Representative Men: Seven Lectures
other, it seems a poverty that we can only spend it once; we wish for
a thousand heads, a thousand bodies, that we might celebrate its immense
beauty in many ways and places. Is this fancy? Well, in good faith,
we are multiplied by our proxies. How easily we adopt their labors!
Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus. Every
novel is debtor to Homer. Every carpenter who shaves with a foreplane
borrows the genius of a forgotten inventor. Life is girt all around
with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished
to add their point of light to our sky. Engineer, broker, jurist,
physician, moralist, theologian, and every man, inasmuch as he has any
science, is a definer and map-maker of the latitudes and longitudes
of our condition. These road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must
extend the area of life, and multiply our relations. We are as much
gainers by finding a new property in the old earth, as by acquiring
a new planet.
We are too passive in the reception of these material or semi-material
aids. We must not be sacks and stomachs. To ascend one step,--we are
better served through our sympathy. Activity is contagious. Looking
where others look, and conversing with the same things, we catch the
charm which lured them. Napoleon said, "you must not fight too often
with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war." Talk much
with any man of vigorous mind, and we acquire very fast the habit of
looking at things in the same light, and, on each occurrence, we
anticipate his thought.
Men are helpful through the intellect and the affections. Other help,
I find a false appearance. If you affect to give me bread and fire,
I perceive that I pay for it the full price, and at last it leaves me
as it found me, neither better nor worse: but all mental and moral
force is a positive good. It goes out from you whether you will or
not, and profits me whom you never thought of. I cannot even hear of
personal vigor of any kind, great power of performance, without fresh
resolution. We are emulous of all that man can do. Cecil's saying of
Sir Walter Raleigh, "I know that he can toil terribly," is an electric
touch. So are Clarendon's portraits,--of Hampden; "who was of an
industry and vigilance not to be tired out or wearied by the most
laborious, and of parts not to be imposed on by the most subtle and
sharp, and of a personal courage equal to his best parts"--of Falkland;
"who was so severe an adorer of truth, that he could as easily have
given himself leave to steal, as to dissemble." We cannot read Plutarch,
without a tingling of the blood; and I accept the saying of the Chinese
Mencius: "As age is the instructor of a hundred ages. When the manners
of Loo are heard of, the stupid become intelligent, and the wavering,
determined."
This is the moral of biography; yet it is hard for departed men to
touch the quick like our own companions, whose names may not last as
long. What is he whom I never think of? whilst in every solitude are
those who succor our genius, and stimulate us in wonderful manners.
There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than that
other can, and by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What
has friendship so signaled as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue
is in us? We will never more think cheaply of ourselves, or of life.
We are piqued to some purpose, and the industry of the diggers on the
railroad will not again shame us.
Under this head, too, falls that homage, very pure, as I think, which
all ranks pay to the hero of the day, from Coriolanus and Gracchus,
down to Pitt, Lafayette, Wellington, Webster, Lamartine. Hear the
shouts in the street! The people cannot see him enough. They delight
in a man. Here is a head and a trunk! What a front! What eyes! Atlantean
shoulders, and the whole carriage heroic, with equal inward force to
guide the great machine! This pleasure of full expression to that
which, in their private experience, is usually cramped and obstructed,
runs, also, much higher, and is the secret of the reader's joy in
literary genius. Nothing is kept back. There is fire enough to fuse
the mountain of ore. Shakspeare's principal merit may be conveyed, in
saying that he, of all men, best understands the English language, and
can say what he will. Yet these unchoked channels and floodgates of
expression are only health or fortunate constitution. Shakspeare's
name suggests other and purely intellectual benefits.
Senates and sovereigns have no compliment, with their medals, swords,
and armorial coats, like the addressing to a human being thoughts out
of a certain height, and presupposing his intelligence. This honor,
which is possible in personal intercourse scarcely twice in a lifetime,
genius perpetually pays; contented, if now and then, in a century, the
proffer is accepted. The indicators of the values of matter are degraded
to a sort of cooks and confectioners, on the appearance of the
indicators of ideas. Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the
supersensible regions, and draws on their map; and, by acquainting us
with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These
are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have
conversed with is the show.
We go to the gymnasium and the swimming-school to see the power and
beauty of the body; there is the like pleasure, and a higher benefit,
from witnessing intellectual feats of all kinds; as, feats of memory,
of mathematical combination, great power of abstraction, the
transmutings of the imagination, even versatility, and concentration,
as these acts expose the invisible organs and members of the mind,
which respond, member for member, to the parts of the body. For, we
thus enter a new gymnasium, and learn to choose men by their truest
marks, taught, with Plato, "to choose those who can, without aid from
the eyes, or any other sense, proceed to truth and to being." Foremost
among these activities, are the summersaults, spells, and resurrections,
wrought by the imagination. When this wakes, a man seems to multiply
ten times or a thousand times his force. It opens the delicious sense
of indeterminate size, and inspires an audacious mental habit. We are
as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a
word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our
heads are bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the
Pit. And this benefit is real, because we are entitled to these
enlargements, and, once having passed the bounds, shall never again
be quite the miserable pedants we were.
The high functions of the intellect are so allied, that some imaginative
power usually appears in all eminent minds, even in arithmeticians of
the first class, but especially in meditative men of an intuitive habit
of thought. This class serve us, so that they have the perception of
identity and the perception of reaction. The eyes of Plato, Shakespeare,
Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either of these laws. The perception
of these laws is a kind of metre of the mind. Little minds are little,
through failure to see them.
Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our delight in reason degenerates
into idolatry of the herald. Especially when a mind of powerful method
has instructed men, we find the examples of oppression. The dominion
of Aristotle, the Ptolemaic astronomy, the credit of Luther, of Bacon,
of Locke,--in religion the history of hierarchies, of saints, and the
sects which have taken the name of each founder, are in point. Alas!
every man is such a victim. The imbecility of men is always inviting
the impudence of power. It is the delight of vulgar talent to dazzle
and to bind the beholder. But true genius seeks to defend us from
itself. True genius will not impoverish, but will liberate, and add
new senses. If a wise man should appear in our village, he would create,
in those who conversed with him, a new consciousness of wealth, by
opening their eyes to unobserved advantages; he would establish a sense
of immovable equality, calm us with assurances that we could not be
cheated; as every one would discern the checks and guaranties of
condition. The rich would see their mistakes and poverty, the poor
their escapes and their resources.
But nature brings all this about in due time. Rotation is her remedy.
The soul is impatient of masters, and eager for change. Housekeepers
say of a domestic who has been valuable, "She has lived with me long
enough." We are tendencies, or rather, symptoms, and none of us
complete. We touch and go, and sip the foam of many lives. Rotation
is the law of nature. When nature removes a great man, people explore
the horizon for a successor; but none comes and none will. His class
is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field, the
next man will appear; not Jefferson, nor Franklin, but now a great
salesman; then a road-contractor; then a student of fishes; then a
buffalo-hunting explorer, or a semi-savage western general. Thus we
make a stand against our rougher masters; but against the best there
is a finer remedy. The power which they communicate is not theirs.
When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the
idea, to which, also, Plato was debtor.
I must not forget that we have a special debt to a single class. Life
is a scale of degrees. Between rank and rank of our great men are wide
intervals. Mankind have, in all ages, attached themselves to a few
persons, who, either by the quality of that idea they embodied, or by
the largeness of their reception, were entitled to the position of
leaders and law-givers. These teach us the qualities of primary
nature,--admit us to the constitution of things. We swim, day by day,
on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and
towns in the air, of which the men about us are dupes. But life is a
sincerity. In lucid intervals we say, "Let there be an entrance opened
for me into realities; I have worn the fool's cap too long." We will
know the meaning of our economies and politics. Give us the cipher,
and, if persons and things are scores of a celestial music, let us
read off the strains. We have been cheated of our reason; yet there
have been sane men, who enjoyed a rich and related existence. What
they know, they know for us. With each new mind, a new secret of nature
transpires; nor can the Bible be closed, until the last great man is
born. These men correct the delirium of the animal spirits, make us
considerate, and engage us to new aims and powers. The veneration of
mankind selects these for the highest place. Witness the multitude of
statues, pictures, and memorials which recall their genius in every
city, village, house, and ship:--
"Ever their phantoms arise before us.
Our loftier brothers, but one in blood;
At bed and table they lord it o'er us,
With looks of beauty, and words of good."
How to illustrate the distinctive benefit of ideas, the service rendered
by those who introduce moral truths into the general mind?--I am
plagued, in all my living, with a perpetual tariff of prices. If I
work in my garden, and prune an apple-tree, I am well enough
entertained, and could continue indefinitely in the like occupation.
But it comes to mind that a day is gone, and I have got this precious
nothing done. I go to Boston or New York, and run up and down on my
affairs: they are sped, but so is the day. I am vexed by the
recollection of this price I have paid for a trifling advantage. I
remember the _peau d'ane_, on which whoso sat should have his desire,
but a piece of the skin was gone for every wish. I go to a convention of
philanthropists. Do what I can, I cannot keep my eyes off the clock. But