Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
can well afford to occupy myself with foreign objects; then I shall
regret the lost literature of your mind, and wish you were by my side
again. But if you come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new
visions, not with yourself but with your lusters, and I shall not be
able any more than now to converse with you. So I will owe to my
friends this evanescent intercourse. I will receive from them, not
what they have, but what they are. They shall give me that which
properly they cannot give, but which emanates from them. But they
shall not hold me by any relations less subtile and pure. We will meet
as though we met not, and part as though we parted not.
24. It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a
friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the
other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is
not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall
wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the
reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold
companion. If he is unequal, he will presently pass away; but thou art
enlarged by thy own shining, and no longer a mate for frogs and worms,
dost soar and burn with the gods of the empyrean.[308] It is thought a
disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love
cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the unworthy object, and
dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask
crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its
independency the surer. Yet these things may hardly be said without a
sort of treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is
entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or
provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it may
deify both.
HEROISM[309]
"Paradise is under the shadow of swords,"[310]
_Mahomet._
1. In the elder English dramatists,[311] and mainly in the plays of
Beaumont and Fletcher,[312] there is a constant recognition of
gentility, as if a noble behavior were as easily marked in the society
of their age, as color is in our American population. When any Rodrigo,
Pedro, or Valerio[313] enters, though he be a stranger, the duke or
governor exclaims, This is a gentleman,--and proffers civilities without
end; but all the rest are slag and refuse. In harmony with this delight
in personal advantages, there is in their plays a certain heroic cast of
character and dialogue,--as in Bonduca, Sophocles, the Mad Lover, the
Double Marriage,[314]--wherein the speaker is so earnest and cordial,
and on such deep grounds of character, that the dialogue, on the
slightest additional incident in the plot, rises naturally into poetry.
Among many texts, take the following. The Roman Martius has conquered
Athens--all but the invincible spirits of Sophocles, the duke of Athens,
and Dorigen, his wife. The beauty of the latter inflames Martius, and he
seeks to save her husband; but Sophocles will not ask his life, although
assured, that a word will save him, and the execution of both proceeds.
"_Valerius._ Bid thy wife farewell.
_Soph._ No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen,
Yonder, above, 'bout Ariadne's crown.[315]
My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste.
_Dor._ Stay, Sophocles--with this, tie up my sight;
Let not soft nature so transformed be,
And lose her gentler sexed humanity,
To make me see my lord bleed. So, 'tis well;
Never one object underneath the sun
Will I behold before my Sophocles:
Farewell; now teach the Romans how to die.
_Mar._ Dost know what 'tis to die?
_Soph._ Thou dost not, Martius,
And therefore, not what 'tis to live; to die
Is to begin to live. It is to end
An old, stale, weary work, and to commence
A newer and a better. 'Tis to leave
Deceitful knaves for the society
Of gods and goodness. Thou, thyself, must part
At last, from all thy garlands, pleasures, triumphs,
And prove thy fortitude what then 'twill do.
_Val._ But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus?
_Soph._ Why should I grieve or vex for being sent
To them I ever loved best? Now, I'll kneel,
But with my back toward thee; 'tis the last duty
This trunk can do the gods.
_Mar._ Strike, strike, Valerius,
Or Martius' heart will leap out at his mouth:
This is a man, a woman! Kiss thy lord,
And live with all the freedom you were wont.
O love! thou doubly hast afflicted me
With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart,
My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn,
Ere thou transgress this knot of piety.
_Val._ What ails my brother?
_Soph._ Martius, oh Martius,
Thou now hast found a way to conquer me.
_Dor._ O star of Rome! what gratitude can speak
Fit words to follow such a deed as this?
_Mar._ This admirable duke, Valerius,
With his disdain of fortune and of death,
Captived himself, has captived me,
And though my arm hath ta'en his body here,
His soul hath subjugated Martius' soul.
By Romulus,[316] he is all soul, I think;
He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved;
Then we have vanquished nothing; he is free,
And Martius walks now in captivity."
2. I do not readily remember any poem, play, sermon, novel, or
oration, that our press vents in the last few years, which goes to the
same tune. We have a great many flutes and flageolets, but not often
the sound of any fife. Yet, Wordsworth's Laodamia, and the ode of
"Dion,"[317] and some sonnets, have a certain noble music; and
Scott[318] will sometimes draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord
Evandale, given by Balfour of Burley.[319] Thomas Carlyle,[320] with
his natural taste for what is manly and daring in character, has
suffered no heroic trait in his favorites to drop from his
biographical and historical pictures. Earlier, Robert Burns[321] has
given us a song or two. In the Harleian Miscellanies,[322] there is an
account of the battle of Lutzen,[323] which deserves to be read. And
Simon Ockley's[324] History of the Saracens recounts the prodigies of
individual valor with admiration, all the more evident on the part of
the narrator, that he seems to think that his place in Christian
Oxford[325] requires of him some proper protestations of abhorrence.
But if we explore the literature of Heroism, we shall quickly come to
Plutarch,[326] who is its Doctor and historian. To him we owe the
Brasidas,[327] the Dion,[328] the Epaminondas,[329] the Scipio[330] of
old, and I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to all
the ancient writers. Each of his "Lives" is a refutation to the
despondency and cowardice of our religious and political theorists. A
wild courage, a Stoicism[331] not of the schools, but of the blood,
shines in every anecdote, and has given that book its immense fame.
3. We need books of this tart cathartic virtue, more than books of
political science, or of private economy. Life is a festival only to
the wise. Seen from the nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a
ragged and dangerous front. The violations of the laws of nature by
our predecessors and our contemporaries are punished in us also. The
disease and deformity around us certify the infraction of natural,
intellectual, and moral laws, and often violation on violation to
breed such compound misery. A lockjaw that bends a man's head back to
his heels, hydrophobia that makes him bark at his wife and babes,
insanity that makes him eat grass; war, plague, cholera, famine
indicate a certain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by
human crime, must have its outlet by human suffering. Unhappily,
almost no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some
amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a
share in the expiation.
4. Our culture, therefore, must not omit the arming of the man. Let
him hear in season that he is born into the state of war, and that the
commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go
dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collected, and neither
defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and
life in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity, dare the gibbet and the
mob by the absolute truth of his speech, and the rectitude of his
behavior.
5. Toward all this external evil, the man within the breast assumes a
warlike attitude, and affirms his ability to cope single-handed with
the infinite army of enemies. To this military attitude of the soul we
give the name of Heroism. Its rudest form is the contempt for safety
and ease, which makes the attractiveness of war. It is a self-trust
which slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its
energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a mind
of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but
pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advances to his own music,
alike in frightful alarms, and in the tipsy mirth of universal
dissoluteness. There is somewhat not philosophical in heroism; there
is somewhat not holy in it; it seems not to know that other souls are
of one texture with it; it has pride; it is the extreme of individual
nature. Nevertheless, we must profoundly revere it. There is somewhat
in great actions, which does not allow us to go behind them. Heroism
feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right; and although a
different breeding, different religion, and greater intellectual
activity, would have modified or even reversed the particular action,
yet for the hero, that thing he does is the highest deed, and is not
open to the censure of philosophers or divines. It is the avowal of
the unschooled man, that he finds a quality in him that is negligent
of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of hatred, of reproach, and
knows that his will is higher and more excellent than all actual and
all possible antagonists.
6. Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind, and in
contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism
is an obedience[332] to a secret impulse of an individual's character.
Now to no other man can its wisdom appear as it does to him, for every
man must be supposed to see a little further on his own proper path
than any one else. Therefore, just and wise men take umbrage at his
act, until after some little time be past: then they see it to be in
unison with their acts. All prudent men see that the action is clean
contrary to a sensual prosperity; for every heroic act measures itself
by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success
at last, and then the prudent also extol.
7. Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of the soul
at war, and its ultimate objects are the last defiance of falsehood
and wrong, and the power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil
agents. It speaks the truth, and it is just, generous, hospitable,
temperate, scornful of petty calculations, and scornful of being
scorned. It persists; it is of an undaunted boldness, and of a
fortitude not to be wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of common
life. That false prudence which dotes on health and wealth is the butt
and merriment of heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus,[333] is almost
ashamed of its body. What shall it say, then, to the sugar-plums, and
cats'-cradles, to the toilet, compliments, quarrels, cards, and
custard, which rack the wit of all human society. What joys has kind
nature provided for us dear creatures! There seems to be no interval
between greatness and meanness. When the spirit is not master of the
world then it is its dupe. Yet the little man takes the great hoax so
innocently, works in it so headlong and believing, is born red, and
dies gray, arranging his toilet, attending on his own health, laying