Representative Men: Seven Lectures
if there should appear in the company some gentle soul who knows little
of persons or parties, of Carolina or Cuba, but who announces a law that
disposes these particulars, and so certifies me of the equity which
checkmates every false player, bankrupts every self-seeker, and apprises
me of my independence on any conditions of country, or time, or human
body, that man liberates me; I forget the clock.
I pass out of the sore relation to persons. I am healed of my hurts.
I am made immortal by apprehending my possession of incorruptible
goods. Here is great competition of rich and poor. We live in a market,
where is only so much wheat, or wool, or land; and if I have so much
more, every other must have so much less. I seem to have no good,
without breach of good manners. Nobody is glad in the gladness of
another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious superiority.
Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is
our system; and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets,
envies, and hatreds of his competitors. But in these new fields there
is room: here are no self-esteems, no exclusions.
I admire great men of all classes, those who stand for facts, and for
thoughts; I like rough and smooth "Scourges of God," and "Darlings of
the human race." I like the first Caesar; and Charles V., of Spain;
and Charles XII., of Sweden; Richard Plantagenet; and Bonaparte, in
France. I applaud a sufficient man, an officer, equal to his office;
captains, ministers, senators. I like a master standing firm on legs
of iron, well-born, rich, handsome, eloquent, loaded with advantages,
drawing all men by fascination into tributaries and supporters of his
power. Sword and staff, or talents sword-like or staff-like, carry on
the work of the world. But I find him greater, when he can abolish
himself, and all heroes, by letting in this element of reason,
irrespective of persons; this subtilizer, and irresistible upward
force, into our thought, destroying individualism; the power so great,
that the potentate is nothing. Then he is a monarch, who gives a
constitution to his people; a pontiff, who preaches the equality of
souls, and releases his servants from their barbarous homages; an
emperor, who can spare his empire.
But I intended to specify, with a little minuteness, two or three
points of service. Nature never spares the opium or nepenthe; but
wherever she mars her creature with some deformity or defect, lays her
poppies plentifully on the bruise, and the sufferer goes joyfully
through life, ignorant of the ruin, and incapable of seeing it, though
all the world point their finger at it every day. The worthless and
offensive members of society, whose existence is a social pest,
invariably think themselves the most ill-used people alive, and never
get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their
contemporaries. Our globe discovers its hidden virtues, not only in
heroes and archangels, but in gossips and nurses. Is it not a rare
contrivance that lodged the due inertia in every creature, the
conserving, resisting energy, the anger at being waked or changed?
Altogether independent of the intellectual force in each, is the pride
of opinion, the security that we are right. Not the feeblest grandame,
not a mowing idiot, but uses what spark of perception and faculty is
left, to chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion over the absurdities
of all the rest. Difference from me is the measure of absurdity. Not
one has a misgiving of being wrong. Was it not a bright thought that
made things cohere with this bitumen, fastest of cements? But, in the
midst of this chuckle of self-gratulation, some figure goes by, which
Thersites too can love and admire. This is he that should marshal us
the way we were going. There is no end to his aid. Without Plato, we
should almost lose our faith in the possibility of a reasonable book.
We seem to want but one, but we want one. We love to associate with
heroic persons, since our receptivity is unlimited; and, with the
great, our thoughts and manners easily become great. We are all wise
in capacity, though so few in energy. There needs but one wise man in
a company, and all are wise, so rapid is the contagion.
Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism, and
enable us to see other people and their works. But there are vices and
follies incident to whole populations and ages. Men resemble their
contemporaries, even more than their progenitors. It is observed in
old couples, or in persons who have been housemates for a course of
years, that they grow alike; and, if they should live long enough, we
should not be able to know them apart. Nature abhors these
complaisances, which threaten to melt the world into a lump, and hastens
to break up such maudlin agglutinations. The like assimilation goes
on between men of one town, of one sect, of one political party; and
the ideas of the time are in the air, and infect all who breathe it.
Viewed from any high point, the city of New York, yonder city of London,
the western civilization, would seem a bundle of insanities. We keep
each other in countenance, and exasperate by emulation the frenzy of
the time. The shield against the stingings of conscience, is the
universal practice, or our contemporaries. Again; it is very easy to
be as wise and good as your companions. We learn of our contemporaries,
what they know, without effort, and almost through the pores of the
skin. We catch it by sympathy, or, as a wife arrives at the intellectual
and moral elevations of her husband. But we stop where they stop. Very
hardly can we take another step. The great, or such as hold of nature,
and transcend fashions, by their fidelity to universal ideas, are
saviors from these federal errors, and defend us from our
contemporaries. They are the exceptions which we want, where all grows
alike. A foreign greatness is the antidote for cabalism.
Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves from too much conversation
with our mates, and exult in the depth of nature in that direction in
which he leads us. What indemnification is one great man for populations
of pigmies! Every mother wishes one son a genius, though all the rest
should be mediocre. But a new danger appears in the excess of influence
of the great man. His attractions warp us from our place. We have
become underlings and intellectual suicides. Ah! yonder in the horizon
is our help:--other great men, new qualities, counterweights and
checks on each other. We cloy of the honey of each peculiar greatness.
Every hero becomes a bore at last. Perhaps Voltaire was not bad-hearted,
yet he said of the good Jesus, even, "I pray you, let me never hear
that man's name again." They cry up the virtues of George
Washington,--"Damn George Washington!" is the poor Jacobin's whole
speech and confutation. But it is human nature's indispensable defense.
The centripetence augments the centrifugence. We balance one man with
his opposite, and the health of the state depends on the see-saw.
There is, however, a speedy limit to the use of heroes. Every genius
is defended from approach by quantities of availableness. They are
very attractive, and seem at a distance our own: but we are hindered
on all sides from approach. The more we are drawn, the more we are
repelled. There is something not solid in the good that is done for
us. The best discovery the discoverer makes for himself. It has
something unreal for his companion, until he too has substantiated it.
It seems as if the Deity dressed each soul which he sends into nature
in certain virtues and powers not communicable to other men, and,
sending it to perform one more turn through the circle of beings, wrote
"Not transferable," and "Good for this trip only," on these garments
of the soul. There is somewhat deceptive about the intercourse of
minds. The boundaries are invisible, but they are never crossed. There
is such good will to impart, and such good will to receive, that each
threatens to become the other; but the law of individuality collects
its secret strength: you are you, and I am I, and so we remain.
For Nature wishes every thing to remain itself; and, whilst every
individual strives to grow and exclude, and to exclude and grow, to
the extremities of the universe, and to impose the law of its being
on every other creature, Nature steadily aims to protect each against
every other. Each is self-defended. Nothing is more marked than the
power by which individuals are guarded from individuals, in a world
where every benefactor becomes so easily a malefactor, only by
continuation of his activity into places where it is not due; where
children seem so much at the mercy of their foolish parents, and where
almost all men are too social and interfering. We rightly speak of the
guardian angels of children. How superior in their security from
infusions of evil persons, from vulgarity and second thought! They
shed their own abundant beauty on the objects they behold. Therefore,
they are not at the mercy of such poor educators as we adults. If we
huff and chide them, they soon come not to mind it, and get a
self-reliance; and if we indulge them to folly, they learn the
limitation elsewhere.
We need not fear excessive influence. A more generous trust is
permitted. Serve the great. Stick at no humiliation. Grudge no office
thou canst render. Be the limb of their body, the breath of their
mouth. Compromise thy egotism. Who cares for that, so thou gain aught
wider and nobler? Never mind the taunt of Boswellism: the devotion may
easily be greater than the wretched pride which is guarding its own
skirts. Be another: not thyself, but a Platonist; not a soul, but a
Christian; not a naturalist, but a Cartesian; not a poet, but a
Shakspearian. In vain, the wheels of tendency will not stop, nor will
all the forces of inertia, fear, or love itself, hold thee there. On,
and forever onward! The microscope observes a monad or wheel-insect
among the infusories circulating in water. Presently, a dot appears
on the animal, which enlarges to a slit, and it becomes two perfect
animals. The ever-proceeding detachment appears not less in all thought,
and in society. Children think they cannot live without their parents.
But, long before they are aware of it, the black dot has appeared, and
the detachment taken place. Any accident will now reveal to them their
independence.
But great men:--the word is injurious. Is there caste? is there fate?
What becomes of the promise to virtue? The thoughtful youth laments
the superfoetation of nature. "Generous and handsome," he says, "is
your hero; but look at yonder poor Paddy, whose country is his
wheelbarrow; look at his whole nation of Paddies." Why are the masses,
from the dawn of history down, food for knives and powder? The idea
dignifies a few leaders, who have sentiment, opinion, love,
self-devotion; and they make war and death sacred;--but what for the
wretches whom they hire and kill? The cheapness of man is every day's
tragedy. It is as real a loss that others should be low, as that we
should be low; for we must have society.
Is it a reply to these suggestions, to say, society is a Pestalozzian
school; all are teachers and pupils in turn. We are equally served by
receiving and by imparting. Men who know the same things, are not long
the best company for each other. But bring to each an intelligent
person of another experience, and it is as if you let off water from
a lake, by cutting a lower basin. It seems a mechanical advantage, and
great benefit it is to each speaker, as he can now paint out his thought
to himself. We pass very fast, in our personal moods, from dignity to
dependence. And if any appear never to assume the chair, but always