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Title: Natural history of intellect and other papers
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Release date: September 4, 2023 [eBook #71558]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1893
Credits: Emmanuel Ackerman, A. Marshall, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT AND OTHER PAPERS ***
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have been
placed at the end of the chapter.
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
NATURAL HISTORY OF
INTELLECT
_AND OTHER PAPERS_
BY
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
[Illustration: (Publisher colophon)]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1893
Copyright, 1893,
BY EDWARD W. EMERSON.
_All rights reserved._
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company
PREFATORY NOTE.
The first two pieces in this volume are lectures from the “University
Courses” on philosophy, given at Harvard College in 1870 and 1871,
by persons not members of the Faculty. “The Natural History of the
Intellect” was the subject which Emerson chose. He had from his
early youth cherished the project of a new method in metaphysics,
proceeding by observation of the mental facts, without attempting an
analysis and coördination of them, which must, from the nature of the
case, be premature. With this view, he had, at intervals from 1848
to 1866, announced courses on the “Natural History of Intellect,”
“The Natural Method of Mental Philosophy,” and “Philosophy for the
People.” He would, he said, give anecdotes of the spirit, a calendar
of mental moods, without any pretense of system.
None of these attempts, however, disclosed any novelty of method,
or, indeed, after the opening statement of his intention, any marked
difference from his ordinary lectures. He had always been writing
anecdotes of the spirit, and those which he wrote under this heading
were used by him in subsequently published essays so largely that
I find very little left for present publication. The lecture which
gives its name to the volume was the first of the earliest course,
and it seems to me to include all that distinctly belongs to the
particular subject.
The lecture on “Memory” is from the same course; that on “Boston”
from the course on “Life and Literature,” in 1861. The other pieces
are reprints from the “North American Review” and the “Dial.”
J. E. CABOT.
_September 9, 1893._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT 7
MEMORY 55
BOSTON 73
MICHAEL ANGELO 97
MILTON 121
PAPERS FROM THE DIAL 147
I. THOUGHTS ON MODERN LITERATURE 149
II. WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 168
III. PRAYERS 177
IV. AGRICULTURE OF MASSACHUSETTS 183
V. EUROPE AND EUROPEAN BOOKS 187
VI. PAST AND PRESENT 197
VII. A LETTER 206
VIII. THE TRAGIC 216
NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT.
[Illustration: (decorative banner)]
NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT.
I have used such opportunity as I have had, and lately[1] in London
and Paris, to attend scientific lectures; and in listening to
Richard Owen’s masterly enumeration of the parts and laws of the
human body, or Michael Faraday’s explanation of magnetic powers,
or the botanist’s descriptions, one could not help admiring the
irresponsible security and happiness of the attitude of the
naturalist; sure of admiration for his facts, sure of their
sufficiency. They ought to interest you; if they do not, the fault
lies with you.
Then I thought—could not a similar enumeration be made of the
laws and powers of the Intellect, and possess the same claims on
the student? Could we have, that is, the exhaustive accuracy of
distribution which chemists use in their nomenclature and anatomists
in their descriptions, applied to a higher class of facts; to those
laws, namely, which are common to chemistry, anatomy, astronomy,
geometry, intellect, morals, and social life;—laws of the world?
Why not? These powers and laws are also facts in a Natural History.
They also are objects of science, and may be numbered and recorded,
like stamens and vertebræ. At the same time they have a deeper
interest, as in the order of nature they lie higher and are nearer
to the mysterious seat of power and creation.
For at last, it is only that exceeding and universal part which
interests us, when we shall read in a true history what befalls in
that kingdom where a thousand years is as one day, and see that what
is set down is true through all the sciences; in the laws of thought
as well as of chemistry.
In all sciences the student is discovering that nature, as he calls
it, is always working, in wholes and in every detail, after the laws
of the human mind. Every creation, in parts or in particles, is on
the method and by the means which our mind approves as soon as it is
thoroughly acquainted with the facts; hence the delight. No matter
how far or how high science explores, it adopts the method of the
universe as fast as it appears; and this discloses that the mind as
it opens, the mind as it shall be, comprehends and works thus; that
is to say, the Intellect builds the universe and is the key to all it
contains. It is not then cities or mountains, or animals, or globes
that any longer command us, but only man; not the fact, but so much
of man as is in the fact.
In astronomy, vast distance, but we never go into a foreign
system. In geology, vast duration, but we are never strangers. Our
metaphysic should be able to follow the flying force through all
transformations, and name the pair identical through all variety.
I believe in the existence of the material world as the expression
of the spiritual or the real, and in the impenetrable mystery which
hides (and hides through absolute transparency) the mental nature,
I await the insight which our advancing knowledge of material laws
shall furnish.
Every object in nature is a word to signify some fact in the mind.
But when that fact is not yet put into English words, when I look
at the tree or the river and have not yet definitely made out what
they would say to me, they are by no means unimpressive. I wait for
them, I enjoy them before they yet speak. I feel as if I stood by an
ambassador charged with the message of his king, which he does not
deliver because the hour when he should say it is not yet arrived.
Whilst we converse with truths as thoughts, they exist also as
plastic forces; as the soul of a man, the soul of a plant, the genius
or constitution of any part of nature, which makes it what it is. The
thought which was in the world, part and parcel of the world, has
disengaged itself and taken an independent existence.
* * * * *
My belief in the use of a course on philosophy is that the student
shall learn to appreciate the miracle of the mind; shall learn its
subtle but immense power, or shall begin to learn it; shall come to
know that in seeing and in no tradition he must find what truth is;
that he shall see in it the source of all traditions, and shall see
each one of them as better or worse statement of its revelations;
shall come to trust it entirely, as the only true; to cleave to
God against the name of God. When he has once known the oracle he
will need no priest. And if he finds at first with some alarm how
impossible it is to accept many things which the hot or the mild
sectarian may insist on his believing, he will be armed by his
insight and brave to meet all inconvenience and all resistance it may
cost him. He from whose hand it came will guide and direct it.
Yet these questions which really interest men, how few can answer.
Here are learned faculties of law and divinity, but would questions
like these come into mind when I see them? Here are learned academies
and universities, yet they have not propounded these for any prize.
Seek the literary circles, the stars of fame, the men of splendor,
of bon-mots, will they afford me satisfaction? I think you could
not find a club of men acute and liberal enough in the world. Bring
the best wits together, and they are so impatient of each other,
so vulgar, there is so much more than their wit,—such follies,
gluttonies, partialities, age, care, and sleep, that you shall have
no academy.
There is really a grievous amount of unavailableness about men of
wit. A plain man finds them so heavy, dull and oppressive, with bad
jokes and conceit and stupefying individualism, that he comes to
write in his tablets, Avoid the great man as one who is privileged
to be an unprofitable companion. For the course of things makes the
scholars either egotists or worldly and jocose. In so many hundreds
of superior men hardly ten or five or two from whom one can hope for
a reasonable word.
Go into the scientific club and hearken. Each savant proves in his
admirable discourse that he and he only knows now or ever did know
anything on the subject: “Does the gentleman speak of anatomy? Who
peeped into a box at the Custom House and then published a drawing
of my rat?” Or is it pretended discoveries of new strata that are
before the meeting? This professor hastens to inform us that he knew
it all twenty years ago, and is ready to prove that he knew so much
then that all further investigation was quite superfluous;—and poor
nature and the sublime law, which is all that our student cares to
hear of, are quite omitted in this triumphant vindication.
Was it better when we came to the philosophers, who found everybody
wrong; acute and ingenious to lampoon and degrade mankind? And then
was there ever prophet burdened with a message to his people who did
not cloud our gratitude by a strange confounding in his own mind of
private folly with his public wisdom?
But if you like to run away from this besetting sin of sedentary men,
you can escape all this insane egotism by running into society, where
the manners and estimate of the world have corrected this folly, and
effectually suppressed this overweening self-conceit. Here each is
to make room for others, and the solidest merits must exist only for
the entertainment of all. We are not in the smallest degree helped.
Great is the dazzle, but the gain is small. Here they play the game
of conversation, as they play billiards, for pastime and credit.
Yes, ’tis a great vice in all countries, the sacrifice of scholars to
be courtiers and diners-out, to talk for the amusement of those who
wish to be amused, though the stars of heaven must be plucked down
and packed into rockets to this end. What with egotism on one side
and levity on the other we shall have no Olympus.
But there is still another hindrance, namely, practicality. We must
have a special talent, and bring something to pass. Ever since the
Norse heaven made the stern terms of admission that a man must do
something excellent with his hands or feet, or with his voice, eyes,
ears, or with his whole body, the same demand has been made in Norse
earth.
Yet what we really want is not a haste to act, but a certain piety
toward the source of action and knowledge. In fact we have to say
that there is a certain beatitude—I can call it nothing less—to which
all men are entitled, tasted by them in different degrees, which is
a perfection of their nature, and to which their entrance must be in
every way forwarded. Practical men, though they could lift the globe,
cannot arrive at this. Something very different has to be done,—the
availing ourselves of every impulse of genius, an emanation of the
heaven it tells of, and the resisting this conspiracy of men and
material things against the sanitary and legitimate inspirations of
the intellectual nature.
What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle
at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking
of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure
of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.
* * * * *
The laws and powers of the Intellect have, however, a stupendous
peculiarity, of being at once observers and observed. So that it is
difficult to hold them fast, as objects of examination, or hinder
them from turning the professor out of his chair. The wonder of the
science of Intellect is that the substance with which we deal is of
that subtle and active quality that it intoxicates all who approach
it. Gloves on the hands, glass guards over the eyes, wire-gauze
masks over the face, volatile salts in the nostrils, are no defence
against this virus, which comes in as secretly as gravitation into
and through all barriers.
Let me have your attention to this dangerous subject, which we will
cautiously approach on different sides of this dim and perilous lake,
so attractive, so delusive. We have had so many guides and so many
failures. And now the world is still uncertain whether the pool has
been sounded or not.
My contribution will be simply historical. I write anecdotes of the
intellect; a sort of Farmer’s Almanac of mental moods. I confine my
ambition to true reporting of its play in natural action, though I
should get only one new fact in a year.
I cannot myself use that systematic form which is reckoned essential
in treating the science of the mind. But if one can say so without
arrogance, I might suggest that he who contents himself with dotting
a fragmentary curve, recording only what facts he has observed,
without attempting to arrange them within one outline, follows a
system also,—a system as grand as any other, though he does not
interfere with its vast curves by prematurely forcing them into a
circle or ellipse, but only draws that arc which he clearly sees, or
perhaps at a later observation a remote curve of the same orbit, and
waits for a new opportunity, well-assured that these observed arcs
will consist with each other.
I confess to a little distrust of that completeness of system which
metaphysicians are apt to affect. ’Tis the gnat grasping the world.
All these exhaustive theories appear indeed a false and vain attempt
to introvert and analyze the Primal Thought. That is upstream, and
what a stream! Can you swim up Niagara Falls?
We have invincible repugnance to introversion, to study of the eyes
instead of that which the eyes see; and the belief of men is that
the attempt is unnatural and is punished by loss of faculty. I share
the belief that the natural direction of the intellectual powers is
from within outward, and that just in proportion to the activity
of thoughts on the study of outward objects, as architecture, or
farming, or natural history, ships, animals, chemistry,—in that
proportion the faculties of the mind had a healthy growth; but a
study in the opposite direction had a damaging effect on the mind.
Metaphysic is dangerous as a single pursuit. We should feel more
confidence in the same results from the mouth of a man of the
world. The inward analysis must be corrected by rough experience.
Metaphysics must be perpetually reinforced by life; must be the
observations of a working-man on working-men; must be biography,—the
record of some law whose working was surprised by the observer in
natural action.
I think metaphysics a grammar to which, once read, we seldom return.
’Tis a Manila full of pepper, and I want only a teaspoonful in a
year. I admire the Dutch, who burned half the harvest to enhance the
price of the remainder.
I want not the logic but the power, if any, which it brings into
science and literature; the man who can humanize this logic, these
syllogisms, and give me the results. The adepts value only the pure
geometry, the aerial bridge ascending from earth to heaven with
arches and abutments of pure reason. I am fully contented if you tell
me where are the two termini.
My metaphysics are to the end of use. I wish to know the laws of this
wonderful power, that I may domesticate it. I observe with curiosity
its risings and settings, illumination and eclipse; its obstructions
and its provocations, that I may learn to live with it wisely, court
its aid, catch sight of its splendor, feel its approach, hear and
save its oracles and obey them. But this watching of the mind, in
season and out of season, to see the mechanics of the thing, is a
little of the detective. The analytic process is cold and bereaving
and, shall I say it? somewhat mean, as spying. There is something
surgical in metaphysics as we treat it. Were not an ode a better
form? The poet sees wholes and avoids analysis; the metaphysician,
dealing as it were with the mathematics of the mind, puts himself out
of the way of the inspiration; loses that which is the miracle and
creates the worship.
I think that philosophy is still rude and elementary. It will one
day be taught by poets. The poet is in the natural attitude; he is
believing; the philosopher, after some struggle, having only reasons
for believing.
* * * * *
What I am now to attempt is simply some sketches or studies for
such a picture; _Mémoires pour servir_ toward a Natural History of
Intellect.
First I wish to speak of the excellence of that element, and the
great auguries that come from it, notwithstanding the impediments
which our sensual civilization puts in the way.
Next I treat of the identity of the thought with Nature; and I add a
rude list of some by-laws of the mind.
Thirdly I proceed to the fountains of thought in Instinct and
Inspiration, and I also attempt to show the relation of men of
thought to the existing religion and civility of the present time.
I. We figure to ourselves Intellect as an ethereal sea, which ebbs
and flows, which surges and washes hither and thither, carrying its
whole virtue into every creek and inlet which it bathes. To this sea
every human house has a water front. But this force, creating nature,
visiting whom it will and withdrawing from whom it will, making
day where it comes and leaving night when it departs, is no fee or
property of man or angel. It is as the light, public and entire to
each, and on the same terms.
What but thought deepens life, and makes us better than cow or cat?
The grandeur of the impression the stars and heavenly bodies make on
us is surely more valuable than our exact perception of a tub or a
table on the ground.
To Be is the unsolved, unsolvable wonder. To Be, in its two
connections of inward and outward, the mind and nature. The wonder
subsists, and age, though of eternity, could not approach a solution.
But the suggestion is always returning, that hidden source publishing
at once our being and that it is the source of outward nature. Who
are we and what is Nature have one answer in the life that rushes
into us.
In my thought I seem to stand on the bank of a river and watch the
endless flow of the stream, floating objects of all shapes, colors
and natures; nor can I much detain them as they pass, except by
running beside them a little way along the bank. But whence they come
or whither they go is not told me. Only I have a suspicion that, as
geologists say every river makes its own valley, so does this mystic
stream. It makes its valley, makes its banks and makes perhaps the
observer too. Who has found the boundaries of human intelligence?
Who has made a chart of its channel or approached the fountain of
this wonderful Nile?
I am of the oldest religion. Leaving aside the question which
was prior, egg or bird, I believe the mind is the creator of the
world, and is ever creating;—that at last Matter is dead Mind; that
mind makes the senses it sees with; that the genius of man is a
continuation of the power that made him and that has not done making
him.
I dare not deal with this element in its pure essence. It is too
rare for the wings of words. Yet I see that Intellect is a science
of degrees, and that as man is conscious of the law of vegetable and
animal nature, so he is aware of an Intellect which overhangs his
consciousness like a sky, of degree above degree, of heaven within
heaven.
Every just thinker has attempted to indicate these degrees, these
steps on the heavenly stair, until he comes to light where language
fails him. Above the thought is the higher truth,—truth as yet
undomesticated and therefore unformulated.
* * * * *
It is a steep stair down from the essence of Intellect pure to
thoughts and intellections. As the sun is conceived to have made our
system by hurling out from itself the outer rings of diffuse ether
which slowly condensed into earths and moons, by a higher force of
the same law the mind detaches minds, and a mind detaches thoughts or
intellections. These again all mimic in their sphericity the first
mind, and share its power.
Life is incessant parturition. There are viviparous and oviparous
minds; minds that produce their thoughts complete men, like armed
soldiers, ready and swift to go out to resist and conquer all the
armies of error, and others that deposit their dangerous unripe
thoughts here and there to lie still for a time and be brooded in
other minds, and the shell not be broken until the next age, for them
to begin, as new individuals, their career.
The perceptions of a soul, its wondrous progeny, are born by the
conversation, the marriage of souls; so nourished, so enlarged.
They are detached from their parent, they pass into other minds;
ripened and unfolded by many they hasten to incarnate themselves
in action, to take body, only to carry forward the will which sent
them out. They take to themselves wood and stone and iron; ships
and cities and nations and armies of men and ages of duration; the
pomps of religion, the armaments of war, the codes and heraldry
of states; agriculture, trade, commerce;—these are the ponderous
instrumentalities into which the nimble thoughts pass, and which they
animate and alter, and presently, antagonized by other thoughts which
they first aroused, or by thoughts which are sons and daughters of
these, the thought buries itself in the new thought of larger scope,
whilst the old instrumentalities and incarnations are decomposed and
recomposed into new.
Our eating, trading, marrying, and learning are mistaken by us for
ends and realities, whilst they are properly symbols only; when we
have come, by a divine leading, into the inner firmament, we are
apprised of the unreality or representative character of what we
esteemed final.
So works the poor little blockhead manikin. He must arrange and
dignify his shop or farm the best he can. At last he must be able
to tell you it, or write it, translate it all clumsily enough into
the new sky-language he calls thought. He cannot help it, the
irresistible meliorations bear him forward.
II. Whilst we consider this appetite of the mind to arrange its
phenomena, there is another fact which makes this useful. There is in
nature a parallel unity which corresponds to the unity in the mind
and makes it available. This methodizing mind meets no resistance in
its attempts. The scattered blocks, with which it strives to form a
symmetrical structure, fit. This design following after finds with
joy that like design went before. Not only man puts things in a row,
but things belong in a row.
It is certain that however we may conceive of the wonderful little
bricks of which the world is builded, we must suppose a similarity
and fitting and identity in their frame. It is necessary to suppose
that every hose in nature fits every hydrant; so only is combination,
chemistry, vegetation, animation, intellection possible. Without
identity at base, chaos must be forever.
And as mind, our mind or mind like ours reappears to us in our study
of nature, nature being everywhere formed after a method which we can
well understand, and all the parts, to the most remote, allied or
explicable,—therefore our own organization is a perpetual key, and a
well-ordered mind brings to the study of every new fact or class of
facts a certain divination of that which it shall find.
This reduction to a few laws, to one law, is not a choice of the
individual, it is the tyrannical instinct of the mind. There is
no solitary flower and no solitary thought. It comes single like
a foreign traveller,—but find out its name and it is related to a
powerful and numerous family. Wonderful is their working and relation
each to each. We hold them as lanterns to light each other and our
present design. Every new thought modifies, interprets old problems.
The retrospective value of each new thought is immense, like a torch
applied to a long train of gunpowder. To be isolated is to be sick,
and in so far, dead. The life of the All must stream through us to
make the man and the moment great.
Well, having accepted this law of identity pervading the universe,
we next perceive that whilst every creature represents and obeys
it, there is diversity, there is more or less of power; that the
lowest only means incipient form, and over it is a higher class in
which its rudiments are opened, raised to higher powers; that there
is development from less to more, from lower to superior function,
steadily ascending to man.
If man has organs for breathing, for sight, for locomotion, for
taking food, for digesting, for protection by house-building, by
attack and defence, for reproduction and love and care of his young,
you shall find all the same in the muskrat. There is a perfect
correspondence; or ’tis only man modified to live in a mud-bank. A
fish in like manner is man furnished to live in the sea; a thrush, to
fly in the air; and a mollusk is a cheap edition with a suppression
of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for
shelving in an oyster-bank or among the sea-weed.
If we go through the British Museum or the Jardin des Plantes in
Paris, or any cabinet where is some representation of all the
kingdoms of nature, we are surprised with occult sympathies; we
feel as if looking at our own bone and flesh through coloring and
distorting glasses. Is it not a little startling to see with what
genius some people take to hunting, with what genius some people
fish,—what knowledge they still have of the creature they hunt?
The robber, as the police-reports say, must have been intimately
acquainted with the premises. How lately the hunter was the poor
creature’s organic enemy; a presumption _inflamed_, as the lawyers
say, by observing how many faces in the street still remind us of
visages in the forest,—the escape from the quadruped type not yet
perfectly accomplished.
* * * * *
From whatever side we look at Nature we seem to be exploring the
figure of a disguised man. How obvious is the momentum in our mental
history! The momentum, which increases by exact laws in falling
bodies, increases by the same rate in the intellectual action. Every
scholar knows that he applies himself coldly and slowly at first to
his task, but, with the progress of the work, the mind itself becomes
heated, and sees far and wide as it approaches the end, so that it is
the common remark of the student, Could I only have begun with the
same fire which I had on the last day, I should have done something.
The affinity of particles accurately translates the affinity of
thoughts, and what a modern experimenter calls “the contagious
influence of chemical action” is so true of mind that I have only
to read the law that its application may be evident: “A body in
the act of combination or decomposition enables another body, with
which it may be in contact, to enter into the same state.” And if one
remembers how contagious are the moral states of men, how much we are
braced by the presence and actions of any Spartan soul; it does not
need vigor of our own kind, but the spectacle of vigor of any kind,
any prodigious power of performance wonderfully arms and recruits us.
There are those who disputing will make you dispute, and the nervous
and hysterical and animalized will produce a like series of symptoms
in you, though no other persons ever evoke the like phenomena, and
though you are conscious that they do not properly belong to you, but
are a sort of extension of the diseases of this particular person
into you.
The idea of vegetation is irresistible in considering mental
activity. Man seems a higher plant. What happens here in mankind
is matched by what happens out there in the history of grass and
wheat. This curious resemblance repeats, in the mental function,
the germination, growth, state of melioration, crossings, blight,
parasites, and in short all the accidents of the plant. Under every
leaf is the bud of a new leaf, and not less under every thought is a
newer thought. The plant absorbs much nourishment from the ground in
order to repair its own waste by exhalation, and keep itself good.
Increase its food and it becomes fertile. The mind is first only
receptive. Surcharge it with thoughts in which it delights and it
becomes active. The moment a man begins not to be convinced, that
moment he begins to convince.
In the orchard many trees send out a moderate shoot in the first
summer heat, and stop. They look all summer as if they would
presently burst into bud again, but they do not. The fine tree
continues to grow. The same thing happens in the man. Every man has
material enough in his experience to exhaust the sagacity of Newton
in working it out. We have more than we use. I never hear a good
speech at caucus or at cattle-show but it helps me, not so much by
adding to my knowledge as by apprising me of admirable uses to which
what I know can be turned. The commonest remark, if the man could
only extend it a little, would make him a genius; but the thought is
prematurely checked, and grows no more. All great masters are chiefly
distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps
a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken their first
step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of
your first.
The botanist discovered long ago that Nature loves mixtures, and that
nothing grows well on the crab-stock, but the blood of two trees
being mixed a new and excellent fruit is produced. And not less in
human history aboriginal races are incapable of improvement; the
dull, melancholy Pelasgi arrive at no civility until the Phœnicians
and Ionians come in. The Briton, the Pict, is nothing until the
Roman, the Saxon, the Norman, arrives.
It is observed that our mental processes go forward even when they
seem suspended. Scholars say that if they return to the study of a
new language after some intermission, the intelligence of it is more
and not less. A subject of thought to which we return from month to
month, from year to year, has always some ripeness of which we can
give no account. We say the book grew in the author’s mind.
In unfit company the finest powers are paralyzed. No ambition,
no opposition, no friendly attention and fostering kindness,
no wine, music or exhilarating aids, neither warm fireside nor
fresh air, walking or riding, avail at all to resist the palsy of
mis-association. Genius is mute, is dull; there is no genius. Ask of
your flowers to open when you have let in on them a freezing wind.
The mechanical laws might as easily be shown pervading the kingdom
of mind as the vegetative. A man has been in Spain. The facts and
thoughts which the traveller has found in that country gradually
settle themselves into a determinate heap of one size and form and
not another. That is what he knows and has to say of Spain; he cannot
say it truly until a sufficient time for the arrangement of the
particles has elapsed.
* * * * *
These views of the source of thought and the mode of its
communication lead us to a whole system of ethics, strict as any
department of human duty, and open to us the tendencies and duties of
men of thought in the present time.
Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanent wise man, but
men capable of wisdom, who being put into certain company or other
favorable conditions become wise, as glasses rubbed acquire power for
a time.
An individual body is the momentary arrest or fixation of certain
atoms, which, after performing compulsory duty to this enchanted
statue, are released again to flow in the currents of the world.
An individual mind in like manner is a fixation or momentary eddy
in which certain services and powers are taken up and minister in
petty niches and localities, and then, being released, return to the
unbounded soul of the world.
In this eternal resurrection and rehabilitation of transitory
persons, who and what are they? ’Tis only the source that we can
see;—the eternal mind, careless of its channels, omnipotent in
itself, and continually ejaculating its torrent into every artery
and vein and veinlet of humanity. Wherever there is health, that
is, consent to the cause and constitution of the universe, there is
perception and power.
Each man is a new power in Nature. He holds the keys of the world
in his hands. No quality in Nature’s vast magazines he cannot
touch, no truth he cannot see. Silent, passive, even sulkily Nature
offers every morning her wealth to man. She is immensely rich; he
is welcome to her entire goods, but she speaks no word, will not so
much as beckon or cough; only this, she is careful to leave all her
doors ajar,—towers, hall, storeroom and cellar. If he takes her hint
and uses her goods she speaks no word; if he blunders and starves
she says nothing. To the idle blockhead Nature is poor, sterile,
inhospitable. To the gardener her loam is all strawberries, pears,
pineapples. To the miller her rivers whirl the wheel and weave
carpets and broadcloth. To the sculptor her stone is soft; to the
painter her plumbago and marl are pencils and chromes. To the poet
all sounds and words are melodies and rhythms. In her hundred-gated
Thebes every chamber is a new door.
But he enters the world by one key. Herein is the wealth of each.
His equipment, though new, is complete; his prudence is his own; his
courage, his charity, are his own. He has his own defences and his
own fangs; his perception and his own mode of reply to sophistries.
Whilst he draws on his own he cannot be overshadowed or supplanted.
There are two mischievous superstitions, I know not which does the
most harm, one, that “I am wiser than you,” and the other that “You
are wiser than I.” The truth is that every man is furnished, if he
will heed it, with wisdom necessary to steer his own boat,—if he will
not look away from his own to see how his neighbor steers his.
Every man is a new method and distributes things anew. If he could
attain full size he would take up, first or last, atom by atom, all
the world into a new form. And our deep conviction of the riches
proper to every mind does not allow us to admit of much looking over
into one another’s virtues. Let me whisper a secret; nobody ever
forgives any admiration in you of them, any overestimate of what they
do or have. I acquiesce to be that I am, but I wish no one to be
civil to me.
Strong men understand this very well. Power fraternizes with power,
and wishes you not to be like him but like yourself. Echo the leaders
and they will fast enough see that you have nothing for them. They
came to you for something they had not.
There is always a loss of truth and power when a man leaves working
for himself to work for another. Absolutely speaking I can only work
for myself. All my good is magnetic, and I educate not by lessons
but by going about my business. When, moved by love, a man teaches
his child or joins with his neighbor in any act of common benefit,
or spends himself for his friend, or rushes at immense personal
sacrifice on some public, self-immolating act, it is not done for
others, but to fulfil a high necessity of his proper character. The
benefit to others is contingent and not contemplated by the doer.
The one thing not to be forgiven to intellectual persons is that
they believe in the ideas of others. From this deference comes the
imbecility and fatigue of their society, for of course they cannot
affirm these from the deep life; they say what they would have you
believe, but what they do not quite know. Profound sincerity is the
only basis of talent as of character. The temptation is to patronize
Providence, to fall into the accepted ways of talking and acting of
the good sort of people.
Each has a certain aptitude for knowing or doing somewhat which, when
it appears, is so adapted and aimed on that, that it seems a sort
of obtuseness to everything else. Well, this aptitude, if he would
obey it, would prove a telescope to bring under his clear vision what
was blur to everybody else. ’Tis a wonderful instrument, an organic
sympathy with the whole frame of things. There is no property or
relation in that immense arsenal of forces which the earth is, but
some man is at last found who affects this, delights to unfold and
work it, as if he were the born publisher and demonstrator of it.
As a dog has a sense that you have not, to find the track of his
master or of a fox, and as each tree can secrete from the soil the
elements that form a peach, a lemon, or a cocoa-nut, according to its
kind, so individual men have secret senses, each some incommunicable
sagacity. And men are primary or secondary as their opinions and
actions are organic or not.
I know well what a sieve every ear is. Teach me never so much and I
hear or retain only that which I wish to hear, what comports with
my experience and my desire. Many eyes go through the meadow, but
few see the flowers. A hunter finds plenty of game on the ground you
have sauntered over with idle gun. White huckleberries are so rare
that in miles of pasture you shall not find a dozen. But a girl who
understands it will find you a pint in a quarter of an hour.
Though the world is full of food we can take only the crumbs fit for
us. The air rings with sounds, but only a few vibrations can reach
our tympanum. Perhaps creatures live with us which we never see,
because their motion is too swift for our vision. The sun may shine,
or a galaxy of suns; you will get no more light than your eye will
hold. What can Plato or Newton teach, if you are deaf or incapable?
A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are
put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is
no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the
power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can
use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power
to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,—congestion of the
brain, apoplexy and strangulation.
III. In reckoning the sources of our mental power it were fatal
to omit that one which pours all the others into its mould;—that
unknown country in which all the rivers of our knowledge have their
fountains, and which, by its qualities and structure, determines
both the nature of the waters and the direction in which they flow.
The healthy mind lies parallel to the currents of nature and sees
things in place, or makes discoveries. Newton did not exercise more
ingenuity but less than another to see the world. Right thought comes
spontaneously, comes like the morning wind; comes daily, like our
daily bread, to humble service; comes duly to those who look for
it. It does not need to pump your brains and force thought to think
rightly. O no, the ingenious person is warped by his ingenuity and
mis-sees.
Instinct is our name for the potential wit. Each man has a feeling
that what is done anywhere is done by the same wit as his. All men
are his representatives, and he is glad to see that his wit can work
at this or that problem as it ought to be done, and better than he
could do it. We feel as if one man wrote all the books, painted,
built, in dark ages; and we are sure that it can do more than ever
was done. It was the same mind that built the world. That is Instinct.
Ask what the Instinct declares, and we have little to say. He is no
newsmonger, no disputant, no talker. ’Tis a taper, a spark in the
great night. Yet a spark at which all the illuminations of human arts
and sciences were kindled. This is that glimpse of inextinguishable
light by which men are guided; though it does not show objects, yet
it shows the way. This is that sense by which men feel when they are
wronged, though they do not see how. This is that source of thought
and feeling which acts on masses of men, on all men at certain times,
with resistless power. Ever at intervals leaps a word or fact to
light which is no man’s invention, but the common instinct, making
the revolutions that never go back.
This is Instinct, and Inspiration is only this power excited,
breaking its silence; the spark bursting into flame. Instinct is a
shapeless giant in the cave, massive, without hands or fingers or
articulating lips or teeth or tongue; Behemoth, disdaining speech,
disdaining particulars, lurking, surly, invincible, disdaining
thoughts, always whole, never distributed, aboriginal, old as nature,
and saying, like poor Topsy, “never was born, growed.” Indifferent to
the dignity of its function, it plays the god in animal nature as in
human or as in the angelic, and spends its omniscience on the lowest
wants. The old Hindoo Gautama says, “Like the approach of the iron to
the loadstone is the approach of the new-born child to the breast.”
There is somewhat awful in that first approach.
The Instinct begins at this low point, at the surface of the earth,
and works for the necessities of the human being; then ascends step
by step to suggestions which are when expressed the intellectual and
moral laws.
The mythology cleaves close to nature; and what else was it they
represented in Pan, god of shepherds, who was not yet completely
finished in godlike form, blocked rather, and wanting the
extremities; had emblematic horns and feet? Pan, that is, All. His
habit was to dwell in mountains, lying on the ground, tooting like a
cricket in the sun, refusing to speak, clinging to his behemoth ways.
He could intoxicate by the strain of his shepherd’s pipe,—silent yet
to most, for his pipes make the music of the spheres, which because
it sounds eternally is not heard at all by the dull, but only by the
mind. He wears a coat of leopard spots or stars. He could terrify
by earth-born fears called _panics_. Yet was he in the secret of
nature and could look both before and after. He was only seen under
disguises, and was not represented by any outward image; a terror
sometimes, at others a placid omnipotence.
Such homage did the Greek, delighting in accurate form, not fond of
the extravagant and unbounded, pay to the inscrutable force we call
Instinct, or nature when it first becomes intelligent.
The action of the Instinct is for the most part negative, regulative,
rather than initiative or impulsive. But it has a range as wide as
human nature, running over all the ground of morals, of intellect,
and of sense. In its lower function, when it deals with the apparent
world, it is common-sense. It requires the performance of all
that is needful to the animal life and health. Then it requires a
proportion between a man’s acts and his condition, requires all that
is called humanity; that symmetry and connection which is imperative
in all healthily constituted men, and the want of which the rare and
brilliant sallies of irregular genius cannot excuse.
* * * * *
If we could retain our early innocence we might trust our feet
uncommanded to take the right path to our friend in the woods. But we
have interfered too often; the feet have lost, by our distrust, their
proper virtue, and we take the wrong path and miss him. ’Tis the
barbarian instinct within us which culture deadens.
We find ourselves expressed in nature, but we cannot translate it
into words. But Perception is the armed eye. A civilization has tamed
and ripened this savage wit, and he is a Greek. His Aye and No have
become nouns and verbs and adverbs. Perception differs from Instinct
by adding the Will. Simple percipiency is the virtue of space, not of
man.
The senses minister to a mind they do not know. At a moment in
our history the mind’s eye opens and we become aware of spiritual
facts, of rights, of duties, of thoughts,—a thousand faces of one
essence. We call the essence Truth; the particular aspects of it
we call thoughts. These facts, this essence, are not new; they are
old and eternal, but our seeing of them is new. Having seen them
we are no longer brute lumps whirled by Fate, but we pass into the
council-chamber and government of nature. In so far as we see them we
share their life and sovereignty.
The point of interest is here, that these gates, once opened, never
swing back. The observers may come at their leisure, and do at last
satisfy themselves of the fact. The thought, the doctrine, the
right hitherto not affirmed is published in set propositions, in
conversation of scholars and philosophers, of men of the world, and
at last in the very choruses of songs. The young hear it, and as they
have never fought it, never known it otherwise, they accept it, vote
for it at the polls, embody it in the laws. And the perception thus
satisfied reacts on the senses, to clarify them, so that it becomes
more indisputable.
* * * * *
This is the first property of the Intellect I am to point out; the
mind detaches. A man is intellectual in proportion as he can make an
object of every sensation, perception and intuition; so long as he
has no engagement in any thought or feeling which can hinder him from
looking at it as somewhat foreign.
A man of talent has only to name any form or fact with which we are
most familiar, and the strong light which he throws on it enhances it
to all eyes. People wonder they never saw it before. The detachment
consists in seeing it under a new order, not under a personal but
under a universal light. To us it had economic, but to the universe
it has poetic relations, and it is as good as sun and star now.
Indeed this is the measure of all intellectual power among men, the
power to complete this detachment, the power of genius to hurl a new
individual into the world.
An intellectual man has the power to go out of himself and see
himself as an object; therefore his defects and delusions interest
him as much as his successes. He not only wishes to succeed in life,
but he wishes in thought to know the history and destiny of a man;
whilst the cloud of egotists drifting about are only interested in a
success to their egotism.
The senses report the new fact or change; the mind discovers some
essential copula binding this fact or change to a class of facts or
changes, and enjoys the discovery as if coming to its own again. A
perception is always a generalization. It lifts the object, whether
in material or moral nature, into a type. The animal, the low degrees
of intellect, know only individuals. The philosopher knows only laws.
That is, he considers a purely mental fact, part of the soul itself.
We say with Kenelm Digby, “All things that she knoweth are herself,
and she is all that she knoweth.” Insight assimilates the thing
seen. Is it only another way of affirming and illustrating this to
say that it sees nothing alone, but sees each particular object in
just connections,—sees all in God? In all healthy souls is an inborn
necessity of presupposing for each particular fact a prior Being
which compels it to a harmony with all other natures. The game of
Intellect is the perception that whatever befalls or can be stated
is a universal proposition; and contrariwise, that every general
statement is poetical again by being particularized or impersonated.
A single thought has no limit to its value; a thought, properly
speaking,—that is a truth held not from any man’s saying so, or
any accidental benefit or recommendation it has in our trade or
circumstance, but because we have perceived it is a fact in the
nature of things, and in all times and places will and must be
the same thing,—is of inestimable value. Every new impression on
the mind is not to be derided, but is to be accounted for, and,
until accounted for, registered as an indisputable addition to our
catalogue of natural facts.
The first fact is the fate in every mental perception,—that my
seeing this or that, and that I see it so or so, is as much a fact
in the natural history of the world as is the freezing of water at
thirty-two degrees of Fahrenheit. My percipiency affirms the presence
and perfection of law, as much as all the martyrs. A perception, it
is of a necessity older than the sun and moon, and the Father of
the Gods. It is there with all its destinies. It is its nature to
rush to expression, to rush to embody itself. It is impatient to
put on its sandals and be gone on its errand, which is to lead to a
larger perception, and so to new action. For thought exists to be
expressed. That which cannot externize itself is not thought.
Do not trifle with your perceptions, or hold them cheap. They are
your door to the seven heavens, and if you pass it by you will miss
your way. Say, what impresses me ought to impress me. I am bewildered
by the immense variety of attractions and cannot take a step; but
this one thread, fine as gossamer, is yet real; and I hear a whisper,
which I dare trust, that it is the thread on which the earth and the
heaven of heavens are strung.
The universe is traversed by paths or bridges or stepping-stones
across the gulfs of space in every direction. To every soul that
is created is its path, invisible to all but itself. Each soul,
therefore, walking in its own path walks firmly; and to the
astonishment of all other souls, who see not its path, it goes as
softly and playfully on its way as if, instead of being a line,
narrow as the edge of a sword, over terrific pits right and left, it
were a wide prairie.
Genius is a delicate sensibility to the laws of the world, adding the
power to express them again in some new form. The highest measure of
poetic power is such insight and faculty to fuse the circumstances of
to-day as shall make transparent the whole web of circumstance and
opinion in which the man finds himself, so that he releases himself
from the traditions in which he grew,—no longer looks back to Hebrew
or Greek or English use or tradition in religion, laws, or life, but
sees so truly the omnipresence of eternal cause that he can convert
the daily and hourly event of New York, of Boston, into universal
symbols. I owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain
from the common and showing me that gods are sitting disguised in
every company.
The conduct of Intellect must respect nothing so much as preserving
the sensibility. My measure for all subjects of science as of events
is their impression on the soul. That mind is best which is most
impressionable. There are times when the cawing of a crow, a weed, a
snow-flake, a boy’s willow whistle, or a farmer planting in his field
is more suggestive to the mind than the Yosemite gorge or the Vatican
would be in another hour. In like mood an old verse, or certain
words, gleam with rare significance.
But sensibility does not exhaust our idea of it. That is only half.
Genius is not a lazy angel contemplating itself and things. It is
insatiable for expression. Thought must take the stupendous step
of passing into realization. A master can formulate his thought.
Our thoughts at first possess us. Later, if we have good heads, we
come to possess them. We believe that certain persons add to the
common vision a certain degree of control over these states of mind;
that the true scholar is one who has the power to stand beside his
thoughts or to hold off his thoughts at arm’s length and give them
perspective.
* * * * *
It is not to be concealed that the gods have guarded this privilege
with costly penalty. This slight discontinuity which perception
effects between the mind and the object paralyzes the will. If you
cut or break in two a block or stone and press the two parts closely
together, you can indeed bring the particles very near, but never
again so near that they shall attract each other so that you can take
up the block as one. That indescribably small interval is as good as
a thousand miles, and has forever severed the practical unity. Such
is the immense deduction from power by discontinuity.
The intellect that sees the interval partakes of it, and the fact of
intellectual perception severs once for all the man from the things
with which he converses. Affection blends, intellect disjoins subject
and object. For weal or woe we clear ourselves from the thing we
contemplate. We grieve but are not the grief; we love but are not
love. If we converse with low things, with crimes, with mischances,
we are not compromised. And if with high things, with heroic actions,
with virtues, the interval becomes a gulf and we cannot enter into
the highest good. Artist natures do not weep. Goethe, the surpassing
intellect of modern times, apprehends the spiritual but is not
spiritual.
There is indeed this vice about men of thought, that you cannot quite
trust them; not as much as other men of the same natural probity,
without intellect; because they have a hankering to play Providence
and make a distinction in favor of themselves from the rules they
apply to the human race.
* * * * *
The primary rule for the conduct of Intellect is to have control of
the thoughts without losing their natural attitudes and action. They
are the oracle; we are not to poke and drill and force, but to follow
them. Yet the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets.
You must formulate your thought or ’tis all sky and no stars. There
are men of great apprehension, discursive minds, who easily entertain
ideas, but are not exact, severe with themselves, cannot connect or
arrange their thoughts so as effectively to report them. A blending
of these two—the intellectual perception of truth and the moral
sentiment of right—is wisdom. All thought is practical. Wishing is
one thing; will another. Wishing is castle-building; the dreaming
about things agreeable to the senses, but to which we have no right.
Will is the advance to that which rightly belongs to us, to which
the inward magnet ever points, and which we dare to make ours. The
revelation of thought takes us out of servitude into freedom. So does
the sense of right.
Will is the measure of power. To a great genius there must be a great
will. If the thought is not a lamp to the will, does not proceed to
an act, the wise are imbecile. He alone is strong and happy who has a
will. The rest are herds. He uses; they are used. He is of the Maker;
they are of the Made.
Will is always miraculous, being the presence of God to men. When
it appears in a man he is a hero, and all metaphysics are at fault.
Heaven is the exercise of the faculties, the added sense of power.
All men know the truth, but what of that? It is rare to find one who
knows how to speak it. A man tries to speak it and his voice is like
the hiss of a snake, or rude and chiding. The truth is not spoken
but injured. The same thing happens in power to do the right. His
rectitude is ridiculous. His organs do not play him true.
There is a meter which determines the constructive power of
man,—this, namely, the question whether the mind possesses the
control of its thoughts, or they of it. The new sect stands for
certain thoughts. We go to individual members for an exposition of
them. Vain expectation. They are possessed by the ideas but do not
possess them. One meets contemplative men who dwell in a certain
feeling and delight which are intellectual but wholly above their
expression. They cannot formulate. They impress those who know
them by their loyalty to the truth they worship but cannot impart.
Sometimes the patience and love are rewarded by the chamber of power
being at last opened; but sometimes they pass away dumb, to find it
where all obstruction is removed.
By and by comes a facility; some one that can move the mountain
and build of it a causeway through the Dismal Swamp, as easily as
he carries the hair on his head. Talent is habitual facility of
execution. We like people who can do things. The various talents are
organic, or each related to that part of nature it is to explore and
utilize. Somewhat is to come to the light, and one was created to
fetch it,—a vessel of honor or of dishonor. ’Tis of instant use in
the economy of the Cosmos, and the more armed and biassed for the
work the better.
Each of these talents is born to be unfolded and set at work for the
use and delight of men, and, in the last result, the man with the
talent is the need of mankind; the whole ponderous machinery of the
state has really for its aim just to place this skill of each.
But idea and execution are not often entrusted to the same head.
There is some incompatibility of good speculation and practice, for
example, the failure of monasteries and Brook Farms. To hammer out
phalanxes must be done by smiths; as soon as the scholar attempts it
he is half a charlatan.
The grasp is the main thing. Most men’s minds do not grasp anything.
All slips through their fingers, like the paltry brass grooves that
in most country houses are used to raise or drop the curtain, but are
made to sell, and will not hold any curtain but cobwebs. I have heard
that idiot children are known from their birth by the circumstance
that their hands do not close round anything. Webster naturally and
always grasps, and therefore retains something from every company and
circumstance.
As a talent Dante’s imagination is the nearest to hands and feet
that we have seen. He clasps the thought as if it were a tree or a
stone, and describes as mathematically. I once found Page the painter
modelling his figures in clay, Ruth and Naomi, before he painted them
on canvas. Dante, one would say, did the same thing before he wrote
the verses.
* * * * *
I have spoken of Intellect constructive. But it is in degrees. How it
moves when its pace is accelerated! The pace of Nature is so slow.
Why not from strength to strength, from miracle to miracle, and not
as now with this retardation—as if Nature had sprained her foot—and
plenteous stopping at little stations?
The difference is obvious enough in Talent between the speed of one
man’s action above another’s. In debate, in legislature, not less
in action; in war or in affairs, alike daring and effective. But I
speak of it in quite another sense, namely, in the habitual speed of
combination of thought.
The same functions which are perfect in our quadrupeds are seen
slower performed in palæontology. Many races it cost them to achieve
the completion that is now in the life of one. Life had not yet so
fierce a glow.
Shakespeare astonishes by his equality in every play, act, scene or
line. One would say he must have been a thousand years old when he
wrote his first line, so thoroughly is his thought familiar to him,
and has such scope and so solidly worded, as if it were already a
proverb and not hereafter to become one. Well, that millennium in
effect is really only a little acceleration in his process of thought.
But each power is commonly at the expense of some other. When pace is
increased it will happen that the control is in a degree lost. Reason
does not keep her firm seat. The Delphian prophetess, when the spirit
possesses her, is herself a victim. The excess of individualism, when
it is not corrected or subordinated to the Supreme Reason, makes
that vice which we stigmatize as monotones, men of one idea, or, as
the French say, _enfant perdu d’une conviction isolée_, which give
such a comic tinge to all society. Every man has his theory, true,
but ridiculously overstated. We are forced to treat a great part of
mankind as if they were a little deranged. We detect their mania and
humor it, so that conversation soon becomes a tiresome effort.
You laugh at the monotones, at the men of one idea, but if we look
nearly at heroes we may find the same poverty; and perhaps it is not
poverty, but power. The secret of power, intellectual or physical, is
concentration, and all concentration involves of necessity a certain
narrowness. It is a law of nature that he who looks at one thing must
turn his eyes from every other thing in the universe. The horse goes
better with blinders, and the man for dedication to his task. If you
ask what compensation is made for the inevitable narrowness, why,
this, that in learning one thing well you learn all things.
Immense is the patience of Nature. You say thought is a penurious
rill. Well, we can wait. Nature is immortal, and can wait. Nature
having for capital this rill, drop by drop, as it trickles from the
rock of ages,—this rill and her patience,—she husbands and hives,
she forms reservoirs, were it only a phial or a hair-tube that
will hold as it were a drop of attar. Not having enough to support
all the powers of a race, she thins her stock and raises a few
individuals, or only a pair. Not sufficing to feed all the faculties
synchronously, she feeds one faculty and starves all the rest. I am
familiar with cases, we meet them daily, wherein the vital force
being insufficient for the constitution, everything is neglected
that can be spared; some one power fed, all the rest pine. ’Tis like
a withered hand or leg on a Hercules. It makes inconvenience in
society, for we presume symmetry, and because they know one thing we
defer to them in another, and find them really contemptible. We can’t
make half a bow and say, I honor and despise you. But Nature can; she
whistles with all her winds, and does as she pleases.
* * * * *
It is much to write sentences; it is more to add method and write
out the spirit of your life symmetrically. But to arrange general
reflections in their natural order, so that I shall have one
homogeneous piece,—a Lycidas, an Allegro, a Hamlet, a Midsummer
Night’s Dream,—this continuity is for the great. The wonderful men
are wonderful hereby. Such concentration of experiences is in every
great work, which, though successive in the mind of the master, were
primarily combined in his piece.
But what we want is consecutiveness. ’Tis with us a flash of light,
then a long darkness, then a flash again. Ah! could we turn these
fugitive sparkles into an astronomy of Copernican worlds.
* * * * *
I must think this keen sympathy, this thrill of awe with which we
watch the performance of genius, a sign of our own readiness to
exert the like power. I must think we are entitled to powers far
transcending any that we possess; that we have in the race the sketch
of a man which no individual comes up to.
Every sincere man is right, or, to make him right, only needs a
little larger dose of his own personality. Excellent in his own way
by means of not apprehending the gift of another. When he speaks out
of another’s mind, we detect it. He can’t make any paint stick but
his own. No man passes for that with another which he passes for
with himself. The respect and the censure of his brother are alike
injurious and irrelevant. We see ourselves; we lack organs to see
others, and only squint at them.
Don’t fear to push these individualities to their farthest
divergence. Characters and talents are complemental and suppletory.
The world stands by balanced antagonisms. The more the peculiarities
are pressed the better the result. The air would rot without
lightning; and without the violence of direction that men have,
without bigots, without men of fixed idea, no excitement, no
efficiency.
The novelist should not make any character act absurdly, but only
absurdly as seen by others. For it is so in life. Nonsense will not
keep its unreason if you come into the humorist’s point of view, but
unhappily we find it is fast becoming sense, and we must flee again
into the distance if we would laugh.
What strength belongs to every plant and animal in nature. The tree
or the brook has no duplicity, no pretentiousness, no show. It is,
with all its might and main, what it is, and makes one and the same
impression and effect at all times. All the thoughts of a turtle are
turtles, and of a rabbit, rabbits. But a man is broken and dissipated
by the giddiness of his will; he does not throw himself into his
judgments; his genius leads him one way but ’tis likely his trade or
politics in quite another. He rows with one hand and with the other
backs water, and does not give to any manner of life the strength
of his constitution. Hence the perpetual loss of power and waste of
human life.
The natural remedy against this miscellany of knowledge and aim, this
desultory universality of ours, this immense ground-juniper falling
abroad and not gathered up into any columnar tree, is to substitute
realism for sentimentalism; a certain recognition of the simple and
terrible laws which, seen or unseen, pervade and govern.
You will say this is quite axiomatic and a little too true. I do
not find it an agreed point. Literary men for the most part have a
settled despair as to the realization of ideas in their own time.
There is in all students a distrust of truth, a timidity about
affirming it; a wish to patronize Providence.
We disown our debt to moral evil. To science there is no poison; to
botany no weed; to chemistry no dirt. The curses of malignity and
despair are important criticism, which must be heeded until he can
explain and rightly silence them.
“_Croyez moi, l’erreur aussi a son mérite_,” said Voltaire. We see
those who surmount by dint of egotism or infatuation obstacles from
which the prudent recoil. The right partisan is a heady man, who,
because he does not see many things, sees some one thing with heat
and exaggeration; and if he falls among other narrow men, or objects
which have a brief importance, prefers it to the universe, and seems
inspired and a godsend to those who wish to magnify the matter and
carry a point. ’Tis the difference between progress by railroad and
by walking across the broken country. Immense speed, but only in one
direction.
* * * * *
There are two theories of life; one for the demonstration of our
talent, the other for the education of the man. One is activity, the
busy-body, the following of that practical talent which we have,
in the belief that what is so natural, easy and pleasant to us and
desirable to others will surely lead us out safely; in this direction
lie usefulness, comfort, society, low power of all sorts. The other
is trust, religion, consent to be nothing for eternity, entranced
waiting, the worship of ideas. This is solitary, grand, secular. They
are in perpetual balance and strife. One is talent, the other genius.
One is skill, the other character.
We are continually tempted to sacrifice genius to talent, the hope
and promise of insight to the lust of a freer demonstration of those
gifts we have; and we buy this freedom to glitter by the loss of
general health.
It is the levity of this country to forgive everything to talent. If
a man show cleverness, rhetorical skill, bold front in the forum or
the senate, people clap their hands without asking more. We have a
juvenile love of smartness, of showy speech. We like faculty that can
rapidly be coined into money, and society seems to be in conspiracy
to utilize every gift prematurely, and pull down genius to lucrative
talent. Every kind of meanness and mischief is forgiven to intellect.
All is condoned if I can write a good song or novel.
Wide is the gulf between genius and talent. The men we know, poets,
wits, writers, deal with their thoughts as jewellers with jewels,
which they sell but must not wear. Like the carpenter, who gives up
the key of the fine house he has built, and never enters it again.
There is a conflict between a man’s private dexterity or talent and
his access to the free air and light which wisdom is; between wisdom
and the habit and necessity of repeating itself which belongs to
every mind. Peter is the mould into which everything is poured like
warm wax, and be it astronomy or railroads or French revolution or
theology or botany, it comes out Peter. But there are quick limits
to our interest in the personality of people. They are as much alike
as their barns and pantries, and are as soon musty and dreary. They
entertain us for a time, but at the second or third encounter we have
nothing more to learn.
* * * * *
The daily history of the Intellect is this alternating of expansions
and concentrations. The expansions are the invitations from heaven
to try a larger sweep, a higher pitch than we have yet climbed, and
to leave all our past for this enlarged scope. Present power, on the
other hand, requires concentration on the moment and the thing to be
done.
The condition of sanity is to respect the order of the intellectual
world; to keep down talent in its place, to enthrone the instinct.
There must be perpetual rallying and self-recovery. Each talent is
ambitious and self-asserting; it works for show and for the shop, and
the greater it grows the more is the mischief and the misleading, so
that presently all is wrong.
* * * * *
No wonder the children love masks and costumes, and play horse, play
soldier, play school, play bear, and delight in theatricals. The
children have only the instinct of the universe, in which becoming
somewhat else is the perpetual game of nature, and death the penalty
of standing still. ’Tis not less in thought. I cannot conceive
any good in a thought which confines and stagnates. The universe
exists only in transit, or we behold it shooting the gulf from the
past to the future. We are passing into new heavens in fact by the
movement of our solar system, and in thought by our better knowledge.
Transition is the attitude of power. A fact is only a fulcrum of the
spirit. It is the terminus of a past thought, but only a means now to
new sallies of the imagination and new progress of wisdom. The habit
of saliency, of not pausing but proceeding, is a sort of importation
and domestication of the divine effort into a man. Routine, the rut,
is the path of indolence, of cows, of sluggish animal life; as near
gravitation as it can go. But wit sees the short way, puts together
what belongs together, custom or no custom; in that is organization.
Inspiration is the continuation of the divine effort that built the
man. The same course continues itself in the mind which we have
witnessed in nature, namely, the carrying-on and completion of the
metamorphosis from grub to worm, from worm to fly. In human thought
this process is often arrested for years and ages. The history of
mankind is the history of arrested growth. This premature stop, I
know not how, befalls most of us in early youth; as if the growth of
high powers, the access to rare truths, closed at two or three years
in the child, while all the pagan faculties went ripening on to sixty.
So long as you are capable of advance, so long you have not abdicated
the hope and future of a divine soul. That wonderful oracle will
reply when it is consulted, and there is no history or tradition, no
rule of life or art or science, on which it is not a competent and
the only competent judge.
Man was made for conflict, not for rest. In action is his power;
not in his goals but in his transitions man is great. Instantly he
is dwarfed by self-indulgence. The truest state of mind rested in
becomes false.
The spiritual power of man is twofold, mind and heart, Intellect and
morals; one respecting truth, the other the will. One is the man,
the other the woman in spiritual nature. One is power, the other is
love. These elements always coexist in every normal individual, but
one predominates. And as each is easily exalted in our thoughts till
it serves to fill the universe and become the synonym of God, the
soul in which one predominates is ever watchful and jealous when such
immense claims are made for one as seem injurious to the other. Ideal
and practical, like ecliptic and equator, are never parallel. Each
has its vices, its proper dangers, obvious enough when the opposite
element is deficient.
Intellect is skeptical, runs down into talent, selfish working for
private ends, conceited, ostentatious and malignant. On the other
side the clear-headed thinker complains of souls led hither and
thither by affections which, alone, are blind guides and thriftless
workmen, and in the confusion asks the polarity of intellect. But all
great minds and all great hearts have mutually allowed the absolute
necessity of the twain.
If the first rule is to obey your genius, in the second place the
good mind is known by the choice of what is positive, of what is
advancing. We must embrace the affirmative. But the affirmative of
affirmatives is love. _Quantus amor tantus animus._ Strength enters
as the moral element enters. Lovers of men are as safe as the sun.
Goodwill makes insight. Sensibility is the secret readiness to
believe in all kinds of power, and the contempt of any experience we
have not is the opposite pole. The measure of mental health is the
disposition to find good everywhere, good and order, analogy, health
and benefit,—the love of truth, tendency to be in the right, no
fighter for victory, no cockerel.
We have all of us by nature a certain divination and parturient
vaticination in our minds of some higher good and perfection than
either power or knowledge. Knowledge is plainly to be preferred
before power, as being that which guides and directs its blind force
and impetus; but Aristotle declares that the origin of reason is not
reason but something better.
The height of culture, the highest behavior, consists in the
identification of the Ego with the universe; so that when a man says
I hope, I find, I think, he might properly say, The human race thinks
or finds or hopes. And meantime he shall be able continually to keep
sight of his biographical Ego,—I have a desk, I have an office, I am
hungry, I had an ague,—as rhetoric or offset to his grand spiritual
Ego, without impertinence, or ever confounding them.
I may well say this is divine, the continuation of the divine effort.
Alas! it seems not to be ours, to be quite independent of us. Often
there is so little affinity between the man and his works that we
think the wind must have writ them. Also its communication from one
to another follows its own law and refuses our intrusion. It is in
one, it belongs to all; yet how to impart it?
We need all our resources to live in the world which is to be used
and decorated by us. Socrates kept all his virtues as well as his
faculties well in hand. He was sincerely humble, but he utilized his
humanity chiefly as a better eyeglass to penetrate the vapors that
baffled the vision of other men.
* * * * *
The superiority of the man is in the simplicity of his thought, that
he has no obstruction, but looks straight at the pure fact, with no
color of option. Profound sincerity is the only basis of talent as of
character. The virtue of the Intellect is its own, its courage is of
its own kind, and at last it will be justified, though for the moment
it seem hostile to what it most reveres.
* * * * *
We wish to sum up the conflicting impressions by saying that all
point at last to a unity which inspires all. Our poetry, our religion
are its skirts and penumbræ. Yet the charm of life is the hints we
derive from this. They overcome us like perfumes from a far-off
shore of sweetness, and their meaning is that no tongue shall
syllable it without leave; that only itself can name it; that by
casting ourselves on it and being its voice it rushes each moment to
positive commands, creating men and methods, and ties the will of a
child to the love of the First Cause.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 1850
MEMORY.
[Illustration: (decorative banner)]
MEMORY.
Memory is a primary and fundamental faculty, without which none other
can work; the cement, the bitumen, the matrix in which the other
faculties are imbedded; or it is the thread on which the beads of man
are strung, making the personal identity which is necessary to moral
action. Without it all life and thought were an unrelated succession.
As gravity holds matter from flying off into space, so memory gives
stability to knowledge; it is the cohesion which keeps things from
falling into a lump, or flowing in waves.
We like longevity, we like signs of riches and extent of nature in
an individual. And most of all we like a great memory. The lowest
life remembers. The sparrow, the ant, the worm, have the same memory
as we. If you bar their path, or offer them somewhat disagreeable
to their senses, they make one or two trials, and then once for all
avoid it.
Every machine must be perfect of its sort. It is essential to a
locomotive that it can reverse its movement, and run backward and
forward with equal celerity. The builder of the mind found it not
less needful that it should have retroaction, and command its past
act and deed. Perception, though it were immense and could pierce
through the universe, was not sufficient.
Memory performs the impossible for man by the strength of his divine
arms; holds together past and present, beholding both, existing in
both, abides in the flowing, and gives continuity and dignity to
human life. It holds us to our family, to our friends. Hereby a home
is possible; hereby only a new fact has value.
Opportunities of investment are useful only to those who have
capital. Any piece of knowledge I acquire to-day, a fact that falls
under my eyes, a book I read, a piece of news I hear, has a value
at this moment exactly proportioned to my skill to deal with it.
To-morrow, when I know more, I recall that piece of knowledge and use
it better.
The Past has a new value every moment to the active mind, through
the incessant purification and better method of its memory. Once it
joined its facts by color and form and sensuous relations. Some fact
that had a childish significance to your childhood and was a type
in the nursery, when riper intelligence recalls it means more and
serves you better as an illustration; and perhaps in your age has new
meaning. What was an isolated, unrelated belief or conjecture, our
later experience instructs us how to place in just connection with
other views which confirm and expand it. The old whim or perception
was an augury of a broader insight, at which we arrive later with
securer conviction. This is the companion, this the tutor, the poet,
the library, with which you travel. It does not lie, cannot be
corrupted, reports to you not what you wish but what really befel.
You say, “I can never think of some act of neglect, of selfishness,
or of passion without pain.” Well, that is as it should he. That is
the police of the Universe: the angels are set to punish you, so long
as you are capable of such crime. But in the history of character the
day comes when you are incapable of such crime. Then you suffer no
more, you look on it as heaven looks on it, with wonder at the deed,
and with applause at the pain it has cost you.
Memory is not a pocket, but a living instructor, with a prophetic
sense of the values which he guards; a guardian angel set there
within you to record your life, and by recording to animate you to
uplift it. It is a scripture written day by day from the birth of
the man; all its records full of meanings which open as he lives on,
explaining each other, explaining the world to him and expanding
their sense as he advances, until it shall become the whole law of
nature and life.
As every creature is furnished with teeth to seize and eat, and with
stomach to digest its food, so the memory is furnished with a perfect
apparatus. There is no book like the memory, none with such a good
index, and that of every kind, alphabetic, systematic, arranged
by names of persons, by colors, tastes, smells, shapes, likeness,
unlikeness, by all sorts of mysterious hooks and eyes to catch and
hold, and contrivances for giving a hint.
The memory collects and re-collects. We figure it as if the mind were
a kind of looking-glass, which being carried through the street of
time receives on its clear plate every image that passes; only with
this difference that our plate is iodized so that every image sinks
into it, and is held there. But in addition to this property it has
one more, this, namely, that of all the million images that are
imprinted, the very one we want reappears in the centre of the plate
in the moment when we want it.
We can tell much about it, but you must not ask us what it is. On
seeing a face I am aware that I have seen it before, or that I have
not seen it before. On hearing a fact told I am aware that I knew it
already. You say the first words of the old song, and I finish the
line and the stanza. But where I have them, or what becomes of them
when I am not thinking of them for months and years, that they should
lie so still, as if they did not exist, and yet so nigh that they
come on the instant when they are called for, never any man was so
sharp-sighted, or could turn himself inside out quick enough to find.
’Tis because of the believed incompatibility of the affirmative and
advancing attitude of the mind with tenacious acts of recollection
that people are often reproached with living in their memory. Late
in life we live by memory, and in our solstices or periods of
stagnation; as the starved camel in the desert lives on his humps.
Memory was called by the schoolmen _vespertina cognitio_, evening
knowledge, in distinction from the command of the future which we
have by the knowledge of causes, and which they called _matutina
cognitio_, or morning knowledge.
Am I asked whether the thoughts clothe themselves in words? I answer,
Yes, always; but they are apt to be instantly forgotten. Never was
truer fable than that of the Sibyl’s writing on leaves which the
wind scatters. The difference between men is that in one the memory
with inconceivable swiftness flies after and re-collects the flying
leaves,—flies on wing as fast as that mysterious whirlwind, and the
envious Fate is baffled.
This command of old facts, the clear beholding at will of what is
best in our experience, is our splendid privilege. “He who calls
what is vanished back again into being enjoys a bliss like that of
creating,” says Niebuhr. The memory plays a great part in settling
the intellectual rank of men. We estimate a man by how much he
remembers. A seneschal of Parnassus is Mnemosyne. This power will
alone make a man remarkable; and it is found in all good wits.
Therefore the poets represented the Muses as the daughters of Memory,
for the power exists in some marked and eminent degree in men of an
ideal determination. Quintilian reckoned it the measure of genius.
“Tantum ingenii quantum memoriæ.”
We are told that Boileau having recited to Daguesseau one day an
epistle or satire he had just been composing, Daguesseau tranquilly
told him he knew it already, and in proof set himself to recite it
from end to end. Boileau, astonished, was much distressed until he
perceived that it was only a feat of memory.
The mind disposes all its experience after its affection and to its
ruling end; one man by puns and one by cause and effect, one to
heroic benefit and one to wrath and animal desire. This is the high
difference, the quality of the association by which a man remembers.
In the minds of most men memory is nothing but a farm-book or a
pocket-diary. On such a day I paid my note; on the next day the cow
calved; on the next I cut my finger; on the next the banks suspended
payment. But another man’s memory is the history of science and art
and civility and thought; and still another deals with laws and
perceptions that are the theory of the world.
This thread or order of remembering, this classification, distributes
men, one remembering by shop-rule or interest; one by passion; one
by trifling external marks, as dress or money. And one rarely takes
an interest in how the facts really stand, in the order of cause and
effect, without self-reference. This is an intellectual man. Nature
interests him; a plant, a fish, time, space, mind, being, in their
own method and law. Napoleon was such, and that saves him.
But this mysterious power that binds our life together has its own
vagaries and interruptions. It sometimes occurs that memory has a
personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its informations at
its will, not at mine. One sometimes asks himself, Is it possible
that it is only a visitor, not a resident? Is it some old aunt who
goes in and out of the house, and occasionally recites anecdotes of
old times and persons which I recognize as having heard before, and
she being gone again I search in vain for any trace of the anecdotes?
We can help ourselves to the _modus_ of mental processes only by
coarse material experiences. A knife with a good spring, a forceps
whose lips accurately meet and match, a steel-trap, a loom, a watch,
the teeth or jaws of which fit and play perfectly, as compared with
the same tools when badly put together, describe to us the difference
between a person of quick and strong perception, like Franklin or
Swift or Webster or Richard Owen, and a heavy man who witnesses
the same facts or shares experiences like theirs. ’Tis like the
impression made by the same stamp in sand or in wax. The way in
which Burke or Sheridan or Webster or any orator surprises us is by
his always having a sharp tool that fits the present use. He has an
old story, an odd circumstance, that illustrates the point he is now
proving, and is better than an argument. The more he is heated, the
wider he sees; he seems to remember all he ever knew; thus certifying
us that he is in the habit of seeing better than other people; that
what his mind grasps it does not let go. ’Tis the bull-dog bite; you
must cut off the head to loosen the teeth.
We hate this fatal shortness of Memory, these docked men whom
we behold. We gathered up what a rolling snow-ball as we came
along,—much of it professedly for the future, as capital stock of
knowledge. Where is it now? Look behind you. I cannot see that your
train is any longer than it was in childhood. The facts of the last
two or three days or weeks are all you have with you,—the reading
of the last month’s books. Your conversation, action, your face and
manners report of no more, of no greater wealth of mind. Alas! you
have lost something for everything you have gained, and cannot grow.
Only so much iron will the loadstone draw; it gains new particles all
the way as you move it, but one falls off for every one that adheres.
As there is strength in the wild horse which is never regained when
he is once broken by training, and as there is a sound sleep of
children and of savages, profound as the hibernation of bears, which
never visits the eyes of civil gentlemen and ladies, so there is a
wild memory in children and youth which makes what is early learned
impossible to forget; and perhaps in the beginning of the world it
had most vigor. Plato deplores writing as a barbarous invention which
would weaken the memory by disuse. The Rhapsodists in Athens it seems
could recite at once any passage of Homer that was desired.
If writing weakens the memory, we may say as much and more of
printing. What is the newspaper but a sponge or invention for
oblivion? the rule being that for every fact added to the memory,
one is crowded out, and that only what the affection animates can be
remembered.
The mind has a better secret in generalization than merely adding
units to its list of facts. The reason of the short memory is shallow
thought. As deep as the thought, so great is the attraction. An act
of the understanding will marshal and concatenate a few facts; a
principle of the reason will thrill and magnetize and redistribute
the whole world.
But defect of memory is not always want of genius. By no means. It is
sometimes owing to excellence of genius. Thus men of great presence
of mind who are always equal to the occasion do not need to rely on
what they have stored for use, but can think in this moment as well
and deeply as in any past moment, and if they cannot remember the
rule they can make one. Indeed it is remarked that inventive men have
bad memories. Sir Isaac Newton was embarrassed when the conversation
turned on his discoveries and results; he could not recall them; but
if he was asked why things were so or so he could find the reason on
the spot.
A man would think twice about learning a new science or reading a new
paragraph, if he believed the magnetism was only a constant amount,
and that he lost a word or a thought for every word he gained. But
the experience is not quite so bad. In reading a foreign language,
every new word mastered is a lamp lighting up related words and so
assisting the memory. Apprehension of the whole sentence aids to fix
the precise meaning of a particular word, and what familiarity has
been acquired with the genius of the language and the writer helps in
fixing the exact meaning of the sentence. So is it with every fact
in a new science: they are mutually explaining, and each one adds
transparency to the whole mass.
The damages of forgetting are more than compensated by the large
values which new thoughts and knowledge give to what we already
know. If new impressions sometimes efface old ones, yet we steadily
gain insight; and because all nature has one law and meaning,—part
corresponding to part,—all we have known aids us continually to the
knowledge of the rest of nature. Thus, all the facts in this chest of
memory are property at interest. And who shall set a boundary to this
mounting value? Shall we not on higher stages of being remember and
understand our early history better?
They say in Architecture, “An arch never sleeps;” I say, the Past
will not sleep, it works still. With every new fact a ray of light
shoots up from the long buried years. Who can judge the new book?
He who has read many books. Who, the new assertion? He who has
heard many the like. Who, the new man? He that has seen men. The
experienced and cultivated man is lodged in a hall hung with pictures
which every new day retouches, and to which every step in the march
of the soul adds a more sublime perspective.
We learn early that there is great disparity of value between our
experiences; some thoughts perish in the using. Some days are bright
with thought and sentiment, and we live a year in a day. Yet these
best days are not always those which memory can retain. This water
once spilled cannot be gathered. There are more inventions in the
thoughts of one happy day than ages could execute, and I suppose I
speak the sense of most thoughtful men when I say, I would rather
have a perfect recollection of all I have thought and felt in a day
or a week of high activity than read all the books that have been
published in a century.
The memory is one of the compensations which Nature grants to those
who have used their days well; when age and calamity have bereaved
them of their limbs or organs, then they retreat on mental faculty
and concentrate on that. The poet, the philosopher, lamed, old,
blind, sick, yet disputing the ground inch by inch against fortune,
finds a strength against the wrecks and decays sometimes more
invulnerable than the heyday of youth and talent.
I value the praise of Memory. And how does Memory praise? By holding
fast the best. A thought takes its true rank in the memory by
surviving other thoughts that were once preferred. Plato remembered
Anaxagoras by one of his sayings. If we recall our own favorites we
shall usually find that it is for one crowning act or thought that we
hold them dear.
Have you not found memory an apotheosis or deification? The poor,
short, lone fact dies at the birth. Memory catches it up into her
heaven, and bathes it in immortal waters. Then a thousand times
over it lives and acts again, each time transfigured, ennobled. In
solitude, in darkness, we tread over again the sunny walks of youth;
confined now in populous streets you behold again the green fields,
the shadows of the gray birches; by the solitary river hear again the
joyful voices of early companions, and vibrate anew to the tenderness
and dainty music of the poetry your boyhood fed upon. At this hour
the stream is still flowing, though you hear it not; the plants are
still drinking their accustomed life and repaying it with their
beautiful forms. But you need not wander thither. It flows for you,
and they grow for you, in the returning images of former summers. In
low or bad company you fold yourself in your cloak, withdraw yourself
entirely from all the doleful circumstance, recall and surround
yourself with the best associates and the fairest hours of your life:—
“Passing sweet are the domains of tender memory.”
You may perish out of your senses, but not out of your memory or
imagination.
The memory has a fine art of sifting out the pain and keeping all the
joy. The spring days when the bluebird arrives have usually only few
hours of fine temperature, are sour and unlovely; but when late in
autumn we hear rarely a bluebird’s notes they are sweet by reminding
us of the spring. Well, it is so with other tricks of memory. Of the
most romantic fact the memory is more romantic; and this power of
sinking the pain of any experience and of recalling the saddest with
tranquillity, and even with a wise pleasure, is familiar. The memory
is as the affection. Sampson Reed says, “The true way to store the
memory is to develop the affections.” A _souvenir_ is a token of
love. _Remember me_ means, Do not cease to love me. We remember those
things which we love and those things which we hate. The memory of
all men is robust on the subject of a debt due to them, or of an
insult inflicted on them. “They can remember,” as Johnson said, “who
kicked them last.”
Every artist is alive on the subject of his art. The Persians say, “A
real singer will never forget the song he has once learned.” Michael
Angelo, after having once seen a work of any other artist, would
remember it so perfectly that if it pleased him to make use of any
portion thereof, he could do so, but in such a manner that none could
perceive it.
We remember what we understand, and we understand best what we
like; for this doubles our power of attention, and makes it our
own. Captain John Brown, of Ossawatomie, said he had in Ohio three
thousand sheep on his farm, and could tell a strange sheep in his
flock as soon as he saw its face. One of my neighbors, a grazier,
told me that he should know again every cow, ox, or steer that he
ever saw. Abel Lawton knew every horse that went up and down through
Concord to the towns in the county. And in higher examples each man’s
memory is in the line of his action.
Nature trains us on to see illusions and prodigies with no more
wonder than our toast and omelet at breakfast. Talk of memory and
cite me these fine examples of Grotius and Daguesseau, and I think
how awful is that power and what privilege and tyranny it must
confer. Then I come to a bright school-girl who remembers all she
hears, carries thousands of nursery rhymes and all the poetry in
all the readers, hymn-books, and pictorial ballads in her mind; and
’tis a mere drug. She carries it so carelessly, it seems like the
profusion of hair on the shock heads of all the village boys and
village dogs; it grows like grass. ’Tis a bushel-basket memory of all
unchosen knowledge, heaped together in a huge hamper, without method,
yet securely held, and ready to come at call; so that an old scholar,
who knows what to do with a memory, is full of wonder and pity that
this magical force should be squandered on such frippery.
He is a skilful doctor who can give me a recipe for the cure of a bad
memory. And yet we have some hints from experience on this subject.
And first, _health_. It is found that we remember best when the
head is clear, when we are thoroughly awake. When the body is in a
quiescent state in the absence of the passions, in the moderation
of food, it yields itself a willing medium to the intellect. For
the true river Lethe is the body of man, with its belly and uproar
of appetite and mountains of indigestion and bad humors and quality
of darkness. And for this reason, and observing some mysterious
continuity of mental operation during sleep or when our will is
suspended, ’tis an old rule of scholars, that which Fuller records,
“’Tis best knocking in the nail overnight and clinching it next
morning.” Only I should give extension to this rule and say Yes,
drive the nail this week and clinch it the next, and drive it this
year and clinch it the next.
But Fate also is an artist. We forget also according to beautiful
laws. Thoreau said, “Of what significance are the things you can
forget. A little thought is sexton to all the world.”
We must be severe with ourselves, and what we wish to keep we must
once thoroughly possess. Then the thing seen will no longer be what
it was, a mere sensuous object before the eye or ear, but a reminder
of its law, a possession for the intellect. Then we relieve ourselves
of all task in the matter, we put the _onus_ of being remembered
on the object, instead of on our will. We shall do as we do with
all our studies, prize the fact or the name of the person by that
predominance it takes in our mind after near acquaintance. I have
several times forgotten the name of Flamsteed, never that of Newton;
and can drop easily many poets out of the Elizabethan chronology, but
not Shakespeare.
We forget rapidly what should be forgotten. The _universal_ sense of
fables and anecdotes is marked by our tendency to forget name and
date and geography. “How in the right are children,” said Margaret
Fuller, “to forget name and date and place.”
You cannot overstate our debt to the past, but has the present no
claim? This past memory is the baggage, but where is the troop? The
divine gift is not the old but the new. The divine is the instant
life that receives and uses, the life that can well bury the old in
the omnipotency with which it makes all things new.
The acceleration of mental process is equivalent to the lengthening
of life. If a great many thoughts pass through your mind you will
believe a long time has elapsed, many hours or days. In dreams a rush
of many thoughts, of seeming experiences, of spending hours and going
through a great variety of actions and companies, and when we start
up and look at the watch, instead of a long night we are surprised to
find it was a short nap. The opium-eater says, “I sometimes seemed to
have lived seventy or a hundred years in one night.” You know what
is told of the experience of some persons who have been recovered
from drowning. They relate that their whole life’s history seemed to
pass before them in review. They remembered in a moment all that they
ever did.
If we occupy ourselves long on this wonderful faculty, and see the
natural helps of it in the mind, and the way in which new knowledge
calls upon old knowledge—new giving undreamed-of value to old;
everywhere relation and suggestion, so that what one had painfully
held by strained attention and recapitulation now falls into place
and is clamped and locked by inevitable connection as a planet in its
orbit (every other orb, or the law or system of which it is a part,
being a perpetual reminder),—we cannot fail to draw thence a sublime
hint that thus there must be an endless increase in the power of
memory only through its use; that there must be a proportion between
the power of memory and the amount of knowables; and since the
Universe opens to us, the reach of the memory must be as large.
With every broader generalization which the mind makes, with every
deeper insight, its retrospect is also wider. With every new insight
into the duty or fact of to-day we come into new possession of the
past.
When we live by principles instead of traditions, by obedience to the
law of the mind instead of by passion, the Great Mind will enter into
us, not as now in fragments and detached thoughts, but the light of
to-day will shine backward and forward.
Memory is a presumption of a possession of the future. Now we are
halves, we see the past but not the future, but in that day will
the hemisphere complete itself and foresight be as perfect as
aftersight.
BOSTON.
“We are citizens of two fair cities,” said the Genoese gentleman to
a Florentine artist, “and if I were not a Genoese, I should wish
to be Florentine.” “And I,” replied the artist, “if I were not
Florentine”—“You would wish to be Genoese,” said the other. “No,”
replied the artist, “I should wish to be Florentine.”
The rocky nook with hill-tops three
Looked eastward from the farms,
And twice each day the flowing sea
Took Boston in its arms.
* * * * *
The sea returning day by day
Restores the world-wide mart;
So let each dweller on the Bay
Fold Boston in his heart.
Let the blood of her hundred thousands
Throb in each manly vein,
And the wits of all her wisest
Make sunshine in her brain.
And each shall care for other,
And each to each shall bend,
To the poor a noble brother,
To the good an equal friend.
A blessing through the ages thus
Shield all thy roofs and towers!
GOD WITH THE FATHERS, SO WITH US,
Thou darling town of ours!
[Illustration: (decorative banner)]
BOSTON.
The old physiologists said, “There is in the air a hidden food of
life;” and they watched the effect of different climates. They
believed the air of mountains and the seashore a potent predisposer
to rebellion. The air was a good republican, and it was remarked
that insulary people are versatile and addicted to change, both in
religious and secular affairs.
The air that we breathe is an exhalation of all the solid material
globe. An aerial fluid streams all day, all night, from every flower
and leaf, from every water and soil, from every rock-ledge; and from
every stratum a different aroma and air according to its quality.
According to quality and according to temperature, it must have
effect on manners.
There is the climate of the Sahara: a climate where the sunbeams are
vertical; where is day after day, sunstroke after sunstroke, with a
frosty shadow between. “There are countries,” said Howell, “where
the heaven is a fiery furnace, or a blowing bellows, or a dropping
sponge, most parts of the year.” Such is the assimilating force of
the Indian climate, that, Sir Erskine Perry says, “the usage and
opinion of the Hindoos so invades men of all castes and colors who
deal with them that all take a Hindoo tint. Parsee, Mongol, Afghan,
Israelite, Christian, have all passed under this influence and
exchanged a good part of their patrimony of ideas for the notions,
manner of seeing, and habitual tone of Indian society.” He compares
it to the geologic phenomenon which the black soil of the Dhakkan
offers,—the property, namely, of assimilating to itself every foreign
substance introduced into its bosom.
How can we not believe in influences of climate and air, when, as
true philosophers, we must believe that chemical atoms also have
their spiritual cause why they are thus and not other; that carbon,
oxygen, alum and iron, each has its origin in spiritual nature?
Even at this day men are to be found superstitious enough to believe
that to certain spots on the surface of the planet special powers
attach, and an exalted influence on the genius of man. And it appears
as if some localities of the earth, through wholesome springs, or
as the _habitat_ of rare plants and minerals, or through ravishing
beauties of Nature, were preferred before others. There is great
testimony of discriminating persons to the effect that Rome is
endowed with the enchanting property of inspiring a longing in men
there to live and there to die.
* * * * *
Who lives one year in Boston ranges through all the climates of the
globe. And if the character of the people has a larger range and
greater versatility, causing them to exhibit equal dexterity in
what are elsewhere reckoned incompatible works, perhaps they may
thank their climate of extremes, which at one season gives them the
splendor of the equator and a touch of Syria, and then runs down to
a cold which approaches the temperature of the celestial spaces.
It is not a country of luxury or of pictures; of snows rather, of
east-winds and changing skies; visited by icebergs, which, floating
by, nip with their cool breath our blossoms. Not a luxurious climate,
but wisdom is not found with those who dwell at their ease. Give me a
climate where people think well and construct well,—I will spend six
months there, and you may have all the rest of my years.
What Vasari says, three hundred years ago, of the republican city
of Florence might be said of Boston; “that the desire for glory and
honor is powerfully generated by the air of that place, in the men
of every profession; whereby all who possess talent are impelled to
struggle that they may not remain in the same grade with those whom
they perceive to be only men like themselves, even though they may
acknowledge such indeed to be masters; but all labor by every means
to be foremost.”
We find no less stimulus in our native air; not less ambition in
our blood, which Puritanism has not sufficiently chastised; and at
least an equal freedom in our laws and customs, with as many and as
tempting rewards to toil; with so many philanthropies, humanities,
charities, soliciting us to be great and good.
New England is a sort of Scotland. ’Tis hard to say why. Climate is
much; then, old accumulation of the means,—books, schools, colleges,
literary society;—as New Bedford is not nearer to the whales than New
London or Portland, yet they have all the equipments for a whaler
ready, and they hug an oil-cask like a brother.
I do not know that Charles River or Merrimac water is more clarifying
to the brain than the Savannah or Alabama rivers, yet the men that
drink it get up earlier, and some of the morning light lasts through
the day. I notice that they who drink for some little time of the
Potomac water lose their relish for the water of the Charles River,
of the Merrimac and the Connecticut,—even of the Hudson. I think the
Potomac water is a little acrid, and should be corrected by copious
infusions of these provincial streams.
Of great cities you cannot compute the influences. In New York,
in Montreal, New Orleans and the farthest colonies,—in Guiana, in
Guadaloupe,—a middle-aged gentleman is just embarking with all his
property to fulfil the dream of his life and spend his old age in
Paris; so that a fortune falls into the massive wealth of that city
every day in the year. Astronomers come because there they can find
apparatus and companions. Chemist, geologist, artist, musician,
dancer, because there only are grandees and their patronage,
appreciators and patrons. Demand and supply run into every invisible
and unnamed province of whim and passion.
Each great city gathers these values and delights for mankind,
and comes to be the brag of its age and population. The Greeks
thought him unhappy who died without seeing the statue of Jove at
Olympia. With still more reason, they praised Athens, the “Violet
City.” It was said of Rome in its proudest days, looking at the
vast radiation of the privilege of Roman citizenship through the
then-known world,—“the extent of the city and of the world is the
same” (_spatium et urbis et orbis idem_). London now for a thousand
years has been in an affirmative or energizing mood; has not stopped
growing. Linnæus, like a naturalist, esteeming the globe a big egg,
called London the _punctum saliens_ in the yolk of the world.
* * * * *
This town of Boston has a history. It is not an accident, not a
windmill, or a railroad station, or cross-roads tavern, or an
army-barracks grown up by time and luck to a place of wealth; but
a seat of humanity, of men of principle, obeying a sentiment and
marching loyally whither that should lead them; so that its annals
are great historical lines, inextricably national; part of the
history of political liberty. I do not speak with any fondness, but
the language of coldest history, when I say that Boston commands
attention as the town which was appointed in the destiny of nations
to lead the civilization of North America.
A capital fact distinguishing this colony from all other colonies was
that the persons composing it consented to come on the one condition
that the charter should be transferred from the company in England to
themselves; and so they brought the government with them.
On the 3d of November, 1620, King James incorporated forty of his
subjects, Sir F. Gorges and others, the council established at
Plymouth in the county of Devon for the planting, ruling, ordering
and governing of New England in America. The territory—conferred on
the patentees in absolute property, with unlimited jurisdiction, the
sole power of legislation, the appointment of all officers and all
forms of government—extended from the 40th to the 48th degree of
north latitude, and in length from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
John Smith writes (1624): “Of all the four parts of the world that
I have yet seen not inhabited, could I but have means to transplant
a colony, I would rather live here than anywhere; and if it did not
maintain itself, were we but once indifferently well fitted, let us
starve. Here are many isles planted with corn, groves, mulberries,
salvage gardens and good harbours. The sea-coast as you pass shows
you all along large corn-fields and great troops of well-proportioned
people.” Massachusetts in particular, he calls “the paradise of these
parts,” notices its high mountain, and its river, “which doth pierce
many days’ journey into the entrails of that country.” Morton arrived
in 1622, in June, beheld the country, and “the more he looked, the
more he liked it.”
In sixty-eight years after the foundation of Boston, Dr. Mather
writes of it, “The town hath indeed three elder Sisters in this
colony, but it hath wonderfully outgrown them all, and her mother,
Old Boston in England, also; yea, within a few years after the first
settlement it grew to be the metropolis of the whole English America.”
How easy it is, after the city is built, to see where it ought to
stand. In our beautiful bay, with its broad and deep waters covered
with sails from every port; with its islands hospitably shining in
the sun; with its waters bounded and marked by light-houses, buoys
and sea-marks; every foot sounded and charted; with its shores
trending steadily from the two arms which the capes of Massachusetts
stretch out to sea, down to the bottom of the bay where the city
domes and spires sparkle through the haze,—a good boatman can easily
find his way for the first time to the State House, and wonder that
Governor Carver had not better eyes than to stop on the Plymouth
Sands.
But it took ten years to find this out. The colony of 1620 had landed
at Plymouth. It was December, and the ground was covered with snow.
Snow and moonlight make all places alike; and the weariness of the
sea, the shrinking from cold weather and the pangs of hunger must
justify them.
But the next colony planted itself at Salem, and the next at
Weymouth; another at Medford; before these men, instead of jumping on
to the first land that offered, wisely judged that the best point for
a city was at the bottom of a deep and islanded bay, where a copious
river entered it, and where a bold shore was bounded by a country of
rich undulating woodland.
* * * * *
The planters of Massachusetts do not appear to have been hardy men,
rather, comfortable citizens, not at all accustomed to the rough task
of discoverers; and they exaggerated their troubles. Bears and wolves
were many; but early, they believed there were lions; Monadnoc was
burned over to kill them. John Smith was stung near to death by the
most poisonous tail of a fish, called a sting-ray. In the journey of
Rev. Peter Bulkeley and his company through the forest from Boston to
Concord they fainted from the powerful odor of the sweetfern in the
sun;—like what befell, still earlier, Biorn and Thorfinn, Northmen,
in their expedition to the same coast; who ate so many grapes from
the wild vines that they were reeling drunk. The lions have never
appeared since,—nor before. Their crops suffered from pigeons and
mice. Nature has never again indulged in these exasperations. It
seems to have been the last outrage ever committed by the sting-rays
or by the sweetfern, or by the fox-grapes; they have been of
peaceable behavior ever since.
Any geologist or engineer is accustomed to face more serious dangers
than any enumerated, excepting the hostile Indians. But the awe was
real and overpowering in the superstition with which every new object
was magnified. The superstition which hung over the new ocean had
not yet been scattered; the powers of the savage were not known; the
dangers of the wilderness were unexplored; and, in that time, terrors
of witchcraft, terrors of evil spirits, and a certain degree of
terror still clouded the idea of God in the mind of the purest.
The divine will descends into the barbarous mind in some strange
disguise; its pure truth not to be guessed from the rude vizard under
which it goes masquerading. The common eye cannot tell what the bird
will be, from the egg, nor the pure truth from the grotesque tenet
which sheathes it. But by some secret tie it holds the poor savage
to it, and he goes muttering his rude ritual or mythology, which yet
conceals some grand commandment; as courage, veracity, honesty, or
chastity and generosity.
So these English men, with the Middle Ages still obscuring their
reason, were filled with Christian thought. They had a culture of
their own. They read Milton, Thomas à Kempis, Bunyan and Flavel with
religious awe and delight, not for entertainment. They were precisely
the idealists of England; the most religious in a religious era. An
old lady who remembered these pious people said of them that “they
had to hold on hard to the huckleberry bushes to hinder themselves
from being translated.”
In our own age we are learning to look as on chivalry at the
sweetness of that ancient piety which makes the genius of St.
Bernard, Latimer, Scougal, Jeremy Taylor, Herbert, and Leighton.
Who can read the fiery ejaculations of St. Augustine, a man of as
clear a sight as almost any other; of Thomas à Kempis, of Milton, of
Bunyan even, without feeling how rich and expansive a culture—not
so much a culture as a higher life—they owed to the promptings of
this sentiment; without contrasting their immortal heat with the
cold complexion of our recent wits? Who can read the pious diaries
of the Englishmen in the time of the Commonwealth and later, without
a sigh that we write no diaries to-day? Who shall restore to us the
odoriferous Sabbaths which made the earth and the humble roof a
sanctity?
This spirit, of course, involved that of Stoicism, as, in its turn,
Stoicism did this. Yet how much more attractive and true that this
piety should be the central trait and the stern virtues follow, than
that Stoicism should face the gods and put Jove on his defence. That
piety is a refutation of every skeptical doubt. These men are a
bridge to us between the unparalleled piety of the Hebrew epoch and
our own. These ancient men, like great gardens with great banks of
flowers, send out their perfumed breath across the great tracts of
time. How needful is David, Paul, Leighton, Fénelon, to our devotion.
Of these writers, of this spirit which deified them, I will say with
Confucius, “If in the morning I hear of the right way, and in the
evening die, I can be happy.”
I trace to this deep religious sentiment and to its culture great
and salutary results to the people of New England; first, namely,
the culture of the intellect, which has always been found in the
Calvinistic church. The colony was planted in 1620; in 1638 Harvard
College was founded. The General Court of Massachusetts, in 1647,
“To the end that learning may not be buried in the graves of the
forefathers, ordered, that every township, after the Lord has
increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall appoint one
to teach all children to write and read; and where any town shall
increase to the number of a hundred families, they shall set up a
Grammar School, the Masters thereof being able to instruct youth so
far as they may be fitted for the University.”
Many and rich are the fruits of that simple statute. The universality
of an elementary education in New England is her praise and her
power in the whole world. To the schools succeeds the village
Lyceum,—now very general throughout all the country towns of New
England,—where every week through the winter, lectures are read and
debates sustained which prove a college for the young rustic. Hence
it happens that the young farmers and mechanics, who work all summer
in the field or shop, in the winter often go into a neighboring town
to teach the district school arithmetic and grammar. As you know too,
New England supplies annually a large detachment of preachers and
schoolmasters and private tutors to the interior of the South and
West.
* * * * *
New England lies in the cold and hostile latitude which by shutting
men up in houses and tight and heated rooms a large part of the year,
and then again shutting up the body in flannel and leather, defrauds
the human being in some degree of his relations to external nature;
takes from the muscles their suppleness, from the skin its exposure
to the air; and the New Englander, like every other northerner, lacks
that beauty and grace which the habit of living much in the air, and
the activity of the limbs not in labor but in graceful exercise, tend
to produce in climates nearer to the sun. Then the necessity, which
always presses the northerner, of providing fuel and many clothes
and tight houses and much food against the long winter, makes him
anxiously frugal, and generates in him that spirit of detail which is
not grand and enlarging, but goes rather to pinch the features and
degrade the character.
As an antidote to the spirit of commerce and of economy, the
religious spirit—always enlarging, firing man, prompting the
pursuit of the vast, the beautiful, the unattainable—was especially
necessary to the culture of New England. In the midst of her
laborious and economical and rude and awkward population, where is
little elegance and no facility; with great accuracy in details,
little spirit of society or knowledge of the world, you shall not
unfrequently meet that refinement which no education and no habit
of society can bestow; which makes the elegance of wealth look
stupid, and unites itself by natural affinity to the highest minds
of the world; nourishes itself on Plato and Dante, Michael Angelo
and Milton; on whatever is pure and sublime in art,—and, I may say,
gave a hospitality in this country to the spirit of Coleridge and
Wordsworth, and to the music of Beethoven, before yet their genius
had found a hearty welcome in Great Britain.
I do not look to find in England better manners than the best manners
here. We can show native examples, and I may almost say (travellers
as we are) natives who never crossed the sea, who possess all the
elements of noble behavior.
It is the property of the religious sentiment to be the most refining
of all influences. No external advantages, no good birth or breeding,
no culture of the taste, no habit of command, no association with the
elegant,—even no depth of affection that does not rise to a religious
sentiment, can bestow that delicacy and grandeur of bearing which
belong only to a mind accustomed to celestial conversation. All else
is coarse and external; all else is tailoring and cosmetics beside
this;[2] for thoughts are expressed in every look or gesture, and
these thoughts are as if angels had talked with the child.
By this instinct we are lifted to higher ground. The religious
sentiment gave the iron purpose and arm. That colonizing was a great
and generous scheme, manly meant and manly done. When one thinks of
the enterprises that are attempted in the heats of youth, the Zoars,
New-Harmonies and Brook-Farms, Oakdales and Phalansteries, which have
been so profoundly ventilated, but end in a protracted picnic which
after a few weeks or months dismisses the partakers to their old
homes, we see with new increased respect the solid, well-calculated
scheme of these emigrants, sitting down hard and fast where they
came, and building their empire by due degrees.
John Smith says, “Thirty, forty, or fifty sail went yearly in America
only to trade and fish, but nothing would be done for a plantation,
till about some hundred of your Brownists of England, Amsterdam and
Leyden went to New Plymouth; whose humorous ignorances caused them
for more than a year to endure a wonderful deal of misery, with an
infinite patience.”
What should hinder that this America, so long kept in reserve from
the intellectual races until they should grow to it, glimpses being
afforded which spoke to the imagination, yet the firm shore hid until
science and art should be ripe to propose it as a fixed aim, and a
man should be found who should sail steadily west sixty-eight days
from the port of Palos to find it,—what should hinder that this New
Atlantis should have its happy ports, its mountains of security, its
gardens fit for human abode where all elements were right for the
health, power and virtue of man?
America is growing like a cloud, towns on towns, States on States;
and wealth (always interesting, since from wealth power cannot be
divorced) is piled in every form invented for comfort or pride.
If John Bull interest you at home, come and see him under new
conditions, come and see the Jonathanization of John.
There are always men ready for adventures,—more in an over-governed,
over-peopled country, where all the professions are crowded and all
character suppressed, than elsewhere. This thirst for adventure is
the vent which Destiny offers; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new
country, speak to the imagination and offer swing and play to the
confined powers.
The American idea, Emancipation, appears in our freedom of
intellection, in our reforms, and in our bad politics; it has, of
course, its sinister side, which is most felt by the drilled and
scholastic, but if followed it leads to heavenly places.
European and American are each ridiculous out of his sphere. There is
a Columbia of thought and art and character, which is the last and
endless sequel of Columbus’s adventure.
* * * * *
European critics regret the detachment of the Puritans to this
country without aristocracy; which a little reminds one of the pity
of the Swiss mountaineers when shown a handsome Englishman: “What
a pity he has no goitre!” The future historian will regard the
detachment of the Puritans without aristocracy the supreme fortune
of the colony; as great a gain to mankind as the opening of this
continent.
There is a little formula, couched in pure Saxon, which you may hear
in the corners of streets and in the yard of the dame’s school, from
very little republicans: “I’m as good as you be,” which contains
the essence of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights and of the American
Declaration of Independence. And this was at the bottom of Plymouth
Rock and of Boston Stone; and this could be heard (by an acute ear)
in the Petitions to the King, and the platforms of churches, and was
said and sung in every tone of the psalmody of the Puritans; in every
note of Old Hundred and Hallelujah and Short Particular Metre.
What is very conspicuous is the saucy independence which shines in
all their eyes. They could say to themselves, Well, at least this
yoke of man, of bishops, of courtiers, of dukes, is off my neck. We
are a little too close to wolf and famine than that anybody should
give himself airs here in the swamp.
London is a long way off, with beadles and pursuivants and
horse-guards. Here in the clam-banks and the beech and chestnut
forest, I shall take leave to breathe and think freely. If you do
not like it, if you molest me, I can cross the brook and plant a new
state out of reach of anything but squirrels and wild pigeons.
Bonaparte sighed for his republicans of 1789. The soul of a political
party is by no means usually the officers and pets of the party, who
wear the honors and fill the high seats and spend the salaries. No,
but the theorists and extremists, the men who are never contented
and never to be contented with the work actually accomplished, but
who from conscience are engaged to what that party professes,—these
men will work and watch and rally and never tire in carrying their
point. The theology and the instinct of freedom that grew here in
the dark in serious men furnished a certain rancor which consumed
all opposition, fed the party and carried it, over every rampart and
obstacle, to victory.
Boston never wanted a good principle of rebellion in it, from
the planting until now; there is always a minority unconvinced,
always a heresiarch, whom the governor and deputies labor with but
cannot silence. Some new light, some new doctrinaire who makes an
unnecessary ado to establish his dogma; some Wheelwright or defender
of Wheelwright; some protester against the cruelty of the magistrates
to the Quakers; some tender minister hospitable to Whitefield against
the counsel of all the ministers; some John Adams and Josiah Quincy
and Governor Andrew to undertake and carry the defence of patriots
in the courts against the uproar of all the province; some defender
of the slave against the politician and the merchant; some champion
of first principles of humanity against the rich and luxurious; some
adversary of the death penalty; some pleader for peace; some noble
protestant, who will not stoop to infamy when all are gone mad, but
will stand for liberty and justice, if alone, until all come back to
him.
* * * * *
I confess I do not find in our people, with all their education, a
fair share of originality of thought;—not any remarkable book of
wisdom; not any broad generalization, any equal power of imagination.
No Novum Organon; no Mécanique Céleste; no Principia; no Paradise
Lost; no Hamlet; no Wealth of Nations; no National Anthem; have we
yet contributed.
Nature is a frugal mother and never gives without measure. When she
has work to do she qualifies men for that and sends them equipped
for that. In Massachusetts she did not want epic poems and dramas
yet, but first, planters of towns, fellers of the forest, builders of
mills and forges, builders of roads, and farmers to till and harvest
corn for the world. Corn, yes, but honest corn; corn with thanks to
the Giver of corn; and the best thanks, namely, obedience to his law;
this was the office imposed on our Founders and people; liberty,
clean and wise. It was to be built on Religion, the Emancipator;
Religion which teaches equality of all men in view of the spirit
which created man.
The seed of prosperity was planted. The people did not gather where
they had not sown. They did not try to unlock the treasure of the
world except by honest keys of labor and skill. They knew, as God
knew, that command of nature comes by obedience to nature; that
reward comes by faithful service; that the most noble motto was that
of the Prince of Wales,—“I serve,”—and that he is greatest who serves
best. There was no secret of labor which they disdained.
They accepted the divine ordination that man is for use; that
intelligent being exists to the utmost use; and that his ruin is
to live for pleasure and for show. And when within our memory some
flippant senator wished to taunt the people of this country by
calling them “the mudsills of society,” he paid them ignorantly a
true praise; for good men are as the green plain of the earth is, as
the rocks, and the beds of rivers are, the foundation and flooring
and sills of the State.
The power of labor which belongs to the English race fell here into
a climate which befriended it, and into a maritime country made for
trade, where was no rival and no envious lawgiver. The sailor and the
merchant made the law to suit themselves, so that there was never,
I suppose, a more rapid expansion in population, wealth and all the
elements of power, and in the citizens, consciousness of power and
sustained assertion of it, than was exhibited here.
Moral values become also money values. When men saw that these
people, besides their industry and thrift, had a heart and soul and
would stand by each other at all hazards, they desired to come and
live here. A house in Boston was worth as much again as a house just
as good in a town of timorous people, because here the neighbors
would defend each other against bad governors and against troops;
quite naturally house-rents rose in Boston.
Besides, youth and health like a stirring town, above a torpid place
where nothing is doing. In Boston they were sure to see something
going forward before the year was out. For here was the moving
principle itself, the _primum mobile_, a living mind agitating the
mass and always afflicting the conservative class with some odious
novelty or other; a new religious sect, a political point, a point of
honor, a reform in education, a philanthropy.
From Roger Williams and Eliot and Robinson and the Quaker women who
for a testimony walked naked into the streets, and as the record
tells us “were arrested and publicly whipped,—the baggages that
they were;” from Wheelwright the Antinomian and Ann Hutchinson and
Whitefield and Mother Ann the first Shaker, down to Abner Kneeland
and Father Lamson and William Garrison, there never was wanting some
thorn of dissent and innovation and heresy to prick the sides of
conservatism.
With all their love of his person, they took immense pleasure in
turning out the governor and deputy and assistants, and contravening
the counsel of the clergy; as they had come so far for the sweet
satisfaction of resisting the Bishops and the King.
* * * * *
The Massachusetts colony grew and filled its own borders with a
denser population than any other American State (Kossuth called it
the City State), all the while sending out colonies to every part of
New England; then South and West, until it has infused all the Union
with its blood.
We are willing to see our sons emigrate, as to see our hives swarm.
That is what they were made to do, and what the land wants and
invites. The towns or countries in which the man lives and dies where
he was born, and his son and son’s son live and die where he did, are
of no great account.
I know that this history contains many black lines of cruel
injustice; murder, persecution, and execution of women for witchcraft.
I am afraid there are anecdotes of poverty and disease in Broad
Street that match the dismal statistics of New York and London. No
doubt all manner of vices can be found in this, as in every city;
infinite meanness, scarlet crime. Granted. But there is yet in
every city a certain permanent tone; a tendency to be in the right
or in the wrong; audacity or slowness; labor or luxury; giving or
parsimony; which side is it on? And I hold that a community, as a
man, is entitled to be judged by his best.
We are often praised for what is least ours. Boston too is sometimes
pushed into a theatrical attitude of virtue, to which she is not
entitled and which she cannot keep. But the genius of Boston is seen
in her real independence, productive power and northern acuteness of
mind,—which is in nature hostile to oppression. It is a good city
as cities go; Nature is good. The climate is electric, good for wit
and good for character. What public souls have lived here, what
social benefactors, what eloquent preachers, skilful workmen, stout
captains, wise merchants; what fine artists, what gifted conversers,
what mathematicians, what lawyers, what wits; and where is the middle
class so able, virtuous and instructed?
And thus our little city thrives and enlarges, striking deep roots,
and sending out boughs and buds, and propagating itself like a banyan
over the continent. Greater cities there are that sprung from it,
full of its blood and names and traditions. It is very willing to
be outnumbered and outgrown, so long as they carry forward its life
of civil and religious freedom, of education, of social order, and
of loyalty to law. It is very willing to be outrun in numbers, and
in wealth; but it is very jealous of any superiority in these, its
natural instinct and privilege. You cannot conquer it by numbers,
or by square miles, or by counted millions of wealth. For it owes
its existence and its power to principles not of yesterday, and
the deeper principle will always prevail over whatever material
accumulations.
As long as she cleaves to her liberty, her education and to her
spiritual faith as the foundation of these, she will teach the
teachers and rule the rulers of America. Her mechanics, her farmers
will toil better; she will repair mischief; she will furnish what is
wanted in the hour of need; her sailors will man the Constitution;
her mechanics repair the broken rail; her troops will be the first in
the field to vindicate the majesty of a free nation, and remain last
on the field to secure it. Her genius will write the laws and her
historians record the fate of nations.
* * * * *
In an age of trade and material prosperity, we have stood a little
stupefied by the elevation of our ancestors. We praised the Puritans
because we did not find in ourselves the spirit to do the like.
We praised with a certain adulation the invariable valor of the
old war-gods and war-councillors of the Revolution. Washington
has seemed an exceptional virtue. This praise was a concession of
unworthiness in those who had so much to say of it. The heroes only
shared this power of a sentiment, which, if it now breathes into us,
will make it easy to us to understand them, and we shall not longer
flatter them. Let us shame the fathers, by superior virtue in the
sons.
It is almost a proverb that a great man has not a great son. Bacon,
Newton and Washington were childless. But, in Boston, Nature is
more indulgent, and has given good sons to good sires, or at least
continued merit in the same blood. The elder President Adams has to
divide voices of fame with the younger President Adams. The elder
Otis could hardly excel the popular eloquence of the younger Otis;
and the Quincy of the Revolution seems compensated for the shortness
of his bright career in the son who so long lingers among the last of
those bright clouds,
“That on the steady breeze of honor sail
In long succession calm and beautiful.”
Here stands to-day as of yore our little city of the rocks; here
let it stand forever, on the man-bearing granite of the North! Let
her stand fast by herself! She has grown great. She is filled with
strangers, but she can only prosper by adhering to her faith. Let
every child that is born of her and every child of her adoption see
to it to keep the name of Boston as clean as the sun; and in distant
ages her motto shall be the prayer of millions on all the hills
that gird the town, “As with our Fathers, so God be with us!” SICUT
PATRIBUS, SIT DEUS NOBIS!
FOOTNOTES:
[2]
“Come dal fuoco il caldo, esser diviso,
Non puo’l bel dall’ eterno.”
MICHEL ANGELO.
[As from fire heat cannot be separated,—neither can beauty from the
eternal.]
MICHAEL ANGELO.
Never did sculptor’s dream unfold
A form which marble doth not hold
In its white block; yet it therein shall find
Only the hand secure and bold
Which still obeys the mind.
MICHAEL ANGELO’S _Sonnets_.
Non ha l’ ottimo artista alcun concetto,
Ch’un marmo solo in sè non circoscriva
Col suo soverchio, e solo a quello arriva
La man che obbedisce all’ intelletto.
M. ANGELO, _Sonnetto primo_.
[Illustration: (decorative banner)]
MICHAEL ANGELO.[3]
Few lives of eminent men are harmonious; few that furnish, in all
the facts, an image corresponding with their fame. But all things
recorded of Michael Angelo Buonarotti agree together. He lived one
life; he pursued one career. He accomplished extraordinary works;
he uttered extraordinary words; and in this greatness was so little
eccentricity, so true was he to the laws of the human mind, that his
character and his works, like Sir Isaac Newton’s, seem rather a part
of nature than arbitrary productions of the human will. Especially we
venerate his moral fame. Whilst his name belongs to the highest class
of genius, his life contains in it no injurious influence. Every
line in his biography might be read to the human race with wholesome
effect. The means, the materials of his activity, were coarse enough
to be appreciated, being addressed for the most part to the eye; the
results, sublime and all innocent. A purity severe and even terrible
goes out from the lofty productions of his pencil and his chisel, and
again from the more perfect sculpture of his own life, which heals
and exalts. “He nothing common did, or mean,” and dying at the end
of near ninety years, had not yet become old, but was engaged in
executing his grand conceptions in the ineffaceable architecture of
St. Peter’s.
Above all men whose history we know, Michael Angelo presents us with
the perfect image of the artist. He is an eminent master in the four
fine arts, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture and Poetry. In three of
them by visible means, and in poetry by words, he strove to express
the Idea of Beauty. This idea possessed him and determined all his
activity. Beauty in the largest sense, beauty inward and outward,
comprehending grandeur as a part, and reaching to goodness as its
soul,—this to receive and this to impart, was his genius.
It is a happiness to find, amid the falsehood and griefs of the
human race, a soul at intervals born to behold and create only
beauty. So shall not the indescribable charm of the natural world,
the great spectacle of morn and evening which shut and open the most
disastrous day, want observers. The ancient Greeks called the world
Κόσμος, _Beauty_; a name which, in our artificial state of society,
sounds fanciful and impertinent. Yet, in proportion as man rises
above the servitude to wealth and a pursuit of mean pleasures, he
perceives that what is most real is most beautiful, and that, by the
contemplation of such objects, he is taught and exalted. This truth,
that perfect beauty and perfect goodness are one, was made known to
Michael Angelo; and we shall endeavor by sketches from his life to
show the direction and limitations of his search after this element.
In considering a life dedicated to the study of Beauty, it is
natural to inquire, what is Beauty? Can this charming element be so
abstracted by the human mind, as to become a distinct and permanent
object? Beauty cannot be defined. Like Truth, it is an ultimate
aim of the human being. It does not lie within the limits of the
understanding. “The nature of the beautiful,”—we gladly borrow the
language of Moritz, a German critic,—“consists herein, that because
the understanding in the presence of the beautiful cannot ask, ‘Why
is it beautiful?’ for that reason is it so. There is no standard
whereby the understanding can determine whether objects are beautiful
or otherwise. What other standard of the beautiful exists, than the
entire circuit of all harmonious proportions of the great system of
nature? All particular beauties scattered up and down in nature are
only so far beautiful, as they suggest more or less in themselves
this entire circuit of harmonious proportions.” This great Whole, the
understanding cannot embrace. Beauty may be felt. It may be produced.
But it cannot be defined.
The Italian artists sanction this view of beauty by describing it
as _il più nell’ uno_, “the many in one,” or multitude in unity,
intimating that what is truly beautiful seems related to all nature.
A beautiful person has a kind of universality, and appears to have
truer conformity to all pleasing objects in external nature than
another. Every great work of art seems to take up into itself the
excellencies of all works, and to present, as it were, a miniature of
nature.
In relation to this element of Beauty, the minds of men divide
themselves into two classes. In the first place, all men have an
organization corresponding more or less to the entire system of
nature, and therefore a power of deriving pleasure from Beauty. This
is Taste. In the second place, certain minds, more closely harmonized
with nature, possess the power of abstracting Beauty from things,
and reproducing it in new forms, on any object to which accident may
determine their activity; as stone, canvas, song, history. This is
Art.
Since Beauty is thus an abstraction of the harmony and proportion
that reigns in all nature, it is therefore studied in nature, and
not in what does not exist. Hence the celebrated French maxim of
Rhetoric, _Rien de beau que le vrai_; “Nothing is beautiful but
what is true.” It has a much wider application than to Rhetoric; as
wide, namely, as the terms of the proposition admit. In art, Michael
Angelo is himself but a document or verification of this maxim. He
labored to express the beautiful, in the entire conviction that it
was only to be attained unto by knowledge of the true. The common eye
is satisfied with the surface on which it rests. The wise eye knows
that it is surface, and, if beautiful, only the result of interior
harmonies, which, to him who knows them, compose the image of higher
beauty. Moreover, he knew well that only by an understanding of
the internal mechanism can the outside be faithfully delineated.
The walls of houses are transparent to the architect. The symptoms
disclose the constitution to the physician; and to the artist it
belongs by a better knowledge of anatomy, and, within anatomy, of
life and thought, to acquire the power of true drawing. “The human
form,” says Goethe, “cannot be comprehended through seeing its
surface. It must be stripped of the muscles, its parts separated, its
joints observed, its divisions marked, its action and counter action
learned; the hidden, the reposing, the foundation of the apparent,
must be searched, if one would really see and imitate what moves
as a beautiful inseparable whole in living waves before the eye.”
Michael Angelo dedicated himself, from his childhood to his death,
to a toilsome observation of nature. The first anecdote recorded of
him shows him to be already on the right road. Granacci, a painter’s
apprentice, having lent him, when a boy, a print of St. Antony beaten
by devils, together with some colors and pencils, he went to the
fish-market to observe the form and color of fins and of the eyes of
fish. Cardinal Farnese one day found him, when an old man, walking
alone in the Coliseum, and expressed his surprise at finding him
solitary amidst the ruins; to which he replied, “I go yet to school
that I may continue to learn.” And one of the last drawings in his
portfolio is a sublime hint of his own feeling; for it is a sketch of
an old man with a long beard, in a go-cart, with an hour-glass before
him; and the motto, _Ancora imparo_, “I still learn.”
In this spirit he devoted himself to the study of anatomy for twelve
years; we ought to say rather, as long as he lived. The depth of his
knowledge in anatomy has no parallel among the artists of modern
times. Most of his designs, his contemporaries inform us, were made
with a pen, and in the style of an engraving on copper or wood; a
manner more expressive but not admitting of correction. When Michael
Angelo would begin a statue, he made first on paper the _skeleton_;
afterwards, upon another paper, the same figure clothed with muscles.
The studies of the statue of Christ in the Church of Minerva at Rome,
made in this manner, were long preserved.
Those who have never given attention to the arts of design, are
surprised that the artist should find so much to study in a fabric of
such limited parts and dimensions as the human body. But reflection
discloses evermore a closer analogy between the finite form and
the infinite inhabitant. Man is the highest, and indeed the only
proper object of plastic art. There needs no better proof of our
instinctive feeling of the immense expression of which the human
figure is capable, than the uniform tendency which the religion of
every country has betrayed towards Anthropomorphism, or attributing
to the Deity the human form. And behold the effect of this familiar
object every day! No acquaintance with the secrets of its mechanism,
no degrading views of human nature, not the most swinish compost of
mud and blood that was ever misnamed philosophy, can avail to hinder
us from doing involuntary reverence to any exhibition of majesty or
surpassing beauty in human clay.
Our knowledge of its highest expression we owe to the Fine Arts. Not
easily in this age will any man acquire by himself such perceptions
of the dignity or grace of the human frame, as the student of
art owes to the remains of Phidias, to the Apollo, the Jove, the
paintings and statues of Michael Angelo, and the works of Canova.
There are now in Italy, both on canvas and in marble, forms and faces
which the imagination is enriched by contemplating. Goethe says that
he is but half himself who has never seen the Juno in the Rondanini
palace at Rome. Seeing these works true to human nature and yet
superhuman, “we feel that we are greater than we know.” Seeing these
works, we appreciate the taste which led Michael Angelo, against the
taste and against the admonition of his patrons, to cover the walls
of churches with unclothed figures, “improper,” says his biographer,
“for the place, but proper for the exhibition of all the pomp of his
profound knowledge.”
The love of beauty which never passes beyond outline and color, was
too slight an object to occupy the powers of his genius. There is
a closer relation than is commonly thought between the fine arts
and the useful arts; and it is an essential fact in the history of
Michael Angelo, that his love of beauty is made solid and perfect
by his deep understanding of the mechanic arts. Architecture is
the bond that unites the elegant and the economical arts, and his
skill in this is a pledge of his capacity in both kinds. His Titanic
handwriting in marble and travertine is to be found in every part of
Rome and Florence; and even at Venice, on defective evidence, he is
said to have given the plan of the bridge of the Rialto. Nor was his
a skill in ornament, or confined to the outline and designs of towers
and façades, but a thorough acquaintance with all the secrets of the
art, with all the details of economy and strength.
When the Florentines united themselves with Venice, England and
France, to oppose the power of the Emperor Charles V., Michael
Angelo was appointed Military Architect and Engineer, to superintend
the erection of the necessary works. He visited Bologna to inspect
its celebrated fortifications, and, on his return, constructed a
fortification on the heights of San Miniato, which commands the city
and environs of Florence. On the 24th of October, 1529, the Prince
of Orange, general of Charles V., encamped on the hills surrounding
the city, and his first operation was to throw up a rampart to
storm the bastion of San Miniato. His design was frustrated by the
providence of Michael Angelo. Michael made such good resistance, that
the Prince directed the artillery to demolish the tower. The artist
hung mattresses of wool on the side exposed to the attack, and by
means of a bold projecting cornice, from which they were suspended,
a considerable space was left between them and the wall. This simple
expedient was sufficient, and the Prince was obliged to turn his
siege into a blockade.
After an active and successful service to the city for six months,
Michael Angelo was informed of a treachery that was ripening within
the walls. He communicated it to the government with his advice upon
it; but was mortified by receiving from the government reproaches
at his credulity and fear. He replied, “that it was useless for him
to take care of the walls, if they were determined not to take care
of themselves,” and he withdrew privately from the city to Ferrara,
and thence to Venice. The news of his departure occasioned a general
concern in Florence, and he was instantly followed with apologies
and importunities to return. He did so, and resumed his office. On
the 21st of March, 1530, the Prince of Orange assaulted the city by
storm. Michael Angelo is represented as having ordered his defence so
vigorously, that the Prince was compelled to retire. By the treachery
however of the general of the Republic, Malatesta Baglioni, all his
skill was rendered unavailing, and the city capitulated on the 9th
of August. The excellence of the works constructed by our artist has
been approved by Vauban, who visited them and took a plan of them.
In Rome, Michael Angelo was consulted by Pope Paul III. in building
the fortifications of San Borgo. He built the stairs of Ara Celi
leading to the Church once the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; he
arranged the piazza of the Capitol, and built its porticoes. He
was charged with rebuilding the Pons Palatinus over the Tiber. He
prepared, accordingly, a large quantity of blocks of travertine,
and was proceeding with the work, when, through the intervention of
his rivals, this work was taken from him and intrusted to Nanni di
Bacio Bigio, who plays but a pitiful part in Michael’s history. Nanni
sold the travertine, and filled up the piers with gravel at a small
expense. Michael Angelo made known his opinion, that the bridge could
not resist the force of the current; and, one day riding over it on
horseback, with his friend Vasari, he cried, “George, this bridge
trembles under us; let us ride faster lest it fall whilst we are upon
it.” It fell, five years after it was built, in 1557, and is still
called the “Broken Bridge.”
Versatility of talent in men of undoubted ability always awakens
the liveliest interest; and we observe with delight, that, besides
the sublimity and even extravagance of Michael Angelo, he possessed
an unexpected dexterity in minute mechanical contrivances. When the
Sistine Chapel was prepared for him that he might paint the ceiling,
he found the platform on which he was to work, suspended by ropes
which passed through the ceiling. Michael demanded of San Gallo, the
Pope’s architect, how these holes were to be repaired in the picture?
San Gallo replied; “That was for him to consider, for the platform
could be constructed in no other way.” Michael removed the whole,
and constructed a movable platform to rest and roll upon the floor,
which is believed to be the same simple contrivance which is used
in Rome, at this day, to repair the walls of churches. He gave this
model to a carpenter, who made it so profitable as to furnish a dowry
for his two daughters. He was so nice in tools, that he made with his
own hand the wimbles, the files, the rasps, the chisels and all other
irons and instruments which he needed in sculpture; and, in painting,
he not only mixed but ground his colors himself, trusting no one.
And not only was this discoverer of Beauty, and its teacher among
men, rooted and grounded in those severe laws of practical skill,
which genius can never teach, and which must be learned by practice
alone, but he was one of the most industrious men that ever lived.
His diligence was so great that it is wonderful how he endured its
fatigues. The midnight battles, the forced marches, the winter
campaigns of Julius Cæsar or Charles XII. do not indicate greater
strength of body or of mind. He finished the gigantic painting of
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in twenty months, a fact which
enlarges, it has been said, the known powers of man. Indeed he toiled
so assiduously at this painful work, that, for a long time after,
he was unable to see any picture but by holding it over his head. A
little bread and wine was all his nourishment; and he told Vasari
that he often slept in his clothes, both because he was too weary to
undress, and because he would rise in the night and go immediately
to work. “I have found,” says his friend, “some of his designs in
Florence, where, whilst may be seen the greatness of his genius, it
may also be known that when he wished to take Minerva from the head
of Jove, there needed the hammer of Vulcan.” He used to make to a
single figure nine, ten, or twelve heads before he could satisfy
himself, seeking that there should be in the composition a certain
universal grace such as nature makes, saying, that “he needed to
have his compasses in his eye, and not in his hand, because the
hands work whilst the eye judges.” He was accustomed to say, “Those
figures alone are good, from which the labor is scraped off, when the
scaffolding is taken away.”
At near eighty years, he began in marble a group of four figures for
a dead Christ; because, he said, to exercise himself with the mallet
was good for his health.
And what did he accomplish? It does not fall within our design to
give an account of his works, yet for the sake of the completeness
of our sketch we will name the principal ones. Sculpture he called
_his_ art, and to it he regretted afterwards he had not singly
given himself. The style of his paintings is monumental; and even
his poetry partakes of that character. In sculpture, his greatest
work is the statue of Moses in the Church of Pietro in Vincolo, in
Rome. It is a sitting statue of colossal size, and is designed to
embody the Hebrew Law. The lawgiver is supposed to gaze upon the
worshippers of the golden calf. The majestic wrath of the figure
daunts the beholder. In the Piazza del Gran Duca at Florence, stands,
in the open air, his David, about to hurl the stone at Goliah. In
the Church called the Minerva, at Rome, is his Christ; an object of
so much devotion to the people, that the right foot has been shod
with a brazen sandal to prevent it from being kissed away. In St.
Peter’s, is his Pietà, or dead Christ in the arms of his mother. In
the Mausoleum of the Medici at Florence, are the tombs of Lorenzo
and Cosmo, with the grand statues of Night and Day, and Aurora and
Twilight. Several statues of less fame, and bas-reliefs, are in Rome
and Florence and Paris.
His Paintings are in the Sistine Chapel, of which he first
covered the ceiling with the story of the creation, in successive
compartments, with the great series of the Prophets and Sibyls in
alternate tablets, and a series of greater and smaller fancy-pieces
in the lunettes. This is his capital work painted in fresco. Every
one of these pieces, every figure, every hand and foot and finger,
is a study of anatomy and design. Slighting the secondary arts of
coloring, and all the aids of graceful finish, he aimed exclusively,
as a stern designer, to express the vigor and magnificence of his
conceptions. Upon the wall, over the altar, is painted the Last
Judgment.
Of his designs, the most celebrated is the cartoon representing
soldiers coming out in the bath and arming themselves; an incident of
the war of Pisa. The wonderful merit of this drawing, which contrasts
the extremes of relaxation and vigor, is conspicuous even in the
coarsest prints.
Of his genius for Architecture, it is sufficient to say that he
built St. Peter’s, an ornament of the earth. He said he would hang
the Pantheon in the air; and he redeemed his pledge by suspending
that vast cupola, without offence to grace or to stability, over the
astonished beholder. He did not live to complete the work; but is
there not something affecting in the spectacle of an old man, on the
verge of ninety years, carrying steadily onward with the heat and
determination of manhood, his poetic conceptions into progressive
execution, surmounting by the dignity of his purposes all obstacles
and all enmities, and only hindered by the limits of life from
fulfilling his designs? Very slowly came he, after months and years,
to the dome. At last he began to model it very small in wax. When it
was finished, he had it copied larger in wood, and by this model it
was built. Long after it was completed, and often since, to this day,
rumors are occasionally spread that it is giving way, and it is said
to have been injured by unskilful attempts to repair it. Benedict
XIV., during one of these panics, sent for the architect Marchese
Polini, to come to Rome and examine it. Polini put an end to all the
various projects of repairs, by the satisfying sentence; “The cupola
does not start, and if it should start, nothing can be done but to
pull it down.”
The impulse of his grand style was instantaneous upon his
contemporaries. Every stroke of his pencil moved the pencil in
Raphael’s hand. Raphael said, “I bless God I live in the times of
Michael Angelo.” Sir Joshua Reynolds, two centuries later, declared
to the British Institution, “I feel a self-congratulation in knowing
myself capable of such sensations as he intended to excite.”
A man of such habits and such deeds, made good his pretensions to
a perception and to delineation of external beauty. But inimitable
as his works are, his whole life confessed that his hand was all
inadequate to express his thought. “He alone,” he said, “is an artist
whose hands can perfectly execute what his mind has conceived;” and
such was his own mastery, that men said, “the marble was flexible in
his hands.” Yet, contemplating ever with love the idea of absolute
beauty, he was still dissatisfied with his own work. The things
proposed to him in his imagination were such, that, for not being
able with his hands to express so grand and terrible conceptions, he
often abandoned his work. For this reason he often only blocked his
statue. A little before he died, he burned a great number of designs,
sketches and cartoons made by him, being impatient of their defects.
Grace in living forms, except in very rare instances, did not satisfy
him. He never made but one portrait (a cartoon of Messer Tommaso di
Cavalieri), because he abhorred to draw a likeness unless it were of
infinite beauty.
Such was his devotion to art. But let no man suppose that the images
which his spirit worshipped were mere transcripts of external grace,
or that this profound soul was taken or holden in the chains of
superficial beauty. To him, of all men, it was transparent. Through
it he beheld the eternal spiritual beauty which ever clothes itself
with grand and graceful outlines, as its appropriate form. He called
eternal grace “the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the
soul which he has called into Time.” “As from the fire, heat cannot
be divided, no more can beauty from the eternal.” He was conscious
in his efforts of higher aims than to address the eye. He sought,
through the eye, to reach the soul. Therefore, as, in the first
place, he sought to approach the Beautiful by the study of the True,
so he failed not to make the next step of progress, and to seek
Beauty in its highest form, that of Goodness. The sublimity of his
art is in his life. He did not only build a divine temple, and paint
and carve saints and prophets. He lived out the same inspiration.
There is no spot upon his fame. The fire and sanctity of his pencil
breathe in his words. When he was informed that Paul IV. desired he
should paint again the side of the chapel where the Last Judgment
was painted, because of the indecorous nudity of the figures, he
replied, “Tell the Pope that this is easily done. Let him reform the
world and he will find the pictures will reform themselves.” He saw
clearly that if the corrupt and vulgar eyes, that could see nothing
but indecorum in his terrific prophets and angels, could be purified
as his own were pure, they would only find occasion for devotion in
the same figures. As he refused to undo his work, Daniel di Volterra
was employed to clothe the figures; hence ludicrously called _Il
Braghettone_. When the Pope suggested to him that the chapel would
be enriched if the figures were ornamented with gold, Michael Angelo
replied, “In those days, gold was not worn; and the characters I have
painted were neither rich nor desirous of wealth, but holy men, with
whom gold was an object of contempt.”
Not until he was in the seventy-third year of his age, he undertook
the building of St. Peter’s. On the death of San Gallo, the architect
of the church, Paul III. first entreated, then commanded the aged
artist, to assume the charge of this great work, which though
commenced forty years before, was only commenced by Bramante,
and ill continued by San Gallo. Michael Angelo, who believed in
his own ability as a sculptor, but distrusted his capacity as an
architect, at first refused and then reluctantly complied. His heroic
stipulation with the Pope was worthy of the man and the work. He
required that he should be permitted to accept this work without any
fee or reward, because he undertook it as a religious act; and,
furthermore, that he should be absolute master of the whole design,
free to depart from the plans of San Gallo and to alter what had been
already done.
This disinterestedness and spirit,—no fee and no interference,—reminds
one of the reward named by the ancient Persian. When importuned to
claim some compensation of the empire for the important services he
had rendered it, he demanded, “that he and his should neither command
nor obey, but should be free.” However, as it was undertaken, so was
it performed. When the Pope, delighted with one of his chapels, sent
him one hundred crowns of gold, as one month’s wages, Michael sent
them back. The Pope was angry, but the artist was immovable. Amidst
endless annoyances from the envy and interest of the office-holders
and agents in the work whom he had displaced, he steadily ripened
and executed his vast ideas. The combined desire to fulfil, in
everlasting stone, the conceptions of his mind, and to complete his
worthy offering to Almighty God, sustained him through numberless
vexations with unbroken spirit. In answer to the importunate
solicitations of the Duke of Tuscany that he would come to Florence,
he replies that “to leave St. Peter’s in the state in which it now
was, would be to ruin the structure, and thereby be guilty of a great
sin;” that he hoped he should shortly see the execution of his plans
brought to such a point that they could no longer be interfered with,
and this was the capital object of his wishes, “if,” he adds, “I do
not commit a great crime, by disappointing the cormorants who are
daily hoping to get rid of me.”
A natural fruit of the nobility of his spirit is his admiration of
Dante, to whom two of his sonnets are addressed. He shared Dante’s
“deep contempt of the vulgar, not of the simple inhabitants of lowly
streets or humble cottages, but of that sordid and abject crowd of
all classes and all places who obscure, as much as in them lies,
every beam of beauty in the universe.” In like manner, he possessed
an intense love of solitude. He lived alone, and never or very rarely
took his meals with any person. As will be supposed, he had a passion
for the country, and in old age speaks with extreme pleasure of his
residence with the hermits in the mountains of Spoleto; so much so
that he says he is “only half in Rome, since, truly, peace is only
to be found in the woods.” Traits of an almost savage independence
mark all his history. Although he was rich, he lived like a poor man,
and never would receive a present from any person; because it seemed
to him that if a man gave him anything, he was always obligated to
that individual. His friend Vasari mentions one occasion on which
his scruples were overcome. It seems that Michael was accustomed
to work at night with a pasteboard cap or helmet on his head, into
which he stuck a candle, that his work might be lighted and his hands
at liberty. Vasari observed that he did not use wax candles, but a
better sort made of the tallow of goats. He therefore sent him four
bundles of them, containing forty pounds. His servant brought them
after night-fall, and presented them to him. Michael Angelo refused
to receive them. “Look you, Messer Michael Angelo,” replied the man,
“these candles have well nigh broken my arm, and I will not carry
them back; but just here, before your door, is a spot of soft mud,
and they will stand upright in it very well, and there I will light
them all.”—“Put them down, then,” returned Michael, “since you shall
not make a bonfire at my gate.” Meantime he was liberal to profusion
to his old domestic Urbino, to whom he gave at one time two thousand
crowns, and made him rich in his service.
Michael Angelo was of that class of men who are too superior to the
multitude around them to command a full and perfect sympathy. They
stand in the attitude rather of appeal from their contemporaries to
their race. It has been the defect of some great men, that they did
not duly appreciate or did not confess the talents and virtues of
others, and so lacked one of the richest sources of happiness and
one of the best elements of humanity. This apathy perhaps happens
as often from preoccupied attention as from jealousy. It has been
supposed that artists more than others are liable to this defect.
But Michael Angelo’s praise on many works is to this day the stamp
of fame. Michael Angelo said of Masaccio’s pictures that when
they were first painted they must have been alive. He said of his
predecessor, the architect Bramante, that he laid the first stone of
St. Peter’s, clear, insulated, luminous, with fit design for a vast
structure. He often expressed his admiration of Cellini’s bust of
Altoviti. He loved to express admiration of Titian, of Donatello, of
Ghiberti, of Brunelleschi. And it is said that when he left Florence
to go to Rome, to build St. Peter’s, he turned his horse’s head on
the last hill from which the noble dome of the Cathedral (built by
Brunelleschi) is visible, and said, “Like you, I will not build;
better than you I cannot.” Indeed, as we have said, the reputation
of many works of art now in Italy derives a sanction from the
tradition of his praise. It is more commendation to say, “This was
Michael Angelo’s favorite,” than to say, “This was carried to Paris
by Napoleon.” Michael, however, had the philosophy to say, “Only an
inventor can use the inventions of others.”
There is yet one more trait in Michael Angelo’s history, which
humanizes his character without lessening its loftiness; this is his
platonic love. He was deeply enamored of the most accomplished lady
of the time, Vittoria Colonna, the widow of the Marquis di Pescara,
who, after the death of her husband, devoted herself to letters, and
to the writing of religious poetry. She was also an admirer of his
genius, and came to Rome repeatedly to see him. To her his sonnets
are addressed; and they all breathe a chaste and divine regard,
unparalleled in any amatory poetry except that of Dante and Petrarch.
They are founded on the thought that beauty is the virtue of the
body, as virtue is the beauty of the soul; that a beautiful person is
sent into the world as an image of the divine beauty, not to provoke
but to purify the sensual into an intellectual and divine love.
He enthrones his mistress as a benignant angel, who is to refine
and perfect his own character. Condivi, his friend, has left this
testimony; “I have often heard Michael Angelo reason and discourse
upon love, but never heard him speak otherwise than upon platonic
love. As for me, I am ignorant what Plato has said upon this subject;
but this I know very well, that, in a long intimacy, I never heard
from his mouth a single word that was not perfectly decorous and
having for its object to extinguish in youth every improper desire,
and that his own nature is a stranger to depravity.” The poems
themselves cannot be read without awakening sentiments of virtue.
An eloquent vindication of their philosophy may be found in a paper
by Signor Radici in the London “Retrospective Review,” and, by the
Italian scholar, in the Discourse of Benedetto Varchi upon one sonnet
of Michael Angelo, contained in the volume of his poems published by
Biagioli, from which, in substance, the views of Radici are taken.
Towards his end, there seems to have grown in him an invincible
appetite of dying, for he knew that his spirit could only enjoy
contentment after death. So vehement was this desire that, he says,
“my soul can no longer be appeased by the wonted seductions of
painting and sculpture.” A fine melancholy, not unrelieved by his
habitual heroism, pervades his thoughts on this subject. At the age
of eighty years, he wrote to Vasari, sending him various spiritual
sonnets he had written, and tells him he “is at the end of his life,
that he is careful where he bends his thoughts, that he sees it is
already twenty-four o’clock, and no fancy arose in his mind but
DEATH was sculptured on it.” In conversing upon this subject with
one of his friends, that person remarked, that Michael might well
grieve that one who was incessant in his creative labors should have
no restoration. “No,” replied Michael, “it is nothing; for, if life
pleases us, death, being a work of the same master, ought not to
displease us.” But a nobler sentiment, uttered by him, is contained
in his reply to a letter of Vasari, who had informed him of the
rejoicings made at the house of his nephew Lionardo, at Florence,
over the birth of another Buonarotti. Michael admonishes him that
“a man ought not to smile, when all those around him weep; and that
we ought not to show that joy when a child is born, which should be
reserved for the death of one who has lived well.”
Amidst all these witnesses to his independence, his generosity, his
purity and his devotion, are we not authorized to say that this
man was penetrated with the love of the highest beauty, that is,
goodness; that his was a soul so enamored of grace, that it could
not stoop to meanness or depravity; that art was to him no means of
livelihood or road to fame, but the end of living, as it was the
organ through which he sought to suggest lessons of an unutterable
wisdom; that here was a man who lived to demonstrate that to the
human faculties, on every hand, worlds of grandeur and grace are
opened, which no profane eye and no indolent eye can behold, but
which to see and to enjoy, demands the severest discipline of all the
physical, intellectual and moral faculties of the individual?
The city of Florence, on the river Arno, still treasures the fame
of this man. There, his picture hangs in every window; there, the
tradition of his opinions meets the traveller in every spot. “Do you
see that statue of St. George? Michael Angelo asked it why it did
not speak.”—“Do you see this fine church of Santa Maria Novella? It
is that which Michael Angelo called ‘his bride.’”—“Look at these
bronze gates of the Baptistery, with their high reliefs, cast by
Ghiberti five hundred years ago. Michael Angelo said, ‘they were fit
to be the gates of Paradise.’”—Here is the church, the palace, the
Laurentian library he built. Here is his own house. In the church of
Santa Croce are his mortal remains. Whilst he was yet alive, he asked
that he might be buried in that church, in such a spot that the dome
of the cathedral might be visible from his tomb when the doors of
the church stood open. And there and so is he laid. The innumerable
pilgrims whom the genius of Italy draws to the city, duly visit this
church, which is to Florence what Westminster Abbey is to England.
There, near the tomb of Nicholas Machiavelli, the historian and
philosopher; of Galileo, the great-hearted astronomer; of Boccaccio,
and of Alfieri, stands the monument of Michael Angelo Buonarotti.
Three significant garlands are sculptured on the tomb; they should
be four, but that his countrymen feared their own partiality. The
forehead of the bust, esteemed a faithful likeness, is furrowed with
eight deep wrinkles one above another. The traveller from a distant
continent, who gazes on that marble brow, feels that he is not a
stranger in the foreign church; for the great name of Michael Angelo
sounds hospitably in his ear. He was not a citizen of any country; he
belonged to the human race; he was a brother and a friend to all who
acknowledge the beauty that beams in universal nature, and who seek
by labor and self-denial to approach its source in perfect goodness.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Reprinted from the _North American Review_, June, 1837.
MILTON.
I framed his tongue to music,
I armed his hand with skill,
I moulded his face to beauty,
And his heart the throne of will.
[Illustration: (decorative banner)]
MILTON.[4]
The discovery of the lost work of Milton, the treatise “Of the
Christian Doctrine,” in 1823, drew a sudden attention to his name.
For a short time the literary journals were filled with disquisitions
on his genius; new editions of his works, and new compilations of
his life, were published. But the new-found book having in itself
less attraction than any other work of Milton, the curiosity of the
public as quickly subsided, and left the poet to the enjoyment of his
permanent fame, or to such increase or abatement of it only as is
incidental to a sublime genius, quite independent of the momentary
challenge of universal attention to his claims.
But if the new and temporary renown of the poet is silent again, it
is nevertheless true that he has gained, in this age, some increase
of permanent praise. The fame of a great man is not rigid and
stony like his bust. It changes with time. It needs time to give
it due perspective. It was very easy to remark an altered tone in
the criticism when Milton re-appeared as an author, fifteen years
ago, from any that had been bestowed on the same subject before.
It implied merit indisputable and illustrious; yet so near to
the modern mind as to be still alive and life-giving. The aspect
of Milton, to this generation, will be part of the history of the
nineteenth century. There is no name in English literature between
his age and ours that rises into any approach to his own. And as a
man’s fame, of course, characterizes those who give it, as much as
him who receives it, the new criticism indicated a change in the
public taste, and a change which the poet himself might claim to have
wrought.
The reputation of Milton had already undergone one or two revolutions
long anterior to its recent aspects. In his lifetime, he was little
or not at all known as a poet, but obtained great respect from
his contemporaries as an accomplished scholar and a formidable
pamphleteer. His poem fell unregarded among his countrymen. His
prose writings, especially the “Defence of the English People,”
seem to have been read with avidity. These tracts are remarkable
compositions. They are earnest, spiritual, rich with allusion,
sparkling with innumerable ornaments; but, as writings designed to
gain a practical point, they fail. They are not effective, like
similar productions of Swift and Burke; or, like what became also
controversial tracts, several masterly speeches in the history of the
American Congress. Milton seldom deigns a glance at the obstacles
that are to be overcome before that which he proposes can be done.
There is no attempt to conciliate,—no mediate, no preparatory course
suggested,—but, peremptory and impassioned, he demands, on the
instant, an ideal justice. Therein they are discriminated from modern
writings, in which a regard to the actual is all but universal.
Their rhetorical excellence must also suffer some deduction. They
have no perfectness. These writings are wonderful for the truth,
the learning, the subtilty and pomp of the language; but the whole
is sacrificed to the particular. Eager to do fit justice to each
thought, he does not subordinate it so as to project the main
argument. He writes whilst he is heated; the piece shows all the
rambles and resources of indignation, but he has never _integrated_
the parts of the argument in his mind. The reader is fatigued with
admiration, but is not yet master of the subject.
Two of his pieces may be excepted from this description, one for its
faults, the other for its excellence. The “Defence of the People
of England,” on which his contemporary fame was founded, is, when
divested of its pure Latinity, the worst of his works. Only its
general aim, and a few elevated passages, can save it. We could be
well content, if the flames to which it was condemned at Paris, at
Toulouse, and at London, had utterly consumed it. The lover of his
genius will always regret that he should not have taken counsel of
his own lofty heart at this, as at other times, and have written from
the deep convictions of love and right, which are the foundations of
civil liberty. There is little poetry or prophecy in this mean and
ribald scolding. To insult Salmasius, not to acquit England, is the
main design. What under heaven had Madame de Saumaise, or the manner
of living of Saumaise, or Salmasius, or his blunders of grammar,
or his niceties of diction, to do with the solemn question whether
Charles Stuart had been rightly slain? Though it evinces learning
and critical skill, yet, as an historical argument, it cannot be
valued with similar disquisitions of Robertson and Hallam, and
even less celebrated scholars. But, when he comes to speak of the
reason of the thing, then he always recovers himself. The voice of
the mob is silent, and Milton speaks. And the peroration, in which
he implores his countrymen to refute this adversary by their great
deeds, is in a just spirit. The other piece is his “Areopagitica,”
the discourse, addressed to the Parliament, in favor of removing
the censorship of the press; the most splendid of his prose works.
It is, as Luther said of one of Melancthon’s writings, “alive, hath
hands and feet,—and not like Erasmus’s sentences, which were made,
not grown.” The weight of the thought is equalled by the vivacity of
the expression, and it cheers as well as teaches. This tract is far
the best known and the most read of all, and is still a magazine of
reasons for the freedom of the press. It is valuable in history as an
argument addressed to a government to produce a practical end, and
plainly presupposes a very peculiar state of society.
But deeply as that peculiar state of society, in which and for which
Milton wrote, has engraved itself in the remembrance of the world,
it shares the destiny which overtakes everything local and personal
in nature; and the accidental facts on which a battle of principles
was fought have already passed, or are fast passing, into oblivion.
We have lost all interest in Milton as the redoubted disputant of a
sect; but by his own innate worth this man has steadily risen in the
world’s reverence, and occupies a more imposing place in the mind of
men at this hour than ever before.
It is the aspect which he presents to this generation, that alone
concerns us. Milton the polemic has lost his popularity long ago; and
if we skip the pages of “Paradise Lost” where “God the Father argues
like a school divine,” so did the next age to his own. But, we are
persuaded, he kindles a love and emulation in us which he did not
in foregoing generations. We think we have seen and heard criticism
upon the poems, which the bard himself would have more valued than
the recorded praise of Dryden, Addison and Johnson, because it came
nearer to the mark; was finer and closer appreciation; the praise
of intimate knowledge and delight; and, of course, more welcome to
the poet than the general and vague acknowledgment of his genius by
those able but unsympathizing critics. We think we have heard the
recitation of his verses by genius which found in them that which
itself would say; recitation which told, in the diamond sharpness of
every articulation, that now first was such perception and enjoyment
possible; the perception and enjoyment of all his varied rhythm,
and his perfect fusion of the classic and the English styles. This
is a poet’s right; for every masterpiece of art goes on for some
ages reconciling the world unto itself, and despotically fashioning
the public ear. The opposition to it, always greatest at first,
continually decreases and at last ends; and a new race grows up in
the taste and spirit of the work, with the utmost advantage for
seeing intimately its power and beauty.
But it would be great injustice to Milton to consider him as enjoying
merely a critical reputation. It is the prerogative of this great man
to stand at this hour foremost of all men in literary history, and
so (shall we not say?) of all men, in the power _to inspire_. Virtue
goes out of him into others. Leaving out of view the pretensions of
our contemporaries (always an incalculable influence), we think no
man can be named whose mind still acts on the cultivated intellect
of England and America with an energy comparable to that of Milton.
As a poet, Shakspeare undoubtedly transcends, and far surpasses him
in his popularity with foreign nations; but Shakspeare is a voice
merely; who and what he was that sang, that sings, we know not.
Milton stands erect, commanding, still visible as a man among men,
and reads the laws of the moral sentiment to the new-born race. There
is something pleasing in the affection with which we can regard a
man who died a hundred and sixty years ago in the other hemisphere,
who, in respect to personal relations, is to us as the wind, yet by
an influence purely spiritual makes us jealous for his fame as for
that of a near friend. He is identified in the mind with all select
and holy images, with the supreme interests of the human race. If
hereby we attain any more precision, we proceed to say that we think
no man in these later ages, and few men ever, possessed so great
a conception of the manly character. Better than any other he has
discharged the office of every great man, namely, to raise the idea
of Man in the minds of his contemporaries and of posterity,—to draw
after nature a life of man, exhibiting such a composition of grace,
of strength and of virtue, as poet had not described nor hero lived.
Human nature in these ages is indebted to him for its best portrait.
Many philosophers in England, France and Germany, have formerly
dedicated their study to this problem; and we think it impossible to
recall one in those countries who communicates the same vibration of
hope, of self-reverence, of piety, of delight in beauty, which the
name of Milton awakens. Lord Bacon, who has written much and with
prodigious ability on this science, shrinks and falters before the
absolute and uncourtly Puritan. Bacon’s Essays are the portrait of an
ambitious and profound calculator,—a great man of the vulgar sort. Of
the upper world of man’s being they speak few and faint words. The
man of Locke is virtuous without enthusiasm and intelligent without
poetry. Addison, Pope, Hume and Johnson, students, with very unlike
temper and success, of the same subject, cannot, taken together, make
any pretension to the amount or the quality of Milton’s inspirations.
The man of Lord Chesterfield is unworthy to touch his garment’s
hem. Franklin’s man is a frugal, inoffensive, thrifty citizen, but
savors of nothing heroic. The genius of France has not, even in her
best days, yet culminated in any one head,—not in Rousseau, not in
Pascal, not in Fénelon,—into such perception of all the attributes of
humanity as to entitle it to any rivalry in these lists. In Germany,
the greatest writers are still too recent to institute a comparison;
and yet we are tempted to say that art and not life seems to be the
end of their effort. But the idea of a purer existence than any he
saw around him, to be realized in the life and conversation of men,
inspired every act and every writing of John Milton. He defined the
object of education to be, “to fit a man to perform justly, skilfully
and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of
peace and war.” He declared that “he who would aspire to write well
hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem; that
is, a composition and pattern of the best and honorablest things,
not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities,
unless he have in himself the experience and the practice of all
that which is praiseworthy.” Nor is there in literature a more noble
outline of a wise external education, than that which he drew up, at
the age of thirty-six, in his Letter to Samuel Hartlib. The muscles,
the nerves and the flesh with which this skeleton is to be filled up
and covered, exist in his works and must be sought there.
For the delineation of this heroic image of man, Milton enjoyed
singular advantages. Perfections of body and of mind are attributed
to him by his biographers, that, if the anecdotes had come down
from a greater distance of time, or had not been in part furnished
or corroborated by political enemies, would lead us to suspect the
portraits were ideal, like the Cyrus of Xenophon, the Telemachus of
Fénelon, or the popular traditions of Alfred the Great.
Handsome to a proverb, he was called the lady of his college. Aubrey
says, “This harmonical and ingenuous soul dwelt in a beautiful and
well-proportioned body.” His manners and his carriage did him no
injustice. Wood, his political opponent, relates that “his deportment
was affable, his gait erect and manly, bespeaking courage and
undauntedness.” Aubrey adds a sharp trait, that “he pronounced the
letter R very hard, a certain sign of satirical genius.” He had
the senses of a Greek. His eye was quick, and he was accounted an
excellent master of his rapier. His ear for music was so acute, that
he was not only enthusiastic in his love, but a skilful performer
himself; and his voice, we are told, was delicately sweet and
harmonious. He insists that music shall make a part of a generous
education.
With these keen perceptions, he naturally received a love of nature
and a rare susceptibility to impressions from external beauty. In the
midst of London, he seems, like the creatures of the field and the
forest, to have been tuned in concord with the order of the world;
for, he believed, his poetic vein only flowed from the autumnal
to the vernal equinox; and, in his essay on Education, he doubts
whether, in the fine days of spring, any study can be accomplished by
young men. “In those vernal seasons of the year when the air is calm
and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against nature not to
go out and see her riches and partake in her rejoicing with heaven
and earth.” His sensibility to impressions from beauty needs no proof
from his history; it shines through every page. The form and the
voice of Leonora Baroni seemed to have captivated him in Rome, and to
her he addressed his Italian sonnets and Latin epigrams.
To these endowments it must be added that his address and his
conversation were worthy of his fame. His house was resorted to
by men of wit, and foreigners came to England, we are told, “to
see the Lord Protector and Mr. Milton.” In a letter to one of his
foreign correspondents, Emeric Bigot, and in reply apparently to some
compliment on his powers of conversation, he writes: “Many have been
celebrated for their compositions, whose common conversation and
intercourse have betrayed no marks of sublimity or genius. But, as
far as possible, I aim to show myself equal in thought and speech to
what I have written, if I have written anything well.”
These endowments received the benefit of a careful and happy
discipline. His father’s care, seconded by his own endeavor,
introduced him to a profound skill in all the treasures of Latin,
Greek, Hebrew and Italian tongues; and, to enlarge and enliven his
elegant learning, he was sent into Italy, where he beheld the remains
of ancient art, and the rival works of Raphael, Michael Angelo and
Correggio; where, also, he received social and academical honors
from the learned and the great. In Paris, he became acquainted
with Grotius; in Florence or Rome, with Galileo; and probably no
traveller ever entered that country of history with better right to
its hospitality, none upon whom its influences could have fallen more
congenially.
Among the advantages of his foreign travel, Milton certainly did
not count it the least that it contributed to forge and polish that
great weapon of which he acquired such extraordinary mastery,—his
power of language. His lore of foreign tongues added daily to his
consummate skill in the use of his own. He was a benefactor of the
English tongue by showing its capabilities. Very early in life he
became conscious that he had more to say to his fellow-men than they
had fit words to embody. At nineteen years, in a college exercise,
he addresses his native language, saying to it that it would be his
choice to leave trifles for a grave argument,
“Such as may make thee search thy coffers round,
Before thou clothe my fancy in fit sound;
Such where the deep transported mind may soar
Above the wheeling poles, and at Heaven’s door
Look in, and see each blissful deity,
How he before the thunderous throne doth lie.”
Michael Angelo calls “him alone an artist, whose hands can execute
what his mind has conceived.” The world, no doubt, contains many
of that class of men whom Wordsworth denominates “_silent poets_,”
whose minds teem with images which they want words to clothe. But
Milton’s mind seems to have no thought or emotion which refused to be
recorded. His mastery of his native tongue was more than to use it as
well as any other; he cast it into new forms. He uttered in it things
unheard before. Not imitating but rivalling Shakspeare, he scattered,
in tones of prolonged and delicate melody, his pastoral and romantic
fancies; then, soaring into unattempted strains, he made it capable
of an unknown majesty, and bent it to express every trait of beauty,
every shade of thought; and searched the kennel and jakes as well as
the palaces of sound for the harsh discords of his polemic wrath. We
may even apply to his performance on the instrument of language, his
own description of music:
“—Notes, with many a winding bout
Of linkëd sweetness long drawn out,
With wanton heed and giddy cunning,
The melting voice through mazes running,
Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony.”
But, whilst Milton was conscious of possessing this intellectual
voice, penetrating through ages and propelling its melodious
undulations forward through the coming world, he knew that this
mastery of language was a secondary power, and he respected the
mysterious source whence it had its spring; namely, clear conceptions
and a devoted heart. “For me,” he said, in his “Apology for
Smectymnuus,” “although I cannot say that I am utterly untrained in
those rules which best rhetoricians have given, or unacquainted with
those examples which the prime authors of eloquence have written in
any learned tongue, yet true eloquence I find to be none but the
serious and hearty love of truth; and that whose mind soever is
fully possessed with a fervent desire to know good things, and with
the dearest charity to infuse the knowledge of them into others,
when such a man would speak, his words, by what I can express, like
so many nimble and airy servitors, trip about him at command, and
in well-ordered files, as he would wish, fall aptly into their own
places.”
But, as basis or fountain of his rare physical and intellectual
accomplishments, the man Milton was just and devout. He is rightly
dear to mankind, because in him, among so many perverse and partial
men of genius,—in him humanity rights itself; the old eternal
goodness finds a home in his breast, and for once shows itself
beautiful. His gifts are subordinated to his moral sentiments. And
his virtues are so graceful that they seem rather talents than
labors. Among so many contrivances as the world has seen to make
holiness ugly, in Milton at least it was so pure a flame, that the
foremost impression his character makes is that of elegance. The
victories of the conscience in him are gained by the commanding
charm which all the severe and restrictive virtues have for him. His
virtues remind us of what Plutarch said of Timoleon’s victories, that
they resembled Homer’s verses, they ran so easy and natural. His
habits of living were austere. He was abstemious in diet, chaste,
an early riser, and industrious. He tells us, in a Latin poem, that
the lyrist may indulge in wine and in a freer life; but that he
who would write an epic to the nations, must eat beans and drink
water. Yet in his severity is no grimace or effort. He serves from
love, not from fear. He is innocent and exact, because his taste
was so pure and delicate. He acknowledges to his friend Diodati, at
the age of twenty-one, that he is enamored, if ever any was, of
moral perfection: “For, whatever the Deity may have bestowed upon
me in other respects, he has certainly inspired me, if any ever
were inspired, with a passion for the good and fair. Nor did Ceres,
according to the fable, ever seek her daughter Proserpine with such
unceasing solicitude, as I have sought this τοῦ καλοῦ ἰδέαν, this
perfect model of the beautiful in all forms and appearances of
things.”
When he was charged with loose habits of living, he declares, that
“a certain niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness and self-esteem
either of what I was or what I might be, and a modesty, kept me still
above those low descents of mind beneath which he must deject and
plunge himself, that can agree” to such degradation. “His mind gave
him,” he said, “that every free and gentle spirit, without that oath
of chastity, ought to be born a knight; nor needed to expect the gilt
spur, or the laying of a sword upon his shoulder, to stir him up, by
his counsel and his arm, to secure and protect” attempted innocence.
He states these things, he says, “to show, that, though Christianity
had been but slightly taught him, yet a certain reservedness of
natural disposition and moral discipline, learned out of the
noblest philosophy, was enough to keep him in disdain of far less
incontinences than these,” that had been charged on him. In like
spirit, he replies to the suspicious calumny respecting his morning
haunts. “Those morning haunts are where they should be, at home; not
sleeping, or concocting the surfeits of an irregular feast, but up
and stirring, in winter, often ere the sound of any bell awake men
to labor or devotion; in summer, as oft with the bird that first
rouses, or not much tardier, to read good authors, or cause them to
be read, till the attention be weary, or memory have its perfect
fraught; then with useful and generous labors preserving the body’s
health and hardiness, to render lightsome, clear, and not lumpish
obedience to the mind, to the cause of religion and our country’s
liberty, when it shall require firm hearts in sound bodies to stand
and cover their stations. These are the morning practices.” This
native honor never forsook him. It is the spirit of “Comus,” the
loftiest song in the praise of chastity that is in any language.
It always sparkles in his eyes. It breathed itself over his decent
form. It refined his amusements, which consisted in gardening, in
exercise with the sword, and in playing on the organ. It engaged
his interest in chivalry, in courtesy, in whatsoever savored of
generosity and nobleness. This magnanimity shines in all his life. He
accepts a high impulse at every risk, and deliberately undertakes the
defence of the English people, when advised by his physicians that
he does it at the cost of sight. There is a forbearance even in his
polemics. He opens the war and strikes the first blow. When he had
cut down his opponents, he left the details of death and plunder to
meaner partisans. He said, “he had learned the prudence of the Roman
soldier, not to stand breaking of legs, when the breath was quite out
of the body.”
To this antique heroism, Milton added the genius of the Christian
sanctity. Few men could be cited who have so well understood what
is peculiar in the Christian ethics, and the precise aid it has
brought to men, in being an emphatic affirmation of the omnipotence
of spiritual laws, and, by way of marking the contrast to vulgar
opinions, laying its chief stress on humility. The indifferency of
a wise mind to what is called high and low, and the fact that true
greatness is a perfect humility, are revelations of Christianity
which Milton well understood. They give an inexhaustible truth to
all his compositions. His firm grasp of this truth is his weapon
against the prelates. He celebrates in the martyrs “the unresistible
might of weakness.” He told the bishops that “instead of showing the
reason of their lowly condition from divine example and command,
they seek to prove their high preëminence from human consent and
authority.” He advises that in country places, rather than to trudge
many miles to a church, public worship be maintained nearer home, as
in a house or barn. “For, notwithstanding the gaudy superstition of
some still devoted ignorantly to temples, we may be well assured,
that he who disdained not to be born in a manger, disdains not to
be preached in a barn.” And the following passage, in the “Reason
of Church Government,” indicates his own perception of the doctrine
of humility. “Albeit I must confess to be half in doubt whether I
should bring it forth or no, it being so contrary to the eye of the
world, that I shall endanger either not to be regarded, or not to
be understood. For who is there, almost, that measures wisdom by
simplicity, strength by suffering, dignity by lowliness?” Obeying
this sentiment, Milton deserved the apostrophe of Wordsworth:—
“Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on itself did lay.”
He laid on himself the lowliest duties. Johnson petulantly taunts
Milton with “great promise and small performance,” in returning
from Italy because his country was in danger, and then opening a
private school. Milton, wiser, felt no absurdity in this conduct.
He returned into his revolutionized country, and assumed an honest
and useful task, by which he might serve the state daily, whilst he
launched from time to time his formidable bolts against the enemies
of liberty. He felt the heats of that “love” which “esteems no office
mean.” He compiled a logic for boys; he wrote a grammar; and devoted
much of his time to the preparing of a Latin dictionary. But the
religious sentiment warmed his writings and conduct with the highest
affection of faith. The memorable covenant, which in his youth, in
the second book of the “Reason of Church Government,” he makes with
God and his reader, expressed the faith of his old age. For the first
time since many ages, the invocations of the Eternal Spirit in the
commencement of his books are not poetic forms, but are thoughts, and
so are still read with delight. His views of choice of profession,
and choice in marriage, equally expect a divine leading.
Thus chosen, by the felicity of his nature and of his breeding, for
the clear perception of all that is graceful and all that is great
in man, Milton was not less happy in his times. His birth fell upon
the agitated years when the discontents of the English Puritans
were fast drawing to a head against the tyranny of the Stuarts. No
period has surpassed that in the general activity of mind. It is said
that no opinion, no civil, religious, moral dogma can be produced,
that was not broached in the fertile brain of that age. Questions
that involve all social and personal rights were hasting to be
decided by the sword, and were searched by eyes to which the love of
freedom, civil and religious, lent new illumination. Milton, gentle,
learned, delicately bred in all the elegancy of art and learning,
was set down in England in the stern, almost fanatic society of the
Puritans. The part he took, the zeal of his fellowship, make us
acquainted with the greatness of his spirit as in tranquil times we
could not have known it. Susceptible as Burke to the attractions
of historical prescription, of royalty, of chivalry, of an ancient
church illustrated by old martyrdoms and installed in cathedrals,—he
threw himself, the flower of elegancy, on the side of the reeking
conventicle; the side of humanity, but unlearned and unadorned. His
muse was brave and humane, as well as sweet. He felt the dear love
of native land and native language. The humanity which warms his
pages begins as it should, at home. He preferred his own English,
so manlike he was, to the Latin, which contained all the treasures
of his memory. “My mother bore me,” he said, “a speaker of what God
made mine own, and not a translator.” He told the Parliament, that
“the imprimaturs of Lambeth House had been writ in Latin; for that
our English, the language of men ever famous and foremost in the
achievements of liberty, will not easily find servile letters enow
to spell such a dictatory presumption.” At one time he meditated
writing a poem on the settlement of Britain, and a history of England
was one of the three main tasks which he proposed to himself. He
proceeded in it no further than to the Conquest. He studied with
care the character of his countrymen, and once in the “History,” and
once again in the “Reason of Church Government,” he has recorded his
judgment of the English genius.
Thus drawn into the great controversies of the times, in them he is
never lost in a party. His private opinions and private conscience
always distinguish him. That which drew him to the party was his love
of liberty, ideal liberty; this therefore he could not sacrifice to
any party. Toland tells us, “As he looked upon true and absolute
freedom to be the greatest happiness of this life, whether to
societies or single persons, so he thought constraint of any sort to
be the utmost misery; for which reason be used to tell those about
him the entire satisfaction of his mind, that he had constantly
employed his strength and faculties in the defence of liberty, and in
direct opposition to slavery.” Truly he was an apostle of freedom;
of freedom in the house, in the state, in the church; freedom of
speech, freedom of the press, yet in his own mind discriminated from
savage license, because that which he desired was the liberty of
the wise man, containing itself in the limits of virtue. He pushed,
as far as any in that democratic age, his ideas of _civil_ liberty.
He proposed to establish a republic, of which the federal power was
weak and loosely defined, and the substantial power should remain
with primary assemblies. He maintained, that a nation may try, judge,
and slay their king, if he be a tyrant. He pushed as far his views
of _ecclesiastical_ liberty. He taught the doctrine of unlimited
toleration. One of his tracts is writ to prove that no power on
earth can compel in matters of religion. He maintained the doctrine
of _literary_ liberty, denouncing the censorship of the press, and
insisting that a book shall come into the world as freely as a man,
so only it bear the name of author or printer, and be responsible for
itself like a man. He maintained the doctrine of _domestic_ liberty,
or the liberty of divorce, on the ground that unfit disposition of
mind was a better reason for the act of divorce than infirmity of
body, which was good ground in law. The tracts he wrote on these
topics are, for the most part, as fresh and pertinent to-day as they
were then. The events which produced them, the practical issues
to which they tend, are mere occasions for this philanthropist to
blow his trumpet for human rights. They are all varied applications
of one principle, the liberty of the wise man. He sought absolute
truth, not accommodating truth. His opinions on all subjects are
formed for man as he ought to be, for a nation of Miltons. He would
be divorced when he finds in his consort unfit disposition; knowing
that he should not abuse that liberty, because with his whole heart
he abhors licentiousness and loves chastity. He defends the slaying
of the king, because a king is a king no longer than he governs
by the laws; “it would be right to kill Philip of Spain making an
inroad into England, and what right the king of Spain hath to govern
us at all, the same hath the king Charles to govern tyrannically.”
He would remove hirelings out of the church, and support preachers
by voluntary contributions; requiring that such only should preach
as have faith enough to accept so self-denying and precarious a
mode of life, scorning to take thought for the aspects of prudence
and expediency. The most devout man of his time, he frequented no
church; probably from a disgust at the fierce spirit of the pulpits.
And so, throughout all his actions and opinions, is he a consistent
spiritualist, or believer in the omnipotence of spiritual laws. He
wished that his writings should be communicated only to those who
desired to see them. He thought nothing honest was low. He thought
he could be famous only in proportion as he enjoyed the approbation
of the good. He admonished his friend “not to admire military
prowess, or things in which force is of most avail. For it would not
be matter of rational wonder, if the wethers of our country should
be born with horns that could batter down cities and towns. Learn to
estimate great characters, not by the amount of animal strength, but
by the habitual justice and temperance of their conduct.”
Was there not a fitness in the undertaking of such a person to write
a poem on the subject of Adam, the first man? By his sympathy with
all nature; by the proportion of his powers; by great knowledge, and
by religion, he would reascend to the height from which our nature is
supposed to have descended. From a just knowledge of what man should
be, he described what he was. He beholds him as he walked in Eden:—
“His fair large front and eye sublime declared
Absolute rule; and hyacinthine locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clustering, but not beneath his shoulders broad.”
And the soul of this divine creature is excellent as his form. The
tone of his thought and passion is as healthful, as even, and as
vigorous, as befits the new and perfect model of a race of gods.
The perception we have attributed to Milton, of a purer ideal of
humanity, modifies his poetic genius. The man is paramount to
the poet. His fancy is never transcendent, extravagant; but, as
Bacon’s imagination was said to be “the noblest that ever contented
itself to minister to the understanding,” so Milton’s ministers
to the character. Milton’s sublimest song, bursting into heaven
with its peals of melodious thunder, is the voice of Milton still.
Indeed, throughout his poems, one may see under a thin veil, the
opinions, the feelings, even the incidents of the poet’s life, still
reappearing. The sonnets are all occasional poems. “L’Allegro” and
“Il Penseroso” are but a finer autobiography of his youthful fancies
at Harefield; the “Comus” a transcript, in charming numbers, of that
philosophy of chastity, which, in the “Apology for Smectymnuus,” and
in the “Reason of Church Government,” he declares to be his defence
and religion. The “Samson Agonistes” is too broad an expression
of his private griefs to be mistaken, and is a version of the
“Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.” The most affecting passages in
“Paradise Lost” are personal allusions; and, when we are fairly in
Eden, Adam and Milton are often difficult to be separated. Again,
in “Paradise Regained,” we have the most distinct marks of the
progress of the poet’s mind, in the revision and enlargement of his
religious opinions. This may be thought to abridge his praise as a
poet. It is true of Homer and Shakspeare that they do not appear
in their poems; that those prodigious geniuses did cast themselves
so totally into their song, that their individuality vanishes, and
the poet towers to the sky, whilst the man quite disappears. The
fact is memorable. Shall we say that in our admiration and joy in
these wonderful poems we have even a feeling of regret that the men
knew not what they did; that they were too passive in their great
service; were channels through which streams of thought flowed from
a higher source, which they did not appropriate, did not blend with
their own being? Like prophets, they seem but imperfectly aware of
the import of their own utterances. We hesitate to say such things,
and say them only to the unpleasing dualism, when the man and the
poet show like a double consciousness. Perhaps we speak to no fact,
but to mere fables, of an idle mendicant Homer, and of a Shakspeare
content with a mean and jocular way of life. Be it how it may, the
genius and office of Milton were different, namely, to ascend by
the aids of his learning and his religion,—by an equal perception,
that is, of the past and the future,—to a higher insight and more
lively delineation of the heroic life of man. This was his poem;
whereof all his indignant pamphlets and all his soaring verses are
only single cantos or detached stanzas. It was plainly needful that
his poetry should be a version of his own life, in order to give
weight and solemnity to his thoughts; by which they might penetrate
and possess the imagination and the will of mankind. The creations
of Shakspeare are cast into the world of thought to no further end
than to delight. Their intrinsic beauty is their excuse for being.
Milton, fired “with dearest charity to infuse the knowledge of good
things into others,” tasked his giant imagination and exhausted the
stores of his intellect for an end beyond, namely, to teach. His
own conviction it is which gives such authority to his strain. Its
reality is its force. If out of the heart it came, to the heart it
must go. What schools and epochs of common rhymers would it need to
make a counterbalance to the severe oracles of his muse:
“In them is plainest taught and easiest learnt,
What makes a nation happy, and keeps it so.”
The lover of Milton reads one sense in his prose and in his metrical
compositions; and sometimes the muse soars highest in the former,
because the thought is more sincere. Of his prose in general, not
the style alone but the argument also is poetic; according to Lord
Bacon’s definition of poetry, following that of Aristotle, “Poetry,
not finding the actual world exactly conformed to its idea of good
and fair, seeks to accommodate the shows of things to the desires
of the mind, and to create an ideal world better than the world of
experience.” Such certainly is the explanation of Milton’s tracts.
Such is the apology to be entered for the plea for freedom of
divorce; an essay, which, from the first until now, has brought a
degree of obloquy on his name. It was a sally of the extravagant
spirit of the time, overjoyed, as in the French Revolution, with the
sudden victories it had gained, and eager to carry on the standard
of truth to new heights. It is to be regarded as a poem on one of
the griefs of man’s condition, namely, unfit marriage. And as many
poems have been written upon unfit society, commending solitude, yet
have not been proceeded against, though their end was hostile to the
state; so should this receive that charity which an angelic soul,
suffering more keenly than others from the unavoidable evils of human
life, is entitled to.
We have offered no apology for expanding to such length our
commentary on the character of John Milton; who, in old age, in
solitude, in neglect, and blind, wrote the Paradise Lost; a man whom
labor or danger never deterred from whatever efforts a love of the
supreme interests of man prompted. For are we not the better; are
not all men fortified by the remembrance of the bravery, the purity,
the temperance, the toil, the independence and the angelic devotion
of this man, who, in a revolutionary age, taking counsel only of
himself, endeavored, in his writings and in his life, to carry out
the life of man to new heights of spiritual grace and dignity,
without any abatement of its strength?
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Reprinted from the _North American Review_, July, 1838.
PAPERS FROM THE DIAL.
The tongue is prone to lose the way;
Not so the pen, for in a letter
We have not better things to say,
But surely say them better.
[Illustration: (decorative banner)]
PAPERS FROM THE DIAL.
I.
THOUGHTS ON MODERN LITERATURE.[5]
In our fidelity to the higher truth we need not disown our debt, in
our actual state of culture, in the twilights of experience, to these
rude helpers. They keep alive the memory and the hope of a better
day. When we flout all particular books as initial merely, we truly
express the privilege of spiritual nature, but alas, not the fact
and fortune of this low Massachusetts and Boston, of these humble
Junes and Decembers of mortal life. Our souls are not self-fed, but
do eat and drink of chemical water and wheat. Let us not forget the
genial miraculous force we have known to proceed from a book. We go
musing into the vault of day and night; no constellation shines, no
muse descends, the stars are white points, the roses brick-colored
leaves, and frogs pipe, mice cheep, and wagons creak along the road.
We return to the house and take up Plutarch or Augustine, and read a
few sentences or pages, and lo! the air swims with life, secrets of
magnanimity and grandeur invite us on every hand, life is made up of
them. Such is our debt to a book. Observe moreover that we ought to
credit literature with much more than the bare word it gives us. I
have just been reading poems which now in memory shine with a certain
steady, warm, autumnal light. That is not in their grammatical
construction which they give me. If I analyze the sentences it
eludes me, but is the genius and suggestion of the whole. Over every
true poem lingers a certain wild beauty, immeasurable; a happiness
lightsome and delicious fills the heart and brain, as they say
every man walks environed by his proper atmosphere, extending to
some distance around him. This beautiful result must be credited to
literature also in casting its account.
In looking at the library of the Present Age, we are first
struck with the fact of the immense miscellany. It can hardly be
characterized by any species of book, for every opinion, old and new,
every hope and fear, every whim and folly has an organ. It exhibits
a vast carcass of tradition every year with as much solemnity as a
new revelation. Along with these it vents books that breathe of new
morning, that seem to heave with the life of millions, books for
which men and women peak and pine; books which take the rose out of
the cheek of him that wrote them, and give him to the midnight a sad,
solitary, diseased man; which leave no man where they found him, but
make him better or worse; and which work dubiously on society and
seem to inoculate it with a venom before any healthy result appears.
In order to any complete view of the literature of the present age,
an inquiry should include what it quotes, what it writes and what it
wishes to write. In our present attempt to enumerate some traits of
the recent literature, we shall have somewhat to offer on each of
these topics, but we cannot promise to set in very exact order what
we have to say.
In the first place it has all books. It reprints the wisdom of the
world. How can the age be a bad one which gives me Plato and Paul and
Plutarch, St. Augustine, Spinoza, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher,
Donne and Sir Thomas Browne, beside its own riches? Our presses groan
every year with new editions of all the select pieces of the first
of mankind,—meditations, history, classifications, opinions, epics,
lyrics, which the age adopts by quoting them. If we should designate
favorite studies in which the age delights more than in the rest of
this great mass of the permanent literature of the human race, one
or two instances would be conspicuous. First; the prodigious growth
and influence of the genius of Shakspeare, in the last one hundred
and fifty years, is itself a fact of the first importance. It almost
alone has called out the genius of the German nation into an activity
which spreading from the poetic into the scientific, religious and
philosophical domains, has made theirs now at last the paramount
intellectual influence of the world, reacting with great energy on
England and America. And thus, and not by mechanical diffusion, does
an original genius work and spread himself.
The poetry and speculation of the age are marked by a certain
philosophic turn, which discriminates them from the works of earlier
times. The poet is not content to see how “Fair hangs the apple
from the rock,” “What music a sunbeam awoke in the groves,” nor
of Hardiknute, how “Stately steppes he east the way, and stately
steppes he west,” but he now revolves, What is the apple to me? and
what the birds to me? and what is Hardiknute to me? and what am I?
And this is called subjectiveness, as the eye is withdrawn from the
object and fixed on the subject or mind.
We can easily concede that a steadfast tendency of this sort appears
in modern literature. It is the new consciousness of the one mind,
which predominates in criticism. It is the uprise of the soul, and
not the decline. It is founded on that insatiable demand for unity,
the need to recognize one nature in all the variety of objects, which
always characterizes a genius of the first order. Accustomed always
to behold the presence of the universe in every part, the soul will
not condescend to look at any new part as a stranger, but saith,—“I
know all already, and what art thou? Show me thy relations to me, to
all, and I will entertain thee also.”
There is a pernicious ambiguity in the use of the term _subjective_.
We say, in accordance with the general view I have stated, that the
single soul feels its right to be no longer confounded with numbers,
but itself to sit in judgment on history and literature, and to
summon all facts and parties before its tribunal. And in this sense
the age is subjective.
But, in all ages, and now more, the narrow-minded have no interest
in anything but in its relation to their personality. What
will help them to be delivered from some burden, eased in some
circumstance, flattered or pardoned or enriched; what will help to
marry or to divorce them, to prolong or to sweeten life, is sure
of their interest; and nothing else. Every form under the whole
heaven they behold in this most partial light or darkness of
intense selfishness, until we hate their being. And this habit of
intellectual selfishness has acquired in our day the fine name of
subjectiveness.
Nor is the distinction between these two habits to be found in the
circumstance of using the first person singular, or reciting facts
and feelings of personal history. A man may say I, and never refer
to himself as an individual; and a man may recite passages of his
life with no feeling of egotism. Nor need a man have a vicious
subjectiveness because he deals in abstract propositions.
But the criterion which discriminates these two habits in the poet’s
mind is the tendency of his composition; namely, whether it leads
us to nature, or to the person of the writer. The great always
introduce us to facts; small men introduce us always to themselves.
The great man, even whilst he relates a private fact personal to him,
is really leading us away from him to an universal experience. His
own affection is in nature, in _what is_, and, of course, all his
communication leads outward to it, starting from whatsoever point.
The great never with their own consent become a load on the minds
they instruct. The more they draw us to them, the farther from them
or more independent of them we are, because they have brought us to
the knowledge of somewhat deeper than both them and us. The great
never hinder us; for their activity is coincident with the sun and
moon, with the course of the rivers and of the winds, with the stream
of laborers in the street and with all the activity and well-being of
the race. The great lead us to nature, and in our age to metaphysical
nature, to the invisible awful facts, to moral abstractions, which
are not less nature than is a river or a coal-mine,—nay, they are
far more nature,—but its essence and soul.
But the weak and wicked, led also to analyze, saw nothing in thought
but luxury. Thought for the selfish became selfish. They invited us
to contemplate nature, and showed us an abominable self. Would you
know the genius of the writer? Do not enumerate his talents or his
feats, but ask thyself, What spirit is he of? Do gladness and hope
and fortitude flow from his page into thy heart? Has he led thee to
nature because his own soul was too happy in beholding her power and
love? Or is his passion for the wilderness only the sensibility of
the sick, the exhibition of a talent which only shines whilst you
praise it; which has no root in the character, and can thus minister
to the vanity but not to the happiness of the possessor; and which
derives all its _éclat_ from our conventional education, but would
not make itself intelligible to the wise man of another age or
country? The water we wash with never speaks of itself, nor does
fire or wind or tree. Neither does the noble natural man: he yields
himself to your occasion and use, but his act expresses a reference
to universal good.
Another element of the modern poetry akin to this subjective
tendency, or rather the direction of that same on the question of
resources, is the Feeling of the Infinite. Of the perception now fast
becoming a conscious fact,—that there is One Mind, and that all the
powers and privileges which lie in any, lie in all; that I as a man
may claim and appropriate whatever of true or fair or good or strong
has anywhere been exhibited; that Moses and Confucius, Montaigne and
Leibnitz are not so much individuals as they are parts of man and
parts of me, and my intelligence proves them my own,—literature is
far the best expression. It is true, this is not the only nor the
obvious lesson it teaches. A selfish commerce and government have
caught the eye and usurped the hand of the masses. It is not to be
contested that selfishness and the senses write the laws under which
we live, and that the street seems to be built and the men and women
in it moving, not in reference to pure and grand ends, but rather to
very short and sordid ones. Perhaps no considerable minority, no one
man, leads a quite clean and lofty life. What then? We concede in
sadness the fact. But we say that these low customary ways are not
all that survives in human beings. There is that in us which mutters,
and that which groans, and that which triumphs, and that which
aspires. There are facts on which men of the world superciliously
smile, which are worth all their trade and politics; which drive
young men into gardens and solitary places, and cause extravagant
gestures, starts, distortions of the countenance, and passionate
exclamations; sentiments, which find no aliment or language for
themselves on the wharves, in court, or market, but which are soothed
by silence, by darkness, by the pale stars, and the presence of
nature. All over the modern world the educated and susceptible have
betrayed their discontent with the limits of our municipal life,
and with the poverty of our dogmas of religion and philosophy. They
betray this impatience by fleeing for resource to a conversation with
nature, which is courted in a certain moody and exploring spirit,
as if they anticipated a more intimate union of man with the world
than has been known in recent ages. Those who cannot tell what they
desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts
and vast wishes. The very child in the nursery prattles mysticism,
and doubts and philosophizes. A wild striving to express a more
inward and infinite sense characterizes the works of every art. The
music of Beethoven is said, by those who understand it, to labor with
vaster conceptions and aspirations than music has attempted before.
This feeling of the Infinite has deeply colored the poetry of the
period. This new love of the vast, always native in Germany, was
imported into France by De Staël, appeared in England in Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Felicia Hemans, and finds a most genial
climate in the American mind. Scott and Crabbe, who formed themselves
on the past, had none of this tendency; their poetry is objective. In
Byron, on the other hand, it predominates; but in Byron it is blind,
it sees not its true end—an infinite good, alive and beautiful, a
life nourished on absolute beatitudes, descending into nature to
behold itself reflected there. His will is perverted, he worships
the accidents of society, and his praise of nature is thieving and
selfish.
Nothing certifies the prevalence of this taste in the people more
than the circulation of the poems,—one would say most incongruously
united by some bookseller,—of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. The only
unity is in the subjectiveness and the aspiration common to the three
writers. Shelley, though a poetic mind, is never a poet. His muse is
uniformly imitative; all his poems composite. A good English scholar
he is, with ear, taste, and memory; much more, he is a character
full of noble and prophetic traits; but imagination, the original,
authentic fire of the bard, he has not. He is clearly modern, and
shares with Richter, Chateaubriand, Manzoni and Wordsworth, the
feeling of the infinite, which so labors for expression in their
different genius. But all his lines are arbitrary, not necessary.
When we read poetry, the mind asks,—Was this verse one of twenty
which the author might have written as well; or is this what that
man was created to say? But, whilst every line of the true poet will
be genuine, he is in a boundless power and freedom to say a million
things. And the reason why he can say one thing well, is because his
vision extends to the sight of all things, and so he describes each
as one who knows many and all.
The fame of Wordsworth is a leading fact in modern literature, when
it is considered how hostile his genius at first seemed to the
reigning taste, and with what limited poetic talents his great and
steadily growing dominion has been established. More than any poet
his success has been not his own but that of the idea which he shared
with his coevals, and which he has rarely succeeded in adequately
expressing. The Excursion awakened in every lover of Nature the right
feeling. We saw stars shine, we felt the awe of mountains, we heard
the rustle of the wind in the grass, and knew again the ineffable
secret of solitude. It was a great joy. It was nearer to Nature than
anything we had before. But the interest of the poem ended almost
with the narrative of the influences of Nature on the mind of the
Boy, in the First Book. Obviously for that passage the poem was
written, and with the exception of this and of a few strains of the
like character in the sequel, the whole poem was dull. Here was no
poem, but here was poetry, and a sure index where the subtle muse was
about to pitch her tent and find the argument of her song. It was
the human soul in these last ages striving for a just publication of
itself. Add to this, however, the great praise of Wordsworth, that
more than any other contemporary bard he is pervaded with a reverence
of somewhat higher than (conscious) thought. There is in him that
property common to all great poets, a wisdom of humanity, which is
superior to any talents which they exert. It is the wisest part of
Shakspeare and of Milton. For they are poets by the free course
which they allow to the informing soul, which through their eyes
beholdeth again and blesseth the things which it hath made. The soul
is superior to its knowledge, wiser than any of its works.
With the name of Wordsworth rises to our recollection the name of
his contemporary and friend, Walter Savage Landor—a man working
in a very different and peculiar spirit, yet one whose genius and
accomplishments deserve a wiser criticism than we have yet seen
applied to them, and the rather that his name does not readily
associate itself with any school of writers. Of Thomas Carlyle, also,
we shall say nothing at this time, since the quality and energy of
his influence on the youth of this country will require at our hands,
erelong, a distinct and faithful acknowledgment.
But of all men he who has united in himself, and that in the most
extraordinary degree, the tendencies of the era, is the German poet,
naturalist and philosopher, Goethe. Whatever the age inherited
or invented, he made his own. He has owed to Commerce and to the
victories of the Understanding, all their spoils. Such was his
capacity, that the magazines of the world’s ancient or modern
wealth, which arts and intercourse and skepticism could command,—he
wanted them all. Had there been twice so much, he could have used
it as well. Geologist, mechanic, merchant, chemist, king, radical,
painter, composer,—all worked for him, and a thousand men seemed to
look through his eyes. He learned as readily as other men breathe.
Of all the men of this time, not one has seemed so much at home in
it as he. He was not afraid to live. And in him this encyclopædia of
facts, which it has been the boast of the age to compile, wrought
an equal effect. He was knowing; he was brave; he was clean from
all narrowness; he has a perfect propriety and taste,—a quality by
no means common to the German writers. Nay, since the earth as we
said had become a reading-room, the new opportunities seem to have
aided him to be that resolute realist he is, and seconded his sturdy
determination to see things for what they are. To look at him one
would say there was never an observer before. What sagacity, what
industry of observation. To read his record is a frugality of time,
for you shall find no word that does not stand for a thing, and he is
of that comprehension which can see the value of truth. His love of
Nature has seemed to give a new meaning to that word. There was never
man more domesticated in this world than he. And he is an apology for
the analytic spirit of the period, because, of his analysis, always
wholes were the result. All conventions, all traditions he rejected.
And yet he felt his entire right and duty to stand before and try
and judge every fact in nature. He thought it necessary to dot round
with his own pen the entire sphere of knowables; and for many of his
stories, this seems the only reason: Here is a piece of humanity I
had hitherto omitted to sketch;—take this. He does not say so in
syllables,—yet a sort of conscientious feeling he had to be _up_ to
the universe, is the best account and apology for many of them. He
shared also the subjectiveness of the age, and that too in both the
senses I have discriminated. With the sharpest eye for form, color,
botany, engraving, medals, persons and manners, he never stopped at
surface, but pierced the purpose of a thing and studied to reconcile
that purpose with his own being. What he could so reconcile was good;
what he could not, was false. Hence a certain greatness encircles
every fact he treats; for to him it has a soul, an eternal reason
why it was so, and not otherwise. This is the secret of that deep
realism, which went about among all objects he beheld, to find the
cause why they must be what they are. It was with him a favorite
task to find a theory of every institution, custom, art, work of
art, which he observed. Witness his explanation of the Italian mode
of reckoning the hours of the day, as growing out of the Italian
climate; of the obelisk of Egypt, as growing out of a common natural
fracture in the granite parallelopiped in Upper Egypt; of the Doric
architecture, and the Gothic; of the Venetian music of the gondolier,
originating in the habit of the fishers’ wives of the Lido singing
on shore to their husbands on the sea; of the amphitheatre, which
is the enclosure of the natural cup of heads that arranges itself
round every spectacle in the street; of the coloring of Titian and
Paul Veronese, which one may verify in common daylight in Venice
every afternoon; of the Carnival at Rome; of the domestic rural
architecture in Italy; and many the like examples.
But also that other vicious subjectiveness, that vice of the
time, infected him also. We are provoked with his Olympian
self-complacency, the patronizing air with which he vouchsafes to
tolerate the genius and performances of other mortals, “the good
Hiller,” “our excellent Kant,” “the friendly Wieland,” &c. &c. There
is a good letter from Wieland to Merck, in which Wieland relates that
Goethe read to a select party his journal of a tour in Switzerland
with the Grand Duke, and their passage through the Vallais and over
the St. Gothard. “It was,” says Wieland, “as good as Xenophon’s
Anabasis. The piece is one of his most masterly productions, and is
thought and written with the greatness peculiar to him. The fair
hearers were enthusiastic at the nature in this piece; I liked the
sly art in the composition, whereof they saw nothing, still better.
It is a true poem, so concealed is the art too. But what most
remarkably in this, as in all his other works, distinguishes him from
Homer and Shakspeare, is, that the Me, the _Ille ego_, everywhere
glimmers through, although without any boasting and with an infinite
fineness.” This subtle element of egotism in Goethe certainly does
not seem to deform his compositions, but to lower the moral influence
of the man. He differs from all the great in the total want of
frankness. Who saw Milton, who saw Shakspeare, saw them do their
best, and utter their whole heart manlike among their brethren. No
man was permitted to call Goethe brother. He hid himself, and worked
always to astonish, which is egotism, and therefore little.
If we try Goethe by the ordinary canons of criticism, we should
say that his thinking is of great altitude, and all level; not a
succession of summits, but a high Asiatic table-land. Dramatic power,
the rarest talent in literature, he has very little. He has an eye
constant to the fact of life and that never pauses in its advance.
But the great felicities, the miracles of poetry, he has never. It
is all design with him, just thought and instructed expression,
analogies, allusion, illustration, which knowledge and correct
thinking supply; but of Shakspeare and the transcendent muse, no
syllable. Yet in the court and law to which we ordinarily speak,
and without adverting to absolute standards, we claim for him the
praise of truth, of fidelity to his intellectual nature. He is the
king of all scholars. In these days and in this country, where the
scholars are few and idle, where men read easy books and sleep after
dinner, it seems as if no book could so safely be put in the hands
of young men as the letters of Goethe, which attest the incessant
activity of this man, to eighty years, in an endless variety of
studies, with uniform cheerfulness and greatness of mind. They cannot
be read without shaming us into an emulating industry. Let him have
the praise of the love of truth. We think, when we contemplate the
stupendous glory of the world, that it were life enough for one man
merely to lift his hands and cry with St. Augustine, “Wrangle who
pleases, I will wonder.” Well, this he did. Here was a man who, in
the feeling that the thing itself was so admirable as to leave all
comment behind, went up and down, from object to object, lifting
the veil from every one, and did no more. What he said of Lavater,
may trulier be said of him, that “it was fearful to stand in the
presence of one before whom all the boundaries within which Nature
has circumscribed our being were laid flat.” His are the bright and
terrible eyes which meet the modern student in every sacred chapel of
thought, in every public enclosure.
But now, that we may not seem to dodge the question which all men
ask, nor pay a great man so ill a compliment as to praise him only
in the conventional and comparative speech, let us honestly record
our thought upon the total worth and influence of this genius.
Does he represent, not only the achievement of that age in which
he lived, but that which it would be and is now becoming? And what
shall we think of that absence of the moral sentiment, that singular
equivalence to him of good and evil in action, which discredit his
compositions to the pure? The spirit of his biography, of his poems,
of his tales, is identical, and we may here set down by way of
comment on his genius the impressions recently awakened in us by the
story of Wilhelm Meister.
All great men have written proudly, nor cared to explain. They knew
that the intelligent reader would come at last, and would thank them.
So did Dante, so did Machiavel. Goethe has done this in Meister.
We can fancy him saying to himself:—There are poets enough of the
Ideal; let me paint the Actual, as, after years of dreams, it will
still appear and reappear to wise men. That all shall right itself
in the long Morrow, I may well allow, and my novel may wait for the
same regeneration. The age, that can damn it as false and falsifying,
will see that it is deeply one with the genius and history of all
the centuries. I have given my characters a bias to error. Men have
the same. I have let mischance befall instead of good fortune. They
do so daily. And out of many vices and misfortunes, I have let a
great success grow, as I had known in my own and many other examples.
Fierce churchmen and effeminate aspirants will chide and hate my
name, but every keen beholder of life will justify my truth, and will
acquit me of prejudging the cause of humanity by painting it with
this morose fidelity. To a profound soul is not austere truth the
sweetest flattery?
Yes, O Goethe! but the ideal is truer than the actual. That is
ephemeral, but this changes not. Moreover, because nature is moral,
that mind only can see, in which the same order entirely obtains. An
interchangeable Truth, Beauty and Goodness, each wholly interfused in
the other, must make the humors of that eye which would see causes
reaching to their last effect and reproducing the world forever.
The least inequality of mixture, the excess of one element over the
other, in that degree diminishes the transparency of things, makes
the world opaque to the observer, and destroys so far the value of
his experience. No particular gifts can countervail this defect. In
reading Meister, I am charmed with the insight; to use a phrase of
Ben Jonson’s, “it is rammed with life.” I find there actual men and
women even too faithfully painted. I am moreover instructed in the
possibility of a highly accomplished society, and taught to look
for great talent and culture under a gray coat. But this is all.
The limits of artificial society are never quite out of sight. The
vicious conventions, which hem us in like prison walls and which
the poet should explode at his touch, stand for all they are worth
in the newspaper. We are never lifted above ourselves, we are not
transported out of the dominion of the senses, or cheered with an
infinite tenderness, or armed with a grand trust.
Goethe, then, must be set down as the poet of the Actual, not of the
Ideal; the poet of limitation, not of possibility; of this world,
and not of religion and hope; in short, if we may say so, the poet
of prose, and not of poetry. He accepts the base doctrine of Fate,
and gleans what straggling joys may yet remain out of its ban. He is
like a banker or a weaver with a passion for the country; he steals
out of the hot streets before sunrise, or after sunset, or on a rare
holiday, to get a draft of sweet air and a gaze at the magnificence
of summer, but dares not break from his slavery and lead a man’s life
in a man’s relation to nature. In that which should be his own place,
he feels like a truant, and is scourged back presently to his task
and his cell. Poetry is with Goethe thus external, the gilding of the
chain, the mitigation of his fate; but the Muse never assays those
thunder-tones which cause to vibrate the sun and the moon, which
dissipate by dreadful melody all this iron network of circumstance,
and abolish the old heavens and the old earth before the freewill or
Godhead of man. That Goethe had not a moral perception proportionate
to his other powers, is not then merely a circumstance, as we might
relate of a man that he had or had not the sense of tune or an eye
for colors, but it is the cardinal fact of health or disease; since,
lacking this, he failed in the high sense to be a creator, and, with
divine endowments, drops by irreversible decree into the common
history of genius. He was content to fall into the track of vulgar
poets and spend on common aims his splendid endowments, and has
declined the office proffered to now and then a man in many centuries
in the power of his genius, of a Redeemer of the human mind. He has
written better than other poets only as his talent was subtler, but
the ambition of creation he refused. Life for him is prettier,
easier, wiser, decenter, has a gem or two more on its robe, but its
old eternal burden is not relieved; no drop of healthier blood flows
yet in its veins. Let him pass. Humanity must wait for its physician
still at the side of the road, and confess as this man goes out, that
they have served it better who assured it out of the innocent hope in
their hearts that a Physician will come, than this majestic Artist,
with all the treasuries of wit, of science, and of power at his
command.
The criticism, which is not so much spoken as felt in reference to
Goethe, instructs us directly in the hope of literature. We feel
that a man gifted like him should not leave the world as he found
it. It is true, though somewhat sad, that every fine genius teaches
us how to blame himself. Being so much, we cannot forgive him for
not being more. When one of these grand monads is incarnated whom
nature seems to design for eternal men and draw to her bosom, we
think that the old weariness of Europe and Asia, the trivial forms
of daily life will now end, and a new morning break on us all. What
is Austria? What is England? What is our graduated and petrified
social scale of ranks and employments? Shall not a poet redeem us
from these idolatries, and pale their legendary lustre before the
fires of the Divine Wisdom which burn in his heart? All that in our
sovereign moments each of us has divined of the powers of thought,
all the hints of omnipresence and energy which we have caught, this
man should unfold, and constitute facts.
And this is the insatiable craving which alternately saddens and
gladdens men at this day. The Doctrine of the Life of Man established
after the truth through all his faculties;—this is the thought which
the literature of this hour meditates and labors to say. This is that
which tunes the tongue and fires the eye and sits in the silence of
the youth. Verily it will not long want articulate and melodious
expression. There is nothing in the heart but comes presently to the
lips. The very depth of the sentiment, which is the author of all the
cutaneous life we see, is guarantee for the riches of science and
of song in the age to come. He who doubts whether this age or this
country can yield any contribution to the literature of the world,
only betrays his own blindness to the necessities of the human soul.
Has the power of poetry ceased, or the need? Have the eyes ceased to
see that which they would have, and which they have not? Have they
ceased to see other eyes? Are there no lonely, anxious, wondering
children, who must tell their tale? Are we not evermore whipped by
thoughts;
“In sorrow steeped, and steeped in love
Of thoughts not yet incarnated.”
The heart beats in this age as of old, and the passions are busy as
ever. Nature has not lost one ringlet of her beauty, one impulse of
resistance and valor. From the necessity of loving none are exempt,
and he that loves must utter his desires. A charm as radiant as
beauty ever beamed, a love that fainteth at the sight of its object,
is new to-day.
“The world does not run smoother than of old,
There are sad haps that must be told.”
Man is not so far lost but that he suffers ever the great Discontent
which is the elegy of his loss and the prediction of his recovery.
In the gay saloon he laments that these figures are not what
Raphael and Guercino painted. Withered though he stand, and trifler
though he be, the august spirit of the world looks out from his
eyes. In his heart he knows the ache of spiritual pain, and his
thought can animate the sea and land. What then shall hinder the
Genius of the time from speaking its thought? It cannot be silent,
if it would. It will write in a higher spirit and a wider knowledge
and with a grander practical aim than ever yet guided the pen of
poet. It will write the annals of a changed world, and record the
descent of principles into practice, of love into Government, of
love into Trade. It will describe the new heroic life of man, the
now unbelieved possibility of simple living and of clean and noble
relations with men. Religion will bind again these that were sometime
frivolous, customary, enemies, skeptics, self-seekers, into a joyful
reverence for the circumambient Whole, and that which was ecstacy
shall become daily bread.
II.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.[6]
We sometimes meet in a stage coach in New England an erect, muscular
man, with fresh complexion and a smooth hat, whose nervous speech
instantly betrays the English traveller;—a man nowise cautious to
conceal his name or that of his native country, or his very slight
esteem for the persons and the country that surround him. When Mr.
Bull rides in an American coach, he speaks quick and strong; he
is very ready to confess his ignorance of everything about him,
persons, manners, customs, politics, geography. He wonders that the
Americans should build with wood, whilst all this stone is lying in
the roadside; and is astonished to learn that a wooden house may last
a hundred years; nor will he remember the fact as many minutes after
it has been told him: he wonders that they do not make elder-wine and
cherry-bounce, since here are cherries, and every mile is crammed
with elder-bushes. He has never seen a good horse in America, nor a
good coach, nor a good inn. Here is very good earth and water and
plenty of them; that he is free to allow; to all other gifts of
nature or man his eyes are sealed by the inexorable demand for the
precise conveniences to which he is accustomed in England. Add to
this proud blindness the better quality of great downrightness in
speaking the truth, and the love of fair play, on all occasions, and
moreover the peculiarity which is alleged of the Englishman, that his
virtues do not come out until he quarrels.
Transfer these traits to a very elegant and accomplished mind, and
we shall have no bad picture of Walter Savage Landor, who may stand
as a favorable impersonation of the genius of his countrymen at the
present day. A sharp, dogmatic man, with a great deal of knowledge,
a great deal of worth, and a great deal of pride; with a profound
contempt for all that he does not understand; a master of all elegant
learning, and capable of the utmost delicacy of sentiment, and
yet prone to indulge a sort of ostentation of coarse imagery and
language. His partialities and dislikes are by no means culpable, but
are often whimsical and amusing; yet they are quite sincere, and,
like those of Johnson and Coleridge, are easily separable from the
man. What he says of Wordsworth is true of himself, that he delights
to throw a clod of dirt on the table, and cry “Gentlemen, there is
a better man than all of you.” Bolivar, Mina and General Jackson
will never be greater soldiers than Napoleon and Alexander, let Mr.
Landor think as he will; nor will he persuade us to burn Plato and
Xenophon, out of our admiration of Bishop Patrick, or “Lucas on
Happiness,” or “Lucas on Holiness,” or even Barrow’s Sermons. Yet a
man may love a paradox without either losing his wit or his honesty.
A less pardonable eccentricity is the cold and gratuitous obtrusion
of licentious images, not so much the suggestion of merriment as of
bitterness. Montaigne assigns as a reason for his license of speech,
that he is tired of seeing his Essays on the work-tables of ladies,
and he is determined they shall for the future put them out of sight.
In Mr. Landor’s coarseness there is a certain air of defiance, and
the rude word seems sometimes to arise from a disgust at niceness
and over-refinement. Before a well-dressed company he plunges his
fingers in a cesspool, as if to expose the whiteness of his hands
and the jewels of his ring. Afterward, he washes them in water, he
washes them in wine; but you are never secure from his freaks. A sort
of Earl Peterborough in literature, his eccentricity is too decided
not to have diminished his greatness. He has capital enough to have
furnished the brain of fifty stock authors, yet has written no book.
But we have spoken all our discontent. Possibly his writings are
open to harsher censure; but we love the man, from sympathy as well
as for reasons to be assigned; and have no wish, if we were able, to
put an argument in the mouth of his critics. Now for twenty years
we have still found the “Imaginary Conversations” a sure resource
in solitude, and it seems to us as original in its form as in its
matter. Nay, when we remember his rich and ample page, wherein we are
always sure to find free and sustained thought, a keen and precise
understanding, an affluent and ready memory familiar with all chosen
books, an industrious observation in every department of life, an
experience to which nothing has occurred in vain, honor for every
just and generous sentiment and a scourge like that of Furies for
every oppressor, whether public or private,—we feel how dignified is
this perpetual Censor in his curule chair, and we wish to thank a
benefactor of the reading world.
Mr. Landor is one of the foremost of that small class who make
good in the nineteenth century the claims of pure literature. In
these busy days of avarice and ambition, when there is so little
disposition to profound thought or to any but the most superficial
intellectual entertainments, a faithful scholar, receiving from
past ages the treasures of wit and enlarging them by his own love,
is a friend and consoler of mankind. When we pronounce the names of
Homer and Æschylus; Horace, Ovid and Plutarch; Erasmus, Scaliger
and Montaigne; Ben Jonson and Isaak Walton; Dryden and Pope,—we
pass at once out of trivial associations and enter into a region of
the purest pleasure accessible to human nature. We have quitted all
beneath the moon and entered that crystal sphere in which everything
in the world of matter reappears, but transfigured and immortal.
Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs
of his condition. The existence of the poorest play-wright and the
humblest scrivener is a good omen. A charm attaches to the most
inferior names which have in any manner got themselves enrolled in
the registers of the House of Fame, even as porters and grooms in the
courts; to Creech and Fenton, Theobald and Dennis, Aubrey and Spence.
From the moment of entering a library and opening a desired book, we
cease to be citizens, creditors, debtors, housekeepers and men of
care and fear. What boundless leisure! what original jurisdiction!
the old constellations have set, new and brighter have arisen; an
Elysian light tinges all objects:—
“In the afternoon we came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon.”
And this sweet asylum of an intellectual life must appear to have
the sanction of nature, as long as so many men are born with so
decided an aptitude for reading and writing. Let us thankfully allow
every faculty and art which opens new scope to a life so confined
as ours. There are vast spaces in a thought: a slave, to whom the
religious sentiment is opened, has a freedom which makes his master’s
freedom a slavery. Let us not be so illiberal with our schemes for
the renovation of society and nature as to disesteem or deny the
literary spirit. Certainly there are heights in nature which command
this; there are many more which this commands. It is vain to call it
a luxury, and as saints and reformers are apt to do, decry it as a
species of day-dreaming. What else are sanctities, and reforms, and
all other things? Whatever can make for itself an element, means,
organs, servants, and the most profound and permanent existence
in the hearts and heads of millions of men, must have a reason
for its being. Its excellency is reason and vindication enough. If
rhyme rejoices us there should be rhyme, as much as if fire cheers
us we should bring wood and coals. Each kind of excellence takes
place for its hour and excludes everything else. Do not brag of your
actions, as if they were better than Homer’s verses or Raphael’s
pictures. Raphael and Homer feel that action is pitiful beside
their enchantments. They could act too, if the stake was worthy of
them: but now all that is good in the universe urges them to their
task. Whoever writes for the love of truth and beauty, and not with
ulterior ends, belongs to this sacred class; and among these, few
men of the present age have a better claim to be numbered than Mr.
Landor. Wherever genius or taste has existed, wherever freedom and
justice are threatened, which he values as the element in which
genius may work, his interest is sure to be commanded. His love
of beauty is passionate, and betrays itself in all petulant and
contemptuous expressions.
But beyond his delight in genius and his love of individual and civil
liberty, Mr. Landor has a perception that is much more rare, the
appreciation of character. This is the more remarkable considered
with his intense nationality, to which we have already alluded. He is
buttoned in English broadcloth to the chin. He hates the Austrians,
the Italians, the French, the Scotch, and the Irish. He has the
common prejudices of an English landholder; values his pedigree, his
acres and the syllables of his name; loves all his advantages, is not
insensible to the beauty of his watch seal, or the Turk’s head on
his umbrella; yet with all this miscellaneous pride there is a noble
nature within him which instructs him that he is so rich that he can
well spare all his trappings, and, leaving to others the painting
of circumstance, aspire to the office of delineating character. He
draws his own portrait in the costume of a village schoolmaster, and
a sailor, and serenely enjoys the victory of nature over fortune. Not
only the elaborated story of Normanby, but the whimsical selection
of his heads proves this taste. He draws with evident pleasure
the portrait of a man who never said anything right and never did
anything wrong. But in the character of Pericles he has found full
play for beauty and greatness of behavior, where the circumstances
are in harmony with the man. These portraits, though mere sketches,
must be valued as attempts in the very highest kind of narrative,
which not only has very few examples to exhibit of any success,
but very few competitors in the attempt. The word Character is in
all mouths; it is a force which we all feel; yet who has analyzed
it? What is the nature of that subtle and majestic principle which
attaches us to a few persons, not so much by personal as by the most
spiritual ties? What is the quality of the persons who, without being
public men, or literary men, or rich men, or active men, or (in the
popular sense) religious men, have a certain salutary omnipresence
in all our life’s history, almost giving their own quality to the
atmosphere and the landscape? A moral force, yet wholly unmindful of
creed and catechism, intellectual, but scornful of books, it works
directly and without means, and though it may be resisted at any
time, yet resistance to it is a suicide. For the person who stands
in this lofty relation to his fellow-men is always the impersonation
to them of their conscience. It is a sufficient proof of the
extreme delicacy of this element, evanescing before any but the most
sympathetic vision, that it has so seldom been employed in the drama
and in novels. Mr. Landor, almost alone among living English writers,
has indicated his perception of it.
These merits make Mr. Landor’s position in the republic of letters
one of great mark and dignity. He exercises with a grandeur of
spirit the office of writer, and carries it with an air of old and
unquestionable nobility. We do not recollect an example of more
complete independence in literary history. He has no clanship, no
friendships that warp him. He was one of the first to pronounce
Wordsworth the great poet of the age, yet he discriminates his faults
with the greater freedom. He loves Pindar, Æschylus, Euripides,
Aristophanes, Demosthenes, Virgil, yet with open eyes. His position
is by no means the highest in literature: he is not a poet or a
philosopher. He is a man full of thoughts, but not, like Coleridge, a
man of ideas. Only from a mind conversant with the First Philosophy
can definitions be expected. Coleridge has contributed many valuable
ones to modern literature. Mr. Landor’s definitions are only
enumerations of particulars; the generic law is not seized. But as it
is not from the highest Alps or Andes but from less elevated summits
that the most attractive landscape is commanded, so is Mr. Landor
the most useful and agreeable of critics. He has commented on a wide
variety of writers, with a closeness and extent of view which has
enhanced the value of those authors to his readers. His Dialogue on
the Epicurean philosophy is a theory of the genius of Epicurus. The
Dialogue between Barrow and Newton is the best of all criticisms on
the essays of Bacon. His picture of Demosthenes in three several
Dialogues is new and adequate. He has illustrated the genius of
Homer, Æschylus, Pindar, Euripides, Thucydides. Then he has examined
before he has expatiated, and the minuteness of his verbal criticism
gives a confidence in his fidelity when he speaks the language of
meditation or of passion. His acquaintance with the English tongue is
unsurpassed. He “hates false words, and seeks with care, difficulty
and moroseness those that fit the thing.” He knows the value of his
own words. “They are not,” he says, “written on slate.” He never
stoops to explanation, nor uses seven words where one will do. He
is a master of condensation and suppression, and that in no vulgar
way. He knows the wide difference between compression and an obscure
elliptical style. The dense writer has yet ample room and choice of
phrase, and even a gamesome mood often between his valid words. There
is no inadequacy or disagreeable contraction in his sentence, any
more than in a human face, where in a square space of a few inches is
found room for every possible variety of expression.
Yet it is not as an artist that Mr. Landor commends himself to us.
He is not epic or dramatic, he has not the high, overpowering method
by which the master gives unity and integrity to a work of many
parts. He is too wilful, and never abandons himself to his genius.
His books are a strange mixture of politics, etymology, allegory,
sentiment, and personal history; and what skill of transition he
may possess is superficial, not spiritual. His merit must rest, at
last, not on the spirit of the dialogue or the symmetry of any of
his historical portraits, but on the value of his sentences. Many of
these will secure their own immortality in English literature; and
this, rightly considered, is no mean merit. These are not plants and
animals, but the genetical atoms of which both are composed. All our
great debt to the Oriental world is of this kind, not utensils and
statues of the precious metal, but bullion and gold-dust. Of many of
Mr. Landor’s sentences we are fain to remember what was said of those
of Socrates; that they are cubes, which will stand firm, place them
how or where you will.
III.
PRAYERS.[7]
“Not with fond shekels of the tested gold,
Nor gems whose rates are either rich or poor
As fancy values them: but with true prayers,
That shall be up at heaven and enter there
Ere sunrise; prayers from preserved souls,
From fasting maids, whose minds are dedicate
To nothing temporal.” SHAKSPEARE.
Pythagoras said that the time when men are honestest is when they
present themselves before the gods. If we can overhear the prayer we
shall know the man. But prayers are not made to be overheard, or to
be printed, so that we seldom have the prayer otherwise than it can
be inferred from the man and his fortunes, which are the answer to
the prayer, and always accord with it. Yet there are scattered about
in the earth a few records of these devout hours, which it would
edify us to read, could they be collected in a more catholic spirit
than the wretched and repulsive volumes which usurp that name. Let
us not have the prayers of one sect, nor of the Christian Church, but
of men in all ages and religions who have prayed well. The prayer of
Jesus is (as it deserves) become a form for the human race. Many men
have contributed a single expression, a single word to the language
of devotion, which is immediately caught and stereotyped in the
prayers of their church and nation. Among the remains of Euripides we
have this prayer: “Thou God of all! infuse light into the souls of
men, whereby they may be enabled to know what is the root from whence
all their evils spring, and by what means they may avoid them.” In
the Phædrus of Plato, we find this petition in the mouth of Socrates:
“O gracious Pan! and ye other gods who preside over this place!
grant that I may be beautiful within; and that those external things
which I have may be such as may best agree with a right internal
disposition of mine; and that I may account him to be rich, who is
wise and just.” Wacic the Caliph, who died A. D. 845, ended his life,
the Arabian historians tell us, with these words: “O thou whose
kingdom never passes away, pity one whose dignity is so transient.”
But what led us to these remembrances was the happy accident which
in this undevout age lately brought us acquainted with two or three
diaries, which attest, if there be need of attestation, the eternity
of the sentiment and its equality to itself through all the variety
of expression. The first is the prayer of a deaf and dumb boy:—
“When my long-attached friend comes to me, I have pleasure
to converse with him, and I rejoice to pass my eyes over his
countenance; but soon I am weary of spending my time causelessly
and unimproved, and I desire to leave him, (but not in rudeness),
because I wished to be engaged in my business. But thou, O my
Father, knowest I always delight to commune with thee in my lone
and silent heart; I am never full of thee; I am never weary of
thee; I am always desiring thee. I hunger with strong hope and
affection for thee, and I thirst for thy grace and spirit.
“When I go to visit my friends, I must put on my best garments, and
I must think of my manner to please them. I am tired to stay long,
because my mind is not free, and they sometimes talk gossip with
me. But oh, my Father, thou visitest me in my work, and I can lift
up my desires to thee, and my heart is cheered and at rest with thy
presence, and I am always alone with thee, and thou dost not steal
my time by foolishness. I always ask in my heart, where can I find
thee?”
The next is a voice out of a solitude as strict and sacred as that in
which nature had isolated this eloquent mute:—
“My Father, when I cannot be cheerful or happy, I can be true
and obedient, and I will not forget that joy has been, and may
still be. If there is no hour of solitude granted me, still I
will commune with thee. If I may not search out and pierce thy
thought, so much the more may my living praise thee. At whatever
price, I must be alone with thee; this must be the demand I make.
These duties are not the life, but the means which enable us to
show forth the life. So must I take up this cross, and bear it
willingly. Why should I feel reproved when a busy one enters the
room? I am not idle, though I sit with folded hands, but instantly
I must seek some cover. For that shame I reprove myself. Are they
only the valuable members of society who labor to dress and feed
it? Shall we never ask the aim of all this hurry and foam, of this
aimless activity? Let the purpose for which I live be always before
me; let every thought and word go to confirm and illuminate that
end; namely, that I must become near and dear to thee; that now I
am beyond the reach of all but thee.
“How can we not be reconciled to thy will? I will know the joy
of giving to my friend the dearest treasure I have. I know that
sorrow comes not at once only. We cannot meet it and say, now it is
overcome, but again, and yet again, its flood pours over us, and as
full as at first.
“If but this tedious battle could be fought,
Like Sparta’s heroes at one rocky pass,
‘One day be spent in dying,’ men had sought
The spot, and been cut down like mower’s grass.”
The next is in a metrical form. It is the aspiration of a different
mind, in quite other regions of power and duty, yet they all accord
at last.
“Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high,
As I can now discern with this clear eye.
“And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe’er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou’st distinguished me.
“That my weak hand may equal my firm faith,
And my life practise more than my tongue saith;
That my low conduct may not show,
Nor my relenting lines,
That I thy purpose did not know,
Or overrated thy designs.”
The last of the four orisons is written in a singularly calm and
healthful spirit, and contains this petition:—
“My Father: I now come to thee with a desire to thank thee for the
continuance of our love, the one for the other. I feel that without
thy love in me I should be alone here in the flesh. I cannot
express my gratitude for what thou hast been and continuest to be
to me. But thou knowest what my feelings are. When nought on earth
seemeth pleasant to me, thou dost make thyself known to me, and
teach that which is needful for me, and dost cheer my travels on.
I know that thou hast not created me and placed me here on earth,
amidst its toils and troubles and the follies of those around me,
and told me to be like thyself when I see so little of thee here
to profit by; thou hast not done this, and then left me here to
myself, a poor, weak man, scarcely able to earn my bread. No; thou
art my Father and I will love thee, for thou didst first love me,
and lovest me still. We will ever be parent and child. Wilt thou
give me strength to persevere in this great work of redemption.
Wilt thou show me the true means of accomplishing it.... I thank
thee for the knowledge that I have attained of thee by thy sons
who have been before me, and especially for him who brought me so
perfect a type of thy goodness and love to men.... I know that thou
wilt deal with me as I deserve. I place myself therefore in thy
hand, knowing that thou wilt keep me from harm so long as I consent
to live under thy protecting care.”
Let these few scattered leaves, which a chance (as men say, but which
to us shall be holy) brought under our eye nearly at the same moment,
stand as an example of innumerable similar expressions which no
mortal witness has reported, and be a sign of the times. Might they
be suggestion to many a heart of yet higher secret experiences which
are ineffable! But we must not tie up the rosary on which we have
strung these few white beads, without adding a pearl of great price
from that book of prayer, the “Confessions of Saint Augustine.”
“And being admonished to reflect upon myself, I entered into the
very inward parts of my soul, by thy conduct; and I was able to do
it, because now thou wert become my helper. I entered and discerned
with the eye of my soul (such as it was), even beyond my soul and
mind itself, the Light unchangeable. Not this vulgar light which
all flesh may look upon, nor as it were a greater of the same kind,
as though the brightness of this should be manifold greater and
with its greatness take up all space. Not such was this light, but
other, yea, far other from all these. Neither was it so above my
understanding as oil swims above water, or as the heaven is above
the earth. But it is above me, because it made me; and I am under
it, because I was made by it. He that knows truth or verity, knows
what that light is, and he that knows it, knows eternity, and it
is known by charity. O eternal Verity! and true Charity! and dear
Eternity! thou art my God, to thee do I sigh day and night. Thee
when I first knew, thou liftedst me up that I might see, there
was what I might see, and that I was not yet such as to see. And
thou didst beat back my weak sight upon myself, shooting out beams
upon me after a vehement manner; and I even trembled between love
and horror, and I found myself to be far off, and even in the very
region of dissimilitude from thee.”
IV.
AGRICULTURE OF MASSACHUSETTS.[8]
In an afternoon in April, after a long walk, I traversed an
orchard where boys were grafting apple-trees, and found the
Farmer in his corn-field. He was holding the plough, and his son
driving the oxen. This man always impresses me with respect, he
is so manly, so sweet-tempered, so faithful, so disdainful of all
appearances,—excellent and reverable in his old weather-worn cap and
blue frock bedaubed with the soil of the field; so honest withal,
that he always needs to be watched lest he should cheat himself. I
still remember with some shame that in some dealing we had together a
long time ago, I found that he had been looking to my interest in the
affair, and I had been looking to my interest, and nobody had looked
to his part. As I drew near this brave laborer in the midst of his
own acres, I could not help feeling for him the highest respect. Here
is the Cæsar, the Alexander of the soil, conquering and to conquer,
after how many and many a hard-fought summer’s day and winter’s day;
not like Napoleon, hero of sixty battles only, but of six thousand,
and out of every one he has come victor; and here he stands, with
Atlantic strength and cheer, invincible still. These slight and
useless city limbs of ours will come to shame before this strong
soldier, for his have done his own work and ours too. What good this
man has or has had, he has earned. No rich father or father-in-law
left him any inheritance of land or money. He borrowed the money with
which he bought his farm, and has bred up a large family, given them
a good education, and improved his land in every way year by year,
and this without prejudice to himself the landlord, for here he is, a
man every inch of him, and reminds us of the hero of the Robin Hood
ballad,—
“Much, the miller’s son,
There was no inch of his body
But it was worth a groom.”
Innocence and justice have written their names on his brow. Toil
has not broken his spirit. His laugh rings with the sweetness and
hilarity of a child; yet he is a man of a strongly intellectual
taste, of much reading, and of an erect good sense and independent
spirit which can neither brook usurpation nor falsehood in any
shape. I walked up and down the field, as he ploughed his furrow,
and we talked as we walked. Our conversation naturally turned on the
season and its new labors. He had been reading the Report of the
Agricultural Survey of the Commonwealth, and had found good things
in it; but it was easy to see that he felt toward the author much as
soldiers do towards the historiographer who follows the camp, more
good-nature than reverence for the gownsman.
The First Report, he said, is better than the last, as I observe the
first sermon of a minister is often his best, for every man has one
thing which he specially wishes to say, and that comes out at first.
But who is this book written for? Not for farmers; no pains are taken
to send it to them; it was by accident that this volume came into my
hands for a few days. And it is not for them. They could not afford
to follow such advice as is given here; they have sterner teachers;
their own business teaches them better. No; this was written for the
literary men. But in that case, the state should not be taxed to pay
for it. Let us see. The account of the maple sugar,—that is very good
and entertaining, and, I suppose, true. The story of the farmer’s
daughter, whom education had spoiled for everything useful on a
farm,—that is good too, and we have much that is like it in Thomas’s
Almanack. But why this recommendation of stone houses? They are not
so cheap, not so dry, and not so fit for us. Our roads are always
changing their direction, and after a man has built at great cost a
stone house, a new road is opened, and he finds himself a mile or two
from the highway. Then our people are not stationary, like those of
old countries, but always alert to better themselves, and will remove
from town to town as a new market opens or a better farm is to be
had, and do not wish to spend too much on their buildings.
The Commissioner advises the farmers to sell their cattle and their
hay in the fall, and buy again in the spring. But we farmers always
know what our interest dictates, and do accordingly. We have no
choice in this matter; our way is but too plain. Down below, where
manure is cheap and hay dear, they will sell their oxen in November;
but for me to sell my cattle and my produce in the fall, would be to
sell my farm, for I should have no manure to renew a crop in the
spring. And thus Necessity farms it; necessity finds out when to go
to Brighton, and when to feed in the stall, better than Mr. Colman
can tell us.
But especially observe what is said throughout these Reports of
the model farms and model farmers. One would think that Mr. D. and
Major S. were the pillars of the Commonwealth. The good Commissioner
takes off his hat when he approaches them, distrusts the value of
“his feeble praise,” and repeats his compliments as often as their
names are introduced. And yet, in my opinion, Mr. D., with all his
knowledge and present skill, would starve in two years on any one of
fifty poor farms in this neighborhood, on each of which now a farmer
manages to get a good living. Mr. D. inherited a farm, and spends on
it every year from other resources; otherwise his farm had ruined
him long since;—and as for the Major, he never got rich by his skill
in making land produce, but in making men produce. The truth is, a
farm will not make an honest man rich in money. I do not know of
a single instance in which a man has honestly got rich by farming
alone. It cannot be done. The way in which men who have farms grow
rich, is either by other resources, or by trade, or by getting their
labor for nothing, or by other methods of which I could tell you
many sad anecdotes. What does the Agricultural Surveyor know of all
this? What can he know? He is the victim of the “Reports” that are
sent him, of particular farms. He cannot go behind the estimates to
know how the contracts were made, and how the sales were effected.
The true men of skill, the poor farmers, who, by the sweat of their
face, without an inheritance and without offence to their conscience
have reared a family of valuable citizens and matrons to the state,
reduced a stubborn soil to a good farm,—although their buildings are
many of them shabby, are the only right subjects of this Report; yet
these make no figure in it. These should be holden up to imitation,
and their methods detailed; yet their houses are very uninviting
and inconspicuous to State Commissioners. So with these premiums
to farms, and premiums at cattle-shows. The class that I describe
must pay the premium which is awarded to the rich. Yet the premium
obviously ought to be given for the good management of a poor farm.
In this strain the Farmer proceeded, adding many special criticisms.
He had a good opinion of the Surveyor, and acquitted him of any
blame in the matter, but was incorrigible in his skepticism
concerning the benefits conferred by legislatures on the agriculture
of Massachusetts. I believe that my friend is a little stiff and
inconvertible in his own opinions, and that there is another side to
be heard; but so much wisdom seemed to lie under all his statement
that it deserved a record.
V.
EUROPE AND EUROPEAN BOOKS.[9]
It was a brighter day than we have often known in our literary
calendar, when within a twelvemonth a single London advertisement
announced a new volume of poems by Wordsworth, poems by Tennyson, and
a play by Henry Taylor. Wordsworth’s nature or character has had
all the time it needed in order to make its mark and supply the want
of talent. We have learned how to read him. We have ceased to expect
that which he cannot give. He has the merit of just moral perception,
but not that of deft poetic execution. How would Milton curl his lip
at such slipshod newspaper style. Many of his poems, as for example
the Rylstone Doe, might be all improvised. Nothing of Milton, nothing
of Marvell, of Herbert, of Dryden, could be. These are such verses
as in a just state of culture should be _vers de société_, such
as every gentleman could write but none would think of printing,
or of claiming the poet’s laurel on their merit. The Pindar, the
Shakspeare, the Dante, whilst they have the just and open soul, have
also the eye to see the dimmest star that glimmers in the Milky Way,
the serratures of every leaf, the test-objects of the microscope, and
then the tongue to utter the same things in words that engrave them
on all the ears of mankind. The poet demands all gifts, and not one
or two only.
The poet, like the electric rod, must reach from a point nearer the
sky than all surrounding objects, down to the earth, and into the
dark wet soil, or neither is of use. The poet must not only converse
with pure thought, but he must demonstrate it almost to the senses.
His words must be pictures, his verses must be spheres and cubes, to
be seen and smelled and handled. His fable must be a good story, and
its meaning must hold as pure truth. In the debates on the Copyright
Bill, in the English Parliament, Mr. Sergeant Wakley, the coroner,
quoted Wordsworth’s poetry in derision, and asked the roaring House
of Commons what that meant, and whether a man should have public
reward for writing such stuff. Homer, Horace, Milton and Chaucer
would defy the coroner. Whilst they have wisdom to the wise, he
would see that to the external they have external meaning. Coleridge
excellently said of poetry, that poetry must first be good sense; as
a palace might well be magnificent, but first it must be a house.
Wordsworth is open to ridicule of this kind. And yet Wordsworth,
though satisfied if he can suggest to a sympathetic mind his own
mood, and though setting a private and exaggerated value on his
compositions; though confounding his accidental with the universal
consciousness, and taking the public to task for not admiring
his poetry,—is really a master of the English language, and his
poems evince a power of diction that is no more rivalled by his
contemporaries than is his poetic insight. But the capital merit
of Wordsworth is that he has done more for the sanity of this
generation than any other writer. Early in life, at a crisis it is
said in his private affairs, he made his election between assuming
and defending some legal rights, with the chances of wealth and a
position in the world,—and the inward promptings of his heavenly
genius; he took his part; he accepted the call to be a poet, and sat
down, far from cities, with coarse clothing and plain fare to obey
the heavenly vision. The choice he had made in his will, manifested
itself in every line to be real. We have poets who write the poetry
of society, of the patrician and conventional Europe, as Scott and
Moore, and others who, like Byron or Bulwer, write the poetry of
vice and disease. But Wordsworth threw himself into his place, made
no reserves or stipulations; man and writer were not to be divided.
He sat at the foot of Helvellyn and on the margin of Windermere,
and took their lustrous mornings and their sublime midnights for
his theme, and not Marlow, nor Massinger, not Horace, nor Milton,
nor Dante. He once for all forsook the styles and standards and
modes of thinking of London and Paris, and the books read there, and
the aims pursued, and wrote Helvellyn and Windermere, and the dim
spirits which these haunts harbored. There was not the least attempt
to reconcile these with the spirit of fashion and selfishness, nor
to show, with great deference to the superior judgment of dukes
and earls, that although London was the home for men of great
parts, yet Westmoreland had these consolations for such as fate had
condemned to the country life,—but with a complete satisfaction
he pitied and rebuked their false lives, and celebrated his own
with the religion of a true priest. Hence the antagonism which was
immediately felt between his poetry and the spirit of the age, that
here not only criticism but conscience and will were parties; the
spirit of literature and the modes of living and the conventional
theories of the conduct of life were called in question on wholly
new grounds,—not from Platonism, not from Christianity, but from the
lessons which the country muse taught a stout pedestrian climbing
a mountain and following a river from its parent rill down to the
sea. The Cannings and Jeffreys of the capital, the Court Journals
and Literary Gazettes were not well pleased, and voted the poet a
bore. But that which rose in him so high as to the lips, rose in many
others as high as to the heart. What he said, they were prepared to
hear and confirm. The influence was in the air, and was wafted up
and down into lone and into populous places, resisting the popular
taste, modifying opinions which it did not change, and soon came
to be felt in poetry, in criticism, in plans of life, and at last
in legislation. In this country it very early found a stronghold,
and its effect may be traced on all the poetry both of England and
America.
But, notwithstanding all Wordsworth’s grand merits, it was a great
pleasure to know that Alfred Tennyson’s two volumes were coming
out in the same ship; it was a great pleasure to receive them. The
elegance, the wit and subtlety of this writer, his rich fancy, his
power of language, his metrical skill, his independence of any
living masters, his peculiar topics, his taste for the costly and
gorgeous, discriminate the musky poet of gardens and conservatories,
of parks and palaces. Perhaps we felt the popular objection that
he wants rude truth; he is too fine. In these boudoirs of damask
and alabaster, one is farther off from stern nature and human life
than in “Lalla Rookh” and “The Loves of the Angels.” Amid swinging
censers and perfumed lamps, amidst velvet and glory we long for rain
and frost. Otto-of-roses is good, but wild air is better. A critical
friend of ours affirms that the vice which bereaved modern painters
of their power, is the ambition to begin where their fathers ended;
to equal the masters in their exquisite finish, instead of their
religious purpose. The painters are not willing to paint ill enough;
they will not paint for their times, agitated by the spirit which
agitates their country; so should their picture picture us and draw
all men after them; but they copy the technics of their predecessors,
and paint for their predecessors’ public. It seems as if the same
vice had worked in poetry. Tennyson’s compositions are not so much
poems as studies in poetry, or sketches after the styles of sundry
old masters. He is not the husband, who builds the homestead after
his own necessity, from foundation-stone to chimney-top and turret,
but a tasteful bachelor who collects quaint staircases and groined
ceilings. We have no right to such superfineness. We must not make
our bread of pure sugar. These delicacies and splendors are then
legitimate when they are the excess of substantial and necessary
expenditure. The best songs in English poetry are by that heavy,
hard, pedantic poet, Ben Jonson. Jonson is rude, and only on rare
occasions gay. Tennyson is always fine; but Jonson’s beauty is
more grateful than Tennyson’s. It is a natural manly grace of a
robust workman. Ben’s flowers are not in pots at a city florist’s,
arranged on a flower-stand, but he is a countryman at a harvest-home,
attending his ox-cart from the fields, loaded with potatoes and
apples, with grapes and plums, with nuts and berries, and stuck
with boughs of hemlock and sweetbriar, with ferns and pond lilies
which the children have gathered. But let us not quarrel with our
benefactors. Perhaps Tennyson is too quaint and elegant. What then?
It is long since we have had as good a lyrist; it will be long before
we have his superior. “Godiva” is a noble poem that will tell the
legend a thousand years. The poem of all the poetry of the present
age for which we predict the longest term, is “Abou ben Adhem,” of
Leigh Hunt. Fortune will still have her part in every victory, and
it is strange that one of the best poems should be written by a man
who has hardly written any other. And “Godiva” is a parable which
belongs to the same gospel. “Locksley Hall” and “The Two Voices”
are meditative poems, which were slowly written to be slowly read.
“The Talking Oak,” though a little hurt by its wit and ingenuity, is
beautiful, and the most poetic of the volume. “Ulysses” belongs to
a high class of poetry, destined to be the highest, and to be more
cultivated in the next generation. “Œnone” was a sketch of the same
kind. One of the best specimens we have of the class is Wordsworth’s
“Laodamia,” of which no special merit it can possess equals the total
merit of having selected such a subject in such a spirit.
Next to the poetry, the novels, which come to us in every ship from
England, have an importance increased by the immense extension of
their circulation through the new cheap press, which sends them
to so many willing thousands. We have heard it alleged with some
evidence that the prominence given to intellectual power in Bulwer’s
romances has proved a main stimulus to mental culture in thousands
of young men in England and America. The effect on manners cannot be
less sensible, and we can easily believe that the behavior of the
ball-room and of the hotel has not failed to draw some addition of
dignity and grace from the fair ideals with which the imagination of
a novelist has filled the heads of the most imitative class.
We are not very well versed in these books, yet we have read Mr.
Bulwer enough to see that the story is rapid and interesting; he has
really seen London society, and does not draw ignorant caricatures.
He is not a genius, but his novels are marked with great energy and
with a courage of experiment which in each instance had its degree
of success. The story of Zanoni was one of those world-fables which
is so agreeable to the human imagination that it is found in some
form in the language of every country, and is always reappearing
in literature. Many of the details of this novel preserve a poetic
truth. We read Zanoni with pleasure, because magic is natural. It
is implied in all superior culture that a complete man would need
no auxiliaries to his personal presence. The eye and the word are
certainly far subtler and stronger weapons than either money or
knives. Whoever looked on the hero would consent to his will, being
certified that his aims were universal, not selfish; and he would
be obeyed as naturally as the rain and the sunshine are. For this
reason, children delight in fairy tales. Nature is described in
them as the servant of man, which they feel ought to be true. But
Zanoni pains us and the author loses our respect, because he speedily
betrays that he does not see the true limitations of the charm;
because the power with which his hero is armed is a toy, inasmuch as
the power does not flow from its legitimate fountains in the mind, is
a power for London; a divine power converted into a burglar’s false
key or a highwayman’s pistol to rob and kill with.
But Mr. Bulwer’s recent stories have given us who do not read novels,
occasion to think of this department of literature, supposed to
be the natural fruit and expression of the age. We conceive that
the obvious division of modern romance is into two kinds: first,
the novels of costume or of circumstance, which is the old style,
and vastly the most numerous. In this class, the hero, without any
particular character, is in a very particular circumstance; he is
greatly in want of a fortune or of a wife, and usually of both, and
the business of the piece is to provide him suitably. This is the
problem to be solved in thousands of English romances, including the
Porter novels and the more splendid examples of the Edgeworth and
Scott romances.
It is curious how sleepy and foolish we are, that these tales will
so take us. Again and again we have been caught in that old foolish
trap. Had one noble thought opening the chambers of the intellect,
one sentiment from the heart of God been spoken by them, the reader
had been made a participator of their triumph; he too had been an
invited and eternal guest; but this reward granted them is property,
all-excluding property, a little cake baked for them to eat and
for none other, nay, a preference and cosseting which is rude and
insulting to all but the minion.
Except in the stories of Edgeworth and Scott, whose talent knew how
to give to the book a thousand adventitious graces, the novels of
costume are all one, and there is but one standard English novel,
like the one orthodox sermon, which with slight variation is repeated
every Sunday from so many pulpits.
But the other novel, of which “Wilhelm Meister” is the best specimen,
the novel of _character_, treats the reader with more respect; the
development of character being the problem, the reader is made a
partaker of the whole prosperity. Everything good in such a story
remains with the reader when the book is closed. A noble book was
“Wilhelm Meister.” It gave the hint of a cultivated society which we
found nowhere else. It was founded on power to do what was necessary,
each person finding it an indispensable qualification of membership
that he could do something useful, as in mechanics or agriculture
or other indispensable art; then a probity, a justice was to be
its element, symbolized by the insisting that each property should
be cleared of privilege, and should pay its full tax to the state.
Then a perception of beauty was the equally indispensable element of
the association, by which each was dignified and all were dignified;
then each was to obey his genius to the length of abandonment. They
watched each candidate vigilantly, without his knowing that he
was observed, and when he had given proof that he was a faithful
man, then all doors, all houses, all relations were open to him;
high behavior fraternized with high behavior, without question of
heraldry, and the only power recognized is the force of character.
The novels of Fashion, of D’Israeli, Mrs. Gore, Mr. Ward, belong to
the class of novels of costume, because the aim is purely external
success. Of the tales of fashionable life, by far the most agreeable
and the most efficient was Vivian Grey. Young men were and still are
the readers and victims. Byron ruled for a time, but Vivian, with
no tithe of Byron’s genius, rules longer. One can distinguish the
Vivians in all companies. They would quiz their father and mother and
lover and friend. They discuss sun and planets, liberty and fate,
love and death, over the soup. They never sleep, go nowhere, stay
nowhere, eat nothing, and know nobody, but are up to anything, though
it were the genesis of nature, or the last cataclysm,—Festus-like,
Faust-like, Jove-like, and could write an Iliad any rainy morning,
if fame were not such a bore. Men, women, though the greatest
and fairest, are stupid things; but a rifle, and a mild pleasant
gunpowder, a spaniel, and a cheroot, are themes for Olympus. I fear
it was in part the influence of such pictures on living society
which made the style of manners of which we have so many pictures,
as, for example, in the following account of the English fashionist.
“His highest triumph is to appear with the most wooden manners,
as little polished as will suffice to avoid castigation, nay, to
contrive even his civilities so that they may appear as near as
may be to affronts; instead of a noble high-bred ease, to have the
courage to offend against every restraint of decorum, to invert the
relation in which our sex stand to women, so that they appear the
attacking, and he the passive or defensive party.”
We must here check our gossip in mid volley and adjourn the rest of
our critical chapter to a more convenient season.
VI.
PAST AND PRESENT.[10]
Here is Carlyle’s new poem, his Iliad of English woes, to follow his
poem on France, entitled the History of the French Revolution. In its
first aspect it is a political tract, and since Burke, since Milton,
we have had nothing to compare with it. It grapples honestly with the
facts lying before all men, groups and disposes them with a master’s
mind, and, with a heart full of manly tenderness, offers his best
counsel to his brothers. Obviously it is the book of a powerful and
accomplished thinker, who has looked with naked eyes at the dreadful
political signs in England for the last few years, has conversed much
on these topics with such wise men of all ranks and parties as are
drawn to a scholar’s house, until such daily and nightly meditation
has grown into a great connection, if not a system of thoughts;
and the topic of English politics becomes the best vehicle for the
expression of his recent thinking, recommended to him by the desire
to give some timely counsels, and to strip the worst mischiefs of
their plausibility. It is a brave and just book, and not a semblance.
“No new truth,” say the critics on all sides. Is it so? Truth is very
old, but the merit of seers is not to invent but to dispose objects
in their right places, and he is the commander who is always in the
mount, whose eye not only sees details, but throws crowds of details
into their right arrangement and a larger and juster totality than
any other. The book makes great approaches to true contemporary
history, a very rare success, and firmly holds up to daylight the
absurdities still tolerated in the English and European system. It
is such an appeal to the conscience and honor of England as cannot
be forgotten, or be feigned to be forgotten. It has the merit which
belongs to every honest book, that it was self-examining before it
was eloquent, and so hits all other men, and, as the country people
say of good preaching, “comes bounce down into every pew.” Every
reader shall carry away something. The scholar shall read and write,
the farmer and mechanic shall toil, with new resolution, nor forget
the book when they resume their labor.
Though no theocrat, and more than most philosophers a believer in
political systems, Mr. Carlyle very fairly finds the calamity of the
times, not in bad bills of Parliament, nor the remedy in good bills,
but the vice in false and superficial aims of the people, and the
remedy in honesty and insight. Like every work of genius, its great
value is in telling such simple truths. As we recall the topics, we
are struck with the force given to the plain truths; the picture of
the English nation all sitting enchanted, the poor, enchanted so that
they cannot work, the rich, enchanted so that they cannot enjoy, and
are rich in vain; the exposure of the progress of fraud into all arts
and social activities; the proposition that the laborer must have
a greater share in his earnings; that the principle of permanence
shall be admitted into all contracts of mutual service; that the
state shall provide at least schoolmaster’s education for all the
citizens; the exhortation to the workman that he shall respect the
work and not the wages; to the scholar that he shall be there for
light; to the idle, that no man shall sit idle; the picture of Abbot
Samson, the true governor, who “is not there to expect reason and
nobleness of others, he is there to give them of his own reason
and nobleness;” and the assumption throughout the book, that a new
chivalry and nobility, namely the dynasty of labor, is replacing the
old nobilities. These things strike us with a force which reminds
us of the morals of the Oriental or early Greek masters, and of no
modern book. Truly in these things is great reward. It is not by
sitting still at a grand distance and calling the human race _larvæ_,
that men are to be helped, nor by helping the depraved after their
own foolish fashion, but by doing unweariedly the particular work we
were born to do. Let no man think himself absolved because he does a
generous action and befriends the poor, but let him see whether he so
holds his property that a benefit goes from it to all. A man’s diet
should be what is simplest and readiest to be had, because it is
so private a good. His house should be better, because that is for
the use of hundreds, perhaps of thousands, and is the property of
the traveller. But his speech is a perpetual and public instrument;
let that always side with the race and yield neither a lie nor a
sneer. His manners,—let them be hospitable and civilizing, so that
no Phidias or Raphael shall have taught anything better in canvas or
stone; and his acts should be representative of the human race, as
one who makes them rich in his having, and poor in his want.
It requires great courage in a man of letters to handle the
contemporary practical questions; not because he then has all men
for his rivals, but because of the infinite entanglements of the
problem, and the waste of strength in gathering unripe fruits. The
task is superhuman; and the poet knows well that a little time will
do more than the most puissant genius. Time stills the loud noise of
opinions, sinks the small, raises the great, so that the true emerges
without effort and in perfect harmony to all eyes; but the truth of
the present hour, except in particulars and single relations, is
unattainable. Each man can very well know his own part of duty, if
he will; but to bring out the truth for beauty, and as literature,
surmounts the powers of art. The most elaborate history of to-day
will have the oddest dislocated look in the next generation. The
historian of to-day is yet three ages off. The poet cannot descend
into the turbid present without injury to his rarest gifts. Hence
that necessity of isolation which genius has always felt. He must
stand on his glass tripod, if he would keep his electricity.
But when the political aspects are so calamitous that the sympathies
of the man overpower the habits of the poet, a higher than literary
inspiration may succor him. It is a costly proof of character, that
the most renowned scholar of England should take his reputation in
his hand and should descend into the ring; and he has added to his
love whatever honor his opinions may forfeit. To atone for this
departure from the vows of the scholar and his eternal duties to
this secular charity, we have at least this gain, that here is a
message which those to whom it was addressed cannot choose but hear.
Though they die, they must listen. It is plain that whether by hope
or by fear, or were it only by delight in this panorama of brilliant
images, all the great classes of English society must read, even
those whose existence it proscribes. Poor Queen Victoria,—poor Sir
Robert Peel, poor Primate and Bishops,—poor Dukes and Lords! There
is no help in place or pride or in looking another way; a grain of
wit is more penetrating than the lightning of the night-storm, which
no curtains or shutters will keep out. Here is a book which will be
read, no thanks to anybody but itself. What pains, what hopes, what
vows, shall come of the reading! Here is a book as full of treason as
an egg is full of meat, and every lordship and worship and high form
and ceremony of English conservatism tossed like a foot-ball into the
air, and kept in the air, with merciless kicks and rebounds, and yet
not a word is punishable by statute. The wit has eluded all official
zeal; and yet these dire jokes, these cunning thrusts, this flaming
sword of Cherubim waved high in air, illuminates the whole horizon,
and shows to the eyes of the universe every wound it inflicts. Worst
of all for the party attacked, it bereaves them beforehand of all
sympathy, by anticipating the plea of poetic and humane conservatism,
and impressing the reader with the conviction that the satirist
himself has the truest love for everything old and excellent in
English land and institutions, and a genuine respect for the basis of
truth in those whom he exposes.
We are at some loss how to state what strikes us as the fault of
this remarkable book, for the variety and excellence of the talent
displayed in it is pretty sure to leave all special criticism in the
wrong. And we may easily fail in expressing the general objection
which we feel. It appears to us as a certain disproportion in the
picture, caused by the obtrusion of the whims of the painter. In
this work, as in his former labors, Mr. Carlyle reminds us of a sick
giant. His humors are expressed with so much force of constitution
that his fancies are more attractive and more credible than the
sanity of duller men. But the habitual exaggeration of the tone
wearies whilst it stimulates. It is felt to be so much deduction
from the universality of the picture. It is not serene sunshine, but
everything is seen in lurid storm-lights. Every object attitudinizes,
to the very mountains and stars almost, under the refraction of this
wonderful humorist; and instead of the common earth and sky, we have
a Martin’s Creation or Judgment Day. A crisis has always arrived
which requires a _deus ex machinâ_. One can hardly credit, whilst
under the spell of this magician, that the world always had the same
bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us,—as of a failed world just
re-collecting its old withered forces to begin again and try to do a
little business. It was perhaps inseparable from the attempt to write
a book of wit and imagination on English politics, that a certain
local emphasis and love of effect, such as is the vice of preaching,
should appear,—producing on the reader a feeling of forlornness by
the excess of value attributed to circumstances. But the splendor
of wit cannot outdazzle the calm daylight, which always shows every
individual man in balance with his age, and able to work out his own
salvation from all the follies of that, and no such glaring contrasts
or severalties in that or this. Each age has its own follies, as its
majority is made up of foolish young people; its superstitions appear
no superstitions to itself; and if you should ask the contemporary,
he would tell you, with pride or with regret, (according as he was
practical or poetic), that he had none. But after a short time, down
go its follies and weakness and the memory of them; its virtues alone
remain, and its limitation assumes the poetic form of a beautiful
superstition, as the dimness of our sight clothes the objects in the
horizon with mist and color. The revelation of Reason is this of the
unchangeableness of the fact of humanity under all its subjective
aspects; that to the cowering it always cowers, to the daring it
opens great avenues. The ancients are only venerable to us because
distance has destroyed what was trivial; as the sun and stars affect
us only grandly, because we cannot reach to their smoke and surfaces
and say, Is that all?
And yet the gravity of the times, the manifold and increasing dangers
of the English State, may easily excuse some over-coloring of the
picture; and we at this distance are not so far removed from any of
the specific evils, and are deeply participant in too many, not to
share the gloom and thank the love and courage of the counsellor.
This book is full of humanity, and nothing is more excellent in
this as in all Mr. Carlyle’s works, than the attitude of the writer.
He has the dignity of a man of letters, who knows what belongs to
him, and never deviates from his sphere; a continuer of the great
line of scholars, he sustains their office in the highest credit
and honor. If the good heaven have any good word to impart to this
unworthy generation, here is one scribe qualified and clothed for its
occasion. One excellence he has in an age of Mammon and of criticism,
that he never suffers the eye of his wonder to close. Let who will be
the dupe of trifles, he cannot keep his eye off from that gracious
Infinite which embosoms us.
As a literary artist he has great merits, beginning with the main
one that he never wrote one dull line. How well-read, how adroit,
what thousand arts in his one art of writing; with his expedient
for expressing those unproven opinions which he entertains but
will not endorse, by summoning one of his men of straw from the
cell,—and the respectable Sauerteig, or Teufelsdröckh, or Dryasdust,
or Picturesque Traveller, says what is put into his mouth, and
disappears. That morbid temperament has given his rhetoric a somewhat
bloated character; a luxury to many imaginative and learned persons,
like a showery south-wind with its sun-bursts and rapid chasing of
lights and glooms over the landscape, and yet its offensiveness to
multitudes of reluctant lovers makes us often wish some concession
were possible on the part of the humorist. Yet it must not be
forgotten that in all his fun of castanets, or playing of tunes with
a whip-lash like some renowned charioteers,—in all this glad and
needful venting of his redundant spirits, he does yet ever and anon,
as if catching the glance of one wise man in the crowd, quit his
tempestuous key, and lance at him in clear level tone the very word,
and then with new glee return to his game. He is like a lover or an
outlaw who wraps up his message in a serenade, which is nonsense to
the sentinel, but salvation to the ear for which it is meant. He does
not dodge the question, but gives sincerity where it is due.
One word more respecting this remarkable style. We have in literature
few specimens of magnificence. Plato is the purple ancient, and
Bacon and Milton the moderns of the richest strains. Burke sometimes
reaches to that exuberant fulness, though deficient in depth.
Carlyle, in his strange, half-mad way, has entered the Field of the
Cloth of Gold, and shown a vigor and wealth of resource which has no
rival in the tourney-play of these times;—the indubitable champion
of England. Carlyle is the first domestication of the modern system,
with its infinity of details, into style. We have been civilizing
very fast, building London and Paris, and now planting New England
and India, New Holland and Oregon,—and it has not appeared in
literature; there has been no analogous expansion and recomposition
in books. Carlyle’s style is the first emergence of all this wealth
and labor with which the world has gone with child so long. London
and Europe, tunnelled, graded, corn-lawed, with trade-nobility, and
East and West Indies for dependencies; and America, with the Rocky
Hills in the horizon, have never before been conquered in literature.
This is the first invasion and conquest. How like an air-balloon or
bird of Jove does he seem to float over the continent, and stooping
here and there pounce on a fact as a symbol which was never a symbol
before. This is the first experiment, and something of rudeness
and haste must be pardoned to so great an achievement. It will be
done again and again, sharper, simpler; but fortunate is he who did
it first, though never so giant-like and fabulous. This grandiose
character pervades his wit and his imagination. We have never had
anything in literature so like earthquakes as the laughter of
Carlyle. He “shakes with his mountain mirth.” It is like the laughter
of the Genii in the horizon. These jokes shake down Parliament-house
and Windsor Castle, Temple and Tower, and the future shall echo the
dangerous peals. The other particular of magnificence is in his
rhymes. Carlyle is a poet who is altogether too burly in his frame
and habit to submit to the limits of metre. Yet he is full of rhythm,
not only in the perpetual melody of his periods, but in the burdens,
refrains, and grand returns of his sense and music. Whatever thought
or motto has once appeared to him fraught with meaning, becomes an
omen to him henceforward, and is sure to return with deeper tones and
weightier import, now as threat, now as confirmation, in gigantic
reverberation, as if the hills, the horizon, and the next ages
returned the sound.
VII.
A LETTER.[11]
As we are very liable, in common with the letter-writing world, to
fall behindhand in our correspondence; and a little more liable
because in consequence of our editorial function we receive more
epistles than our individual share, we have thought that we might
clear our account by writing a quarterly catholic letter to all
and several who have honored us, in verse or prose, with their
confidence, and expressed a curiosity to know our opinion. We shall
be compelled to dispose very rapidly of quite miscellaneous topics.
And first, in regard to the writer who has given us his speculations
on Rail-roads and Air-roads, our correspondent shall have his own
way. To the railway, we must say,—like the courageous lord mayor at
his first hunting, when told the hare was coming,—“Let it come, in
Heaven’s name, I am not afraid on’t.” Very unlooked-for political and
social effects of the iron road are fast appearing. It will require
an expansion of the police of the old world. When a railroad train
shoots through Europe every day from Brussels to Vienna, from Vienna
to Constantinople, it cannot stop every twenty or thirty miles at a
German custom-house, for examination of property and passports. But
when our correspondent proceeds to flying-machines, we have no longer
the smallest taper-light of credible information and experience left,
and must speak on _a priori_ grounds.
Shortly then, we think the population is not yet quite fit for
them, and therefore there will be none. Our friend suggests so many
inconveniences from piracy out of the high air to orchards and lone
houses, and also to other high fliers; and the total inadequacy of
the present system of defence, that we have not the heart to break
the sleep of the good public by the repetition of these details. When
children come into the library, we put the inkstand and the watch on
the high shelf until they be a little older; and Nature has set the
sun and moon in plain sight and use, but laid them on the high shelf
where her roystering boys may not in some mad Saturday afternoon pull
them down or burn their fingers. The sea and the iron road are safer
toys for such ungrown people; we are not yet ripe to be birds.
In the next place, to fifteen letters on Communities, and the
Prospects of Culture, and the destinies of the cultivated class,—what
answer? Excellent reasons have been shown us why the writers,
obviously persons of sincerity and elegance, should be dissatisfied
with the life they lead, and with their company. They have exhausted
all its benefit, and will not bear it much longer. Excellent reasons
they have shown why something better should be tried. They want a
friend to whom they can speak and from whom they may hear now and
then a reasonable word. They are willing to work, so it be with
friends. They do not entertain anything absurd or even difficult.
They do not wish to force society into hated reforms, nor to break
with society. They do not wish a township, or any large expenditure,
or incorporated association, but simply a concentration of chosen
people. By the slightest possible concert, persevered in through
four or five years, they think that a neighborhood might be formed
of friends who would provoke each other to the best activity. They
believe that this society would fill up the terrific chasm of ennui,
and would give their genius that inspiration which it seems to wait
in vain.
But, “the selfishness!” One of the writers relentingly says, “What
shall my uncles and aunts do without me?” and desires distinctly to
be understood not to propose the Indian mode of giving decrepit
relatives as much of the mud of holy Ganges as they can swallow, and
more, but to begin the enterprise of concentration by concentrating
all uncles and aunts in one delightful village by themselves!—so
heedless is our correspondent of putting all the dough into one
pan, and all the leaven into another. Another objection seems to
have occurred to a subtle but ardent advocate. Is it, he writes, a
too great wilfulness and intermeddling with life,—with life, which
is better accepted than calculated? Perhaps so; but let us not be
too curiously good. The Buddhist is a practical Necessitarian; the
Yankee is not. We do a great many selfish things every day; among
them all let us do one thing of enlightened selfishness. It were fit
to forbid concert and calculation in this particular, if that were
our system, if we were up to the mark of self-denial and faith in
our general activity. But to be prudent in all the particulars of
life, and in this one thing alone religiously forbearing; prudent to
secure to ourselves an injurious society, temptations to folly and
despair, degrading examples, and enemies; and only abstinent when it
is proposed to provide ourselves with guides, examples, lovers!
We shall hardly trust ourselves to reply to arguments by which we
would too gladly be persuaded. The more discontent, the better we
like it. It is not for nothing, we assure ourselves, that our people
are busied with these projects of a better social state, and that
sincere persons of all parties are demanding somewhat vital and
poetic of our stagnant society. How fantastic and unpresentable
soever the theory has hitherto seemed, how swiftly shrinking from the
examination of practical men, let us not lose the warning of that
most significant dream. How joyfully we have felt the admonition of
larger natures which despised our aims and pursuits, conscious that
a voice out of heaven spoke to us in that scorn. But it would be
unjust not to remind our younger friends that whilst this aspiration
has always made its mark in the lives of men of thought, in vigorous
individuals it does not remain a detached object, but is satisfied
along with the satisfaction of other aims. To live solitary and
unexpressed, is painful,—painful in proportion to one’s consciousness
of ripeness and equality to the offices of friendship. But herein we
are never quite forsaken by the Divine Providence. The loneliest man,
after twenty years, discovers that he stood in a circle of friends,
who will then show like a close fraternity held by some masonic tie.
But we are impatient of the tedious introductions of Destiny, and a
little faithless, and would venture something to accelerate them. One
thing is plain, that discontent and the luxury of tears will bring
nothing to pass. Regrets and Bohemian castles and æsthetic villages
are not a very self-helping class of productions, but are the voices
of debility. Especially to one importunate correspondent we must say
that there is no chance for the æsthetic village. Every one of the
villagers has committed his several blunder; his genius was good, his
stars consenting, but he was a marplot. And though the recuperative
force in every man may be relied on infinitely, it must be relied on
before it will exert itself. As long as he sleeps in the shade of the
present error, the after-nature does not betray its resources. Whilst
he dwells in the old sin, he will pay the old fine.
More letters we have on the subject of the position of young men,
which accord well enough with what we see and hear. There is an
American disease, a paralysis of the active faculties, which falls
on young men of this country as soon as they have finished their
college education, which strips them of all manly aims and bereaves
them of animal spirits; so that the noblest youths are in a few years
converted into pale Caryatides to uphold the temple of conventions.
They are in the state of the young Persians, when “that mighty Yezdam
prophet” addressed them and said, “Behold the signs of evil days are
come; there is now no longer any right course of action, nor any
self-devotion left among the Iranis.” As soon as they have arrived
at this term, there are no employments to satisfy them, they are
educated above the work of their times and country, and disdain it.
Many of the more acute minds pass into a lofty criticism of these
things, which only embitters their sensibility to the evil and widens
the feeling of hostility between them and the citizens at large. From
this cause, companies of the best-educated young men in the Atlantic
states every week take their departure for Europe; for no business
that they have in that country, but simply because they shall so
be hid from the reproachful eyes of their countrymen and agreeably
entertained for one or two years, with some lurking hope, no doubt,
that something may turn up to give them a decided direction. It is
easy to see that this is only a postponement of their proper work,
with the additional disadvantage of a two years’ vacation. Add that
this class is rapidly increasing by the infatuation of the active
class, who, whilst they regard these young Athenians with suspicion
and dislike, educate their own children in the same courses, and use
all possible endeavors to secure to them the same result.
Certainly we are not insensible to this calamity, as described
by the observers or witnessed by ourselves. It is not quite
new and peculiar; though we should not know where to find in
literature any record of so much unbalanced intellectuality, such
undeniable apprehension without talent, so much power without equal
applicability, as our young men pretend to. Yet in Theodore Mundt’s
account of Frederic Hölderlin’s “Hyperion,” we were not a little
struck with the following Jeremiad of the despair of Germany, whose
tone is still so familiar that we were somewhat mortified to find
that it was written in 1799. “Then came I to the Germans. I cannot
conceive of a people more disjoined than the Germans. Mechanics you
shall see, but no man. Is it not like some battle-field, where hands
and arms and all members lie scattered about, whilst the life-blood
runs away into the sand? Let every man mind his own, you say, and I
say the same. Only let him mind it with all his heart, and not with
this cold study, literally, hypocritically, to appear that which he
passes for,—but in good earnest, and in all love, let him be that
which he is; then there is a soul in his deed. And is he driven into
a circumstance where the spirit must not live? Let him thrust it from
him with scorn, and learn to dig and plough. There is nothing holy
which is not desecrated, which is not degraded to a mean end among
this people. It is heart-rending to see your poet, your artist, and
all who still revere genius, who love and foster the Beautiful. The
Good! They live in the world as strangers in their own house; they
are like the patient Ulysses whilst he sat in the guise of a beggar
at his own door, whilst shameless rioters shouted in the hall and
asked, Who brought the ragamuffin here? Full of love, talent and
hope, spring up the darlings of the muse among the Germans; some
seven years later, and they flit about like ghosts, cold and silent;
they are like a soil which an enemy has sown with poison, that it
will not bear a blade of grass. On earth all is imperfect! is the
old proverb of the German. Aye, but if one should say to these
God-forsaken, that with them all is imperfect only because they leave
nothing pure which they do not pollute, nothing holy which they do
not defile with their fumbling hands; that with them nothing prospers
because the godlike nature which is the root of all prosperity they
do not revere; that with them, truly, life is shallow and anxious and
full of discord, because they despise genius, which brings power and
nobleness into manly action, cheerfulness into endurance, and love
and brotherhood into towns and houses. Where a people honors genius
in its artists, there breathes like an atmosphere a universal soul,
to which the shy sensibility opens, which melts self-conceit,—all
hearts become pious and great, and it adds fire to heroes. The home
of all men is with such a people, and there will the stranger gladly
abide. But where the divine nature and the artist is crushed, the
sweetness of life is gone, and every other planet is better than the
earth. Men deteriorate, folly increases, and a gross mind with it;
drunkenness comes with a disaster; with the wantonness of the tongue
and with the anxiety for a livelihood the blessing of every year
becomes a curse, and all the gods depart.”
The steep antagonism between the money-getting and the academic
class must be freely admitted, and perhaps is the more violent,
that whilst our work is imposed by the soil and the sea, our culture
is the tradition of Europe. But we cannot share the desperation of
our contemporaries; least of all should we think a preternatural
enlargement of the intellect a calamity. A new perception, the
smallest new activity given to the perceptive power, is a victory won
to the living universe from Chaos and old Night, and cheaply bought
by any amounts of hard fare and false social position. The balance
of mind and body will redress itself fast enough. Superficialness is
the real distemper. In all the cases we have ever seen where people
were supposed to suffer from too much wit, or, as men said, from a
blade too sharp for the scabbard, it turned out that they had not wit
enough. It may easily happen that we are grown very idle, and must
go to work, and that the times must be worse before they are better.
It is very certain that speculation is no succedaneum for life. What
we would know, we must do. As if any taste or imagination could take
the place of fidelity! The old Duty is the old God. And we may come
to this by the rudest teaching. A friend of ours went five years
ago to Illinois to buy a farm for his son. Though there were crowds
of emigrants in the roads, the country was open on both sides, and
long intervals between hamlets and houses. Now after five years he
had just been to visit the young farmer and see how he prospered,
and reports that a miracle had been wrought. From Massachusetts to
Illinois the land is fenced in and builded over, almost like New
England itself, and the proofs of thrifty cultivation abound;—a
result not so much owing to the natural increase of population, as to
the hard times, which, driving men out of cities and trade, forced
them to take off their coats and go to work on the land; which has
rewarded them not only with wheat but with habits of labor. Perhaps
the adversities of our commerce have not yet been pushed to the
wholesomest degree of severity. Apathies and total want of work, and
reflection on the imaginative character of American life, etc., etc.,
are like seasickness, and never will obtain any sympathy if there is
a wood-pile in the yard, or an unweeded patch in the garden; not to
mention the graver absurdity of a youth of noble aims who can find no
field for his energies, whilst the colossal wrongs of the Indian, of
the Negro, of the emigrant, remain unmitigated, and the religious,
civil and judicial forms of the country are confessedly effete and
offensive. We must refer our clients back to themselves, believing
that every man knows in his heart the cure for the disease he so
ostentatiously bewails.
As far as our correspondents have entangled their private griefs
with the cause of American Literature, we counsel them to disengage
themselves as fast as possible. In Cambridge orations and elsewhere
there is much inquiry for that great absentee American Literature.
What can have become of it? The least said is best. A literature
is no man’s private concern, but a secular and generic result, and
is the affair of a power which works by a prodigality of life and
force very dismaying to behold,—every trait of beauty purchased by
hecatombs of private tragedy. The pruning in the wild gardens of
nature is never forborne. Many of the best must die of consumption,
many of despair, and many be stupid and insane, before the one great
and fortunate life which they each predicted can shoot up into a
thrifty and beneficent existence.
VIII.
THE TRAGIC.[12]
He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the
house of Pain. As the salt sea covers more than two thirds of the
surface of the globe, so sorrow encroaches in man on felicity. The
conversation of men is a mixture of regrets and apprehensions. I do
not know but the prevalent hue of things to the eye of leisure is
melancholy. In the dark hours, our existence seems to be a defensive
war, a struggle against the encroaching All, which threatens
surely to engulf us soon, and is impatient of our short reprieve.
How slender the possession that yet remains to us; how faint the
animation! how the spirit seems already to contract its domain,
retiring within narrower walls by the loss of memory, leaving its
planted fields to erasure and annihilation. Already our own thoughts
and words have an alien sound. There is a simultaneous diminution of
memory and hope. Projects that once we laughed and leapt to execute,
find us now sleepy and preparing to lie down in the snow. And in
the serene hours we have no courage to spare. We cannot afford to
let go any advantages. The riches of body or of mind which we do
not need to-day, are the reserved fund against the calamity that
may arrive to-morrow. It is usually agreed that some nations have
a more sombre temperament, and one would say that history gave no
record of any society in which despondency came so readily to heart
as we see it and feel it in ours. Melancholy cleaves to the English
mind in both hemispheres as closely as to the strings of an Æolian
harp. Men and women at thirty years, and even earlier, have lost all
spring and vivacity, and if they fail in their first enterprises they
throw up the game. But whether we and those who are next to us are
more or less vulnerable, no theory of life can have any right which
leaves out of account the values of vice, pain, disease, poverty,
insecurity, disunion, fear and death.
What are the conspicuous tragic elements in human nature? The
bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual
source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny; the belief that the
order of nature and events is controlled by a law not adapted to
man, nor man to that, but which holds on its way to the end, serving
him if his wishes chance to lie in the same course, crushing him if
his wishes lie contrary to it, and heedless whether it serves or
crushes him. This is the terrible meaning that lies at the foundation
of the old Greek tragedy, and makes the Œdipus and Antigone and
Orestes objects of such hopeless commiseration. They must perish,
and there is no over-god to stop or to mollify this hideous enginery
that grinds or thunders, and snatches them up into its terrific
system. The same idea makes the paralyzing terror with which the
East Indian mythology haunts the imagination. The same thought is
the predestination of the Turk. And universally, in uneducated and
unreflecting persons on whom too the religious sentiment exerts
little force, we discover traits of the same superstition: “If you
balk water you will be drowned the next time;” “if you count ten
stars you will fall down dead;” “if you spill the salt;” “if your
fork sticks upright in the floor;” “if you say the Lord’s prayer
backwards,”—and so on, a several penalty, nowise grounded in the
nature of the thing, but on an arbitrary will. But this terror of
contravening an unascertained and unascertainable will, cannot
coexist with reflection: it disappears with civilization, and can
no more be reproduced than the fear of ghosts after childhood.
It is discriminated from the doctrine of Philosophical Necessity
herein: that the last is an Optimism, and therefore the suffering
individual finds his good consulted in the good of all, of which he
is a part. But in destiny, it is not the good of the whole or the
_best will_ that is enacted, but only _one particular will_. Destiny
properly is not a will at all, but an immense whim; and this the only
ground of terror and despair in the rational mind, and of tragedy
in literature. Hence the antique tragedy, which was founded on this
faith, can never be reproduced.
After reason and faith have introduced a better public and private
tradition, the tragic element is somewhat circumscribed. There must
always remain, however, the hindrance of our private satisfaction by
the laws of the world. The law which establishes nature and the human
race, continually thwarts the will of ignorant individuals, and this
in the particulars of disease, want, insecurity and disunion.
But the essence of tragedy does not seem to me to lie in any list of
particular evils. After we have enumerated famine, fever, inaptitude,
mutilation, rack, madness and loss of friends, we have not yet
included the proper tragic element, which is Terror, and which does
not respect definite evils but indefinite; an ominous spirit which
haunts the afternoon and the night, idleness and solitude.
A low, haggard sprite sits by our side, “casting the fashion of
uncertain evils”—a sinister presentiment, a power of the imagination
to dislocate things orderly and cheerful and show them in startling
array. Hark! what sounds on the night wind, the cry of Murder in that
friendly house; see these marks of stamping feet, of hidden riot.
The whisper overheard, the detected glance, the glare of malignity,
ungrounded fears, suspicions, half-knowledge and mistakes, darken the
brow and chill the heart of men. And accordingly it is natures not
clear, not of quick and steady perceptions, but imperfect characters
from which somewhat is hidden that all others see, who suffer most
from these causes. In those persons who move the profoundest pity,
tragedy seems to consist in temperament, not in events. There are
people who have an appetite for grief, pleasure is not strong enough
and they crave pain, mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on
poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can soothe their
ragged and dishevelled desolation. They mis-hear and mis-behold, they
suspect and dread. They handle every nettle and ivy in the hedge, and
tread on every snake in the meadow.
“Come bad chance,
And we add to it our strength,
And we teach it art and length,
Itself o’er us to advance.”
Frankly, then, it is necessary to say that all sorrow dwells in a low
region. It is superficial; for the most part fantastic, or in the
appearance and not in things. Tragedy is in the eye of the observer,
and not in the heart of the sufferer. It looks like an insupportable
load under which earth moans aloud. But analyze it; it is not I,
it is not you, it is always another person who is tormented. If a
man says, Lo! I suffer—it is apparent that he suffers not, for grief
is dumb. It is so distributed as not to destroy. That which would
rend you falls on tougher textures. That which seems intolerable
reproach or bereavement, does not take from the accused or bereaved
man or woman appetite or sleep. Some men are above grief, and some
below it. Few are capable of love. In phlegmatic natures calamity
is unaffecting, in shallow natures it is rhetorical. Tragedy must
be somewhat which I can respect. A querulous habit is not tragedy.
A panic such as frequently in ancient or savage nations put a troop
or an army to flight without an enemy; a fear of ghosts; a terror
of freezing to death that seizes a man in a winter midnight on the
moors; a fright at uncertain sounds heard by a family at night in the
cellar or on the stairs,—are terrors that make the knees knock and
the teeth clatter, but are no tragedy, any more than seasickness,
which may also destroy life. It is full of illusion. As it comes,
it has its support. The most exposed classes, soldiers, sailors,
paupers, are nowise destitute of animal spirits. The spirit is true
to itself, and finds its own support in any condition, learns to live
in what is called calamity as easily as in what is called felicity;
as the frailest glass-bell will support a weight of a thousand pounds
of water at the bottom of a river or sea, if filled with the same.
A man should not commit his tranquillity to things, but should
keep as much as possible the reins in his own hands, rarely giving
way to extreme emotion of joy or grief. It is observed that the
earliest works of the art of sculpture are countenances of sublime
tranquillity. The Egyptian sphinxes, which sit to-day as they sat
when the Greek came and saw them and departed, and when the Roman
came and saw them and departed, and as they will still sit when the
Turk, the Frenchman and the Englishman, who visit them now, shall
have passed by,—“with their stony eyes fixed on the East and on
the Nile,” have countenances expressive of complacency and repose,
an expression of health, deserving their longevity, and verifying
the primeval sentence of history on the permanency of that people,
“Their strength is to sit still.” To this architectural stability
of the human form, the Greek genius added an ideal beauty, without
disturbing the seals of serenity; permitting no violence of mirth,
or wrath, or suffering. This was true to human nature. For, in life,
actions are few, opinions even few, prayers few; loves, hatreds, or
any emissions of the soul. All that life demands of us through the
greater part of the day, is an equilibrium, a readiness, open eyes
and ears, and free hands. Society asks this, and truth, and love, and
the genius of our life. There is a fire in some men which demands an
outlet in some rude action; they betray their impatience of quiet by
an irregular Catalinarian gait; by irregular, faltering, disturbed
speech, too emphatic for the occasion. They treat trifles with a
tragic air. This is not beautiful. Could they not lay a rod or two
of stone wall, and work off this superabundant irritability? When
two strangers meet in the highway, what each demands of the other
is that the aspect should show a firm mind, ready for any event of
good or ill, prepared alike to give death or to give life, as the
emergency of the next moment may require. We must walk as guests
in nature; not impassioned, but cool and disengaged. A man should
try Time, and his face should wear the expression of a just judge,
who has nowise made up his opinion, who fears nothing, and even
hopes nothing, but who puts nature and fortune on their merits: he
will hear the case out, and then decide. For all melancholy, as all
passion, belongs to the exterior life. Whilst a man is not grounded
in the divine life by his proper roots, he clings by some tendrils of
affection to society—mayhap to what is best and greatest in it, and
in calm times it will not appear that he is adrift and not moored;
but let any shock take place in society, any revolution of custom, of
law, of opinion, and at once his type of permanence is shaken. The
disorder of his neighbors appears to him universal disorder; chaos is
come again. But in truth he was already a driving wreck, before the
wind arose which only revealed to him his vagabond state. If a man
is centred, men and events appear to him a fair image or reflection
of that which he knoweth beforehand in himself. If any perversity or
profligacy break out in society, he will join with others to avert
the mischief, but it will not arouse resentment or fear, because he
discerns its impassable limits. He sees already in the ebullition of
sin the simultaneous redress.
Particular reliefs also, fit themselves to human calamities; for the
world will be in equilibrium, and hates all manner of exaggeration.
Time, the consoler, Time, the rich carrier of all changes, dries the
freshest tears by obtruding new figures, new costumes, new roads, on
our eye, new voices on our ear. As the west wind lifts up again the
heads of the wheat which were bent down and lodged in the storm, and
combs out the matted and dishevelled grass as it lay in night-locks
on the ground, so we let in time as a drying wind into the seed-field
of thoughts which are dark and wet and low bent. Time restores
to them temper and elasticity. How fast we forget the blow that
threatened to cripple us. Nature will not sit still; the faculties
will do somewhat; new hopes spring, new affections twine and the
broken is whole again.
Time consoles, but Temperament resists the impression of pain.
Nature proportions her defence to the assault. Our human being is
wonderfully plastic; if it cannot win this satisfaction here, it
makes itself amends by running out there and winning that. It is
like a stream of water, which is dammed up on one bank, overruns
the other, and flows equally at its own convenience over sand, or
mud, or marble. Most suffering is only apparent. We fancy it is
torture; the patient has his own compensations. A tender American
girl doubts of Divine Providence whilst she reads the horrors of
“the middle passage;” and they are bad enough at the mildest; but to
such as she these crucifixions do not come: they come to the obtuse
and barbarous, to whom they are not horrid, but only a little worse
than the old sufferings. They exchange a cannibal war for the stench
of the hold. They have gratifications which would be none to the
civilized girl. The market-man never damned the lady because she had
not paid her bill, but the stout Irishwoman has to take that once
a month. She however never feels weakness in her back because of
the slave-trade. This self-adapting strength is especially seen in
disease. “It is my duty,” said Sir Charles Bell, “to visit certain
wards of the hospital where there is no patient admitted but with
that complaint which most fills the imagination with the idea of
insupportable pain and certain death. Yet these wards are not the
least remarkable for the composure and cheerfulness of their inmates.
The individual who suffers has a mysterious counterbalance to that
condition, which, to us who look upon her, appears to be attended
with no alleviating circumstance.” Analogous supplies are made to
those individuals whose character leads them to vast exertions of
body and mind. Napoleon said to one of his friends at St. Helena,
“Nature seems to have calculated that I should have great reverses to
endure, for she has given me a temperament like a block of marble.
Thunder cannot move it; the shaft merely glides along. The great
events of my life have slipped over me without making any demand on
my moral or physical nature.”
The intellect is a consoler, which delights in detaching or putting
an interval between a man and his fortune, and so converts the
sufferer into a spectator and his pain into poetry. It yields the
joys of conversation, of letters and of science. Hence also the
torments of life become tuneful tragedy, solemn and soft with music,
and garnished with rich dark pictures. But higher still than the
activities of art, the intellect in its purity and the moral sense in
its purity are not distinguished from each other, and both ravish us
into a region whereinto these passionate clouds of sorrow cannot rise.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] _The Dial_, vol. i. p. 137.
[6] _The Dial_, vol. ii. p. 262.
[7] _The Dial_, vol. iii. p. 77.
[8] _The Dial_, vol. iii. p. 123.
[9] _The Dial_, vol. iii. p. 511.
[10] _The Dial_, vol. iv. p. 96.
[11] _The Dial_, vol. iv. p. 262.
[12] From the course on “Human Life,” read in Boston, 1839-40.
Published in _The Dial_, vol. iv. p. 515.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within
the text and consultation of external sources.
Some hyphens in words have been silently removed, some added,
when a predominant preference was found in the original book.
Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text,
and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.
Pg. 100: ‘χόσμος’ replaced by ‘Κόσμος’.
Pg. 211: ‘ageeably entertained’ replaced by ‘agreeably entertained’.
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