Society and solitude: Twelve chapters
and upright man of business, in difficult times, as soldiers in a
soldier.
There is a courage in the treatment of every art by a master in
architecture, in sculpture, in painting, or in poetry, each cheering
the mind of the spectator or receiver as by true strokes of genius,
which yet nowise implies the presence of physical valor in the artist.
This is the courage of genius, in every kind. A certain quantity of
power belongs to a certain quantity of faculty. The beautiful voice at
church goes sounding on, and covers up in its volume, as in a cloak,
all the defects of the choir. The singers, I observe, all yield to it,
and so the fair singer indulges her instinct, and dares, and dares,
because she knows she can.
It gives the cutting edge to every profession. The judge puts his
mind to the tangle of contradictions in the case, squarely accosts
the question, and, by not being afraid of it, by dealing with it as
business which must be disposed of, he sees presently that common
arithmetic and common methods apply to this affair. Perseverance
strips it of all peculiarity, and ranges it on the same ground as
other business. Morphy played a daring game in chess: the daring was
only an illusion of the spectator, for the player sees his move to be
well fortified and safe. You may see the same dealing in criticism;
a new book astonishes for a few days, takes itself out of common
jurisdiction, and nobody knows what to say of it: but the scholar is
not deceived. The old principles which books exist to express are more
beautiful than any book; and out of love of the reality he is an expert
judge how far the book has approached it and where it has come short.
In all applications ’tis the same power,--the habit of reference to
one’s own mind, as the home of all truth and counsel, and which can
easily dispose of any book because it can very well do without all
books. When a confident man comes into a company magnifying this or
that author he has freshly read, the company grow silent and ashamed of
their ignorance. But I remember the old professor, whose searching mind
engraved every word he spoke on the memory of the class, when we asked
if he had read this or that shining novelty, “No, I have never read
that book”; instantly the book lost credit, and was not to be heard of
again.
Every creature has a courage of his constitution fit for his
duties:--Archimedes, the courage of a geometer to stick to his diagram,
heedless of the siege and sack of the city; and the Roman soldier his
faculty to strike at Archimedes. Each is strong, relying on his own,
and each is betrayed when he seeks in himself the courage of others.
Captain John Brown, the hero of Kansas, said to me in conversation,
that “for a settler in a new country, one good, believing,
strong-minded man is worth a hundred, nay, a thousand men without
character; and that the right men will give a permanent direction to
the fortunes of a state. As for the bullying drunkards, of which armies
are usually made up, he thought cholera, small-pox, and consumption as
valuable recruits.” He held the belief that courage and chastity are
silent concerning themselves. He said, “As soon as I hear one of my men
say, ‘Ah, let me only get my eye on such a man, I’ll bring him down,’
I don’t expect much aid in the fight from that talker. ’Tis the quiet,
peaceable men, the men of principle, that make the best soldiers.”
“’Tis still observed those men most valiant are
Who are most modest ere they came to war.”
True courage is not ostentatious; men who wish to inspire terror seem
thereby to confess themselves cowards. Why do they rely on it, but
because they know how potent it is with themselves?
The true temper has genial influences. It makes a bond of union
between enemies. Governor Wise of Virginia, in the record of his
first interviews with his prisoner, appeared to great advantage. If
Governor Wise is a superior man, or inasmuch as he is a superior man,
he distinguishes John Brown. As they confer, they understand each other
swiftly; each respects the other. If opportunity allowed, they would
prefer each other’s society and desert their former companions. Enemies
would become affectionate. Hector and Achilles, Richard and Saladin,
Wellington and Soult, General Daumas and Abdel Kader, become aware that
they are nearer and more alike than any other two, and, if their nation
and circumstance did not keep them apart, would run into each other’s
arms.
See too what good contagion belongs to it. Everywhere it finds its
own with magnetic affinity. Courage of the soldier awakes the courage
of woman. Florence Nightingale brings lint and the blessing of her
shadow. Heroic women offer themselves as nurses of the brave veteran.
The troop of Virginian infantry that had marched to guard the prison
of John Brown ask leave to pay their respects to the prisoner. Poetry
and eloquence catch the hint, and soar to a pitch unknown before.
Everything feels the new breath, except the old doting, nigh-dead
politicians, whose heart the trumpet of resurrection could not wake.
The charm of the best courages is that they are inventions,
inspirations, flashes of genius. The hero could not have done the
feat at another hour, in a lower mood. The best act of the marvellous
genius of Greece was its first act; not in the statue or the Parthenon,
but in the instinct which, at Thermopylæ, held Asia at bay, kept Asia
out of Europe,--Asia with its antiquities and organic slavery,--from
corrupting the hope and new morning of the West. The statue, the
architecture, were the later and inferior creation of the same
genius. In view of this moment of history, we recognize a certain
prophetic instinct better than wisdom. Napoleon said well, “My hand
is immediately connected with my head”; but the _sacred_ courage is
connected with the heart. The head is a half, a fraction, until it is
enlarged and inspired by the moral sentiment. For it is not the means
on which we draw, as health or wealth, practical skill or dexterous
talent, or multitudes of followers, that count, but the aims only. The
aim reacts back on the means. A great aim aggrandizes the means. The
meal and water that are the commissariat of the _forlorn hope_ that
stake their lives to defend the pass are sacred as the Holy Grail, or
as if one had eyes to see in chemistry the fuel that is rushing to feed
the sun.
There is a persuasion in the soul of man that he is here for cause,
that he was put down in this place by the Creator to do the work for
which he inspires him, that thus he is an overmatch for all antagonists
that could combine against him. The pious Mrs. Hutchinson says of some
passages in the defence of Nottingham against the Cavaliers, “It was a
great instruction that the best and highest courages are beams of the
Almighty.” And whenever the religious sentiment is adequately affirmed,
it must be with dazzling courage. As long as it is cowardly insinuated,
as with the wish to succor some partial and temporary interest, or to
make it affirm some pragmatical tenet which our parish church receives
to-day, it is not imparted, and cannot inspire or create. For it is
always new, leads and surprises, and practice never comes up with it.
There are ever appearing in the world men who, almost as soon as they
are born, take a bee-line to the rack of the inquisitor, the axe of the
tyrant, like Jordano Bruno, Vanini, Huss, Paul, Jesus, and Socrates.
Look at Fox’s Lives of the Martyrs, Sewel’s History of the Quakers,
Southey’s Book of the Church, at the folios of the Brothers Bollandi,
who collected the lives of twenty-five thousand martyrs, confessors,
ascetics, and self-tormentors. There is much of fable, but a broad
basis of fact. The tender skin does not shrink from bayonets, the timid
woman is not scared by fagots; the rack is not frightful, nor the rope
ignominious. The poor Puritan, Antony Parsons, at the stake, tied straw
on his head, when the fire approached him, and said, “This is God’s
hat.” Sacred courage indicates that a man loves an idea better than all
things in the world; that he is aiming neither at pelf or comfort, but
will venture all to put in act the invisible thought in his mind. He
is everywhere a liberator, but of a freedom that is ideal; not seeking
to have land or money or conveniences, but to have no other limitation
than that which his own constitution imposes. He is free to speak
truth; he is not free to lie. He wishes to break every yoke all over
the world which hinders his brother from acting after his thought.
There are degrees of courage, and each step upward makes us acquainted
with a higher virtue. Let us say then frankly that the education of
the will is the object of our existence. Poverty, the prison, the
rack, the fire, the hatred and execrations of our fellow-men, appear
trials beyond the endurance of common humanity; but to the hero whose
intellect is aggrandized by the soul, and so measures these penalties
against the good which his thought surveys, these terrors vanish as
darkness at sunrise.
We have little right in piping times of peace to pronounce on these
rare heights of character; but there is no assurance of security. In
the most private life, difficult duty is never far off. Therefore
we must think with courage. Scholars and thinkers are prone to an
effeminate habit, and shrink if a coarser shout comes up from the
street, or a brutal act is recorded in the journals. The Medical
College piles up in its museum its grim monsters of morbid anatomy,
and there are melancholy sceptics with a taste for carrion who batten
on the hideous facts in history,--persecutions, inquisitions, St.
Bartholomew massacres, devilish lives, Nero, Cæsar, Borgia, Marat,
Lopez,--men in whom every ray of humanity was extinguished, parricides,
matricides, and whatever moral monsters. These are not cheerful facts,
but they do not disturb a healthy mind; they require of us a patience
as robust as the energy that attacks us, and an unresting exploration
of final causes. Wolf, snake, and crocodile are not inharmonious in
nature, but are made useful as checks, scavengers, and pioneers; and
we must have a scope as large as Nature’s to deal with beast-like men,
detect what scullion function is assigned them, and foresee in the
secular melioration of the planet how these will become unnecessary,
and will die out.
He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount
a fear. I do not wish to put myself or any man into a theatrical
position, or urge him to ape the courage of his comrade. Have the
courage not to adopt another’s courage. There is scope and cause and
resistance enough for us in our proper work and circumstance. And
there is no creed of an honest man, be he Christian, Turk, or Gentoo,
which does not equally preach it. If you have no faith in beneficent
power above you, but see only an adamantine fate coiling its folds
about nature and man, then reflect that the best use of fate is to
teach us courage, if only because baseness cannot change the appointed
event. If you accept your thoughts as inspirations from the Supreme
Intelligence, obey them when they prescribe difficult duties, because
they come only so long as they are used; or, if your scepticism reaches
to the last verge, and you have no confidence in any foreign mind, then
be brave, because there is one good opinion which must always be of
consequence to you, namely, your own.
* * * * *
I am permitted to enrich my chapter by adding an anecdote of pure
courage from real life, as narrated in a ballad by a lady to whom all
the particulars of the fact are exactly known.
GEORGE NIDIVER.
Men have done brave deeds,
And bards have sung them well:
I of good George Nidiver