Representative Men: Seven Lectures
rudiments of the Mother-Tongue,--how could he not read off one strain
into music? Was he like Saadi, who, in his vision, designed to fill
his lap with the celestial flowers, as presents for his friends; but
the fragrance of the roses so intoxicated him, that the skirt dropped
from his hands? or, is reporting a breach of the manners of that
heavenly society? or, was it that he saw the vision intellectually,
and hence that chiding of the intellectual that pervades his books?
Be it as it may, his books have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no
relief to the dead prosaic level. In his profuse and accurate imagery
is no pleasure, for there is no beauty. We wander forlorn in a lack-
lustre landscape. No bird ever sang in all these gardens of the dead.
The entire want of poetry in so transcendent a mind betokens the
disease, and, like a hoarse voice in a beautiful person, is a kind of
warning. I think, sometimes, he will not be read longer. His great
name will turn a sentence. His books have become a monument. His laurels
so largely mixed with cypress, a charnel-breath so mingles with the
temple incense, that boys and maids will shun the spot.
Yet, in this immolation of genius and fame at the shrine of conscience,
is a merit sublime beyond praise. He lived to purpose: he gave a
verdict. He elected goodness as the clue to which the soul must cling
in all this labyrinth of nature. Many opinions conflict as to the true
center. In the shipwreck, some cling to running rigging, some to cask
and barrel, some to spars, some to mast; the pilot chooses with
science,--I plant myself here; all will sink before this; "he comes
to land who sails with me." Do not rely on heavenly favor, or on
compassion to folly, or on prudence, on common sense, the old usage
and main chance of men; nothing can keep you,--not fate, nor health,
nor admirable intellect; none can keep you, but rectitude only,
rectitude forever and ever!--and, with a tenacity that never swerved
in all his studies, inventions, dreams, he adheres to this brave choice.
I think of him as of some transmigratory votary of Indian legend, who
says, "Though I be dog, or jackal, or pismire, in the last rudiments
of nature, under what integument or ferocity, I cleave to right, as
the sure ladder that leads up to man and to God."
Swedenborg has rendered a double service to mankind, which is now only
beginning to be known. By the science of experiment and use, he made
his first steps; he observed and published the laws of nature; and,
ascending by just degrees, from events to their summits and causes,
he was fired with piety at the harmonies he felt, and abandoned himself
to his joy and worship. This was his first service. If the glory was
too bright for his eyes to bear, if he staggered under the trance of
delight, the more excellent is the spectacle he saw, the realities of
being which beam and blaze through him, and which no infirmities of
the prophet are suffered to obscure; and he renders a second passive
service to men, not less than the first,--perhaps, in the great circle
of being, and in the retributions of spiritual nature, not less glorious
or less beautiful to himself.
IV. MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC.
Every fact is related on one side to sensation and, on the other, to
morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two
sides, to find the other; given the upper, to find the under side.
Nothing so thin, but has these two faces; and, when the observer has
seen the obverse, he turns it over to see the reverse.
Life is a pitching of this penny,--heads or tails. We never tire of
this game, because there is still a slight shudder of astonishment at
the exhibition of the other face, at the contrast of the two faces.
A man is flushed with success, and bethinks himself what this good
luck signifies. He drives his bargain in the street; but it occurs
that he also is bought and sold. He sees the beauty of a human face,
and searches the cause of that beauty, which must be more beautiful.
He builds his fortunes, maintains the laws, cherishes his children;
but he asks himself, why? and whereto? This head and this tail are
called, in the language of philosophy, Infinite and Finite; Relative
and Absolute; Apparent and Real; and many fine names beside.
Each man is born with a predisposition to one or the other of these
sides of nature; and it will easily happen that men will be found
devoted to one or the other. One class has the perception of difference,
and is conversant with facts and surfaces; cities and persons; and the
bringing certain things to pass;--the men of talent and action. Another
class have the perception of identity, and are men of faith and
philosophy, men of genius.
Each of these riders drives too fast. Plotinus believes only in
philosophers; Fenelon, in saints; Pindar and Byron, in poets. Read the
haughty language in which Plato and the Platonists speak of all men
who are not devoted to their own shining abstractions: other men are
rats and mice. The literary class is usually proud and exclusive. The
correspondence of Pope and Swift describes mankind around them as
monsters; and that of Goethe and Schiller, in our own time, is scarcely
more kind.
It is easy to see how this arrogance comes. The genius is a genius by
the first look he casts on any object. Is his eye creative? Does he
not rest in angles and colors, but beholds the design--he will presently
undervalue the actual object. In powerful moments, his thought has
dissolved the works of art and nature into their causes, so that the
works appear heavy and faulty. He has a conception of beauty which the
sculptor cannot embody. Picture, statue, temple, railroad, steam-engine,
existed first in an artist's mind, without flaw, mistake, or friction,
which impair the executed models. So did the church, the state, college,
court, social circle, and all the institutions. It is not strange that
these men, remembering what they have seen and hoped of ideas, should
affirm disdainfully the superiority of ideas. Having at some time seen
that the happy soul will carry all the arts in power, they say, Why
cumber ourselves with superfluous realizations? and, like dreaming
beggars, they assume to speak and act as if these values were already
substantiated.
On the other part, the men of toil and trade and luxury,--the animal
world, including the animal in the philosopher and poet also,--and the
practical world, including the painful drudgeries which are never
excused to philosopher or poet any more than to the rest,--weigh heavily
on the other side. The trade in our streets believes in no metaphysical
causes, thinks nothing of the force which necessitated traders and a
trading planet to exist; no, but sticks to cotton, sugar, wool, and
salt. The ward meetings, on election days, are not softened by any
misgivings of the value of these ballotings. Hot life is streaming in
a single direction. To the men of this world, to the animal strength
and spirits, to the men of practical power, whilst immersed in it, the
man of ideas appears out of his reason. They alone have reason.
Things always bring their own philosophy with them, that is, prudence.
No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic,
also. In England, the richest country that ever existed, property
stands for more, compared with personal ability, than in any other.
After dinner, a man believes less, denies more; verities have lost
some charm. After dinner, arithmetic is the only science; ideas are
disturbing, incendiary, follies of young men, repudiated by the solid
portion of society; and a man comes to be valued by his athletic and
animal qualities. Spence relates, that Mr. Pope was with Sir Godfrey
Kneller one day, when his nephew, a Guinea trader, came in. "Nephew,"
said Sir Godfrey, "you have the honor of seeing the two greatest men
in the world." "I don't know how great men you may be," said the Guinea
man, "but I don't like your looks. I have often bought a man much
better than both of you, all muscles and bones, for ten guineas. Thus,
the men of the senses revenge themselves on the professors, and repay
scorn for scorn. The first had leaped to conclusions not yet ripe, and
say more than is true; the others make themselves merry with the
philosopher, and weigh man by the pound.--They believe that mustard
bites the tongue, that pepper is hot, friction-matches are incendiary,
revolvers to be avoided, and suspenders hold up pantaloons; that there
is much sentiment in a chest of tea; and a man will be eloquent, if
you give him good wine. Are you tender and scrupulous,--you must eat
more mince-pie. They hold that Luther had milk in him when he said,
"Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib, und Gesang Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben
lang,"
and when he advised a young scholar perplexed with fore-ordination and
free-will, to get well drunk. "The nerves," says Cabanis, "they are
the man." My neighbor, a jolly farmer, in the tavern bar-room, thinks
that the use of money is sure and speedy spending. "For his part," he
says, "he puts his down his neck, and gets the good of it."
The inconvenience of this way of thinking is, that it runs into
indifferentism, and then into disgust. Life is eating us up. We shall
be fables presently. Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years
hence. Life's well enough; but we shall be glad to get out of it, and
they will all be glad to have us. Why should we fret and drudge? Our
meat will taste to-morrow as it did yesterday, and we may at last have
had enough of it. "Ah," said my languid gentleman at Oxford, "there's
nothing new or true,--and no matter."
With a little more bitterness, the cynic moans: our life is like an
ass led to market by a bundle of hay being carried before him: he sees
nothing but the bundle of hay. "There is so much trouble in coming
into the world," said Lord Bolingbroke, "and so much more, as well as
meanness, in going out of it, that 'tis hardly worth while to be here
at all." I knew a philosopher of this kidney, who was accustomed briefly
to sum up his experience of human nature in saying, "Mankind is a
damned rascal:" and the natural corollary is pretty sure to
follow,--"The world lives by humbug, and so will I."
The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each
other, and the scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there
arises a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two,
the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by being in extremes. He
labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance. He will not
go beyond his card. He sees the one-sidedness of these men of the
street; he will not be a Gibeonite; he stands for the intellectual
faculties, a cool head, and whatever serves to keep it cool; no
unadvised industry, no unrewarded self-devotion, no loss of the brains
in toil. Am I an ox, or a dray?--You are both in extremes, he says.
You that will have all solid, and a world of pig-lead, deceive
yourselves grossly. You believe yourselves rooted and grounded on
adamant; and, yet, if we uncover the last facts of our knowledge, you
are spinning like bubbles in a river, you know not whither or whence,
and you are bottomed and capped and wrapped in delusions.
Neither will he be betrayed to a book, and wrapped in a gown. The
studious class are their own victims; they are thin and pale, their
feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the
day a fear of interruption,--pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism. If
you come near them, and see what conceits they entertain,--they are
abstractionists, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some
dreams; in expecting the homage of society to some precious scheme
built on a truth, but destitute of proportion in its presentment, of