Essays — First Series
great building, like a palace, the gates of which were open and fixed
back to the wall with large nails. I asked the reason, and was told
that the house had not been shut, night or day, for a hundred years.
Strangers may present themselves at any hour and in whatever number;
the master has amply provided for the reception of the men and their
animals, and is never happier than when they tarry for some time.
Nothing of the kind have I seen in any other country.” The magnanimous
know very well that they who give time, or money, or shelter, to the
stranger,—so it be done for love and not for ostentation,—do, as it
were, put God under obligation to them, so perfect are the
compensations of the universe. In some way the time they seem to lose
is redeemed and the pains they seem to take remunerate themselves.
These men fan the flame of human love and raise the standard of civil
virtue among mankind. But hospitality must be for service and not for
show, or it pulls down the host. The brave soul rates itself too high
to value itself by the splendor of its table and draperies. It gives
what it hath, and all it hath, but its own majesty can lend a better
grace to bannocks and fair water than belong to city feasts.
The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same wish to do no
dishonor to the worthiness he has. But he loves it for its elegancy,
not for its austerity. It seems not worth his while to be solemn and
denounce with bitterness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of
tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold. A great man scarcely knows
how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision his
living is natural and poetic. John Eliot, the Indian Apostle, drank
water, and said of wine,—“It is a noble, generous liquor and we should
be humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water was made before
it.” Better still is the temperance of King David, who poured out on
the ground unto the Lord the water which three of his warriors had
brought him to drink, at the peril of their lives.
It is told of Brutus, that when he fell on his sword after the battle
of Philippi, he quoted a line of Euripides,—“O Virtue! I have followed
thee through life, and I find thee at last but a shade.” I doubt not
the hero is slandered by this report. The heroic soul does not sell its
justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep
warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.
Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well
abide its loss.
But that which takes my fancy most in the heroic class, is the
good-humor and hilarity they exhibit. It is a height to which common
duty can very well attain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity. But
these rare souls set opinion, success, and life at so cheap a rate that
they will not soothe their enemies by petitions, or the show of sorrow,
but wear their own habitual greatness. Scipio, charged with peculation,
refuses to do himself so great a disgrace as to wait for justification,
though he had the scroll of his accounts in his hands, but tears it to
pieces before the tribunes. Socrates’s condemnation of himself to be
maintained in all honor in the Prytaneum, during his life, and Sir
Thomas More’s playfulness at the scaffold, are of the same strain. In
Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Sea Voyage,” Juletta tells the stout captain
and his company,—
_Juletta_. Why, slaves, ’tis in our power to hang ye.
_Master_. Very likely,
’Tis in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.
These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the bloom and glow of a
perfect health. The great will not condescend to take any thing
seriously; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were
the building of cities or the eradication of old and foolish churches
and nations which have cumbered the earth long thousands of years.
Simple hearts put all the history and customs of this world behind
them, and play their own game in innocent defiance of the Blue-Laws of
the world; and such would appear, could we see the human race assembled
in vision, like little children frolicking together, though to the eyes
of mankind at large they wear a stately and solemn garb of works and
influences.
The interest these fine stories have for us, the power of a romance
over the boy who grasps the forbidden book under his bench at school,
our delight in the hero, is the main fact to our purpose. All these
great and transcendent properties are ours. If we dilate in beholding
the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it is that we are already
domesticating the same sentiment. Let us find room for this great guest
in our small houses. The first step of worthiness will be to disabuse
us of our superstitious associations with places and times, with number
and size. Why should these words, Athenian, Roman, Asia and England, so
tingle in the ear? Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods
sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut
River and Boston Bay you think paltry places, and the ear loves names
of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we will
tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it only
that thyself is here, and art and nature, hope and fate, friends,
angels and the Supreme Being shall not be absent from the chamber where
thou sittest. Epaminondas, brave and affectionate, does not seem to us
to need Olympus to die upon, nor the Syrian sunshine. He lies very well
where he is. The Jerseys were handsome ground enough for Washington to
tread, and London streets for the feet of Milton. A great man makes his
climate genial in the imagination of men, and its air the beloved
element of all delicate spirits. That country is the fairest which is
inhabited by the noblest minds. The pictures which fill the imagination
in reading the actions of Pericles, Xenophon, Columbus, Bayard, Sidney,
Hampden, teach us how needlessly mean our life is; that we, by the
depth of our living, should deck it with more than regal or national
splendor, and act on principles that should interest man and nature in
the length of our days.
We have seen or heard of many extraordinary young men who never
ripened, or whose performance in actual life was not extraordinary.
When we see their air and mien, when we hear them speak of society, of
books, of religion, we admire their superiority; they seem to throw
contempt on our entire polity and social state; theirs is the tone of a
youthful giant who is sent to work revolutions. But they enter an
active profession and the forming Colossus shrinks to the common size
of man. The magic they used was the ideal tendencies, which always make
the Actual ridiculous; but the tough world had its revenge the moment
they put their horses of the sun to plough in its furrow. They found no
example and no companion, and their heart fainted. What then? The
lesson they gave in their first aspirations is yet true; and a better
valor and a purer truth shall one day organize their belief. Or why
should a woman liken herself to any historical woman, and think,
because Sappho, or Sévigné, or De Staël, or the cloistered souls who
have had genius and cultivation do not satisfy the imagination and the
serene Themis, none can,—certainly not she? Why not? She has a new and
unattempted problem to solve, perchance that of the happiest nature
that ever bloomed. Let the maiden, with erect soul, walk serenely on
her way, accept the hint of each new experience, search in turn all the
objects that solicit her eye, that she may learn the power and the
charm of her new-born being, which is the kindling of a new dawn in the
recesses of space. The fair girl who repels interference by a decided
and proud choice of influences, so careless of pleasing, so wilful and
lofty, inspires every beholder with somewhat of her own nobleness. The
silent heart encourages her; O friend, never strike sail to a fear!
Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas. Not in vain you
live, for every passing eye is cheered and refined by the vision.
The characteristic of heroism is its persistency. All men have
wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have
chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile
yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the
common the heroic. Yet we have the weakness to expect the sympathy of
people in those actions whose excellence is that they outrun sympathy
and appeal to a tardy justice. If you would serve your brother, because
it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back your words when you
find that prudent people do not commend you. Adhere to your own act,
and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and
extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age. It was a high
counsel that I once heard given to a young person,—“Always do what you
are afraid to do.” A simple manly character need never make an apology,
but should regard its past action with the calmness of Phocion, when he
admitted that the event of the battle was happy, yet did not regret his
dissuasion from the battle.
There is no weakness or exposure for which we cannot find consolation
in the thought—this is a part of my constitution, part of my relation
and office to my fellow-creature. Has nature covenanted with me that I
should never appear to disadvantage, never make a ridiculous figure?
Let us be generous of our dignity as well as of our money. Greatness
once and for ever has done with opinion. We tell our charities, not
because we wish to be praised for them, not because we think they have
great merit, but for our justification. It is a capital blunder; as you
discover when another man recites his charities.
To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to live with some rigor
of temperance, or some extremes of generosity, seems to be an
asceticism which common good-nature would appoint to those who are at
ease and in plenty, in sign that they feel a brotherhood with the great
multitude of suffering men. And not only need we breathe and exercise
the soul by assuming the penalties of abstinence, of debt, of solitude,
of unpopularity,—but it behooves the wise man to look with a bold eye
into those rarer dangers which sometimes invade men, and to familiarize
himself with disgusting forms of disease, with sounds of execration,
and the vision of violent death.
Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the day never
shines in which this element may not work. The circumstances of man, we
say, are historically somewhat better in this country and at this hour
than perhaps ever before. More freedom exists for culture. It will not
now run against an axe at the first step out of the beaten track of
opinion. But whoso is heroic will always find crises to try his edge.
Human virtue demands her champions and martyrs, and the trial of
persecution always proceeds. It is but the other day that the brave
Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rights of free
speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to live.
I see not any road of perfect peace which a man can walk, but after the
counsel of his own bosom. Let him quit too much association, let him go
home much, and stablish himself in those courses he approves. The
unremitting retention of simple and high sentiments in obscure duties
is hardening the character to that temper which will work with honor,
if need be in the tumult, or on the scaffold. Whatever outrages have
happened to men may befall a man again; and very easily in a republic,
if there appear any signs of a decay of religion. Coarse slander, fire,
tar and feathers and the gibbet, the youth may freely bring home to his
mind and with what sweetness of temper he can, and inquire how fast he