Essays — First Series
imagination hath its friends; and life would be dearer with such
companions. But if you cannot have them on good mutual terms, you
cannot have them. If not the Deity but our ambition hews and shapes the
new relations, their virtue escapes, as strawberries lose their flavor
in garden-beds.
Thus truth, frankness, courage, love, humility and all the virtues
range themselves on the side of prudence, or the art of securing a
present well-being. I do not know if all matter will be found to be
made of one element, as oxygen or hydrogen, at last, but the world of
manners and actions is wrought of one stuff, and begin where we will we
are pretty sure in a short space to be mumbling our ten commandments.
VIII.
HEROISM
“Paradise is under the shadow of swords.”
_Mahomet._
Ruby wine is drunk by knaves,
Sugar spends to fatten slaves,
Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons;
Thunderclouds are Jove’s festoons,
Drooping oft in wreaths of dread
Lightning-knotted round his head;
The hero is not fed on sweets,
Daily his own heart he eats;
Chambers of the great are jails,
And head-winds right for royal sails.
HEROISM
In the elder English dramatists, and mainly in the plays Of Beaumont
and Fletcher, 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
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,—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.
_Sophocles_. No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen,
Yonder, above, ’bout Ariadne’s crown,
My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste.
_Dorigen_. 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.
_Martius_. Dost know what ’t is to die?
_Sophocles_. 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 ’t will do.
_Valerius_. But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus?
_Sophocles_. 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.
_Martius_. 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.
_Valerius_. What ails my brother?
_Sophocles_. Martius, O Martius,
Thou now hast found a way to conquer me.
_Dorigen_. O star of Rome! what gratitude can speak
Fit words to follow such a deed as this?
_Martius_. This admirable duke, Valerius,
With his disdain of fortune and of death,
Captived himself, has captivated me,
And though my arm hath ta’en his body here,
His soul hath subjugated Martius’ soul.
By Romulus, 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.
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,”
and some sonnets, have a certain noble music; and Scott will sometimes
draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord Evandale given by Balfour of
Burley. Thomas Carlyle, 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 has given us a song or two. In the Harleian Miscellanies there is
an account of the battle of Lutzen which deserves to be read. And Simon
Ockley’s 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 requires of
him some proper protestations of abhorrence. But if we explore the
literature of Heroism we shall quickly come to Plutarch, who is its
Doctor and historian. To him we owe the Brasidas, the Dion, the
Epaminondas, the Scipio 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 not of the schools but
of the blood, shines in every anecdote, and has given that book its
immense fame.
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 lock-jaw 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 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.
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.
Towards 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.
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 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 farther 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.
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, 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
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 traps for sweet food and strong wine, setting
his heart on a horse or a rifle, made happy with a little gossip or a
little praise, that the great soul cannot choose but laugh at such
earnest nonsense. “Indeed, these humble considerations make me out of
love with greatness. What a disgrace is it to me to take note how many
pairs of silk stockings thou hast, namely, these and those that were
the peach-colored ones; or to bear the inventory of thy shirts, as one
for superfluity, and one other for use!”
Citizens, thinking after the laws of arithmetic, consider the
inconvenience of receiving strangers at their fireside, reckon narrowly
the loss of time and the unusual display; the soul of a better quality
thrusts back the unseasonable economy into the vaults of life, and
says, I will obey the God, and the sacrifice and the fire he will
provide. Ibn Hankal, the Arabian geographer, describes a heroic extreme
in the hospitality of Sogd, in Bukharia. “When I was in Sogd I saw a