Uses of Great Men
Plato; or, the Philosopher
Swedenborg; or, the Mystic
Montaigne; or, the Skeptic
Shakspeare; or, the Poet
Napoleon; or, the Man of the World
Goethe; or, the Writer



Uses of Great Men



IT IS NATURAL to believe in great men. If the companions of our childhood should turn
out to be heroes, and their condition regal it would not surprise us. All mythology opens
with demigods, and the circumstance is high and poetic; that is, their genius is
paramount. In the legends of the Gautama, the first men ate the earth and found it
deliciously sweet.

Nature seems to exist for the excellent. The world is upheld by the veracity of good men:
they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and
nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society; and, actually or
ideally, we manage to live with superiors. We call our children and our lands by their
names. Their names are wrought into the verbs of language, their works and effigies are
in our houses, and every circumstance of the day recalls an anecdote of them.
The search after the great man is the dream of youth and the most serious occupation of
manhood. We travel into foreign parts to find his works,--if possible, to get a glimpse of
him. But we are put off with fortune instead. You say, the English are practical; the
Germans are hospitable; in Valencia the climate is delicious; and in the hills of the
Sacramento there is gold for the gathering. Yes, but I do not travel to find comfortable,
rich and hospitable people, or clear sky, or ingots that cost too much. But if there were
any magnet that would point to the countries and houses where are the persons who
are intrinsically rich and powerful, I would sell all and buy it, and put myself on the road
today.

The race goes with us on their credit. The knowledge that in the city is a man who
invented the railroad, raises the credit of all the citizens. But enormous populations, if
they be beggars, are disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants or of fleas,--the
more, the worse.

Our religion is the love and cherishing of these patrons. The gods of fable are the shining
moments of great men. We run all our vessels into one mould. Our colossal theologies of
Judaism, Christism, Buddhism, Mahometism, are the necessary and structural action of
the human mind. The student of history is like a man going into a warehouse to buy
cloths or carpets. He fancies he has a new article. If he go to the factory, he shall find that
his new stuff still repeats the scrolls and rosettes which are found on the interior walls of
the pyramids of Thebes. Our theism is the purification of the human mind. Man can
paint, or make, or think, nothing but man. He believes that the great material elements
had their origin from his thought. And our philosophy finds one essence collected or
distributed.

If now we proceed to inquire into the kinds of service we derive from others, let us be
warned of the danger of modern studies, and begin low enough. We must not contend
against love, or deny the substantial existence of other people. I know not what would
happen to us. We have social strengths. Our affection toward others creates a sort of
vantage or purchase which nothing will supply. I can do that by another which I cannot
do alone. I can say to you what I cannot first say to myself. Other men are lenses through
which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own,
and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the otherest. The
stronger the nature, the more it is reactive. Let us have the quality pure. A little genius
let us leave alone. A main difference betwixt men is, whether they attend their own af-
fair or not. Man is that noble endogenous plant which grows, like the palm, from within
outward. His own affair, though impossible to others, he can open with celerity and in
sport. It is easy to sugar to be sweet and to nitre to be salt. We take a great deal of pains
to waylay and entrap that which of itself will fall into our hands. I count him a great man
who inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor and
difficulty; he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light and in large relations,
whilst they must make painful corrections and keep a vigilant eye on many sources of
error. His service to us is of like sort. It costs a beautiful person no exertion to paint her
image on our eyes; yet how splendid is that benefit! It costs no more for a wise soul to
convey his quality to other men. And every one can do his best thing easiest. “Peu de
moyens, beaucoup d'effet.” He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never
reminds us of others.

But he must be related to us, and our life receive from him some promise of explanation.
I cannot tell what I would know; but I have observed there are persons who, in their
character and actions, answer questions which I have not skill to put. One man answers
some question which none of his contemporaries put, and is isolated. The past and
passing religions and philosophies answer some other questions. Certain men affect us
as rich possibilities, but helpless to themselves and to their times,--the sport perhaps of
some instinct that rules in the air;--they do not speak to our want. But the great are near;
we know them at sight. They satisfy expectation and fall into place. What is good is
effective, generative; makes for itself room, food and allies. A sound apple produces
seed,--a hybrid does not. Is a man in his place, he is constructive, fertile, magnetic,
inundating armies with his purpose, which is thus executed. The river makes its own
shores, and each legitimate idea makes its own channels and welcome,--harvests for
food, institutions for expression, weapons to fight with and disciples to explain it. The
true artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has
nothing broader than his own shoes.

Our common discourse respects two kinds of use or service from superior men. Direct
giving is agreeable to the early belief of men; direct giving of material or metaphysical
aid, as of health, eternal youth, fine senses, arts of healing, magical power and prophecy.
The boy believes there is a teacher who can sell him wisdom. Churches believe in
imputed merit. But, in strictness, we are not much cognizant of direct serving. Man is
endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The aid we have from others is mechanical
compared with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus learned is delightful in the
doing, and the effect remains. Right ethics are central and go from the soul outward. Gift
is contrary to the law of the universe. Serving others is serving us. I must absolve me to
myself. “Mind thy affair,” says the spirit:--“coxcomb, would you meddle with the skies, or
with other people?” Indirect service is left. Men have a pictorial or representative quality,
and serve us in the intellect. Behmen and Swedenborg saw that things were represent-
ative. Men are also representative; first, of things, and secondly, of ideas.

As plants convert the minerals into food for animals, so each man converts some raw
material in nature to human use. The inventors of fire, electricity, magnetism, iron, lead,
glass, linen, silk, cotton; the makers of tools; the inventor of decimal notation; the
geometer; the engineer; the musician,--severally make an easy way for all, through
unknown and impossible confusions. Each man is by secret liking connected with some
district of nature, whose agent and interpreter he is; as Linnaeus, of plants; Huber, of
bees; Fries, of lichens; Van Mons, of pears; Dalton, of atomic forms; Euclid, of lines;
Newton, of fluxions.

A man is a centre for nature, running out threads of relation through every thing, fluid
and solid, material and elemental. The earth rolls; every clod and stone comes to the
meridian: so every organ, function, acid, crystal, grain of dust, has its relation to the
brain. It waits long, but its turn comes. Each plant has its parasite, and each created
thing its lover and poet. Justice has already been done to steam, to iron, to wood, to coal,
to loadstone, to iodine, to corn and cotton; but how few materials are yet used by our
arts! The mass of creatures and of qualities are still hid and expectant. It would seem as if
each waited, like the enchanted princess in fairy tales, for a destined human deliverer.
Each must be disenchanted and walk forth to the day in human shape. In the history of
discovery, the ripe and latent truth seems to have fashioned a brain for itself. A magnet
must be made man in some Gilbert, or Swedenborg, or Oerstad, before the general mind
can come to entertain its powers.

If we limit ourselves to the first advantages, a sober grace adheres to the mineral and
botanic kingdoms, which, in the highest moments, comes up as the charm of nature,--
the glitter of the spar, the sureness of affinity, the veracity of angles. Light and darkness,
heat and cold, hunger and food, sweet and sour, solid, liquid and gas, circle us round in a
wreath of pleasures, and, by their agreeable quarrel, beguile the day of life. The eye
repeats every day the first eulogy on things,--“He saw that they were good.” We know
where to find them; and these performers are relished all the more, after a little
experience of the pretending races. We are entitled also to higher advantages.
Something is wanting to science until it has been humanized. The table of logarithms is
one thing, and its vital play in botany, music, optics and architecture, another. There are
advancements to numbers, anatomy, architecture, astronomy, little suspected at first,
when, by union with intellect and will, they ascend into the life and reappear in
conversation, character and politics.

But this comes later. We speak now only of our acquaintance with them in their own
sphere and the way in which they seem to fascinate and draw to them some genius who
occupies himself with one thing, all his life long. The possibility of interpretation lies in
the identity of the observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial side;
has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and necessary sphere where it
plays a part as indestructible as any other. And to these, their ends, all things continually
ascend. The gases gather to the solid firmament: the chemic lump arrives at the plant,
and grows; arrives at the quadruped, and walks; arrives at the man, and thinks. But also
the constituency determines the vote of the representative. He is not only representative,
but participant. Like can only be known by like. The reason why he knows about them is
that he is of them; he has just come out of nature, or from being a part of that thing.
Animated chlorine knows of chlorine, and incarnate zinc, of zinc. Their quality makes his
career; and he can variously publish their virtues, because they compose him. Man,
made of the dust of the world, does not forget his origin; and all that is yet inanimate will
one day speak and reason. Unpublished nature will have its whole secret told. Shall we
say that quartz mountains will pulverize into innumerable Werners, Von Buchs and
Beaumonts, and the laboratory of the atmosphere holds in solution I know not what
Berzeliuses and Davys?

Thus we sit by the fire and take hold on the poles of the earth. This quasi omnipresence
supplies the imbecility of our condition. In one of those celestial days when heaven and
earth meet and adorn each other, it seems a poverty that we can only spend it once: we
wish for a thousand heads, a thousand bodies, that we might celebrate its immense
beauty in many ways and places. Is this fancy? Well, in good faith, we are multiplied by
our proxies. How easily we adopt their labors! Every ship that comes to America got its
chart from Columbus. Every novel is a debtor to Homer. Every carpenter who shaves
with a fore-plane borrows the genius of a forgotten inventor. Life is girt all round with a
zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light
to our sky.Engineer, broker, jurist, physician, moralist, theologian, and every man,
inasmuch as he has any science,--is a definer and map-maker of the latitudes and
longitudes of our condition. These roadmakers on every hand enrich us. We must extend
the area of life and multiply our relations. We are as much gainers by finding a new
property in the old earth as by acquiring a new planet.

We are too passive in the reception of these material or semi-material aids. We must not
be sacks and stomachs. To ascend one step,--we are better served through our
sympathy. Activity is contagious. Looking where others look, and conversing with the
same things, we catch the charm which lured them. Napoleon said, “You must not fight
too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.” Talk much with any
man of vigorous mind, and we acquire very fast the habit of looking at things in the
same light, and on each occurrence we anticipate his thought.

Men are helpful through the intellect and the affections. Other help I find a false
appearance. If you affect to give me bread and fire, I perceive that I pay for it the full
price, and at last it leaves me as it found me, neither better nor worse: but all mental and
moral force is a positive good. It goes out from you, whether you will or not, and profits
me whom you never thought of. I cannot even hear of personal vigor of any kind, great
power of performance, without fresh resolution. We are emulous of all that man can do.
Cecil's saying of Sir Walter Raleigh, “I know that he can toil terribly,” is an electric touch.
So are Clarendon's portraits,--of Hampden, “who was of an industry and vigilance not to
be tired out or wearied by the most laborious, and of parts not to be imposed on by the
most subtle and sharp, and of a personal courage equal to his best parts”;--of Falkland,
“who was so severe an adorer of truth, that he could as easily have given himself leave to
steal, as to dissemble.” We cannot read Plutarch without a tingling of the blood; and I
accept the saying of the Chinese Mencius: “A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.
When the manners of Loo are heard of, the stupid become intelligent, and the wavering,
determined.”

This is the moral of biography; yet it is hard for departed men to touch the quick like our
own companions, whose names may not last as long. What is he whom I never think of?
Whilst in every solitude are those who succor our genius and stimulate us in wonderful
manners. There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than that other can,
and, by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What has friendship so signal as its
sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in us? We will never more think cheaply of
ourselves, or of life. We are piqued to some purpose, and the industry of the diggers on
the railroad will not again shame us.

Under this head too falls that homage, very pure as I think, which all ranks pay to the
hero of the day, from Coriolanus and Gracchus down to Pitt, Lafayette, Wellington,
Webster, Lamartine. Hear the shouts in the street! The people cannot see him enough.
They delight in a man. Here is a head and a trunk! What a front! what eyes! Atlantean
shoulders, and the whole carriage heroic, with equal inward force to guide the great
machine! This pleasure of full expression to that which, in their private experience, is
usually cramped and obstructed, runs also much higher, and is the secret of the reader's
joy in literary genius. Nothing is kept back. There is fire enough to fuse the mountain of
ore. Shakespeare's principal merit may be conveyed in saying that he of all men best
understands the English language, and can say what he will. Yet these unchoked
channels and floodgates of expression are only health or fortunate constitution.
Shakespeare's name suggests other and purely intellectual benefits.

Senates and sovereigns have no compliment, with their medals, swords and armorial
coats, like the addressing to a human being thoughts out of a certain height, and
presupposing his intelligence. This honor, which is possible in personal intercourse
scarcely twice in a lifetime, genius perpetually pays; contented if now and then in a
century the proffer is accepted. The indicators of the values of matter are degraded to a
sort of cooks and confectioners, on the appearance of the indicators of ideas. Genius is
the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws their map; and, by
acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These are at
once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have conversed with is the show.

We go to the gymnasium and the swimming-school to see the power and beauty of the
body; there is the like pleasure and a higher benefit from witnessing intellectual feats of
all kinds; as feats of memory, of mathematical combination, great power of abstraction,
the transmutings of the imagination, even versatility and concentration,--as these acts
expose the invisible organs and members of the mind, which respond, member for
member, to the parts of the body. For we thus enter a new gymnasium, and learn to
choose men by their truest marks, taught, with Plato, “to choose those who can, without
aid from the eyes or any other sense, proceed to truth and to being.” Foremost among
these activities are the summersaults, spells and resurrections wrought by the
imagination. When this wakes, a man seems to multiply ten times or a thousand times
his force. It opens the delicious sense of indeterminate size and inspires an audacious
mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a
word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed
with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the Pit. And this benefit is real because we
are entitled to these enlargements, and once having passed the bounds shall never
again be quite the miserable pedants we were.

The high functions of the intellect are so allied that some imaginative power usually
appears in all eminent minds, even in arithmeticians of the first class, but especially in
meditative men of an intuitive habit of thought. This class serve us, so that they have the
perception of identity and the perception of reaction. The eyes of Plato, Shakespeare,
Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either of these laws. The perception of these laws is
a kind of metre of the mind. Little minds are little through failure to see them.

Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our delight in reason degenerates into idolatry of
the herald. Especially when a mind of powerful method has instructed men, we find the
examples of oppression. The dominion of Aristotle, the Ptolemaic astronomy, the credit
of Luther, of Bacon, of Locke;--in religion the history of hierarchies, of saints, and the
sects which have taken the name of each founder, are in point. Alas! every man is such a
victim. The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power. It is the delight
of vulgar talent to dazzle and to blind the beholder. But true genius seeks to defend us
from itself. True genius will not impoverish, but will liberate, and add new senses. If a
wise man should appear in our village he would create, in those who conversed with him,
a new consciousness of wealth, by opening their eyes to unobserved advantages; he
would establish a sense of immovable equality, calm us with assurances that we could
not be cheated; as every one would discern the checks and guaranties of condition. The
rich would see their mistakes and poverty, the poor their escapes and their resources.

But nature brings all this about in due time. Rotation is her remedy. The soul is impat-
ient of masters and eager for change. Housekeepers say of a domestic who has been
valuable, “She had lived with me long enough.” We are tendencies, or rather, symptoms,
and none of us complete. We touch and go, and sip the foam of many lives. Rotation is
the law of nature. When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a
successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some
other and quite different field the next man will appear; not Jefferson, not Franklin, but
now a great salesman, then a road-contractor, then a student of fishes, then a buffalo-
hunting explorer, or a semi-savage Western general. Thus we make a stand against our
rougher masters; but against the best there is a finer remedy. The power which they
communicate is not theirs. When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato,
but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.

I must not forget that we have a special debt to a single class. Life is a scale of degrees.
Between rank and rank of our great men are wide intervals. Mankind have in all ages
attached themselves to a few persons who either by the quality of that idea they
embodied or by the largeness of their reception were entitled to the position of leaders
and law-givers. These teach us the qualities of primary nature,--admit us to the
constitution of things. We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions and are effectually
amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men about us are dupes. But life
is a sincerity. In lucid intervals we say, “Let there be an entrance opened for me into
realities. I have worn the fool's cap too long.” We will know the meaning of our
economies and politics. Give us the cipher, and if persons and things are scores of a
celestial music, let us read off the strains. We have been cheated of our reason; yet there
have been sane men, who enjoyed a rich and related existence. What they know, they
know for us. With each new mind, a new secret of nature transpires; nor can the Bible be
closed until the last great man is born. These men correct the delirium of the animal
spirits, make us considerate and engage us to new aims and powers. The veneration of
mankind selects these for the highest place. Witness the multitude of statues, pictures
and memorials which recall their genius in every city, village, house and ship:-

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

How to illustrate the distinctive benefit of ideas, the service rendered by those who
introduce moral truths into the general mind?--I am plagued, in all my living, with a
perpetual tariff of prices. If I work in my garden and prune an apple-tree, I am well
enough entertained, and could continue indefinitely in the like occupation. But it comes
to mind that a day is gone, and I have got this precious nothing done. I go to Boston or
New York and run up and down on my affairs: they are sped, but so is the day. I am
vexed by the recollection of this price I have paid for a trifling advantage. I remember the
peau d'ane on which whoso sat should have his desire, but a piece of the skin was gone
for every wish. I go to a convention of philanthropists. Do what I can, I cannot keep my
eyes off the clock. But if there should appear in the company some gentle soul who
knows little of persons or parties, of Carolina or Cuba, but who announces a law that
disposes these particulars, and so certifies me of the equity which checkmates every
false player, bankrupts every self-seeker, and apprises me of my independence on any
conditions of country, or time, or human body,--that man liberates me; I forget the clock.
I pass out of the sore relation to persons. I am healed of my hurts. I am made immortal
by apprehending my possession of incorruptible goods. Here is great competition of rich
and poor. We live in a market, where is only so much wheat, or wool, or land; and if I
have so much more, every other must have so much less. I seem to have no good without
breach of good manners. Nobody is glad in the gladness of another, and our system is
one of war, of an injurious superiority. Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish
to be first. It is our system; and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets,
envies and hatreds of his competitors. But in these new fields there is room: here are no
self-esteems, no exclusions.

I admire great men of all classes, those who stand for facts, and for thoughts; I like rough
and smooth, “Scourges of God,” and “Darlings of the human race.” I like the first Caesar;
and Charles V, of Spain; and Charles XII, of Sweden; Richard Plantagenet; and Bonaparte,
in France. I applaud a sufficient man, an officer equal to his office; captains, ministers,
senators. I like a master standing firm on legs of iron, wellborn, rich, handsome,
eloquent, loaded with advantages, drawing all men by fascination into tributaries and
supporters of his power. Sword and staff, or talents sword-like or staff-like, carry on the
work of the world. But I find him greater when he can abolish himself and all heroes, by
letting in this element of reason, irrespective of persons, this subtilizer and irresistible
upward force, into our thought, destroying individualism; the power so great that the
potentate is nothing. Then he is a monarch who gives a constitution to his people; a
pontiff who preaches the equality of souls and releases his servants from their
barbarous homages; an emperor who can spare his empire.


But I intended to specify, with a little minuteness, two or three points of service. Nature
never spares the opium or nepenthe, but wherever she mars her creature with some
deformity or defect, lays her poppies plentifully on the bruise, and the sufferer goes
joyfully through life, ignorant of the ruin and incapable of seeing it, though all the world
point their finger at it every day. The worthless and offensive members of society, whose
existence is a social pest, invariably think themselves the most ill-used people alive, and
never get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their
contemporaries. Our globe discovers its hidden virtues, not only in heroes and
archangels, but in gossips and nurses. Is it not a rare contrivance that lodged the due
inertia in every creature, the conserving, resisting energy, the anger at being waked or
changed? Altogether independent of the intellectual force in each is the pride of opinion,
the security that we are right. Not the feeblest grandame, not a mowing idiot, but uses
what spark of perception and faculty is left, to chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion
over the absurdities of all the rest. Difference from me is the measure of absurdity. Not
one has a misgiving of being wrong. Was it not a bright thought that made things cohere
with this bitumen, fastest of cements? But, in the midst of this chuckle of self-gratulation,
some figure goes by which Thersites too can love and admire. This is he that should
marshal us the way we were going. There is no end to his aid. Without Plato we should
almost lose our faith in the possibility of a reasonable book. We seem to want but one,
but we want one. We love to associate with heroic persons, since our receptivity is
unlimited; and, with the great, our thoughts and manners easily become great. We are all
wise in capacity, though so few in energy. There needs but one wise man in a company
and all are wise, so rapid is the contagion.

Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism and enable us to see
other people and their works. But there are vices and follies incident to whole popu-
lations and ages. Men resemble their contemporaries even more than their progenitors.
It is observed in old couples, or in persons who have been housemates for a course
of years, that they grow like, and if they should live long enough we should not be
able to know them apart. Nature abhors these complaisances which threaten to melt
the world into a lump, and hastens to break up such maudlin agglutinations. The like
assimilation goes on between men of one town, of one sect, of one political party; and
the ideas of the time are in the air, and infect all who breathe it. Viewed from any high
point, this city of New York, yonder city of London, the Western civilization, would seem a
bundle of insanities. We keep each other in countenance and exasperate by emulation
the frenzy of the time. The shield against the stingings of conscience is the universal
practice, or our contemporaries. Again, it is very easy to be as wise and good as your
companions. We learn of our contemporaries what they know without effort, and almost
through the pores of the skin. We catch it by sympathy, or as a wife arrives at the
intellectual and moral elevations of her husband. But we stop where they stop. Very
hardly can we take another step. The great, or such as hold of nature and transcend
fashions by their fidelity to universal ideas, are saviors from these federal errors, and
defend us from our contemporaries. They are the exceptions which we want, where all
grows like. A foreign greatness is the antidote for cabalism.

Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves from too much conversation with our
mates, and exult in the depth of nature in that direction in which he leads us. What
indemnification is one great man for populations of pigmies! Every mother wishes one
son a genius, though all the rest should be mediocre. But a new danger appears in the
excess of influence of the great man. His attractions warp us from our place. We have
become underlings and intellectual suicides. Ah! yonder in the horizon is our help;--other
great men, new qualities, counterweights and checks on each other. We cloy of the
honey of each peculiar greatness. Every hero becomes a bore at last. Perhaps Voltaire
was not bad-hearted, yet he said of the good Jesus, even, “I pray you, let me never hear
that man's name again.” They cry up the virtues of George Washington,--“Damn George
Washington!” is the poor Jacobin's whole speech and confutation. But it is human
nature's indispensable defence. The centripetence augments the centrifugence. We
balance one man with his opposite, and the health of the state depends on the see-saw.

There is however a speedy limit to the use of heroes. Every genius is defended from
approach by quantities of unavailableness. They are very attractive, and seem at a
distance our own: but we are hindered on all sides from approach. The more we are
drawn, the more we are repelled. There is something not solid in the good that is done
for us. The best discovery the discoverer makes for himself. It has something unreal for
his companion until he too has substantiated it. It seems as if the Deity dressed each
soul which he sends into nature in certain virtues and powers not communicable to
other men, and sending it to perform one more turn through the circle of beings, wrote,
“Not transferable” and “Good for this trip only,” on these garments of the soul. There is
somewhat deceptive about the intercourse of minds. The boundaries are invisible, but
they are never crossed. There is such good will to impart, and such good will to receive,
that each threatens to become the other; but the law of individuality collects its secret
strength: you are you, and I am I, and so we remain.

For nature wishes every thing to remain itself; and whilst every individual strives to grow
and exclude and to exclude and grow, to the extremities of the universe, and to impose
the law of its being on every other creature, Nature steadily aims to protect each against
every other. Each is self-defended. Nothing is more marked than the power by which
individuals are guarded from individuals, in a world where every benefactor becomes so
easily a malefactor only by continuation of his activity into places where it is not due;
where children seem so much at the mercy of their foolish parents, and where almost all
men are too social and interfering. We rightly speak of the guardian angels of children.
How superior in their security from infusions of evil persons, from vulgarity and second
thought! They shed their own abundant beauty on the objects they behold. Therefore
they are not at the mercy of such poor educators as we adults. If we huff and chide them
they soon come not to mind it and get a self-reliance; and if we indulge them to folly,
they learn the limitation elsewhere.

We need not fear excessive influence. A more generous trust is permitted. Serve the
great. Stick at no humiliation. Grudge no office thou canst render. Be the limb of their
body, the breath of their mouth. Compromise thy egotism. Who cares for that, so thou
gain aught wider and nobler? Never mind the taunt of Boswellism: the devotion may
easily be greater than the wretched pride which is guarding its own skirts. Be another:
not thyself, but a Platonist; not a soul, but a Christian; not a naturalist, but a Cartesian;
not a poet, but a Shakespearean. In vain, the wheels of tendency will not stop, nor will all
the forces of inertia, fear, or of love itself hold thee there. On, and forever onward! The
microscope observes a monad or wheel-insect among the infusories circulating in water.
Presently a dot appears on the animal, which enlarges to a slit, and it becomes two
perfect animals. The ever-proceeding detachment appears not less in all thought and in
society. Children think they cannot live without their parents. But, long before they are
aware of it, the black dot has appeared and the detachment taken place. Any accident
will now reveal to them their independence.


But great men:--the word is injurious. Is there caste? Is there fate? What becomes of the
promise to virtue? The thoughtful youth laments the superfoetation of nature.
“Generous and handsome,” he says, “is your hero; but look at yonder poor Paddy, whose
country is his wheelbarrow; look at his whole nation of Paddies.” Why are the masses,
from the dawn of history down, food for knives and powder? The idea dignifies a few
leaders, who have sentiment, opinion, love, self-devotion; and they make war and death
sacred;--but what for the wretches whom they hire and kill? The cheapness of man is
every day's tragedy. It is as real a loss that others should be as low as that we should be
low; for we must have society.

Is it a reply to these suggestions to say, Society is a Pestalozzian school: all are teachers
and pupils in turn? We are equally served by receiving and by imparting. Men who know
the same things are not long the best company for each other. But bring to each an
intelligent person of another experience, and it is as if you let off water from a lake by
cutting a lower basin. It seems a mechanical advantage, and great benefit it is to each
speaker, as he can now paint out his thought to himself. We pass very fast, in our
personal moods, from dignity to dependence. And if any appear never to assume the
chair, but always to stand and serve, it is because we do not see the company in a
sufficiently long period for the whole rotation of parts to come about. As to what we call
the masses, and common men,--there are no common men. All men are at last of a size;
and true art is only possible on the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis
somewhere. Fair play and an open field and freshest laurels to all who have won them!
But heaven reserves an equal scope for every creature. Each is uneasy until he has
produced his private ray unto the concave sphere and beheld his talent also in its last
nobility and exaltation.

The heroes of the hour are relatively great; of a faster growth; or they are such in whom,
at the moment of success, a quality is ripe which is then in request. Other days will
demand other qualities. Some rays escape the common observer, and want a finely
adapted eye. Ask the great man if there be none greater. His companions are; and not
the less great but the more that society cannot see them. Nature never sends a great
man into the planet without confiding the secret to another soul.

One gracious fact emerges from these studies,--that there is true ascension in our love.
The reputations of the nineteenth century will one day be quoted to prove its barbarism.
The genius of humanity is the real subject whose biography is written in our annals. We
must infer much, and supply many chasms in the record. The history of the universe is
symptomatic, and life is mnemonical. No man, in all the procession of famous men, is
reason or illumination or that essence we were looking for; but is an exhibition, in some
quarter, of new possibilities. Could we one day complete the immense figure which
these flagrant points compose! The study of many individuals leads us to an elemental
region wherein the individual is lost, or wherein all touch by their summits. Thought and
feeling that break out there cannot be impounded by any fence of personality. This is the
key to the power of the greatest men,--their spirit diffuses itself. A new quality of mind
travels by night and by day, in concentric circles from its origin, and publishes itself by
unknown methods: the union of all minds appears intimate; what gets admission to one,
cannot be kept out of any other; the smallest acquisition of truth or of energy, in any
quarter, is so much good to the commonwealth of souls. If the disparities of talent and
position vanish when the individuals are seen in the duration which is necessary to
complete the career of each, even more swiftly the seeming injustice disappears when
we ascend to the central identity of all the individuals, and know that they are made of
the substance which ordaineth and doeth.

The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The qualities abide; the
men who exhibit them have now more, now less, and pass away; the qualities remain on
another brow. No experience is more familiar. Once you saw phoenixes: they are gone;
the world is not therefore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read sacred emblems
turn out to be common pottery; but the sense of the pictures is sacred, and you may still
read them transferred to the walls of the world. For a time our teachers serve us
personally, as metres or milestones of progress. Once they were angels of knowledge
and their figures touched the sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, culture and
limits; and they yielded their place to other geniuses. Happy, if a few names remain so
high that we have not been able to read them nearer, and age and comparison have not
robbed them of a ray. But at last we shall cease to look in men for completeness, and
shall content ourselves with their social and delegated quality. All that respects the
individual is temporary and prospective, like the individual himself, who is ascending out
of his limits into a catholic existence. We have never come at the true and best benefit of
any genius so long as we believe him an original force. In the moment when he ceases to
help us as a cause, he begins to help us more as an effect. Then he appears as an
exponent of a vaster mind and will. The opaque self becomes transparent with the light
of the First Cause.

Yet, within the limits of human education and agency, we may say great men exist that
there may be greater men. The destiny of organized nature is amelioration, and who can
tell its limits? It is for man to tame the chaos; on every side, whilst he lives, to scatter the
seeds of science and of song, that climate, corn, animals, men, may be milder, and the
germs of love and benefit may be multiplied.




Plato; or, the Philosopher



AMONG secular 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 cornerstone of schools; these are the
fountain-head of literatures. A discipline it is in logic, arithmetic, taste, symmetry, poetry,
language, rhetoric, ontology, morals or practical wisdom. There was never such range of
speculation. Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of
thought. Great havoc makes he among our originalities. We have reached the mountain
from which all these drift boulders were detached. The Bible of the learned for twenty-
two hundred years, every brisk young man who says in succession fine things to each
reluctant generation,--Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, Rousseau, Alfieri,
Coleridge,--is some reader of Plato, translating into the vernacular, wittily, his good
things. Even the men of grander proportion suffer some deduction from the misfortune
(shall I say?) of coming after this exhausting generalizer. St. Augustine, Copernicus,
Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg, Goethe, are likewise his debtors and must say after him.
For it is fair to credit the broadest generalizer with all the particulars deducible from his
thesis.

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the shame of mankind,
since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories. No wife,
no children had he, and the thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity and are
tinged with his mind. How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out of night,
to be his men,--Platonists! the Alexandrians, a constellation of genius; the Elizabethans,
not less; Sir Thomas More, Henry More, John Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy
Taylor, Ralph Cudworth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; Marcilius Ficinus and Picus
Mirandola. Calvinism is in his Phaedo: Christianity is in it. Mahometanism draws all its
philosophy, in its hand-book of morals, the Akhlak-y-Jalaly, from him. Mysticism finds in
Plato all its texts. This citizen of a town in Greece is no villager nor patriot. An Englishman
reads and says, “how English!” a German--“how Teutonic!” an Italian--“how Roman and
how Greek!” As they say that Helen of Argos had that universal beauty that every body
felt related to her, so Plato seems to a reader in New England an American genius. His
broad humanity transcends all sectional lines.

This range of Plato instructs us what to think of the vexed question concerning his
reputed works,--what are genuine, what spurious. It is singular that wherever we find a
man higher by a whole head than any of his contemporaries, it is sure to come into
doubt what are his real works. Thus Homer, Plato, Raffaelle, Shakespeare. For these men
magnetize their contemporaries, so that their companions can do for them what they
can never do for themselves; and the great man does thus live in several bodies, and
write, or paint or act, by many hands; and after some time it is not easy to say what is the
authentic work of the master and what is only of his school.

Plato, too, like every great man, consumed his own times. What is a great man but one of
great affinities, who takes up into himself all arts, sciences, all knowables, as his food? He
can spare nothing; he can dispose of every thing. What is not good for virtue, is good for
knowledge. Hence his contemporaries tax him with plagiarism. But the inventor only
knows how to borrow; and society is glad to forget the innumerable laborers who
ministered to this architect, and reserves all its gratitude for him. When we are praising
Plato, it seems we are praising quotations from Solon and Sophron and Philolaus. Be it
so. Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines
and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. And this
grasping inventor puts all nations under contribution.

Plato absorbed the learning of his times,--Philolaus, Timaeus, Heraclitus, Parmenides,
and what else; then his master, Socrates; and finding himself still capable of a larger
synthesis,--beyond all example then or since,--he traveled into Italy, to gain what
Pythagoras had for him; then into Egypt, and perhaps still farther East, to import the
other element, which Europe wanted, into the European mind. This breadth entitles him
to stand as the representative of philosophy. He says, in the Republic, “Such a genius as
philosophers must of necessity have, is wont but seldom in all its parts to meet in one
man, but its different parts generally spring up in different persons.” Every man who
would do anything well, must come to it from a higher ground. A philosopher must be
more than a philosopher. Plato is clothed with the powers of a poet, stands upon the
highest place of the poet, and (though I doubt he wanted the decisive gift of lyric
expression), mainly is not a poet because he chose to use the poetic gift to an ulterior
purpose.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about
them. They lived in their writings, and so their house and street life was trivial and
commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of
their readers most resembles them. Plato especially has no external biography. If he had
lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing of them. He ground them all into paint. As a
good chimney burns its smoke, so a philosopher converts the value of all his fortunes
into his intellectual performances.

He was born 427 A.C., about the time of the death of Pericles; was of patrician
connection in his times and city, and is said to have had an early inclination for war, but,
in his twentieth year, meeting with Socrates, was easily dissuaded from this pursuit and
remained for ten years his scholar, until the death of Socrates. He then went to Megara,
accepted the invitations of Dion and of Dionysius to the court of Sicily, and went thither
three times, though very capriciously treated. He traveled into Italy; then into Egypt,
where he stayed a long time; some say three,--some say thirteen years. It is said he went
farther, into Babylonia: this is uncertain. Returning to Athens, he gave lessons in the
Academy to those whom his fame drew thither; and died, as we have received it, in the
act of writing, at eighty-one years.

But the biography of Plato is interior. We are to account for the supreme elevation of this
man in the intellectual history of our race,--how it happens that in proportion to the
culture of men they become his scholars; that, as our Jewish Bible has implanted itself in
the tabletalk and household life of every man and woman in the European and American
nations, so the writings of Plato have preoccupied every school of learning, every lover
of thought, every church, every poet,--making it impossible to think, on certain levels,
except through him. He stands between the truth and every man's mind, and has almost
impressed language and the primary forms of thought with his name and seal. I am
struck, in reading him, with the extreme modernness of his style and spirit. Here is the
germ of that Europe we know so well, in its long history of arts and arms; here are all its
traits, already discernible in the mind of Plato,--and in none before him. It has spread
itself since into a hundred histories, but has added no new element. This perpetual
modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art; since the author of it was not
misled by any thing short-lived or local, but abode by real and abiding traits. How Plato
came thus to be Europe, and philosophy, and almost literature, is the problem for us to
solve.

This could not have happened without a sound, sincere and catholic man, able to honor,
at the same time, the ideal, or laws of the mind, and fate, or the order of nature. The first
period of a nation, as of an individual, is the period of unconscious strength. Children cry,
scream and stamp with fury, unable to express their desires. As soon as they can speak
and tell their want and the reason of it, they become gentle. In adult life, whilst the
perceptions are obtuse, men and women talk vehemently and superlatively, blunder and
quarrel: their manners are full of desperation; their speech is full of oaths. As soon as,
with culture, things have cleared up a little, and they see them no longer in lumps and
masses but accurately distributed, they desist from that weak vehemence and explain
their meaning in detail. If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would
still be a beast in the forest. The same weakness and want, on a higher plane, occurs
daily in the education of ardent young men and women. “Ah! you don't understand me; I
have never met with any one who comprehends me”: and they sigh and weep, write
verses and walk alone,--fault of power to express their precise meaning. In a month or
two, through the favor of their good genius, they meet some one so related as to assist
their volcanic estate, and, good communication being once established, they are
thenceforward good citizens. It is ever thus. The progress is to accuracy, to skill, to truth,
from blind force.

There is a moment in the history of every nation, when, proceeding out of this brute
youth, the perceptive powers reach their ripeness and have not yet become microscopic:
so that man, at that instant, extends across the entire scale, and, with his feet still
planted on the immense forces of night, converses by his eyes and brain with solar and
stellar creation. That is the moment of adult health, the culmination of power.
Such is the history of Europe, in all points; and such in philosophy. Its early records,
almost perished, are of the immigrations from Asia, bringing with them the dreams of
barbarians; a confusion of crude notions of morals and of natural philosophy, gradually
subsiding through the partial insight of single teachers.

Before Pericles came the Seven Wise Masters, and we have the beginnings of geometry,
metaphysics and ethics: then the partialists,--deducing the origin of things from flux or
water, or from air, or from fire, or from mind. All mix with these causes mythologic
pictures. At last comes Plato, the distributor, who needs no barbaric point, or tattoo, or
whooping; for he can define. He leaves with Asia the vast and superlative; he is the
arrival of accuracy and intelligence. “He shall be as a god to me, who can rightly divide
and define.”

This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to
itself of the constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts lie forever at the base; the one,
and the two: 1. Unity, or Identity; and, 2. Variety. We unite all things by perceiving the law
which pervades them; by perceiving the superficial differences and the profound
resemblances. But every mental act,--this very perception of identity or oneness,
recognizes the difference of things. Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to speak or
to think without embracing both.

The mind is urged to ask for one cause of many effects; then for the cause of that; and
again the cause, diving still into the profound: self-assured that it shall arrive at an
absolute and sufficient one,--a one that shall be all. “In the midst of the sun is the light, in
the midst of the light is truth, and in the midst of truth is the imperishable being,” say the
Vedas. All philosophy, of East and West, has the same centripetence. Urged by an
opposite necessity, the mind returns from the one to that which is not one, but other or
many; from cause to effect; and affirms the necessary existence of variety, the self-
existence of both, as each is involved in the other. These strictly-blended elements it is
the problem of thought to separate and to reconcile. Their existence is mutually
contradictory and exclusive; and each so fast slides into the other that we can never say
what is one, and what it is not. The Proteus is as nimble in the highest as in the lowest
grounds; when we contemplate the one, the true, the good,--as in the surfaces and
extremities of matter.

In all nations there are minds which incline to dwell in the conception of the fundamental
Unity. The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of devotion lose all being in one Being. This
tendency finds its highest expression in the religious writings of the East, and chiefly in
the Indian Scriptures, in the Vedas, the Bhagavat Geeta, and the Vishnu Purana. Those
writings contain little else than this idea, and they rise to pure and sublime strains in
celebrating it.

The Same, the Same: friend and foe are of one stuff; the ploughman, the plough and the
furrow are of one stuff; and the stuff is such and so much that the variations of form are
unimportant. “You are fit” (says the supreme Krishna to a sage) “to apprehend that you
are not distinct from me. That which I am, thou art, and that also is this world, with its
gods and heroes and mankind. Men contemplate distinctions, because they are
stupefied with ignorance.” “The words I and mine constitute ignorance. What is the great
end of all, you shall now learn from me. It is soul,--one in all bodies, pervading, uniform,
perfect, preeminent over nature, exempt from birth, growth and decay, omnipresent,
made up of true knowledge, independent, unconnected with unrealities, with name,
species and the rest, in time past, present and to come. The knowledge that this spirit,
which is essentially one, is in one's own and in all other bodies, is the wisdom of one who
knows the unity of things. As one diffusive air, passing through the perforations of a
flute, is distinguished as the notes of a scale, so the nature of the Great Spirit is single,
though its forms be manifold, arising from the consequences of acts. When the
difference of the investing form, as that of god or the rest, is destroyed, there is no
distinction.” “The whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu, who is identical with all
things, and is to be regarded by the wise as not differing from, but as the same as
themselves. I neither am going nor coming; nor is my dwelling in any one place; nor art
thou, thou; nor are others, others; nor am I, I.” As if he had said, “All is for the soul, and
the soul is Vishnu; and animals and stars are transient paintings; and light is whitewash;
and durations are deceptive; and form is imprisonment; and heaven itself a decoy.” That
which the soul seeks is resolution into being above form, out of Tartarus and out of
heaven,--liberation from nature.

If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action tends
directly backwards to diversity. The first is the course or gravitation of mind; the second
is the power of nature. Nature is the manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces.
Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things,
all thought; the one, the many. One is being; the other, intellect: one is necessity; the
other, freedom: one, rest; the other, motion: one, power; the other, distribution: one,
strength; the other, pleasure: one, consciousness; the other, definition: one, genius; the
other, talent: one, earnestness; the other, knowledge: one, possession; the other, trade:
one, caste; the other, culture: one, king; the other, democracy: and, if we dare carry these
generalizations a step higher, and name the last tendency of both, we might say, that the
end of the one is escape from organization,--pure science; and the end of the other is
the highest instrumentality, or use of means, or executive deity.

Each student adheres, by temperament and by habit, to the first or to the second of
these gods of the mind. By religion, he tends to unity; by intellect, or by the senses, to
the many. A too rapid unification, and an excessive appliance to parts and particulars,
are the twin dangers of speculation.

To this partiality the history of nations corresponded. The country of unity, of immov-
able institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in abstractions, of men faithful in
doctrine and in practice to the idea of a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is Asia; and it
realizes this faith in the social institution of caste. On the other side, the genius of Europe
is active and creative: it resists caste by culture; its philosophy was a discipline; it is a land
of arts, inventions, trade, freedom. If the East loved infinity, the West delighted in
boundaries.

European civility is the triumph of talent, the extension of system, the sharpened
understanding, adaptive skill, delight in forms, delight in manifestation, in compre-
hensible results. Pericles, Athens, Greece, had been working in this element with
the joy of genius not yet chilled by any foresight of the detriment of an excess. They saw
before them no sinister political economy; no ominous Malthus; no Paris or London; no
pitiless subdivision of classes,--the doom of the pin-makers, the doom of the weavers, of
dressers, of stockingers, of carders, of spinners, of colliers; no Ireland; no Indian caste,
superinduced by the efforts of Europe to throw it off. The understanding was in its health
and prime. Art was in its splendid novelty. They cut the Pentelican marble as if it were
snow, and their perfect works in architecture and sculpture seemed things of course, not
more difficult than the completion of a new ship at the Medford yards, or new mills at
Lowell. These things are in course, and may be taken for granted. The Roman legion,
Byzantine legislation, English trade, the saloons of Versailles, the cafes of Paris, the
steam-mill, steamboat, steam-coach, may all be seen in perspective; the town-meeting,
the ballot-box, the newspaper and cheap press.

Meantime, Plato, in Egypt and in Eastern pilgrimages, imbibed the idea of one Deity, in
which all things are absorbed. The unity of Asia and the detail of Europe; the infinitude
of the Asiatic soul and the defining, result-loving, machine-making, surface-seeking,
opera-going Europe,--Plato came to join, and, by contact, to enhance the energy of each.
The excellence of Europe and Asia are in his brain. Metaphysics and natural philosophy
expressed the genius of Europe; he substructs the religion of Asia, as the base.

In short, a balanced soul was born, perceptive of the two elements. It is as easy to be
great as to be small. The reason why we do not at once believe in admirable souls is
because they are not in our experience. In actual life, they are so rare as to be incredible;
but primarily there is not only no presumption against them, but the strongest
presumption in favor of their appearance. But whether voices were heard in the sky, or
not; whether his mother or his father dreamed that the infant man-child was the son of
Apollo; whether a swarm of bees settled on his lips, or not;--a man who could see two
sides of a thing was born. The wonderful synthesis so familiar in nature; the upper and
the under side of the medal of Jove; the union of impossibilities, which reappears in
every object; its real and its ideal power,--was now also transferred entire to the
consciousness of a man.

The balanced soul came. If he loved abstract truth, he saved himself by propounding the
most popular of all principles, the absolute good, which rules rulers, and judges the
judge. If he made transcendental distinctions, he fortified himself by drawing all his
illustrations from sources disdained by orators and polite conversers; from mares and
puppies; from pitchers and soup-ladles; from cooks and criers; the shops of potters,
horse-doctors, butchers and fishmongers. He cannot forgive in himself a partiality, but is
resolved that the two poles of thought shall appear in his statement. His argument and
his sentence are self-imposed and spherical. The two poles appear; yes, and become two
hands, to grasp and appropriate their own.

Every great artist has been such by synthesis. Our strength is transitional, alternating; or,
shall I say, a thread of two strands. The sea-shore, sea seen from shore, shore seen from
sea; the taste of two metals in contact; and our enlarged powers at the approach and at
the departure of a friend; the experience of poetic creativeness, which is not found in
staying at home, nor yet in traveling, but in transitions from one to the other, which must
therefore be adroitly managed to present as much transitional surface as possible; this
command of two elements must explain the power and the charm of Plato. Art
expresses the one or the same by the different. Thought seeks to know unity in unity;
poetry to show it by variety; that is, always by an object or symbol. Plato keeps the two
vases, one of aether and one of pigment, at his side, and invariably uses both. Things
added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language are
inexhaustibly attractive. Plato turns incessantly the obverse and the reverse of the medal
of Jove.

To take an example:--The physical philosophers had sketched each his theory of the
world; the theory of atoms, of fire, of flux, of spirit; theories mechanical and chemical in
their genius. Plato, a master of mathematics, studious of all natural laws and causes,
feels these, as second causes, to be no theories of the world but bare inventories and
lists. To the study of nature he therefore prefixes the dogma,--“Let us declare the cause
which led the Supreme Ordainer to produce and compose the universe. He was good;
and he who is good has no kind of envy. Exempt from envy, he wished that all things
should be as much as possible like himself. Whosoever, taught by wise men, shall admit
this as the prime cause of the origin and foundation of the world, will be in the truth.” “All
things are for the sake of the good, and it is the cause of every thing beautiful.” This
dogma animates and impersonates his philosophy.

The synthesis which makes the character of his mind appears in all his talents. Where
there is great compass of wit, we usually find excellencies that combine easily in the
living man, but in description appear incompatible. The mind of Plato is not to be
exhibited by a Chinese catalogue, but is to be apprehended by an original mind in the
exercise of its original power. In him the freest abandonment is united with the precision
of a geometer. His daring imagination gives him the more solid grasp of facts; as the
birds of highest flight have the strongest alar bones. His patrician polish, his intrinsic
elegance, edged by an irony so subtle that it stings and paralyzes, adorn the soundest
health and strength of frame. According to the old sentence, “If Jove should descend to
the earth, he would speak in the style of Plato.”

With this palatial air there is, for the direct aim of several of his works and running
through the tenor of them all, a certain earnestness, which mounts, in the Republic and
in the Phaedo, to piety. He has been charged with feigning sickness at the time of the
death of Socrates. But the anecdotes that have come down from the times attest his
manly interference before the people in his master's behalf, since even the savage cry
of the assembly to Plato is preserved; and the indignation towards popular government,
in many of his pieces, expresses a personal exasperation. He has a probity, a native
reverence for justice and honor, and a humanity which makes him tender for the
superstitions of the people. Add to this, he believes that poetry, prophecy and the high
insight are from a wisdom of which man is not master; that the gods never philosophize,
but by a celestial mania these miracles are accomplished. Horsed on these winged
steeds, he sweeps the dim regions, visits worlds which flesh cannot enter; he saw the
souls in pain, he hears the doom of the judge, he beholds the penal metempsychosis,
the Fates, with the rock and shears, and hears the intoxicating hum of their spindle.

But his circumspection never forsook him. One would say he had read the inscription on
the gates of Busyrane,--“Be bold”; and on the second gate,--“Be bold, be bold, and
evermore be bold”; and then again had paused well at the third gate,--“Be not too bold.”
His strength is like the momentum of a falling planet, and his discretion the return of its
due and perfect curve,--so excellent is his Greek love of boundary and his skill in
definition. In reading logarithms one is not more secure than in following Plato in his
flights. Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are
playing in the sky. He has finished his thinking before he brings it to the reader, and he
abounds in the surprises of a literary master. He has that opulence which furnishes, at
every turn, the precise weapon he needs. As the rich man wears no more garments,
drives no more horses, sits in no more chambers than the poor,--but has that one dress,
or equipage, or instrument, which is fit for the hour and the need; so Plato, in his plenty,
is never restricted, but has the fit word. There is indeed no weapon in all the armory of
wit which he did not possess and use,--epic, analysis, mania, intuition, music, satire and
irony, down to the customary and polite. His illustrations are poetry and his jests
illustrations. Socrates' profession of obstetric art is good philosophy; and his finding that
word “cookery,” and “adulatory art,” for rhetoric, in the Gorgias, does us a substantial
service still. No orator can measure in effect with him who can give good nicknames.

What moderation and understatement and checking his thunder in mid volley! He has
good-naturedly furnished the courtier and citizen with all that can be said against the
schools. “For philosophy is an elegant thing, if any one modestly meddles with it; but if
he is conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts the man.” He could well afford
to be generous,--he, who from the sunlike centrality and reach of his vision, had a faith
without cloud. Such as his perception, was his speech: he plays with the doubt and
makes the most of it: he paints and quibbles; and by and by comes a sentence that
moves the sea and land. The admirable earnest comes not only at intervals, in the
perfect yes and no of the dialogue, but in bursts of light. “I, therefore, Callicles, am
persuaded by these accounts, and consider how I may exhibit my soul before the judge
in a healthy condition. Wherefore, disregarding the honors that most men value, and
looking to the truth, I shall endeavor in reality to live as virtuously as I can; and when I
die, to die so. And I invite all other men, to the utmost of my power; and you too I in turn
invite to this contest, which, I affirm, surpasses all contests here.”

He is a great average man; one who, to the best thinking, adds a proportion and equality
in his faculties, so that men see in him their own dreams and glimpses made available
and made to pass for what they are. A great common-sense is his warrant and
qualification to be the world's interpreter. He has reason, as all the philosophic and
poetic class have: but he has also what they have not,--this strong solving sense to
reconcile his poetry with the appearances of the world, and build a bridge from the
streets of cities to the Atlantis. He omits never this graduation, but slopes his thought,
however picturesque the precipice on one side, to an access from the plain. He never
writes in ecstasy, or catches us up into poetic raptures.


Plato apprehended the cardinal facts. He could prostrate himself on the earth and cover
his eyes whilst he adored that which cannot be numbered, or gauged, or known, or
named: that of which every thing can be affirmed and denied: that “which is entity and
nonentity.” He called it super-essential. He even stood ready, as in the Parmenides, to
demonstrate that it was so,--that this Being exceeded the limits of intellect. No man ever
more fully acknowledged the Ineffable. Having paid his homage, as for the human race,
to the Illimitable, he then stood erect, and for the human race affirmed, “And yet things
are knowable!”--that is, the Asia in his mind was first heartily honored,--the ocean of love
and power, before form, before will, before knowledge, the Same, the Good, the One;
and now, refreshed and empowered by this worship, the instinct of Europe, namely,
culture, returns; and he cries, “Yet things are knowable!” They are knowable, because
being from one, things correspond. There is a scale; and the correspondence of heaven
to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of
stars, called astronomy; a science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of
qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,--I call it Dialectic,--which is
the Intellect discriminating the false and the true. It rests on the observation of identity
and diversity; for to judge is to unite to an object the notion which belongs to it. The
sciences, even the best,--mathematics and astronomy,--are like sportsmen, who seize
whatever prey offers, even without being able to make any use of it. Dialectic must teach
the use of them. “This is of that rank that no intellectual man will enter on any study for
its own sake, but only with a view to advance himself in that one sole science which
embraces all.”

“The essence or peculiarity of man is to comprehend a whole; or that which in the
diversity of sensations can be comprised under a rational unity.” “The soul which has
never perceived the truth, cannot pass into the human form.” I announce to men the
Intellect. I announce the good of being interpenetrated by the mind that made nature:
this benefit, namely, that it can understand nature, which it made and maketh. Nature is
good, but intellect is better: as the lawgiver is before the law-receiver. I give you joy, O
sons of men! that truth is altogether wholesome; that we have hope to search out what
might be the very self of everything. The misery of man is to be baulked of the sight of
essence and to be stuffed with conjectures; but the supreme good is reality; the supreme
beauty is reality; and all virtue and all felicity depend on this science of the real: for
courage is nothing else than knowledge; the fairest fortune that can befall man is to be
guided by his daemon to that which is truly his own. This also is the essence of justice,--
to attend every one his own: nay, the notion of virtue is not to be arrived at except
through direct contemplation of the divine essence. Courage then for “the persuasion
that we must search that which we do not know, will render us, beyond comparison,
better, braver and more industrious than if we thought it impossible to discover what we
do not know, and useless to search for it.” He secures a position not to be commanded,
by his passion for reality; valuing philosophy only as it is the pleasure of conversing with
real being.

Thus, full of the genius of Europe, he said, Culture. He saw the institutions of Sparta and
recognized, more genially one would say than any since, the hope of education. He
delighted in every accomplishment, in every graceful and useful and truthful
performance; above all in the splendors of genius and intellectual achievement. “The
whole of life, O Socrates,” said Glauco, “is, with the wise, the measure of hearing such
discourses as these.” What a price he sets on the feats of talent, on the powers of
Pericles, of Isocrates, of Parmenides! What price above price on the talents themselves!
He called the several faculties, gods, in his beautiful personation. What value he gives to
the art of gymnastic in education; what to geometry; what to music; what to astronomy,
whose appeasing and medicinal power he celebrates! In the Timaeus he indicates the
highest employment of the eyes. “By us it is asserted that God invented and bestowed
sight on us for this purpose,--that on surveying the circles of intelligence in the heavens,
we might properly employ those of our own minds, which, though disturbed when
compared with the others that are uniform, are still allied to their circulations; and that
having thus learned, and being naturally possessed of a correct reasoning faculty, we
might, by imitating the uniform revolutions of divinity, set right our own wanderings and
blunders.” And in the Republic,-- “By each of these disciplines a certain organ of the soul
is both purified and reanimated which is blinded and buried by studies of another kind; an
organ better worth saving than ten thousand eyes, since truth is perceived by this alone.”

He said, Culture; but he first admitted its basis, and gave immeasurably the first place to
advantages of nature. His patrician tastes laid stress on the distinctions of birth. In the
doctrine of the organic character and disposition is the origin of caste. “Such as were fit
to govern, into their composition the informing Deity mingled gold; into the military,
silver; iron and brass for husbandmen and artificers.” The East confirms itself, in all ages,
in this faith. The Koran is explicit on this point of caste. “Men have their metal, as of gold
and silver. Those of you who were the worthy ones in the state of ignorance, will be the
worthy ones in the state of faith, as soon as you embrace it.” Plato was not less firm. “Of
the five orders of things, only four can be taught to the generality of men.” In the
Republic he insists on the temperaments of the youth, as first of the first.

A happier example of the stress laid on nature is in the dialogue with the young Theages,
who wishes to receive lessons from Socrates. Socrates declares that if some have grown
wise by associating with him, no thanks are due to him; but, simply, whilst they were with
him they grew wise, not because of him; he pretends not to know the way of it. “It is
adverse to many, nor can those be benefited by associating with me whom the Daemon
opposes; so that it is not possible for me to live with these. With many however he does
not prevent me from conversing, who yet are not at all benefited by associating with me.
Such, O Theages, is the association with me; for, if it pleases the God, you will make great
and rapid proficiency: you will not, if he does not please. Judge whether it is not safer to
be instructed by some one of those who have power over the benefit which they impart
to men, than by me, who benefit or not, just as it may happen.” As if he had said, “I have
no system. I cannot be answerable for you. You will be what you must. If there is love
between us, inconceivably delicious and profitable will our intercourse be; if not, your
time is lost and you will only annoy me. I shall seem to you stupid, and the reputation I
have, false. Quite above us, beyond the will of you or me, is this secret affinity or
repulsion laid. All my good is magnetic, and I educate, not by lessons, but by going about
my business.”

He said, Culture; he said, Nature; and he failed not to add, “There is also the divine.”
There is no thought in any mind but it quickly tends to convert itself into a power and
organizes a huge instrumentality of means. Plato, lover of limits, loved the illimitable, saw
the enlargement and nobility which come from truth itself and good itself, and
attempted as if on the part of the human intellect, once for all to do it adequate
homage,--homage fit for the immense soul to receive, and yet homage becoming the
intellect to render. He said then, “Our faculties run out into infinity, and return to us
thence. We can define but a little way; but here is a fact which will not be skipped, and
which to shut our eyes upon is suicide. All things are in a scale; and, begin where we will,
ascend and ascend. All things are symbolical; and what we call results are beginnings.”

A key to the method and completeness of Plato is his twice bisected line. After he has
illustrated the relation between the absolute good and true and the forms of the
intelligible world, he says: “Let there be a line cut in two unequal parts. Cut again each of
these two main parts,--one representing the visible, the other the intelligible world,--and
let these two new sections represent the bright part and the dark part of each of these
worlds. You will have, for one of the sections of the visible world, images, that is, both
shadows and reflections;--for the other section, the objects of these images, that is,
plants, animals, and the works of art and nature. Then divide the intelligible world in like
manner; the one section will be of opinions and hypotheses, and the other section of
truths.” To these four sections, the four operations of the soul correspond,--conjecture,
faith, understanding, reason. As every pool reflects the image of the sun, so every
thought and thing restores us an image and creature of the supreme Good. The universe
is perforated by a million channels for his activity. All things mount and mount.

All his thought has this ascension; in Phaedrus, teaching that beauty is the most lovely of
all things, exciting hilarity and shedding desire and confidence through the universe
wherever it enters, and it enters in some degree into all things:--but that there is another,
which is as much more beautiful than beauty as beauty is than chaos; namely, wisdom,
which our wonderful organ of sight cannot reach unto, but which, could it be seen,
would ravish us with its perfect reality. He has the same regard to it as the source of
excellence in works of art. When an artificer, he says, in the fabrication of any work,
looks to that which always subsists according to the same; and, employing a model of
this kind, expresses its idea and power in his work,--it must follow that his production
should be beautiful. But when he beholds that which is born and dies, it will be far from
beautiful.

Thus ever: the Banquet is a teaching in the same spirit, familiar now to all the poetry and
to all the sermons of the world, that the love of the sexes is initial, and symbolizes at a
distance the passion of the soul for that immense lake of beauty it exists to seek. This
faith in the Divinity is never out of mind, and constitutes the ground of all his dogmas.
Body cannot teach wisdom;--God only. In the same mind he constantly affirms that virtue
cannot be taught; that it is not a science, but an inspiration; that the greatest goods are
produced to us through mania and are assigned to us by a divine gift.

This leads me to that central figure which he has established in his Academy as the
organ through which every considered opinion shall be announced, and whose
biography he has likewise so labored that the historic facts are lost in the light of Plato's
mind. Socrates and Plato are the double star which the most powerful instruments will
not entirely separate. Socrates again, in his traits and genius, is the best example of that
synthesis which constitutes Plato's extraordinary power. Socrates, a man of humble
stem, but honest enough; of the commonest history; of a personal homeliness so
remarkable as to be a cause of wit in others:--the rather that his broad good nature and
exquisite taste for a joke invited the sally, which was sure to be paid. The players
personated him on the stage; the potters copied his ugly face on their stone jugs. He was
a cool fellow, adding to his humor a perfect temper and a knowledge of his man, be he
who he might whom he talked with, which laid the companion open to certain defeat in
any debate,--and in debate he immoderately delighted. The young men are prodigiously
fond of him and invite him to their feasts, whither he goes for conversation. He can
drink, too; has the strongest head in Athens; and after leaving the whole party under the
table, goes away as if nothing had happened, to begin new dialogues with somebody
that is sober. In short, he was what our country-people call an old one.

He affected a good many citizen-like tastes, was monstrously fond of Athens, hated trees,
never willingly went beyond the walls, knew the old characters, valued the bores and
philistines, thought every thing in Athens a little better than anything in any other place.
He was plain as a Quaker in habit and speech, affected low phrases, and illustrations
from cocks and quails, soup-pans and sycamore-spoons, grooms and farriers, and
unnamable offices,--especially if he talked with any superfine person. He had a Franklin-
like wisdom. Thus he showed one who was afraid to go on foot to Olympia, that it was
no more than his daily walk within doors, if continuously extended, would easily reach.

Plain old uncle as he was, with his great ears, an immense talker,--the rumor ran that on
one or two occasions, in the war with Boeotia, he had shown a determination which had
covered the retreat of a troop; and there was some story that under cover of folly, he
had, in the city government, when one day he chanced to hold a seat there, evinced a
courage in opposing singly the popular voice, which had well-nigh ruined him. He is very
poor; but then he is hardy as a soldier, and can live on a few olives; usually, in the
strictest sense, on bread and water, except when entertained by his friends. His
necessary expenses were exceedingly small, and no one could live as he did. He wore no
under garment; his upper garment was the same for summer and winter, and he went
barefooted; and it is said that to procure the pleasure, which he loves, of talking at his
ease all day with the most elegant and cultivated young men, he will now and then
return to his shop and carve statues, good or bad, for sale. However that be, it is certain
that he had grown to delight in nothing else than this conversation; and that, under his
hypocritical pretence of knowing nothing, he attacks and brings down all the fine
speakers, all the fine philosophers of Athens, whether natives or strangers from Asia
Minor and the islands. Nobody can refuse to talk with him, he is so honest and really
curious to know; a man who was willingly confuted if he did not speak the truth, and who
willingly confuted others asserting what was false; and not less pleased when confuted
than when confuting; for he thought not any evil happened to men of such a magnitude
as false opinion respecting the just and unjust. A pitiless disputant, who knows nothing,
but the bounds of whose conquering intelligence no man had ever reached; whose
temper was imperturbable; whose dreadful logic was always leisurely and sportive; so
careless and ignorant as to disarm the wariest and draw them, in the pleasantest
manner, into horrible doubts and confusion. But he always knew the way out; knew it,
yet would not tell it. No escape; he drives them to terrible choices by his dilemmas, and
tosses the Hippiases and Gorgiases with their grand reputations, as a boy tosses his
balls. The tyrannous realist!--Meno has discoursed a thousand times, at length, on virtue,
before many companies, and very well, as it appeared to him; but at this moment he
cannot even tell what it is,--this cramp-fish of a Socrates has so bewitched him.

This hard-headed humorist, whose strange conceits, drollery and bonhommie diverted
the young patricians, whilst the rumor of his sayings and quibbles gets abroad every
day,--turns out, in the sequel, to have a probity as invincible as his logic, and to be either
insane, or at least, under cover of this play, enthusiastic in his religion. When accused
before the judges of subverting the popular creed, he affirms the immortality of the soul,
the future reward and punishment; and refusing to recant, in a caprice of the popular
government was condemned to die, and sent to the prison. Socrates entered the prison
and took away all ignominy from the place, which could not be a prison whilst he was
there. Crito bribed the jailer; but Socrates would not go out by treachery. “Whatever
inconvenience ensue, nothing is to be preferred before justice. These things I hear like
pipes and drums, whose sound makes me deaf to every thing you say.” The fame of this
prison, the fame of the discourses there and the drinking of the hemlock are one of the
most precious passages in the history of the world.

The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, of the droll and the martyr, the keen street and
market debater with the sweetest saint known to any history at that time, had forcibly
struck the mind of Plato, so capacious of these contrasts; and the figure of Socrates by a
necessity placed itself in the foreground of the scene, as the fittest dispenser of the
intellectual treasures he had to communicate. It was a rare fortune that this Aesop of the
mob and this robed scholar should meet, to make each other immortal in their mutual
faculty. The strange synthesis in the character of Socrates capped the synthesis in the
mind of Plato. Moreover by this means he was able, in the direct way and without envy
to avail himself of the wit and weight of Socrates, to which unquestionably his own debt
was great; and these derived again their principal advantage from the perfect art of
Plato.

It remains to say that the defect of Plato in power is only that which results inevitably
from his quality. He is intellectual in his aim; and therefore, in expression, literary.
Mounting into heaven, diving into the pit, expounding the laws of the state, the passion
of love, the remorse of crime, the hope of the parting soul,--he is literary, and never
otherwise. It is almost the sole deduction from the merit of Plato that his writings have
not,--what is no doubt incident to this regnancy of intellect in his work,--the vital authority
which the screams of prophets and the sermons of unlettered Arabs and Jews possess.
There is an interval; and to cohesion, contact is necessary.

I know not what can be said in reply to this criticism but that we have come to a fact in
the nature of things: an oak is not an orange. The qualities of sugar remain with sugar,
and those of salt with salt.

In the second place, he has not a system. The dearest defenders and disciples are at
fault. He attempted a theory of the universe, and his theory is not complete or selfevi-
dent. One man thinks he means this, and another that; he has said one thing in one
place, and the reverse of it in another place. He is charged with having failed to make the
transition from ideas to matter. Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the
smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching,
or second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.

The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea. Plato would willingly have a Platonism, a
known and accurate expression for the world, and it should be accurate. It shall be the
world passed through the mind of Plato,--nothing less. Every atom shall have the Platonic
tinge; every atom, every relation or quality you knew before, you shall know again and
find here, but now ordered; not nature, but art. And you shall feel that Alexander indeed
overran, with men and horses, some countries of the planet; but countries, and things of
which countries are made, elements, planet itself, laws of planet and of men, have
passed through this man as bread into his body, and become no longer bread, but body:
so all this mammoth morsel has become Plato. He has clapped copyright on the world.
This is the ambition of individualism. But the mouthful proves too large. Boa constrictor
has good will to eat it, but he is foiled. He falls abroad in the attempt; and biting, gets
strangled: the bitten world holds the biter fast by his own teeth. There he perishes:
unconquered nature lives on and forgets him. So it fares with all: so must it fare with
Plato. In view of eternal nature, Plato turns out to be philosophical exercitations. He
argues on this side and on that. The acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never
tell what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on both sides of every
great question from him.

These things we are forced to say if we must consider the effort of Plato or of any
philosopher to dispose of nature,--which will not be disposed of. No power of genius has
ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains.
But there is an injustice in assuming this ambition for Plato. Let us not seem to treat with
flippancy his venerable name. Men, in proportion to their intellect, have admitted his
transcendent claims. The way to know him is to compare him, not with nature, but with
other men. How many ages have gone by, and he remains unapproached! A chief
structure of human wit, like Karnac, or the medieval cathedrals, or the Etrurian remains,
it requires all the breath of human faculty to know it. I think it is trueliest seen when seen
with the most respect. His sense deepens, his merits multiply, with study. When we say,
Here is a fine collection of fables; or when we praise the style, or the common sense, or
arithmetic, we speak as boys, and much of our impatient criticism of the dialectic, I
suspect, is no better. The criticism is like our impatience of miles, when we are in a hur-
ry; but it is still best that a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty yards. The
great-eyed Plato proportioned the lights and shades after the genius of our life.


PLATO: NEW READINGS


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


Modern science, by the extent of its generalization, has learned to indemnify the student
of man for the defects of individuals by tracing growth and ascent in races; and, by the
simple expedient of lighting up the vast background, generates a feeling of complacency
and hope. The human being has the saurian and the plant in his rear. His arts and scienc-
es, the easy issue of his brain, look glorious when prospectively beheld from the distant
brain of ox, crocodile and fish. It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night
behind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six men, as Ho-
mer, Phidias, Menu and Columbus, was no wise discontented with the result. These
samples attested the virtue of the tree. These were a clear amelioration of trilobite and
saurus, and a good basis for further proceeding. With this artist, time and space are
cheap, and she is insensible to what you say of tedious preparation. She waited tranquil-
ly the flowing periods of paleontology, for the hour to be struck when man should arrive.
Then periods must pass before the motion of the earth can be suspected; then before the
map of the instincts and the cultivable powers can be drawn. But as of races, so the suc-
cession of individual men is fatal and beautiful, and Plato has the fortune in the history
of mankind to mark an epoch.

Plato's fame does not stand on a syllogism, or on any masterpieces of the Socratic reaso-
ing, or on any thesis, as for example the immortality of the soul. He is more than an ex-
pert, or a schoolman, or a geometer, or the prophet of a peculiar message. He represents
the privilege of the intellect, the power, namely, of carrying up every fact to successive
platforms and so disclosing in every fact a germ of expansion. These expansions are in the
essence of thought. The naturalist would never help us to them by any discoveries of the
extent of the universe, but is as poor when cataloguing the resolved nebula of Orion,
as when measuring the angles of an acre. But the Republic of Plato, by these expansions,
may be said to require and so to anticipate the astronomy of Laplace. The expansions are
organic. The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the
rose. In ascribing to Plato the merit of announcing them, we only say, Here was a more
complete man, who could apply to nature the whole scale of the senses, the understanding
and the reason. These expansions or extensions consist in continuing the spiritual sight
where the horizon falls on our natural vision, and by this second sight discovering the
long lines of law which shoot in every direction. Everywhere he stands on a path which
has no end, but runs continuously round the universe. Therefore every word becomes
an exponent of nature. Whatever he looks upon discloses a second sense, and ulterior sens-
es. His perception of the generation of contraries, of death out of life and life out of
death,--that law by which, in nature, decomposition is recomposition, and putrefaction
and cholera are only signals of a new creation; his discernment of the little in the
large and the large in the small; studying the state in the citizen and the citizen in
the state; and leaving it doubtful whether he exhibited the Republic as an allegory on
the education of the private soul; his beautiful definitions of ideas, of time, of form, of
figure, of the line, sometimes hypothetically given, as his defin-ing of virtue, courage,
justice, temperance; his love of the apologue, and his apologues themselves; the cave
of Trophonius; the ring of Gyges; the charioteer and two horses; the golden, silver,
brass and iron temperaments; Theuth and Thamus; and the visions of Hades and the
Fates,--fables which have imprinted themselves in the human memory like the signs
of the zodiac; his soliform eye and his boniform soul; his doctrine of assimilation;
his doctrine of reminiscence; his clear vision of the laws of return, or reaction, which
secure instant justice throughout the universe, instanced everywhere, but specially in
the doctrine, "what comes from God to us, returns from us to God," and in Socrates'
belief that the laws below are sisters of the laws above.

More striking examples are his moral conclusions. Plato affirms the coincidence of sci-
ence and virtue; for vice can never know itself and virtue, but virtue knows both itself
and vice. The eye attested that justice was best, as long as it was profitable; Plato
affirms that it is profitable throughout; that the profit is intrinsic, though the just
conceal his justice from gods and men; that it is better to suffer injustice than to
do it; that the sinner ought to covet punishment; that the lie was more hurtful than
homicide; and that ignorance, or the involuntary lie, was more calamitous than in-
voluntary homicide; that the soul is unwillingly deprived of true opinions, and that no
man sins willingly; that the order or proceeding of nature was from the mind to the body,
and, though a sound body cannot restore an unsound mind, yet a good soul can, by its
virtue, render the body the best possible. The intelligent have a right over the igno-
rant, namely, the right of instructing them. The right punishment of one out of tune is
to make him play in tune; the fine which the good, refusing to govern, ought to pay, is,
to be governed by a worse man; that his guards shall not handle gold and silver, but
shall be instructed that there is gold and silver in their souls, which will make men
willing to give them every thing which they need.

This second sight explains the stress laid on geometry. He saw that the globe of earth
was not more lawful and precise than was the supersensible; that a celestial geometry
was in place there, as a logic of lines and angles here below; that the world was through-
out mathematical; the proportions are constant of oxygen, azote and lime; there is just
so much water and slate and magnesia; not less are the proportions constant of the
moral elements.

This eldest Goethe, hating varnish and falsehood, delighted in revealing the real at
the base of the accidental; in discovering connection, continuity and representation
everywhere, hating insulation; and appears like the god of wealth among the cabins of
vagabonds, opening power and capability in everything he touches. Ethical science was
new and vacant when Plato could write thus:--"Of all whose arguments are left to the
men of the present time, no one has ever yet condemned injustice, or praised justice,
otherwise than as respects the repute, honors and emoluments arising therefrom; while,
as respects either of them in itself, and subsisting by its own power in the soul of
the possessor, and concealed both from gods and men, no one has yet sufficiently in-
vestigated, either in poetry or prose writings,--how, namely, that injustice is the
greatest of all the evils that the soul has within it, and justice the greatest good."

His definition of ideas, as what is simple, permanent, uniform and self-existent,
forever discriminating them from the notions of the understanding, marks an era in
the world. He was born to behold the self-evolving power of spirit, endless, gener-
ator of new ends; a power which is the key at once to the centrality and the evan-
escence of things. Plato is so centred that he can well spare all his dogmas. Thus
the fact of knowledge and ideas reveals to him the fact of eternity; and the doc-
trine of reminiscence he offers as the most probable particular explication. Call
that fanciful,--it matters not: the connection between our knowledge and the abyss
of being is still real, and the explication must be not less magnificent.

He has indicated every eminent point in speculation. He wrote on the scale of the mind
itself, so that all things have symmetry in his tablet. He put in all the past, without
weariness, and descended into detail with a courage like that he witnessed in nature.
One would say that his forerunners had mapped out each a farm or a district or an is-
land, in intellectual geography, but that Plato first drew the sphere. He domesticates
the soul in nature: man is the microcosm. All the circles of the visible heaven repre-
sent as many circles in the rational soul. There is no lawless particle, and there is
nothing casual in the action of the human mind. The names of things, too, are fatal,
following the nature of things. All the gods of the Pantheon are, by their names, sig-
nificant of a profound sense. The gods are the ideas. Pan is speech, or manifestation;
Saturn, the contemplative; Jove, the regal soul; and Mars, passion. Venus is proportion;
Calliope, the soul of the world; Aglaia, intellectual illustration.

These thoughts, in sparkles of light, had appeared often to pious and to poetic souls;
but this well-bred, all-knowing Greek geometer comes with command, gathers them all
up into rank and gradation, the Euclid of holiness, and marries the two parts of nature.
Before all men, he saw the intellectual values of the moral sentiment. He describes his
own ideal, when he paints, in Timaeus, a god leading things from disorder into order.
He kindled a fire so truly in the centre that we see the sphere illuminated, and can
distinguish poles, equator and lines of latitude, every arc and node: a theory so aver-
aged, so modulated, that you would say the winds of ages had swept through this rhyth-
mic structure, and not that it was the brief extempore blotting of one short-lived
scribe. Hence it has happened that a very well-marked class of souls, namely those
who delight in giving a spiritual, that is, an ethico-intellectual expression to every
truth, by exhibiting an ulterior end which is yet legitimate to it,--are said to Platonize.
Thus, Michael Angelo is a Platonist in his sonnets: Shakspeare is a Platonist when he
writes,--

"Nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean,"
or,--
"He, that can endure
To follow with allegiance a fallen lord,
Does conquer him that did his master conquer,
And earns a place in the story."

Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and 'tis the magnitude only of Shakespeare's proper genius
that hinders him from being classed as the most eminent of this school. Swedenborg,
throughout his prose poem of "Conjugal Love," is a Platonist.His subtlety commended him
to men of thought. The secret of his popular success is the moral aim which endeared him
to mankind. "Intellect," he said, "is king of heaven and of earth;" but in Plato, intel-
lect is always moral. His writings have also the sempiternal youth of poetry. For their
arguments, most of them, might have been couched in sonnets: and poetry has never
soared higher than in the Timaeus and the Phaedrus. As the poet, too, he is only con-
templative. He did not, like Pythagoras, break himself with an institution. All his painting
in the Republic must be esteemed mythical, with intent to bring out, sometimes in violent
colors, his thought. You cannot institute, without peril of charlatanism.

It was a high scheme, his absolute privilege for the best(which, to make emphatic, he
expressed by community of women), as the premium which he would set on grandeur. There
shall be exempts of two kinds: first, those who by demerit have put themselves below
protection,--outlaws; and secondly, those who by eminence of nature and desert are out
of the reach of your rewards. Let such be free of the city and above the law. We confide
them to themselves; let them do with us as they will. Let none presume to measure the
irregularities of Michael Angelo and Socrates by village scales.

In his eighth book of the Republic, he throws a little mathematical dust in our eyes. I
am sorry to see him, after such noble superiorities, permitting the lie to governors.
Plato plays Providence a little with the baser sort, as people allow themselves with
their dogs and cats.




Swedenborg; or, the Mystic



AMONG eminent persons, those who are most dear to men are not of the class which
the economist calls producers: they have nothing in their hands; they have not cultivated
corn, nor made bread; they have not led out a colony, nor invented a loom. A higher
class, in the estimation and love of this city-building market-going race of mankind, are
the poets, who, from the intellectual kingdom, feed the thought and imagination with
ideas and pictures which raise men out of the world of corn and money, and console
them for the shortcomings of the day and the meanness of labor and traffic. Then, also,
the philosopher has his value, who flatters the intellect of this laborer by engaging him
with subtleties which instruct him in new faculties. Others may build cities; he is to
understand them and keep them in awe. But there is a class who lead us into another
region,--the world of morals or of will. What is singular about this region of thought is its
claim. Wherever the sentiment of right comes in, it takes precedence of every thing else.
For other things, I make poetry of them; but the moral sentiment makes poetry of me.

I have sometimes thought that he would render the greatest service to modern criticism,
who should draw the line of relation that subsists between Shakespeare and Swedenborg.
The human mind stands ever in perplexity, demanding intellect, demanding sanctity, impa-
tient equally of each without the other. The reconciler has not yet appeared. If we tire
of the saints, Shakespeare is our city of refuge. Yet the instincts presently teach that
the problem of essence must take precedence of all others;--the questions of Whence?
What? and Whither? and the solution of these must be in a life, and not in a book. A
drama or poem is a proximate or oblique reply; but Moses, Menu, Jesus, work directly on
this problem. The atmosphere of moral sentiment is a region of grandeur which reduces
all material magnificence to toys, yet opens to every wretch that has reason the doors
of the universe. Almost with a fierce haste it lays its empire on the man. In the language
of the Koran, “God said, The heaven and the earth and all that is between them, think
ye that we created them in jest, and that ye shall not return to us?” It is the kingdom of
the will, and by inspiring the will, which is the seat of personality, seems to convert the
universe into a person;-

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

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

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

The privilege of this caste is an access to the secrets and structure of nature by some
higher method than by experience. In common parlance, what one man is said to learn
by experience, a man of extraordinary sagacity is said, without experience, to divine. The
Arabians say, that Abul Khain, the mystic, and Abu Ali Seena, the philosopher, conferred
together; and, on parting, the philosopher said, “All that he sees, I know”; and the mystic
said, “All that he knows, I see.” If one should ask the reason of this intuition, the solution
would lead us into that property which Plato denoted as Reminiscence, and which is
implied by the Bramins in the tenet of Transmigration. The soul having been often born,
or, as the Hindoos say, “travelling the path of existence through thousands of births,”
having beheld the things which are here, those which are in heaven and those which are
beneath, there is nothing of which she has not gained the knowledge: no wonder that
she is able to recollect, in regard to any one thing, what formerly she knew. “For, all
things in nature being linked and related, and the soul having heretofore known all,
nothing hinders but that any man who has recalled to mind, or according to the common
phrase has learned, one thing only, should of himself recover all his ancient knowledge,
and find out again all the rest, if he have but courage and faint not in the midst of his
researches. For inquiry and learning is reminiscence all.” How much more, if he that
inquires be a holy and godlike soul For by being assimilated to the original soul, by
whom and after whom all things subsist, the soul of man does then easily flow into all
things, and all things flow into it: they mix; and he is present and sympathetic with their
structure and law.

This path is difficult, secret and beset with terror. The ancients called it ecstasy or
absence,--a getting out of their bodies to think. All religious history contains traces of the
trance of saints,--a beatitude, but without any sign of joy; earnest, solitary, even sad; “the
flight,” Plotinus called it, “of the alone to the alone”; Muesiz, the closing of the eyes,--
whence our word, Mystic. The trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Behmen, Bunyan,
Fox, Pascal, Guyon, Swedenborg, will readily come to mind. But what as readily comes to
mind is the accompaniment of disease. This beatitude comes in terror, and with shocks
to the mind of the receiver. “It o'erinforms the tenement of clay,” and drives the man
mad; or gives a certain violent bias which taints his judgment. In the chief examples of
religious illumination somewhat morbid has mingled, in spite of the unquestionable in-
crease of mental power. Must the highest good drag after it a quality which neutralizes
and discredits it?-

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

Shall we say, that the economical mother disburses so much earth and so much fire, by
weight and meter, to make a man, and will not add a pennyweight, though a nation is
perishing for a leader? Therefore the men of God purchased their science by folly or
pain. If you will have pure carbon, carbuncle, or diamond, to make the brain transparent,
the trunk and organs shall be so much the grosser: instead of porcelain they are potter's
earth, clay, or mud.

In modern times no such remarkable example of this introverted mind has occurred as
in Emanuel Swedenborg, born in Stockholm, in 1688. This man, who appeared to his
contemporaries a visionary and elixir of moonbeams, no doubt led the most real life of
any man then in the world: and now, when the royal and ducal Frederics, Christians and
Brunswicks of that day have slid into oblivion, he begins to spread himself into the minds
of thousands. As happens in great men, he seemed, by the variety and amount of his
powers, to be a composition of several persons,--like the giant fruits which are matured
in gardens by the union of four or five single blossoms. His frame is on a larger scale and
possesses the advantages of size. As it is easier to see the reflection of the great sphere
in large globes, though defaced by some crack or blemish, than in drops of water, so
men of large calibre, though with some eccentricity or madness, like Pascal or Newton,
help us more than balanced mediocre minds.

His youth and training could not fail to be extraordinary. Such a boy could not whistle or
dance, but goes grubbing into mines and mountains, prying into chemistry and optics,
physiology, mathematics and astronomy, to find images fit for the measure of his
versatile and capacious brain. He was a scholar from a child, and was educated at
Upsala. At the age of twenty-eight he was made Assessor of the Board of Mines by
Charles XII. In 1716, he left home for four years and visited the universities of England,
Holland, France and Germany. He performed a notable feat of engineering in 1718, at
the siege of Frederikshald, by hauling two galleys, five boats and a sloop, some fourteen
English miles overland, for the royal service. In 1721 he journeyed over Europe to
examine mines and smelting works. He published in 1716 his Daedalus Hyperboreus,
and from this time for the next thirty years was employed in the composition and
publication of his scientific works. With the like force he threw himself into theology. In
1743, when he was fifty-four years old, what is called his illumination began. All his
metallurgy and transportation of ships overland was absorbed into this ecstasy. He
ceased to publish any more scientific books, withdrew from his practical labors and
devoted himself to the writing and publication of his voluminous theological works,
which were printed at his own expense, or at that of the Duke of Brunswick or other
prince, at Dresden, Leipsic, London, or Amsterdam. Later, he resigned his office of
Assessor: the salary attached to this office continued to be paid to him during his life. His
duties had brought him into intimate acquaintance with King Charles XII, by whom he
was much consulted and honored. The like favor was continued to him by his successor.
At the Diet of 1751, Count Hopken says, the most solid memorials on finance were from
his pen. In Sweden he appears to have attracted a marked regard. His rare science and
practical skill, and the added fame of second sight and extraordinary religious
knowledge and gifts, drew to him queens, nobles, clergy, shipmasters and people about
the ports through which he was wont to pass in his many voyages. The clergy interfered
a little with the importation and publication of his religious works, but he seems to have
kept the friendship of men in power. He was never married. He had great modesty and
gentleness of bearing. His habits were simple; he lived on bread, milk and vegetables; he
lived in a house situated in a large garden; he went several times to England, where he
does not seem to have attracted any attention whatever from the learned or the
eminent; and died at London, March 29, 1772, of apoplexy, in his eighty-fifth year. He is
described, when in London, as a man of a quiet, clerical habit, not averse to tea and
coffee, and kind to children. He wore a sword when in full velvet dress, and, whenever he
walked out, carried a gold-headed cane. There is a common portrait of him in antique
coat and wig, but the face has a wandering or vacant air.

The genius which was to penetrate the science of the age with a far more subtle science;
to pass the bounds of space and time, venture into the dim spirit-realm, and attempt to
establish a new religion in the world,--began its lessons in quarries and forges, in the
smelting-pot and crucible, in ship-yards and dissecting-rooms. No one man is perhaps
able to judge of the merits of his works on so many subjects. One is glad to learn that his
books on mines and metals are held in the highest esteem by those who understand
these matters. It seems that he anticipated much science of the nineteenth century;
anticipated, in astronomy, the discovery of the seventh planet,--but, unhappily, not also
of the eighth; anticipated the views of modern astronomy in regard to the generation of
earths by the sun; in magnetism, some important experiments and conclusions of later
students; in chemistry, the atomic theory; in anatomy, the discoveries of Schlichting,
Monro and Wilson; and first demonstrated the office of the lungs. His excellent English
editor magnanimously lays no stress on his discoveries, since he was too great to care to
be original; and we are to judge, by what he can spare, of what remains.

A colossal soul, he lies vast abroad on his times, uncomprehended by them, and requires
a long focal distance to be seen; suggests, as Aristotle, Bacon, Selden, Humboldt, that a
certain vastness of learning, or quasi omnipresence of the human soul in nature, is
possible. His superb speculation, as from a tower, over nature and arts, without ever
losing sight of the texture and sequence of things, almost realizes his own picture, in the
“Principia,” of the original integrity of man. Over and above the merit of his particular
discoveries, is the capital merit of his self-equality. A drop of water has the properties of
the sea, but cannot exhibit a storm. There is beauty of a concert, as well as of a flute;
strength of a host, as well as of a hero; and, in Swedenborg, those who are best
acquainted with modern books will most admire the merit of mass. One of the
missouriums and mastodons of literature, he is not to be measured by whole colleges of
ordinary scholars. His stalwart presence would flutter the gowns of an university. Our
books are false by being fragmentary: their sentences are bonmots, and not parts of
natural discourse; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing
a brief notoriety to their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature;--being some
curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature and purposely framed to
excite surprise, as jugglers do by concealing their means. But Swedenborg is systematic
and respective of the world in every sentence; all the means are orderly given; his
faculties work with astronomic punctuality, and this admirable writing is pure from all
pertness or egotism.

Swedenborg was born into an atmosphere of great ideas. It is hard to say what was his
own: yet his life was dignified by noblest pictures of the universe. The robust Aristotelian
method, with its breadth and adequateness, shaming our sterile and linear logic by its
genial radiation, conversant with series and degree, with effects and ends, skilful to
discriminate power from form, essence from accident, and opening, by its terminology
and definition, high roads into nature, had trained a race of athletic philosophers. Harvey
had shown the circulation of the blood; Gilbert had shown that the earth was a magnet;
Descartes, taught by Gilbert's magnet, with its vortex, spiral and polarity, had filled
Europe with the leading thought of vortical motion, as the secret of nature. Newton, in
the year in which Swedenborg was born, published the “Principia,” and established the
universal gravity. Malpighi, following the high doctrines of Hippocrates, Leucippus and
Lucretius, had given emphasis to the dogma that nature works in leasts,--“tota in minimis
existit natura.” Unrivalled dissectors, Swammerdam, Leuwenhoek, Winslow, Eustachius,
Heister, Vesalius, Boerhaave, had left nothing for scalpel or microscope to reveal in
human or comparative anatomy: Linnaeus, his contemporary, was affirming, in his
beautiful science, that “Nature is always like herself”; and, lastly, the nobility of method,
the largest application of principles, had been exhibited by Leibnitz and Christian Wolff,
in cosmology; whilst Locke and Grotius had drawn the moral argument. What was left for
a genius of the largest calibre but to go over their ground and verify and unite? It is easy
to see, in these minds, the origin of Swedenborg's studies, and the suggestion of his
problems. He had a capacity to entertain and vivify these volumes of thought. Yet the
proximity of these geniuses, one or other of whom had introduced all his leading ideas,
makes Swedenborg another example of the difficulty, even in a highly fertile genius, of
proving originality, the first birth and annunciation of one of the laws of nature.
He named his favorite views the doctrine of Forms, the doctrine of Series and Degrees,
the doctrine of Influx, the doctrine of Correspondence. His statement of these doctrines
deserves to be studied in his books. Not every man can read them, but they will reward
him who can. His theologic works are valuable to illustrate these. His writings would be a
sufficient library to a lonely and athletic student; and the “Economy of the Animal
Kingdom” is one of those books which, by the sustained dignity of thinking, is an honor
to the human race. He had studied spars and metals to some purpose. His varied and
solid knowledge makes his style lustrous with points and shooting spiculae of thought,
and resembling one of those winter mornings when the air sparkles with crystals. The
grandeur of the topics makes the grandeur of the style. He was apt for cosmology,
because of that native perception of identity which made mere size of no account to him.
In the atom of magnetic iron he saw the quality which would generate the spiral motion
of sun and planet.

The thoughts in which he lived were, the universality of each law in nature; the Platonic
doctrine of the scale or degrees; the version or conversion of each into other, and so the
correspondence of all the parts; the fine secret that little explains large, and large, little;
the centrality of man in nature, and the connection that subsists throughout all things:
he saw that the human body was strictly universal, or an instrument through which the
soul feeds and is fed by the whole of matter; so that he held, in exact antagonism to the
skeptics, that “the wiser a man is, the more will he be a worshipper of the Deity.” In short,
he was a believer in the Identity-philosophy, which he held not idly, as the dreamers of
Berlin or Boston, but which he experimented with and established through years of
labor, with the heart and strength of the rudest Viking that his rough Sweden ever sent
to battle.

This theory dates from the oldest philosophers, and derives perhaps its best illustration
from the newest. It is this, that Nature iterates her means perpetually on successive
planes. In the old aphorism, nature is always self-similar. In the plant, the eye or
germinative point opens to a leaf, then to another leaf, with a power of transforming the
leaf into radicle, stamen, pistil, petal, bract, sepal, or seed. The whole art of the plant is
still to repeat leaf on leaf without end, the more or less of heat, light, moisture and food
determining the form it shall assume. In the animal, nature makes a vertebra, or a spine
of vertebrae, and helps herself still by a new spine, with a limited power of modifying its
form,--spine on spine, to the end of the world. A poetic anatomist, in our own day,
teaches that a snake, being a horizontal line, and man, being an erect line, constitute a
right angle; and between the lines of this mystical quadrant all animated beings find
their place: and he assumes the hair-worm, the span-worm, or the snake, as the type or
prediction of the spine. Manifestly, at the end of the spine, Nature puts out smaller
spines, as arms; at the end of the arms, new spines, as hands; at the other end, she
repeats the process, as legs and feet. At the top of the column she puts out another
spine, which doubles or loops itself over, as a span-worm, into a ball, and forms the skull,
with extremities again: the hands being now the upper jaw, the feet the lower jaw, the
fingers and toes being represented this time by upper and lower teeth. This new spine is
destined to high uses. It is a new man on the shoulders of the last. It can almost shed its
trunk and manage to live alone, according to the Platonic idea in the Timaeus. Within it,
on a higher plane, all that was done in the trunk repeats itself. Nature recites her lesson
once more in a higher mood. The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of
feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding and generating, in a new and ethereal element.
Here in the brain is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing,
digesting and assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation
repeated. In the brain are male and female faculties; here is marriage, here is fruit. And
there is no limit to this ascending scale, but series on series. Every thing, at the end of
one use, is taken up into the next, each series punctually repeating every organ and
process of the last. We are adapted to infinity. We are hard to please, and love nothing
which ends; and in nature is no end, but every thing at the end of one use is lifted into a
superior, and the ascent of these things climbs into daemonic and celestial natures. 6/20
Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly repeating a simple air or
theme, now high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills
earth and heaven with the chant.

Gravitation, as explained by Newton, is good, but grander when we find chemistry only
an extension of the law of masses into particles, and that the atomic theory shows the
action of chemistry to be mechanical also. Metaphysics shows us a sort of gravitation
operative also in the mental phenomena; and the terrible tabulation of the French
statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to exact numerical
ratios. If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes or marries his
grandmother, then in every twenty thousand or thirty thousand is found one man who
eats shoes or marries his grandmother. What we call gravitation, and fancy ultimate, is
one fork of a mightier stream for which we have yet no name. Astronomy is excellent;
but it must come up into life to have its full value, and not remain there in globes and
spaces. The globule of blood gyrates around its own axis in the human veins, as the
planet in the sky; and the circles of intellect relate to those of the heavens. Each law of
nature has the like universality; eating, sleep or hybernation, rotation, generation,
metamorphosis, vortical motion, which is seen in eggs as in planets. These grand rhymes
or returns in nature,--the dear, best-known face startling us at every turn, under a mask
so unexpected that we think it the face of a stranger, and carrying up the semblance into
divine forms,--delighted the prophetic eye of Swedenborg; and he must be reckoned a
leader in that revolution, which, by giving to science an idea, has given to an aimless
accumulation of experiments, guidance and form and a beating heart.

I own with some regret that his printed works amount to about fifty stout octavos, his
scientific works being about half of the whole number; and it appears that a mass of
manuscript still unedited remains in the royal library at Stockholm. The scientific works
have just now been translated into English, in an excellent edition.

Swedenborg printed these scientific books in the ten years from 1734 to 1744, and they
remained from that time neglected; and now, after their century is complete, he has at
last found a pupil in Mr. Wilkinson, in London, a philosophic critic, with a coequal vigor of
understanding and imagination comparable only to Lord Bacon's, who has restored his
master's buried books to the day, and transferred them, with every advantage, from
their forgotten Latin into English, to go round the world in our commercial and
conquering tongue. This startling reappearance of Swedenborg, after a hundred years, in
his pupil, is not the least remarkable fact in his history. Aided it is said by the munificence
of Mr. Clissold, and also by his literary skill, this piece of poetic justice is done. The
admirable preliminary discourses with which Mr. Wilkinson has enriched these volumes,
throw all the contemporary philosophy of England into shade, and leave me nothing to
say on their proper grounds.

The “Animal Kingdom” is a book of wonderful merits. It was written with the highest
end,--to put science and the soul, long estranged from each other, at one again. It was an
anatomist's account of the human body, in the highest style of poetry. Nothing can
exceed the bold and brilliant treatment of a subject usually so dry and repulsive. He saw
nature “wreathing through an everlasting spiral, with wheels that never dry, on axles that
never creak,” and sometimes sought “to uncover those secret recesses where Nature is
sitting at the fires in the depths of her laboratory”; whilst the picture comes
recommended by the hard fidelity with which it is based on practical anatomy. It is
remarkable that this sublime genius decides peremptorily for the analytic, against the
synthetic method; and, in a book whose genius is a daring poetic synthesis, claims to
confine himself to a rigid experience.

He knows, if he only, the flowing of nature, and how wise was that old answer of Amasis
to him who bade him drink up the sea,--“Yes, willingly, if you will stop the rivers that
flow in.” Few knew as much about nature and her subtle manners, or expressed more
subtly her goings. He thought as large a demand is made on our faith by nature, as by
miracles. “He noted that in her proceeding from first principles through her several
subordinations, there was no state through which she did not pass, as if her path lay
through all things.” “For as often as she betakes herself upward from visible phenomena,
or, in other words, withdraws herself inward, she instantly as it were disappears, while
no one knows what has become of her, or whither she is gone: so that it is necessary to
take science as a guide in pursuing her steps.”

The pursuing the inquiry under the light of an end or final cause gives wonderful
animation, a sort of personality to the whole writing.This book announces his favorite
dogmas. The ancient doctrine of Hippocrates, that the brain is a gland; and of Leucippus,
that the atom may be known by the mass; or, in Plato, the macrocosm by the
microcosm; and, in the verses of Lucretius,--

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

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

and which Malpighi had summed in his maxim that “nature exists entire in leasts,”--is a
favorite thought of Swedenborg. “It is a constant law of the organic body that large,
compound, or visible forms exist and subsist from smaller, simpler and ultimately from
invisible forms, which act similarly to the larger ones, but more perfectly and more
universally; and the least forms so perfectly and universally as to involve an idea
representative of their entire universe.” The unities of each organ are so many little
organs, homogeneous with their compound: the unities of the tongue are little tongues;
those of the stomach, little stomachs; those of the heart are little hearts. This fruitful idea
furnishes a key to every secret. What was too small for the eye to detect was read by the
aggregates; what was too large, by the units. There is no end to his application of the
thought. “Hunger is an aggregate of very many little hungers, or losses of blood by the
little veins all over the body.” It is a key to his theology also. “Man is a kind of very minute
heaven, corresponding to the world of spirits and to heaven. Every particular idea of
man, and every affection, yea, every smallest part of his affection, is an image and effigy
of him. A spirit may be known from only a single thought. God is the grand man.”

The hardihood and thoroughness of his study of nature required a theory of forms also.
“Forms ascend in order from the lowest to the highest. The lowest form is angular, or the
terrestrial and corporeal. The second and next higher form is the circular, which is also
called the perpetual-angular, because the circumference of a circle is a perpetual angle.
The form above this is the spiral, parent and measure of circular forms: its diameters are
not rectilinear, but variously circular, and have a spherical surface for centre; therefore it
is called the perpetual-circular. The form above this is the vortical, or perpetual-spiral:
next, the perpetual-vortical, or celestial: last, the perpetual-celestial, or spiritual.”

Was it strange that a genius so bold should take the last step also, should conceive that
he might attain the science of all sciences, to unlock the meaning of the world? In the
first volume of the “Animal Kingdom,” he broaches the subject in a remarkable note:--

“In our doctrine of Representations and Correspondences we shall treat of both these
symbolical and typical resemblances, and of the astonishing things which occur, I will not
say in the living body only, but throughout nature, and which correspond so entirely to
supreme and spiritual things that one would swear that the physical world was purely
symbolical of the spiritual world; insomuch that if we choose to express any natural
truth in physical and definite vocal terms, and to convert these terms only into the
corresponding and spiritual terms, we shall by this means elicit a spiritual truth or
theological dogma, in place of the physical truth or precept: although no mortal would
have predicted that any thing of the kind could possibly arise by bare literal transpo-
sition; inasmuch as the one precept, considered separately from the other, appears to
have absolutely no relation to it. I intend hereafter to communicate a number of ex-
amples of such correspondences, together with a vocabulary containing the terms
of spiritual things, as well as of the physical things for which they are to be substi-
tuted. This symbolism pervades the living body.”

The fact thus explicitly stated is implied in all poetry, in allegory, in fable, in the use of
emblems and in the structure of language. Plato knew it, as is evident from his twice
bisected line in the sixth book of the Republic. Lord Bacon had found that truth and
nature differed only as seal and print; and he instanced some physical propositions, with
their translation into a moral or political sense. Behmen, and all mystics, imply this law in
their dark riddle-writing. The poets, in as far as they are poets, use it; but it is known to
them only as the magnet was known for ages, as a toy. Swedenborg first put the fact into
a detached and scientific statement, because it was habitually present to him, and never
not seen. It was involved, as we explained already, in the doctrine of identity and
iteration, because the mental series exactly tallies with the material series. It required an
insight that could rank things in order and series; or rather it required such rightness of
position that the poles of the eye should coincide with the axis of the world. The earth
had fed its mankind through five or six millenniums, and they had sciences, religions,
philosophies, and yet had failed to see the correspondence of meaning between every
part and every other part. And, down to this hour, literature has no book in which the
symbolism of things is scientifically opened. One would say that as soon as men had the
first hint that every sensible object,--animal, rock, river, air,--nay, space and time, subsists
not for itself, nor finally to a material end, but as a picture-language to tell another story
of beings and duties, other science would be put by, and a science of such grand presage
would absorb all faculties: that each man would ask of all objects what they mean: Why
does the horizon hold me fast, with my joy and grief, in this centre? Why hear I the same
sense from countless differing voices, and read one never quite expressed fact in
endless picture-language? Yet whether it be that these things will not be intellectually
learned, or that many centuries must elaborate and compose so rare and opulent a
soul,--there is no comet, rock-stratum, fossil, fish, quadruped, spider, or fungus, that, for
itself, does not interest more scholars and classifiers than the meaning and upshot of
the frame of things.

But Swedenborg was not content with the culinary use of the world. In his fifty-fourth
year these thoughts held him fast, and his profound mind admitted the perilous opinion,
too frequent in religious history, that he was an abnormal person, to whom was granted
the privilege of conversing with angels and spirits; and this ecstasy connected itself with
just this office of explaining the moral import of the sensible world. To a right perception,
at once broad and minute, of the order of nature, he added the comprehension of the
moral laws in their widest social aspects; but whatever he saw, through some excessive
determination to form in his constitution, he saw not abstractly, but in pictures, heard it
in dialogues, constructed it in events. When he attempted to announce the law most
sanely, he was forced to couch it in parable.

Modern psychology offers no similar example of a deranged balance. The principal
powers continued to maintain a healthy action, and to a reader who can make due
allowance in the report for the reporter's peculiarities, the results are still instructive,
and a more striking testimony to the sublime laws he announced than any that balanced
dulness could afford. He attempts to give some account of the modus of the new state,
affirming that “his presence in the spiritual world is attended with a certain separation,
but only as to the intellectual part of his mind, not as to the will part”; and he affirms that
“he sees, with the internal sight, the things that are in another life, more clearly than he
sees the things which are here in the world.”

Having adopted the belief that certain books of the Old and New Testaments were exact
allegories, or written in the angelic and ecstatic mode, he employed his remaining years
in extricating from the literal, the universal sense. He had borrowed from Plato the fine
fable of “a most ancient people, men better than we and dwelling nigher to the gods”;
and Swedenborg added that they used the earth symbolically; that these, when they saw
terrestrial objects, did not think at all about them, but only about those which they
signified. The correspondence between thoughts and things henceforward occupied
him. “The very organic form resembles the end inscribed on it.” A man is in general and
in particular an organized justice or injustice, selfishness or gratitude. And the cause of
this harmony he assigned in the Arcana: “The reason why all and single things, in the
heavens and on earth, are representative, is because they exist from an influx of the
Lord, through heaven.” This design of exhibiting such correspondences, which, if
adequately executed, would be the poem of the world, in which all history and science
would play an essential part, was narrowed and defeated by the exclusively theologic
direction which his inquiries took. His perception of nature is not human and universal,
but is mystical and Hebraic. He fastens each natural object to a theologic notion;--a horse
signifies carnal understanding; a tree, perception; the moon, faith; a cat means this; an
ostrich that; an artichoke this other;--and poorly tethers every symbol to a several
ecclesiastic sense. The slippery Proteus is not so easily caught. In nature, each individual
symbol plays innumerable parts, as each particle of matter circulates in turn through
every system. The central identity enables any one symbol to express successively all the
qualities and shades of real being. In the transmission of the heavenly waters, every
hose fits every hydrant. Nature avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry that
would chain her waves. She is no literalist. Every thing must be taken genially, and we
must be at the top of our condition to understand any thing rightly.

His theological bias thus fatally narrowed his interpretation of nature, and the dictionary
of symbols is yet to be written. But the interpreter whom mankind must still expect, will
find no predecessor who has approached so near to the true problem.

Swedenborg styles himself in the title-page of his books, “Servant of the Lord Jesus
Christ”; and by force of intellect, and in effect, he is the last Father in the Church, and is
not likely to have a successor. No wonder that his depth of ethical wisdom should give
him influence as a teacher. To the withered traditional church, yielding dry catechisms,
he let in nature again, and the worshipper, escaping from the vestry of verbs and texts, is
surprised to find himself a party to the whole of his religion. His religion thinks for him
and is of universal application. He turns it on every side; it fits every part of life,
interprets and dignifies every circumstance. Instead of a religion which visited him
diplomatically three or four times,--when he was born, when he married, when he fell
sick and when he died, and, for the rest, never interfered with him,--here was a teaching
which accompanied him all day, accompanied him even into sleep and dreams; into his
thinking, and showed him through what a long ancestry his thoughts descend; into
society, and showed by what affinities he was girt to his equals and his counterparts; into
natural objects, and showed their origin and meaning, what are friendly, and what are
hurtful; and opened the future world by indicating the continuity of the same laws. His
disciples allege that their intellect is invigorated by the study of his books.

There is no such problem for criticism as his theological writings, their merits are so
commanding, yet such grave deductions must be made. Their immense and sandy
diffuseness is like the prairie or the desert, and their incongruities are like the last
deliration. He is superfluously explanatory, and his feeling of the ignorance of men,
strangely exaggerated. Men take truths of this nature very fast. Yet he abounds in
assertions, he is a rich discoverer, and of things which most import us to know. His
thought dwells in essential resemblances, like the resemblance of a house to the man
who built it. He saw things in their law, in likeness of function, not of structure. There
is an invariable method and order in his delivery of his truth, the habitual proceeding of
the mind from inmost to outmost. What earnestness and weightiness,--his eye never
roving, without one swell of vanity, or one look to self in any common form of literary
pride! a theoretic or speculative man, but whom no practical man in the universe could
affect to scorn. Plato is a gownsman; his garment, though of purple, and almost skywoven,
is an academic robe and hinders action with its voluminous folds. But this mystic is
awful to Caesar. Lycurgus himself would bow.

The moral insight of Swedenborg, the correction of popular errors, the announcement of
ethical laws, take him out of comparison with any other modern writer and entitle him to
a place, vacant for some ages, among the lawgivers of mankind. That slow but
commanding influence which he has acquired, like that of other religious geniuses, must
be excessive also, and have its tides, before it subsides into a permanent amount. Of
course what is real and universal cannot be confined to the circle of those who
sympathize strictly with his genius, but will pass forth into the common stock of wise and
just thinking. The world has a sure chemistry, by which it extracts what is excellent in its
children and lets fall the infirmities and limitations of the grandest mind.

That metempsychosis which is familiar in the old mythology of the Greeks, collected in
Ovid and in the Indian Transmigration, and is there objective, or really takes place in
bodies by alien will,--in Swedenborg's mind has a more philosophic character. It is
subjective, or depends entirely upon the thought of the person. All things in the universe
arrange themselves to each person anew, according to his ruling love. Man is such as his
affection and thought are. Man is man by virtue of willing, not by virtue of knowing and
understanding. As he is, so he sees. The marriages of the world are broken up. Interiors
associate all in the spiritual world. Whatever the angels looked upon was to them
celestial. Each Satan appears to himself a man; to those as bad as he, a comely man; to
the purified, a heap of carrion. Nothing can resist states: every thing gravitates: like will
to like: what we call poetic justice takes effect on the spot. We have come into a world
which is a living poem. Every thing is as I am. Bird and beast is not bird and beast, but
emanation and effluvia of the minds and wills of men there present. Every one makes
his own house and state. The ghosts are tormented with the fear of death and cannot
remember that they have died. They who are in evil and falsehood are afraid of all
others. Such as have deprived themselves of charity, wander and flee: the societies
which they approach discover their quality and drive them away. The covetous seem to
themselves to be abiding in cells where their money is deposited, and these to be
infested with mice. They who place merit in good works seem to themselves to cut wood.
“I asked such, if they were not wearied? They replied, that they have not yet done work
enough to merit heaven.”

He delivers golden sayings which express with singular beauty the ethical laws; as when
he uttered that famed sentence, that “In heaven the angels are advancing continually to
the springtime of their youth, so that the oldest angel appears the youngest”: “The more
angels, the more room”: “The perfection of man is the love of use”: “Man, in his perfect
form, is heaven”: “What is from Him, is Him”: “Ends always ascend as nature descends.”
And the truly poetic account of the writing in the inmost heaven, which, as it consists of
inflexions according to the form of heaven, can be read without instruction. He almost
justifies his claim to preternatural vision, by strange insights of the structure of the
human body and mind. “It is never permitted to any one, in heaven, to stand behind
another and look at the back of his head; for then the influx which is from the Lord is
disturbed.” The angels, from the sound of the voice, know a man's love; from the
articulation of the sound, his wisdom; and from the sense of the words, his science.

In the “Conjugal Love,” he has unfolded the science of marriage. Of this book one would
say that with the highest elements it has failed of success. It came near to be the Hymn
of Love, which Plato attempted in the “Banquet”; the love, which, Dante says, Casella
sang among the angels in Paradise; and which, as rightly celebrated, in its genesis,
fruition and effect, might well entrance the souls, as it would lay open the genesis of all
institutions, customs and manners. The book had been grand if the Hebraism had been
omitted and the law stated without Gothicism, as ethics, and with that scope for
ascension of state which the nature of things requires. It is a fine Platonic development of
the science of marriage; teaching that sex is universal, and not local; virility in the male
qualifying every organ, act, and thought; and the feminine in woman. Therefore in the
real or spiritual world the nuptial union is not momentary, but incessant and total; and
chastity not a local, but a universal virtue; unchastity being discovered as much in the
trading, or planting, or speaking, or philosophizing, as in generation; and that, though
the virgins he saw in heaven were beautiful, the wives were incomparably more
beautiful, and went on increasing in beauty evermore.

Yet Swedenborg, after his mode, pinned his theory to a temporary form. He exaggerates
the circumstance of marriage; and though he finds false marriages on earth, fancies a
wiser choice in heaven. But of progressive souls, all loves and friendships are
momentary. Do you love me? means, Do you see the same truth? If you do, we are
happy with the same happiness: but presently one of us passes into the perception of
new truth;--we are divorced, and no tension in nature can hold us to each other. I know
how delicious is this cup of love,--I existing for you, you existing for me; but it is a child's
clinging to his toy; an attempt to eternize the fireside and nuptial chamber; to keep the
picture-alphabet through which our first lessons are prettily conveyed. The Eden of God
is bare and grand: like the out-door landscape remembered from the evening fireside, it
seems cold and desolate whilst you cower over the coals, but once abroad again, we pity
those who can forego the magnificence of nature for candle-light and cards. Perhaps the
true subject of the “Conjugal Love” is Conversation whose laws are profoundly set forth.
It is false, if literally applied to marriage. For God is the bride or bridegroom of the soul.
Heaven is not the pairing of two, but the communion of all souls. We meet, and dwell an
instant under the temple of one thought, and part, as though we parted not, to join
another thought in other fellowships of joy. So far from there being anything divine in
the low and proprietary sense of Do you love me? it is only when you leave and lose me
by casting yourself on a sentiment which is higher than both of us, that I draw near and
find myself at your side; and I am repelled if you fix your eye on me and demand love. In
fact, in the spiritual world we change sexes every moment. You love the worth in me;
then I am your husband: but it is not me, but the worth, that fixes the love; and that
worth is a drop of the ocean of worth that is beyond me. Meantime I adore the greater
worth in another, and so become his wife. He aspires to a higher worth in another spirit,
and is wife or receiver of that influence.


Whether from a self-inquisitorial habit that he grew into from jealousy of the sins to
which men of thought are liable, he has acquired, in disentangling and demonstrating
that particular form of moral disease, an acumen which no conscience can resist. I refer
to his feeling of the profanation of thinking to what is good, “from scientifics.” “To reason
about faith, is to doubt and deny.” He was painfully alive to the difference between
knowing and doing, and this sensibility is incessantly expressed. Philosophers are,
therefore, vipers, cockatrices, asps, hemorrhoids, presters, and flying serpents; literary
men are conjurors and charlatans.

But this topic suggests a sad afterthought, that here we find the seat of his own pain.
Possibly Swedenborg paid the penalty of introverted faculties. Success, or a fortunate
genius, seems to depend on a happy adjustment of heart and brain; on a due proportion,
hard to hit, of moral and mental power, which perhaps obeys the law of those chemical
ratios which make a proportion in volumes necessary to combination, as when gases
will combine in certain fixed rates, but not at any rate.It is hard to carry a full cup;
and this man, profusely endowed in heart and mind, early fell into dangerous discord
with himself. In his Animal Kingdom he surprised us by declaring that he loved anal-
ysis, and not synthesis; and now, after his fiftieth year, he falls into jealousy of his
intellect; and though aware that truth is not solitary nor is goodness solitary, but both
must ever mix and marry, he makes war on his mind, takes the part of the conscience
against it, and, on all occasions, traduces and blasphemes it. The violence is instantly
avenged. Beauty is disgraced, love is unlovely, when truth, the half part of heaven, is
denied, as much as when a bitterness in men of talent leads to satire and destroys the
judgment. He is wise, but wise in his own despite. There is an air of infinite grief and the
sound of wailing all over and through this lurid universe. A vampyre sits in the seat of the
prophet and turns with gloomy appetite to the images of pain. Indeed, a bird does not
more readily weave its nest, or a mole bore into the ground, than this seer of the souls
substructs a new hell and pit, each more abominable than the last, round every new
crew of offenders. He was let down through a column that seemed of brass, but it was
formed of angelic spirits, that he might descend safely amongst the unhappy, and
witness the vastation of souls and hear there, for a long continuance, their lamentations:
he saw their tormentors, who increase and strain pangs to infinity; he saw the hell of the
jugglers, the hell of the assassins, the hell of the lascivious; the hell of robbers, who kill
and boil men; the infernal tun of the deceitful; the excrementitious hells; the hell of the
revengeful, whose faces resembled a round, broad cake, and their arms rotate like a
wheel. Except Rabelais and Dean Swift nobody ever had such science of filth and
corruption.

These books should be used with caution. It is dangerous to sculpture these evanescing
images of thought. True in transition, they become false if fixed. It requires, for his just
apprehension, almost a genius equal to his own. But when his visions become the
stereotyped language of multitudes of persons of all degrees of age and capacity, they
are perverted. The wise people of the Greek race were accustomed to lead the most
intelligent and virtuous young men, as part of their education, through the Eleusinian
mysteries, wherein, with much pomp and graduation, the highest truths known to
ancient wisdom were taught. An ardent and contemplative young man, at eighteen or
twenty years, might read once these books of Swedenborg, these mysteries of love and
conscience, and then throw them aside for ever. Genius is ever haunted by similar
dreams, when the hells and the heavens are opened to it. But these pictures are to be
held as mystical, that is, as a quite arbitrary and accidental picture of the truth,--not as
the truth. Any other symbol would be as good; then this is safely seen.


Swedenborg's system of the world wants central spontaneity; it is dynamic, not vital, and
lacks power to generate life. There is no individual in it. The universe is a gigantic crystal,
all whose atoms and laminae lie in uninterrupted order and with unbroken unity, but
cold and still. What seems an individual and a will, is none. There is an immense chain of
intermediation, extending from centre to extremes, which bereaves every agency of all
freedom and character. The universe, in his poem, suffers under a magnetic sleep, and
only reflects the mind of the magnetizer. Every thought comes into each mind by
influence from a society of spirits that surround it, and into these from a higher society,
and so on. All his types mean the same few things. All his figures speak one speech. All
his interlocutors Swedenborgize. Be they who they may, to this complexion must they
come at last. This Charon ferries them all over in his boat; kings, counsellors, cavaliers,
doctors, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Hans Sloane, King George II, Mahomet, or whomsoever,
and all gather one grimness of hue and style. Only when Cicero comes by, our gentle
seer sticks a little at saying he talked with Cicero, and with a touch of human relenting
remarks, “one whom it was given me to believe was Cicero”; and when the soi disant
Roman opens his mouth, Rome and eloquence have ebbed away,--it is plain theologic
Swedenborg like the rest. His heavens and hells are dull; fault of want of individualism.
The thousand-fold relation of men is not there. The interest that attaches in nature to
each man, because he is right by his wrong, and wrong by his right; because he defies all
dogmatizing and classification, so many allowances and contingencies and futurities are
to be taken into account; strong by his vices, often paralyzed by his virtues;--sinks into
entire sympathy with his society. This want reacts to the centre of the system. Though
the agency of “the Lord” is in every line referred to by name, it never becomes alive.
There is no lustre in that eye which gazes from the centre and which should vivify the
immense dependency of beings.

The vice of Swedenborg's mind is its theological determination. Nothing with him has the
liberality of universal wisdom, but we are always in a church. That Hebrew muse, which
taught the lore of right and wrong to men, had the same excess of influence for him it
has had for the nations. The mode, as well as the essence, was sacred. Palestine is ever
the more valuable as a chapter in universal history, and ever the less an available
element in education. The genius of Swedenborg, largest of all modern souls in this
department of thought, wasted itself in the endeavor to reanimate and conserve what
had already arrived at its natural term, and, in the great secular Providence, was retiring
from its prominence, before Western modes of thought and expression. Swedenborg
and Behmen both failed by attaching themselves to the Christian symbol, instead of to
the moral sentiment, which carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities, in
its bosom.

The excess of influence shows itself in. the incongruous importation of a foreign rhet-
oric. “What have I to do,” asks the impatient reader, “with jasper and sardonyx, beryl
and chalcedony; what with arks and passovers, ephahs and ephods; what with lepers and
emerods; what with heave-offerings and unleavened bread, chariots of fire, dragons
crowned and horned, behemoth and unicorn? Good for Orientals, these are nothing to
me. The more learning you bring to explain them, the more glaring the impertinence.
The more coherent and elaborate the system, the less I like it. I say, with the Spartan,
‘Why do you speak so much to the purpose, of that which is nothing to the purpose?'
My learning is such as God gave me in my birth and habit, in the delight and study of my
eyes and not of another man's. Of all absurdities, this of some foreigner proposing to
take away my rhetoric and substitute his own, and amuse me with pelican and stork,
instead of thrush and robin; palm-trees and shittim-wood, instead of sassafras and
hickory,--seems the most needless.”

Locke said, “God, when he makes the prophet, does not unmake the man.”
Swedenborg's history points the remark. The parish disputes in the Swedish church
between the friends and foes of Luther and Melancthon, concerning “faith alone” and
“works alone,” intrude themselves into his speculations upon the economy of the
universe, and of the celestial societies. The Lutheran bishop's son, for whom the heavens
are opened, so that he sees with eyes and in the richest symbolic forms the awful truth
of things, and utters again in his books, as under a heavenly mandate, the indisputable
secrets of moral nature,--with all these grandeurs resting upon him, remains the
Lutheran bishop's son; his judgments are those of a Swedish polemic, and his vast
enlargements purchased by adamantine limitations. He carries his controversial memory
with him in his visits to the souls. He is like Michael Angelo, who, in his frescoes, put the
cardinal who had offended him to roast under a mountain of devils; or like Dante, who
avenged, in vindictive melodies, all his private wrongs; or perhaps still more like
Montaigne's parish priest, who, if a hail-storm passes over the village, thinks the day of
doom is come, and the cannibals already have got the pip. Swedenborg confounds us
not less with the pains of Melancthon and Luther and Wolfius, and his own books, which
he advertises among the angels.

Under the same theologic cramp, many of his dogmas are bound. His cardinal position
in morals is that evils should be shunned as sins. But he does not know what evil is, or
what good is, who thinks any ground remains to be occupied, after saying that evil is to
be shunned as evil. I doubt not he was led by the desire to insert the element of
personality of Deity. But nothing is added. One man, you say, dreads erysipelas,--show
him that this dread is evil: or, one dreads hell,--show him that dread is evil. He who loves
goodness, harbors angels, reveres reverence and lives with God. The less we have to do
with our sins the better. No man can afford to waste his moments in compunctions.
“That is active duty,” say the Hindoos, “which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge,
which is for our liberation: all other duty is good only unto weariness.”

Another dogma, growing out of this pernicious theologic limitation, is his Inferno.
Swedenborg has devils. Evil, according to old philosophers, is good in the making. That
pure malignity can exist is the extreme proposition of unbelief. It is not to be entertained
by a rational agent; it is atheism; it is the last profanation. Euripides rightly said,--

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

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

“O wad ye tak a thought, and mend!”

has the advantage of the vindictive theologian. Every thing is superficial and perishes but
love and truth only. The largest is always the truest sentiment, and we feel the more
generous spirit of the Indian Vishnu,--“I am the same to all mankind. There is not one
who is worthy of my love or hatred. They who serve me with adoration,--I am in them,
and they in me. If one whose ways are altogether evil serve me alone, he is as
respectable as the just man; he is altogether well employed; he soon becometh of a
virtuous spirit and obtaineth eternal happiness.”

For the anomalous pretension of Revelations of the other world,--only his probity and
genius can entitle it to any serious regard. His revelations destroy their credit by running
into detail. If a man say that the Holy Ghost has informed him that the Last judgment (or
the last of the judgments) took place in 1757; or that the Dutch, in the other world, live in
a heaven by themselves, and the English in a heaven by themselves; I reply that the Spirit
which is holy is reserved, taciturn, and deals in laws. The rumors of ghosts and hob-
goblins gossip and tell fortunes. The teachings of the high Spirit are abstemious, and,
in regard to particulars, negative. Socrates's Genius did not advise him to act or to find,
but if he purposed to do somewhat not advantageous, it dissuaded him. “What God is,”
he said, “I know not; what he is not, I know.” The Hindoos have denominated the
Supreme Being, the “Internal Check.” The illuminated Quakers explained their Light, not
as somewhat which leads to any action, but it appears as an obstruction to any thing
unfit. But the right examples are private experiences, which are absolutely at one on this
point. Strictly speaking, Swedenborg's revelation is a confounding of planes,--a capital
offence in so learned a categorist. This is to carry the law of surface into the plane of
substance, to carry individualism and its fopperies into the realm of essences and
generals,--which is dislocation and chaos.

The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. No imprudent, no sociable angel ever dropt
an early syllable to answer the longings of saints, the fears of mortals. We should have
listened on our knees to any favorite, who, by stricter obedience, had brought his
thoughts into parallelism with the celestial currents and could hint to human ears the
scenery and circumstance of the newly parted soul. But it is certain that it must tally with
what is best in nature. It must not be inferior in tone to the already known works of the
artist who sculptures the globes of the firmament and writes the moral law. It must be
fresher than rainbows, stabler than mountains, agreeing with flowers, with tides and the
rising and setting of autumnal stars. Melodious poets shall be hoarse as street ballads
when once the penetrating key-note of nature and spirit is sounded,--the earth-beat,
seabeat, heart-beat, which makes the tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of blood,
and the sap of trees.

In this mood we hear the rumor that the seer has arrived, and his tale is told. But there
is no beauty, no heaven: for angels, goblins. The sad muse loves night and death and
the pit. His Inferno is mesmeric. His spiritual world bears the same relation to the gen-
erosities and joys of truth of which human souls have already made us cognizant, as
a man's bad dreams bear to his ideal life. It is indeed very like, in its endless power of
lurid pictures, to the phenomena of dreaming, which nightly turns many an honest
gentleman, benevolent but dyspeptic, into a wretch, skulking like a dog about the outer
yards and kennels of creation. When he mounts into the heaven, I do not hear its
language. A man should not tell me that he has walked among the angels; his proof is
that his eloquence makes me one. Shall the archangels be less majestic and sweet than
the figures that have actually walked the earth? These angels that Swedenborg paints
give us no very high idea of their discipline and culture: they are all country parsons:
their heaven is a fete champetre, an evangelical picnic, or French distribution of prizes to
virtuous peasants. Strange, scholastic, didactic, passionless, bloodless man, who denotes
classes of souls as a botanist disposes of a carex, and visits doleful hells as a stratum of
chalk or hornblende! He has no sympathy. He goes up and down the world of men, a
modern Rhadamanthus in gold-headed cane and peruke, and with nonchalance and the
air of a referee, distributes souls. The warm, many-weathered, passionate-peopled world
is to him a grammar of hieroglyphs, or an emblematic freemason's procession. How
different is Jacob Behmen! he is tremulous with emotion and listens awe-struck, with the
gentlest humanity, to the Teacher whose lessons he conveys; and when he asserts that,
“in some sort, love is greater than God,” his heart beats so high that the thumping
against his leathern coat is audible across the centuries. ‘Tis a great difference. Behmen
is healthily and beautifully wise, notwithstanding the mystical narrowness and
incommunicableness. Swedenborg is disagreeably wise, and with all his accumulated
gifts, paralyzes and repels.

It is the best sign of a great nature that it opens a foreground, and, like the breath of
morning landscapes, invites us onward. Swedenborg is retrospective, nor can we divest
him of his mattock and shroud. Some minds are for ever restrained from descending
into nature; others are for ever prevented from ascending out of it. With a force of many
men, he could never break the umbilical cord which held him to nature, and he did not
rise to the platform of pure genius.

It is remarkable that this man, who, by his perception of symbols, saw the poetic
construction of things and the primary relation of mind to matter, remained entirely
devoid of the whole apparatus of poetic expression, which that perception creates. He
knew the grammar and rudiments of the Mother-Tongue,--how could he not read off one
strain into music? Was he like Saadi, who, in his vision, designed to fill his lap with the
celestial flowers, as presents for his friends; but the fragrance of the roses so intoxicated
him that the skirt dropped from his hands? or is reporting a breach of the manners of
that heavenly society? or was it that he saw the vision intellectually, and hence that
chiding of the intellectual that pervades his books? Be it as it may, his books have no
melody, no emotion, no humor, no relief to the dead prosaic level. In his profuse and
accurate imagery is no pleasure, for there is no beauty. We wander forlorn in a lacklustre
landscape. No bird ever sang in all these gardens of the dead. The entire want of
poetry in so transcendent a mind betokens the disease, and like a hoarse voice in a
beautiful person, is a kind of warning. I think, sometimes, he will not be read longer. His
great name will turn a sentence. His books have become a monument. His laurel so
largely mixed with cypress, a charnel-breath so mingles with the temple incense, that
boys and maids will shun the spot.

Yet in this immolation of genius and fame at the shrine of conscience, is a merit sublime
beyond praise. He lived to purpose: he gave a verdict. He elected goodness as the clue to
which the soul must cling in all this labyrinth of nature. Many opinions conflict as to the
true centre. In the shipwreck, some cling to running rigging, some to cask and barrel,
some to spars, some to mast; the pilot chooses with science,--I plant myself here; all will
sink before this; “he comes to land who sails with me.” Do not rely on heavenly favor, or
on compassion to folly, or on prudence, on common sense, the old usage and main
chance of men: nothing can keep you,--not fate, nor health, nor admirable intellect; none
can keep you, but rectitude only, rectitude for ever and ever! And with a tenacity that
never swerved in all his studies, inventions, dreams, he adheres to this brave choice. I
think of him as of some transmigrating votary of Indian legend, who says “Though I be
dog, or jackal, or pismire, in the last rudiments of nature, under what integument or
ferocity, I cleave to right, as the sure ladder that leads up to man and to God.”

Swedenborg has rendered a double service to mankind, which is now only beginning to
be known. By the science of experiment and use, he made his first steps: he observed
and published the laws of nature; and ascending by just degrees from events to their
summits and causes, he was fired with piety at the harmonies he felt, and abandoned
himself to his joy and worship. This was his first service. If the glory was too bright for
his eyes to bear, if he staggered under the trance of delight, the more excellent is the
spectacle he saw, the realities of being which beam and blaze through him, and which
no infirmities of the prophet are suffered to obscure; and he renders a second passive
service to men, not less than the first, perhaps, in the great circle of being,--and, in the
retributions of spiritual nature, not less glorious or less beautiful to himself.




Montaigne; or, the Skeptic



EVERY FACT is related on one side to sensation, and on the other to morals. The game
of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the
upper, to find the under side. Nothing so thin but has these two faces, and when the
observer has seen the obverse, he turns it over to see the reverse. Life is a pitching of
this penny,--heads or tails. We never tire of this game, because there is still a slight
shudder of astonishment at the exhibition of the other face, at the contrast of the two
faces. A man is flushed with success, and bethinks himself what this good luck signifies.
He drives his bargain in the street; but it occurs that he also is bought and sold. He sees
the beauty of a human face, and searches the cause of that beauty, which must be more
beautiful. He builds his fortunes, maintains the laws, cherishes his children; but he asks
himself, Why? and whereto? This head and this tail are called, in the language of
philosophy, Infinite and Finite; Relative and Absolute; Apparent and Real; and many fine
names beside.

Each man is born with a predisposition to one or the other of these sides of nature; and
it will easily happen that men will be found devoted to one or the other. One class has
the perception of difference, and is conversant with facts and surfaces, cities and
persons, and the bringing certain things to pass;--the men of talent and action. Another
class have the perception of identity, and are men of faith and philosophy, men of
genius.

Each of these riders drives too fast. Plotinus believes only in philosophers; Fenelon, in
saints; Pindar and Byron, in poets. Read the haughty language in which Plato and the
Platonists speak of all men who are not devoted to their own shining abstractions:
other men are rats and mice. The literary class is usually proud and exclusive. The
correspondence of Pope and Swift describes mankind around them as monsters; and
that of Goethe and Schiller, in our own time, is scarcely more kind.

It is easy to see how this arrogance comes. The genius is a genius by the first look he
casts on any object. Is his eye creative? Does he not rest in angles and colors, but
beholds the design?--he will presently undervalue the actual object. In powerful
moments, his thought has dissolved the works of art and nature into their causes, so
that the works appear heavy and faulty. He has a conception of beauty which the
sculptor cannot embody. Picture, statue, temple, railroad, steam-engine, existed first in
an artist's mind, without flaw, mistake, or friction, which impair the executed models. So
did the Church, the State, college, court, social circle, and all the institutions. It is not
strange that these men, remembering what they have seen and hoped of ideas, should
affirm disdainfully the superiority of ideas. Having at some time seen that the happy soul
will carry all the arts in power, they say, Why cumber ourselves with superfluous
realizations? and like dreaming beggars they assume to speak and act as if these values
were already substantiated.

On the other part, the men of toil and trade and luxury,--the animal world, including the
animal in the philosopher and poet also, and the practical world, including the painful
drudgeries which are never excused to philosopher or poet any more than to the rest,--
weigh heavily on the other side. The trade in our streets believes in no metaphysical
causes, thinks nothing of the force which necessitated traders and a trading planet to
exist: no, but sticks to cotton, sugar, wool and salt.The ward meetings, on election days,
are not softened by any misgiving of the value of these ballotings. Hot life is streaming in
a single direction. To the men of this world, to the animal strength and spirits, to the men
of practical power, whilst immersed in it, the man of ideas appears out of his reason.
They alone have reason.

Things always bring their own philosophy with them, that is, prudence. No man acquires
property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also. In England, the richest country
that ever existed, property stands for more, compared with personal ability, than in any
other. After dinner, a man believes less, denies more: verities have lost some charm.
After dinner, arithmetic is the only science: ideas are disturbing, incendiary, follies of
young men, repudiated by the solid portion of society: and a man comes to be valued by
his athletic and animal qualities. Spence relates that Mr. Pope was with Sir Godfrey
Kneller one day, when his nephew, a Guinea trader, came in. “Nephew,” said Sir Godfrey,
“you have the honor of seeing the two greatest men in the world.” “I don't know how
great men you may be,” said the Guinea man, “but I don't like your looks. I have often
bought a man much better than both of you, all muscles and bones, for ten guineas.”
Thus the men of the senses revenge themselves on the professors and repay scorn for
scorn. The first had leaped to conclusions not yet ripe, and say more than is true; the
others make themselves merry with the philosopher, and weigh man by the pound. They
believe that mustard bites the tongue, that pepper is hot, friction-matches incendiary,
revolvers are to be avoided, and suspenders hold up pantaloons; that there is much
sentiment in a chest of tea; and a man will be eloquent, if you give him good wine. Are
you tender and scrupulous,--you must eat more mince-pie. They hold that Luther had
milk in him when he said,--

“Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weiber, Gesang,
Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang”;-
[He who does not love wine, women, song,
remains a fool all his life long]

and when he advised a young scholar, perplexed with fore-ordination and free-will, to
get well drunk. “The nerves,” says Cabanis, “they are the man.” My neighbor, a jolly
farmer, in the tavern bar-room, thinks that the use of money is sure and speedy
spending. For his part, he says, he puts his down his neck and gets the good of it.

The inconvenience of this way of thinking is that it runs into indifferentism and then into
disgust. Life is eating us up. We shall be fables presently. Keep cool: it will be all one a
hundred years hence. Life's well enough, but we shall be glad to get out of it, and they
will all be glad to have us. Why should we fret and drudge? Our meat will taste tomorrow
as it did yesterday, and we may at last have had enough of it. “Ah,” said my languid
gentleman at Oxford, “there's nothing new or true,--and no matter.”

With a little more bitterness, the cynic moans; our life is like an ass led to market by a
bundle of hay being carried before him; he sees nothing but the bundle of hay. “There is
so much trouble in coming into the world,” said Lord Bolingbroke, “and so much more, as
well as meanness, in going out of it, that 'tis hardly worthwhile to be here at all.” I knew a
philosopher of this kidney who was accustomed briefly to sum up his experience of
human nature in saying, “Mankind is a damned rascal”: 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 ego-
tism. If you come near them and see what conceits they entertain,--they are abstract-
ionists, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some dream; in expecting the hom-
age of society to some precious scheme, built on a truth, but destitute of proportion
in its presentment, of justness in its application, and of all energy of will in the schemer
to embody and vitalize it.

But I see plainly, he says, that I cannot see. I know that human strength is not in
extremes, but in avoiding extremes. I, at least, will shun the weakness of philosophizing
beyond my depth. What is the use of pretending to powers we have not? What is the use
of pretending to assurances we have not, respecting the other life? Why exaggerate the
power of virtue? Why be an angel before your time? These strings, wound up too high,
will snap. If there is a wish for immortality, and no evidence, why not say just that? If
there are conflicting evidences, why not state them? If there is not ground for a candid
thinker to make up his mind, yea or nay,--why not suspend the judgment? I weary of
these dogmatizers. I tire of these hacks of routine, who deny the dogmas. I neither affirm
nor deny. I stand here to try the case. I am here to consider, skopein, to consider how it
is. I will try to keep the balance true. Of what use to take the chair and glibly rattle off
theories of society, religion and nature, when I know that practical objections lie in the
way, insurmountable by me and by my mates? Why so talkative in public, when each of
my neighbors can pin me to my seat by arguments I cannot refute? Why pretend that life
is so simple a game, when we know how subtle and elusive the Proteus*(28) is? Why
think to shut up all things in your narrow coop, when we know there are not one or two
only, but ten, twenty, a thousand things, and unlike? Why fancy that you have all the
truth in your keeping? There is much to say on all sides.

Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which
any thing more than an approximate solution can be had? Is not marriage an open
question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the
institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in? And the reply of Socrates,
to him who asked whether he should choose a wife, still remains reasonable, that
“whether he should choose one or not, he would repent it.” Is not the State a question?
All society is divided in opinion on the subject of the State. Nobody loves it; great
numbers dislike it and suffer conscientious scruples to allegiance; and the only defence
set up, is the fear of doing worse in disorganizing. Is it otherwise with the Church? Or, to
put any of the questions which touch mankind nearest,--shall the young man aim at a
leading part in law, in polities, in trade? It will not be pretended that a success in either of
these kinds is quite coincident with what is best and inmost in his mind. Shall he then,
cutting the stays that hold him fast to the social state, put out to sea with no guidance
but his genius? There is much to say on both sides. Remember the open question
between the present order of “competition” and the friends of “attractive and associated
labor.” The generous minds embrace the proposition of labor shared by all; it is the only
honesty; nothing else is safe. It is from the poor man's hut alone that strength and virtue
come: and yet, on the other side, it is alleged that labor impairs the form and breaks the
spirit of man, and the laborers cry unanimously, “We have no thoughts.” Culture, how
indispensable! I cannot forgive you the want of accomplishments; and yet culture will
instantly impair that chiefest beauty of spontaneousness. Excellent is culture for a
savage; but once let him read in the book, and he is no longer able not to think of
Plutarch's heroes. In short, since true fortitude of understanding consists “in not letting
what we know be embarrassed by what we do not know,” we ought to secure those
advantages which we can command, and not risk them by clutching after the airy and
unattainable. Come, no chimeras! Let us go abroad; let us mix in affairs; let us learn and
get and have and climb. “Men are a sort of moving plants, and, like trees, receive a great
part of their nourishment from the air. If they keep too much at home, they pine.” Let us
have a robust, manly life; let us know what we know, for certain; what we have, let it be
solid and seasonable and our own. A world in the hand is worth two in the bush. Let us
have to do with real men and women, and not with skipping ghosts.

This then is the right ground of the skeptic,--this of consideration, of self-containing; not
at all of unbelief; not at all of universal denying, nor of universal doubting,--doubting
even that he doubts; least of all of scoffing and profligate jeering at all that is stable and
good. These are no more his moods than are those of religion and philosophy. He is the
considerer, the prudent, taking in sail, counting stock, husbanding his means, believing
that a man has too many enemies than that he can afford to be his own foe; that we
cannot give ourselves too many advantages in this unequal conflict, with powers so vast
and unweariable ranged on one side, and this little conceited vulnerable popinjay that a
man is, bobbing up and down into every danger, on the other. It is a position taken up for
better defence, as of more safety, and one that can be maintained; and it is one of more
opportunity and range: as, when we build a house, the rule is to set it not too high nor
too low, under the wind, but out of the dirt.

The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mobility. The Spartan and Stoic schemes
are too stark and stiff for our occasion. A theory of Saint John, and of non-resistance,
seems, on the other hand, too thin and aerial. We want some coat woven of elastic steel,
stout as the first and limber as the second. We want a ship in these billows we inhabit. An
angular, dogmatic house would be rent to chips and splinters in this storm of many
elements. No, it must be tight, and fit to the form of man, to live at all; as a shell must
dictate the architecture of a house founded on the sea. The soul of man must be the type
of our scheme, just as the body of man is the type after which a dwelling-house is built.
Adaptiveness is the peculiarity of human nature. We are golden averages, volitant
stabilities, compensated or periodic errors, houses founded on the sea. The wise skeptic
wishes to have a near view of the best game and the chief players; what is best in the
planet; art and nature, places and events; but mainly men. Every thing that is excellent in
mankind,--a form of grace, an arm of iron, lips of persuasion, a brain of resources, every
one skilful to play and win,--he will see and judge.

The terms of admission to this spectacle are, that he have a certain solid and intelligible
way of living of his own; some method of answering the inevitable needs of human life;
proof that he has played with skill and success; that he has evinced the temper,
stoutness and the range of qualities which, among his contemporaries and countrymen,
entitle him to fellowship and trust. For the secrets of life are not shown except to
sympathy and likeness. Men do not confide themselves to boys, or coxcombs, or
pedants, but to their peers. Some wise limitation, as the modern phrase is; some
condition between the extremes, and having, itself, a positive quality; some stark and
sufficient man, who is not salt or sugar, but sufficiently related to the world to do justice
to Paris or London, and, at the same time, a vigorous and original thinker, whom cities
can not overawe, but who uses them,--is the fit person to occupy this ground of
speculation.

These qualities meet in the character of Montaigne. And yet, since the personal regard
which I entertain for Montaigne may be unduly great, I will, under the shield of this
prince of egotists, offer, as an apology for electing him as the representative of
skepticism, a word or two to explain how my love began and grew for this admirable
gossip.

A single odd volume of Cotton's translation of the Essays remained to me from my
father's library, when a boy. It lay long neglected, until, after many years, when I was
newly escaped from college, I read the book, and procured the remaining volumes. I
remember the delight and wonder in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I had
myself written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and
experience. It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise, I
came to a tomb of Auguste Collignon, who died in 1830, aged sixty-eight years, and who,
said the monument, “lived to do right, and had formed himself to virtue on the Essays of
Montaigne.” Some years later, I became acquainted with an accomplished English poet,
John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my correspondence, I found that, from a love of
Montaigne, he had made a pilgrimage to his chateau, still standing near Castellan, in
Perigord, and, after two hundred and fifty years, had copied from the walls of his library
the inscriptions which Montaigne had written there. That Journal of Mr. Sterling's,
published in the Westminster Review, Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted in the Prolegomena to his
edition of the Essays. I heard with pleasure that one of the newly-discovered autographs
of William Shakespeare was in a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne. It is the only
book which we certainly know to have been in the poet's library. And, oddly enough, the
duplicate copy of Florio, which the British Museum purchased with a view of protecting
the Shakespeare autograph (as I was informed in the Museum), turned out to have the
autograph of Ben Jonson in the fly-leaf. Leigh Hunt relates of Lord Byron, that Montaigne
was the only great writer of past times whom he read with avowed satisfaction. Other
coincidences, not needful to be mentioned here, concurred to make this old Gascon still
new and immortal for me.

In 1571, on the death of his father, Montaigne, then thirty-eight years old, retired from
the practice of law at Bordeaux, and settled himself on his estate. Though he had been a
man of pleasure and sometimes a courtier, his studious habits now grew on him, and he
loved the compass, staidness and independence of the country gentleman's life. He took
up his economy in good earnest, and made his farms yield the most. Downright and
plain-dealing, and abhorring to be deceived or to deceive, he was esteemed in the
country for his sense and probity. In the civil wars of the League, which converted every
house into a fort, Montaigne kept his gates open and his house without defence. All
parties freely came and went, his courage and honor being universally esteemed. The
neighboring lords and gentry brought jewels and papers to him for safekeeping. Gibbon
reckons, in these bigoted times, but two men of liberality in France,--Henry IV and
Montaigne.

Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers. His French freedom runs into
grossness; but he has anticipated all censure by the bounty of his own confessions. In
his times, books were written to one sex only, and almost all were written in Latin; so
that in a humorist a certain nakedness of statement was permitted, which our manners,
of a literature addressed equally to both sexes, do not allow. But though a biblical
plainness coupled with a most uncanonical levity may shut his pages to many sensitive
readers, yet the offence is superficial. He parades it: he makes the most of it: nobody can
think or say worse of him than he does. He pretends to most of the vices; and, if there be
any virtue in him, he says, it got in by stealth. There is no man, in his opinion, who has
not deserved hanging five or six times; and he pretends no exception in his own behalf.
“Five or six as ridiculous stories,” too, he says, “can be told of me, as of any man living.”
But, with all this really superfluous frankness, the opinion of an invincible probity grows
into every reader's mind.

“When I the most strictly and religiously confess myself, I find that the best virtue I
have has in it some tincture of vice; and I, who am as sincere and perfect a lover of vir-
tue of that stamp as any other whatever, am afraid that Plato, in his purest virtue, if he
had listened and laid his ear close to himself, would have heard some jarring sound of
human mixture; but faint and remote and only to be perceived by himself.”

Here is an impatience and fastidiousness at color or pretence of any kind. He has been
in courts so long as to have conceived a furious disgust at appearances; he will indulge
himself with a little cursing and swearing; he will talk with sailors and gipsies, use flash
and street ballads; he has stayed in-doors till he is deadly sick; he will to the open air,
though it rain bullets. He has seen too much of gentlemen of the long robe, until he
wishes for cannibals; and is so nervous, by factitious life, that he thinks the more
barbarous man is, the better he is. He likes his saddle. You may read theology, and
grammar, and metaphysics elsewhere. Whatever you get here shall smack of the earth
and of real life, sweet, or smart, or stinging. He makes no hesitation to entertain you with
the records of his disease, and his journey to Italy is quite full of that matter. He took and
kept this position of equilibrium. Over his name he drew an emblematic pair of scales,
and wrote Que scais je? under it. As I look at his effigy opposite the title-page, I seem to
hear him say, “You may play old Poz, if you will; you may rail and exaggerate,--I stand
here for truth, and will not, for all the states and churches and revenues and personal
reputations of Europe, overstate the dry fact, as I see it; I will rather mumble and prose
about what I certainly know,--my house and barns; my father, my wife and my tenants;
my old lean bald pate; my knives and forks; what meats I eat and what drinks I prefer,
and a hundred straws just as ridiculous,--than I will write, with a fine crow-quill, a fine
romance. I like gray days, and autumn and winter weather. I am gray and autumnal
myself, and think an undress and old shoes that do not pinch my feet, and old friends
who do not constrain me, and plain topics where I do not need to strain myself and
pump my brains, the most suitable. Our condition as men is risky and ticklish enough.
One cannot be sure of himself and his fortune an hour, but he may be whisked off into
some pitiable or ridiculous plight. Why should I vapor and play the philosopher, instead
of ballasting, the best I can, this dancing balloon? So, at least, I live within compass, keep
myself ready for action, and can shoot the gulf at last with decency. If there be anything
farcical in such a life, the blame is not mine; let it lie at fate's and nature's door.”

The Essays, therefore, are an entertaining soliloquy on every random topic that comes
into his head; treating every thing without ceremony, yet with masculine sense. There
have been men with deeper insight; but, one would say, never a man with such abun-
dance of thoughts: he is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the
reader care for all that he cares for.

The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the
book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book.
Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive. One has the same
pleasure in it that he feels in listening to the necessary speech of men about their work,
when any unusual circumstance gives momentary importance to the dialogue. For
blacksmiths and teamsters do not trip in their speech; it is a shower of bullets. It is
Cambridge men who correct themselves and begin again at every half sentence, and,
moreover, will pun, and refine too much, and swerve from the matter to the expression.
Montaigne talks with shrewdness, knows the world and books and himself, and uses the
positive degree; never shrieks, or protests, or prays: no weakness, no convulsion, no
superlative: does not wish to jump out of his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space
or time, but is stout and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes pain because it
makes him feel himself and realize things; as we pinch ourselves to know that we are
awake. He keeps the plain; he rarely mounts or sinks; likes to feel solid ground and the
stones underneath. His writing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration; contented, self-res-
pecting and keeping the middle of the road. There is but one exception,--in his love
for Socrates. In speaking of him, for once his cheek flushes and his style rises to passion.

Montaigne died of a quinsy, at the age of sixty, in 1592. When he came to die he caused
the mass to be celebrated in his chamber. At the age of thirty-three, he had been
married. “But,” he says, “might I have had my own will, I would not have married Wisdom
herself, if she would have had me: but 'tis to much purpose to evade it, the common
custom and use of life will have it so. Most of my actions are guided by example, not
choice.” In the hour of death, he gave the same weight to custom. Que scais je? What
do I know?

This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed by translating it into all tongues and
printing seventy-five editions of it in Europe; and that, too, a circulation somewhat
chosen, namely among courtiers, soldiers, princes, men of the world and men of wit and
generosity.

Shall we say that Montaigne has spoken wisely, and given the right and permanent
expression of the human mind, on the conduct of life?

We are natural believers. Truth, or the connection between cause and effect, alone
interests us. We are persuaded that a thread runs through all things: all worlds are
strung on it, as beads; and men, and events, and life, come to us only because of that
thread: they pass and repass only that we may know the direction and continuity of that
line. A book or statement which goes to show that there is no line, but random and
chaos, a calamity out of nothing, a prosperity and no account of it, a hero born from a
fool, a fool from a hero,--dispirits us. Seen or unseen, we believe the tie exists. Talent
makes counterfeit ties; genius finds the real ones. We hearken to the man of science,
because we anticipate the sequence in natural phenomena which he uncovers. We love
whatever affirms, connects, preserves; and dislike what scatters or pulls down. One man
appears whose nature is to all men's eyes conserving and constructive; his presence
supposes a well-ordered society, agriculture, trade, large institutions and empire. If these
did not exist, they would begin to exist through his endeavors. Therefore he cheers and
comforts men, who feel all this in him very readily. The nonconformist and the rebel say
all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discover to our
sense no plan of house or state of their own. Therefore, though the town and state and
way of living, which our counsellor contemplated, might be a very modest or musty
prosperity, yet men rightly go for him, and reject the reformer so long as he comes only
with axe and crowbar.

But though we are natural conservers and causationists, and reject a sour, dumpish
unbelief, the skeptical class, which Montaigne represents, have reason, and every man,
at some time, belongs to it. Every superior mind will pass through this domain of
equilibration,--I should rather say, will know how to avail himself of the checks and
balances in nature, as a natural weapon against the exaggeration and formalism of
bigots and blockheads.

Skepticism is the attitude assumed by the student in relation to the particulars which
society adores, but which he sees to be reverend only in their tendency and spirit. The
ground occupied by the skeptic is the vestibule of the temple. Society does not like to
have any breath of question blown on the existing order. But the interrogation of custom
at all points is an inevitable stage in the growth of every superior mind, and is the
evidence of its perception of the flowing power which remains itself in all changes.

The superior mind will find itself equally at odds with the evils of society and with the
projects that are offered to relieve them. The wise skeptic is a bad citizen; no con-
servative, he sees the selfishness of property and the drowsiness of institutions. But
neither is he fit to work with any democratic party that ever was constituted; for parties
wish every one committed, and he penetrates the popular patriotism. His politics are
those of the “Soul's Errand” of Sir Walter Raleigh; or of Krishna, in the Bhagavat,
“There is none who is worthy of my love or hatred”; whilst he sentences law, physic,
divinity, commerce and custom. He is a reformer; yet he is no better member of the
philanthropic association. It turns out that he is not the champion of the operative, the
pauper, the prisoner, the slave. It stands in his mind that our life in this world is not of
quite so easy interpretation as churches and schoolbooks say. He does not wish to take
ground against these benevolences, to play the part of devil's attorney, and blazon every
doubt and sneer that darkens the sun for him. But he says, There are doubts.

I mean to use the occasion, and celebrate the calendar-day of our Saint Michel de
Montaigne, by counting and describing these doubts or negations. I wish to ferret them
out of their holes and sun them a little. We must do with them as the police do with old
rogues, who are shown up to the public at the marshal's office. They will never be so
formidable when once they have been identified and registered. But I mean honestly by
them,--that justice shall be done to their terrors. I shall not take Sunday objections, made
up on purpose to be put down. I shall take the worst I can find, whether I can dispose of
them or they of me.

I do not press the skepticism of the materialist. I know the quadruped opinion will not
prevail. ‘Tis of no importance what bats and oxen think. The first dangerous symptom I
report is, the levity of intellect; as if it were fatal to earnestness to know much.
Knowledge is the knowing that we can not know. The dull pray; the geniuses are light
mockers. How respectable is earnestness on every platform! but intellect kills it. Nay, San
Carlo, my subtle and admirable friend, one of the most penetrating of men, finds that all
direct ascension, even of lofty piety, leads to this ghastly insight and sends back the
votary orphaned. My astonishing San Carlo thought the lawgivers and saints infected.
They found the are empty; saw, and would not tell; and tried to choke off their
approaching followers, by saying, “Action, action, my dear fellows, is for you!” Bad as was
to me this detection by San Carlo, this-frost in July, this blow from a bride, there was still
a worse, namely the cloy or satiety of the saints. In the mount of vision, ere they have yet
risen from their knees, they say, “We discover that this our homage and beatitude is
partial and deformed: we must fly for relief to the suspected and reviled Intellect, to the
Understanding, the Mephistopheles, to the gymnastics of talent.”

This is hobgoblin the first; and though it has been the subject of much elegy in our
nineteenth century, from Byron, Goethe and other poets of less fame, not to mention
many distinguished private observers,--I confess it is not very affecting to my imagination;
for it seems to concern the shattering of baby-houses and crockery-shops. What flutters
the Church of Rome, or of England, or of Geneva, or of Boston, may yet be very far from
touching any principle of faith. I think that the intellect and moral sentiment are
unanimous; and that though philosophy extirpates bugbears, yet it supplies the natural
checks of vice, and polarity to the soul. I think that the wiser a man is, the more
stupendous he finds the natural and moral economy, and lifts himself to a more
absolute reliance.

There is the power of moods, each setting at nought all but its own tissue of facts and
beliefs. There is the power of complexions, obviously modifying the dispositions and
sentiments. The beliefs and unbeliefs appear to be structural; and as soon as each man
attains the poise and vivacity which allow the whole machinery to play, he will not need
extreme examples, but will rapidly alternate all opinions in his own life. Our life is March
weather, savage and serene in one hour. We go forth austere, dedicated, believing in the
iron links of Destiny, and will not turn on our heel to save our life: but a book, or a bust,
or only the sound of a name, shoots a spark through the nerves, and we suddenly
believe in will: my finger-ring shall be the seal of Solomon; fate is for imbeciles; all is
possible to the resolved mind. Presently a new experience gives a new turn to our
thoughts: common sense resumes its tyranny; we say, “Well, the army, after all, is the
gate to fame, manners and poetry: and, look you,--on the whole, selfishness plants best,
prunes best, makes the best commerce and the best citizen.” Are the opinions of a man
on right and wrong, on fate and causation, at the mercy of a broken sleep or an indiges-
tion? 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 discover-
able in distant times and places? And when it shows the power of selfinterest, I accept
that as part of the divine law and must reconcile it with aspiration the best I can.

The word Fate, or Destiny, expresses the sense of mankind, in all ages, that the laws of
the world do not always befriend, but often hurt and crush us. Fate, in the shape of
Kinde or nature, grows over us like grass. We paint Time with a scythe; Love and Fortune,
blind; and Destiny, deaf. We have too little power of resistance against this ferocity which
champs us up. What front can we make against these unavoidable, victorious, maleficent
forces? What can I do against the influence of Race, in my history? What can I do against
hereditary and constitutional habits; against scrofula, lymph, impotence? against climate,
against barbarism, in my country? I can reason down or deny every thing, except this
perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.


But the main resistance which the affirmative impulse finds, and one including all others,
is in the doctrine of the Illusionists. There is a painful rumor in circulation that we have
been practised upon in all the principal performances of life, and free agency is the
emptiest name. We have been sopped and drugged with the air, with food, with woman,
with children, with sciences, with events, which leave us exactly where they found us. The
mathematics, 'tis complained, leave the mind where they find it: so do all sciences; and
so do all events and actions. I find a man who has passed through all the sciences, the
churl he was; and, through all the offices, learned, civil and social, can detect the child.
We are not the less necessitated to dedicate life to them. In fact we may come to accept
it as the fixed rule and theory of our state of education, that God is a substance, and his
method is illusion. The Eastern sages owned the goddess Yoganidra, the great illusory
energy of Vishnu, by whom, as utter ignorance, the whole world is beguiled.

Or shall I state it thus?--The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearance of
reconciliation between the theory and practice of life. Reason, the prized reality, the Law,
is apprehended, now and then, for a serene and profound moment amidst the hubbub
of cares and works which have no direct bearing on it;--is then lost for months or years,
and again found for an interval, to be lost again. If we compute it in time, we may, in fifty
years, have half a dozen reasonable hours. But what are these cares and works the
better? A method in the world we do not see, butthis parallelism of great and little,
which never react on each other, nor discover the smallest tendency to converge.
Experiences, fortunes, governings, readings, writings, are nothing to the purpose; as
when a man comes into the room it does not appear whether he has been fed on yams
or buffalo,--he has contrived to get so much bone and fibre as he wants, out of rice or
out of snow. So vast is the disproportion between the sky of law and the pismire of
performance under it, that whether he is a man of worth or a sot is not so great a matter
as we say. Shall I add, as one juggle of this enchantment, the stunning non-intercourse
law which makes co-operation impossible? The young spirit pants to enter society. But all
the ways of culture and greatness lead to solitary imprisonment. He has been often
baulked. He did not expect a sympathy, with his thought from the village, but he went
with it to the chosen and intelligent, and found no entertainment for it, but mere
misapprehension, distaste and scoffing. Men are strangely mistimed and misapplied;
and the excellence of each is an inflamed individualism which separates him more.

There are these, and more than these diseases of thought, which our ordinary teachers
do not attempt to remove. Now shall we, because a good nature inclines us to virtue's
side, say, There are no doubts,--and lie for the right? Is life to be led in a brave or in a
cowardly manner? and is not the satisfaction of the doubts essential to all manliness? Is
the name of virtue to be a barrier to that which is virtue? Can you not believe that a man
of earnest and burly habit may find small good in tea, essays and catechism, and want a
rougher instruction, want men, labor, trade, farming, war, hunger, plenty, love, hatred,
doubt and terror to make things plain to him; and has he not a right to insist on being
convinced in his own way? When he is convinced, he will be worth the pains.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them. Some
minds are incapable of skepticism. The doubts they profess to entertain are rather a
civility or accommodation to the common discourse of their company. They may well
give themselves leave to speculate, for they are secure of a return. Once admitted to the
heaven of thought, they see no relapse into night, but infinite invitation on the other side.
Heaven is within heaven, and sky over sky, and they are encompassed with divinities.
Others there are to whom the heaven is brass, and it shuts down to the surface of the
earth. It is a question of temperament, or of more or less immersion in nature. The last
class must needs have a reflex or parasite faith; not a sight of realities, but an instinctive
reliance on the seers and believers of realities. The manners and thoughts of believers
astonish them and convince them that these have seen something which is hid from
themselves. But their sensual habit would fix the believer to his last position, whilst he as
inevitably advances; and presently the unbeliever, for love of belief, burns the believer.

Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic, atheistic, and really
men of no account. The spiritualist finds himself driven to express his faith by a series of
skepticisms. Charitable souls come with their projects and ask his co-operation. How can
he hesitate? It is the rule of mere comity and courtesy to agree where you can, and to
turn your sentence with something auspicious, and not freezing and sinister. But he is
forced to say, “O, these things will be as they must be: what can you do? These particular
griefs and crimes are the foliage and fruit of such trees as we see growing. It is vain to
complain of the leaf or the berry; cut it off, it will bear another just as bad. You must
begin your cure lower down.” The generosities of the day prove an intractable element
for him. The people's questions are not his; their methods are not his; and against all
the dictates of good nature he is driven to say he has no pleasure in them.

Even the doctrines dear to the hope of man, of the divine Providence and of the im-
mortality of the soul, his neighbors can not put the statement so that he shall affirm it.
But he denies out of more faith, and not less. He denies out of honesty. He had rather
stand charged with the imbecility of skepticism, than with untruth. I believe, he says, in
the moral design of the universe; it exists hospitably for the weal of souls; but your
dogmas seem to me caricatures: why should I make believe them? Will any say, This is
cold and infidel? The wise and magnanimous will not say so. They will exult in his far-
sighted good-will that can abandon to the adversary all the ground of tradition and
common belief, without losing a jot of strength. It sees to the end of all transgression.
George Fox saw that there was “an ocean of darkness and death; but withal an infinite
ocean of light and love which flowed over that of darkness.”

The final solution in which skepticism is lost, is in the moral sentiment, which never
forfeits its supremacy. All moods may be safely tried, and their weight allowed to all
objections: the moral sentiment as easily outweighs them all, as any one. This is the drop
which balances the sea. I play with the miscellany of facts, and take those superficial
views which we call skepticism; but I know that they will presently appear to me in that
order which makes skepticism impossible. A man of thought must feel the thought that
is parent of the universe; that the masses of nature do undulate and flow.

This faith avails to the whole emergency of life and objects. The world is saturated with
deity and with law. He is content with just and unjust, with sots and fools, with the
triumph of folly and fraud. He can behold with serenity the yawning gulf between the
ambition of man and his power of performance, between the demand and supply of
power, which makes the tragedy of all souls.

Charles Fourier announced that “the attractions of man are proportioned to his
destinies”; in other words, that every desire predicts its own satisfaction. Yet all
experience exhibits the reverse of this; the incompetency of power is the universal grief
of young and ardent minds. They accuse the divine Providence of a certain parsimony. It
has shown the heaven and earth to every child and filled him with a desire for the whole;
a desire raging, infinite; a hunger, as of space to be filled with planets; a cry of famine, as
of devils for souls. Then for the satisfaction,--to each man is administered a single drop, a
bead of dew of vital power, per day,--a cup as large as space, and one drop of the water
of life in it. Each man woke in the morning with an appetite that could eat the solar
system like a cake; a spirit for action and passion without bounds; he could lay his hand
on the morning star; he could try conclusions with gravitation or chemistry; but, on the
first motion to prove his strength,--hands, feet, senses, gave way and would not serve
him. He was an emperor deserted by his states, and left to whistle by himself, or thrust
into a mob of emperors, all whistling: and still the sirens sang, “The attractions are
proportioned to the destinies.” In every house, in the heart of each maiden and of each
boy, in the soul of the soaring saint, this chasm is found,--between the largest promise of
ideal power, and the shabby experience.

The expansive nature of truth comes to our succor, elastic, not to be surrounded. Man
helps himself by larger generalizations. The lesson of life is practically to generalize; to
believe what the years and the centuries say, against the hours; to resist the usurpation
of particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense. Things seem to say one thing, and say
the reverse. The appearance is immoral; the result is moral. Things seem to tend
downward, to justify despondency, to promote rogues, to defeat the just; and by knaves
as by martyrs the just cause is carried forward. Although knaves win in every political
struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of
criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is
changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies,--yet, general ends are
somehow answered. We see, now, events forced on which seem to retard or retrograde
the civility of ages. But the world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves cannot
drown him. He snaps his finger at laws: and so, throughout history, heaven seems to
affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents,
through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.

Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to
bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence without losing his reverence;
let him learn that he is here, not to work but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss
open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the Eternal
Cause:-

“If my bark sink, 'tis to another sea.”



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 rattle-brain, saying what comes upper-
most, and, because he says every thing, saying at last something good; but a heart
in unison with his time and country. There is nothing whimsical and fantastic in his
production, but sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions and
pointed with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.

The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not have any individual great,
except through the general. There is no choice to genius. A great man does not wake up
on some fine morning and say, “I am full of life, I will go to sea and find an Antarctic
continent: to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany and find a new food for
man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a new mechanic power”: no, but he
finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and
necessities of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way,
and their hands all point in the direction in which he should go.The Church has reared
him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out the advice which her music gave him,
and builds a cathedral needed by her chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it
educates him, by trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two
counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of production to the
place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad. Every master has found his materials
collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with his people and in his love of the
materials he wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the
shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him thus far on his way.
The human race has gone out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hollows and bridged
the rivers. Men, nations, poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters
into their labors. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out of the nation-
al feeling and history, and he would have all to do for himself: his powers would be ex-
pended in the first preparations. Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in
not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and
suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.

Shakespeare's youth fell in a time when the English people were importunate for
dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily at political allusions and
attempted to suppress them. The Puritans, a growing and energetic party, and the
religious among the Anglican church, would suppress them. But the people wanted
them. Inn-yards, houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs
were the ready theatres of strolling players. The people had tasted this new joy; and, as
we could not hope to suppress newspapers now,--no, not by the strongest party,--neither
then could king, prelate, or puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ which was ballad,
epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch and library, at the same time. Probably king,
prelate and puritan, all found their own account in it. It had become, by all causes, a
national interest,--by no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have
thought of treating it in an English history,--but not a whit less considerable because it
was cheap and of no account, like a baker's-shop. The best proof of its vitality is the
crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene, Jonson,
Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont and
Fletcher.

The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the first importance to
the poet who works for it. He loses no time in idle experiments. Here is audience and
expectation prepared. In the case of Shakespeare there is much more. At the time when
he left Stratford and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays of all dates and
writers existed in manuscript and were in turn produced on the boards. Here is the Tale
of Troy, which the audience will bear hearing some part of, every week; the Death of
Julius Caesar, and other stories out of Plutarch, which they never tire of; a shelf full of
English history, from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur, down to the royal Henries, which
men hear eagerly; and a string of doleful tragedies, merry Italian tales and Spanish
voyages, which all the London ‘prentices know. All the mass has been treated, with
more or less skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has the soiled and tattered
manuscripts. It is now no longer possible to say who wrote them first. They have been
the property of the Theatre so long, and so many rising geniuses have enlarged or
altered them, inserting a speech or a whole scene, or adding a song, that no man can any
longer claim copyright in this work of numbers. Happily, no man wishes to. They are not
yet desired in that way. We have few readers, many spectators and hearers. They had
best lie where they are.

Shakespeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old plays waste
stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had the prestige which hedges
about a modern tragedy existed, nothing could have been done. The rude warm blood of
the living England circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he
wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on
which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It
holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice, and in furnishing so much
work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure and in full strength for the audacities of his
imagination. In short, the poet owes to his legend what sculpture owed to the temple.
Sculpture in Egypt and in Greece grew up in subordination to architecture. It was the
ornament of the temple wall: at first a rude relief carved on pediments, then the relief
became bolder and a head or arm was projected from the wall; the groups being still
arranged with reference to the building, which serves also as a frame to hold the figures;
and when at last the greatest freedom of style and treatment was reached, the prevailing
genius of architecture still enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As
soon as the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the temple or palace,
the art began to decline: freak, extravagance and exhibition took the place of the old
temperance. This balance-wheel, which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous
irritability of poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which the
people were already wonted, and which had a certain excellence which no single genius,
however extraordinary, could hope to create.

In point of fact it appears that Shakespeare did owe debts in all directions, and was able
to use whatever he found; and the amount of indebtedness may be inferred from
Malone's laborious computations in regard to the First, Second and Third parts of Henry
VI, in which, “out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding
Shakespeare, 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors, and 1899 were
entirely his own.” And the proceeding investigation hardly leaves a single drama of his
absolute invention. Malone's sentence is an important piece of external history. In Henry
VIII I think I see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his own finer
stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior, thoughtful man, with a vicious
ear. I can mark his lines, and know well their cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy, and the
following scene with Cromwell, where instead of the metre of Shakespeare, whose secret
is that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading for the sense will best bring out
the rhythm,--here the lines are constructed on a given tune, and the verse has even a
trace of pulpit eloquence. But the play contains through all its length unmistakable traits
of Shakespeare's hand, and some passages, as the account of the coronation, are like
autographs. What is odd, the compliment to Queen Elizabeth is in the bad rhythm.

Shakespeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any invention can. If he lost
any credit of design, he augmented his resources; and, at that day, our petulant demand
for originality was not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The
universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet who appears in illiterate
times, absorbs into his sphere all the light which is any where radiating. Every intellectual
jewel, every flower of sentiment it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he comes
to value his memory equally with his invention. He is therefore little solicitous whence his
thoughts have been derived; whether through translation, whether through tradition,
whether by travel in distant countries, whether by inspiration; from whatever source,
they are equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very near home.
Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a good many foolish things, and
do not know when they have spoken wisely. He knows the sparkle of the true stone, and
puts it in high place, wherever he finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer perhaps;
of Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that all wit was their wit. And they are librarians and
historiographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was heir and dispenser of all the
hundred tales of the world,--

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

The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature; and more recently
not only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to him, but, in the whole society of Eng-
lish writers, a large unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the
opulence which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower. Chaucer, it
seems, drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, from Guido di Colonna, whose
Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Dares Phrygius, Ovid
and Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio and the Provencal poets are his benefactors:
the Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and
John of Meung: Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Urbino: The Cock and the Fox,
from the Lais of Marie: The House of Fame, from the French or Italian: and poor Gower
he uses as if he were only a brick-kiln or stone-quarry out of which to build his
house. He steals by this apology,--that what he takes has no worth where he finds it
and the greatest where he leaves it. It has come to be practically a sort of rule in
literature, that a man having once shown himself capable of original writing, is en-
titled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the
property of him who can entertain it and of him who can adequately place it. A cer-
tain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned
what to do with them they become our own.


Thus all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective. The learned member of the
legislature, at Westminster or at Washington, speaks and votes for thousands. Show us
the constituency, and the now invisible channels by which the senator is made aware
of their wishes; the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence or
conversation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes and estimates, and it will
bereave his fine attitude and resistance of something of their impressiveness. As Sir
Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke and Rousseau think, for thousands; and so
there were fountains all around Homer, Menu, Saadi, or Milton, from which they drew;
friends, lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,--all perished--which, if seen, would go to
reduce the wonder. Did the bard speak with authority? Did he feel himself overmatched
by any companion? The appeal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there at last in his
breast a Delphi whereof to ask concerning any thought or thing, whether it be verily so,
yea or nay? and to have answer, and to rely on that? All the debts which such a man
could contract to other wit would never disturb his consciousness of originality; for the
ministrations of books and of other minds are a whiff of smoke to that most private
reality with which he has conversed.

It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no man's
work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the
same impulse. Our English Bible is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of
the English language. But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but centuries and
churches brought it to perfection. There never was a time when there was not some
translation existing. The Liturgy, admired for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of
the piety of ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the Catholic
church,--these collected, too, in long periods, from the prayers and meditations of every
saint and sacred writer all over the world. Grotius makes the like remark in respect to
the Lord's Prayer, that the single clauses of which it is composed were already in use in
the time of Christ, in the Rabbinical forms. He picked out the grains of gold. The nervous
language of the Common Law, the impressive forms of our courts and the precision and
substantial truth of the legal distinctions, are the contribution of all the sharp-sighted,
strong-minded men who have lived in the countries where these laws govern. The
translation of Plutarch gets its excellence by being translation on translation. There never
was a time when there was none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept,
and all others successively picked out and thrown away. Something like the same
process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these books. The world takes
liberties with world-books. Vedas, Aesop's Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin
Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men. In the composition of such
works the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the
farmer, the fop, all think for us. Every book supplies its time with one good word; every
municipal law, every trade, every folly of the day; and the generic catholic genius who is
not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the originality of all, stands with the next
age as the recorder and embodiment of his own.

We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakespeare Society, for
ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from the Mysteries celebrated in churches
and by churchmen, and the final detachment from the church, and the completion of
secular plays, from Ferrex and Porrex, and Gammer Gurton's Needle, down to the
possession of the stage by the very pieces which Shakespeare altered, remodelled and
finally made his own. Elated with success and piqued by the growing interest of the
problem, they have left no book-stall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file
of old yellow accounts to decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to
discover whether the boy Shakespeare poached or not, whether he held horses at the
theatre door, whether he kept school, and why he left in his will only his second-best bed
to Ann Hathaway, his wife.

There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing age mischooses the
object on which all candles shine and all eyes are turned; the care with which it registers
every trifle touching Queen Elizabeth and King James, and the Essexes, Leicesters,
Burleighs and Buckinghams; and lets pass without a single valuable note the founder of
another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be remembered,--the man
who carries the Saxon race in him by the inspiration which feeds him, and on whose
thoughts the foremost people of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and
minds to receive this and not another bias. A popular player;--nobody suspected he was
the poet of the human race; and the secret was kept as faithfully from poets and
intellectual men as from courtiers and frivolous people. Bacon, who took the inventory of
the human understanding for his times, never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson, though
we have strained his few words of regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic
fame whose first vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has
conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question, the better poet of
the two.

If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakespeare's time should be
capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born four years after Shakespeare,
and died twenty-three years after him; and I find, among his correspondents and
acquaintances, the following persons: Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney,
the Earl of Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane, Isaac
Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton, John Pym, John Hales,
Kepler, Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Arminius; with all of whom exists some token
of his having communicated, without enumerating many others whom doubtless he
saw,--Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, the two Herberts, Marlow,
Chapman and the rest. Since the constellation of great men who appeared in Greece in
the time of Pericles, there was never any such society;--yet their genius failed them to
find out the best head in the universe. Our poet's mask was impenetrable. You cannot
see the mountain near. It took a century to make it suspected; and not until two
centuries had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we think adequate begin to
appear. It was not possible to write the history of Shakespeare till now; for he is the
father of German literature: it was with the introduction of Shakespeare into German, by
Lessing, and the translation of his works by Wieland and Schlegel, that the rapid burst of
German literature was most intimately connected. It was not until the nineteenth
century, whose speculative genius is a sort of living Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet
could find such wondering readers. Now, literature, philosophy and thought are
Shakespearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see. Our
ears are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge and Goethe are the only critics who
have expressed our convictions with any adequate fidelity: but there is in all cultivated
minds a silent appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, which, like Christianity,
qualifies the period.

The Shakespeare Society have inquired in all directions, advertised the missing facts,
offered money for any information that will lead to proof,--and with what result? Beside
some important illustration of the history of the English stage, to which I have adverted,
they have gleaned a few facts touching the property, and dealings in regard to property,
of the poet. It appears that from year to year he owned a larger share in the Blackfriars'
Theatre: its wardrobe and other appurtenances were his: that he bought an estate in his
native village with his earnings as writer and shareholder; that he lived in the best house
in Stratford; was intrusted by his neighbors with their commissions in London, as of
borrowing money, and the like; that he was a veritable farmer. About the time when he
was writing Macbeth, he sues Philip Rogers, in the borough-court of Stratford, for thir-
tyfive shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to him at different times; and in all respects
appears as a good husband, with no reputation for eccentricity or excess. He was a good-
natured sort of man, an actor and shareholder in the theatre, not in any striking manner
distinguished from other actors and managers. I admit the importance of this
information. It was well worth the pains that have been taken to procure it.

But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these researches may have
rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite invention which is the concealed
magnet of his attraction for us. We are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the
chronicle of parentage, birth, birth-place, schooling, school-mates, earning of money,
marriage, publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we have come to an end of
this gossip, no ray of relation appears between it and the goddess-born; and it seems as
if, had we dipped at random into the “Modern Plutarch,” and read any other life there, it
would have fitted the poems as well. It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the
rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past and refuse all
history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce and Collier have wasted their oil. The famed theatres,
Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Park and Tremont have vainly assisted. Betterton,
Garrick, Kemble, Kean and Macready dedicate their lives to this genius; him they crown,
elucidate, obey and express. The genius knows them not. The recitation begins; one
golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry and sweetly torments us
with invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I remember I went once to see the Hamlet
of a famed performer, the pride of the English stage; and all I then heard and all I now
remember of the tragedian was that in which the tragedian had no part; simply Hamlet's
question to the ghost:-

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

That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the world's dimension, crowds it
with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces the big reality to be the glimpses of the
moon. These tricks of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the greenroom. Can any
biography shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer Night's Dream admits
me? Did Shakespeare confide to any notary or parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate in
Stratford, the genesis of that delicate creation? The forest of Arden, the nimble air of
Scone Castle, the moonlight of Portia's villa, “the antres vast and desarts idle” of Othello's
captivity,--where is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the chancellor's file of accounts,
or private letter, that has kept one word of those transcendent secrets? In fine, in this
drama, as in all great works of art,--in the Cyclopean architecture of Egypt and India, in
the Phidian sculpture, the Gothic minsters, the Italian painting, the Ballads of Spain and
Scotland,--the Genius draws up the ladder after him, when the creative age goes up to
heaven, and gives way to a new age, which sees the works and asks in vain for a history.

Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can tell nothing, except
to the Shakespeare in us, that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He
cannot step from off his tripod and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the
antique documents extricated, analyzed and compared by the assiduous Dyce and
Collier, and now read one of these skyey sentences,--aerolites,--which seem to have
fallen out of heaven, and which not your experience but the man within the breast has
accepted as words of fate, and tell me if they match; if the former account in any manner
for the latter; or which gives the most historical insight into the man.

Hence, though our external history is so meagre, yet, with Shakespeare for biographer,
instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the information which is material; that which
describes character and fortune, that which, if we were about to meet the man and deal
with him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded convictions on those
questions which knock for answer at every heart,--on life and death, on love, on wealth
and poverty, on the prizes of life and the ways whereby we come at them; on the
characters of men, and the influences, occult and open, which affect their fortunes; and
on those mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy our science and which yet
interweave their malice and their gift in our brightest hours. Who ever read the volume
of the Sonnets without finding that the poet had there revealed, under masks that are no
masks to the intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love; the confusion of sentiments in
the most susceptible, and, at the same time, the most intellectual of men? What trait of
his private mind has he hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his ample pictures of
the gentleman and the king, what forms and humanities pleased him; his delight in
troops of friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let
Antonio the merchant answer for his great heart. So far from Shakespeare's being the
least known, he is the one person, in all modern history, known to us. What point of
morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of
life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office,
or function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered? What king has he not
taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her
delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What
gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?

Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakespeare valuable that does
not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I
think as highly as these critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He was
a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images, which, seeking vent,
found the drama next at hand. Had he been less, we should have had to consider how
well he filled his place, how good a dramatist he was,--and he is the best in the world.
But it turns out that what he has to say is of that weight as to withdraw some attention
from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose history is to be rendered into all
languages, into verse and prose, into songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so
that the occasion which gave the saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or of a
prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial compared with the universality of its
application. So it fares with the wise Shakespeare and his book of life. He wrote the airs
for all our modern music: he wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners: he drew
the man of England and Europe; the father of the man in America; he drew the man, and
described the day, and what is done in it: he read the hearts of men and women, their
probity, and their second thought and wiles; the wiles of innocence, and the transitions
by which virtues and vices slide into their contraries: he could divide the mother's part
from the father's part in the face of the child, or draw the fine demarcations of freedom
and of fate: he knew the laws of repression which make the police of nature: and all the
sweets and all the terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the
landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life sinks the form, as of
Drama or Epic, out of notice. ‘Tis like making a question concerning the paper on which a
king's message is written.

Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the
crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort,
nestle into Plato's brain and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare's. We are still
out of doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique. No man can
imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety compatible with an individual
self,--the subtilest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship. With this
wisdom of life is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He clothed the
creatures of his legend with form and sentiments as if they were people who had lived
under his roof; and few real men have left such distinct characters as these fictions. And
they spoke in language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him into an
ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent humanity co-ordinates all his
faculties. Give a man of talents a story to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He
has certain observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental prominence, and
which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part and starves that other part, con-
sulting not the fitness of the thing, but his fitness and strength. But Shakespeare has
no peculiarity, no importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities; no
cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no discoverable egotism: the
great he tells greatly; the small subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion;
he is strong, as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without effort
and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the one as
the other. This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs;
a merit so incessant that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other readers.

This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of things into music and
verse, makes him the type of the poet and has added a new problem to metaphysics.
This is that which throws him into natural history, as a main production of the globe, and
as announcing new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without
loss or blur: he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass, the tragic and
the comic indifferently and without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful
execution into minute details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as
he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature's, will bear the scrutiny of the solar
microscope.

In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of production, more or fewer
pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the power to make one picture. Daguerre learned
how to let one flower etch its image on his plate of iodine, and then proceeds at leisure
to etch a million. There are always objects; but there was never representation. Here is
perfect representation, at last; and now let the world of figures sit for their portraits. No
recipe can be given for the making of a Shakespeare; but the possibility of the translation
of things into song is demonstrated.

His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. The sonnets, though their excellence is lost
in the splendor of the dramas, are as inimitable as they; and it is not a merit of lines, but
a total merit of the piece; like the tone of voice of some incomparable person, so is this a
speech of poetic beings, and any clause as unproducible now as a whole poem.

Though the speeches in the plays, and single lines, have a beauty which tempts the ear
to pause on them for their euphuism, yet the sentence is so loaded with meaning and so
linked with its foregoers and followers, that the logician is satisfied. His means are as
admirable as his ends; every subordinate invention, by which he helps himself to
connect some irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too. He is not reduced to dismount and
walk because his horses are running off with him in some distant direction: he always
rides.

The finest poetry was first experience; but the thought has suffered a transformation
since it was an experience. Cultivated men often attain a good degree of skill in writing
verses; but it is easy to read, through their poems, their personal history: any one
acquainted with the parties can name every figure; this is Andrew and that is Rachel. The
sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar with wings, and not yet a butterfly. In the
poet's mind the fact has gone quite over into the new element of thought, and has lost
all that is exuvial. This generosity abides with Shakespeare. We say, from the truth and
closeness of his pictures, that he knows the lesson by heart. Yet there is not a trace of
egotism.

One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without
which no man can be a poet,--for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation
but for its grace: he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that
sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe.
Epicurus relates that poetry hath such charms that a lover might forsake his mistress to
partake of them. And the true bards have been noted for their firm and cheerful temper.
Homer lies in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi says, “It was rumored
abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with repentance?” Not less sovereign
and cheerful,--much more sovereign and cheerful, is the tone of Shakespeare. His name
suggests joy and emancipation to the heart of men. If he should appear in any company
of human souls, who would not march in his troop? He touches nothing that does not
borrow health and longevity from his festal style.

And now, how stands the account of man with this bard and benefactor, when, in
solitude, shutting our ears to the reverberations of his fame, we seek to strike the
balance? Solitude has austere lessons; it can teach us to spare both heroes and poets;
and it weighs Shakespeare also, and finds him to share the halfness and imperfection of
humanity.

Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendor of meaning that plays over the
visible world; knew that a tree had another use than for apples, and corn another than
for meal, and the ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads: that these things bore a
second and finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and conveying in
all their natural history a certain mute commentary on human life. Shakespeare
employed them as colors to compose his picture. He rested in their beauty; and never
took the step which seemed inevitable to such genius, namely to explore the virtue
which resides in these symbols and imparts this power:--what is that which they
themselves say? He converted the elements which waited on his command, into
entertainments. He was master of the revels to mankind. Is it not as if one should have,
through majestic powers of science, the comets given into his hand, or the planets and
their moons, and should draw them from their orbits to glare with the municipal
fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise in all towns, “Very superior pyrotechny this
evening”? Are the agents of nature, and the power to understand them, worth no more
than a street serenade, or the breath of a cigar? One remembers again the trumpet-text
in the Koran,--“The heavens and the earth and all that is between them, think ye we have
created them in jest?” As long as the question is of talent and mental power, the world of
men has not his equal to show. But when the question is, to life and its materials and its
auxiliaries, how does he profit me? What does it signify? It is but a Twelfth Night, or
Midsummer-Night's Dream, or Winter Evening's Tale: what signifies another picture more
or less? The Egyptian verdict of the Shakespeare Societies comes to mind; that he was a
jovial actor and manager. I can not marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable men
have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought; but this man, in wide contrast.
Had he been less, had he reached only the common measure of great authors, of Bacon,
Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, we might leave the fact in the twilight of human fate: but that
this man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger subject than had
ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs forward into Chaos,--
that he should not be wise for himself;--it must even go into the world's history that the
best poet led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public amusement.

Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite, German and Swede, beheld the same
objects: they also saw through them that which was contained. And to what purpose?
The beauty straightway vanished; they read commandments, all-excluding mountainous
duty; an obligation, a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life became
ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim's progress, a probation, beleaguered round with doleful
histories of Adam's fall and curse behind us; with doomsdays and purgatorial and penal
fires before us; and the heart of the seer and the heart of the listener sank in them.

It must be conceded that these are half-views of half-men. The world still wants its
poetpriest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle, with Shakespeare the player, nor shall grope
in graves, with Swedenborg the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act, with equal
inspiration. For knowledge will brighten the sunshine; right is more beautiful than private
affection; and love is compatible with universal wisdom.



Napoleon; or, the Man of the World



AMONG the eminent persons of the nineteenth century, Bonaparte is far the best known
and the most powerful; and owes his predominance to the fidelity with which he
expresses the tone of thought and belief, the aims of the masses of active and cultivated
men. It is Swedenborg's theory that every organ is made up of homogeneous particles;
or as it is sometimes expressed, every whole is made of similars; that is, the lungs are
composed of infinitely small lungs; the liver, of infinitely small livers; the kidney, of little
kidneys, etc. Following this analogy, if any man is found to carry with him the power and
affections of vast numbers, if Napoleon is France, if Napoleon is Europe, it is because the
people whom he sways are little Napoleons.

In our society there is a standing antagonism between the conservative and the
democratic classes; between those who have made their fortunes, and the young and
the poor who have fortunes to make; between the interests of dead labor,--that is, the
labor of hands long ago still in the grave, which labor is now entombed in money stocks,
or in land and buildings owned by idle capitalists,--and the interests of living labor, which
seeks to possess itself of land and buildings and money stocks. The first class is timid,
selfish, illiberal, hating innovation, and continually losing numbers by death. The second
class is selfish also, encroaching, bold, self-relying, always outnumbering the other and
recruiting its numbers every hour by births. It desires to keep open every avenue to the
competition of all, and to multiply avenues: the class of business men in America, in
England, in France and throughout Europe; the class of industry and skill. Napoleon is its
representative. The instinct of active, brave, able men, throughout the middle class
everywhere, has pointed out Napoleon as the incarnate Democrat. He had their virtues
and their vices; above all, he had their spirit or aim. That tendency is material, pointing
at a sensual success and employing the richest and most various means to that end;
conversant with mechanical powers, highly intellectual, widely and accurately learned
and skilful, but subordinating all intellectual and spiritual forces into means to a material
success. To be the rich man, is the end. “God has granted,” says the Koran, “to every
people a prophet in its own tongue.” Paris and London and New York, the spirit of
commerce, of money and material power, were also to have their prophet; and
Bonaparte was qualified and sent.

Every one of the million readers of anecdotes or memoirs or lives of Napoleon, delights
in the page, because he studies in it his own history. Napoleon is thoroughly modern,
and, at the highest point of his fortunes, has the very spirit of the newspapers. He is no
saint,--to use his own word, “no capuchin,” and he is no hero, in the high sense. The man
in the street finds in him the qualities and powers of other men in the street. He finds
him, like himself, by birth a citizen, who, by very intelligible merits, arrived at such a
commanding position that he could indulge all those tastes which the common man
possesses but is obliged to conceal and deny: good society, good books, fast travelling,
dress, dinners, servants without number, personal weight, the execution of his ideas, the
standing in the attitude of a benefactor to all persons about him, the refined enjoyments
of pictures, statues, music, palaces and conventional honors,--precisely what is agreeable
to the heart of every man in the nineteenth century, this powerful man possessed.

It is true that a man of Napoleon's truth of adaptation to the mind of the masses around
him, becomes not merely representative but actually a monopolizer and usurper of other
minds. Thus Mirabeau plagiarized every good thought, every good word that was spoken
in France. Dumont relates that he sat in the gallery of the Convention and heard Mira-
beau make a speech. It struck Dumont that he could fit it with a peroration, which he
wrote in pencil immediately, and showed it to Lord Elgin, who sat by him. Lord Elgin
approved it, and Dumont, in the evening, showed it to Mirabeau. Mirabeau read it, pro-
nounced it admirable, and declared he would incorporate it into his harangue tomorrow,
to the Assembly. “It is impossible,” said Dumont, “as, unfortunately, I have shown
it to Lord Elgin.” “If you have shown it to Lord Elgin and to fifty persons beside,
I shall still speak it to-morrow”: and he did speak it, with much effect, at the next
day's session. For Mirabeau, with his overpowering personality, felt that these things
which his presence inspired were as much his own as if he had said them, and that his
adoption of them gave them their weight. Much more absolute and centralizing was the
successor to Mirabeau's popularity and to much more than his predominance in France.
Indeed, a man of Napoleon's stamp almost ceases to have a private speech and opinion.
He is so largely receptive, and is so placed, that he comes to be a bureau for all the
intelligence, wit and power of the age and country. He gains the battle; he makes the
code; he makes the system of weights and measures; he levels the Alps; he builds the
road. All distinguished engineers, savans, statists, report to him: so likewise do all
good heads in every kind: he adopts the best measures, sets his stamp on them, and not
these alone, but on every happy and memorable expression. Every sentence spoken by
Napoleon and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.

Bonaparte was the idol of common men because he had in transcendent degree the
qualities and powers of common men. There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to
the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy. Bonaparte wrought, in
common with that great class he represented, for power and wealth,--but Bonaparte,
specially, without any scruple as to the means. All the sentiments which embarrass
men's pursuit of these objects, he set aside. The sentiments were for women and
children. Fontanes, in 1804, expressed Napoleon's own sense, when in behalf of the
Senate he addressed him,--“Sire, the desire of perfection is the worst disease that ever
afflicted the human mind.” The advocates of liberty and of progress are “ideologists”;--a
word of contempt often in his mouth;--“Necker is an ideologist”: “Lafayette is an
ideologist.”

An Italian proverb, too well known, declares that “if you would succeed, you must not be
too good.” It is an advantage, within certain limits, to have renounced the dominion of
the sentiments of piety, gratitude and generosity; since what was an impassable bar to
us, and still is to others, becomes a convenient weapon for our purposes; just as the river
which was a formidable barrier, winter transforms into the smoothest of roads.

Napoleon renounced, once for all, sentiments and affections, and would help himself
with his hands and his head. With him is no miracle and no magic. He is a worker in
brass, in iron, in wood, in earth, in roads, in buildings, in money and in troops, and a very
consistent and wise master-workman. He is never weak and literary, but acts with the
solidity and the precision of natural agents. He has not lost his native sense and
sympathy with things. Men give way before such a man, as before natural events. To be
sure there are men enough who are immersed in things, as farmers, smiths, sailors and
mechanics generally; and we know how real and solid such men appear in the presence
of scholars and grammarians: but these men ordinarily lack the power of arrangement,
and are like hands without a head. But Bonaparte superadded to this mineral and animal
force, insight and generalization, so that men saw in him combined the natural and the
intellectual power, as if the sea and land had taken flesh and begun to cipher. Therefore
the land and sea seem to presuppose him. He came unto his own and they received him.
This ciphering operative knows what he is working with and what is the product. He
knew the properties of gold and iron, of wheels and ships, of troops and diplomatists,
and required that each should do after its kind.

The art of war was the game in which he exerted his arithmetic. It consisted, according to
him, in having always more forces than the enemy, on the point where the enemy is
attacked, or where he attacks: and his whole talent is strained by endless manoeuvre
and evolution, to march always on the enemy at an angle, and destroy his forces in
detail. It is obvious that a very small force, skilfully and rapidly manoeuvring so as always
to bring two men against one at the point of engagement, will be an overmatch for a
much larger body of men.

The times, his constitution and his early circumstances combined to develop this pattern
democrat. He had the virtues of his class and the conditions for their activity. That
common-sense which no sooner respects any end than it finds the means to effect it; the
delight in the use of means; in the choice, simplification and combining of means; the
directness and thoroughness of his work; the prudence with which all was seen and the
energy with which all was done, make him the natural organ and head of what I may
almost call, from its extent, the modern party.

Nature must have far the greatest share in every success, and so in his. Such a man
was wanted, and such a man was born; a man of stone and iron, capable of sitting on
horseback sixteen or seventeen hours, of going many days together without rest or
food except by snatches, and with the speed and spring of a tiger in action; a man not
embarrassed by any scruples; compact, instant, selfish, prudent, and of a perception
which did not suffer itself to be baulked or misled by any pretences of others, or any
superstition or any heat or haste of his own. “My hand of iron,” he said, “was not at the
extremity of my arm, it was immediately connected with my head.” He respected the
power of nature and fortune, and ascribed to it his superiority, instead of valuing himself,
like inferior men, on his opinionativeness, and waging war with nature. His favorite rhe-
toric lay in allusion to his star; and he pleased himself, as well as the people, when he
styled himself the “Child of Destiny.” “They charge me,” he said, “with the commission
of great crimes: men of my stamp do not commit crimes. Nothing has been more simple
than my elevation, 'tis in vain to ascribe it to intrigue or crime; it was owing to the
peculiarity of the times and to my reputation of having fought well against the enemies
of my country. I have always marched with the opinion of great masses and with events.
Of what use then would crimes be to me?” Again he said, speaking of his son, “My son
can not replace me; I could not replace myself. I am the creature of circumstances.”

He had a directness of action never before combined with so much comprehension. He
is a realist, terrific to all talkers and confused truth-obscuring persons. He sees where
the matter hinges, throws himself on the precise point of resistance, and slights all other
considerations. He is strong in the right manner, namely by insight. He never blundered
into victory, but won his battles in his head before he won them on the field. His
principal means are in himself. He asks counsel of no other. In 1796 he writes to the
Directory: “I have conducted the campaign without consulting any one. I should have
done no good if I had been under the necessity of conforming to the notions of another
person. I have gained some advantages over superior forces and when totally destitute
of every thing, because, in the persuasion that your confidence was reposed in me, my
actions were as prompt as my thoughts.”

History is full, down to this day, of the imbecility of kings and governors. They are a class
of persons much to be pitied, for they know not what they should do. The weavers strike
for bread, and the king and his ministers, knowing not what to do, meet them with
bayonets. But Napoleon understood his business. Here was a man who in each moment
and emergency knew what to do next. It is an immense comfort and refreshment to the
spirits, not only of kings, but of citizens. Few men have any next; they live from hand to
mouth, without plan, and are ever at the end of their line, and after each action wait for
an impulse from abroad. Napoleon had been the first man of the world, if his ends had
been purely public. As he is, he inspires confidence and vigor by the extraordinary unity
of his action. He is firm, sure, self-denying, self-postponing, sacrificing every thing,--
money, troops, generals, and his own safety also, to his aim; not misled, like common
adventurers, by the splendor of his own means. “Incidents ought not to govern policy,”
he said, “but policy, incidents.” “To be hurried away by every event is to have no political
system at all.” His victories were only so many doors, and he never for a moment lost
sight of his way onward, in the dazzle and uproar of the present circumstance. He knew
what to do, and he flew to his mark. He would shorten a straight line to come at his
object. Horrible anecdotes may no doubt be collected from his history, of the price at
which he bought his successes; but he must not therefore be set down as cruel, but only
as one who knew no impediment to his will; not bloodthirsty, not cruel,--but woe to what
thing or person stood in his way! Not bloodthirsty, but not sparing of blood,--and pitiless.
He saw only the object: the obstacle must give way. “Sire, General Clarke can not
combine with General Junot, for the dreadful fire of the Austrian battery.”--“Let him carry
the battery.”--“Sire, every regiment that approaches the heavy artillery is sacrificed: Sire,
what orders?”--“Forward, forward!” Seruzier, a colonel of artillery, gives, in his “Military
Memoirs,” the following sketch of a scene after the battle of Austerlitz.--“At the moment
in which the Russian army was making its retreat, painfully, but in good order, on the ice
of the lake, the Emperor Napoleon came riding at full speed toward the artillery. ‘You are
losing time,' he cried; ‘fire upon those masses; they must be engulfed: fire upon the ice!'
The order remained unexecuted for ten minutes. In vain several officers and myself were
placed on the slope of a hill to produce the effect: their balls and mine rolled upon the
ice without breaking it up. Seeing that, I tried a simple method of elevating light
howitzers. The almost perpendicular fall of the heavy projectiles produced the desired
effect. My method was immediately followed by the adjoining batteries, and in less than
no time we buried” some “thousands of Russians and Austrians under the waters of the
lake.”

In the plenitude of his resources, every obstacle seemed to vanish. “There shall be no
Alps,” he said; and he built his perfect roads, climbing by graded galleries their steepest
precipices, until Italy was as open to Paris as any town in France. He laid his bones to,
and wrought for his crown. Having decided what was to be done, he did that with might
and main. He put out all his strength. He risked every thing and spared nothing, neither
ammunition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals, nor himself.

We like to see every thing do its office after its kind, whether it be a milch-cow or a
rattlesnake; and if fighting be the best mode of adjusting national differences, (as large
majorities of men seem to agree,) certainly Bonaparte was right in making it thorough.
The grand principle of war, he said, was that an army ought always to be ready, by day
and by night and at all hours, to make all the resistance it is capable of making. He never
economized his ammunition, but, on a hostile position, rained a torrent of iron,--shells,
balls, grape-shot,--to annihilate all defence. On any point of resistance he concentrated
squadron on squadron in overwhelming numbers until it was swept out of existence. To
a regiment of horse-chasseurs at Lobenstein, two days before the battle of Jena,
Napoleon said, “My lads, you must not fear death; when soldiers brave death, they drive
him into the enemy's ranks.” In the fury of assault, he no more spared himself. He went
to the edge of his possibility. It is plain that in Italy he did what he could, and all that he
could. He came, several times, within an inch of ruin; and his own person was all but lost.
He was flung into the marsh at Arcola. The Austrians were between him and his troops,
in the melee, and he was brought off with desperate efforts. At Lonato, and at other
places, he was on the point of being taken prisoner. He fought sixty battles. He had
never enough. Each victory was a new weapon. “My power would fall, were I not to
support it by new achievements. Conquest has made me what I am, and conquest must
maintain me.” He felt, with every wise man, that as much life is needed for conservation
as for creation. We are always in peril, always in a bad plight, just on the edge of
destruction and only to be saved by invention and courage.

This vigor was guarded and tempered by the coldest prudence and punctuality. A
thunderbolt in the attack, he was found invulnerable in his intrenchments. His very
attack was never the inspiration of courage, but the result of calculation. His idea of the
best defence consists in being still the attacking party. “My ambition,” he says, “was great,
but was of a cold nature.” In one of his conversations with Las Cases, he remarked, “As to
moral courage, I have rarely met with the two-o'clock-in-the-morning kind: I mean
unprepared courage; that which is necessary on an unexpected occasion, and which, in
spite of the most unforeseen events, leaves full freedom of judgment and decision”: and
he did not hesitate to declare that he was himself eminently endowed with this two o'
clock-in-the-morning courage, and that he had met with few persons equal to himself
in this respect.

Every thing depended on the nicety of his combinations, and the stars were not more
punctual than his arithmetic. His personal attention descended to the smallest par-
ticulars. “At Montebello, I ordered Kellermann to attack with eight hundred horse, and
with these he separated the six thousand Hungarian grenadiers, before the very eyes of
the Austrian cavalry. This cavalry was half a league off and required a quarter of an hour
to arrive on the field of action, and I have observed that it is always these quarters of an
hour that decide the fate of a battle.” “Before he fought a battle, Bonaparte thought little
about what he should do in case of success, but a great deal about what he should do in
case of a reverse of fortune.” The same prudence and good sense mark all his behavior.
His instructions to his secretary at the Tuileries are worth remembering. “During the
night, enter my chamber as seldom as possible. Do not awake me when you have any
good news to communicate; with that there is no hurry. But when you bring bad news,
rouse me instantly, for then there is not a moment to be lost.” It was a whimsical
economy of the same kind which dictated his practice, when general in Italy, in regard to
his burdensome correspondence. He directed Bourrienne to leave all letters unopened
for three weeks, and then observed with satisfaction how large a part of the
correspondence had thus disposed of itself and no longer required an answer. His
achievement of business was immense, and enlarges the known powers of man. There
have been many working kings, from Ulysses to William of Orange, but none who
accomplished a tithe of this man's performance.

To these gifts of nature, Napoleon added the advantage of having been born to a private
and humble fortune. In his later days he had the weakness of wishing to add to his
crowns and badges the prescription of aristocracy; but he knew his debt to his austere
education, and made no secret of his contempt for the born kings, and for “the
hereditary asses,” as he coarsely styled the Bourbons. He said that “in their exile they had
learned nothing, and forgot nothing.” Bonaparte had passed through all the degrees of
military service, but also was citizen before he was emperor, and so has the key to
citizenship. His remarks and estimates discover the information and justness of
measurement of the middle class. Those who had to deal with him found that he was
not to be imposed upon, but could cipher as well as another man. This appears in all
parts of his Memoirs, dictated at St. Helena. When the expenses of the empress, of his
household, of his palaces, had accumulated great debts, Napoleon examined the bills of
the creditors himself, detected overcharges and errors, and reduced the claims by
considerable sums.

His grand weapon, namely the millions whom he directed, he owed to the representative
character which clothed him. He interests us as he stands for France and for Europe;
and he exists as captain and king only as far as the Revolution, or the interest of the
industrious masses, found an organ and a leader in him. In the social interests, he knew
the meaning and value of labor, and threw himself naturally on that side. I like an
incident mentioned by one of his biographers at St. Helena. “When walking with Mrs.
Balcombe, some servants, carrying heavy boxes, passed by on the road, and Mrs.
Balcombe desired them, in rather an angry tone, to keep back. Napoleon interfered,
saying ‘Respect the burden, Madam.'” In the time of the empire he directed attention to
the improvement and embellishment of the markets of the capital. “The market-place,”
he said, “is the Louvre of the common people.” The principal works that have survived
him are his magnificent roads. He filled the troops with his spirit, and a sort of freedom
and companionship grew up between him and them, which the forms of his court never
permitted between the officers and himself. They performed, under his eye, that which
no others could do. The best document of his relation to his troops is the order of the
day on the morning of the battle of Austerlitz, in which Napoleon promises the troops
that he will keep his person out of reach of fire. This declaration, which is the reverse of
that ordinarily made by generals and sovereigns on the eve of a battle, sufficiently
explains the devotion of the army to their leader.

But though there is in particulars this identity between Napoleon and the mass of the
people, his real strength lay in their conviction that he was their representative in his
genius and aims, not only when he courted, but when he controlled, and even when he
decimated them by his conscriptions. He knew, as well as any Jacobin in France, how to
philosophize on liberty and equality; and when allusion was made to the precious blood
of centuries, which was spilled by the killing of the Duc d'Enghien, he suggested, “Neither
is my blood ditchwater.” The people felt that no longer the throne was occupied and the
land sucked of its nourishment, by a small class of legitimates, secluded from all
community with the children of the soil, and holding the ideas and superstitions of a
long-forgotten state of society. Instead of that vampyre, a man of themselves held, in the
Tuileries, knowledge and ideas like their own, opening of course to them and their
children all places of power and trust. The day of sleepy, selfish policy, ever narrowing
the means and opportunities of young men, was ended, and a day of expansion and
demand was come. A market for all the powers and productions of man was opened;
brilliant prizes glittered in the eyes of youth and talent. The old, iron-bound, feudal
France was changed into a young Ohio or New York; and those who smarted under the
immediate rigors of the new monarch, pardoned them as the necessary severities of the
military system which had driven out the oppressor. And even when the majority of the
people had begun to ask whether they had really gained any thing under the exhausting
levies of men and money of the new master, the whole talent of the country, in every
rank and kindred, took his part and defended him as its natural patron. In 1814, when
advised to rely on the higher classes, Napoleon said to those around him, “Gentlemen, in
the situation in which I stand, my only nobility is the rabble of the Faubourgs.”

Napoleon met this natural expectation. The necessity of his position required a
hospitality to every sort of talent, and its appointment to trusts; and his feeling went
along with this policy. Like every superior person, he undoubtedly felt a desire for men
and compeers, and a wish to measure his power with other masters, and an impatience
of fools and underlings. In Italy, he sought for men and found none. “Good God!” he said,
“how rare men are! There are eighteen millions in Italy, and I have with difficulty found
two,--Dandolo and Melzi.” In later years, with larger experience, his respect for mankind
was not increased. In a moment of bitterness he said to one of his oldest friends, “Men
deserve the contempt with which they inspire me. I have only to put some gold-lace on
the coat of my virtuous republicans and they immediately become just what I wish
them.” This impatience at levity was, however, an oblique tribute of respect to those able
persons who commanded his regard not only when he found them friends and
coadjutors but also when they resisted his will. He could not confound Fox and Pitt,
Carnot, Lafayette and Bernadotte, with the danglers of his court; and in spite of the
detraction which his systematic egotism dictated toward the great captains who
conquered with and for him, ample acknowledgments are made by him to Lannes,
Duroc, Kleber, Dessaix, Massena, Murat, Ney and Augereau. If he felt himself their patron
and the founder of their fortunes, as when he said, “I made my generals out of mud,”
--he could not hide his satisfaction in receiving from them a seconding and support
commensurate with the grandeur of his enterprise. In the Russian campaign he was so
much impressed by the courage and resources of Marshal Ney, that he said, “I have two
hundred millions in my coffers, and I would give them all for Ney.” The characters which
he has drawn of several of his marshals are discriminating, and though they did not
content the insatiable vanity of French officers, are no doubt substantially just. And in
fact every species of merit was sought and advanced under his government. “I know,” he
said, “the depth and draught of water of every one of my generals.” Natural power was
sure to be well received at his court. Seventeen men in his time were raised from
common soldiers to the rank of king, marshal, duke, or general; and the crosses of his
Legion of Honor were given to personal valor, and not to family connexion. “When
soldiers have been baptized in the fire of a battlefield, they have all one rank in my eyes.”

When a natural king becomes a titular king, every body is pleased and satisfied. The
Revolution entitled the strong populace of the Faubourg St. Antoine, and every horseboy
and powder-monkey in the army, to look on Napoleon as flesh of his flesh and the
creature of his party: but there is something in the success of grand talent which enlists
an universal sympathy. For in the prevalence of sense and spirit over stupidity and
malversation, all reasonable men have an interest; and as intellectual beings we feel the
air purified by the electric shock, when material force is overthrown by intellectual
energies. As soon as we are removed out of the reach of local and accidental partialities,
Man feels that Napoleon fights for him; these are honest victories; this strong steam-
engine does our work. Whatever appeals to the imagination, by transcending the
ordinary limits of human ability, wonderfully encourages us and liberates us. This
capacious head, revolving and disposing sovereignly trains of affairs, and animating such
multitudes of agents; this eye, which looked through Europe; this prompt invention; this
inexhaustible resource:--what events! what romantic pictures! what strange situations!-
when spying the Alps, by a sunset in the Sicilian sea; drawing up his army for battle in
sight of the Pyramids, and saying to his troops, “From the tops of those pyramids, forty
centuries look down on you”; fording the Red Sea; wading in the gulf of the Isthmus of
Suez. On the shore of Ptolemais, gigantic projects agitated him. “Had Acre fallen, I should
have changed the face of the world.” His army, on the night of the battle of Austerlitz,
which was the anniversary of his inauguration as Emperor, presented him with a
bouquet of forty standards taken in the fight. Perhaps it is a little puerile, the pleasure he
took in making these contrasts glaring; as when he pleased himself with making kings
wait in his antechambers, at Tilsit, at Paris and at Erfurt.

We can not, in the universal imbecility, indecision and indolence of men, sufficiently
congratulate ourselves on this strong and ready actor, who took occasion by the beard,
and showed us how much may be accomplished by the mere force of such virtues as all
men possess in less degrees; namely, by punctuality, by personal attention, by courage
and thoroughness. “The Austrians,” he said, “do not know the value of time.” I should cite
him, in his earlier years, as a model of prudence. His power does not consist in any wild
or extravagant force; in any enthusiasm like Mahomet's, or singular power of persuasion;
but in the exercise of common-sense on each emergency, instead of abiding by rules
and customs. The lesson he teaches is that which vigor always teaches;--that there is
always room for it. To what heaps of cowardly doubts is not that man's life an answer.
When he appeared it was the belief of all military men that there could be nothing new in
war; as it is the belief of men to-day that nothing new can be undertaken in politics, or in
church, or in letters, or in trade, or in farming, or in our social manners and customs; and
as it is at all times the belief of society that the world is used up. But Bonaparte knew
better than society; and moreover knew that he knew better. I think all men know better
than they do; know that the institutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and
baubles; but they dare not trust their presentiments. Bonaparte relied on his own sense,
and did not care a bean for other people's. The world treated his novelties just as it treats
everybody's novelties,--made infinite objection, mustered all the impediments; but he
snapped his finger at their objections. “What creates great difficulty,” he remarks, “in the
profession of the land-commander, is the necessity of feeding so many men and
animals. If he allows himself to be guided by the commissaries he will never stir, and all
his expeditions will fail.” An example of his common-sense is what he says of the passage
of the Alps in winter, which all writers, one repeating after the other, had described as
impracticable. “The winter,” says Napoleon, “is not the most unfavorable season for the
passage of lofty mountains. The snow is then firm, the weather settled, and there is
nothing to fear from avalanches, the real and only danger to be apprehended in the Alps.
On these high mountains there are often very fine days in December, of a dry cold, with
extreme calmness in the air.” Read his account, too, of the way in which battles are
gained. “In all battles a moment occurs when the bravest troops, after having made the
greatest efforts, feel inclined to run. That terror proceeds from a want of confidence in
their own courage, and it only requires a slight opportunity, a pretence, to restore
confidence to them. The art is, to give rise to the opportunity and to invent the pretence.
At Arcola I won the battle with twenty-five horsemen. I seized that moment of lassitude,
gave every man a trumpet, and gained the day with this handful. You see that two
armies are two bodies which meet and endeavor to frighten each other; a moment of
panic occurs, and that moment must be turned to advantage. When a man has been
present in many actions, he distinguishes that moment without difficulty: it is as easy as
casting up an addition.”

This deputy of the nineteenth century added to his gifts a capacity for speculation on
general topics. He delighted in running through the range of practical, of literary and of
abstract questions. His opinion is always original and to the purpose. On the voyage to
Egypt he liked, after dinner, to fix on three or four persons to support a proposition, and
as many to oppose it. He gave a subject, and the discussions turned on questions of
religion, the different kinds of government, and the art of war. One day he asked
whether the planets were inhabited? On another, what was the age of the world? Then
he proposed to consider the probability of the destruction of the globe, either by water
or by fire: at another time, the truth or fallacy of presentiments, and the interpretation of
dreams. He was very fond of talking of religion. In 1806 he conversed with Fournier,
bishop of Montpellier, on matters of theology. There were two points on which they
could not agree, viz. that of hell, and that of salvation out of the pale of the church. The
Emperor told Josephine that he disputed like a devil on these two points, on which the
bishop was inexorable. To the philosophers he readily yielded all that was proved against
religion as the work of men and time, but he would not hear of materialism. One fine
night, on deck, amid a clatter of materialism, Bonaparte pointed to the stars, and said,
“You may talk as long as you please, gentlemen, but who made all that?” He delighted in
the conversation of men of science, particularly of Monge and Berthollet; but the men of
letters he slighted; they were “manufacturers of phrases.” Of medicine too he was fond
of talking, and with those of its practitioners whom he most esteemed,--with Corvisart at
Paris, and with Antonomarchi at St. Helena. “Believe me,” he said to the last, “we had
better leave off all these remedies: life is a fortress which neither you nor I know any
thing about. Why throw obstacles in the way of its defence? Its own means are superior
to all the apparatus of your laboratories. Corvisart candidly agreed with me that all your
filthy mixtures are good for nothing. Medicine is a collection of uncertain prescriptions,
the results of which, taken collectively, are more fatal than useful to mankind. Water, air
and cleanliness are the chief articles in my pharmacopoeia.”

His memoirs, dictated to Count Montholon and General Gourgaud at St. Helena, have
great value, after all the deduction that it seems is to be made from them on account
of his known disingenuousness. He has the good-nature of strength and conscious
superiority. I admire his simple, clear narrative of his battles;--good as Caesar's; his
good natured and sufficiently respectful account of Marshal Wurmser and his other
antagonists; and his own equality as a writer to his varying subject. The most agreeable
portion is the Campaign in Egypt.

He had hours of thought and wisdom. In intervals of leisure, either in the camp or the
palace, Napoleon appears as a man of genius directing on abstract questions the native
appetite for truth and the impatience of words he was wont to show in war. He could
enjoy every play of invention, a romance, a bon mot, as well as a strategem in a
campaign. He delighted to fascinate Josephine and her ladies, in a dim-lighted
apartment, by the terrors of a fiction to which his voice and dramatic power lent every
addition.

I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern society; of the throng
who fill the markets, shops, counting-houses, manufactories, ships, of the modern world,
aiming to be rich. He was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the internal
improver, the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the opener of doors and
markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse. Of course the rich and aristocratic did
not like him. England, the centre of capital, and Rome and Austria, centres of tradition
and genealogy, opposed him. The consternation of the dull and conservative classes, the
terror of the foolish old men and old women of the Roman conclave, who in their
despair took hold of any thing, and would cling to red-hot iron,--the vain attempts of
statists to amuse and deceive him, of the emperor of Austria to bribe him; and the
instinct of the young, ardent and active men every where, which pointed him out as the
giant of the middle class, make his history bright and commanding. He had the virtues of
the masses of his constituents: he had also their vices. I am sorry that the brilliant
picture has its reverse. But that is the fatal quality which we discover in our pursuit of
wealth, that it is treacherous, and is bought by the breaking or weakening of the
sentiments; and it is inevitable that we should find the same fact in the history of this
champion, who proposed to himself simply a brilliant career, without any stipulation or
scruple concerning the means.

Bonaparte was singularly destitute of generous sentiments. The highest-placed
individual in the most cultivated age and population of the world,--he has not the merit
of common truth and honesty. He is unjust to his generals; egotistic and monopolizing;
meanly stealing the credit of their great actions from Kellermann, from Bernadotte;
intriguing to involve his faithful Junot in hopeless bankruptcy, in order to drive him to a
distance from Paris, because the familiarity of his manners offends the new pride of his
throne. He is a boundless liar. The official paper, his “Moniteur,” and all his bulletins, are
proverbs for saying what he wished to be believed; and worse,--he sat, in his premature
old age, in his lonely island, coldly falsifying facts and dates and characters, and giving to
history a theatrical eclat. Like all Frenchmen he has a passion for stage effect. Every
action that breathes of generosity is poisoned by this calculation. His star, his love of
glory, his doctrine of the immortality of the soul, are all French. “I must dazzle and
astonish. If I were to give the liberty of the press, my power could not last three days.” To
make a great noise is his favorite design. “A great reputation is a great noise: the more
there is made, the farther off it is heard. Laws, institutions, monuments, nations, all fall;
but the noise continues, and resounds in after ages.” His doctrine of immortality is
simply fame. His theory of influence is not flattering. “There are two levers for moving
men,--interest and fear. Love is a silly infatuation, depend upon it. Friendship is but a
name. I love nobody. I do not even love my brothers: perhaps Joseph a little, from habit,
and because he is my elder; and Duroc, I love him too; but why?--because his character
pleases me: he is stern and resolute, and I believe the fellow never shed a tear. For my
part I know very well that I have no true friends. As long as I continue to be what I am, I
may have as many pretended friends as I please. Leave sensibility to women; but men
should be firm in heart and purpose, or they should have nothing to do with war and
government.” He was thoroughly unscrupulous. He would steal, slander, assassinate,
drown and poison, as his interest dictated. He had no generosity, but mere vulgar
hatred; he was intensely selfish; he was perfidious; he cheated at cards; he was a
prodigious gossip, and opened letters, and delighted in his infamous police, and rubbed
his hands with joy when he had intercepted some morsel of intelligence concerning the
men and women about him, boasting that “he knew every thing”; and interfered with the
cutting the dresses of the women; and listened after the hurrahs and the compliments of
the street, incognito. His manners were coarse. He treated women with low familiarity.
He had the habit of pulling their ears and pinching their cheeks when he was in good
humor, and of pulling the ears and whiskers of men, and of striking and horse-play with
them, to his last days. It does not appear that he listened at key-holes, or at least that he
was caught at it. In short, when you have penetrated through all the circles of power and
splendor, you were not dealing with a gentleman, at last; but with an impostor and a
rogue; and he fully deserves the epithet of Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter.


In describing the two parties into which modern society divides itself,--the democrat and
the conservative,--I said, Bonaparte represents the democrat, or the party of men of
business, against the stationary or conservative party. I omitted then to say, what is
material to the statement, namely that these two parties differ only as young and old.
The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative is an old democrat. The
aristocrat is the democrat ripe and gone to seed;--because both parties stand on the one
ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to
keep. Bonaparte may be said to represent the whole history of this party, its youth and
its age; yes, and with poetic justice its fate, in his own. The counter-revolution, the
counter-party, still waits for its organ and representative, in a lover and a man of truly
public and universal aims.

Here was an experiment, under the most favorable conditions, of the powers of intellect
without conscience. Never was such a leader so endowed and so weaponed; never
leader found such aids and followers. And what was the result of this vast talent and
power, of these immense armies, burned cities, squandered treasures, immolated
millions of men, of this demoralized Europe? It came to no result. All passed away like
the smoke of his artillery, and left no trace. He left France smaller, poorer, feebler, than
he found it; and the whole contest for freedom was to be begun again. The attempt was
in principle suicidal. France served him with life and limb and estate, as long as it could
identify its interest with him; but when men saw that after victory was another war; after
the destruction of armies, new conscriptions; and they who had toiled so desperately
were never nearer to the reward,--they could not spend what they had earned, nor
repose on their down-beds, nor strut in their chateaux,--they deserted him. Men found
that his absorbing egotism was deadly to all other men. It resembled the torpedo, which
inflicts a succession of shocks on any one who takes hold of it, producing spasms which
contract the muscles of the hand, so that the man can not open his fingers; and the
animal inflicts new and more violent shocks, until he paralyzes and kills his victim. So this
exorbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished and absorbed the power and existence of
those who served him; and the universal cry of France and of Europe in 1814 was,
“Enough of him”; “Assez de Bonaparte.”

It was not Bonaparte's fault. He did all that in him lay to live and thrive without moral
principle. It was the nature of things, the eternal law of man and of the world which
baulked and ruined him; and the result, in a million experiments, will be the same. Every
experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail.
The pacific Fourier will be as inefficient as the pernicious Napoleon. As long as our
civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by
delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter, and our
wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits which we can taste with all doors open,
and which serves all men.



Goethe; or, the Writer



I FIND a provision in the constitution of the world for the writer, or secretary, who is to
report the doings of the miraculous spirit of life that everywhere throbs and works. His
office is a reception of the facts into the mind, and then a selection of the eminent and
characteristic experiences.

Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the
pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the
mountain; the river its channel in the soil; the animal its bones in the stratum; the fern
and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand
or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow or along the ground, but prints, in characters
more or less lasting, a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself in the
memories of his fellows and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds; the
sky, of tokens; the round is all memoranda and signatures, and every object covered
over with hints which speak to the intelligent.

In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal. It
neither exceeds nor comes short of the fact. But nature strives upward; and, in man, the
report is something more than print of the seal. It is a new and finer form of the original.
The record is alive, as that which it recorded is alive. In man, the memory is a kind of
looking-glass, which, having received the images of surrounding objects, is touched with
life, and disposes them in a new order. The facts do not lie in it inert; but some subside
and others shine; so that we soon have a new picture, composed of the eminent
experiences. The man cooperates. He loves to communicate; and that which is for him to
say lies as a load on his heart until it is delivered. But, besides the universal joy of
conversation, some men are born with exalted powers for this second creation. Men are
born to write. The gardener saves every slip and seed and peach-stone: his vocation is to
be a planter of plants. Not less does the writer attend his affair. Whatever he beholds or
experiences, comes to him as a model and sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense
that they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes that all that can be
thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it.
Nothing so broad, so subtle, or so dear, but comes therefore commended to his pen,
and he will write. In his eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the
possibility of being reported. In conversation, in calamity, he finds new materials; as our
German poet said, “Some god gave me the power to paint what I suffer.” He draws his
rents from rage and pain. By acting rashly, he buys the power of talking wisely. Vexations
and a tempest of passion only fill his sail; as the good Luther writes, “When I am angry, I
can pray well and preach well”: and, if we knew the genesis of fine strokes of eloquence,
they might recall the complaisance of Sultan Amurath, who struck off some Persian
heads, that his physician, Vesalius, might see the spasms in the muscles of the neck. His
failures are the preparation of his victories. A new thought or a crisis of passion apprises
him that all that he has yet learned and written is exoteric,--is not the fact, but some
rumor of the fact. What then? Does he throw away the pen? No; he begins again to
describe in the new light which has shined on him,--if, by some means, he may yet save
some true word. Nature conspires. Whatever can be thought can be spoken, and still
rises for utterance, though to rude and stammering organs. If they can not compass it, it
waits and works, until at last it moulds them to its perfect will and is articulated.

This striving after imitative expression, which one meets every where, is significant of the
aim of nature, but is mere stenography. There are higher degrees, and nature has more
splendid endowments for those whom she elects to a superior office; for the class of
scholars or writers, who see connection where the multitude see fragments, and who
are impelled to exhibit the facts in order, and so to supply the axis on which the frame of
things turns. Nature has dearly at heart the formation of the speculative man, or scholar.
It is an end never lost sight of, and is prepared in the original casting of things. He is
no permissive or accidental appearance, but an organic agent, one of the estates of
the realm, provided and prepared from of old and from everlasting, in the knitting and
contexture of things. Presentiments, impulses, cheer him. There is a certain heat in the
breast which attends the perception of a primary truth, which is the shining of the
spiritual sun down into the shaft of the mine. Every thought which dawns on the mine, in
the moment of its emergence announces its own rank,--whether it is some whimsy, or
whether it is a power.

If he have his incitements, there is, on the other side, invitation and need enough of his
gift. Society has, at all times, the same want, namely of one sane man with adequate
powers of expression to hold up each object of monomania in its right relations. The
ambitious and mercenary bring their last new mumbo-jumbo, whether tariff, Texas,
railroad, Romanism, mesmerism, or California; and, by detaching the object from its
relations, easily succeed in making it seen in a glare; and a multitude go mad about it,
and they are not to be reproved or cured by the opposite multitude who are kept from
this particular insanity by an equal frenzy on another crotchet. But let one man have the
comprehensive eye that can replace this isolated prodigy in its right neighborhood and
bearings,--the illusion vanishes, and the returning reason of the community thanks the
reason of the monitor.

The scholar is the man of the ages, but he must also wish with other men to stand well
with his contemporaries. But there is a certain ridicule, among superficial people, thrown
on the scholars or clerisy, which is of no import unless the scholar heed it. In this
country, the emphasis of conversation and of public opinion commends the practical
man; and the solid portion of the community is named with significant respect in every
circle. Our people are of Bonaparte's opinion concerning ideologists. Ideas are
subversive of social order and comfort, and at last make a fool of the possessor. It is
believed, the ordering a cargo of goods from New York to Smyrna, or the running up and
down to procure a company of subscribers to set a-going five or ten thousand spindles,
or the negotiations of a caucus and the practising on the prejudices and facility of
country-people to secure their votes in November,--is practical and commendable.
If I were to compare action of a much higher strain with a life of contemplation, I should
not venture to pronounce with much confidence in favor of the former. Mankind have
such a deep stake in inward illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or
monk in defence of his life of thought and prayer. A certain partiality, a headiness and
loss of balance, is the tax which all action must pay. Act, if you like,--but you do it at your
peril. Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted and who has
not been the victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces
them to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a
sacrament. The fiery reformer embodies his aspiration in some rite or covenant, and he
and his friends cleave to the form and lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established
Quakerism, the Shaker has established his monastery and his dance; and although each
prates of spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, which is anti-spiritual. But where are his
new things of to-day? In actions of enthusiasm this drawback appears, but in those lower
activities, which have no higher aim than to make us more comfortable and more
cowardly; in actions of cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the
speculative from the practical faculty and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is
nothing else but drawback and negation. The Hindoos write in their sacred books,
“Children only, and not the learned, speak of the speculative and the practical faculties as
two. They are but one, for both obtain the selfsame end, and the place which is gained
by the followers of the one is gained by the followers of the other. That man seeth, who
seeth that the speculative and the practical doctrines are one.” For great action must
draw on the spiritual nature. The measure of action is the sentiment from which it
proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.

This disparagement will not come from the leaders, but from inferior persons. The
robust gentlemen who stand at the head of the practical class, share the ideas of the
time, and have too much sympathy with the speculative class. It is not from men
excellent in any kind that disparagement of any other is to be looked for. With such,
Talleyrand's question is ever the main one; not, is he rich? is he committed? is he
well-meaning? has he this or that faculty? is he of the movement? is he of the es-
tablishment?-but, Is he anybody? does he stand for something? He must be good of
his kind. That is all that Talleyrand, all that State-street, all that the common-sense
of mankind asks. Be real and admirable, not as we know, but as you know. Able men
do not care in what kind a man is able, so only that he is able. A master likes a master,
and does not stipulate whether it be orator, artist, craftsman, or king.

Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class. And it is
not to be denied that men are cordial in their recognition and welcome of intellectual
accomplishments. Still the writer does not stand with us on any commanding ground. I
think this to be his own fault. A pound passes for a pound. There have been times when
he was a sacred person: he wrote Bibles, the first hymns, the codes, the epics, tragic
songs, Sibylline verses, Chaldean oracles, Laconian sentences, inscribed on temple walls.
Every word was true, and woke the nations to new life. He wrote without levity and
without choice. Every word was carved before his eyes into the earth and the sky; and
the sun and stars were only letters of the same purport and of no more necessity. But
how can he be honored when he does not honor himself; when he loses himself in a
crowd; when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy
opinion of a reckless public; when he must sustain with shameless advocacy some bad
government, or must bark, all the year round, in opposition; or write conventional
criticism, or profligate novels, or at any rate write without thought, and without
recurrence by day and by night to the sources of inspiration?

Some reply to these questions may be furnished by looking over the list of men of
literary genius in our age. Among these no more instructive name occurs than that of
Goethe to represent the powers and duties of the scholar or writer.

I described Bonaparte as a representative of the popular external life and aims of the
nineteenth century. Its other half, its poet, is Goethe, a man quite domesticated in the
century, breathing its air, enjoying its fruits, impossible at any earlier time, and taking
away, by his colossal parts, the reproach of weakness which but for him would lie on the
intellectual works of the period. He appears at a time when a general culture has spread
itself and has smoothed down all sharp individual traits; when, in the absence of heroic
characters, a social comfort and cooperation have come in. There is no poet, but scores
of poetic writers; no Columbus, but hundreds of post-captains, with transit-telescope,
barometer and concentrated soup and pemmican; no Demosthenes, no Chatham, but
any number of clever parliamentary and forensic debaters; no prophet or saint, but
colleges of divinity; no learned man, but learned societies, a cheap press, reading-rooms
and book-clubs without number. There was never such a miscellany of facts. The world
extends itself like American trade. We conceive Greek or Roman life, life in the Middle
Ages, to be a simple and comprehensible affair; but modern life to respect a multitude of
things, which is distracting.

Goethe was the philosopher of this multiplicity; hundred-handed, Argus-eyed, able and
happy to cope with this rolling miscellany of facts and sciences, and by his own versatility
to dispose of them with ease; a manly mind, unembarrassed by the variety of coats of
convention with which life had got encrusted, easily able by his subtlety to pierce these
and to draw his strength from nature, with which he lived in full communion. What is
strange too, he lived in a small town, in a petty state, in a defeated state, and in a time
when Germany played no such leading part in the world's affairs as to swell the bosom of
her sons with any metropolitan pride, such as might have cheered a French, or English,
or once, a Roman or Attic genius. Yet there is no trace of provincial limitation in his muse.
He is not a debtor to his position, but was born with a free and controlling genius.
The Helena, or the second part of Faust, is a philosophy of literature set in poetry; the
work of one who found himself the master of histories, mythologies, philosophies,
sciences and national literatures, in the encyclopaedical manner in which modern
erudition, with its international intercourse of the whole earth's population, researches
into Indian, Etruscan and all Cyclopean arts; geology, chemistry, astronomy; and every
one of these kingdoms assuming a certain aerial and poetic character, by reason of the
multitude. One looks at a king with reverence; but if one should chance to be at a
congress of kings, the eye would take liberties with the peculiarities of each. These are
not wild miraculous songs, but elaborate forms to which the poet has confided the
results of eighty years of observation. This reflective and critical wisdom makes the poem
more truly the flower of this time. It dates itself. Still, he is a poet,--poet of a prouder
laurel than any contemporary, and, under this plague of microscopes (for he seems to
see out of every pore of his skin), strikes the harp with a hero's strength and grace.

The wonder of the book is its superior intelligence. In the menstruum of this man's wit,
the past and the present ages, and their religions, politics and modes of thinking, are
dissolved into archetypes and ideas. What new mythologies sail through his head! The
Greeks said that Alexander went as far as Chaos; Goethe went, only the other day, as
far; and one step farther he hazarded, and brought himself safe back.

There is a heart-cheering freedom in his speculation. The immense horizon which
journeys with us lends its majesty to trifles and to matters of convenience and necessity,
as to solemn and festal performances. He was the soul of his century. If that was learned,
and had become, by population, compact organization and drill of parts, one great Ex-
ploring Expedition, accumulating a glut of facts and fruits too fast for any hitherto-existing
savans to classify,--this man's mind had ample chambers for the distribution of all. He
had a power to unite the detached atoms again by their own law. He has clothed our
modern existence with poetry. Amid littleness and detail, he detected the Genius of
life, the old cunning Proteus, nestling close beside us, and showed that the dulness
and prose we ascribe to the age was only another of his masks:-

“His very flight is presence in disguise”:

-that he had put off a gay uniform for a fatigue dress, and was not a whit less vivacious
or rich in Liverpool or the Hague than once in Rome or Antioch. He sought him in public
squares and main streets, in boulevards and hotels; and,in the solidest kingdom of
routine and the senses, he showed the lurking daemonic power; that, in actions of
routine, a thread of mythology and fable spins itself: and this, by tracing the pedigree of
every usage and practice, every institution, utensil and means, home to its origin in the
structure of man. He had an extreme impatience of conjecture and of rhetoric. “I have
guesses enough of my own; if a man write a book, let him set down only what he knows.”
He writes in the plainest and lowest tone, omitting a great deal more than he writes, and
putting ever a thing for a word. He has explained the distinction between the antique
and the modern spirit and art. He has defined art, its scope and laws. He has said the
best things about nature that ever were said. He treats nature as the old philosophers, as
the seven wise masters did,--and, with whatever loss of French tabulation and dissection,
poetry and humanity remain to us; and they have some doctoral skill. Eyes are better on
the whole than telescopes or microscopes. He has contributed a key to many parts of
nature, through the rare turn for unity and simplicity in his mind. Thus Goethe suggested
the leading idea of modern botany, that a leaf or the eye of a leaf is the unit of botany,
and that every part of a plant is only a transformed leaf to meet a new condition; and, by
varying the conditions, a leaf may be converted into any other organ, and any other
organ into a leaf. In like manner, in osteology, he assumed that one vertebra of the spine
might be considered as the unit of the skeleton: the head was only the uttermost
vertebrae transformed. “The plant goes from knot to knot, closing at last with the flower
and the seed. So the tape-worm, the caterpillar, goes from knot to knot and closes with
the head. Man and the higher animals are built up through the vertebrae, the powers
being concentrated in the head.” In optics again he rejected the artificial theory of seven
colors, and considered that every color was the mixture of light and darkness in new
proportions. It is really of very little consequence what topic he writes upon. He sees at
every pore, and has a certain gravitation towards truth. He will realize what you say. He
hates to be trifled with and to be made to say over again some old wife's fable that has
had possession of men's faith these thousand years. He may as well see if it is true as
another. He sifts it. I am here, he would say, to be the measure and judge of these
things. Why should I take them on trust? And therefore what he says of religion, of
passion, of marriage, of manners, of property, of paper-money, of periods of belief, of
omens, of luck, or whatever else, refuses to be forgotten.

Take the most remarkable example that could occur of this tendency to verify every term
in popular use. The Devil had played an important part in mythology in all times. Goethe
would have no word that does not cover a thing. The same measure will still serve: “I
have never heard of any crime which I might not have committed.” So he flies at the
throat of this imp. He shall be real; he shall be modern; he shall be European; he shall
dress like a gentleman, and accept the manners, and walk in the streets, and be well
initiated in the life of Vienna and of Heidelberg in 1820,--or he shall not exist. Accordingly,
he stripped him of mythologic gear, of horns, cloven foot, harpoon tail, brimstone and
blue-fire, and instead of looking in books and pictures, looked for him in his own mind, in
every shade of coldness, selfishness and unbelief that, in crowds or in solitude, darkens
over the human thought,--and found that the portrait gained reality and terror by every
thing he added and by every thing he took away. He found that the essence of this
hobgoblin which had hovered in shadow about the habitations of men ever since there
were men, was pure intellect, applied,--as always there is a tendency,--to the service of
the senses: and he flung into literature, in his Mephistopheles, the first organic figure
that has been added for some ages, and which will remain as long as the Prometheus.
I have no design to enter into any analysis of his numerous works. They consist of
translations, criticism, dramas, lyric and every other description of poems, literary
journals and portraits of distinguished men. Yet I cannot omit to specify the Wilhelm
Meister.

Wilhelm Meister is a novel in every sense, the first of its kind, called by its admirers the
only delineation of modern society,--as if other novels, those of Scott for example, dealt
with costume and condition, this with the spirit of life. It is a book over which some veil is
still drawn. It is read by very intelligent persons with wonder and delight. It is preferred
by some such to Hamlet, as a work of genius. I suppose no book of this century can
compare with it in its delicious sweetness, so new, so provoking to the mind, gratifying it
with so many and so solid thoughts, just insights into life and manners and characters;
so many good hints for the conduct of life, so many unexpected glimpses into a higher
sphere, and never a trace of rhetoric or dulness. A very provoking book to the curiosity of
young men of genius, but a very unsatisfactory one. Lovers of light reading, those who
look in it for the entertainment they find in a romance, are disappointed. On the other
hand, those who begin it with the higher hope to read in it a worthy history of genius,
and the just award of the laurel to its toils and denials, have also reason to complain. We
had an English romance here, not long ago, professing to embody the hope of a new age
and to unfold the political hope of the party called “Young England,”--in which the only
reward of virtue is a seat in Parliament and a peerage. Goethe's romance has a
conclusion as lame and immoral. George Sand, in Consuelo and its continuation, has
sketched a truer and more dignified picture. In the progress of the story, the characters
of the hero and heroine expand at a rate that shivers the porcelain chess-table of
aristocratic convention: they quit the society and habits of their rank, they lose their
wealth, they become the servants of great ideas and of the most generous social ends;
until at last the hero, who is the centre and fountain of an association for the rendering
of the noblest benefits to the human race, no longer answers to his own titled name; it
sounds foreign and remote in his ear. “I am only man,” he says; “I breathe and work for
man”; and this in poverty and extreme sacrifices. Goethe's hero, on the contrary, has so
many weaknesses and impurities and keeps such bad company, that the sober English
public, when the book was translated, were disgusted. And yet it is so crammed with
wisdom, with knowledge of the world and with knowledge of laws; the persons so truly
and subtly drawn, and with such few strokes, and not a word too much,--the book
remains ever so new and unexhausted, that we must even let it go its way and be willing
to get what good from it we can, assured that it has only begun its office and has millions
of readers yet to serve.

The argument is the passage of a democrat to the aristocracy, using both words in their
best sense. And this passage is not made in any mean or creeping way, but through the
hall door. Nature and character assist, and the rank is made real by sense and probity in
the nobles. No generous youth can escape this charm of reality in the book, so that it is
highly stimulating to intellect and courage.

The ardent and holy Novalis characterized the book as “thoroughly modern and prosaic;
the romantic is completely levelled in it; so is the poetry of nature; the wonderful. The
book treats only of the ordinary affairs of men: it is a poeticized civic and domestic story.
The wonderful in it is expressly treated as fiction and enthusiastic dreaming”:--and yet,
what is also characteristic, Novalis soon returned to this book, and it remained his
favorite reading to the end of his life.

What distinguishes Goethe for French and English readers is a property which he shares
with his nation,--a habitual reference to interior truth. In England and in America there is
a respect for talent; and, if it is exerted in support of any ascertained or intelligible
interest or party, or in regular opposition to any, the public is satisfied. In France there is
even a greater delight in intellectual brilliancy for its own sake. And in all these countries,
men of talent write from talent. It is enough if the understanding is occupied, the taste
propitiated,--so many columns, so many hours, filled in a lively and creditable way. The
German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the
English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a
superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a
controlling sincerity. Here is activity of thought; but what is it for? What does the man
mean? Whence, whence all these thoughts?

Talent alone can not make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality
which by birth and quality is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to
see and state things so, and not otherwise; holding things because they are things. If he
can not rightly express himself to-day, the same things subsist and will open themselves
to-morrow. There lies the burden on his mind,--the burden of truth to be declared,--more
or less understood; and it constitutes his business and calling in the world to see those
facts through, and to make them known. What signifies that he trips and stammers; that
his voice is harsh or hissing; that his method or his tropes are inadequate? That message
will find method and imagery, articulation and melody. Though he were dumb it would
speak. If not,--if there be no such God's word in the man,--what care we how adroit, how
fluent, how brilliant he is?

It makes a great difference to the force of any sentence whether there be a man behind
it or no. In the learned journal, in the influential newspaper, I discern no form; only some
irresponsible shadow; oftener some moneyed corporation, or some dangler who hopes,
in the mask and robes of his paragraph, to pass for somebody. But through every clause
and part of speech of a right book I meet the eyes of the most determined of men; his
force and terror inundate every word; the commas and dashes are alive; so that the
writing is athletic and nimble,--can go far and live long.

In England and America, one may be an adept in the writings of a Greek or Latin poet,
without any poetic taste or fire. That a man has spent years on Plato and Proclus, does
not afford a presumption that he holds heroic opinions, or under-values the fashions of
his town. But the German nation have the most ridiculous good faith on these subjects:
the student, out of the lecture-room, still broods on the lessons; and the professor can
not divest himself of the fancy that the truths of philosophy have some application to
Berlin and Munich. This earnestness enables them to outsee men of much more talent.
Hence almost all the valuable distinctions which are current in higher conversation have
been derived to us from Germany. But whilst men distinguished for wit and learning, in
England and France, adopt their study and their side with a certain levity, and are not
understood to be very deeply engaged, from grounds of character, to the topic or the
part they espouse,--Goethe, the head and body of the German nation, does not speak
from talent, but the truth shines through: he is very wise, though his talent often veils his
wisdom. However excellent his sentence is, he has somewhat better in view. It awakens
my curiosity. He has the formidable independence which converse with truth gives: hear
you, or forbear, his fact abides; and your interest in the writer is not confined to his story
and he dismissed from memory when he has performed his task creditably, as a baker
when he has left his loaf; but his work is the least part of him. The old Eternal Genius
who built the world has confided himself more to this man than to any other.
I dare not say that Goethe ascended to the highest grounds from which genius has
spoken. He has not worshipped the highest unity; he is incapable of a self-surrender to
the moral sentiment. There are nobler strains in poetry than any he has sounded. There
are writers poorer in talent, whose tone is purer, and more touches the heart. Goethe
can never be dear to men. His is not even the devotion to pure truth; but to truth for the
sake of culture. He has no aims less large than the conquest of universal nature, of
universal truth, to be his portion: a man not to be bribed, nor deceived, nor overawed; of
a stoical self-command and self-denial, and having one test for all men,--What can you
teach me? All possessions are valued by him for that only; rank, privileges, health, time,
Being itself.

He is the type of culture, the amateur of all arts and sciences and events; artistic, but not
artist; spiritual, but not spiritualist. There is nothing he had not right to know: there is no
weapon in the armory of universal genius he did not take into his hand, but with
peremptory heed that he should not be for a moment prejudiced by his instruments. He
lays a ray of light under every fact, and between himself and his dearest property. From
him nothing was hid, nothing withholden. The lurking daemons sat to him, and the saint
who saw the daemons; and the metaphysical elements took form. “Piety itself is no aim,
but only a means whereby through purest inward peace we may attain to highest
culture.” And his penetration of every secret of the fine arts will make Goethe still more
statuesque. His affections help him, like women employed by Cicero to worm out the
secret of conspirators. Enmities he has none. Enemy of him you may be,--if so you shall
teach him aught which your good-will can not, were it only what experience will accrue
from your ruin. Enemy and welcome, but enemy on high terms. He can not hate
anybody; his time is worth too much. Temperamental antagonisms may be suffered, but
like feuds of emperors, who fight dignifiedly across kingdoms.

His autobiography, under the title of Poetry and Truth out of my Life, is the expression of
the idea--now familiar to the world through the German mind, but a novelty to England,
Old and New, when that book appeared--that a man exists for culture; not for what he
can accomplish, but for what can be accomplished in him. The reaction of things on the
man is the only noteworthy result. An intellectual man can see himself as a third person;
therefore his faults and delusions interest him equally with his successes. Though he
wishes to prosper in affairs, he wishes more to know the history and destiny of man;
whilst the clouds of egotists drifting about him are only interested in a low success.

This idea reigns in the Dichtung und Wahrheit and directs the selection of the incidents;
and nowise the external importance of events, the rank of the personages, or the bulk of
incomes. Of course the book affords slender materials for what would be reckoned with
us a Life of Goethe;--few dates, no correspondence, no details of offices or employments,
no light on his marriage; and a period of ten years, that should be the most active in his
life, after his settlement at Weimar, is sunk in silence. Meantime certain love affairs that
came to nothing, as people say, have the strangest importance: he crowds us with
details:--certain whimsical opinions, cosmogonies and religions of his own invention, and
especially his relations to remarkable minds and to critical epochs of thought:--these he
magnifies. His Daily and Yearly Journal, his Italian Travels, his Campaign in France and
the historical part of his Theory of Colors, have the same interest. In the last, he rapidly
notices Kepler, Roger Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Voltaire, etc.; and the charm of this portion
of the book consists in the simplest statement of the relation betwixt these grandees of
European scientific history and himself; the mere drawing of the lines from Goethe to
Kepler, from Goethe to Bacon, from Goethe to Newton. The drawing of the line is, for the
time and person, a solution of the formidable problem, and gives pleasure when
Iphigenia and Faust do not, without any cost of invention comparable to that of Iphigenia
and Faust.

This lawgiver of art is not an artist. Was it that he knew too much, that his sight was
microscopic and interfered with the just perspective, the seeing of the whole? He is
fragmentary; a writer of occasional poems and of an encyclopaedia of sentences. When
he sits down to write a drama or a tale, he collects and sorts his observations from a
hundred sides, and combines them into the body as fitly as he can. A great deal refuses
to incorporate: this he adds loosely as letters of the parties, leaves from their journals, or
the like. A great deal still is left that will not find any place. This the bookbinder alone can
give any cohesion to; and hence, notwithstanding the looseness of many of his works, we
have volumes of detached paragraphs, aphorisms, xenien, etc.

I suppose the worldly tone of his tales grew out of the calculations of self-culture. It was
the infirmity of an admirable scholar, who loved the world out of gratitude; who knew
where libraries, galleries, architecture, laboratories, savans and leisure were to be had,
and who did not quite trust the compensations of poverty and nakedness. Socrates
loved Athens; Montaigne, Paris; and Madame de Stael said she was only vulnerable on
that side (namely, of Paris). It has its favorable aspect. All the geniuses are usually so
ill-assorted and sickly that one is ever wishing them somewhere else. We seldom see
anybody who is not uneasy or afraid to live. There is a slight blush of shame on the cheek
of good men and aspiring men, and a spice of caricature. But this man was entirely at
home and happy in his century and the world. None was so fit to live, or more heartily
enjoyed the game. In this aim of culture, which is the genius of his works, is their power.
The idea of absolute, eternal truth, without reference to my own enlargement by it, is
higher. The surrender to the torrent of poetic inspiration is higher; but compared with
any motives on which books are written in England and America, this is very truth, and
has the power to inspire which belongs to truth. Thus has he brought back to a book
some of its ancient might and dignity.

Goethe, coming into an over-civilized time and country, when original talent was
oppressed under the load of books and mechanical auxiliaries and the distracting variety
of claims, taught men how to dispose of this mountainous miscellany and make it
subservient. I join Napoleon with him, as being both representatives of the impatience
and reaction of nature against the morgue of conventions,--two stern realists, who, with
their scholars, have severally set the axe at the root of the tree of cant and seeming, for
this time and for all time. This cheerful laborer, with no external popularity or
provocation, drawing his motive and his plan from his own breast, tasked himself with
stints for a giant, and without relaxation or rest, except by alternating his pursuits,
worked on for eighty years with the steadiness of his first zeal.

It is the last lesson of modern science that the highest simplicity of structure is produced,
not by few elements, but by the highest complexity. Man is the most composite of all
creatures; the wheel-insect, volvox globator, is at the other extreme. We shall learn to
draw rents and revenues from the immense patrimony of the old and the recent ages.
Goethe teaches courage, and the equivalence of all times; that the disadvantages of any
epoch exist only to the faint-hearted. Genius hovers with his sunshine and music close by
the darkest and deafest eras. No mortgage, no attainder, will hold on men or hours. The
world is young: the former great men call to us affectionately. We too must write Bibles,
to unite again the heavens and the earthly world. The secret of genius is to suffer no
fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life, in
arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality and a purpose; and first,
last, midst and without end, to honor every truth by use.

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