Representative men; seven lectures

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Book

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iSibetie^iDc oEtiition

REPRESENTATIVE MEN

BEING VOLUME IV.

OF

EMERSON'S COMPLETE WORKS

REPRESENTATIVE MEN

SEVEN LECTURES

BY

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Btto anU EetotgcU (^nition

VOL.

IS THE

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OF THE

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BOSTON
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street

1892

75 /Lz/
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Copyright, 1876,
By RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

Copyright, 1883,
Br EDWARD W. EMERSON.

All rights reserved.

^ Traigfer

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by U. 0. Houghton & Company.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

I. Uses op Great Men 7

II. Plato ; or, The Philosopher .... 39
Plato : New Readings . . . . • . 78

III. SWEDENBORG ; OR, ThE MySTIC .... 89

IV. Montaigne ; or, The Skeptic . . . .141
V. Shakspeare ; or, The Poet . . . . 179

VI. Napoleon; or, The Man of the World . .211
VII. Goethe : or, The Writer ..... 247

USES OF GREAT MEN.

I.

USES OF GEEAT 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 sur-
prise us. All mythology opens with demigods, and
the circumstance is high and poetic ; that is, their
genius is paramount. In the legends of the Gau-
tama,»the first men ate the earth and found it deli-
ciously 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 re-
calls an anecdote of them.

The search after the great man is the dream of

10 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 Eng-
lish 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 power-
ful, I would sell all and buy it, and put myself on
the road to-day.

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

Our religion is the love and cherishing of these
patrons. The gods of fable are the shining mo-
ments of great men. We run all our vessels into
one mould. Our colossal theologies of Judaism,
Christism, Buddhism, Mahometism, are the neces-
sary 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

USES OF GREAT MEN. 11

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 purifi-
cation 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 dange]^ 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 so-
cial strengths. Our affection towards others cre-
ates a sort of vantage or purchase which nothing
will supply. I can do that by another which I can-
not 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 theii

12 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

own affair or not. Man is that noble endogenous
plant which grows, like the palm, from within out-
ward. His own affair, though impossible to others,
Ae can open with celerity and in sport. It is easy
to sugar to be sweet and to nitre to be salt. IVe
' 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^ heaucoup d'effSt'''^ He is great wdio
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, an-
swer questions which I have not skiU to put. One
man answers some question which none of his con-
temporaries put, and is isolated. The past and

USES OF GREAT MEN. 13

passing religions and philosophies answer some
other question. Certain men affect us as rich pos-
sibilities, but helpless to themselves and to their
times, — the sport perhaps of some instinct that
rules in the air ; — they do no^ 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 dbes not. Is a man in his place,
he is constructive, fertile, magnetic, inundating ar-
mies with his purpose, which is thus executed.
The river makes its own shores, and each legiti-
mate idea makes its own channels and welcome, —
harvests for food, institutions for expression, weap-
ons to fight with and disciples to explain it. I The
true artist has the planet for his pedestal ; the ad-
venturer, after years of strife, has nothing broader
than his own shoes.

Our coimnon 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

14 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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. Eight 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 Sweden-
borg saw that things were representative. Men
are also representative; first, of things, and sec-
ondly, 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 deci-
mal notation ; the geometer ; the engineer ; the
musician, — severally make an easy way for all,
through unl^nown and impossible confusions. Each
man is by secret liking connected with some district
of nature, whose agent and interpreter he is ; as
Linnseus, of plants ; Huber, of bees ; Fries, of
lichens ; Van Mons, of pears ; Dalton, of atomic
forms ; Euclid, of lines ; Newton, of fluxions.

USES OF GREAT MEN. 15

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 cre-
ated 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 expec-
tant. 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 itseK. A magnet
must be made man in some Gilbert, or Swedenborg,
or Oersted, before the general mind can come to
entertain its powers.

If we limit ourselves to the first advantages,
a sober grace adheres to the mineral and botanic
kingdoms, which, in the highest moments, comes
up as the charm of nature, — the glitter of the
spar, the sureness of affinity, the veracity of angles.
Light and darkness, heat and cold, hunger and
food, sweet and sour, solid, liquid and gas, circle

16 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 advantageso
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 archi-
tecture, another. There are advancements to num-
bers, anatomy, architecture, astronomy, little sus-
pected 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 j

USES OF GREAT MEN. 17

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 como
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 inan-
imate will one day speak and reason. Unpublished
nature will have its whole secret told. Shall we
say that quartz mountains will pulverize into innu-
merable 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 sup-
plies the imbecility of our condition. In one of
those celestial days when heaven and earth meet
and adorn each other, it seems a poverty that we
can only spend it once : we wish for a thousand
heads, a thousand bodies, that we might celebrate
its immense beauty in many ways and places. Is
this fancy ? Well, in good faith, we are multiplied
by our proxies. How easily we adopt their labors I

18 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

Every ship that comes to America got its chart
from Columbus. Every novel is a debtor to Ho-
mer. 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 road-makers on every hand
enrich us. We must extend the area of life and
multiply our relations. We are as much gainers
by finding a new property in the old earth as by
acquiring a new planet.

We are too passive in the reception of these ma-
terial or semi-material aids. We must not be sacks
and stomachs. To ascend one step, — we are bet-
ter served through our sympathy. Activity is con-
tagious. Looking where others look, and convers-
ing 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.
I Men are helpful through the intellect and the

USES OF GREAT MEN. 19

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 Kaleigh, "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 liimself
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 hmidred ages. When the
manners of Loo are heard of, the stupid become in-
telligent, 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.

20 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 sig-
nal as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is
in us ? We will never more think cheaply of our-
selves, 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
enougho They* delight in a man. Here is a head
and a trunk ! What a front ! what eyes ! Atlan-
tean 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 se-
cret of the reader's joy in literary genius. Toothing
is kept back. There is lire enough ^ to fuse the
mountain of ore. Shakspeare's principal merit
may be conveyed in saying that he of all men best
understands the English language, and can say

USES OF GREAT MEN. 21

what he will. Yet these unchoked channels and
floodgates of expression are only health or fortu-
nate constitution. Shakspeare's name suggests
other and purely intellectual benefits.

Senates and sovereigns have no compliment, wi'v.h
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 con-
fectioners, 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 swimmings
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 imag-
ination, even versatility and concentration, — as
these acts expose the invisible organs and members

22 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 auda-
cious 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 bene-
fit is real because we are entitled to these enlarge-
ments, 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, Shak-
speare, Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either
of these laws. The perception of these laws is a

USES OF GREAT MEN. 23

kind of metre of the mind. Little minds are little
through failure to see them.

Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our de-
light in reason degenerates into idolatry of the
herald. Especially when a mind of powerful
method has instructed men, we find the examples
of oppression. The dominion of Aristotle, the
Ptolemaic astronomy, the credit of Luther, of Ba-
con, of Locke ; — in religion the history of hie-
rarchies, 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 itseK. 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 ad-
vantages ; he would establish a sense of immovable
equality, calm us with assurances that we could not
be cheated ; as every one would discern the checks
and guaranties of condition. The rich would see
their mistakes and poverty, the poor their escapes
and their resources.

But nature brings all this about in due time.
Rotation is her remedy. The soul is impatient of

24 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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. Ro-
tation is the law of nature. When nature removes
a great man, people explore the horizon for a suc-
cessor ; 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 Jef-
ferson, 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 communi-
cate is not theirs. When we are exalted by ideas,
we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to
which also Plato was debtor.

I must not forget that we have a special debt
to a single class. Life is a scale of degrees.
Between rank and rank of our great men are
wide intervals. Mankind have in all ages attached
themselves to a few persons who either by the
quality of that idea they embodied or by the large-
ness of their reception were entitled to the posi-
tion of leaders and law-givers. These teach us the
qualities of primary nature, — admit us to the ecu-

USES OF GREAT MEN, 25

stitution of tMngs. "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 man-
kind 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

26 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

truths into the general mind ? — I am plagued,
in aU my living, with a perpetual tarijff 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 j
are sped, but so is the day. I am vexed by the I
recollection of this price I have paid for a trifling
advantage. I remember the peau d'dne on whic. .
whoso sat should have his desire, but a piece ot \i ,
the skin was gone for every wish. I go to a con-
vention 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 Caro- -
lina or Cuba, but who announces a law that dis- ;
poses these particulars, and so certifies me of 5
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 apprehencling my possession
of incorruptible goods. Here is great competition
of rich and poor. We live in a market, where

USES OF GREAT MEN. 27

in 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 gi-eat 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 ; Rich-
ard Plantagenet ; and Bonaparte, in France. I
applaud a sufficient man, an officer equal to his
office ; captains, ministers, senators. I like a master
standing firm on legs of iron, well-born, rich, hand-
some, 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 irresist-
ible upward force, into our thought, destroying in-

28 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

dividualism ; the power so great that the potentate
is nothing. Then he is a monarch who gives a con*
stitution 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 minute-
ness, 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 aU the
world point their finger at it every day. The
worthless and offensive members of society, whose
existence is a social pest, invariably think them-
selves 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.

USES OF GREAT MEN. 29

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 marshall us the way we
were going. There is no end to his aid. With-
out 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 inci-
dent to whole populations and ages. Men resem-
ble their contemporaries even more tjian their prt)^
genitors. It is observed in old couples, or in per-
sons who have been housemates for a course of
years, that they grow like, and if they should live

80 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

long enough we should not be able to laiow them
apart. Nature abhors these complaisances which
threaten to melt the world into a limip, and has-
tens 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 civiliza-
tion, would seem a bundle of insanities. We keep
each other in countenance and exasperate by emu-
lation 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, with-
out effort, and almost through the pores of the
skin. We catch it by sympathy, or as a wife ar-
rives at the intellectual and moral elevations of her
husband. But wo 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 con-
temporaries. 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

USES OF GREAT MEN. SI

from too much conversation with our mates, and ex-
ult in the depth of nature in that direction in which
he leads us. What indemnification is one great
man for popidations of pigmies ! Every mother
wishes one son a genius, though all the rest should
be mediocre. But a new danger appears in the ex-
cess of influence of the great man. His attractions
warp us from our place. We have become under-
lings and intellectual suicides. Ah ! yonder in the
horizon is our help ; — other great men, new quali-
ties, counterweights and checks on each other. We
cloy of the honey of each peculiar greatness. Ev-
ery 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.

?:2 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

There is sometliing 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 per-
form one more turn through the circle of beings,
wrote '' JV^ot transferable^' and " Good for (his 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 wiU to impart, and
such good wiU to receive, that each threatens to
become the other ; but the law of individuality col-
lects 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 ex-
clude 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*
povv^er by which individuals are guarded from indi-
viduals, 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 chiL

USES OF GREAT MEN. 83

dren 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 guar-
dian angels of children. How superior in their se-
curity from infusions of evil persons, from vulgar-
ity 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-reli-
ance ; 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 an-
other : not thyself, but a Platonist ; not a soul, but
a Christian ; not a naturalist, but a Cartesian ; not
a poet, but a Shaksperian. In vain, the v/heels of
tendency will not stop, nor will all the forces of in-
ertia, fear, or of love itself hold thee there. On,
and forever onward ! The microscope observes a
monad or wheel-insect among the infusories circu-

VOL, IV. 3 •

34 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

lating in water. Presently a dot appears on the
animal, which enlarges to a slit, and it becomes
two perfect animals. The ever-proceeding detach-
ment appears not less in all thought and in society.
Children think they cannot live without their par-
ents. 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 hand-
some,' 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-de-
votion ; 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 trag-
edy. It is as real a loss that others should be
low as that we should be low ; for we must have
society.

Is it a reply to these suggestions to say. Society
is a Pestalozzian school : all are teachers and pu-

USES OF GREAT MEN. 35

pils 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 mechan-
ical 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
jStand and serve, it is because we do not see the
3ompany in a sufficiently long period for the whole
notation of parts to come about. As to what we
call the masses, and common men, — there are no
icommon men. All men are at last of a size ; and
jtrue art is only possible on the conviction that
Wery talent has its apotheosis somewhere. Fair
jplay 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 con-
ave 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 quali

86 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

ties. Some rays escape the common observer, and
want a finely adapted eye. Ask the great man '^i
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 rep- .
utations of the nineteenth century will one day be/
quoted to prove its barbarism. The genius of hu-j
manity is the real subject whose biography is wrii
ten in our annals. "We must infer much, and supj
ply many chasms in ^he record. The history o:
the universe is symptomatic, and life is mnemoni-
cal. No man, in all the procession of famous men) i
is reason or illumination or that essence we were '.
looking for ; but is an exhibition, in some quarter, L
of new possibilities. Could we one day complettj L
the immense figure which these flagrant points com-l^ .
pose ! The study of many individuals leads us to]
an elemental region wherein the individual is lost, |
or wherein all touch by their summits. Though^ \,
and feeling that break out there cannot be im-ii
pounded by any fence of personality. This is the I
key to the power of the greatest men, — their spiriti
diffuses itself. A new quality of mind travels by ]
night and by day, in concentric circles from its ori-

USES OF GREAT MEN. 37

gin, and publishes itself by unknown methods : the
union of all minds appears intimate ; what gets ad-
mission 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 van-
ish 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
iBubstance which ordaineth and doeth.

The genius of humanity is the right point of
jview 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 there-
|fore 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

88 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 shaU cease to look in
men for completeness, and shall content ourselves
with their social and delegated quality. AU that
respects the individual is temporary and prospec-
tive, 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
cause, he begins to help us more as an effect. Thei
he appears as an exponent of a vaster mind an(
will. The opaque self becomes transparent witl
the light of the First Cause.

Yet, within the limits of human education anc
agency, we may say great men exist that there ma]
be greater men. The destiny of organized natur^
is amelioration, and who can teU its limits ? It i^
for man to tame the chaos ; on every side, whilst
he lives, to scatter the seeds of science and of songJ
that climate, corn, animals, men, may be milder|
and the germs of love and benefit may be multi|
plied.

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER.

11.

PLATO; OK, 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 corner-stone of schools;
these are the fountain-head of literatures. A dis-
cipline it is in logic, arithmetic, taste, symmetry,
poetry, language, rhetoric, ontology, morals or prac-
tical wisdom. There was never such range of spec-
ulation. Out of Plato come aU things that are
stiU 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, Cole-
ridge,— is some reader of Plato, translating into
the vernacular, wittily, his good things. Even the

42 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

men of grander proportion suffer some deduction
from the misfortune (shall I say?) of coming after
this exhausting generalizer. St. Augustine, Coper-
nicus, 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 pos-
terity and are tinged with his mind. How many
great men Nature is incessantly sending up out of
night, to be his men, — Platonists! the Alexandri-
ans, a constellation of genius; the Elizabethans,
not less; Sir Thomas More, Henry More, John
Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor,
Ralph Cud worth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor ; Mar-
cilius Ficinus and Picus Mirandola. Calvinism is
in liis Phaedo : Christianity is in it. Mahometan-
ism draws all its philosophy, in its hand-book of
morals, the Akhlak - y - Jalaly, from him. Mysti-
cism 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 Ger-
man, — ' how Teutonic I ' an Italian, — ' how Ro-
man and how Greek I ' As they say that Helen

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 43

of Argos had that universal beauty that every body
felt related to her, so Plato seems to a reader iii
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 singu-
lar 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, Raiiaelle, Shakspeare. For these
men magnetise 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, sci-
ences, all knowables, as his food? He can spare
nothing ; he can dispose of every thing. What is
I not good for virtue, is good for knowledge. Hence
his contemporaries tax him with plagiarism. But
the inventor only knows how to borrow; and so-
ciety is glad to forget the innumerable laborers
who ministered to this architect, and reserves all

44 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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, — Phi-
lolaus, Timaeus, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and what
else ; then his master, Socrates ; and finding him-
self still capable of a larger synthesis, — beyond all
example then or since, — he travelled into Italy,
to gain what Pythagoras had for him ; then into
Egypt, and perhaps still farther East, to import the
other element, which Europe wanted, into the Euro-
pean mind. This breadth entitles him to stand as
the representative of philosophy. He says, in the
Sepublic, " 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 gener-
ally 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.

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER 45'

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 in-
tellectual 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
travelled into Italy ; then into Egypt, where he
stayed a long time ; some say three, — some say
thirteen years. It is said he went farther, into
Babylonia: this is uncertain. Eetuming to Athens,
he gave lessons in the Academy to those whom hia
fame drew thither ; and died, as we have received
itj in the act of writing, at eighty-one years.

46 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

But the biography of Plato is interior. We
are to account for the supreme elevation of this
man in the intellectual history of our race, — how
it happens that in proportion to the culture of
men they become his scholars ; that, as our Jewish
Bible has implanted itself in the table-talk and
household life of every man and woman in the
European and American nations, so the writings of
Plato have preoccupied every school of learning,
every lover of thought, every church, every poet,

— making it impossible to think, on certain levels,
except through him. He stand^etween the tKith
and every man's mind, andf^ms 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 itseK
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 philoso-
phy, and almost literature, is the problem for us t^s
Bolve.

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 47

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 na-
tion, as of an individual, is the period of uncon-
scious 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 cul-
ture, 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 gen-
ius, they meet some one so related as to assist their
volcanic estate, and, good communication being

48 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

once established, they are thenceforward good citi-
zens. It is ever thus. The progress is to accu-
racy, to skill, to truth, from blind force.

There is a moment in the history of every na-
tion, 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 per-
ished, are of the immigrations from Asia, bringing
with them the dreams of barbarians ; a confusion
of crude notions of morals and of natural philos-
ophy, gradually subsiding through the partial in-
sight of single teachers.

Before Pericles came the Seven Wise Masters,
and we have the beginnings of geometry, meta-
physics and ethics : then the partialists, — deduc-
ing 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 paint,
or tattoo, or whooping ; for he can define. He
leaves with Asia the vast and superlative ; he is

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER, 49

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

4

60 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

each is involved in the other. These strictly-
blended elements it is the problem of thought to
separate and to reconcile. Their existence is mu-
tually 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 con-
template distinctions, because they are stupefied

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 61

with ignorance." " The words / and mine consti-
tute 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, indepen-
dent, 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 laiows 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 differ-
ence 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 paint-
ings; and light is whitewash; and durations a^-e
deceptive ; and form is imprisonment ; and heaven

52 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

itself a decoy.' That which the soul seeks is reso
lution 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 inter-
penetrate all things, all thought; the one, the
many. One is being ; the other,, intellect : one is
necessity ; the other, freedom : one, rest ; the other,
motion : one, power ; the other, distribution : one,
strength ; the other, pleasure : one, consciousness ;
the other, definition : one, genius ; the other, talent ;
one, earnestness ; the other, knowledge : one, pos-
session ; 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 organ-
ization, — 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 religji)n, he tends to unity ; by in-

PLATO; on, THE PHILOSOPHER. 63

tellcct, or by the senses, to the many. A too
rapid unification, and an excessive appliance to
parts and particulars, are the twin dangers of spec-
ulation.

To this partiality the history of nations corre-
sponded. The country of unity, of immovable insti-
tutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in ab-
stractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in prac-
tice 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 bounda-
ries.

European civility is the triumph of talent, the
extension of system, the sharpened understanding,
adaptive skill, delight in forms, delight in manifes-
tation, in comprehensible results. Pericles, Athens,
(jreece, 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 Maltlms ;
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

54 REPRESENTATIVE MEN,

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 sculp-
ture 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 Ro-
man legion, Byzantine legislation, English trade,
the saloons of Versailles, the caf^s 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 pil-
grimages, imbibed the idea of one Deity, in which
all things are absorbed. The unity of Asia and
the detail of Europe ; the infinitude of the Asiatic
soul and the defining, result-loving, machine-mak-
ing, surface-seeking, opera-going Europe, — Plato
came to join, and, by contact, to enhance the en-
ergy of each. The excellence of Europe and Asia
are in his brain. Metaphysics and natural philos-
ophy 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 be.

PLATO,' OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 65

lieve 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 ojily no
presumption against them, but the strongest pre-
sumption 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 raedal 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 slaall appear in his statement.

56 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

His argument and his sentence are self-poised and
spherical. The two poles appear; yes, and be-
come two hands, to grasp and ajDpropriate their
own.

Every great artist has been such by synthesis.
Our strength is transitional, alternating ; or, shall
1 say, a thread of two strands. The sea-shore, sea
seen from shore, shore seen from sea; the taste of
two metals in contact ; and our enlarged powers at
the approach and at the departure of a friend ; the
experience of poetic creativeness, which is not
found in staying at home, nor yet in travelling,^ but
in transitions from one to the other, which must
therefore be adroitly managed to present as much
transitional surface as possible ; this 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 attrac-
tive. Plato turns incessantly the obverse and the
reverse of the medal of Jove.

To take an example : — The physical philoso-
phers had sketched each his theory of the world;

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER, 57

the theory of atoms, of fire, of flux, of spirit ; the-
ories mechanical and chemical in their genius.
Plato, a master of mathematics, studious of all nat-
ural 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 de-
scription 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

58 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 Eepublic and in the Phgedo, to
piety. He has been charged with feigning sickness
at the time of the death of Socrates. But the anec-
dotes 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 indigna-
tion towards popular government, in many of his
pieces, expresses a personal exasperation. He has
a probit}^, a native reverence for justice and honor,
and a humanity which makes him tender for the
superstitions of the people. Add to this, he be-
lieves that poetry, prophecy and the high insight
are from a wisdom of which man is not master ;
that the gods never philosopliize, 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

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 69

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 excel-
lent 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
liglitnings 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 sur-
prises 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 gar-
ments, 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, intui-

60 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

tion, music, satire and irony, down to the custom-
ary 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 imderstatement and check-
ing his thunder in mid volley ! He has good-na-
turedly furnished the courtier and citizen with all
that can be said against the schools. " For philos-
ophy is an elegant thing, if any one modestly med-
dles 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 per-
suaded by these accounts, and consider how I may
exhibit my soul before the judge in a healthy con-
dition. Wherefore, disregarding the honors that
most men value, and looking to the truth, I shall

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 61

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 fac-
ulties, 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 ecstacy, 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
Buper-essential. He even stood ready, as in the

62 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

Parmenides, to demonstrate that it was so, — tliat
tliis 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 know-
able ! ' — that is, the Asia in his mind was first
heartily honored, — the ocean of love and power,
before form, before will, before knowledge, the
Same, the Good, the One ; and now, refreshed and
empowered by this worship, the instinct of Eu-
rope, namely, culture, returns ; and he cries, ' Yet
things are knowable ! ' They are knowable, be-
cause 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 chem-
istry; so there is a science of sciences, — I call
it Dialectic, — which is the Intellect discriminat-
ing the false and the true. It rests on the obser-
vation 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 what-
ever prey offers, even without being able to make
any use of it. Dialectic must teach the use of

PLATO', OB, THE PHILOSOPHER. 63

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 himseK in that one
sole science which embraces all."

" The essence or peculiarity of man is to com-
prehend 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 law-
giver is before the law-receiver. I give you joy,
O sons of men ! that truth is altogether whole-
some; that we have hope to search out what
might be the very self of everything. The mis-
ery of man is to be baulked of the sight of essence
and to be stuffed with conjectures ; but the su-
preme good is reality ; the supreme l)eauty 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 excejPt

64 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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, Cul-
ture. He saw the institutions of Sparta and recog-
nized, more genially one would say than any since,
the hope of education. He delighted in every ac-
complishment, 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 tal-
ent, on the powers of Pericles, of Isocrates, of Par-
menides ! 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 ge-
ometry ; what to music ; what to astronomy, whose
appeasing and medicinal power he celebrates ! In
the Timaeus he indicates the highest employment

PLATO; OR, THE PIITLOSOPIIER. 65

of the eyes. " By us it is asserted that God in-
vented 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 com-
pared 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 uni-
form revolutions of divinity, set right our own wan-
derings 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 advan-
tages 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 com-
position 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

VOL. IV. 5

6Q REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

ones in the state of ignorance, will be tlie 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 tem-
peraments 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 asso-
ciating with him, no thanks are due to him ; but,
simply, wliilst 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 Dae-
mon 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 The-
ages, is the association with me ; for, if it pleases
the God, you will make great and rapid profi-
ciency : 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

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 67

us, inconceivably delicious and profitable will our
intercourse be ; if not, your time is lost and you
will only annoy me. I sliall 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 no-
bility which come from truth itself and good itself,
and attempted as if on the part of the human in-
tellect, 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 re-
turn 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

68 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 v/ill 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 opera-
tions of the soul correspond, — conjecture, faith,
understanding, reason. As every pool reflects the
image of the sun, so every thought and thing re-
stores 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 v/herever it en-
ters, and it enters in some degree into all things:
^=but that there is another, which is as much

PLATO; OR, THE PIIILOSOPIIER. 69

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 excel-
lence 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, em-
ploying a model of this kind, expresses its idea and
power in his work, — it must follow that his pro-
duction 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 sci-
ence, but an inspiration •, that the greatest goods
are produced to us through mania and are as-
signed to us by a divine gift.

This leads me to that central figure which he
has established in Ms Academy as the organ

70 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 dou-
ble 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 person-
ated 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 knowl-
edge of his man, be he who he might whom he
talked with, which laid the companion open to cer-
tain defeat in any debate, — and in debate he im-
moderately delighted. The young men are prodig-
iously 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.

PLATO; OR, THE PIIILOSOPIIER 71

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 illustra-
tions from cocks and quails, soup-pans and syca-
more-spoons, grooms and farriers, and unnameable
offices, — especially if he talked with any superfine
person. He had a Franklin-like wisdom. Thus
he shov/ed 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 re-
treat of a troop ; and there was some story that
under cover of folly, he had, in the city govern-
ment, when one day he chanced to hold a seat
there, evinced a courage in opposing singly the
popular voice, which had well-nigh ruined him.
He is very poor ; but then he is hardy as a soldier,
and can live on a few olives ; usually, in the strict-
est sense, on bread and water, except when enter-
tained by liis friends. His necessary expenses

T2 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

were exceedingly small, and no one could live as he
did. He wore no under garment ; his upper gar-
ment 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
jtiothing else than this conversation ; and that, un-
der 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 hon-
est 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 hap-
pened to men of such a magnitude as false opinion
respecting the just and unjust. A pitiless dis-
putant, 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

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 73

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 vir-
tue, before many companies, and very well, as it ap-
peared to him ; but at this moment he cannot even
tell what it is, — this cramp-fish of a Socrates has
so bewitched him.

- This hard-headed humorist, whose strange con-
ceits, drollery and honhommie 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 popu-
lar creed, he affirms the immortality of the soul,
the future reward and punishment ; and refusing
to recant, in a caprice of the popular 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 treach-
ery. " Whatever inconvenience ensue, nothing is

74 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

to be preferred before justice. These things 1
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 prec-
ious passages in the history of the world.

The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, of the
droll and the martyr, the keen street and market
debater with the sweetest saint known to any his-
tory at that time, had forcibly struck the mind of
Plato, so capacious of these contrasts ; and the fig-
ure 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 .^sop 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. More-
over 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

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 75

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 liter-
ary, and never otherwise. It is almost the sole de-
duction from the merit of Plato that his writings
have not, — what is no doubt incident to this reg-
nancy of intellect in his work, — the vital author-
ity which the screams of prophets and the sermons
of unlettered Arabs and Jews possess. There is
an interval ; and to cohesion, contact is necessary.

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

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

76 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

Plato would willingly have a Platonism, a known
and accurate expression for tlie 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 in-
deed 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 na-
ture, Plato turns out to be philosophical exercita-
tions. 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 ques»
tion from him.

PLATO i OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 77

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 per-
fect enigma remains. But there is an injustice in
assuming tliis 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 re-
mains unapproached ! A chief structure of human
wit, lilic Karnac, or the mediaeval 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
wc say. Here is a fine collection of fables ; or when
we praise the style, or the common sense, or arith-
metic, we speak as boys, and much of our im-
patient criticism of the dialectic, I suspect, is no
better.

The criticism is like our impatience of miles,
when we are in a hurry ; but it is still best that
a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty
yards. The great ■ eyed Plato proportioned the
lights and shades after the genius of our life.

PLATO: NEW READINGS.

The publication, in Mr. Bolin's " Serial Librae
ry," of the excellent translations of Plato, which
we esteem one of the chief benefits the cheap press
has yielded, gives us an occasion to take hastily a
few more notes of the elevation and bearings of
this fixed star ; or to add a bulletin, like the jour-
nals, of Plato at the latest dates.

Modern science, by the extent of its generaliza-
tion, has learned to indemnify the student of man
for the defects of individuals by tracing growth
and ascent in races ; and, by the simple expedient
of lighting up the vast background, generates a
feeling of complacency and hope. The human
being has the saurian and the plant in his rear.
His arts and sciences, the easy issue of his brain,
look glorious when prospectively beheld from the
distant brain of ox, crocodile and fish. It seems
as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind
her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned
Dut five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu and

PLATO; NEW READINGS. 79

Columbus, was no wise discontented with the re-
sult. 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 prepara-
tion. She waited tranquilly the flowing periods of
paleontology, for the hour to be struck when man
should arrive. Then periods must pass before the
motion of the earth can be suspected ; then before
the map of the instincts and the cultivable powers
can be drawn. But as of races, so the succession
of individual men is fatal and beautiful, and Plato
has the fortune in the history of mankind to mark
an epoch.

Plato's fame does not stand on a syllogism, or
on any masterpieces of the Socratic reasoning, or
on any thesis, as for example the immortality of
the soul. He is more than an expert, or a school-
man, or a geometer, or the prophet of a peculiar
message. He represents the privilege of the in-
tellect, the power, namely, of carrying up every
fact to successive platforms and so disclosing in
every fact a germ of expansion. These 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

80 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

measuring the angles of an acre. But the Repub-
lic 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 con-
tinuously round the universe. Therefore every
word becomes an exponent of nature. Whatever
he looks upon discloses a second sense, and ulterior
senses. His perception of the generation of con-
traries, of death out of life and life out of death, —
that law by which, in nature, decomposition is re-
composition, 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 edu-
cation of the private soul ; his beautiful definitions

PLATO; NEW READINGS. 81

of ideas, of time, of form, of figure, of the line,
sometimes hypothetically given, as his defining of
virtue, courage, justice, temperance ; his love of
the apologue, and his apologues themselves ; the
cave of Trophonius ; the ring of Gyges ; the char-
ioteer 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 bonif orm 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 every-
where, but specially in the doctrine, " what comes
from God to us, returns from us to God," and in
Socrates' belief that the laws below are sisters of
the laws above.

More striking examples are his moral conclu-
sions. Plato affirms the coincidence of science
and virtue ; for vice can never know itself and
virtue, but virtue knows both itself and vice.
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

VOL. IV. 6

82 REPRESENTATIVE MEN,

lie was more hurtful than homicide; and that
ignorance, or the involuntary lie, was more calami-
tous than involuntary 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 soid can, by its virtue, render the
body the best possible. The intelligent have a
right over the ignorant, namely, the right of in-
structing 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 in-
structed that there is gold and silver in their souls,
which will make men willing to give them every
thing which they need.

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

PLATO; NEW READINGS. 83

This eldest Goethe, hating varnish and false-
hood, delighted in revealing the real at the base
of the accidental ; in discovering connection, con-
tinuity and representation everywhere, hating insu-
lation ; and appears like the god of wealth among
the cabins of vagabonds, opening power and capa-
bility 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 re-
spects the repute, honors and emoluments arising
therefrom ; while, as respects either of them in it-
self, and subsisting by its own power in the soul
of the possessor, and concealed both from gods
and men, no one has yet sufficiently investigated,
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 dis-
criminating them from the notions of the under-
standing, marks an era in the world. He was
born to behold the self-evolving power of spirit,
endless, generator of new ends ; a power which is
the key at once to the centrality and the eva-
^escence of thin/^s. Plato is so centred that he

84 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

can well spare all his dogmas. Thus the fact of
knowledge and ideas reveals to him the fact of
eternity; and the doctrine of reminiscence he
offers as the most probable particular explication.
Call that fanciful, — it matters not: the connec-'
tion between our knowledge and the abyss of
being is still real, iand the explication must be
not less magnificent.

He has indicated every eminent point in spec-
ulation. He wi'ote 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 island, in intellectual geog-
raphy, but that Plato first drew the sphere. He
domesticates the soul in nature : man is the micro-
cosm. All the circles of the visible heaven repre-
sent as many circles in the rational soid. 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, significant of a profound sense. The
gods are the ideas. Pan is speech, or manifesta-
tion; Saturn, the contemplative; Jove, the regal
Boul; and Mars, passion. Venus is proportion;

PLATO; NEW READINGS. 85

Calliope, the soul of the world; Aglaia, intellec-
tual illustration.

These thoughts, in sparkles of light, had ap-
peared often to pious and to poetic souls ; but this
well-bred, all-knowing Greek geometer comes with
command, gathers them all up into rank and gra-
dation, 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 Ti-
maeus, 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 dis-
tinguish poles, equator and lines of latitude,
every arc and node : a theory so averaged, so
modulated, that you would say the winds of ages
had swept through this rhythmic structure, and
not that it was the brief extempore blotting of
one short-lived scribe. Hence it Las 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 An-
gelo is a Platonist in his sonnets : Shakspeare is
a Platonist when he writes,—

86 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

" Nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean,"

or,—

" He, that can endure

To follow with allegiance a fallen lord.

Does conquer him that did his master conquer,

And earns a place in the story."

Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and 'tis the magnitude
only of Shakspeare's proper genius that hinders
him from being classed as the most eminent of
this school. Swedenborg, throughout his prose
poem of " Conjugal Love," is a Platonist.

His subtlety commended him to men of thought.
The secret of his popular success is the moral aim
which endeared him to mankind. " Intellect," he
said, " is king of heaven and of earth ; " but in
Plato, intellect is always moral. His writings
have also the sempiternal youth of poetry. For
their arguments, most of them, might have been
couched in sonnets : and poetry has never soared
higher than in the Timseus and the Phsedrus. As
the poet, too, he is only contemplative. He did
not, like Pythagoras, break himself with an insti-
tution. All his painting in the Republic must be
esteemed mythical, with intent to bring out, some-
times in violent colors, his thought. You cannot
institute, without peril of charlatanism.

It was a high scheme, his absolute privilege
for the best (which, to make emphatic, he ex'

PLATO; NEW READINGS, 87

pressed by community of women), as the premium
which he would set on grandeur. There shall
be exempts of two kinds : first, those who by de-
merit 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, permit-
ting the lie to governors. Plato plays Providence
a little with the baser sort, as people allow them-
selves with their dogs and cats.

SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC.

ni.

SWEDENBOEG; OK, THE MYSTIC.

Among eminent persons, those who are most
dear to men are not of the class which the econo-
mist calls producers : they have nothing in their
hands; they have not cultivated corn, nor made
bread ; they have not led out a colony, nor invented
a loom. A higher class, in the estimation and
love of this city-building market-going race of man-
kind, are the poets, who, from the intellectual
kingdom, feed the thought and imagination with
ideas and pictures which raise men out of the
world of corn and money, and console them for the
short-comings of the day and the 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. Bat 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

92 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 be-
tween Shakspeare and Swedenborg. The human
mind standi ever in perplexity, demanding intel-
lect, demanding sanctity, impatient equally of each
without the other. The reconciler has not yet ap-
peared. If we tire of the saints, Shakspeare is
our city of refuge. Yet the instincts presently
teach that the problem of essence must take pre-
cedence of all others ; — the questions of Whence ?
What? and Whither? and the solution of these
must be in a life, and not in a book. A drama or
poem is a proximate or oblique reply ; but Moses,
Menu, Jesus, work directly on this problem. The
atmosphere of moral sentiment is a region of grand-
eur 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 re-
turn to us ? " It is the kingdom of the will, and

SWEDENBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC. 93

by inspiring tlie will, which is the seat of personal*
ity, seems to convert the universe into a per-
son ; —

" 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 tliee."

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 expe-
rience, to divine. The Arabians say, that Abul
Khain, the mystic, and Abu AH Seena, the philos-
opher, 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

94 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

Plato denoted as Reminiscence, and which is im-
pHed by the Bramins in the tenet of Transmigra-
tion. 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 won-
der 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 ac-
cording 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 reminis-
cence all." How much more, if he that inquires
be a holy and godlike soul ! For by being as-
similated 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 ter-
ror. The ancients called it ecstacy or absence, — ■
a getting out of their bodies to think. All relig

SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 95

ious history contains traces of the trance of saints,
— a beatitude, but without any sign of joy ; ear-
nest, solitary, even sad ; " the flight," Plotinus
called it, " of the alone to the alone ; " Muv^ais, the
closing of the eyes, — whence our word, Mystic,
The trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Beh-
men, 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'erinf orms the tenement of clay,"

and drives the man mad ; or gives a certain vio-
lent bias which taints his judgment. In the chief
examples of religious illumination somewhat mor-
bid has mingled, in spite of the unquestionable in-
crease of mental power. Must the highest good
drag after it a quality which neutralizes and dis-
credits 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 penny-
weight though a nation is perishing for a leader ?
Therefore the men of God purchased their science

96 • REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

by folly or pain. If you will have pure carbon,
carbuncle, or diamond, to make the brain transpar-
ent, 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 vision-
ary 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 thoiv
sands. As happens in great men, he seemed, by
the variety and amount of his powers, to be a com-
position 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 balaiiced
mediocre minds.

His youth and training could not fail to be ex-
traordinary. Such a boy could not whistle or

SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC, 97

dance, but goes grubbing into mines and moun-
tains, 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 Fred-
erikshald, by hauling two gaUeys, five boats and a
sloop, some fourteen English miles overland, for
the royal service. In 1721 he journeyed over Eu-
rope to examine mines and smelting works. He
published in 1716 his Dsedalus Hjrperboreus, and
from this time for the next thirty years was em-
ployed 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 be-
gan. All his metallurgy and transportation of
ships overland was absorbed into this ecstasy. He
ceased to publish any more scientific books, with-
drew 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

98 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

other prince, at Dresden, Leipsic, London, or Am-
sterdam. 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 Hop-
ken says, the most solid memorials on finance were
from his pen. In Sweden he appears to have at-
tracted 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 in-
terfered a little with the importation and publica-
tion 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 gentle-
ness 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 at-
tracted any attention whatever from the learned
or the eminent ; and died at London, March 29,
1772, of apoplexy, in his eighty-fifth year. He is
described, when in London, as a man of a quiet,

SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 99

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 relig-
ion 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 nine-
teenth century ; anticipated, in astronomy, the dis-
covery of the seventh planet, — but, unhappily, not
also of the eighth ; anticipated the views of mod-
ern astronomy in regard to the generation of earths
by the sun ; in magnetism, some important experi-
ments and conclusions of later students ; in chemis-
try, the atomic theory ; in anatomy, the discoveries
of Schlichting, Monro and Wilson ; and first de-
monstrated the office of the lungs. His excellent
English editor magnanimously lays no stress on his

100 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 fo-
cal distance to be seen ; suggests, as Aristotle, Bar
con, 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 capi-
tal merit of his self-equality. A drop of water has
the properties of the sea, but cannot exhibit a
storm. There is beauty of a concert, as well as of
a flute ; strength of a host, as well as of a hero ;
and, in Swedenborg, those who are best acquainted
with modern books will most admire the merit of
mass. One of the missouriums and mastodons of
literature, he is not to be measured by whole col-
leges of ordinary scholars. His stalwart presence
would flutter the gowns of an university. Our
books are false by being fragmentary ; their sen-
tences are honmots, and not parts of natural dis-
course ; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure
in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to

SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 101

their petulance, or aversion from the order of na-
ture ; — 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, skil-
ful to discriminate power from form, essence from
accident, and opening, by its terminology and defi-
nition, high roads into nature, had trained a race of
athletic philosophers. Harvey had shown the cir-
culation 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 Hippo-

102 REPRESENTATIVE MEN,

crates, Leucippus and Lucretius, had given em-
phasis to the dogma that nature works in leasts,
— " tota in minimis existit natura." Unrivalled
dissectors, Swammerdam, Leuwenhock, Winslow,
Eustachius, Heister, Vesalius, Boerhaave, had left
nothing for scalpel or microscope to reveal in human
or comparative anatomy: Linnseus, his contempo-
rary, was affirming, in his beautiful science, that
'' Nature is always like herself : " and, lastly, the
nobility of method, the largest application of prin-
ciples, had been exhibited by Leibnitz and Chris-
tian Wolff, in cosmology ; whilst Locke and Gro-
tius had drawn the moral argument. What was
left for a genius of the largest calibre but to go
over their ground and verify and imite? It is easy
to see, in these minds, the origin of Swedenborg's
studies, and the suggestion of his problems. He
had a caj)acity to entertain and vivify these volumes
of thouglit. Yet tlie proximity of these geniuses,
one or other of whom had introduced all his lead-
ing 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 bo

SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 103

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 spiculse 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 cosmol-
ogy, 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 univer-
sality 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 through-
out all things : he saw that the human body was
strictly universal, or an instrmnent through which
the soul feeds and is fed by the whole of matter ;

104 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

SO that he held, in exact antagonism to the skeptics,
that " the wiser a man is, the more will he be a wor-
shipper 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 aphor-
ism, 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 now
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
fold their place : and he assumes the hair-worm,

SWEDENDORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 105

the span-worm, or the snake, as the type or predic-
tion 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 extrem-
ities 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 al-
most shed its trunk and manage to live alone, ac-
cording to the Platonic idea in the Timseus.
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, digest-
ing, 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 experi-
ence. Here again is the mystery of generation re-
peated. In the brain are male and female facul-
ties ; here is marriage, here is fruit. And there is
no limit to this ascending scale, but series on se-
ries. Every thing, at the end of one use, is take»

106 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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,
hut every thing at the end of one use is lifted into
a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs
into dsemonic and celestial natures. Creative force,
like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly re-
peating 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 exten-
sion 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 phenom-
ena ; and the terrible tabulation of the French sta-
tists 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 re*

SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 107

main there In globes and spaces. The globule o£
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 experi-
ments, 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. Willdnson, in London, a philosophic critic,

108 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

with a coequal ^dgor of understanding and imagi-
nation 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 hun-
dred years, in his pupil, is not the least remarkable
fact in his history. Aided it is said by the munifi-
cence 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 contem-
porary philosophy of England into shade, and leave
me nothing to say on their proper grounds.

The "Animal Kingdom" is a book of wonder-
ful merits. It was written with the highest end, —
to put science and the soul, long estranged from
each other, at one again. It was an anatomist's
account of the human body, in the highest style
of poetry. Nothing can exceed the bold and brill-
iant 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 labora«
tory;" whilst the picture comes recommended by

SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 109

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 man-
ners, 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 ;

110 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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.

Lib. I. 835.

" The principle of all things, entrails made

Of smallest entrails ; bone, of smallest bone ;

Blood, of small sanguine drops reduced to one ;

Gold, of small grains ; earth, of small sands compacted ;

Small drops to water, sparks to fire contracted : "

and which Malpighi had summed in his maxim
that "nature exists entire in leasts," — is a favorite
thought of Swcdenborg. " 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-,

SWEDENBORG ; OB, THE MYSTIC. Ill

those of the heart are little hearts. This fruitful
idea furuishes 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 hun-
gers, 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 partic-
ular 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."

112 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 Representa-
tions 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 spirit-
ual 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 transposition ;
inasmuch as the one precept, considered separately
from the other, appears to have absolutely no
relation to it. I intend hereafter to communicate
a number of examples of such correspondences,
together with a vocabulary containing the terms of
spiritual things, as well as of the physical things
for which they are to be substituted. This sym.
holism pervades the living body."

SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 113

The fact thus explicitly stated is implied in ali
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 propo-
sitions, with their translation into a moral or po-
litical 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 in-
volved, as we explained already, in the doctrine of
identity and iteration, because the mental series
exactly tallies with the material series. It re-
quired 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 be-
tween 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

114 REPRESENTATIVE MEN

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-lan-
guage ? Yet whether it be that these things will
not be intellectually learned, or that many centu-
ries must elaborate and compose so rare and opu-
lent a soul, — there is no comet, rock-stratum, fos-
sil, fish, quadruped, spider, or fungus, that, for
itself, does not interest more scholars and classi-
fiers than the meaning and upshot of the frame of
things.

But Swedenborg was not content with the culi-
nary 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 per-
son, to whom was granted the privilege of convers-
ing with angels and spirits ; and this ecstasy con-
nected itself with just this office of explaining the

SIVEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 115

moral imj^ort of tlie sensible world. To a riglit
perception, at once broad and minute, of tlie order
of nature, he added the comprehension of the
moral laws in their widest social aspects ; but what'
ever 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 para-
ble.

Modern psychology offers no similar example of
a deranged balance. The principal powers contin-
ued 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 instruc-
tive, 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 ec.static mode, he em-

116 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

ployed 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 correspond-
ence between thoughts and things henceforward oc-
cupied him. "The very organic form resembles
the end inscribed on it." A man is in general and
in particular an organized justice or injustice, sel-
fishness or gratitude. And the cause of this har-
mony 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 de-
sign of exhibiting such correspondences, which, if
adequately executed, would bo 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 in-
quiries took. His perception of nature is not hu-
man and universal, but is mystical and Hebraic.
He fastens each natural object to a theologic no-
tion ; — a horse signifies carnal understanding ; a
tree, perception ; the moon, faith ; a cat means
this ; an ostrich that ; an artichoke this other ; -^

SWEDENBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC. 117

and poorly tethers every symbol to a several ec-
clesiastic sense. The slippery Proteus is not so
easily caught. In nature, each individual symbol
plays innuriierable parts, as each particle of matter
circulates in turn through e^/ery system. The cen-
tral identity enables any one symbol to express suc=
cessively 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 sym-
bols is yet to be written. But the interpreter
whom mankind must still expect, will find no pre-
decessor 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 worship-
per, escaping from the vestry of verbs and texts, is

118 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 in-
terfered 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
v/hat affinities he was girt to his equals and his
counterparts ; into natural objects, and showed
tlieir 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 invigor-
ated by the study of his books.

There is no such problem for criticism as his
theological writings, their merits are so command-
ing, yet such grave deductions must be made.
Their immense and sandy diffuseness is like the
prairie or the desert, and their incongruities are
like the last deliration. He is superfluously explan-
atory, and his feeling of the ignorance of men,
strangely exaggerated. Men take truths of this

SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 119

nature very fast. Yet he abounds in assertions, he
is a rich discoverer, and of things which most im-
port us to know. His thought dwells in essential
resemhlances, 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 weight-
iness, — 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 miiverse could affect
to scorn. Plato is a gownsman ; his garment,
though of purple, and almost sky-woven, is an
academic robe and hinders action with its volumi-
nous folds. But this mystic is awful to Csesar.
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 sub-
sides into a permanent amount. Of course what is
real and universal cannot be confined to the circle

120 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 chil-
dren and lets fall the infirmities and limitations of
the grandest mind.

That metempsychosis which is familiar in the
old mythology of the Greeks, collected in Ovid
and in the Indian Transmigration, and is there
objective, or really takes place in bodies by alien
will, — in Swedenborg's mind has a more philo-
sophic character. It is subjective, or depends
entirely upon the thought of the person. All
things in the universe arrange themselves to each
person anew, according to his ruling love. Man
is such as his affection and thought are. Man is
man by virtue of willing, not by virtue of know-
ing and understanding. As he is, so he sees.
The marriages of the world are broken up. In-
teriors associate all in the spiritual world. What-
ever 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

SWEDENDORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC. 121

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 tor-
mented with the fear of death and cannot remem-
ber 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 covet-
ous 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 re-
plied, that they have not yet done work enough
to merit heaven."

He delivers golden sayings which express with
singular beauty the ethical laws ; as when he
uttered that famed sentence, that " In heaven the
angels are advancing continually to the spring-
time of their youth, so that the oldest angel ap-
pears 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

122 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 cele-
brated, 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 Gothi-
cism, 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

SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 123

woman. Therefore in the real or spiritual world
the nuptial union is not momentary, but inces-
sant 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 f
means. Do you see the same truth? If you do,
we are happy with the same happiness : but pres-
ently one of us passes into the perception of new
truth ; — we are divorced, and no tension in nar
ture can hold us to each other. I laiow how deli-
cious 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 nup-
tial 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 fire-
side, it seems cold and desolate whilst you cowei

124 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

over the coals, but once abroad again, we pity
those who can forego the magnificence of nature
fo* 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 f 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 spir-
itual 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 seK-inquisitorial habit that ho

SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 125

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

But this topic suggests a sad afterthought, that
here we find the seat of his own pain. Possibly
Swedenborg paid the penalty of introverted fac^
ulties. Success, or a fortunate genius, seems to
depend on a happy adjustment of heart and brain ;
on a due proportion, hard to hit, of moral and
mental power, which perhaps obeys the law of
those chemical ratios which make a proportion in
volumes necessary to combination, as when gases
will combine in certain fixed rates, but not at any
rate. It is hard to carry a full cup ; and this mai^
profusely endowed in heart and mind, early fell
into dangerous discord with himself. In his Ani-
mal Kingdom he surprised us by declaring that he
loved analysis, and nQt synthesis ; and now, after

126 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

his fiftieth year, he falls into jealousy of his intel-
lect ; 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 occa-
sions, 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 aU
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 lamenta-
tions : 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 boij

SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 127

men ; the infernal tun of the deceitful ; the excre-
nientitious hells ; the hell of the revengeful, whose
faces resembled a round, broad cake, and their
arms rotate like a wheel. Except Eabelais 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, al-
most a genius equal to his own. But when his
visions become the stereotyped language of multi-
tudes of persons of all degrees of age and capacity,
they are perverted. The wise people of the Greek
race were accustomed to lead the most intelligent
and virtuous young men, as j)art of their education,
through the Eleusinian mysteries, wherein, with
much pomp and graduation, the highest truths
known to ancient wisdom were taught. An ar-
dent 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^ heUs
and the heavens are opened to it. But these pic-
tures 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 seeii.

128 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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
<3entre to extremes, which bereaves every agency
of all freedom and character. The universe, in his
poem, suffers under a magnetic sleep, and only re-
flects 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 New-
ton, Sir Hans Sloane, King George II., Mahomet,
or whomsoever, and all gather one primness 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 relentitig 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

SWEDENBORG ; OR, TUE MYSTIC. 129

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 classi-
fication, so many allowances and contingences and
futurities are to be taken into account; strong by
his vices, often paralyzed by his virtues ; — sinks
into entire sympathy with his society. This want
reacts to the centre of the system. Though the
agency of " the Lord " is in every line referred to
by name^ it never becomes alive. There is no lustre
in that eye which gazes from the centre and which
should vivify the immense dependency of beings.

The vice of Swedenborg's mind is its theologic
determination. Nothing with him has the liberal-
ity of universal wisdom, but we are always in a
church. That Hebrew muse, which taught the lore
of right and wrong to men, had the same 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
Vistory, 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 con-
serve what had abeady arrived at its natural term,

VOL. IV. 9

130 REPRESENTATIVE MEN,

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 Chrjstiiuj
symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment, which
carries innumerable Christianities humanities, di-
vinities, in its bosom.

The excess of influence shows itself in the incon-
gruous importation of a foreign rhetoric. ' What
have I to do ' asks the impatient reader, ' with jas-
per and sardonyx, beryl and chalcedony ; what with
arks and passovers, ephahs and ephods ; what with
lepers and emerods ; v/hat with heavo-offerings and
unleavened bread, chariots of fire, dragons crowned
and horned, behemoth and unicorn? Good for
Orientals, these are nothing to me. Tlie more learn-
ing you bring to explain them, the more glaring
the impertinence. The more coherent and elabo-
rate the system, the less I like it. I say, with the
Spartan, " Why do you speak so much to the pur-
pose, 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 peli-
can and stork, instead of thrush and robin ; palm-
trees and shittim - wood, instead of sassafras and
hickory, — seems the most needless.'

SWEDENDORG; OR, THE MYSTIC, 131

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 indisputa-
ble secrets of moral nature, — with all these grand-
eurs resting upon him, remains the Lutheran bish-
op's son; his judgments are those of a Swedish
polemic, and his vast enlargements purchased by
adamantine limitations. He carries his controver-
sial 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 per-
haps 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 boolis, which he advertises
among the angels.

132 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 tliinks 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 tliis 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, wliich is for our lib-
eration : all other duty is good only unto weari-
ness."

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 themi none.'*

SWEDENDOliG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 133

To what a painful perversion had Gothic theology
arrived, that Swedenborg admitted no conversion
for evil spirits I 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,"

" 0 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 adora-
tion,— I am in them, and they in me. If one
whose ways are altogether evil serve me alone, he
is as respectable as the just man ; he is altogether
well employed ; he soon becometh of a virtuous
spirit and obtaineth eternal happiness."

For the anomalous pretension of Kevelations
of the other world, — only his probity and genius
can entitle it to any serious regard. His revela-
tions destroy their credit by running into detail.
If a man say that the Holy Ghost has informed
him that the Last Judgment (or the last of tho

134 REPRESENTATIVE MEN,

judgments), took place in 1757 ; or that the
Dutch, in the other world, live in a heaven by
themselves, and the English in a heaven by them-
selves; I reply that the Spirit which is holy is
reserved, taciturn, and deals in laws. The rumors
of ghosts and hobgoblins 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 cate-
gorist. 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 gen-
erals, — 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

SWEDENBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC. 135

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 circmnstance 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, sea-beat, heart-
beat, which makes the tune to which the sun rolls,
and the globule of blood, and the sap of trees.

In this mood we hear the rumor that the seer
has arrived, and his tale is told. But there is no
beauty, no heaven : for angels, goblins. The sad
muse loves night and death and the pit. His In-
ferno is mesmeric. His spiritual world bears the
same relation to the generosities and joys of truth
of which human souls have already made us cogni-
zant, 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, benevo-
lent but dyspeptic, into a wretch, skulking like a

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136 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 champ Hre^ 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 emblem-
atic 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 cen.

SWEDENBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC. 137

turies. 'T is a great difference. Behmen is health-
ily and beautifully wise, notwithstanding the mys-
tical narrowness and incommunicableness. Swed-
enborg is disagreeably wise, and with all his accu-
mulated 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 re-
trospective, 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 per-
ception 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 fra-
grance 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 ?

138 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 tliQ
dead prosaic level. In his profuse and accurate
imagery is no pleasure, for there is no beauty.
We wander forlorn in a lack-lustre landscape. No
bird ever sang in all these gardens of the dead.
The entire want of poetry in so transcendent a
mind betokens the disease, and like a hoarse voice
in a beautiful person, is a kind of warning. I
think, sometimes, he will not be read longer. His
great name will turn a sentence. His books have
become a monument. His laurel so largely mixed
with cypress, a charnel-breath so mingles with tlie
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 ruiming 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

SWEDENDORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 139

sense, the old usage and main chance of men : noth-
ing can keep you, — not fate, nor health, nor ad-
mirable intellect ; none can keep you, but rectitude
only, rectitude for ever and ever! And with a
tenacity that never swerved in all his studies, in-
ventions, 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 ho
staggered under the trance of delight, the more ex-
cellent is the spectacle he saw, the realities of being
which beam and blaze through him, and which no in-
firmities 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 na-
ture, not less glorious or less beautiful to himself.

MONTAIGNE; OE, THE SKEPTICo

IV.
MONTAIGNE ; OK, 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 as-
tonishment 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 beauti-
ful. 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 ;

144 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 sur-
faces, 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 shin-
ing 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 power-
ful moments, his thought has dissolved the works

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 145

of art and nature into their causes, so that the
works appear heavy and faulty. He has a concep-
tion of beauty which the sculptor cannot embody.
Picture, statue, temple, railroad, steam-engine, ex-
isted 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 cir-
cle, and all the institutions. It is not strange that
these men, remembering what they have seen and
hoped of ideas, should affirm disdainfully the supe-
riority 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 reali-
zations? and like dreaming beggars they assume to
speak and act as if these values were already sub-
stantiated.

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 painfid 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

VOL. IV. 10

146 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 prop-
erty 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, re]3udiated by the solid por-
tion of society: and a man comes to be valued
by his atliletic and animal qualities. Spence re-
lates 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

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 147

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 mus-
tard 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 niclit liebt Wein, Weiber, Gesang,
Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang ; " —

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

The inconvenience of this way of thinking is
that it runs into indifferentism and then into dis-
gust. Life is eating us up. We shall be fables
presently. Keep cool : it will be all one a hun-
dred years hence. Life's well enough, but we
shall be glad to get out of it, and they will all
be glad to have us. Why should we fret and

148 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

drudge? Our meat will taste to-morrow as it
did yesterday, and we may at last have had
enough of it. " Ah," said my languid gentleman
at Oxford, "there's nothing new or true, — and no
matter."

With a little more bitterness, the cynic moans ;
our life is like an ass led to market by a bundle
of hay being carried before him ; he sees nothing
but the bundle of hay. " There is so much
trouble in coming into the world," said Lord
Bolingbroke, " and so much more, as well as
meanness, in going out of it, that 'tis hardly
worth while to be here at all." I knew a philoso-
pher of this kidney who was accustomed briefly
to sum up his experience of human nature in say-
ing, " 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 mu-
tually exasperating each other, and the scoffer
expressing the worst of materialism, there arises
a third party to occupy the middle ground be-
tween 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

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 149

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 be-
lieve yourselves rooted and grounded on adamant ;
and yet, if we uncover the last facts of our knowl-
edge, 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 vic-
tims ; they are thin and pale, their feet are cold,
their heads are hot, the night is without sleep,
the day a fear of interruption, — pallor, squalor,
hunger and egotism. If you come near them and
see what conceits they entertain, — they are ab-
stractionists, and spend their days and nights in
dreaming some dream ; in expecting the homage
of society to some precious scheme, built on a truth,
but destitute of proportion in its presentment, of
justness in its application, and of ail 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.

150 REPRESENTATIVE MEN

What is the use of pretending to powers we have
not ? What is the use of pretending to assurances
we have not, respecting the other life ? Why ex-
aggerate the power of virtue ? Why be an angel
before your time ? These strings, 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, o-KOTrctt', 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, v/lien I
know that practical objections lie in the way, in-
surmountable 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
v/e know how subtle and elusive the Proteus is ?
Why think to shut up all things in your narrow
coop, when we know there are not one or two only,
but ten, twenty, a thousand things, and unlike ?
Why fancy that you have all the truth in your
keeping ? There is much to say on all sides.

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 151

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 woidd repent it." Is not
the State a question ? All society is divided in
opinion on the subject of the State. Nobody loves
it ; great mmibers dislike it and suffer conscien-
tious scruples to allegiance ; and the only defence
set up, is the fear of doing worse in disorganizing.
Is it otherwise with the Church ? Or, to put any
of the questions which touch mankind nearest, —
shall the young man aim at a leading part in law,
in politics, in trade ? It will not be pretended
that a success in either of these kinds is quite
coincident with what is best and inmost in his
mind. Shall he then, cutting the stays that hold
him fast to the social state, put out to sea with no
guidance but his genius? There is much to say on
both sides. Remember the open question between
the present order of "competition" and the friends
of " attractive and associated labor." The gener-
ous minds embrace the proposition of labor shared

152 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 indispen-
sable ! I cannot forgive you the want of accom-
plishments ; and yet culture will instantly impair
that chief est 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 wo know, for
certain ; what we have, let it be solid and season-
able 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, -=-«

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 153

this of consideration, of seK-containing ; not at all
of unbelief ; not at all of universal denying, nor
of universal doubting, — doubting even that he
doubts ; least of all of scoffing and profligate jeer-
ing at all that is stable and good. These are no
more his moods than are those of religion and phi-
losophy. He is the considerer, the prudent, taking
in sail, counting stock, husbanding his means, be-
lieving 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 vulner-
able 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 nonresistance, 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

154 REPRESENTATIVE MEN,

be rent to chips and splinters in tliis 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 pecu-
liarity of human nature. ( We are golden averages,
volitant stabilities, compensated or periodic errors,
houses founded on the sea. J 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 like-
ness. Men do not confide themselves to boys, or
coxcombs, or pedants, but to their peers. Some

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 155

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

A single odd volume of Cotton's translation of
the Essays remained to me from my father's li-
brary, when a boy. It lay long neglected, until,
after many years, when I was newly escaped from
college, I read the book, and procured the remain-
ing volumes. I remember the delight and wonder
in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I
had myself written the book, in some former life,
so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience.
It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in the
cemetery of Pere Lachaise, I came to a tomb of
Auguste Collignon, who died in 1830, aged sixty-

156 BEPRESKyTATlVE MEX.

eight years, and who, said the monument, ** lived
to do right, and had formed himself to virtue ou
the Essays of Montaigne.'' Some yeai'S later, I
became acquainted with an accomplished English
poet, John Sterling : and, in prosecuting my cor-
res].x>ndence, I found that, from a love of ^lon-
taigne, he had made a pilgrimage to his chateau,
still standing near Castellan, in Perigord, and, af-
t<>r two lumdred and fifty years, had copied from
the walls of his library the inscriptions which Mon-
taigne had written there. That Journal of Mr.
Sterling's, published in the ^Vestminster Eeview,
Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted in the Prolegomena to
his edition of the Essays. I heard with pleasure
that one of the newly-iliscovered autogTaphs of
"William Shakspeare was in a copy of Florio's trans-
lation of Montaigne. It is the only book which we
certainly Imow to have been in the poet's library.
And, odtUy enough, the duplicate copy of Florio,
which the British Museum purchased with a ^'iew
of protecting the Shakspeare antogi*aph, (as I was
informed in the Miisemn,) turned out to have the
autogi-aph of Ben Jonson in the fly-leaf. Leigh
Hunt relates of Lord Byron, that Montaigne was
the only gi-eat wi'iter 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.

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 157

In 1571, on the death of his father, Montaigne,
then thirty-eight years old, retired from the prac-
tice of law at Bordeaux, and settled himself on his
estate. Though he had been a man of pleasure
and sometimes a courtier, his studious habits now
grew on him, and he loved the compass, staidness
and independence of the country gentleman's life.
He took up his economy in good earnest, and made
his farms yield the most. Downright and plain-
dealing, and abhorring to be deceived or to de-
ceive, he was esteemed in the coimtry 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 neighbor-
ing lords and gentry brought jewels and papers to
him for safe - keeping. 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 writ-
ten in Latin ; so that in a humorist a certain na-
kedness of statement was permitted, which our
manners, of a literature addressed equaUy to both

158 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

sexes, do not allow. But though a biblical plain-
ness coupled with a most uncanonical levity may
shut his pages to many sensitive readers, yet the
offence is superficial. He parades it: he makes
the most of it : nobody can think or say worse of
him than he does. He pretends to most of the
vices ; and, if there be any virtue in him, he says,
it got in by stealth. There is no man, in his opin-
ion, 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 opin-
ion of an invincible probity grows into every read-
er' s mind. " When I the most strictly and relig-
iously 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 virtue 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 ap'
pearances; he will indulge himself with a little
cursing and swearing ; he will talk with sailors and

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 159

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. What-
ever 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 emblem-
atic pair of scales, and wrote Que sgais je f 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 cer-
tainly 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 ridic-
ulous, — than I will write, with a fine crow-quill,
a fine romance. I like gray days, and autumn and

160 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 con-
strain me, and plain topics where I do not need to
strain myself and pump my brains, the most suit-
able. 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 ballast-
ing, the best I can, this dancing balloon ? So, at
least, I live within compass, keep myself ready for
action, and can shoot the gulf at last with decency.
If there be any thing farcical in such a life, the
blame is not mine : let it lie at fate's and nature's
door.'

The Essays, therefore, are an entertaining solilo-
quy on every random topic that comes into Jiis
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 abundance of thoughts : he is never dull,
never insincere, and has the genius to make the
reader care for all that he cares for.

The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to
his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that
seems less written. It is the language of conversa-
tion transferred to a book. Cut these words, and

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC 161

they would bleed ; ttey 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 them-
selves and begin again at every half sentence, and,
moreover, will pun, and refme too much, and
swerve from the matter to the expression. Mon-
taigne 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 writ-
ing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration ; contented,
self-respecting and keeping the middle of the road.
There is but one exception, — in his love for Soc-
rates. 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

VOL. IT. 11

162 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 't is 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 sgais jef What do I
know?

This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed
by translating it into all tongues and printing sev-
enty-five editions of it in Europe ; and that, too, a
circulation somewhat chosen, namely among court-
iers, 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 connec-
tion 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

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 1C3

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 an-
ticipate 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 in-
stitutions and empire. If these did not exist, they
would begin to exist through his endeavors. There-
fore 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 comisellor contemplated, might be a very mod-
est 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 caus-
ationists, and reject a sour, dumpish unbelief, the
skeptical class, which Montaigne represents, have
reason, and every man, at some time, belongs to it.

164 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 exaggera-
tion and formalism of bigots and blocklieads.

Skepticism is the attitude assumed by the stu-
dent 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. Soci-
ety does not like to have any breath of question
blown on the existing order. But the interroga-
tion of custom at all points is an inevitable stage
in the growth of every superior mind, and is the
evidence of its perception of the flowing power
which remains itself in all changes.

The superior mind will find itself equally at
odds with the evils of society and with the projects
that are offered to relieve them. The wise skeptic
is a bad citizen ; no conservative, he sees the sel-
fishness of property and the drowsiness of institu-
tions. But neither is he fit to work with any demo-
cratic 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 Kaleigh ; or of
Krishna, in the Bhagavat, '' There is none who is
worthy of my love or hatred ; " whilst he sentences

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 1G5

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 interpreta=
tion as churches and £chool-books say. He does
not wish to take ground against these benevolences,
to play the part of devil's attorney, and blazon
every doubt and sneer that darkens the sun for
him. But he says. There are doubts.

I mean to use the occasion, and celebrate the
calendar-day of our Saint Michel de Montaigne, by
counting and describing these doubts or negations.
I wish to ferret them out of their holes and sun
them a little. We must do with them as the police
do with old rogues, who are shown up to the pub-
lic 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.
'T is of no importance what bats and oxen think.
The first dangerous symptom I report is, the levity

ICC) REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

of intellect ; as if it were fatal to earnestness to
know mucli. 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 as-
cension, even of lofty piety, leads to this ghastly
insight and sends back the votary orphaned. My
astonishing San Carlo thought the lawgivers and
saints infected. They found the ark empty ; saw,
and would not tell ; and tried to choke off their ap-
proaching 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 pri-
vate observers, — I confess it is not very affecting

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC, 1G7

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 econ-
omy, 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 modi-
fying 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

168 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

experience gives a new turn to our thoughts : com-
mon sense resumes its tyranny ; we say, * Well, the
army, after all, is the gate to fame, manners and
poetry : and, look you, -— on the whole, selfishness
plants best, prunes best, makes the best commerce
and the best citizen.' Are the opinions of a man
on right and wrong, on fate and causation, at the
mercy of a broken sleep or an indigestion ? Is his
belief in God and Duty no deeper than a stomach
evidence ? And what guaranty for the permanence
of his opinions ? I like not the French celerity, —
a new Church and State once a week. This is
the second negation ; and I shall let it pass for
what it will. As far as it asserts rotation of states
of mind, I suppose it suggests its own remedy,
namely in the record of larger periods. What is
the mean of many states ; of all the states ? Does
the general voice of ages affirm any principle, or is
no community of sentiment discoverable in distant
times and places ? And when it shows the power
of self-interest, I accept that as 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 ;

MONTAIGNE ; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 169

Love and Fortune, blind ; and Destiny, deaf. We
have too little power of resistance against this fe-
rocity which champs us up. What front can we
make against these unavoidable, victorious, malefi-
cent forces ? What can I do against the influence
of Kace, in my history ? What can I do against
hereditary and constitutional habits ; against scrof-
ula, 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 respect-
able.

But the main resistance which the affirmative
impulse finds, and one including all others, is in
the doctrine of the Illusionists. There is a pain-
ful rumor in circulation that we have been prac-
tised 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, 't is 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 so-
cial, can detect the cliild. We are not the less

170 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 recon-
ciliation between the theory and practice of life.
Keason, the prized reality, the Law, is apprehended,
now and then, for a serene and profound moment
amidst the hubbub of cares and works which have
no direct bearing on it ; — is then lost for months
or years, and again found for an interval, to be
lost again. If we compute it in time, we may, in
fifty years, have half a dozen reasonable hours.
But what are these cares and works the better?
A method in the world we do not see, but this par-
allelism of great and little, which never react on
each other, nor discover the smallest tendency to
converge. Experiences, fortunes, governings, read-
ings, writings, are nothing to the purpose ; as
when a man comes into the room it does not ap-
pear 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

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 171

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 en-
chantment, the stumiing 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 sym-
pathy with his thought from the village, but he
went with it to the chosen and intelligent, and
found no entertainment for it, but mere misappre-
hension, 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 at-
tempt to remove. Now shall we, because a good
nature inclines us to virtue's side, say. There are
no doubts, — and lie for the right ? Is life to be
led in a brave or in a cowardly manner ? and is
pot 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, farm-
mg, war, hunger, plenty, love, hatred, doubt and

172 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 pro-
fess to entertain are rather a civility or accommo-
dation 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 in-
stinctive 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 pres-
ently the unbeliever, for love of belief, burns the
believer.

MONTAIGNE; OR, TUE SKEPTIC. 173

Great believers are always reckoned infidels, im-
practicable, fantastic, atlieistic, 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 ques-
tions are not his ; their methods are not his ; and
against all the dictates of good nature he is driven
to say he has no pleasure in them.

Even the doctrines dear to the hope of man, of
the divine Providence and of the immortality of the
soul, his neighbors 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 hos*

174 REPRESENTATIVE MEN,

pitably 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 tradi-
tion 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 dark-
ness and death ; but withal an infinite ocean of
light and love which flowed over that of dark-
ness."

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 super-
ficial 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 undu-
late 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,

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 175

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 satisfac-
tion. 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 hinv

176 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

self, or thrust into a mob of emperors, all whist-
ling : and still the sirens sang, " The attractions are
proportioned to the destinies." In every house,
in the heart of each maiden and of eacli 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 suc-
cor, elastic, not to be surrounded. Man helps him-
self 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
tiling, and say the reverse. The appearance is im-
moral ; the residt 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. Al-
though knaves win in every political struggle, al-
though society seems to be delivered over from the
hands of one set of criminals into the hands of an-
other 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 an-
swered. We see, now, events forced on which
seem to retard or retrograde the civility of ages.
But the world-spmt is a good swimmer, and storms

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 177

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 mider abyss, and opinion
displace opinion, all are at last contained in the
Eternal Cause : —

" If my bark sink, 't is to another sea."

VOL. IV. 13

SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET.

V.

SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET.

Great men are more distinguished by range
and extent than by originality. If we require the
originality which consists in weaving, like a spi-
der, their web from their own bowels ; in finding
clay and making bricks and building the house ; no
great men are original. Nor does valuable origi-
nality 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 de-
sire, 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 uppermost, and, be-
cause he says every thing, saying at last something
good; but a heart in unison with his time and
country. There is notliing whimsical and fantas-
tic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest,
freighted with the weightiest convictions and point-
ed with the most determined aim which any man
or class knows of in his times.

182 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 gen-
ius. 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 neces-
sities 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 edu-
cates 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 pro-
duction 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

SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET, 183

tim thus far on his way. The human race has
gone out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hol-
lows and bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets,
artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he
enters into their labors. Choose any other thing,
out of the line of tendency, out of the national feel-
ing and history, and he would have all to do for
himself : his powers would be expended in the first
preparations. Great genial power, one would al-
most 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 un-
obstructed through the mind.

Shakspeare's youth fell in a time when the Eng-
lish people were importunate for dramatic enter-
tainments. The court took offence easily at politi-
cal 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 extempora-
neous enclosures at country fairs were the ready
theatres of strolling players. The people had
tasted this new joy ; and, as we could not hop e to
suppress newspapers now, — no, not by the strong-
est party, — neither then coidd king, prelate, or
puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ which
Was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch

184 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 inter-
est, — 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 pub-
lic mind, is of the first importance to the poet who
works for it. He loses no time in idle experiments.
Here is audience and expectation prepared. In
the case of Shakspeare there is much more. At
the time when he left Stratford and went up to
London, a great body of stage-plays of all dates
and writers existed in 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 Csesar,
and other stories out of Plutarch, which they never
tire of ; a shelf full of English history, from the
chronicles of Brut and Arthur, down to the royal
Henries, which men hear eagerly ; and a string of
doleful tragedies, merry Italian tales and Spanish

SIIAKSPEARE ; OR, THE POET. 185

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 vrrote 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 add-
ing a song, that no man can any longer claim copy-
right 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.

Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, es-
teemed the mass of old plays waste stock, in which
any experiment could be freely tried. Had the
prestige which hedges about a modern tragedy ex-
isted, 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

186 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

owes to liis legend what sculpture owed to tlie tem-
ple. Sculpture in Egypt and in Greece grew up
in subordination to architectui'e. It was tlie orna-
ment 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 calm-
ness 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 irri-
tability of poetic talent found in the accumulated
dramatic materials to which the people were al-
ready wonted, and which had a certain excellence
which no single genius, however extraordinary,
could hope to create.

In point of fact it appears that Shakspeare did
owe debts in all directions, and was able to use
whatever he found; and the amount of indebted-
ness may be inferred from Malone's laborious com-
putations in regard to the First, Second and Third
parts of Henry VI., in which, " out of 6,043 lines,

SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 187

1,771 were written by some author preceding Shak-
speare, 2,373 by him, on the foundation laid by his
predecessors, and 1,899 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
ijiark his lines, and know well their cadence. See
Wolsey's soliloquy, and the following scene with
CromweU, where instead of the metre of Shakspeare,
whose secret is that the thought constructs the tune,
so that reading for the sense will best bring out
the rhythm, — here the lines are constructed on a
given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit
eloquence. But the play contains through all its
length unmistakable traits of Sh.akspeare'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 rhytlmi.

Shakspeare 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

188 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

press, were unknown. A great poet who appears
in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the
light which is any where radiating. Every intel-
lectual 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 coun-
tries, 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 per-
/r> haps ; of Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that all wit
was their wit. And they are librarians and his-
toriographers, 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
whol3 society of English writers, a large uuacknowl

SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 189

edged 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 Statins. Then Petrarch,
Boccaccio and the Provencal poets are his benefac-
tors: the Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious
translation from William of Lorris and John of
Meung : Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Ur-
bino : 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 writ-
ing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writ-
ings of others at discretion. Thought is the proper^
ty of him who can entertain it and of him who can
adequately place it. A certain 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

190 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

retrospective. The learned member of the legisla-
ture, 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 con-
versation, 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 thmk, 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 ap-
peal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there
at last in his breast a Delphi whereof to ask con-
cerning 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 con-
tract to other wit would never disturb his conscious-
ness 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 oi
done by genius in the world, was no man's work,

SIIAKSPEARE ; OR, THE POET. 191

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 medita-
tions of every saint and sacred writer all over the
world. Grotius makes the like remark in respect
to the Lord's Prayer, that the single clauses of
which it is composed were already in use in the
time of Christ, in the Eabbinical forms. He
picked out the grains of gold. The nervous lan-
guage of the Common Law, the impressive forms
of our courts and the precision and substantial
truth of the legal distinction,^, are the contribution
of all the sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who
have lived in the countries where these laws gov-
ern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excel-
lence 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.

J 92 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

Something like the same process had gone on, long
before, with the originals of these books. The
world takes liberties with world -books. Vedas,
^sop's Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Ili-
ad, Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the
work of single men. In the composition of such
works the time thinks, the market thinks, the ma-
son, 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 cath-
olic 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 Shakspeare Society, for ascertaining the
steps of the English drama, from the Mysteries
celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the
final detachment from the church, and the comple-
tion of secular plays, from Eerrex and Porrex, and
Gammer Gurton's Needle, down to the possession
of the stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare
altered, remodelled and finally made his own.
Elated with success and piqued by the growing
interest of the problem, they have left no book-
stall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened,
no file of old yellow accounts to decompose \n

SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 193

damp and worms, so keen was the hope to dis^
cover whether the boy Shakspeare poached or not,
whether he held horses at the theatre door, whether
he kept scliool, and why he left in his will only his
second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.

There is somewhat touching in the madness with
which the passing age mischooses the object on
which all candles shine and all eyes are turned;
the care with which it registers every trifle touch-
ing Queen Elizabeth and King James, and the
Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs and Buckinghams;
and lets pass without a single valuable note the
founder of another djoiasty, which alone will cause
the Tudor d;>Tiasty to be remembered, — the man
who carries tlie Saxon race in him by the inspira-
tion which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the
foremost people of the world are now for some ages
to be nourished, and minds to receive this and not
another bias. A popidar player ; — nobody sus-
pected he was the poet of the human race; and the
secret was kept as faithfidly from poets and intel-
lectual men as from courtiers and frivolous people.
Bacon, who took the inventory of the human un-
derstanding for his times, never mentioned his
name. Ben Jonson, though we have strained his
few words of regard and panegyric, had no suspi-
cion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he
was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise

VOL. IV. 13

194 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 prov-
erb, Shakspeare's time should be capable of recog-
nizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born four years
after Shakspeare, 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 Ealeigh,
John Milton, Sir Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr.
Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles
Cotton, John Pyra, John Hales, Kej)ler, Vieta, Al-
bericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Arminius; with all
of whom exists some token of his having commu-
nicated, without enumerating many others whom
doubtless he saw, — Shakspeare, 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 impenetra-
ble. 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 criti'
cism which we think adequate begin to appear. It

SIIAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 105

was not possible to write the history of Shakspeare
till now ; for he is the father of German literature :
it was with the introduction of Shakspeare 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 cen-
tury, whose speculative genius is a sort of living
Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet could find
such wondering readers. Now, literature, philoso-
phy and thought, are Shakspearized. 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 crit-
ics 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 Cliristianity, qualifies the
period.

The Shakspeare Society have inquired in all di-
rections, advertised the missing facts, offered money
for any information that will lead to proof, — and
with what result ? Beside some important illustra-
tion 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'

196 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

Theatre: its wardrobe and other appurtenances
were his : that he bought an estate in liis native vil-
lage 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 Rog-
ers, in the borough-court of Stratford, for thirty-
five shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to him
at different times ; and in all respects ajDpears 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 otlier actors
and managers. I admit the importance of this in-
formation. It was well worth the pains that have
been taken to procure it.

But whatever scraps of information concerning
liis 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, mar-
riage, 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*

SHAKSPEARE ; OR, THE POEl 197

born ; and it seems as if, had we dipped at random
into tlie " Modern Plutarch," and read any other
life there, it would have fitted the jwems as well.
It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rain-
bow 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. Bet-
terton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean and Macready ded-
icate 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 ques-
tion 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 real-
ity to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks

198 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the green-
room. Can any biography shed light on the local-
ities into which the Midsummer Night's Dream ad-
mits me ? Did Shakspeare confide to any notary
or parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate in Strat-
ford, 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 chancel-
lor'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 Cyclopsean architecture of Egypt and India,
in the Phidian sculpture, the Gothic minsters, the
Italian painting, the Ballads of Spain and Scot-
land, — 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.

Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shak-
speare ; and even he can tell nothing, except to the
Shakspeare in us, that is, to our most apprehen-
sive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from
off his tripod and give us anecdotes of his inspi-
rations. Read the antique documents extricated,
analyzed and compared by the assiduous Dyce
and CoUier, and now read one of these skyey

SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 199

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 Shakspeare for biographer, instead of
Aubrey and Eowe, 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 in-
terweave their malice and their gift in our bright-
est 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

200 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his
ample pictures of the gentleman and the king,
what forms and humanities pleased him ; his de-
light 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 Shakspeare'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 be-
havior ?

Some able and appreciating critics think no
criticism on Shakspeare 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

SIIAKSPEARE ; OR, THE POET. 201

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 Shakspeare and his book
of life. He wTote 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

202 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

as the landscape lies on the eye. And the impor-
tance of this wisdom of life sinks the form, as of
Drama or Epic, out of notice. ' T is like making
a question concerning the paj)er on which a king's
message is written.

Shakspeare is as much out of the category of
eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He
is inconceivably wise ; the others, conceivably. A
good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain
and think from thence ; but not into Shakspeare's.
We are still out of doors. For executive faculty,
for creation, Shakspeare is unique. No man can
imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of
subtlety compatible with an individual self, — the
subtilest of authors, and only just within the pos-
sibility 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 fac-
ulties. Give a man of talents a story to tell, and
his partiality will presently appear. He has cer«
tain observations, opinions, topics, which have

SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 203

some accidental prominence, and which he dis-
poses all to exhibit. He crams this part and
starves that other part, consulting not the fitness
of the thing, but his fitness and strength. But
Shakspeare has no peculiarity, no importunate
topic ; but all is duly given.; no veins, no curiosi=
ties ; no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no manner-
ist is he : he has no discoverable egotism : the
great he tells greatly ; the small subordinately.
He is wise without emphasis or assertion ; he is
strong, as nature is strong, who lifts the land into
mountain slopes without effort and by the same
rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as
well to do the one as the other* This makes that
equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative and
love-songs ; a merit so incessant that each reader
is incredulous of the perception of other readers.

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
liim into natural history, as a main production of
the globe, and as announcing new eras and amelio-
rations. Things were mirrored in his poetry with-
out loss or blur : he could paint the fine with pre-
cision, the great with compass, the tragic and the
comic indifferently and without any distortion or
favor. He carried his powerful execution into

204 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

minute details, to a liair 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, anc
then proceeds at leisure to etch a million. Then
are always objects ; but there was never represen
tation. Here is perfect representation, at last; ami
now let the world of figures sit for their portraits.
No recipe can be given for the making of a Shaks-
peare ; 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 incom-
parable 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
80 loaded with meaning and so linked with its

SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 205

foregoers and followers, that the logician is satis-
fied. 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 Shakspeare. We say,
from the truth and closeness of his pictures, that he
knows the lesson by heart. Yet there is not a
trace of egotism.

One more royal trait properly belongs to the
poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no
man can be a poet, — for beauty is his aim. He
loves virtue, not for its obligation but for its grace :
he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the
lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the

206 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

spirit of joy and hilarity, lie slieds over tlie uni-
verse. 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 sov-
ereign and cheerful, is the tone of Shakspeare.
His name suggests joy and emancij)ation to the
heart of men. If he should appear in any com-
pany 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, shut-
tino: our ears to the reverberations of his fame, we
seek to strike the balance ? Solitude has austere
lessons ; it can teach us to spare both heroes and
poets ; and it weighs Shakspeare also, and finds him
to share the halfness and imperfection of humanity.

Shakspeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the
splendor of meaning that plays over the visible
world ; knew that a tree had another use than for
apples, and corn another than for meal, and the
baU of the earth, than for tillage and roads : that

STIAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 20T

these tilings bore a second and finer harvest to the
mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and convey-
ing in all their natural history a certain mute
commentary on human life. Shakspeare 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 im-
parts this power : — what is that which they them-
selves 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 fire-
works on a holiday night, and advertise in all
towns, " Very superior pyrotechny this evening " ?
Are the agents of nature, and the power to under-
stand 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 auxili-
aries, how does he profit me ? What does it sig«

208 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

nify? It is but a Twelfth Night, or Midsummer-
Night's Dream, or Winter Evening's Tale : what sig-
nifies another picture more or less ? The Egyptian
verdict of the Shakspeare Societies comes to mind ;
that he was a jovial actor and manager. I can not
marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable men
have led lives in some sort of keeping with their
thought ; but this man, in wide contrast. Had he
been less, had he reached only the 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

SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 209

fall and curse behind us ; with doomsdays and pur-
gatorial and penal fires before us ; and the heart
of the seer and the heart of the listener sank in
them.

It must be conceded that these are half -views of
half-men. The world still wants its poet-priest, a
reconciler, who shall not trifle, with Shakspeare 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 imiversal
wisdom.

VOL. rv. 14

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE
WORLD.

VI.

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE
WORLD.

Among the eminent persons of the nineteenth
century, Bonaparte is far the best known and the
most powerful ; and owes his predominance to
the fidelity with which he expresses the tone of
thought and belief, the aims of the masses of
active and cultivated men. It is Swedenborg's
theory that every organ is made up of homogene-
ous particles ; or as it is sometimes expressed,
every whole is made of similars ; that is, the lungs
are composed of infinitely small lungs ; the liver,
of infinitely small livers ; the kidney, of little
kidneys, &c. Following this analogy, if any man
is found to carry with him the power and affec-
tions 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

214 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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, self-
ish, 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 num-
bers 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 ; th« class of industry and skill. Napo-
leon is its representative. The instinct of ac-
tive, brave, able men, throughout the middle class
every where, has pointed out Napoleon as the in-
carnate Democrat. He had their virtues and their
vices ; above all, he had their spirit or aim. That
tendency is material, pointing at a sensual suc-
cess and employing the richest and most various
means to that end ; conversant with mechanical
powers, highly intellectual, widely and accurately
learned and skiKul, but subordinating all intel-
lectual and spiritual forces into means to a mate*

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 215

rial 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 high-
est 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 in-
dulge 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 nine-
teenth century, this powerful man possessed.

216 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

It is true that a man of Napoleon's truth of
adaptation to the mind of the masses around him,
becomes not merely representative but actually a
monopolizer and usurper of other minds. Thus
Mirabeau plagiarized every good thought, every
good word that was spoken in France. Dumont
relates that he sat in the gallery of the Conven-
tion and heard Mirabeau make a speech. It
struck Dumont that he could fit it with a pero-
ration, which he wrote in pencil immediately, and
showed 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 in-
corporate it into his harangue to-morrow, to the
Assembly. " It is impossible," said Dumont, " as,
unfortunately, I have shown it to Lord Elgin."
" If you have shown it to Lord Elgin and to fifty
persons beside, I shall still speak it to-morrow:"
and he did speak it, with much effect, at the next
day's session. For Mirabeau, with his overpower-
ing 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 popu-
larity and to much more than his predominance
in France. Indeed, a man of Napoleon's stamp

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 217

almost ceases to have a private speech and opin-
ion. He is so largely receptive, and is so placed,
that he comes to be a bureau for all the intelli-
gence, 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 en-
gineers, 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 satis-
faction in coming down to the lowest ground of
politics, for we get rid of ^ant 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 senti-
ments were for women and children. Fontanes, in
1804, expressed Napoleon's own sense, when in be-
half of the Senate he addressed him, — " Sire, the
desire of perfection is the worst disease that ever

218 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

afflicted the human mind." The advocates of lib-
erty 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 sentmients of
piety, gratitude and generosity : since what was an
impassable bar to us, and stiU is to others, becomes
a convenient weapon for our purposes ; just as the
river which was a formidable barrier, winter trans-
forms into the smoothest of roads.

Napoleon renounced, once for all, sentmients 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-work-
man. 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 be-
fore 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

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD, 219

men ordinarily lack the power of arrangement, and
are like hands without a head. But Bonaparte su-
peradded to this mineral and animal force, insight
and generalization, so that men saw in him com-
bined the natural and the intellectual power, as if
the sea and land had taken flesh and begun to ci-
pher. Therefore the land and sea seem to presup-
pose him. He came unto his own and they re-
ceived 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 at-
tacks : 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 circum-
stances combined to develop this pattern democrat.
He had the virtues of his class and the conditions
for their activity. That common-sense which no

220 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 pru-
dence 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 ex-
tent, 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 sev-
enteen 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 embar-
rassed 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 con-
nected with my head." He respected the power
of nature and fortune, and ascribed to it his su-
periority, instead of valuing himself, like inferior
men, on his opinionativeness, and waging war with
nature. His favorite rhetoric lay in allusion to his
star ; and he pleased himself, as well as the people,
when he styled himself the "Child of Destiny."

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 221

" 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, 't is 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 re-
place me ; I could not replace myself. I am the
creature of circumstances."

He had a directness of action never before com-
bined with so much comprehension. He is a real-
ist, terrific to all talkers and confused truth-obscur-
ing 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 prin-
cipal 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

222 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

every tiling, 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 imbecil-
ity 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 un-
derstood 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 extraor-
dinary 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 vic«
tories were only so many doors, and he never for a

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 223

moment lost sight of his way onward, in the daz-
zle and uproar of the present circumstance. He
Iniew 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 suc-
cesses ; 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 blood-
thirsty, 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 Aus-
trian battery." — " Let him carry the battery."
— " Sire, every regiment that approaches the heavy
artillery is sacrificed : Sire, what orders ? " — " For-
ward, 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
rain several officers and myself were placed on the

224 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 ad-
joining batteries, and in less than no time we bur-
ied " some ^ " thousands of Eussians 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 precijDices, until Italy
was as open to Paris as any town in France. He
laid his bones to, and wrought for his crown. Hav-
ing decided what was to be done, he did that with
might and main. He put out all his strength. He
I'isked every thing and spared nothing, neither am-
munition, 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 rattle-snake ;
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 ^Tand principle of war,

^ As I quote at second hand, and cannot procure Seruziei;
I dare not adopt the high figure I find.

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 225

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 posi-
tion, rained a torrent of iron, — shells, balls, gTape-
shot, — to annihilate all defence. On any point
of resistance he concentrated squadron on squad-
ron in overwhelming numbers until it was swept
out of existence. To a regiment of horse-chas-
seurs 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 Areola. 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 achieve-
ments. 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 conserva*

VOL. IV. 15

226 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

tion as for creation. We are always in peril,
always in a bad plight, just on the edge of destruc-
tion 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 in-
spiration 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 Casas, he remarked,
" As to moral courage, I have rarely met with the
two-o'clock-in-the-morning kind : I mean unpre-
pared courage ; that which is necessary on an un-
expected occasion, and which, in spite of the most
unforeseen events, leaves full freedom of judgment
and decision : " and he did not hesitate to declare
that he was himself eminently endowed with this
two-o'clock-in-the-morning courage, and that he
had met with few persons equal to himself in this
respect.

Every thing depended on the nicety of his com-
binations, and the stars were not more punctual
than his arithmetic. His personal attention de-
scended to the smallest particulars. " At Monte-
bello, I ordered Kellermann to attack with eight
hundred horse, and with these he separated the

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 227

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 satisfac-
tion how large a part of the correspondence had
thus disposed of itself and no longer required an
answer. His achievement of business was immense,
aiid 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.

228 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

To these gifts of nature, Napoleon added the ad-
vantage of having been born to a private and hum-
ble fortune. In his later days he had the weakness
of wishing to add to his crowns and badges the pre-
scription 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 heredi-
tary asses," as he coarsely styled the Bourbons.
He said that " in their exile they had learned noth-
ing, 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 measure-
ment 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 cap-
tain and king only as far as the devolution, or the

J

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 229

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. He-
lena. " 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 im-
provement 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 be-
tween 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 relatioii
to his troops is the order of the day on the morn-
ing 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 ex«
plains the devotion of the army to their leader.

230 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 phi-
losophize on liberty and equality ; and when allusion
was made to the precious blood of centuries, which
was spilled by the killing of the Due d'Enghien,
he suggested, " Neither is my blood ditch-water."
The people felt that no longer the throne was oc-
cupied and the land sucked of its nourishment, by
a small class of legitimates, secluded from all com-
munity 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

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 231

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 exliaust-
ing 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 nat-
ural 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 suj^erior 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 in-
creased. In a moment of bitterness he said to
one of his oldest friends, " Men deserve the con-
tempt with which they inspire me. I have only to

232 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

put some gold-lace on the coat of my virtuous re-
publicans and they immediately become just what
I wish them." This impatience at levity was, how-
ever, an oblique tribute of resj)ect 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 con-
f oimd Fox and Pitt, Carnot, Lafayette and Berna-
dotte, with the danglers of his court ; and in spite
of the detraction which his systematic egotism dic-
tated 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 for-
tunes, as when he said " I made my generals out of
mud," — he could not hide his satisfaction in re-
ceiving from them a seconding and support com-
mensurate with the grandeur of his enterprise. In
the Russian campaign he was so much impressed by
the courage and resources of Marshal Ney, that he
said, " I harve two hundred millions in my coffers,
and I would give them all for Ney." The charac-
ters which he has drawn of several of his marshals
are discriminating, and though they did not con-
tent the insatiable vanity of French officers, are no
doubt substantially just. And in fact every species
of merit was sought and advanced under his gov-

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 233

ernment. "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 bap-
tized in the fire of a battle-field, they have all one
rank in my eyes."

When a natural king becomes a titular king,
every body is pleased and satisfied. The Revolu-
tion entitled the strong populace of the Faubourg
St. Antoine, and every horse - boy and powder-
monkey in the army, to look on Napoleon as flesh
of his flesh and the creature of Ms 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 over-
thrown by intellectual energies. As soon as we
are removed out of the reach of local and acciden-
tal 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

234 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

human ability, wonderfully encourages and liber-
ates us. This capacious head, revolving and dis-
posing sovereignly trains of affairs, and animating
such multitudes of agents ; this eye, which looked
through Europe ; this prompt invention ; this inex-
haustible 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;" ford-
ing the Eed Sea ; wading in the gulf of the Isth-
mus of Suez. On the shore of Ptolemais, gigantic
projects agitated him. " Had Acre fallen, I should
have changed the face of the world." His army,
on the night of the battle of Austerlitz, which was
the anniversary of his inauguration as Emperor,
presented him with a bouquet of forty standards
taken in the fight. Perhaps it is a little puerile,
the pleasure he took in making these contrasts
glaring ; as when he pleased himself with making
kings wait in his antechambers, at Tilsit, at Paris
and at Erfurt.

We cannot, in the universal imbecility, indecis-
ion 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 vir-.

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 235

tues as all men possess in less degrees ; namely, by
l^unctuality, 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 com-
mon-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 be-
lief of men to-day that nothing new can be under-
taken in politics, or in church, or in letters, or in
trade, or in farming, or in our social manners and
customs ; and as it is at all times the belief of so-
ciety 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 objec-

236 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

tion, 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 moun-
tains. The snow is then firm, the weather settled,
and there is nothing to fear from avalanches, the
real and only danger to be apprehended in the
Alps. On those high mountains there are often
very fine days in December, of a dry cold, with ex-
treme 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 con-
fidence 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 ^^^he opportu-
nity and to invent the pretence. At Areola I won
the battle with twenty-five horsemen. I seized that
moment of lassitude, gave every man a trumpet,

NAPOLEON; OB, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 237

and gained the day with this handful. You see
that two armies are two bodies which meet and en-
deavor to frighten each other ; a moment of panic
occurs, and that moment must be turned to advan-
tage. When a man has been present in many ac-
tions, he distinguishes that moment without diffi-
culty : 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 ques-
tions. 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 gov-
ernment 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 pro-
posed to consider the probability of the destruction
of the globe, either by water or by fire : at an-
other 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 salva«

238 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

tion out of tlie pale of the church. The Emperor
told Josephine that he disputed like a devil on
these two points, on which the bishop was inexora-
ble. 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 material-
ism. 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, gen-
tlemen, but who made all that ? " He delighted
in the conversation of men of science, particularly
of Monge and BerthoUet ; but the men of let-
ters he slighted ; they were " manufacturers of
phrases." Of medicine too he was fond of talk-
ing, 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
thesQ remedies : life is a fortress which neither you
nor I kuQW ^iiything about. Why throw obsta-
cles in the way pf its defence? Its own means
are superior to all the apparatus of your labora-
tories. Corvisart candidly agreed with me that all
your filthy mixtures are good for nothing. Medi-
cine is a collection of uncertain prescriptions, the
results of which, taken collectively, are more fatal
than useful to mankind. Water, air and cleanli-
ness are the chief articles in my pharmacopoeia."

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 239

His memoirs, dictated to Coimt 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 disingenuous-
ness. 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 sub-
ject. The most agreeable portion is the Campaign
in Egypt.

He had hours of thought and wisdom. In in-
tervals 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 hon mot^ as well as a stratagem in a
campaign. He delighted to fascinate Josephine
and her ladies, in a dim-lighted apartment, by
the terrors of a fiction to which his voice and
dramatic power lent every addition.

I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the mid-
dle 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

240 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the in-
ventor of means, the opener of doors and markets,
the subverter of monopoly and abuse. Of course
the rich and aristocratic did not like him. Eng-
land, the centre of capital, and Eome 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 de-
spair 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 his-
tory 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 treach-
erous, 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 brill-
iant career, without any stipulation or scruple con-
cerning the means.

Bonaparte was singularly destitute of generous
sentiments. The highest-placed individual in the

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 241

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 monop-
olizing; meanly stealing the credit of their great
actions from Kellermann, from Bernadotte ; in-
triguing to involve his faithful Junot in hopeless
bankruptcy, in order to drive him to a distance
from Paris, because the familiarity of his man-
ners 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 giv-
ing to history a theatrical Sclat. Like all French-
men he has a passion for stage effect. Every ac-
tion that breathes of generosity is poisoned by this
calculation. His star, his love of glory, his doc-
trine of the immortality of the soul, are all French.
" I must dazzle and astonish. If I were to give
the liberty of the press, my power could not last
three days." To make a great noise is his favorite
design. " A great reputation is a great noise : the
more there is made, the 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

VOL. IV. 16

242 REPRESENTATIVE MEN,

two levers for moving men, —interest and fear.
Love is a silly infatuation, depend upon it. Friend-
ship 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 unscru-
pulous, tie would steal, slander, assassinate, drown
and poison, as his interest dictated. He had no
generosity, but mere vulgar hatred ; he was in-
tensely selfish; he was perfidious; he cheated at
cards ; he was a prodigious gossip, and opened let-
ters, 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 man-
ners were coarse. He treated women with low
familiarity. He had the habit of pidling their ears

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 243

and pincliing their cheeks when he was in good
humor, and of pulling the ears and whiskers of
men, and of striking and horse-play with them, to
his last days. It does not appear that he listened
at key-holes, or at least that he was caught at it.
In short, when you have penetrated through all the
circles of power and splendor, you were not deal-
ing with a gentleman, at last ; but with an impostor
and a rogue ; and he fully deserves the epithet of
Jit^nter Scapin^ or a sort of Scamp Jupiter.

In describing the two parties into which modern
society divides itself, — the democrat and the con-
servative, — I said, Bonaparte represents the Dem-
ocrat, 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 conser-
vative 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 keej). Bonaparte may be said to rep-
resent 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,
stiU waits for its organ and representative, in a

244 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

lover and a man of truly public and universal
aims.

Here was an experiment, under the most favora-
ble 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 lilie the smoke of his ar-
tillery, 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 ;

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 245

and the animal inflicts new and more violent shocks,
until he paralyzes and kills his victim. So this ex-
orbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished and ab-
sorbed the power and existence of those who served
him ; and the universal cry of France and of Eu-
rope 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 princi-
ple. 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, wiU
fail. The pacific Fourier wiU be as inefiicient as
the pernicious Napoleon. As long as our civiliza-
tion is essentially one of property, of fences, of ex-
clusiveness, 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.

Vll.
GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER

I FIND a provision in the constitution of the
world for the writer, or secretary, who is to report
the doings of the miraculous spirit of life that every-
where throbs and works. His office is a 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 f uU of sounds ; the sky, of tokens ; the
ground is all memoranda and signatures, and every

250 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

object covered over with hints which speak to the
intelligent.

In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and
the narrative is the print of the seal. It neither
exceeds nor comes short of the fact. But nature
strives upward ; and, in man, the report is some-
thing more than print of the seal. It is a new and
finer form of the original. The record is alive, as
that which it recorded is alive. In man, the mem-
ory 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 soon we have a new picture, com-
posed of the eminent experiejices. The man co-
operates. 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

GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER 251

report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it. Nothing
so broad, so subtle, or so clear, but comes therefore
commeiicled 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 complai-
sance 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 ex-
oteric, — is not the fact, but some rumor of the
fact. What then? Does he throw away the pen ?
No ; he begins again to describe in the new light
which has shined on him, — if, by some means, he
may yet save some true word. Nature conspires.
Whatever can be thought can be spoken, and still
rises for utterance, though to rude and stammering
organs. If they cannot compass it, it waits and

252 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

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 deavly 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 appear-
ance, but an organic agent, one of the estates of
the realm, provided and prepared from of old and
from everlasting, in the knitting and contexture
of things. Presentiments, impulses, cheer him.
There is a certain heat in the breast which attends
the perception of a primary truth, which is the
shining of the spiritual sun down into the shaft of
the mine. Every thought which dawns on the
mind, in the moment of its 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
iide, invitation and need enough of his gift. Soci-

GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER, 253

ety 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 rela-
tions. The ambitious and mercenary bring their
last new mumbo-jumbo, whether tariff, Texas, rail-
road, Romanism, mesmerism, or California ; and, by
detaching the object from its relations, easily suc-
ceed in making it seen in a glare ; and a multitude
go mad about it, and they are not to be rej)roved
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 com-
prehensive eye that can replace this isolated prodigy
in its right neighborhood and bearings, — the illu-
sion vanishes, and the returning reason of the com-
munity 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 con-
temporaries. 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 countr}'-, 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 peo-
ple are of Bonaparte's opinion concerning ideolo-
gists. Ideas are subversive of social order and
comfort, and at last make a fool of the possessore

254 REPRESENT A TIVE MEN.

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 ne-
gotiations of a caucus and the practising on the
prejudices and facility of country-people to secure
their votes in November, — is practical and com-
mendable.

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 fa-
vor 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 re-
former embodies his aspiration in some rite or cov-
enant, and he and his friends cleave to the form and
lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established
Quakerism, the Shaker has established his monas-
tery and his dance; and although each prates of

GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 255

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 ap-
pears, 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 lead-
ers, but from inferior persons. The robust gentle-
men 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 disparage-
ment of any other is to be looked for. With such,

256 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

Talleyrand's question is ever the main one ; not, is
lie rich ? is he committed ? is he well-meaning ? has
he this or that faculty ? is he of the movement ? is
he of the establishment ? — but, Is he any hody f
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 command-
ing 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 sen-
tences, 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

GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 257

can he be honored when he does not honor himself ;
when he loses himself in the crowd ; when he is no
longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to
the giddy opinion of a reckless public; when he
must sustain with shameless advocacy some bad
government, or must bark, all the year round, in
opposition ; or write conventional criticism, or prof-
ligate 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 gen-
ius 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 co-operation have come in. There is
no poet, but scores of poetic writers ; no Colum-

VOU IV 17

258 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

bus, 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 de-
baters ; no prophet or saint, but colleges of divin-
ity ; no learned man, but learned societies, a cheap
press, reading-rooms and book-clubs without num-
ber. 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, wliich
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 sci-
ences, 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 Ger-
many 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 Koman or Attio

GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 259

genius. Yet there is no trace of provincial limita-
tion 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, my»
thologies, philosophies, sciences and national litera°
tures, in the encyclopaedical manner in which mod-
ern erudition, with its international intercourse of
the whole earth's population, researches into In-
dian, Etruscan and all Cyclopean arts; geology,
chemistry, astronomy ; and every one of these king-
doms assuming a certain aerial and poetic charac-
ter, 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 liber-
ties 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 intelli-
gence. In tke menstruum of this man's wit, the

260 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

past and the present ages, and their religions, pol-
itics and modes of thinking, are dissolved into
archetypes and ideas. What new mythologies sail
through his head ! The Greeks said that Alexan-
der 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 specula-
tion. 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
Exploring 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

GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 261

dress, and was not a whit less vivacious or rich in
Liverpool or the Hague than once in Rome or An-
tioch. He sought him in public squares and main
streets, in boulevards and hotels ; and, in the solid-
est kingdom of routine and the senses, he showed
the lurking daemonic power ; that, in actions of
routine, a thread of mythology and fable spins it-
self : 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 ex-
plained the distinction between the antique and
the modern spirit and art. He has defined art, its
scope and laws. He has said the best tilings 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 bet-
ter on the whole than telescopes or microscopeso
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

262 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

of modern botany, that a leaf or the eye of a leaf
is the unit of botany, and that every part of the
plant is only a transformed leaf to meet a new con-
dition ; 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 uppermost vertebrse 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 re-
jected the artificial theory of seven colors, and con-
sidered 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 gravita-
tion 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 pos-
session 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,

GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 263

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 pop-
ular 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 meas=
ure 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

264 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

the senses : and he flung into literature, in his Me-
phistopheles, 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 distin-
guished 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 nov-
els, 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 sweet-
ness, so new, so provoking to the mind, gratifying
it with so many and so solid thoughts, just in-
sights 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

GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 265

light reading, those who look in it for the enter
tainment they find in a romance, are disappointed.
On the other hand, those who begin it with the
higher hope to read in it a v/orthy 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 con-
tinuation, has sketched a truer and more dignified
picture. In the progress of the story, the char-
acters 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, tiiey lose their wealth, they become
the servants of great ideas and of the most gen-
erous 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,
J Goethe's hero, on the contrary, has so many weak-

266 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

nesses and impurities and keeps such bad com-
j)any, 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 per-
sons so truly and subtly drawn, and with such few
strokes, and not a word too much, — the book re-
mains ever so new and unexliausted, that we must
even let it go its way and be willing to get what
good from it we can, assured that it has only
begun its office and has millions of readers yet to
serve.

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

The ardent and holy Novalis characterized the
book as " thorouglily modern and prosaic ; the ro-
mantic is completely levelled in it; so is the po-
etry of nature; the wonderful. The book treats
only of the ordinary affairs of men : it is a poet'
icized civic and domestic story. The wonderful
in it is expressly treated as fiction and enthusi<

GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 267

astic dreaming : " — and yet, what is also charac-
teristic, 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 satis-
fied. 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 oc-
cupied, 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 su-
perficial 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

268 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

which by bu*th and quality is pledged to the doc-
trines there set forth, and which exists to see and
state things so, and not otherwise ; holding things
because they are things. If he cannot 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 stam-
mers; 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 news-
paper, I discern no form; only some irresponsi-
ble 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

GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 269

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 pre-
sumption that he holds heroic opinions, or under-
values the fashions of his town. But the German
nation have the most ridiculous good faith on these
subjects : the student, out of the lecture-room, still
broods on the lessons ; and the professor can not
divest himself of the fancy that the truths of phi-
losophy have some application to Berlin and Mu-
nich. 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 Ger-
many. 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 Ger-
man 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

270 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

independence which converse with truth gives :
hear you, or forbear, his fact abides ; and your in-
terest 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 con-
fided himseK more to this man than to any other.

I dare not say that Goethe ascended to the high-
est grounds from which genius has spoken. He
has not worshipped the highest unity ; he is inca-
pable 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 con-
quest 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 f 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
"ind sciences and events; artistic^, but not artist;
spiritual, but not spiritualist. There is nothing he

GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 271

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 be-
tween 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 itseK is no aim, but only a means
whereby through purest inward peace we may at-
tain to highest culture." And his penetration of
every secret of the fine arts will make Goethe still
more statuesque. His affections help him, like wo-
men 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 cannot, were it only what ex-
perience will accrue from your ruin. Enemy and
welcome, but enemy on high terms. He cannot
hate any body ; his time is worth too much. Tem-
peramental 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

272 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

New, when that book appeared, — that a man ex-
ists for culture ; not for what he can accomplish,
but for what can be accomplished in him. The
reaction of things on the man is the only note-
worthy result. An intellectual man can see him-
self as a third person ; therefore his faults and de-
lusions interest him equally with his successes.
Though he wishes to prosper in affairs, he wishes
more to know the history and destiny of man ;
whilst the clouds of egotists drifting about him
are only interested in a low success.

This idea reigns in the "Dichtung und Wahr-
heit " and directs the selection of the incidents ;
and nowise the external importance of events, the
rank of the personages, or the bulk of incomes. Of
course the book affords slender materials for what
would be reckoned with us a "Life of Goethe;" —
few dates, no correspondence, no details of offices
or employments, no light on his marriage ; and a
period of ten years, that shoidd be the most active
in Ms life, after his settlement at Weimar, is sunk
in silence. Meantime certain love-affairs that came
to nothing, as people say, have the strangest impor-
tance : he crowds us with details : — certain whim-
sical opinions, cosmogonies and religions of his own
invention, and especially his relations to remarka-
ble minds and to critical epochs of thought : —
these he magnifies. His " Daily aud Yearly Jour*

GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 273

naJ," 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, New-
ton, Voltaire, &c. ; and the charm of this portion of
the book consists in the simplest statement of the
relation betwixt these grandees of European scien-
tific history and himself ; the mere drawing of the
lines from Goethe to Kepler, from Goethe to Ba-
con, 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 Iph-
igenia and Faust do not, without any cost of inven-
tion comparable to that of Iphigenia and Faust.

This lawgiver of art is not an artist. Was it
that he knew too much, that his sight was micro-
scopic and interfered with the just perspective, the
seeing of the whole ? He is fragmentary ; a writer
of occasional poems and of an encyclopaedia of sen-
tences. 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 incorpo-
rate : this he adds loosely as letters of the parties,
leaves from their journals, or the like. A great
deal stiU 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

voi:« IV. 18

274 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

works, we have volumes of detached paragraphs,
aphorisms, X^enien^ &c.

I suppose the worldly tone of his tales grew out
of the calculations of self-culture. It was the in-
firmity of an admirable scholar, who loved the
world out of gratitude ; who knew where libraries,
galleries, architecture, laboratories, savans and lei-
sure, were to be had, and who did not quite trust
the compensations of poverty and nakedness. Soc-
rates loved Athens ; Montaigne, Paris ; and Ma-
dame de Stael said she was only vulnerable on that
side (namely, of Paris). It has its favorable as-
pect. All the geniuses are usually so ill assorted
and sickly that one is ever wishing them somewhere
else. We seldom see any body who is not uneasy
or afraid to live. There is a slight blush of shame
on the cheek of good men and aspiring men, and a
spice of caricature. But this man was entirely at
home and happy in his century and the world.
None was so fit to live, or more 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.

GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER 275

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 momitaiuous 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 sever-
ally set the axe at the root of the tree of cant and
seeming, for this time and for all time. This cheer-
ful laborer, with no external popularity or provoca-
tion, 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 glohator, 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

/

CrLQ
276 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. ^^^

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 caU 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.