Essays — First Series
towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the
perils of the state from nomadism. And in these late and civil
countries of England and America these propensities still fight out the
old battle, in the nation and in the individual. The nomads of Africa
were constrained to wander, by the attacks of the gad-fly, which drives
the cattle mad, and so compels the tribe to emigrate in the rainy
season and to drive off the cattle to the higher sandy regions. The
nomads of Asia follow the pasturage from month to month. In America and
Europe the nomadism is of trade and curiosity; a progress, certainly,
from the gad-fly of Astaboras to the Anglo and Italo-mania of Boston
Bay. Sacred cities, to which a periodical religious pilgrimage was
enjoined, or stringent laws and customs, tending to invigorate the
national bond, were the check on the old rovers; and the cumulative
values of long residence are the restraints on the itineracy of the
present day. The antagonism of the two tendencies is not less active in
individuals, as the love of adventure or the love of repose happens to
predominate. A man of rude health and flowing spirits has the faculty
of rapid domestication, lives in his wagon and roams through all
latitudes as easily as a Calmuc. At sea, or in the forest, or in the
snow, he sleeps as warm, dines with as good appetite, and associates as
happily as beside his own chimneys. Or perhaps his facility is deeper
seated, in the increased range of his faculties of observation, which
yield him points of interest wherever fresh objects meet his eyes. The
pastoral nations were needy and hungry to desperation; and this
intellectual nomadism, in its excess, bankrupts the mind through the
dissipation of power on a miscellany of objects. The home-keeping wit,
on the other hand, is that continence or content which finds all the
elements of life in its own soil; and which has its own perils of
monotony and deterioration, if not stimulated by foreign infusions.
Every thing the individual sees without him corresponds to his states
of mind, and every thing is in turn intelligible to him, as his onward
thinking leads him into the truth to which that fact or series belongs.
The primeval world,—the Fore-World, as the Germans say,—I can dive to
it in myself as well as grope for it with researching fingers in
catacombs, libraries, and the broken reliefs and torsos of ruined
villas.
What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history,
letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic or Homeric
age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or
five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally
through a Grecian period. The Grecian state is the era of the bodily
nature, the perfection of the senses,—of the spiritual nature unfolded
in strict unity with the body. In it existed those human forms which
supplied the sculptor with his models of Hercules, Phœbus, and Jove;
not like the forms abounding in the streets of modern cities, wherein
the face is a confused blur of features, but composed of incorrupt,
sharply defined and symmetrical features, whose eye-sockets are so
formed that it would be impossible for such eyes to squint and take
furtive glances on this side and on that, but they must turn the whole
head. The manners of that period are plain and fierce. The reverence
exhibited is for personal qualities; courage, address, self-command,
justice, strength, swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest. Luxury and
elegance are not known. A sparse population and want make every man his
own valet, cook, butcher and soldier, and the habit of supplying his
own needs educates the body to wonderful performances. Such are the
Agamemnon and Diomed of Homer, and not far different is the picture
Xenophon gives of himself and his compatriots in the Retreat of the Ten
Thousand. “After the army had crossed the river Teleboas in Armenia,
there fell much snow, and the troops lay miserably on the ground
covered with it. But Xenophon arose naked, and taking an axe, began to
split wood; whereupon others rose and did the like.” Throughout his
army exists a boundless liberty of speech. They quarrel for plunder,
they wrangle with the generals on each new order, and Xenophon is as
sharp-tongued as any and sharper-tongued than most, and so gives as
good as he gets. Who does not see that this is a gang of great boys,
with such a code of honor and such lax discipline as great boys have?
The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, and indeed of all the old
literature, is that the persons speak simply,—speak as persons who have
great good sense without knowing it, before yet the reflective habit
has become the predominant habit of the mind. Our admiration of the
antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural. The Greeks
are not reflective, but perfect in their senses and in their health,
with the finest physical organization in the world. Adults acted with
the simplicity and grace of children. They made vases, tragedies, and
statues, such as healthy senses should,—that is, in good taste. Such
things have continued to be made in all ages, and are now, wherever a
healthy physique exists; but, as a class, from their superior
organization, they have surpassed all. They combine the energy of
manhood with the engaging unconsciousness of childhood. The attraction
of these manners is that they belong to man, and are known to every man
in virtue of his being once a child; besides that there are always
individuals who retain these characteristics. A person of childlike
genius and inborn energy is still a Greek, and revives our love of the
Muse of Hellas. I admire the love of nature in the Philoctetes. In
reading those fine apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, mountains
and waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I feel the
eternity of man, the identity of his thought. The Greek had it seems
the same fellow-beings as I. The sun and moon, water and fire, met his
heart precisely as they meet mine. Then the vaunted distinction between
Greek and English, between Classic and Romantic schools, seems
superficial and pedantic. When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to
me,—when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no
more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls
are tinged with the same hue, and do as it were run into one, why
should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian
years?
The student interprets the age of chivalry by his own age of chivalry,
and the days of maritime adventure and circumnavigation by quite
parallel miniature experiences of his own. To the sacred history of the
world he has the same key. When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps
of antiquity merely echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer
of his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of
tradition and the caricature of institutions.
Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us
new facts in nature. I see that men of God have from time to time
walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart and soul
of the commonest hearer. Hence evidently the tripod, the priest, the
priestess inspired by the divine afflatus.
Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They cannot unite him
to history, or reconcile him with themselves. As they come to revere
their intuitions and aspire to live holily, their own piety explains
every fact, every word.
How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Menu, of
Socrates, domesticate themselves in the mind. I cannot find any
antiquity in them. They are mine as much as theirs.
I have seen the first monks and anchorets, without crossing seas or
centuries. More than once some individual has appeared to me with such
negligence of labor and such commanding contemplation, a haughty
beneficiary begging in the name of God, as made good to the nineteenth
century Simeon the Stylite, the Thebais, and the first Capuchins.
The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian, Brahmin, Druid,
and Inca, is expounded in the individual’s private life. The cramping
influence of a hard formalist on a young child, in repressing his
spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that without
producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even much
sympathy with the tyranny,—is a familiar fact, explained to the child
when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth
is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and words and forms
of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth. The fact
teaches him how Belus was worshipped and how the Pyramids were built,
better than the discovery by Champollion of the names of all the
workmen and the cost of every tile. He finds Assyria and the Mounds of
Cholula at his door, and himself has laid the courses.
Again, in that protest which each considerate person makes against the
superstition of his times, he repeats step for step the part of old
reformers, and in the search after truth finds, like them, new perils
to virtue. He learns again what moral vigor is needed to supply the
girdle of a superstition. A great licentiousness treads on the heels of
a reformation. How many times in the history of the world has the
Luther of the day had to lament the decay of piety in his own
household! “Doctor,” said his wife to Martin Luther, one day, “how is
it that whilst subject to papacy we prayed so often and with such
fervor, whilst now we pray with the utmost coldness and very seldom?”
The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has in
literature,—in all fable as well as in all history. He finds that the
poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible situations,
but that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true for one and
true for all. His own secret biography he finds in lines wonderfully
intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born. One after another
he comes up in his private adventures with every fable of Æsop, of
Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and verifies them
with his own head and hands.
The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper creations of the
imagination and not of the fancy, are universal verities. What a range
of meanings and what perpetual pertinence has the story of Prometheus!
Beside its primary value as the first chapter of the history of Europe,
(the mythology thinly veiling authentic facts, the invention of the
mechanic arts and the migration of colonies,) it gives the history of
religion, with some closeness to the faith of later ages. Prometheus is
the Jesus of the old mythology. He is the friend of man; stands between
the unjust “justice” of the Eternal Father and the race of mortals, and
readily suffers all things on their account. But where it departs from
the Calvinistic Christianity and exhibits him as the defier of Jove, it
represents a state of mind which readily appears wherever the doctrine
of Theism is taught in a crude, objective form, and which seems the
self-defence of man against this untruth, namely a discontent with the
believed fact that a God exists, and a feeling that the obligation of
reverence is onerous. It would steal if it could the fire of the
Creator, and live apart from him and independent of him. The Prometheus
Vinctus is the romance of skepticism. Not less true to all time are the
details of that stately apologue. Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus,
said the poets. When the gods come among men, they are not known. Jesus
was not; Socrates and Shakspeare were not. Antaeus was suffocated by
the gripe of Hercules, but every time he touched his mother earth his
strength was renewed. Man is the broken giant, and in all his weakness