Society and solitude: Twelve chapters
There has already been a scrutiny and choice from many hundreds of
young pens, before the pamphlet or political chapter which you read in
a fugitive journal comes to your eye. All these are young adventurers,
who produce their performance to the wise ear of Time, who sits and
weighs, and, ten years hence, out of a million of pages reprints
one. Again it is judged, it is winnowed by all the winds of opinion,
and what terrific selection has not passed on it before it can be
reprinted after twenty years,--and reprinted after a century!--it is as
if Minos and Rhadamanthus had indorsed the writing. ’Tis therefore an
economy of time to read old and famed books. Nothing can be preserved
which is not good; and I know beforehand that Pindar, Martial, Terence,
Galen, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Erasmus, More, will be superior to the
average intellect. In contemporaries, it is not so easy to distinguish
betwixt notoriety and fame.
Be sure, then, to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press on
the gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn, without
asking, in the street and the train. Dr. Johnson said, “he always went
into stately shops”; and good travellers stop at the best hotels; for,
though they cost more, they do not cost much more, and there is the
good company and the best information. In like manner, the scholar
knows that the famed books contain, first and last, the best thoughts
and facts. Now and then, by rarest luck, in some foolish Grub Street
is the gem we want. But in the best circles is the best information.
If you should transfer the amount of your reading day by day from the
newspaper to the standard authors---- But who dare speak of such a
thing?
The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are,--1. Never
read any book that is not a year old. 2. Never read any but famed
books. 3. Never read any but what you like; or, in Shakspeare’s phrase
“No profit goes where is no pleasure ta’en:
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.”
Montaigne says, “Books are a languid pleasure”; but I find certain
books vital and spermatic, not leaving the reader what he was: he shuts
the book a richer man. I would never willingly read any others than
such. And I will venture, at the risk of inditing a list of old primers
and grammars, to count the few books which a superficial reader must
thankfully use.
Of the old Greek books, I think there are five which we cannot spare:
1. Homer, who in spite of Pope and all the learned uproar of centuries,
has really the true fire, and is good for simple minds, is the true
and adequate germ of Greece, and occupies that place as history,
which nothing can supply. It holds through all literature, that our
best history is still poetry. It is so in Hebrew, in Sanskrit, and
in Greek. English history is best known through Shakspeare; how much
through Merlin, Robin Hood, and the Scottish ballads!--the German,
through the Nibelungenlied;--the Spanish, through the Cid. Of Homer,
George Chapman’s is the heroic translation, though the most literal
prose version is the best of all. 2. Herodotus, whose history contains
inestimable anecdotes, which brought it with the learned into a sort
of disesteem; but in these days, when it is found that what is most
memorable of history is a few anecdotes, and that we need not be
alarmed though we should find it not dull, it is regaining credit.
3. Æschylus, the grandest of the three tragedians, who has given us
under a thin veil the first plantation of Europe. The “Prometheus”
is a poem of the like dignity and scope as the Book of Job, or the
Norse Edda. 4. Of Plato I hesitate to speak, lest there should be no
end. You find in him that which you have already found in Homer, now
ripened to thought,--the poet converted to a philosopher, with loftier
strains of musical wisdom than Homer reached; as if Homer were the
youth, and Plato the finished man; yet with no less security of bold
and perfect song, when he cares to use it, and with some harp-strings
fetched from a higher heaven. He contains the future, as he came out
of the past. In Plato, you explore modern Europe in its causes and
seed,--all that in thought, which the history of Europe embodies or
has yet to embody. The well-informed man finds himself anticipated.
Plato is up with him too. Nothing has escaped him. Every new crop
in the fertile harvest of reform, every fresh suggestion of modern
humanity, is there. If the student wish to see both sides, and justice
done to the man of the world, pitiless exposure of pedants, and the
supremacy of truth and the religious sentiment, he shall be contented
also. Why should not young men be educated on this book? It would
suffice for the tuition of the race,--to test their understanding,
and to express their reason. Here is that which is so attractive to
all men,--the literature of aristocracy shall I call it?--the picture
of the best persons, sentiments, and manners, by the first master, in
the best times,--portraits of Pericles, Alcibiades, Crito, Prodicus,
Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and Socrates, with the lovely background of
the Athenian and suburban landscape. Or who can overestimate the
images with which Plato has enriched the minds of men, and which pass
like bullion in the currency of all nations? Read the “Phædo,” the
“Protagoras,” the “Phædrus,” the “Timæus,” the “Republic,” and the
“Apology of Socrates.” 5. Plutarch cannot be spared from the smallest
library; first, because he is so readable, which is much; then, that he
is medicinal and invigorating. The lives of Cimon, Lycurgus, Alexander,
Demosthenes, Phocion, Marcellus, and the rest, are what history has of
best. But this book has taken care of itself, and the opinion of the
world is expressed in the innumerable cheap editions, which make it
as accessible as a newspaper. But Plutarch’s “Morals” is less known,
and seldom reprinted. Yet such a reader as I am writing to can as ill
spare it as the “Lives.” He will read in it the essays “On the Dæmon
of Socrates,” “On Isis and Osiris,” “On Progress in Virtue,” “On
Garrulity,” “On Love,” and thank anew the art of printing, and the
cheerful domain of ancient thinking. Plutarch charms by the facility
of his associations; so that it signifies little where you open
his book, you find yourself at the Olympian tables. His memory is
like the Isthmian Games, where all that was excellent in Greece was
assembled, and you are stimulated and recruited by lyric verses, by
philosophic sentiments, by the forms and behavior of heroes, by the
worship of the gods, and by the passing of fillets, parsley and laurel
wreaths, chariots, armor, sacred cups, and utensils of sacrifice. An
inestimable trilogy of ancient social pictures are the three “Banquets”
respectively of Plato, Xenophon, and Plutarch. Plutarch’s has the least
approach to historical accuracy; but the meeting of the Seven Wise
Masters is a charming portraiture of ancient manners and discourse, and
is as clear as the voice of a fife, and entertaining as a French novel.
Xenophon’s delineation of Athenian manners is an accessory to Plato,
and supplies traits of Socrates; whilst Plato’s has merits of every
kind,--being a repertory of the wisdom of the ancients on the subject
of love,--a picture of a feast of wits, not less descriptive than
Aristophanes,--and, lastly, containing that ironical eulogy of Socrates
which is the source from which all the portraits of that philosopher
current in Europe have been drawn.
Of course a certain outline should be obtained of Greek history, in
which the important moments and persons can be rightly set down; but
the shortest is the best, and if one lacks stomach for Mr. Grote’s
voluminous annals, the old slight and popular summary of Goldsmith or
of Gillies will serve. The valuable part is the age of Pericles and the
next generation. And here we must read the “Clouds” of Aristophanes,
and what more of that master we gain appetite for, to learn our way
in the streets of Athens, and to know the tyranny of Aristophanes,
requiring more genius and sometimes not less cruelty than belonged to
the official commanders. Aristophanes is now very accessible, with much
valuable commentary, through the labors of Mitchell and Cartwright. An
excellent popular book is J. A. St. John’s “Ancient Greece”; the “Life
and Letters” of Niebuhr, even more than his Lectures, furnish leading
views; and Winckelmann, a Greek born out of due time, has become
essential to an intimate knowledge of the Attic genius. The secret of
the recent histories in German and in English is the discovery, owed
first to Wolff, and later to Boeckh, that the sincere Greek history
of that period must be drawn from Demosthenes, especially from the
business orations, and from the comic poets.
If we come down a little by natural steps from the master to the
disciples, we have, six or seven centuries later, the Platonists,--who
also cannot be skipped,--Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, Synesius,
Jamblichus. Of Jamblichus the Emperor Julian said, “that he was
posterior to Plato in time, not in genius.” Of Plotinus, we
have eulogies by Porphyry and Longinus, and the favor of the
Emperor Gallienus,--indicating the respect he inspired among his
contemporaries. If any one who had read with interest the “Isis and
Osiris” of Plutarch should then read a chapter called “Providence,” by
Synesius, translated into English by Thomas Taylor, he will find it one
of the majestic remains of literature, and, like one walking in the
noblest of temples, will conceive new gratitude to his fellow-men, and
a new estimate of their nobility. The imaginative scholar will find
few stimulants to his brain like these writers. He has entered the
Elysian Fields; and the grand and pleasing figures of gods and dæmons
and dæmoniacal men, of the “azonic” and the “aquatic gods,” dæmons
with fulgid eyes, and all the rest of the Platonic rhetoric, exalted
a little under the African sun, sail before his eyes. The acolyte has
mounted the tripod over the cave at Delphi; his heart dances, his
sight is quickened. These guides speak of the gods with such depth and
with such pictorial details, as if they had been bodily present at the
Olympian feasts. The reader of these books makes new acquaintance with
his own mind; new regions of thought are opened. Jamblichus’s “Life
of Pythagoras” works more directly on the will than the others; since
Pythagoras was eminently a practical person, the founder of a school
of ascetics and socialists, a planter of colonies, and nowise a man of
abstract studies alone.
The respectable and sometimes excellent translations of Bohn’s Library
have done for literature what railroads have done for internal
intercourse. I do not hesitate to read all the books I have named,
and all good books, in translations. What is really best in any book
is translatable,--any real insight or broad human sentiment. Nay,
I observe that, in our Bible, and other books of lofty moral tone,
it seems easy and inevitable to render the rhythm and music of the
original into phrases of equal melody. The Italians have a fling at
translators,--_i traditori traduttori_; but I thank them. I rarely read
any Latin, Greek, German, Italian, sometimes not a French book in the
original, which I can procure in a good version. I like to be beholden
to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives
tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think
of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of
reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in
my mother-tongue.
For history there is great choice of ways to bring the student through
early Rome. If he can read Livy, he has a good book; but one of the
short English compends, some Goldsmith or Ferguson, should be used,