Representative Men: Seven Lectures
justness in its application, and of all energy of will in the schemer
to embody and vitalize it.
But I see plainly, he says, that I cannot see. I know that human
strength is not in extremes, but in avoiding extremes. I, at least,
will shun the weakness of philosophizing beyond my depth. What is the
use of pretending to powers we have not? What is the use of pretending
to assurances we have not, respecting the other life? Why exaggerate
the power of virtue? Why be an angel before your time? These strings,
wound up too high, will snap. If there is a wish for immortality, and
no evidence, why not say just that? If there are conflicting evidences,
why not state them? If there is not ground for a candid thinker to
make up his mind, yea or nay,--why not suspend the judgment? I weary
of these dogmatizers. I tire of these hacks of routine, who deny the
dogmas. I neither affirm nor deny. I stand here to try the case. I am
here to consider,--to consider how it is. I will try to keep the balance
true. Of what use to take the chair, and glibly rattle off theories
of societies, religion, and nature, when I know that practical
objections lie in the way, insurmountable by me and by my mates? Why
so talkative in public, when each of my neighbors can pin me to my
seat by arguments I cannot refute? Why pretend that life is so simple
a game, when we know how subtle and elusive the Proteus is? Why think
to shut up all things in your narrow coop, when we know there are not
one or two only, but ten, twenty, a thousand things, and unlike? Why
fancy that you have all the truth in your keeping? There is much to
say on all sides.
Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical
question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be
had? Is not marriage an open question when it is alleged, from the
beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to
get out, and such as are out wish to get in? And the reply of Socrates,
to him who asked whether he should choose a wife, still remains
reasonable, "that, whether he should choose one or not, he would repent
it." Is not the state a question? All society is divided in opinion
on the subject of the state. Nobody loves it; great numbers dislike
it, and suffer conscientious scruples to allegiance: and the only
defense set up, is, the fear of doing worse in disorganizing. Is it
otherwise with the church? Or, to put any of the questions which touch
mankind nearest,--shall the young man aim at a leading part in law,
in politics, in trade? It will not be pretended that a success in
either of these kinds is quite coincident with what is best and inmost
in his mind. Shall he, then, cutting the stays that hold him fast to
the social state, put out to sea with no guidance but his genius? There
is much to say on both sides. Remember the open question between the
present order of "competition," and the friends of "attractive and
associated labor." The generous minds embrace the proposition of labor
shared by all; it is the only honesty; nothing else is safe. It is
from the poor man's hut alone, that strength and virtue come; and yet,
on the other side, it is alleged that labor impairs the form, and
breaks the spirit of man, and the laborers cry unanimously, "We have
no thoughts." Culture, how indispensable! I cannot forgive you the
want of accomplishment; and yet, culture will instantly destroy that
chiefest beauty of spontaneousness. Excellent is culture for a savage;
but once let him read in the book, and he is no longer able not to
think of Plutarch's heroes. In short, since true fortitude of
understanding consists "in not letting what we know be embarrassed by
what we do not know," we ought to secure those advantages which we can
command, and not risk them by clutching after the airy and unattainable.
Come, no chimeras! Let us go abroad; let us mix in affairs; let us
learn, and get, and have, and climb. "Men are a sort of moving plants,
and, like trees, receive a great part of their nourishment from the
air. If they keep too much at home, they pine." Let us have a robust,
manly life; let us know what we know, for certain; what we have, let
it be solid, and seasonable, and our own. A world in the hand is worth
two in the bush. Let us have to do with real men and women, and not
with skipping ghosts.
This, then, is the right ground of the skeptic,--this of consideration,
of self-containing; not at all of unbelief; not at all of universal
denying, nor of universal doubting,--doubting even that he doubts;
least of all, of scoffing and profligate jeering at all that is stable
and good. These are no more his moods than are those of religion and
philosophy. He is the considerer, the prudent, taking in sail, counting
stock, husbanding his means, believing that a man has too many enemies,
than that he can afford to be his own; that we cannot give ourselves
too many advantages, in this unequal conflict, with powers so vast and
unweariable ranged on one side, and this little, conceited, vulnerable
popinjay that a man is, bobbing up and down into every danger, on the
other. It is a position taken up for better defense, as of more safety,
and one that can be maintained; and it is one of more opportunity and
range; as, when we build a house, the rule is, to set it not too high
nor too low, under the wind, but out of the dirt.
The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mobility. The Spartan
and Stoic schemes are too stark and stiff for our occasion. A theory
of Saint John, and of non-resistance, seems, on the other hand, too
thin and aerial. We want some coat woven of elastic steel, stout as
the first, and limber as the second. We want a ship in these billows
we inhabit. An angular, dogmatic house would be rent to chips and
splinters, in this storm of many elements. No, it must be tight, and
fit to the form of man, to live at all; as a shell is the architecture
of a house founded on the sea. The soul of man must be the type of our
scheme, just as the body of man is the type after which a dwelling-house
is built. Adaptiveness is the peculiarity of human nature. We are
golden averages, volitant stabilities, compensated or periodic errors,
houses founded on the sea. The wise skeptic wishes to have a near view
of the best game, and the chief players; what is best in the planet;
art and nature, places and events, but mainly men. Everything that is
excellent in mankind,--a form of grace, an arm of iron, lips of
persuasion, a brain of resources, every one skilful to play and win,--he
will see and judge.
The terms of admission to this spectacle are, that he have a certain
solid and intelligible way of living of his own; some method of
answering the inevitable needs of human life; proof that he has played
with skill and success; that he has evinced the temper, stoutness, and
the range of qualities which, among his contemporaries and countrymen,
entitle him to fellowship and trust. For, the secrets of life are not
shown except to sympathy and likeness. Men do not confide themselves
to boys, or coxcombs, or pedants, but to their peers. Some wise
limitation, as the modern phrase is; some condition between the
extremes, and having itself a positive quality; some stark and
sufficient man, who is not salt or sugar, but sufficiently related to
the world to do justice to Paris or London, and, at the same time, a
vigorous and original thinker, whom cities cannot overawe, but who
uses them,--is the fit person to occupy this ground of speculation.
These qualities meet in the character of Montaigne. And yet, since the
personal regard which I entertain for Montaigne may be unduly great,
I will, under the shield of this prince of egotists, offer, as an
apology for electing him as the representative of skepticism, a word
or two to explain how my love began and grew for this admirable gossip.
A single odd volume of Cotton's translation of the Essays remained to
me from my father's library, when a boy. It lay long neglected, until,
after many years, when I was newly escaped from college, I read the
book, and procured the remaining volumes. I remember the delight and
wonder in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I had myself
written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my
thought and experience. It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in
the cemetery of Pere le Chaise, I came to a tomb of Augustus Collignon,
who died in 1830, aged sixty-eight years, and who, said the monument,
"lived to do right, and had formed himself to virtue on the Essays of
Montaigne." Some years later, I became acquainted with an accomplished
English poet, John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my correspondence,
I found that, from a love of Montaigne, he had made a pilgrimage to
his chateau, still standing near Castellan, in Perigord, and, after
two hundred and fifty years, had copied from the walls of his library
the inscriptions which Montaigne had written there. That Journal of
Mr. Sterling's, published in the Westminster Review, Mr. Hazlitt has
reprinted in the Prolegomenae to his edition of the Essays. I heard
with pleasure that one of the newly-discovered autographs of William
Shakspeare was in a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne. It is
the only book which we certainly know to have been in the poet's
library. And, oddly enough, the duplicate copy of Florio, which the
British Museum purchased, with a view of protecting the Shakspeare
autograph (as I was informed in the Museum), turned out to have the
autograph of Ben Jonson in the fly-leaf. Leigh Hunt relates of Lord
Byron, that Montaigne was the only great writer of past times whom he
read with avowed satisfaction. Other coincidences, not needful to be
mentioned here, concurred to make this old Gascon still new and immortal
for me.
In 1571, on the death of his father, Montaigne, then thirty-eight years
old, retired from the practice of law, at Bordeaux, and settled himself
on his estate. Though he had been a man of pleasure, and sometimes a
courtier, his studious habits now grew on him, and he loved the compass,
staidness, and independence of the country gentleman's life. He took
up his economy in good earnest, and made his farms yield the most.
Downright and plain-dealing, and abhorring to be deceived or to
deceive, he was esteemed in the country for his sense and probity. In
the civil wars of the League, which converted every house into a fort,
Montaigne kept his gates open, and his house without defense. All
parties freely came and went, his courage and honor being universally
esteemed. The neighboring lords and gentry brought jewels and papers
to him for safekeeping. Gibbon reckons, in these bigoted times, but
two men of liberality in France,--Henry IV. and Montaigne.
Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers. His French
freedom runs into grossness; but he has anticipated all censures by
the bounty of his own confessions. In his times, books were written
to one sex only, and almost all were written in Latin; so that, in a
humorist, a certain nakedness of statement was permitted, which our
manners, of a literature addressed equally to both sexes, do not allow.
But, though a biblical plainness, coupled with a most uncanonical
levity, may shut his pages to many sensitive readers, yet the offence
is superficial. He parades it: he makes the most of it; nobody can
think or say worse of him than he does. He pretends to most of the
vices; and, if there be any virtue in him, he says, it got in by
stealth. There is no man, in his opinion, who has not deserved hanging
five or six times; and he pretends no exception in his own behalf.
"Five or six as ridiculous stories," too, he says, "can be told of me,
as of any man living." But, with all this really superfluous frankness,