Society and solitude: Twelve chapters
that will place in the cycle the bright stars of Plutarch. The
poet Horace is the eye of the Augustan age; Tacitus, the wisest of
historians; and Martial will give him Roman manners,--and some very
bad ones,--in the early days of the Empire: but Martial must be read,
if read at all, in his own tongue. These will bring him to Gibbon, who
will take him in charge, and convey him with abundant entertainment
down--with notice of all remarkable objects on the way--through
fourteen hundred years of time. He cannot spare Gibbon, with his vast
reading,--with such wit and continuity of mind, that, though never
profound, his book is one of the conveniences of civilization, like
the new railroad from ocean to ocean,--and, I think, will be sure to
send the reader to his “Memoirs of Himself,” and the “Extracts from my
Journal,” and “Abstracts of my Readings,” which will spur the laziest
scholar to emulation of his prodigious performance.
Now having our idler safe down as far as the fall of Constantinople in
1453, he is in very good courses; for here are trusty hands waiting for
him. The cardinal facts of European history are soon learned. There
is Dante’s poem, to open the Italian Republics of the Middle Age;
Dante’s “Vita Nuova,” to explain Dante and Beatrice; and Boccaccio’s
“Life of Dante,”--a great man to describe a greater. To help us,
perhaps a volume or two of M. Sismondi’s “Italian Republics” will be
as good as the entire sixteen. When we come to Michel Angelo, his
Sonnets and Letters must be read, with his Life by Vasari, or, in our
day, by Herman Grimm. For the Church, and the Feudal Institution, Mr.
Hallam’s “Middle Ages” will furnish, if superficial, yet readable and
conceivable outlines.
The “Life of the Emperor Charles V.,” by the useful Robertson, is
still the key of the following age. Ximenes, Columbus, Loyola, Luther,
Erasmus, Melanchthon, Francis I., Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and Henry
IV. of France, are his contemporaries. It is a time of seeds and
expansions, whereof our recent civilization is the fruit.
If now the relations of England to European affairs bring him to
British ground, he is arrived at the very moment when modern history
takes new proportions. He can look back for the legends and mythology
to the “Younger Edda” and the “Heimskringla” of Snorro Sturleson, to
Mallet’s “Northern Antiquities,” to Ellis’s “Metrical Romances,” to
Asser’s “Life of Alfred” and Venerable Bede, and to the researches of
Sharon Turner and Palgrave. Hume will serve him for an intelligent
guide, and in the Elizabethan era he is at the richest period of the
English mind, with the chief men of action and of thought which that
nation has produced, and with a pregnant future before him. Here he has
Shakspeare, Spenser, Sidney, Raleigh, Bacon, Chapman, Jonson, Ford,
Beaumont and Fletcher, Herbert, Donne, Herrick; and Milton, Marvell,
and Dryden, not long after.
In reading history, he is to prefer the history of individuals. He will
not repent the time he gives to Bacon,--not if he read the “Advancement
of Learning,” the “Essays,” the “Novum Organum,” the “History of
Henry VII.,” and then all the “Letters” (especially those to the
Earl of Devonshire, explaining the Essex business), and all but his
“Apophthegms.”
The task is aided by the strong mutual light which these men shed
on each other. Thus, the works of Ben Jonson are a sort of hoop to
bind all these fine persons together, and to the land to which they
belong. He has written verses to or on all his notable contemporaries;
and what with so many occasional poems, and the portrait sketches in
his “Discoveries,” and the gossiping record of his opinions in his
conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden, he has really illustrated
the England of his time, if not to the same extent, yet much in the
same way, as Walter Scott has celebrated the persons and places of
Scotland. Walton, Chapman, Herrick, and Sir Henry Wotton write also to
the times.
Among the best books are certain _Autobiographies_: as, St. Augustine’s
Confessions; Benvenuto Cellini’s Life; Montaigne’s Essays; Lord
Herbert of Cherbury’s Memoirs; Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz;
Rousseau’s Confessions; Linnæus’s Diary; Gibbon’s, Hume’s, Franklin’s,
Burns’s, Alfieri’s, Goethe’s, and Haydon’s Autobiographies.
Another class of books closely allied to these, and of like interest,
are those which may be called _Table-Talks_: of which the best are
Saadi’s Gulistan; Luther’s Table-Talk; Aubrey’s Lives; Spence’s
Anecdotes; Selden’s Table-Talk; Boswell’s Life of Johnson; Eckermann’s
Conversations with Goethe; Coleridge’s Table-Talk; and Hazlitt’s Life
of Northcote.
There is a class whose value I should designate as _Favorites_: such
as Froissart’s Chronicles; Southey’s Chronicle of the Cid; Cervantes;
Sully’s Memoirs; Rabelais; Montaigne; Izaak Walton; Evelyn; Sir Thomas
Browne; Aubrey; Sterne; Horace Walpole; Lord Clarendon; Doctor Johnson;
Burke, shedding floods of light on his times; Lamb; Landor; and De
Quincey;--a list, of course, that may easily be swelled, as dependent
on individual caprice. Many men are as tender and irritable as lovers
in reference to these predilections. Indeed, a man’s library is a sort
of harem, and I observe that tender readers have a great pudency in
showing their books to a stranger.
The annals of bibliography afford many examples of the delirious
extent to which book-fancying can go, when the legitimate delight in a
book is transferred to a rare edition or to a manuscript. This mania
reached its height about the beginning of the present century. For an
autograph of Shakspeare one hundred and fifty-five guineas were given.
In May, 1812, the library of the Duke of Roxburgh was sold. The sale
lasted forty-two days,--we abridge the story from Dibdin,--and among
the many curiosities was a copy of Boccaccio published by Valdarfer,
at Venice, in 1471; the only perfect copy of this edition. Among
the distinguished company which attended the sale were the Duke of
Devonshire, Earl Spencer, and the Duke of Marlborough, then Marquis
of Blandford. The bid stood at five hundred guineas. “A thousand
guineas,” said Earl Spencer: “And ten,” added the Marquis. You might
hear a pin drop. All eyes were bent on the bidders. Now they talked
apart, now ate a biscuit, now made a bet, but without the least thought
of yielding one to the other. But to pass over some details,--the
contest proceeded until the Marquis said, “Two thousand pounds.” The
Earl Spencer bethought him like a prudent general of useless bloodshed
and waste of powder, and had paused a quarter of a minute, when Lord
Althorp with long steps came to his side, as if to bring his father a
fresh lance to renew the fight. Father and son whispered together, and
Earl Spencer exclaimed, “Two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds!”
An electric shock went through the assembly. “And ten,” quietly added
the Marquis. There ended the strife. Ere Evans let the hammer fall, he
paused; the ivory instrument swept the air; the spectators stood dumb,
when the hammer fell. The stroke of its fall sounded on the farthest
shores of Italy. The tap of that hammer was heard in the libraries of
Rome, Milan, and Venice. Boccaccio stirred in his sleep of five hundred
years, and M. Van Praet groped in vain among the royal alcoves in
Paris, to detect a copy of the famed Valdarfer Boccaccio.
Another class I distinguish by the term _Vocabularies_. Burton’s
“Anatomy of Melancholy” is a book of great learning. To read it is
like reading in a dictionary. ’Tis an inventory to remind us how
many classes and species of facts exist, and, in observing into
what strange and multiplex by-ways learning has strayed, to infer
our opulence. Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is
no cant in Germans, it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of
suggestion,--the raw material of possible poems and histories. Nothing
is wanting but a little shuffling, sorting, ligature, and cartilage.
Out of a hundred examples, Cornelius Agrippa “On the Vanity of Arts
and Sciences” is a specimen of that scribatiousness which grew to be
the habit of the gluttonous readers of his time. Like the modern they
read a literature while other mortals read a few books. They read
voraciously, and must disburden themselves; so they take any general
topic, as, Melancholy, or Praise of Science, or Praise of Folly,
and write and quote without method or end. Now and then out of that
affluence of their learning comes a fine sentence from Theophrastus,
or Seneca, or Boëthius, but no high method, no inspiring efflux. But
one cannot afford to read for a few sentences; they are good only as
strings of suggestive words.
There is another class, more needful to the present age, because
the currents of custom run now in another direction, and leave us
dry on this side;--I mean the _Imaginative_. A right metaphysics
should do justice to the co-ordinate powers of Imagination, Insight,
Understanding, and Will. Poetry, with its aids of Mythology and
Romance, must be well allowed for an imaginative creature. Men are
ever lapsing into a beggarly habit, wherein everything that is not
ciphering, that is, which does not serve the tyrannical animal, is
hustled out of sight. Our orators and writers are of the same poverty,
and, in this rag-fair, neither the Imagination, the great awakening
power, nor the Morals, creative of genius and of men, are addressed.
But though orator and poet be of this hunger party, the capacities
remain. We must have symbols. The child asks you for a story, and is
thankful for the poorest. It is not poor to him, but radiant with
meaning. The man asks for a novel,--that is, asks leave for a few
hours to be a poet, and to paint things as they ought to be. The youth
asks for a poem. The very dunces wish to go to the theatre. What
private heavens can we not open, by yielding to all the suggestion of
rich music! We must have idolatries, mythologies,--some swing and verge
for the creative power lying coiled and cramped here, driving ardent
natures to insanity and crime if it do not find vent. Without the great
arts which speak to the sense of beauty, a man seems to me a poor,
naked, shivering creature. These are his becoming draperies, which warm
and adorn him. Whilst the prudential and economical tone of society
starves the imagination, affronted Nature gets such indemnity as she
may. The novel is that allowance and frolic the imagination finds.
Everything else pins it down, and men flee for redress to Byron, Scott,
Disraeli, Dumas, Sand, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, and Reade. Their
education is neglected; but the circulating-library and the theatre, as
well as the trout-fishing, the Notch Mountains, the Adirondack country,
the tour to Mont Blanc, to the White Hills, and the Ghauts, make such
amends as they can.
The imagination infuses a certain volatility and intoxication. It has a
flute which sets the atoms of our frame in a dance, like planets; and,
once so liberated, the whole man reeling drunk to the music, they never
quite subside to their old stony state. But what is the imagination?
Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of
the reason. And books that treat the old pedantries of the world,
our times, places, professions, customs, opinions, histories, with a
certain freedom, and distribute things, not after the usages of America
and Europe, but after the laws of right reason, and with as daring a
freedom as we use in dreams, put us on our feet again, enable us to
form an original judgment of our duties, and suggest new thoughts for
to-morrow.
“Lucrezia Floriani,” “Le Péché de M. Antoine,” “Jeanne,” and
“Consuelo,” of George Sand, are great steps from the novel of one
termination, which we all read twenty years ago. Yet how far off from