Representative Men: Seven Lectures
to stand and serve, it is because we do not see the company in a
sufficiently long period for the whole rotation of parts to come about.
As to what we call the masses, and common men;--there are no common
men. All men are at last of a size; and true art is only possible, on
the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis somewhere. Fair
play, and an open field, and freshest laurels to all who have won them!
But heaven reserves an equal scope for every creature. Each is uneasy
until he has produced his private ray unto the concave sphere, and
beheld his talent also in its last nobility and exaltation.
The heroes of the hour are relatively great: of a faster growth; or
they are such, in whom, at the moment of success, a quality is ripe
which is then in request. Other days will demand other qualities. Some
rays escape the common observer, and want a finely adapted eye. Ask
the great man if there be none greater. His companions are; and not
the less great, but the more, that society cannot see them. Nature
never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret
to another soul.
One gracious fact emerges from these studies,--that there is true
ascension in our love. The reputations of the nineteenth century will
one day be quoted to prove its barbarism. The genius of humanity is
the real subject whose biography is written in our annals. We must
infer much, and supply many chasms in the record. The history of the
universe is symptomatic, and life is mnemonical. No man, in all the
procession of famous men, is reason or illumination, or that essence
we were looking for; but is an exhibition, in some quarter, of new
possibilities. Could we one day complete the immense figure which these
flagrant points compose! The study of many individuals leads us to an
elemental region wherein the individual is lost, or wherein all touch
by their summits. Thought and feeling, that break out there, cannot
be impounded by any fence of personality. This is the key to the power
of the greatest men,--their spirit diffuses itself. A new quality of
mind travels by night and by day, in concentric circles from its origin,
and publishes itself by unknown methods: the union of all minds appears
intimate: what gets admission to one, cannot be kept out of any other:
the smallest acquisition of truth or of energy, in any quarter, is so
much good to the commonwealth of souls. If the disparities of talent
and position vanish, when the individuals are seen in the duration
which is necessary to complete the career of each; even more swiftly
the seeming injustice disappears, when we ascend to the central identity
of all the individuals, and know that they are made of the same
substance which ordaineth and doeth.
The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The
qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less, and
pass away; the qualities remain on another brow. No experience is more
familiar. Once you saw phoenixes: they are gone; the world is not
therefore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read sacred emblems
turn out to be common pottery; but the sense of the pictures is sacred,
and you may still read them transferred to the walls of the world. For
a time, our teachers serve us personally, as metres or milestones of
progress. Once they were angels of knowledge, and their figures touched
the sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, culture, and limits; and
they yielded their places to other geniuses. Happy, if a few names
remain so high, that we have not been able to read them nearer, and
age and comparison have not robbed them of a ray. But, at last, we
shall cease to look in men for completeness, and shall content ourselves
with their social and delegated quality. All that respects the
individual is temporary and prospective, like the individual himself,
who is ascending out of his limits, into a catholic existence. We have
never come at the true and best benefit of any genius, so long as we
believe him an original force. In the moment when he ceases to help
us as a cause, he begins to help us move as an effect. Then he appears
as an exponent of a vaster mind and will. The opaque self becomes
transparent with the light of the First Cause.
Yet, within the limits of human education and agency, we may say, great
men exist that there may be greater men. The destiny of organized
nature is amelioration, and who can tell its limits? It is for man to
tame the chaos; on every side, whilst he lives, to scatter the seeds
of science and of song, that climate, corn, animals, men, may be milder,
and the germs of love and benefit may be multiplied.
II. PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER.
Among books, Plato only is entitled to Omar's fanatical compliment to
the Koran, when he said, "Burn the libraries; for, their value is in
this book." These sentences contain the culture of nations; these are
the corner-stone of schools; these are the fountain-head of literatures.
A discipline it is in logic, arithmetic, taste, symmetry, poetry,
language, rhetoric, ontology, morals, or practical wisdom. There was
never such range of speculation. Out of Plato come all things that are
still written and debated among men of thought. Great havoc makes he
among our originalities. We have reached the mountain from which all
these drift bowlders were detached. The Bible of the learned for twenty-
two hundred years, every brisk young man, who says in succession fine
things to each reluctant generation,--Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus,
Bruno, Locke, Rousseau, Alfieri, Coleridge,--is some reader of Plato,
translating into the vernacular, wittily, his good things. Even the
men of grander proportion suffer some deduction from the misfortune
(shall I say?) of coming after this exhausting generalizer. St.
Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg, Goethe, are likewise
his debtors, and must say after him. For it is fair to credit the
broadest generalizer with all the particulars deducible from his thesis.
Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the
shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add
any idea to his categories. No wife, no children had he, and the
thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity, and are tinged
with his mind. How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out
of night, to be his men,--Platonists! the Alexandrians, a constellation
of genius; the Elizabethans, not less; Sir Thomas More, Henry More,
John Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Ralph Cudworth,
Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; Marcilius Ficinus, and Picus Mirandola.
Calvinism is in his Phaedo: Christianity is in it. Mahometanism draws
all its philosophy, in its hand-book of morals, the Akhlak-y-Jalaly,
from him. Mysticism finds in Plato all its texts. This citizen of a
town in Greece is no villager nor patriot. An Englishman reads and
says, "how English!" a German--"how Teutonic!" an Italian--"how Roman
and how Greek!" As they say that Helen of Argos had that universal
beauty that everybody felt related to her, so Plato seems, to a reader
in New England, an American genius. His broad humanity transcends all
sectional lines.
This range of Plato instructs us what to think of the vexed question
concerning his reputed works,--what are genuine, what spurious. It is
singular that wherever we find a man higher, by a whole head, than any
of his contemporaries, it is sure to come into doubt, what are his
real works. Thus, Homer, Plato, Raffaelle, Shakspeare. For these men
magnetize their contemporaries, so that their companions can do for
them what they can never do for themselves; and the great man does
thus live in several bodies; and write, or paint, or act, by many
hands; and after some time, it is not easy to say what is the authentic
work of the master, and what is only of his school.
Plato, too, like every great man, consumed his own times. What is a
great man, but one of great affinities, who takes up into himself all
arts, sciences, all knowables, as his food? He can spare nothing; he
can dispose of everything. What is not good for virtue is good for
knowledge. Hence his contemporaries tax him with plagiarism. But the
inventor only knows how to borrow; and society is glad to forget the
innumerable laborers who ministered to this architect, and reserves
all its gratitude for him. When we are praising Plato, it seems we are
praising quotations from Solon, and Sophron, and Philolaus. Be it so.
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all
forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation
from all his ancestors. And this grasping inventor puts all nations
under contribution.
Plato absorbed the learning of his times,--Philolaus, Timaeus,
Heraclitus, Parmenides, and what else; then his master, Socrates; and
finding himself still capable of a larger synthesis,--beyond all example
then or since,--he traveled into Italy, to gain what Pythagoras had
for him; then into Egypt, and perhaps still further east, to import
the other element, which Europe wanted, into the European mind. This
breadth entitles him to stand as the representative of philosophy. He
says, in the Republic, "Such a genius as philosophers must of necessity
have, is wont but seldom, in all its parts, to meet in one man; but
its different parts generally spring up in different persons." Every
man, who would do anything well, must come to it from a higher ground.
A philosopher must be more than a philosopher. Plato is clothed with
the powers of a poet, stands upon the highest place of the poet, and
(though I doubt he wanted the decisive gift of lyric expression) mainly
is not a poet, because he chose to use the poetic gift to an ulterior
purpose.
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell
you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their
house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know
their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most
resembles them. Plato, especially, has no external biography. If he
had lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing of them. He ground them
all into paint. As a good chimney burns its smoke, so a philosopher
converts the value of all his fortunes into his intellectual
performances.
He was born 430 A. C., about the time of the death of Pericles; was
of patrician connection in his times and city; and is said to have had
an early inclination for war; but in his twentieth year, meeting with
Socrates, was easily dissuaded from this pursuit, and remained for ten
years his scholar, until the death of Socrates. He then went to Megara;
accepted the invitations of Dion and of Dionysius, to the court of
Sicily; and went thither three times, though very capriciously treated.
He traveled into Italy; then into Egypt, where he stayed a long time;
some say three,--some say thirteen years. It is said, he went farther,
into Babylonia: this is uncertain. Returning to Athens, he gave lessons,
in the Academy, to those whom his fame drew thither; and died, as we
have received it, in the act of writing, at eighty-one years.
But the biography of Plato is interior. We are to account for the
supreme elevation of this man, in the intellectual history of our
race,--how it happens that, in proportion to the culture of men, they
become his scholars; that, as our Jewish Bible has implanted itself
in the table-talk and household life of every man and woman in the
European and American nations, so the writings of Plato have
pre-occupied every school of learning, every lover of thought, every
church, every poet,--making it impossible to think, on certain levels,
except through him. He stands between the truth and every man's mind,