is
singular that wherever we find a man higher, by a whole head, than any
of his contemporaries, it is sure to come into doubt, what are his
real works. Thus, Homer, Plato, Raffaelle, Shakspeare. For these men
magnetize their contemporaries, so that their companions can do for
them what they can never do for themselves; and the great man does
thus live in several bodies; and write, or paint, or act, by many
hands; and after some time, it is not easy to say what is the authentic
work of the master, and what is only of his school.
Plato, too, like every great man, consumed his own times. What is a
great man, but one of great affinities, who takes up into himself all
arts, sciences, all knowables, as his food? He can spare nothing; he
can dispose of everything. What is not good for virtue is good for
knowledge. Hence his contemporaries tax him with plagiarism. But the
inventor only knows how to borrow; and society is glad to forget the
innumerable laborers who ministered to this architect, and reserves
all its gratitude for him. When we are praising Plato, it seems we are
praising quotations from Solon, and Sophron, and Philolaus. Be it so.
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all
forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation
from all his ancestors. And this grasping inventor puts all nations
under contribution.
Plato absorbed the learning of his times,--Philolaus, Timaeus,
Heraclitus, Parmenides, and what else; then his master, Socrates; and
finding himself still capable of a larger synthesis,--beyond all example
then or since,--he traveled into Italy, to gain what Pythagoras had
for him; then into Egypt, and perhaps still further east, to import
the other element, which Europe wanted, into the European mind. This
breadth entitles him to stand as the representative of philosophy. He
says, in the Republic, "Such a genius as philosophers must of necessity
have, is wont but seldom, in all its parts, to meet in one man; but
its different parts generally spring up in different persons. " Every
man, who would do anything well, must come to it from a higher ground.
A philosopher must be more than a philosopher. Plato is clothed with
the powers of a poet, stands upon the highest place of the poet, and
(though I doubt he wanted the decisive gift of lyric expression) mainly
is not a poet, because he chose to use the poetic gift to an ulterior
purpose.
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell
you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their
house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know
their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most
resembles them. Plato, especially, has no external biography. If he
had lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing of them. He ground them
all into paint. As a good chimney burns its smoke, so a philosopher
converts the value of all his fortunes into his intellectual
performances.
He was born 430 A. C. , about the time of the death of Pericles; was
of patrician connection in his times and city; and is said to have had
an early inclination for war; but in his twentieth year, meeting with
Socrates, was easily dissuaded from this pursuit, and remained for ten
years his scholar, until the death of Socrates. He then went to Megara;
accepted the invitations of Dion and of Dionysius, to the court of
Sicily; and went thither three times, though very capriciously treated.
He traveled into Italy; then into Egypt, where he stayed a long time;
some say three,--some say thirteen years. It is said, he went farther,
into Babylonia: this is uncertain. Returning to Athens, he gave lessons,
in the Academy, to those whom his fame drew thither; and died, as we
have received it, in the act of writing, at eighty-one years.
But the biography of Plato is interior. We are to account for the
supreme elevation of this man, in the intellectual history of our
race,--how it happens that, in proportion to the culture of men, they
become his scholars; that, as our Jewish Bible has implanted itself
in the table-talk and household life of every man and woman in the
European and American nations, so the writings of Plato have
pre-occupied every school of learning, every lover of thought, every
church, every poet,--making it impossible to think, on certain levels,
except through him. He stands between the truth and every man's mind,
and has almost impressed language, and the primary forms of thought,
with his name and seal. I am struck, in reading him, with the extreme
modernness of his style and spirit. Here is the germ of that Europe
we know so well, in its long history of arts and arms; here are all
its traits, already discernible in the mind of Plato,--and in none
before him. It has spread itself since into a hundred histories, but
has added no new element. This perpetual modernness is the measure of
merit, in every work of art; since the author of it was not misled by
anything shortlived or local, but abode by real and abiding traits.
How Plato came thus to be Europe, and philosophy, and almost literature,
is the problem for us to solve.
This could not have happened, without a sound, sincere, and catholic
man, able to honor, at the same time, the ideal, or laws of the mind,
and fate, or the order of nature. The first period of a nation, as of
an individual, is the period of unconscious strength. Children cry,
scream and stamp with fury, unable to express their desires. As soon
as they can speak and tell their want, and the reason of it, they
become gentle. In adult life, whilst the perceptions are obtuse, men
and women talk vehemently and superlatively, blunder and quarrel; their
manners are full of desperation; their speech is full of oaths. As
soon as, with culture, things have cleared up a little, and they see
them no longer in lumps and masses, but accurately distributed, they
desist from that weak vehemence, and explain their meaning in detail.
If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still
be a beast in the forest. The same weakness and want, on a higher
plane, occurs daily in the education of ardent young men and women.
"Ah! you don't understand me; I have never met with any one who
comprehends me:" and they sigh and weep, write verses, and walk
alone,--fault of power to express their precise meaning. In a month
or two, through the favor of their good genius, they meet some one so
related as to assist their volcanic estate; and, good communication
being once established, they are thenceforward good citizens. It is
ever thus. The progress is to accuracy, to skill, to truth, from blind
force.
There is a moment, in the history of every nation, when, proceeding
out of this brute youth, the perceptive powers reach their ripeness,
and have not yet become microscopic: so that man, at that instant,
extends across the entire scale; and, with his feet still planted on
the immense forces of night, converses, by his eyes and brain, with
solar and stellar creation. That is the moment of adult health, the
culmination of power.
Such is the history of Europe, in all points; and such in philosophy.
Its early records, almost perished, are of the immigrations from Asia,
bringing with them the dreams of barbarians; a confusion of crude
notions of morals, and of natural philosophy, gradually subsiding,
through the partial insight of single teachers.
