Essays — Second Series
tyrant, "If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused."
I notice too that the ground on which eminent public servants urge the
claims of popular education is fear; 'This country is filling up with
thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them
from our throats.' We do not believe that any education, any system of
philosophy, any influence of genius, will ever give depth of insight to
a superficial mind. Having settled ourselves into this infidelity, our
skill is expended to procure alleviations, diversion, opiates. We adorn
the victim with manual skill, his tongue with languages, his body with
inoffensive and comely manners. So have we cunningly hid the tragedy of
limitation and inner death we cannot avert. Is it strange that society
should be devoured by a secret melancholy which breaks through all its
smiles and all its gayety and games?
But even one step farther our infidelity has gone. It appears that some
doubt is felt by good and wise men whether really the happiness
and probity of men is increased by the culture of the mind in those
disciplines to which we give the name of education. Unhappily too the
doubt comes from scholars, from persons who have tried these methods.
In their experience the scholar was not raised by the sacred thoughts
amongst which he dwelt, but used them to selfish ends. He was a profane
person, and became a showman, turning his gifts to a marketable use, and
not to his own sustenance and growth. It was found that the intellect
could be independently developed, that is, in separation from the man,
as any single organ can be invigorated, and the result was monstrous. A
canine appetite for knowledge was generated, which must still be fed but
was never satisfied, and this knowledge, not being directed on action,
never took the character of substantial, humane truth, blessing those
whom it entered. It gave the scholar certain powers of expression, the
power of speech, the power of poetry, of literary art, but it did not
bring him to peace or to beneficence.
When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange
that society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief. What
remedy? Life must be lived on a higher plane. We must go up to a higher
platform, to which we are always invited to ascend; there, the whole
aspect of things changes. I resist the skepticism of our education and
of our educated men. I do not believe that the differences of opinion
and character in men are organic. I do not recognize, beside the class
of the good and the wise, a permanent class of skeptics, or a class of
conservatives, or of malignants, or of materialists. I do not believe
in two classes. You remember the story of the poor woman who importuned
King Philip of Macedon to grant her justice, which Philip refused: the
woman exclaimed, "I appeal:" the king, astonished, asked to whom she
appealed: the woman replied, "From Philip drunk to Philip sober." The
text will suit me very well. I believe not in two classes of men, but in
man in two moods, in Philip drunk and Philip sober. I think, according
to the good-hearted word of Plato, "Unwillingly the soul is deprived of
truth." Iron conservative, miser, or thief, no man is but by a supposed
necessity which he tolerates by shortness or torpidity of sight. The
soul lets no man go without some visitations and holydays of a diviner
presence. It would be easy to show, by a narrow scanning of any man's
biography, that we are not so wedded to our paltry performances of
every kind but that every man has at intervals the grace to scorn
his performances, in comparing them with his belief of what he should
do;--that he puts himself on the side of his enemies, listening gladly
to what they say of him, and accusing himself of the same things.
What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which degrades all
it has done? Genius counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own idea
it never executed. The Iliad, the Hamlet, the Doric column, the Roman
arch, the Gothic minster, the German anthem, when they are ended, the
master casts behind him. How sinks the song in the waves of melody which
the universe pours over his soul! Before that gracious Infinite out of
which he drew these few strokes, how mean they look, though the praises
of the world attend them. From the triumphs of his art he turns with
desire to this greater defeat. Let those admire who will. With silent
joy he sees himself to be capable of a beauty that eclipses all which
his hands have done; all which human hands have ever done.
Well, we are all the children of genius, the children of virtue,--and
feel their inspirations in our happier hours. Is not every man sometimes
a radical in politics? Men are conservatives when they are least
vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after
dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged: in the
morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused;
when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals. In
the circle of the rankest tories that could be collected in England, Old
or New, let a powerful and stimulating intellect, a man of great heart
and mind, act on them, and very quickly these frozen conservators will
yield to the friendly influence, these hopeless will begin to hope,
these haters will begin to love, these immovable statues will begin to
spin and revolve. I cannot help recalling the fine anecdote which Warton
relates of Bishop Berkeley, when he was preparing to leave England
with his plan of planting the gospel among the American savages. "Lord
Bathurst told me that the members of the Scriblerus club being met at
his house at dinner, they agreed to rally Berkeley, who was also his
guest, on his scheme at Bermudas. Berkeley, having listened to the
many lively things they had to say, begged to be heard in his turn,
and displayed his plan with such an astonishing and animating force of
eloquence and enthusiasm, that they were struck dumb, and, after some
pause, rose up all together with earnestness, exclaiming, 'Let us set
out with him immediately.'" Men in all ways are better than they seem.
They like flattery for the moment, but they know the truth for their
own. It is a foolish cowardice which keeps us from trusting them and
speaking to them rude truth. They resent your honesty for an instant,
they will thank you for it always. What is it we heartily wish of each
other? Is it to be pleased and flattered? No, but to be convicted and
exposed, to be shamed out of our nonsense of all kinds, and made men
of, instead of ghosts and phantoms. We are weary of gliding ghostlike
through the world, which is itself so slight and unreal. We crave a
sense of reality, though it come in strokes of pain. I explain so,--by
this manlike love of truth,--those excesses and errors into which souls
of great vigor, but not equal insight, often fall. They feel the poverty
at the bottom of all the seeming affluence of the world. They know the
speed with which they come straight through the thin masquerade, and
conceive a disgust at the indigence of nature: Rousseau, Mirabeau,
Charles Fox, Napoleon, Byron,--and I could easily add names nearer home,
of raging riders, who drive their steeds so hard, in the violence of
living to forget its illusion: they would know the worst, and tread
the floors of hell. The heroes of ancient and modern fame, Cimon,
Themistocles, Alcibiades, Alexander, Caesar, have treated life and
fortune as a game to be well and skilfully played, but the stake not
to be so valued but that any time it could be held as a trifle light
as air, and thrown up. Caesar, just before the battle of Pharsalia,
discourses with the Egyptian priest concerning the fountains of the
Nile, and offers to quit the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, if he will
show him those mysterious sources.
The same magnanimity shows itself in our social relations, in the
preference, namely, which each man gives to the society of superiors
over that of his equals. All that a man has will he give for right
relations with his mates. All that he has will he give for an erect
demeanor in every company and on each occasion. He aims at such things
as his neighbors prize, and gives his days and nights, his talents and
his heart, to strike a good stroke, to acquit himself in all men's sight
as a man. The consideration of an eminent citizen, of a noted merchant,
of a man of mark in his profession; a naval and military honor, a
general's commission, a marshal's baton, a ducal coronet, the laurel of
poets, and, anyhow procured, the acknowledgment of eminent merit,--have
this lustre for each candidate that they enable him to walk erect and
unashamed in the presence of some persons before whom he felt himself
inferior. Having raised himself to this rank, having established his
equality with class after class of those with whom he would live well,
he still finds certain others before whom he cannot possess himself,
because they have somewhat fairer, somewhat grander, somewhat purer,
which extorts homage of him. Is his ambition pure? then will his laurels
and his possessions seem worthless: instead of avoiding these men who
make his fine gold dim, he will cast all behind him and seek their
society only, woo and embrace this his humiliation and mortification,
until he shall know why his eye sinks, his voice is husky, and his
brilliant talents are paralyzed in this presence. He is sure that the
soul which gives the lie to all things will tell none. His constitution
will not mislead him. If it cannot carry itself as it ought, high and
unmatchable in the presence of any man; if the secret oracles whose
whisper makes the sweetness and dignity of his life do here withdraw and
accompany him no longer,--it is time to undervalue what he has valued,
to dispossess himself of what he has acquired, and with Caesar to take
in his hand the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, and say, "All these
will I relinquish, if you will show me the fountains of the Nile." Dear
to us are those who love us; the swift moments we spend with them are
a compensation for a great deal of misery; they enlarge our life;--but
dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life:
they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby
supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us
to new and unattempted performances.
As every man at heart wishes the best and not inferior society, wishes
to be convicted of his error and to come to himself,--so he wishes that
the same healing should not stop in his thought, but should penetrate
his will or active power. The selfish man suffers more from his
selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important
benefit. What he most wishes is to be lifted to some higher platform,
that he may see beyond his present fear the transalpine good, so that
his fear, his coldness, his custom may be broken up like fragments of
ice, melted and carried away in the great stream of good will. Do
you ask my aid? I also wish to be a benefactor. I wish more to be a
benefactor and servant than you wish to be served by me; and surely the
greatest good fortune that could befall me is precisely to be so moved
by you that I should say, 'Take me and all mine, and use me and mine
freely to your ends'! for I could not say it otherwise than because a
great enlargement had come to my heart and mind, which made me superior
to my fortunes. Here we are paralyzed with fear; we hold on to our
little properties, house and land, office and money, for the bread which
they have in our experience yielded us, although we confess that our
being does not flow through them. We desire to be made great; we desire