^PLANTATIONS 8N BOOK SHOP Sec Shelf... No 3460 i8p e. p. Supple. WORKS. 9 vols, gilt top, the set, $i3.s». LITERATURE AND LIFE. i2mo,gilt top, $1.30. ESSAYS AND REVIEWS. 2 vols. 121110, gilt top, I3.00. CHARACTER AND CHARACTERISTIC MEN. umo, gilt top, Si. 50. SUCCESS AND ITS CONDITIONS. i2mo, gilt top, $i.5°- THE LITERATURE OF THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. i2mo, gilt top, $1.50. OUTLOOKS ON SOCIETY, LITERATURE, AND POLI- TICS. Crown 8vo, gilt top, $1.50. AMERICAN LITERATURE, and Other Papers. With an Introductory Note by Whittikr. Crown 8vo, gilt top, $1.50. RECOLLECTIONS OF EMINENT MEN, with Other Papers. With Portrait, and Introduction by the Rev. C. A. Bartol. Crown 8vo, gilt top, #1.50. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, Boston and New York. CHARACTER AND CHARACTERISTIC MEN EDWIN P. WHIPPLE BOSTON AXO NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY Copyright, 1866 and 1894, By TICKNOR AND FIELDS, AMD HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. All rights reserved. THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA TO THE MEMORY t causative force and essential individuality. As character is thus the expression of no particular quality or faculty, but of a whole nature, it reveals of tourse, a man's imperfections in revealing his greatness. He is nothing unless he acts ; and, as in every vitai thought and deed character appears, his acts must par { CHARACTER. rtike of bis infirmities, and the mental and moral life communicated in them be more or less diseased. As he never acts from opinions or propositions, his nature cannot be hidden behind such thin disguises, the fatal evidence against him being in the deed itself. If there be sensuality, or malignity, or misanthropy in him, it will come out in his actions, though his tongue drop purity and philanthropy in every word. Probably more hatred, licentiousness, and essential impiety are thus communicated through the phraseology and con- tortions of their opposites, than in those of vice itself. Moral life is no creation of moral phrases. The words that are truly vital powers for good or evil are only those which, as Pindar says, " the tongue draws up from the deep heart." Now, as men necessarily communicate themselves when they produce from their vital activity, it follows that their productions will never square with the ab- stract opinions of the understanding, but present a con- crete, organic whole, compounded of truth and error, evil and good, exactly answering to the natures whence they proceed. This actual process of creation we are prone to ignore or overlook, and to criticise institutions as Rymer and Dennis criticised poems, that is, ai though they were the manufactures of mental and moral machines, working on abstract principles ; where- OHARACTEB. 6 ts creaiiou on such a method is impossible, and we are compelled to choose between imperfect organisms ana nothing. That this imperfection is not confined to jurists and legislators is sufficiently manifest when the vehement and opinionated social critic undertakes the work of demolition and reconstruction, and all the vices peculiar to his own nature, such as his intolerance of facts and disregard of the rights and feelings of oth- ers, have an opportunity of displaying themselves. His talk is fine, and his theories do him honor ; but when he comes to act as a man, when he comes to exhibit what he *is as well as what he thinks, it is too com- monly found that four months of the rule of so-called philosophers and philanthropists are enough to make common men sigh for their old Bourbons and Bo napartes. Robespierre, anarchist and philanthropist, Frederick of Prussia, despot and philosopher, were both bitter and vitriolic natures, yet both, in their youth, exceeded Exeter Hall itself in their professions of universal beneficence, and evinced, in their rants, not hypocrisy, but self-delusion. Frederick indeed wrote jarly in life a treatise called " The Anti-Machiavel, which was," says his biographer, "an edifying homily against rapacity, perfidy, arbitrary government, unjust war ; in short, against almost everything for which iU author is now remembered among men." CHARACTER. Thus tc the pride of reason and vanity of opinion character interposes its iron limitations, declaring war against all forms and modes of pretension, and affording the right measure of the wisdom and folly, the right- eousness and the wickedness, substantially existing in persons and in communities of persons. Let us now consider this power in some of the varieties of its man- ifestation, observing the law of its growth and influ- ence and the conditions of its success. Our purpose will rather be to indicate its radical nature than to treat of those superficial peculiarities which many deem to be its essential elements. The question has been often raised, whether charac- ter be the creation of circumstances, or circumstances the creation of character. Now, to assert that circum- stances create character is to eliminate from character that vital causative energy which is its essential char- acteristic ; and to assert that circumstances are the creation of character, is to endow character with the power not only to create, but to furnish the materials of creation. The result of both processes would not be character, but caricature. The truth seems to be, that circumstances are the nutriment of character, the food which it converts into blood ; and this process of assimilation presupposes individual power to act upon tircumstances. Goethe says, in reference to his owl CHARACTER. J mental growth and productiveness, " Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand differ- ent persons, a thousand different things. The learned and the ignorant, the wise and the foolish, infancy and age, have come in turn — generally without the least suspicion of it — to bring me the offering of their thoughts, their faculties, their experience. Often they have sowed the harvest I have reaped. My work is that of an aggregate of beings taken from the whole of nature ; it bears the name of Goethe." Yes, it bears the name of Goethe, because Goethe assimilated all this knowledge and all this aggregate of beings into Goethe, — broadening, enriching, and deepening his in- dividuality, but not annihilating it ; so that his charac- ter became as comprehensive as his experience. Indeed, in all the departments of life, meditative and practical, success thus depends on a thorough knowl- edge, proceeding from a complete assimilation, of all the circumstances connected with each department, — the man standing for the thing, having mastered and, as it were, consumed it, so that all its forces are in himself as personal power and personal intelligence. The true merchant, the true statesman, the true mili- tary commander, the true artist, becomes a man of character only vzLen he " puts on," and identifies hini- lelf with, his particular profession or art. Balzac 8 CHARACTER. thought he could not describe a landscape until he had turned himself for the moment into trees, and grass, and fountains, and stars, and effects of sunlight, and thus entered into the heart and life of the objects he ached to reproduce. Nelson realized with such inten- sity the inmost secrets of his profession, that experience and study had in him been converted into intuition, so that he could meet unexpected contingencies with in- stinctive expedients. If he failed, through lack of means, to snatch all the possible results of victory, his unrealized conception tortured him more than a sabre cut or a shattered limb. At the Battle of the Nile many French ships escaped because he had no frigates ! o pursue them. In his despatches he writes : " Should I die this moment, ' want of frigates ' would be found written on my heart ! " With this view of character as the embodiment of things in persons, it is obviously limited in its sphere to the facts and laws it has made its own, and out of that sphere is comparatively feeble. Thus, many able lawyers and generals have been blunderers as states men ; and one always shudders for the health of the community when the name of a statesman or clergy- man — properly authoritative in his special department — is employed to recommend some universal panacea ir some aqueou& establishment for washing away the CHARACTER. 9 diseases of the world. Character speaks with author- ity only of those matters it has realized, and in respect to them its dogmatisms are reasons and its opinions are judgments. When Mr. Webster, in attacking a legal proposition of an opponent at the bar, was re- minded that he was assailing a dictum of Lord Cam- den, he turned to the Court, and after paying a tribute to Camden's greatness as a jurist, simply added, " But may it please your Honor, / differ from Lord Cam den." It is evident that such self-assertion would have been ridiculous had not the character of the man re. lieved it from all essential pretension ; but if the cas« had been one of surgery or theology, and Mr. Webster had emphasized his " ego" in a difference with Sir Ast- ley Cooper or Hooker, the intrusion of his " I " would have been an impertinence which his reputation as a statesman or lawyer could not have shielded from con- tempt. Indeed, injustice is often done to the real mer its of eminent men when they get enticed out of then strongholds of character, and venture into unaccus- tomed fields of exertion, where their incapacity is soon detected. Macaulay has vividly shown how Hastings, the most vigorous and skilful of English statesmen in India, blundered the moment he applied the experienca he had acquired in Bengal to English politics ; and that perfection in one profession does not imply even cony 10 CHARACTER. mon judgment outside of it, was painfully demonstrated a few years ago, in the case of an accomplished Amer* ican general, among whose splendid talents writing English does not appear to be one. "When, therefore, not content to leave his prodigies of strategy and tac- tics to speak for themselves, he invaded the domair of rhetoric, and crossed pens with Secretary Marcy, people began to imagine, as verbs went shrieking about after nouns, and relative pronouns could find no rela- tions, that the great general had no character at all. But confine a characteristic man to the matters he has really mastered, and there is in him no blundering, no indecision, no uncertainty, but a straightforward, decisive activity, sure as insight and rapid as instinct. You cannot impose upon him by nonsense of any kind, however prettily you may bedizen it in inapplicable eloquence. Thus Jeremiah Mason — a man who was not so much a lawyer as he was law embodied — was once engaged to defend a clergyman accused of a capital crime, and was repeatedly bothered by the attempts of the brethren to make him substitute theo- logical for legal evidence. As he was making out his brief, one of these sympathizers with the prisoner rushed joyously into the room, with the remark that Brother A was certainly innocent, for an angel from heaven had appeared to him the night before, and CHARACTER. 11 had given him direct assurance of the fact. " That is very important evidence, indeed," was the gruff reply of Mason ; " but can you subpoena that angel ? " The anecdote we mention because it is representative ; for the philosophy which prompted such a demand annu- ally saves thousands of merchants, manufacturers, and farmers from rushing into ruinous speculations, and preserves society itself from dissolving into a mere anarchy of fanaticisms. The resistance doubtless comes, in many cases, from stupidity ; but then stu- pidity is a great conservative power, especially in those periods of moral flippancy and benevolent persiflage when it rains invitations to square the circle, to under- take voyages to the moon, and to peril the existence of solid realities on the hope of establishing a millennium on their ruins. As the perfection of character depends on a man's embodying the facts and laws of his profession to such i degree of intensity that power and intelligence are combined in his activity, it is evident that mere unas «imilated knowledge — knowledge that does not form part of the mind, but is attached to it — will often blunder as badly as ignorance itself. Thus Marshal Bsrflner enjoyed for some time the reputation of plan- ning Napoleon's battles, and of being a better general than his master, — an impression which his cwn conceit 12 CHARACTER. doubtless readily indorsed ; but the illusion was dis- pelled in the campaign of 1809, when Napoleon senl him on in advance to assume the command. It took him but a marvellously short time to bring the army to the brink of destruction, and his incompetency was so glaring that some of the marshals mistook it for treach- Bry. Instead of concentrating the forces, he dispersed them over a field of operations forty leagues in extent, and exposed them to the danger of being destroyed in detail, thinking all the while that he was exhibiting singular depth ofjnilitary genius; when, in fact, it was only the opportune arrival of Napoleon, and his fierce, swift orders for immediate concentration, that saved the army from disgraceful dispersion and defeat, — an army which, under Napoleon, soon occupied Vienna, and eventually brought the campaign to a victorious conclusion at Wagram. It is, however, the misfortune of nations that such men as Berthier are not always tested by events, and the limitations of their capacity plainly revealed. Besides, it must be admitted that, in practical politics, circumstances sometimes lift into power small-minded natures, who are exactly level to the prejudices of their time, and thus make themselves indispensable to it. Mr. Addington, by the grace of intolerance made for a ihort period Prime Minister of England, — a man of CHARACTER. 13 peat force of self-consequence, and great variety of demerit, — was one of these fortunate echoes of char- acter; and as his littleness answered admirably to all that was little in the nation, he was, during his whole life, an important element of party power. Canning used despairingly to say of him, that u he was like the Bmall-pox, — every administration had to take him once." No party ever succeeded that did not thus represent the public nonsense as well as the public sense ; and happy is that body of politicians where one of the members relieves his associates of all fear for their safety, not by his vigor or sagacity in administra- tion, but by his being one in whom the public nonsense knows it can confide. Indeed, Sydney Smith declares that every statesman who is troubled by a rush of ideas to the head should have his foolometer ever by his side, to warn him against offending or outstriding pub- lic opinion. This foolometer is as necessary to des- potic as to liberal governments ; for one great secret of the art of politics all over the world is, never to push evil or beneficent measures to that point where resistance commences on the part of the governed. Character, in its intrinsic nature, being thus the embodiment of things in persons, the quality which most distinguishes men of character from men of pas- u'ons and opinions is Persistency, tenacity of hold upon 14 CHARACTER. their work, and power to continue in it. This quality is the measure of the force inherent in character, and is the secret of tho confidence men place in it, — > Boldiers in generals, parties in leaders, people in Btatesmen. Indeed, if we sharply scrutinize the lives of persons eminent in any department of action or meditation, we shall find that it is not so much bril liancy and fertility as constancy and continuousness of effort which make a man great. This is as true of Kepler and Newton as of Hannibal and Caesar; of Shakespeare and Scott as of Howard and Clarkson. The heads of such men are not merely filled with ideas, purposes, and plans, but the primary character- istic of their natures and inmost secret of their success is this : that labor cannot weary, nor obstacles discour- age, nor drudgery disgust them. The universal line of distinction between the strong and the weak is, that one persists ; the other hesitates, falters, trifles, and at last collapses or " caves in." This principle obtains in every department of affairs and every province of thought. Even in social life, it is persistency which attracts confidence more than talents and accomplishments. Lord Macaulay was the most brilliant, rapid, and victorious of talkers, — inex- haustible in words and in matter, — so endless, indeed that on those rare occasions when he allowed others ta CHARACTER 15 put in an occasional word, he was hit by Sydney Smith's immortal epigram, complimenting his " flashes of silence " ; but in character, and in the influence that radiates from character, he was probably inferior to his taciturn father, Zachary Macaulay, who, with an iron grasp of an unpopular cause, and a soul which was felt as inspiration in whatever company he appeared, had still hardly a word to spare. The son conversed, but the mere presence of the father was conversation. The son excited admiration by what he said, the father wielded power and enforced respect and became the object to which the conversation of the circle referred, in virtue of what he was, and of what everybody knew he would persist in being. In politics, again, no mere largeness of comprehen sion or loftiness of principle will compensate for a lack of persistency to bear, with a mind ever fresh and a purpose ever fixed, all the toil, dulness, fret, and dis- appointment of the business ; and this is perhaps the reason that, in politics, the perseverance of the sinners makes us blush so often for the pusillanimity of the faints. So, in wai, mere courage and military talent are not always sufficient to make a great military commander. Thus Peterborough is, in comparison with Marlborough, hardly known as a general ; yet Peterborough, by his skilful and splendid audacity. 16 CHARACTER. gained victories which Marlborough might have been proud to claim. The diihculty with Peterborough was that he could not endure being bored; while Marl- borough's endurance of bores was quite as marvellous as the military genius by which he won every battle he fought and took every place he besieged. If Peter- borough was prevented by the caution of his govern- mant or his allies from seizing an occasion for a great exploit, he resigned his command in a pet ; but Marl- borough patiently submitted to be robbed by the timidity of his allies of opportunities for victories greater even than those he achieved, and persisted, in spite of irritations which would have crazed a more sensitive spirit, until the object of the heterogeneous coalition which his genius welded together had been attained. Again, in the conduct of social and moral reforms, persistency is the test by which we discriminate men of moral opinions from men in whom moral opinions have been deepened into moral ideas and consolidated hi moral character. To be sure, a man may, without character, seem to persist in the work of reform, provided society will fly into a passion with him, and thus furnish continual stimulants to his pride and pug- nacity ; but true persistency becomes indispensabl* irhen his ungracious task is to overcome that smiling; CHARACTER. IT indifference, that self-pleased ignorance, that half-pity- ing, irritating contempt with which a fat and con- tented community commonly receives the arguments and the invectives of innovation. It is the more important to insist on sinewy vigor and constancy in the champions of reform, because, in our day, the business attracts to it so many amateurs who mistake vague intellectual assent to possible improvements for the disposition and genius which make a reformer ; who substitute bustle for action, sauciness for audacity, the itch of disputation for the martyr-spirit ; and who arrive readily at prodigious results through a bland ignoring of all the gigantic obstacles in the path. Thus it would not be difficult, on any pleasant morn- ing, to meet at any city restaurant some ingenious gentleman getting what he is pleased to call a living after the old Adarnic method of competition, who will, over a cup of cotfee, dispose of concrete America in about ten minutes ; slavery disappears after the first sip ; the Constitution goes in two or three draughts ; the Bible vanishes in a pause of deglutitional satis- faction ; and a new order of society springs up while, in obedience to the old, he draws forth a reluctant shilling to pay for the beverage. Now, there is no disgrace •n lacking insight into practical life, and power Vo change it for the better ; but certainly these amia- 18 CHARACTER. ble deficiencies are as gracefully exhibited in assent- ing to what is established a in playing at reform, attitudinizing martyrdom, and engaging in a schemo to overturn the whole world as a mere relaxation from the severer duties o life. In passing from practical life to literature, we shali find that persistency is the quality separating first-rate genius from all the other rates, — proving, as it does, that the author mentally and morally lives in the re- CC> gion of thought and emotion about which he writes ; — ' accepts the drudgery of composition as a path to the , object he desires to master ; and is too much en- raptured with the beautiful vision before his eyes to <-< J weary of labor in its realization. In the creations of ce: such men there is neither languor nor strain, but a o " familiar grasp of things Divine." They are easily to be distinguished from less bountifully endowed na- tures and less raised imaginations. Thus Tennyson, as a man, is evidently not on a level with his works. ^5- Ele is rather a writer of poems than, like Wordsworth, essentially a poet; and, accordingly, he only occasion- ally rises into that region where Wordsworth per- manently dwells ; the moment he ceases his intense scrutiny of his arrested mood, and aims to be easy and familiar, he but unbends into laborious flatness *ut we think a trained eye can detect, even in th« r-4 CO U-l CHARACTER. 19 •eeming commonplaces of Wordsworth, a ray of that light, " that never was on sea or land." Still, Ten- nyson, in his exalted moods, has a clear vision of a poetical conception, persists in his advances to it, discards all vagrant thoughts, and subordinates all minor ones, to give it organic expression ; and, when he descends from his elevation, always brings a poem with him, and not a mere collection of poetical lines and images. Such a man, though his poetical char- acter is — relatively to the greatest poets — imperfect, is still, of course, to be placed far above a mere men- tal roue, like the author of " Festus," who debauches in thoughts and sentiments ; pours forth memories and fancies with equal arrogance of originality ; and having no definite aim, except to be very fine and very saucy, produces little more than a collection of poetic materials, not fused, but confused. From such an anarchy of the faculties no great poem was ever born, for great poems are the creations of great in- dividualities, — of that causative and presiding " Me " which contemptuously rejects the perilous imperti- nences it spontaneously engenders, and drives the nature of which it is the centre persistingly on to the object that gleams in the distance. Make a man uf Milton's force and affluence of imagination half-in- toxicated and half-crazy, and any enterprising booksel 20 CHARACTER. ler might draw from the lees of his mind a " Festus* once a week and each monstrosity would doubtless be hailed by some readers, who think they have a taste for poetry, as a greater miracle of genius than " Par- adise Lost." Indeed, in all the departments of creative thought, fertility is a temptation to be resisted before inven- tions and discoveries are possible. The artist who dallies with his separate conceptions as they throng into his mind, produces no statue or picture, for that depends on austerely dismissing the most enticing im- ages, provided they do not serve his particular purpose at the time. The same truth holds in the inventive arts and in science. It is needless to say that the most common and most attractive manifestations of persistency of char- acter proceed from those natures in which the affec- tions are dominant. An amazing example, replete with that pathos which "lies too deep for tears," is found in the story, chronicled by John of Brompton, of the mother of Thomas-a-Beeket. 1 1 is father, Gil- bert-a-Becket, was taken prisoner during one of the Crusades by a Syrian Emir, and held for a consid- erable period in a kind of honorable captivity A (laughter of the Emir saw him at her father's table, beard \iim converse, fel in love with him. and offered CHARACTEB. 21 to arrange the means by which both might escape to Europe. The project only partly succeeded ; he escaped, but she was left behind. Soon afterward, however, she contrived to elude her attendants, and, after many marvellous adventures by sea and land, arrived in England, knowing but two English words, " London " and " Gilbert." By constantly repeating the first, she was directed to the city ; and there, followed by a mob, she walked for months from street to street, crying, as she went, " Gilbert ! Gilbert ! " She at last came to the street in which her lover lived. The mob and the name attracted the attention of a servant in the house ; Gilbert recognized her and they were married. We doubt if any poet, if even Chaucer, ever imaginatively conceived sentiment in a form so vital and primary as it is realized in this fact. Character, whether it be small or great, evil or good, thus always represents a positive and persisting force, and can, therefore, like other forces, be calcu- lated, and the issues of its action predicted. There \9 nothing really capricious in character to a man gifted with the true piercing insight into it; and Pope was right in bringing the charge of insanity against Curll, the bookseller, provided Curll did once speak politely it a customer, and did once refuse two-and-sixpenee 22 CHARACTER. for Sir Richard Blackmore's Essays. There is nothing tuore mortifying to a reader of mankind than to be convicted of error in spelling out a character. We can all sympathize with the story of that person who was once requested, by a comparative stranger, to lend him ten dollars, to be returned the next day at ten o'clock. The request was complied with ; but the lender felt perfectly certain that the borrower be- longed to that large and constantly-increasing class of our fellow-citizens who are commonly included in the genus "sponge," and he therefore bade his money, as it left his purse, that affectionate farewell which is only breathed in the moment of permanent separa- tions. Much to his chagrin, however, the money was returned within a minute of the appointed time. A few days after, the same person requested a loan of thirty dollars, promising, as before, to return the sura tit a specified hour. "No!" was the response of in- sulted and indignant sagacity ; " you disappointed m« once, sir, and I shall not give you an opportunity of doing H again." A commanding mind in any station is indicated by the accuracy with which it calculates the power Mid working intelligence of the subaltern natures it uses. In business, in war, in government, in all matters where many agents are employed to prodno* CHARACTER. 28 a single result, one miscalculation of character by the person who directs the complex operation is sufficient to throw the whole scheme into confusion. Napo- leon's rage at General Dupont for capitulating at Baylen was caused not more by the disasters which flowed from it than by the irritation he felt in hav- ing confided to Dupont a task he proved incompetent to perform. Napoleon did not often thus miscalculate the capacity of his instruments. In the most des- perate exigency of the battle of "YVagram he had a cheerful faith that he should in the end be victorious, relying, as he did, on two things, — probabilities to others, but certainties to him, — namely, that the col- umn led by Macdonald would pierce the Austrian centre, and that the difficult operation committed to Davoust would be carried out, whatever failure might have been possible had it been intrusted to any other marshal. So, after the defeat at Essling, the success of Napoleon's attempt to withdraw his beaten army depended on the character of Massena, to whom the Emperor despatched a messenger, telling him to keep his position for two hours longer at Aspern. This order, couched in the form of a request, almost re- quired an impossilrlity ; but Napoleon knew the in domitable tenacity of the man to whom he gave it The messenger found Massena seated on a heap of 24 CHARACTER. rubbish, nis eyes bloodshot, his frame weakened by his unparalleled exertions during a contest of forty hours, and his whole appearance indicating a physical state better fitting the hospital than the field. But that steadfast soul seemed altogether unaffected by bodily prostration. Half dead as he was with physical fatigue, he rose painfully, and said : " Tell the Emperor that I will hold out for two hours — six — twenty-four — as long as it is necessary for the safety of the army." And, it is needless to add, he kept his word. In politics, where so many foul purposes are veiled in fair pretences, the calculation of character is of pri- mal importance ; but the process requires insight and foresight beyond what people commonly exercise in practical affairs, and the result is that misconception of men and events which has so often involved individuals and governments in frightful calamities. A true judg- ment of persons penetrates through the surface to the centre and substance of their natures, and can even detect in pretences, which may deceive the pretenders themselves, that subtle guile which corrupt character always infuses into the most celestial professions of morality or humanity. In every French revolution, for example, it rains beneficent words ; but, if we really desire to know how the bland and amiable humanities cf the movement are to terminate, we must give slight CHARACTER. 25 attention to what the social and political leaders say and think, except sc far a? in their sayings and thoughts there are occasionally those unconscious es- capes of character which shed unwilling light on what they really are and what they really mean. We must not hesitate to deny undoubted truths if they are pom- pously announced for the purpose of serving the ends of falsehood. There is an acrid gentleman of my ac- quaintance, who, whenever he sees a quack advertise- ment commencing with the startling interrogation, " Is health desirable ? " instantly answers, " No ! " be- cause, if the premise be once admitted, the pills follow in logical sequence ; and, to save health in the concrete, he is willing to deny it in the abstract. So it is well to reject even liberty, equality, and fraternity, when, from the nature of their champions, or from the nature of the society to which they are applied, equality means the dominion of a clique, frateimity introduces massa- cre, and liberty ushers in Louis Napoleon and the Empire. It was by looking through the rodomontade of such virtue prattlers, and looking at men and things in their essential principles, that. Burke was enabled to predict the issue of the French Revolution of 1789, and to give French news in advance, not merely of the mail, but of the actual occurrence of events. He read events in their principles and causes. a 26 CHARACTER. This calculation of character, this power ot discern ing the tendencies and results of actions in the naturft of their actors, is not confined to practical life, but is applicable also to literature, — another great field in which character is revealed, and to which some allusion has already been made in treating of persistency. As all the vital movements of the mind are acts, character may be as completely expressed in the production of a book as in the conduct of a battle or the establishment of an institution. This is not merely the case in authors like Montaigne, Charles Lamb, and Sydney Smith, whose quaint exposure of individual peculiar- ities constitutes no small portion of their charm ; or in authors like Rousseau and Byron, who exultingly exact attention to their fooleries and obliquities by furiously dragging their readers into the privacies of their moral being ; or in authors like Lamartine, who teem to dwell in an innocent ignorance or dainty denial of all external objects which offend their personal tastes, and who dissolve their natures into a senti- mental mist, which is diffused over every province of nature and human life which they appear to describe or portray. But the same principle, in these so glar- ingly apparent, holds with regard to writers whose natures are not obtruded upon the attention, but which WA\te in the general tone and animating spirit of their CHARACTER. 27 productions. Guizot and Mil- nan have both subjected the original authorities, consulted by Gibbon in his his- tory of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, to the intensest scrutiny, to see if the historian has per- verted, falsified, or suppressed facts. Their judgment is in favor of his honesty and his conscientious re- learch. Yet this by no means proves that we can obtain through his history the real truth of persons and events. The whole immense tract of history he trav- erses he has thoroughly Gibbonized. The qualities of bis character steal out in every paragraph ; the words we instinct with Gibbon's nature ; though the facts xiay be obtained from without, the relations in which they are disposed are communicated from within ; and the human race for fifteen centuries is made tributary to Gibbon's thought, wears the colors and badges of Gibbon's nature, is denied the possession of any pure and exalted experiences which Gibbon cannot verify by his own ; and the reader, who is magnetized by the historian's genius, rises from the perusal of the vast ^ork, informed of nothing as it was in itself, but every- thing as it appeared to Gibbon, and especially doubting two things, — that there is any chastity in women, or any divine truth in Christianity. Yet we suppose that Gibbon would net, by critics, be ranked in the subjec- tive class of writers, but in the objective class. Still, 28 CHARACTER. the sensuality and scepticism which are in him are in- fused into the minds of his docile readers with more refined force than Rousseau and Byron ever succeeded in infusing theirs. Every author, indeed, who really influences the mind, who plants in it thoughts and sentiments which take root and grow, communicates his character. Error and immorality, — two words for one thing, for error is the immorality of the intellect, and immorality the error of the heart, — these escape from him if they are in him, and pass into the recipient mind through suhtle avenues invisible to consciousness. We accordingly sometimes find open natures, gifted with more receptivity than power of resistance or self-assertion, spotted all over with the sins of the intellects they have hospitably entertained, exhibiting evidence of having stormed heaven with iEschylus, and anatomized damnation with Dante, and revelled in indecencies with Rabelais, and got drunk with Burns, and violated all the austerer moralities with Moore. Influence being thus the communication from one mind to another of positive individual life, great na- tures are apt to overcome smaller natures, instead of developing them, — a conquest and usurpation as com- mon in literature as in practical affairs. This spiritual lespotism, wielded by the Caesars and Napoleons of CHARACTER. 29 . hough t, ever implies personal and concentrated might in the despot ; and the process of its operation is very different from those mental processes in which some particular faculty or sentiment acts, as it were, on its own account, — processes which lack all living force and influence, creating nothing, communicating nothing, equally good for nothing and bad for nothing. Thus, by wading through what Robert Hall calls the " con- tinent of mud " of a mechanical religious writer, it ia impossible to obtain any religious life ; and diabolical vitality will perhaps be as vainly sought in the volumes of such a mechanical reprobate as Wycherley. But the moment you place yourself in relation with living minds, you find Shakespeare pouring Norman blood in- to your veins and the feudal system into your thoughts, nnd Milton putting iron into your will, and Spinoza entangling your poor wit in inextricable meshes of argumentation, and Goethe suffusing your whole nature with a sensuous delight, which converts heroism itself into a phase of the comfortable, and disinterestedness into one of the fine arts. The natures of such men, being deeper, healthier, and more broadly inclusive than the natures of intense and morbid authors, are necessarily stronger, more searching, and admit of less resistance. In order that they may be genially assimi- lated, we must keep them at such a distance as to save 80 CHARACTER. our own personality from being insensibly merged into theirs. They are dangerous guests if they eat you, but celestial visitants if you can contrive to eat even a por- tion of them. It is curious to see what queer pranks they sometimes play with aspiring mediocrities, unqual- iied to receive more than the forms of anything, who ^trut about in their liveries, ostentatious of such badges of intellectual servitude, and emulous to act in the farce of high life as it is below stairs. Thus, when Goethe first invaded the United States, it was noised about that he was a many-sided man, free from every sort of misdirecting enthusiasm, and conceiving and pre- Benting all tilings in their right relations. Instantly a swarm of Goethes sprang up all around us, wantoning in nonchalance and the fopperies of comprehensiveness. The thing was found to be easier even than Byronism, requiring no scowls, no cursing and swearing, no in- creased expenditure for cravats and gin ; and, accord- ingly, one could hardly venture into society without meeting some youthful blase, whose commonplace was trumpeted as comprehension, whose intellectual laziness was dignified with the appellation of repose, and whose many-sidedness was the feeble expression of a person- ality without sufficient force to rise even into one-sided- 0699. So far we have considered character principally aa CHARACTER. 81 it works in practical affairs and in literature ; but perhaps its grandest and mightiest exemplifications are in tho.-e rare men who have passed up, through a process of lite and growth, from the actual world into the region of universal sentiments and great spir- itual ideas. Every step in the progress of such men is through material and spiritual facts, each of which is looked into, looked through, and converted into force for further advance. The final elevation they attain, being the consequence of natural growth, has none of the* instability of heights reached by occa- sional raptures of aspiration, but is as solid and as firm as it is high ; and their characters, expressed in deeds all alive with moral energy, are fountains whence the world is continually replenished with a new and nobler life. A great and comprehensive person of this ex- alted order, to whom the imaginations of the poet Beem but the commonplaces of the heaven in which he dwells, is not to be confounded with his counter feits, that is, with certain agile natures that leap, with one bound of thought, from the every-day world t.o an abstract and mocking ideal ; and, perched on their transitory elevation, fleer and gibe at the social system to which they really belong, and of which, with all its sins and follies, thay are far from being tfie best or the wisest members. The impression left 82 CHARACTER. by the reality is radiant spiritual power ; the impress sion left by the counterfeit is simply pertness. But let a great character, with the celestial city actually organized within him, descend upon a com- munity to revolutionize and reform, and, in the con- flict which ensues, he is sure to be victorious, for he is strong with a diviner strength than earth knows, and wields weapons whose stroke no mortal armor can withstand. If he come at all, he comes in a bodily form, and he comes to disturb ; and society, with a bright apprehension of these two facts, has heretofore thought it a shrewd contrivance to remove him to another world before he had utterly disordered this. But in this particular case its axes, and gibbets, and fires could not apply ; for the tremendous per- sonality it sought to put out of the way had been built up by an assimilation of the life of things ; and all mortal engines were therefore powerless to destroy one glowing atom of his solid and immortally persist- ing nature. Accordingly, after his martyrdom, he is the same strange, intrusive, pertinacious, resistless force that he was before ; active as ever in every part of the social frame ; pervading the community by degrees with his peculiar life; glaring in upon his murderers in their most secret nooks of retirement ; rising, lik« ihe ghost of Banquo, to spread horror and amaze CHARACTER. 88 Bent over their feasts ; searing their eyeballs with itrange "sights," even in the public markets; nor does he put off the torment of his presence until the cowards who slew him have gone, like Henry the Second, to the tomb of Becket, and, in the agonies of fear and remorse, have canonized him as a saint. In these scattered remarks on a subject broad as human life, and various as the actual and possible combinations of the elements of human nature, I have attempted to indicate the great vital fact in human affairs, that all influential power, in all the depart- ments of practical intellectual and moral energy, is the expression of character, of forcible, persisting, and calculable persons, who have grown up into a stat- ure more or less colossal through an assimilation of material or spiritual realities. This fact makes pro- duction the test and measure of power, imprints on production the mental and moral imperfections of that power, and, with a kind of sullen sublimity, declares that as a man is so shall be his work. It thus remorselessly tears off all the gaudy ornaments of opinion and phrase with which conceit bedizens weakness, and exhibits each person in his essential personality. The contemplation of this fact, like the contemplation of all facts, may sadden the sentimental and the luxurious, as it reveals Alps to climb, not 2« O 34 CHARACTER. bowers of bliss to bask in ; but to manly natures, who disdain the trappings of pretension, the prospect i9 healthy, and the sharp sleet air invigorating. By showing that men and things are not so good or so great as they seem, it may destroy the hope born of our dreams ; but it is the source of another and more bracing hope, born of activity and intelligence. By the acidity with which it mocks the lazy aspirations, blown up as bubbles from the surface of natures which are really crumbling into dust amidst their pretty playthings, this fact may seem a sneering devil ; but if it start into being one genuine thrill of vital thought, or touch that inmost nerve of activity whence character derives its force, it will be found to cheer *nd to point upward like other angels of the Lord. u. ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. ONE of the most prominent characteristics which strike an observer of human life is the sulky, sleepy common sense which shapes, guides, and lim- its its ordinary affairs ; a common sense fruitful of definite opinions, creative of stable works, solid, per- severing, consistent, intolerant of innovation, contemp- tuous of abstract truth and ideal right, and most Buolimely oontent with itself. This common intelli- gence, the democracy of reason, the wits love to stigmatize as stupidity, because it rigorously resists all substitution of smart sayings for commodious in- stitutions, and is insensible to the value of all thoughts which will not hitch on to things. It believes in bread, beef, houses, laws, trade, talent, the prices- current, the regular course of events, and, perhaps, in the spirituality of table-knockings ; it disbelieves in total abstinence, woman's rights, transcendentalism, perfectibility, and to the humane interrogation " Am \ not a man and a brother ? " it stoutly answers, " No, 36 ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. you are not ! " The great merit of this common sense consists in its representing the average intellect and conscience of the civilized world, — of that portion of intelligence, morality, and Caristianity which has been practically embodied in life and active power. It de- stroys pretence and quackery, and tests genius and heroism. It changes with the progress of society , persecutes in one age what it adopts in the next ; its martyrs of the sixteenth century are its prece- dents and exponents of the nineteenth ; and a good part of the common sense of an elder day is the common nonsense of our own. It would decay and die out were it not continually nourished by the new and freshening life poured into it by the creative thinkers whom it denounces as unpractical visionaries It always yields in the end to every person who rep resents a higher intellectual, moral, or spiritual ener gy than its own, and the grandest achievement of individual power is the conception of a new thought of such indestructible and victorious vitality, that il breaks through all the obstacles which obstruct the passage of heresies into truisms, and converts private opinion into common sense. It would seem to be a good law of life that met Bhould be thus associated in mental recognition of aommon principles of intelligence, level to theii ordi ECCENTRIC CHARACTEB. 37 nary actions, and thus present a solid bulwaik of Bound character, on which pretension should try its tricks, »^d nonsense spend its fury, in vain, hut which genuine intellectual or moral energy might overturn or overleap. The great office of common sense is to set up the general wisdom and the gen- eral will against the caprices of individual opinion and the excesses of self-will. Its maxims and prov erbs constitute a kind of intellectual currency, issued, apparently, on the authority of human nature, and based on the experience of sixty centuries. The de- viations from its established order, whether the devi- ations of whim or the deviations of genius, it calls Eccentricity. The essential characteristic of this or- der consists in its disposing tilings according to their mutual relations, — the natural relations they would assume in practical life, provided they received no twists from individual vanity, or conceit, or passion. Eccentricity is the disturbance of the relations enjoined by common sense, and a habit of looking at things, not in their relations to each other, hut in their re- lations to the dominant wilfulness of the individual. Its most ordinary form is the rebellion of mediocrity tgainst the laws of its own order. When this pro- ceeds on any grounds of original disposition, it soon exalts caprice into a principle and organizes crotchets 38 ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. into character. Men of this stamp, in whose huddled minds disorder is welded together by a kind of crazy force of individuality, commonly pass for more than they are worth. Their self-will, the parent of bound- less impudence and furious self-assertion, gives au- dacity to intellectual littleness, raciness to intellectual anarchy, and a certain flash and sparkle to meanness and malice. The little brain they have, thus galvan- ized by constant contact with the personal pronoun, presents a grand exhibition of mediocrity in convul- sions, of spite in spasms, of impulses in insurrection animating thoughts in heaps. Commonplaces are made to look like novelties by being shot forth in hysteric bursts. Startling paradoxes are created out of inverted truisms. The delirium of impatient sensa- tions is put forward as the rapture of heaven-scaling maginations. Yet through all the jar, and discord, and fussy miscreativeness of such chaotic minds there runs an unmistakable individuality, by which you can discriminate one crazy head from another, and refer the excesses of each to their roots in character. It is only, however, when eccentricity connects itself with genius that we have its raciest and most riotous disregard of the restraints of custom and the maxims of experience. Sane and healthy genius, it s true, is often *t war with recognized principles ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 39 without being eccentric. If it violates the conven- tional order, and disturbs the practical relations of things, it is because it discerns a higher order, and discovers relations more essential. Eccentricity views things in relation to its own crotchet; genius, in re- lation to a new idea. There is a world-wide differ- ence between the eccentric fanaticism of John of Munster and the religious genius of Martin Luther, though both assailed the established order. But genius itself sometimes falls under the dominion of wilfulness and whim, and it then creates magnificent crotchets of its own. Let us now survey this two- fold eccentricity of ordinary and extraordinary minds, as it appears in social life, in the arena of politics and government, in religion, and, in its more refined expression, in literature and art. In regard to the eccentricities of character devel- oped in social life, the most prominent relate to the freaks of impulse and passion. In most old commu nities there is a common sense even in sensuality Vice itself gets gradually digested into a system, is amenable to certain laws of conventional propriety and honor, has for its object simply the gratification of its appeti'es, and frowns with quite a conservative air on all new invention?, all untried experiments, in iniquity. There is often, for instance, in gluttony 40 ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. a solid and stolid respectability, a calm and grand devotion of the whole man to the gastronomic ec- stasy, which evinces that appetite has been organized into faith and life. Thus Doctor Johnson, at a Lord Mayor's dinner, committed the scandalous impropriety cf talking wit and wisdom to an alderman by his side, who desired to concentrate his whole energies on the turtle. " Sir," said the alderman, in a tone and with a look of awful rebuke, " in attempting to listen to your long sentences, and give you a short answer, I have swallowed two pieces of green fat, without ta>ting the flavor. I beg you to let me enjoy my present happiness in peace." Examples might be multiplied of the gravity and sobriety which vices assume when they are institutions as well as appetites. But the spoiled children of wealth, rank, and fash ion soon profess themselves bored with this time- honored, instituted, and decorous dissoluteness, and demand something more stimulating and piquant, something which will tickle vanity and plume will. A certain crazy vehemence of irdividual life, in which impatience of restraint is combined with a desire to startle, leads them to attempt to scale the eminences of immorality by originalities in lawless- ness and discoveries in diabolism. Despising the timia ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 4l science of the old fogies of sensuality, these bright young fellows let loose all the reins of restraint, flame out in all the volatilities of sin and vagaries of vice, ind aim to realize a festivity dashed with insanity md spiced with satanic pride. They desire not merely wine, but the " devil's wine " ; something which will give a zest, a sharp, tingling, fearful, wicked relish to excess. They have a kind of "hunger and thirst after unrighteousness " ; and, poets in dissipa- tion, pursue a constantly receding ideal of frantic delight. Their deity of pleasure is the bewitching daughter of sin and death, who streams mockingly before their inward vision with flushed cheeks, crazy, sparkling eyes, and mad, dishevelled tresses. Such were Buckingham, Rochester, Wharton, Queensberry, — noble roues, high in the peerage of debauch, whose brilliant rascality illustrates the annals of ec- centric libertinism ; who devoted their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the rights of reprobates, and raised infamy itself to a kind of fame ; — men who had a sublime ambition to become heroes in sensual- ity, and seem to have taken for their model that Dionysius of Sicily whom Plutarch commemorates as iaving prolonged a drunken feast through ninety days. Rochester, when he fell into the hands of Bishop Burnet, coirld hardly r^ollect the time when be had #2 ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. been sober, and might, with the amiable simplicity recorded of another inebriate, have staggered into an intelligence office, to know where he had been for the last ten years. "Wharton, bragging to Swift of his drunken frolics, was advised by that cynical satirist to rary his caprices a little, and take a frolic to be vir- tuous. Indeed, in these men the " wet damnation " cf drunkenness seems to have filtered through their senses into their souls, so as to make reason reel and conscience stagger, and the whole man to decline from an immoral into an unmoral being. Yet this suicide of soul and body is, by such disciples and martyrs of pleasure, ludicrously misnamed " life." Its philosophy is concentrated in a remark made by George Selwyn, as he surveyed himself in the glass, the day after a heroic debauch: "I look and feel villanously bad," he said; "but, hang it, it is life, — it is life!" Those devotees and fanatics of pleasure represent that form of eccentricity in which the head seems too small for the passions of the individual to move about in, and they accordingly appear to craze and rend the brain in the desperate effort to escape from their orison. But there are other eccentrics in whom we ebserve the opposite process, persons whose thoughts and feelings are all turned inward, and group at ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 43 iddle round some conceit of their wilfulness, some nobby of their intellect, or some master disposition of their selfishness. These are the men who gradu- ally become insane on some one darling peculiarity of character, which is exaggerated into huge size by assiduous training. It is, as Sir Thomas Browne would say, " an acorn in their young brows which grows to an oak in their old heads." Conceit, for instance, often ends in making a man mentally and morally deaf and blind. He hears nothing but the whispers of vanity, he sees nothing but what is re- flected in the mirror of self-esteem, though society all the while may be on the broad grin or in a civil titter at his pompous nothingness. He will doubt everything before he doubts his own importance ; and his folly, being based on a solid foundation of 6elf-delusion, steals out of him in the most uncon- scious and innocent way in the world. Thus the proud Duke of Somerset, whose conceit was in his rank and his long line of forefathers, once declared that he sincerely pitied Adam because he had no an cestors. The Earl of Buchan, a poor aristocrat, was accustomed to brood in his Edinburgh garret over the deeds and splendors of his ancestors, until he dentified himself with them, and would startle his fccquaintances with the remark, " When I wa* in il ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. Palestine with Richard of the Lion Heart," or, " As I was going to see the execution of Charles the First," 6uch and such things occurred. His greater brother, Erskine, the glory of Westminster Hall, was an egotist of genius, and was such a spendthrift of the personal pronoun, that Cobbett, who was once printing one of his speeches, stopped in the middle, giving as his reason, that at this point the " I's " in his fount of type gave out, and he could not proceed. This egotism, which in Erskine was mingled with genius and good-nature, often frets itself into a mor- bid unreasonableness which is satire-proof. Thus we heard but the other day of an eccentric German who prosecuted an author who had anticipated him in the publication of an invention, on the ground that the idea had been abstracted from his own head through a process of animal magnetism. But the most sovereign and malignant of these eccentric ego- tists was undoubtedly Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, who, while she lived, was the most terrible creature in Great Britain. She bullied Queen Anne, and she henpecked the Great Duke himself, who, serene as » summer morning in a tempest of bullets, cowered Lt his own palace before her imperious will. She defied everything, death included. Indeed, death, like everybody else, seemed to be afraid of her. In hei ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 45 »la age she became as ugly and as spiteful a crone as iver wa. «*acked or burned for witchcraft. She took a malicious dch b ht \a living, because, though life gave her no pleasure, It gave others pain. At one time it was thought she muct go. She lay for a great while speechless and senoeU>3t. The physician said, * She must be blistered or «he will die." This touched her, and she screamed «>.yt, " / won't be blis- tered, and I won't die ! " and she kept her word. But the mirth of society changes to wailing when this conceit develops itself into a hobby, and takes :nen by the button to pester them with the rationale £ its bit of absurdity. The hobby-monger is the jnly perfect and consummated bore, and eccentricity n him becomes a very dismal joke. Self-convinced )f the value of his original, deeply cogitated piece of nonsense, he is determined to devote his life, and your money, to the task of converting his great thought into a great fact, and to make incapacity itself a source of income. The thing is a new mode of levying black-mail, for the cheapest way to escape from the teasing persecution of his tongue is to de liver up your purse. His success generates a whole brood of blockheads, who install hobhyism into an institution, and flood the country with hobby patriot- «m, hobby science, hobby medicine, hobby philao 1Q ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. thropy, hobby theology, hobby morality, and hobby Immorality. Dunces who never had but one thought in their lives, — and that a foolish one, — they cling to that with the tenacity of instinct, and set up, on the strength of it, as Galileos, or Arkwrights, or Clark- sons, or Luthers, transmuting sneers, gibes, invectives, blows, into a sweet, celestial ichor, to slake the thirst of their conceit. They are, to be sure, very candid gentlemen. Their cry is, " P^xamine before you con- demn." Ah ! examine ; but, since the lamented de- cease of Methuselah, human life has been unfortunately contracted, and human knowledge unfortunately en- larged, and it is really the coolest impertinence im- aginable to expect that a man will spend his short existence in inspecting and exploding humbugs, and end at fourscore in establishing a principle which he ought to have taken on trust in his teens. It is better to ride a hobby of one's own than to give one's whole attention to discovering the futility of the hobbies of others ; and better still, as these gen- tlemen are determined that society shall support them, to save time by submitting to assessment. In our country the hobby-mongers seem fairly to be in the ascendant, and the right to mind one's own business must be purchased of these idle dunces portentously developed into voluble bores. Whatever may be thei» ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 47 plan, and however deep may be their sell-deception, their principle of action is identical with that of Punch's music-grinder, who contemptuously refuses the penny you toss at him, to silence his soul-stab- bing melodies, and clamorously demands a shilling as the price of his " moving on." " Don't you sup pose," he inquires, " that I know the vally of peace and quietness as well as you ? " But the conceit of one's self and the conceit of one's hobby are hardly mor6 prolific of eccentricity than the conceit of one's money. Avarice, the most hateful and wolfish of all the hard, cool, callous dis- positions of selfishness, has its own peculiar caprices and crotchets. The ingenuities of its meanness defy all the calculations of reason, and reach the miracu- lous in subtlety. Foote, in endeavoring to express the microscopic niggardliness of a miser of his ac- quaintance, expressed a belief that he would be will ing to take the beam out of his own eye if he knew he could sell the timber. Doubtless one source of *he eccentric miner's insane covetousness and parsi- mony is the tormenting fear of dying a beggar, — hat " fine horror of poverty," according to Lamb, - by which he is not content to keep want from the cjor, or at arm's length, but he places it, by heap Ing wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance/ 48 ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. Well, after saving, and pinching, and scraping, and Btealing, and freezing, and starving, Curmudgeon, the Bkeleton, comes face to face with another skeleton Death, and that fleshless form, with an ironic grin huddles him away, — and he is remembered only by those he has cheated. But his perverse sharpness does not desert him even in his last hours. Scrooge is reported to be dying. It is said that in his will he has left something to a charitable society, and the secretary thereof " happens in," to console him. " You think," says Scrooge, with a malicious sparkle in his closing eyes, " that I am going, but the doctor says the attack is not fatal. If you will take that bequest now, at a deduction of ten per cent, I '11 pay it." " Done ! " said the secretary. " Done ! " says Scrooge, and dies, — dies consistent and triumphant, with a discount on his lips instead of a prayer. It is, however, in politics and public affairs thtt the strange antics of eccentricity produce the smart- est shocks of surprise. Here everything is done in the eyes of men, and disordered minds parade their caprices to a laughing or cursing world. In this sphere of action and passion it is impossible to group or define. The representation tends to become as wild and whirling as the vagaries, volatilities, and inconsistencies it describes. It requires more than ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 49 ordinary steadiness of character for a statesman to iscape from the eccentricities produced by ambition, and the eccentricities produced by reaching the object of ambition, — power. The strife of politics tends to ansettle the calmest understanding, and ulcerate the most benevolent heart. There are no bigotries or absurdities too gross for parties to create or adopt under the stimulus of political passions. The path of all great statesmen lies between two opposing in- sanities, and we can never appreciate the superb se- renity of such men as Washington, Hamilton, Jay, Jefferson, Madison, until we realize the atmosphere of madness, rancor, and folly they were compelled to breathe. There, for instance, among other causes or occasions of political eccentricity, is the love of innovation in itself, and the hatred of innovation in itself; both productive of eccentric partisans, in whose struggles common sense is suspended by mutual con- Bent. By the eccentric reformer, institutions are de- nounced as confining Liberty in strait-waistcoats ; by the eccentric conservative, Liberty is denounced as putting firebrands into the hands of madmen. Thus many of our disgusted American conservatives ap- plauded Louis Napoleon's usurpation on the ground 'Jhat he would restore old abuses, and saw France, fcith delight, leap back thousands of years to the old a d 50 ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. Egyptian monarchy of kings, priests, and soldiers. Gibbon, though the most subtle of religious sceptics, had a morbid hatred of political change, and, on the breaking out of the French Revolution, joined the bishops of the Established Church in assailing it He could not help, however, indulging an ironical fling at the new political friends who were his old theological enemies, and blandly reminded them that if, in his history, he had been a little hard on the primitive church, it was from the best of principles and the best of motives, for that church was an in- novation on the old Pagan Establishment. But the greatest conservative of this sort was Lord- Chancel- lor Thurlow. A deputation of Presbyterians having waited on him to request his aid in obtaining the re- peal of certain statutes disqualifying their body from holding civil offices, Thurlow thus bluffly answered : "Gentlemen, I will be perfectly frank with you. Gentlemen, I am against you, and for the Established Church, by ! Not that I like the Established Church a bit better than any other church, but be- cause it is established. And whenever you can get pour religion established, I '11 be for that too. Good morning to you!" Tn the eccentricity of politicians the two mosl •triking qualities are levity and malignity, — some- ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 61 times existing apart, and sometimes coexisting ir oua mind. The most magnificent instance of levity, com- bined with genius and eloquence, is found, perhaps, in Charles Townshend, the chancellor of the exchequer, who revived the scheme of American taxation, and who carried into the councils of Great Britain a brain large enough for the weightiest affairs, but in- toxicated with impudence, conceit, and champagne. The conceptions of a statesman and the courage of a hero were strangely blended in him with a spirit as volatile, sparkling, and unscrupulous as ever animated the rake of the old comedy. It was as if Sir Har- ry Wildair's tricksiness and mercurial temperament had passed into the head of Camden or Chatham. In the majority of cases, however, the ambition or possession of power develops malignity in disordered minds. In John Randolph it took the shape of a fretful spite which poisoned all it touched, even his own fine faculties. This mingled levity and malig- nity, however, are never seen in their full absurdi- ties and terrors, unless power be absolute, and caprice ranges over a kingdom or an empire, unrestrained by jpinion or law. From the old Oriental despots to the thing of blood and mud " that lately sat throned ja Naples, the history of eccentric despots presents loch a spectacle of monkey -like mischievousnesfta com- 52 ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. biiied with demon-like malice, that we Ian h&rdl/ recognize human nature in a form so diabolically car- icatured. In Nero, Caligula, Domitian, Commodus, Heliogabalus, Paul of Russia, we observe that pecu liar perversity which does wrong things because they are wrong ; and also that last resource of little minds, the desire to startle by the commission of unnatural crimes, evincing the feebleness and barrenness of tal- ent so apt to be associated with such monstrous brutality of disposition, Nero, for example, finds that the luxury of murder palls on his jaded sense, and the poor creature can hit upon no stimulant likely to keep alive his relish for that form of ferocity ehort of murdering his wife and mother ; and at the end — for under such governments there is a decline so deep in the character of the virtues that treachery becomes justice, and assassination becomes patriotism — he dies as thoroughly blase as a London cox- comb, and as abjectly timid as a girl who has seen a ghost. This eccentric malignity is also often developed in men whose minds are unsettled by their being lifted, in the tempests of faction, to a power they we unfitted to exercise. They are Pucks raised to w he seat of Jove. Even Robespierre, — who before Ve became a politician resigned a judicial office be- ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 68 cause he was opposed to capital punishment, — seemed to have been marked oui by nature for an opinionated philanthropist, sour and wilful withal, but well-mean- ing, honest, self-sacrificing, narrow in mind, and obsti- nate in purpose. When he came to be the head of that prolonged mob, the government of France during the Reign of Terror, the poverty of his talents com- pelled him to meet the crisis of affairs by the exploded maxims of the old tyrants. Like all incompetent men who are cursed with power, he tried to make violence do the work of insight and foresight. He Blew because he could not think. He ended in being fiendish because he started in being foolish. The lit- tle thought he had took the shape of an inexorable but bad logic. He tried to solve a political problem, which might have tasked the genius, energy, and ex- perience of the greatest statesman, with a little syllo- gism, of which the Rights of Man and the chopping off the heads of aristocrats constituted the premises, and of which peace, happiness, equality, and fraternity were to be the logical conclusion. The more he chopped, however, the more complicated became his difficulties. New and more puzzling problems sprang up from the Boil he watered with blood. The time came when mere perversity and presumption could carry it no longer. His adherents informed him at night that he was t« 64 ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. bo denounced and slain in the Convention on the morrow, and offered him the means of crushing his enemies. He leaned that barren head of his against a pillar, and for two hours tried to frame some plan by which to carry on the government in case he triumphed. But the poor fellow's invention had been exhausted in the production of his little syllogism, which had miserably failed of success. He could do nothing, he saw, but go on murdering and mur- dering, and he had got somewhat tired of that. The thought that would open a path through the entan- glements of his situation would not come into that unfertile brain. So, in mere despair, he told his ad- herents to let tilings take their course, went to the Convention, uttered his usual declamation, was de- nounced, set upon, and skin ; and thus a capital leader of a debating club, like many a clever man before and since, was ruined by the misfortune of being placed at the head of a nation. It is both impossible to avoid, and dangerous to touch, in an essay like this, the subject of religious eccentricity, though the deviations here from the line of admitted truths and duties are innumerable in amount and variety. There is, first, the eccentricity which proceeds from observing the proprieties of piety while practising the precepts of atheism, — the linei ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 55 decencies of behavior contrasting strangely with the roaree vices of conduct. Thus Madame de Montes- pan, who found it for her interest and vanity to live in habitual violation of the Seventh Commandment, was so rigorous in her devotions that she weighed ler bread in Lent. Cardinal Bernis, the most worth- ess of abbes, owed his advancement in the Church to Ifadame de Pompadour, the most worthless of women, wid then refused " to communicate in the dignity of he purple with a woman of so unsanctimonious a character." Next there is the perverted ingenuity by which creeds are spangled all over with crotchets, «nd the Bible made the basis for conceits as subtle us Cowley's and as ridiculous as Sprat's. Who first doubled the Cape of Good Hope ? Vasco da Gama, you will answer. " No," replies Vieyra, a priest of Portugal ; " one man passed it before he did." "Who?" "Jonah in the whale's belly!" The whale, it seems, from the account of this all-knowing geographer, " went out of the Mediterranean, because he had no other course ; kept the coast of Africa on the left, scoured along Ethiopia, on the shores of Nineveh, and making his tongue serve as a paddle, landed the Prophet there." Next, there is the capri- cious suspension of the damnatory clauses of a creed, »ut "€ respect to eminent individuals, who can give 56 ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. benefices if they cannot practise duties. Kings hav<\ immensely profited by this ecclesiastical urbanity having been allowed to pass sweetly from riot and rapine in this world to rest and reward in the next. " Louie the well-beloved," said the priest who an- nounced the death of Louis the Fifteenth, " sleeps in the Lord." " If such a mass of laziness and lust," growls Carlyle, in reply, " sleep in the Lord, who, think you, sleeps elsewhere ? " But the most ordinary source of the impious piety and irreverent veneration of eccentric religionists is the substitution of an idolatry of self for the wor- ship of God, the individual projecting his own opin- ions and passions into the texts of Scripture and the government of the universe, and thus making a Su- preme Being out of the colossal exaggerations of eelf-will. Under the impulse of a ravenous egoism, Nature and the Bible are converted into an immense magnifying-glass of his own personality, and the Deity with him is but an infinite reflection of himself. Such is ever the tendency and process of fanaticism, and therefore it is that so many gods are often worshipped in one Church. We often smile at the last excess of pagan despotism, the demand of tyrants that divine aonors shall be paid to them ; but the same claim it •ow often urged by little tyrants, who, having div> ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 67 D'^ed their stupidity, inhumanity, or malignity, strut about in quite a furious fashion at their divinity being disallowed, flinging the fussy thunderbolts of their impotent wrath with the air of Joves and the strength of pygmies ! What, think you, would these gentlemen do in case they possessed arbitrary power If the imagination breaks down in the attempt to conceive their possible enormities, the history of re- ligious persecution will be of essential aid in filling up the gaps and enlarging the scope of the most fertile and wide-wandering fancy. The cant of our day, which resents all attempts to analyze bad opin- ions down to their roots in bad dispositions, is prone to dismiss the great theological criminals of history with the smooth remark that they were sincere in their Satanic inhumanities. They used the rack and the hot iron, — they maimed, tormented, gibbeted, burned, beheaded, crucified, it is true ; but then they practised these little diablerie from a sincere sense of duty! Sincere, indeed ! To be sure they were sin- cere. They acted honestly and directly from their characters. Their thoughts, feelings, deeds, — all were of a piece. But out of what interior hell must such devil's notions of duty and Deity have sprung? How much better it w**ald be to strike at the heart of the matter, and acknowledge at once, in the sharp* 8» 58 ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. incisive sarcasm of Bishop Warburton, that these men acted thus because " they made God after man's image, and took the worst possible models at that, — •Jiemselves." If human life, in so many departments of thought *nd action, thus sparkles or glares with eccentrio characters, it is evident that they must occupy a large space in the world's representative literature, mdeed, from Aristophanes down to Thackeray, genius, hough often itself bristling with eccentricities, has •een quick to discern, and cunning to embody, the ■eccentricities of others. The representation has been •scornful or genial according as wit or humor has predominated in the observing mind. In a majority ♦f cases, however, the whims, caprices, crotchets, rui- ng passions, intrusive egotisms, which make their possessors butts or bores to common sense, are by the «oan of mirthful genius so brightened, interpreted, noftened, and humanized, and made to glide into such ludicrous forms of grotesque character, that they are converted into attractive boon companions in the fes- tivities of mind. Two great writers in English liter- ature, Shakespeare and Scott, have been pre-eminently luccessful in this embodiment of eccentric character Shakespeare individualizing its various kinds, Scott imitating its individual specimens. Lower in th# ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 59 •cale, and v» 'dely differing in their manner, are Ben Jonson, Vanbrugh, Fielding, Smollett, Miss Burney, Thackeray, Dickens. The author of " Tristram Shan- dy" occupies in literature a delicious and original little world of his own, answering to the quaint craze in the fine creative genius of Laurence Sterne. Addison, another original, has made oddities the ob- jects of affection by insinuating into them the shy humanities of his beneficent humor ; and in Sir Roger de Coverley has clothed eccentricity with innocence and sanctified it with love, while he has made it touch and unseal those fountains of merriment which sleep in the innermost recesses of the heart. Our own Irving, who felt the attraction of Addison's beautiful reserve while in the act of rushing off* him- self into caricature, commenced his career by welcom- ing the broader outlines of eccentricity with riotous, roaring laughter, and ended with surveying its finer shades with a demure smile. Goldsmith, again, half lovingly, half-laughingly, pictures forth foibles of vanity, and caprices of benevolence, and amiable lit- tle crotchets of understanding, which he discerns peep- ing slyly out from corners and crevices of his own v_sy brain. You can almost hear and see these wits and humorists through .he expressive movement of their respective styles. Steele titters as he delineates. 60 ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. Dryden chuckles, Swift scowls, Pope hiv.cs, as, in wit which is to provoke the mirth of millions, they endow Borne dunce with the immortality of contempt. And then the more genial and subtle of the humorists have such an art in allowing character to develop itself! The folly, or erratic disposition, or queer twist of mind or morals, seems to leak out unwittingly, to escape unawares. The man is self-exposed without being himself conscious of exposure, and goes on cfarming your interest or pity in words which excite your mirth or scorn. It is like Captain Rcok's at- tempt to rouse the sympathy of his fashionable i'riend9 for his losses at the gaming-table. " I lost," he says, "four thousand pounds last nijjht, and the worst of it is, five pounds were in cash." In these writers, however, eccentricity is viewed more or less didactically or dramatically. There aie others whose eccentricities are personal, and shape and color all they see and describe. Such are Ful ler, Burton, and Sir Thomas Browne. But perhaps the most delightful and popular of this class is Cliarles Lamb, — a man cosily domesticated by the heart's Ireside of his readers. Such wit, such humor, such pagination, such intelligence, such sentiment, such kindliness, such heroism, all so quaintly mixed and mingled, and stuttering out in so freakish a fashion. ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 61 and all blending so finely in that exquisite eccentric gomething which we call the character of Charles Lamb, make him the most lovable of writers and men. His essays, the gossip of creative genius, are of a piece with the reoords of his life and conversa- tion. Whether saluting his copy of Chapman's " Ho- mer" with a kiss, — or saying a grace before reading Milton, — or going to the theatre to see his own farce acted, and joining in the hisses of the pit when it fails, — or sagely wondering if the Ogles of Somerset are not descendants of King Lear, — or telling Bar- ry Cornwall not to invite a lugubrious gentleman to dinner because his face would cast a damp over a funeral, — or giving as a reason why he did not leave off smoking, the difficulty of finding an equivalent vice, — or striking into a hot controversy between Coleridge and Ilolcroft, as to whether man as he is, or man as he is to be, is preferable, and settling the dispute by saying, " Give me man as he is not to be," — or doing some deed of kindness and love with tears in his eyes and a pun on his lips, — he is al- ways the same dear, strange, delightful companion and friend. He is never — the rogue — without a scrap of logic to astound common sense. " Mr. Lamb," Bays the head clerk at the India House, "you come down very late in the morning ! " " Yes, 6ir," Mr 62 ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. Lamb replies, " but then you know T go home very early in the afternoon." And then with what hu- morous extravagance he expresses his peevishness at being confined to such work, — with curious ingenuity running his malediction on commerce along all its lines of influence. " Confusion blast all mercantile transactions, all traffic, exchange of commodities, in- tercourse between nations, all the consequent civiliza- tion, and wealth, and amity, and link of society, and getting rid of prejudices, and knowledge of the face of the globe ; and rot all the firs of the forest, that look so romantic alive, and die into desks." It is impossible to cheat this frolicsome humorist with any pretence, any exaggerated sentiment, any of the do- me-goodisms of well-meaning moral feebleness. A lady Bends him " Ccelebs in Search of a Wife," for his pe- rusal and guidance. He returns it with this quatrain written on a fly-leaf, expressing the slight disagree- ment between his views of matrimony and those en- tertained by Miss Hannah More: — " If ever I marry a wife, I '11 marry a landlord's daughter. And sit in the bar all day, And drink cold brandy and water." If he thus slips out of controversy by making the broadest absurdities Ine venicles ot the nnest insijjht ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 63 his sense and enjoyment of absurdities in others risea to rapture. The nonsensical ingenuity of the pam- phlet in which his friend Capel Lofft took the ground that Napoleon, while in the hands of the English, might sue out a writ of habeas corpus, threw him into ecstasies. And not only has he quips and quirks and twisted words for all he sees and feels, but he has the pleasantest art of making his very maladies in- teresting by transmuting them into jests. Out of the darkest depths of the " dismals " fly some of his hap- piest conceits. " My bedfellows," he writes to Words- worth, " are cough and cramp. We sleep three in a bed." " How is it," he says, " that I cannot get rid of this cold ? It can't be from a lack of care. I have studiously been out all these rainy nights until twelve o'clock, have had my feet wet constantly, drank co- piously of brandy to allay inflammation, and done everything else to cure it, and yet it won't depart," ■ — a sage decision, worthy of that illustrious physi eian who told his patient that, if he had no serious drawbacks, he would probably be worse in a week. To crown all, and to make the character perfect in \ts winning contradictions, there beats beneath the ."antHstie covering and incalculable caprices of the humorist the best heart in the world, capable of cour- tesy, of friendship, of love, of heroic self-devotion, and unostentatious self-sacrifice. 64 ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. In this desultory survey of some of the expressions of eccentric character in social life, in politics, in re- ligion, in literature, we have aimed to exhibit eccen- tricity in its principles as far as so slippery, elastic, and elusive a quality will consent to submit itself to the limits of definition. We have endeavored to show that it is a deviation from reason and common sense for the gratification of self-will or the indulgence of some original craze in the faculties, and that this de- viation tends to levity or malignity according as the nature is sweet or savage. We have seen that, airy, innocent, and sportive as it may be in the whims of beautiful natures, it has often led to follies so gross, and crimes so enormous, that their actors seem to have escaped from their humanity into brutes or de- mons. And in this slight view of the morbid phe- nomena of human nature we cannot fail to see how important is that pressure on the individual of insti- tutions and other minds to keep his, caprices in check, and educate and discipline him into reason and use^ fulness, and what a poor mad creature a man is likely to become when this pressure is removed. Freedom no less than order is the product of inward r outward restraint ; and that large and liberal dis- course of intelligence which thinks into the meaning l»f institutions, and enters into communion with other ECCENTRIC CHARACTER. 66 minds, — which is glad to believe that the reason of the race through sixty centuries of gradual develop- ment carries with it more authority than some wild freak or flash of its owi ■ onceit, — this it is which emancipates man from egotism, passion, and folly ; which puts into his will the fine instinct of wisdom ; which makes him tolerant as well as earnest, and merciful as well as just ; which connects his thoughts with things, and opens a passage for them into the common consciousness of men ; and which, chaining impulse to liberate intelligence, and rounding in ec- centricity with the restraints of reason, enlarges his intellect only to inform his conscience, doubles his power by giving it a right direction, and purifies his nature from vanity, and self-will, to bind him, in the beneficent bonds of a common sympathy and a com- mon sense, to the rights, interests, and advancement at a comma a humanity. ffl. INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. THE desire, the duty, the necessity of the age in which we live is education, or that culture which develops, enlarges, and enriches each individ- ual intelligence, according to the measure of its ca- pacity, by familiarizing it with the facts and laws of nature and human life. But, in this rage for infor- mation, we too often overlook the mental constitution of the being we would inform, — detaching the ap- prehensive from the active powers, weakening char- acter by overloading memory, and reaping a harvest of imbeciles after we may have flattered ourselvea we had sown a crop of geniuses. No person can be called educated, until he has organized his knowledge into faculty, and can wield it as a weapon. We purpose, therefore, to invite the attention of our read- ers to some remarks on Intellectual Character, the last and highest result of intellectual education, and the indispensable condition of intellectual success. It is evident, that, when a young man leaves hii INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 67 school or college to take his place in the world, it is indispensable that he be something as well as know something ; and it will require but little experience to demonstrate to him that what he really knows is little more than what he really is, and that his pro- gress in intellectual manhood is not more determined oy the information he retains, than by that portion which, by a benign provision of Providence, he is enabled to forget. Youth, to be sure, is his, — youth, in virtue of which he is free of the universe, — youth, with its elastic vigor, its far-darting hopes, its gener- ous impatience of prudent meanness, its grand denial of instituted falsehood, its beautiful contempt of ac- credited baseness, — but youth which must now con- centrate its wayward energies, which must discourse with facts and grapple with men, and, through strife, and struggle, and the sad wisdom of experience, must pass from the vague delights of generous impulses to the assured joy of manly principles. The moment he comes in contact with the stern and stubborn re- alities which frown on his entrance into practical life, he will find that power is the soul of knowledge, and character the condition of intelligence. He will dis- cover that intellectual success depends primarily on qualities which are jiot strictly intellectual, but per- K>nnl and constitutional. The test of success is in. 68 INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. fluence, — that is, the power of shaping events by informing, guiding, animating, controlling other minds Whether this influence be exerted directly in the world of practical affairs, or indirectly in the world of ideas, its fundamental condition is still force of in- dividual being, and the amount of influence is the measure of the degree of force, just as an effect measures a cause. The characteristic of intellect is insight, — insight into things and their relations ; but then this insight is intense or languid, clesr or con- fused, comprehensive or narrow, exactly in proportion to the weight and power of the individual who sees and combines. It is not so much the into Uect that makes the man, as the man the intellect ; in every act of earnest thinking, the reach of the thought depends on the pressure of the will ; and we would therefore emphasize and enforce, as the primitive re- quirement of intellectual success, that discipline of the individual which develops dim tendencies into po>itive sentiments, sentiments into ideas, and ideas into abilities, — that discipline by which intellect is penetrated through and through with the qnalitief* 1/ manhood, and endowed with arms as well ^s e) <» This is Intellectual Character. Now it should be thundered in the ears metimes partially succeeds. But a revulsion comes, — and then brass has to make a break-neck descent to reach its proper level below gold. There are others whom indolence deludes by some trash about " fits " of inspiration, for whose Heaven-sent spasms they are humbly to wait. There is, it seems, a lucky thought somewhere in the abyss of possibil- ity, which is somehow, at some time, to step out of essence into substance, and take up its abode in their capacious minds, — dutifully kept unoccupied in order that the expected celestial visitor may not be crowded for room. Chance is to make them king, and chance to crown them without their stir ! There are others still, who, while sloth is sapping the primitive energy of their natures, expect to scale the fortresses of knowledge by leaps and not by ladders, and who count on success in such perilous gymnastics, not by the discipline of the athlete, but by the dissipation of the idler. Indolence, indeed, is never at a loss for li smooth lie or delicious sophism to justify inaction, and, in our day, has rationalized it into a philosophy of the mind, and idealized it into a school of poetry, and organized it into a " hospital of incapables." It poraises you the still ecstasy of a divine repose, while it lures you surely down into the vacant dui Si INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. ness of inglorious sloth. It provides a primrose path to stagnant pools, to an Arcadia of thistles, and a Paradise of mud. But in a mind of any primitive power, intellectual indolence is sure to generate intellectual conceit, — a little Jack Horner, that ensconces itself in lazy heads, and, while it dwarfs every power to the level of its own littleness, keeps vociferating, " What a great man am I ! " It is the essential vice of this glib imp of the mind, even when it infests large intellects, that it puts Nature in the possessive case, — labels all its inventions and discoveries " My truth," — and moves about the realms of art, science, and letters in a constant fear of having its pockets picked. Think of a man having vouchsafed to him one of those awful glimpses into the mysteries of creation which should be received with a shudder of prayer- ful joy, and taking the gracious boon with a smirk of all-satisfied conceit ! One page in what Shake- speare calls " Nature's infinite book of secrecy " flies a moment open to his eager gaze, and he hears the iustling of the myriad leaves as they close and clasp, only to make his spirit more abject, his vanity more ravenous, his hatred of rivals more rancorous and wean. That grand unselfish love of *ruth, and joy In its discovery, by whomsoever made, which cbarao INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 85 *erite the true seeker and seer of science and creative art, alone can keep the mind alive and alert, alone can make the possession of truth a means of elevat- ing and purifying the man. But if this conceit, in powerful natures, tend8 to belittle character, and eat into and consume the very faculties whose successful exercise creates it, its slyly insinuated venom works swifter and deadlier on youth and inexperience. The ordinary forms of conceit, it is true, cannot well flourish in any assemblage of young men, whose plain interest it is to undeceive all self-deception and quell every insurrection of in- dividual vanity, and who soon understand the art of burning the nonsense out of an offending brother by caustic ridicule and slow-roasting sarcasm. But there is danger of mutual deception, springing from a com mon belief in a false but attractive principle of cul- ture. The mischief of intellectual conceit in our day consists in its arresting mental growth at the start by stuffing the mind with the husks of pretentious generalities, which, while they impart no vital power and convey no real information, give seeming enlarge- ment to thought, and represent a seeming opulence of knowledge. The deluded student, who picks up \»e»3 ideas in masquerade at the rag-fairs and old- tlothes shops of philosoiny, thinks he has the key 86 INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. to »U secrets and the solvent of all problems, when he really has no experimental knowledge of anything, and dwindles all the more for every juieeless, unnu tritious abstraction he devours. Though famished for the lack of a morsel of the true mental food of facts and ideas, he still svvaggeringly despises all relative Information in his ambition to clutch at absolute truth, and accordingly goes directly to ultimates by the short juts of cheap generalities. Why, to be sure, should he, who can, Napoleon-like, march straight on to the interior capital, submit, Marlborough-like, to the drudgery of besieging the frontier fortresses ? Why Bhould he, who can throw a girdle of generalization roujd the universe in less than forty minutes, stoop to master details ? And this easy and sprightly am- plitude of understanding, which consists not in includ- ing but in excluding all relative facts and principles, he calls comprehensiveness ; the mental decrepitude it occasions he dignifies with the appellation of repose ; and, on the strength of comprehensiveness and repose, he is of course qualified to take his seat beside Shake- speare, and chat cosily with Bacon, and wink know- ingly at Goethe, and startle Leibnitz with a slap on the shoulder, — the true Red-Republican sign of liberty in manners, equality in power, and fraternity in ideas These men, to be sure, have a way of saying thingi INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 87 which he has not yet caught; but then their wide- reaching thoughts are his as well as theirs. Imitating the condescension of some contemporary philosophers of the Infinite, he graciously accepts Christianity and patronises the idea of Deity, though he gives you to understand that he could easily pitch a generalization outside of both. And thus, mistaking his slab-sided- ness for many-sidedness, and forgetting that there is no insight without force to back it, — bedizened in conceit and magnificent in littleness, — he is thrown on society, walking in a vain show of knowledge, and doomed to be up>et and trampled on by the first brawny concrete Fact he stumbles against. A true method of culture makes drudgery beautiful by pre- senting a vision of the object to which it leads; — beware of the conceit that dispenses with it ! How much hetter it is to delve for a little solid knowledge, and be sure of that, than to be a proper target for such a sarcasm as a great statesman once shot at a glib advocate, who was saying nothing with great fluency and at great length ! " Who," he asked, " is this self-sufficient, all-sufficient, insufficient man?'* Idleness and Conceit, however, are not more op- posed to lhat out-springing, reverential activity which makes the person forget himself in devotion to his objects, than Fear. A bold heart in a sound head, — ■ 88 INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. that is the condition of energetic thinking, of the thought that thinks round things, and into things, and through things ; but fear freezes activity at its inmost fountains. " There is nothing," says Montaigne, " that I fear so much as fear." Indeed, an educated man, who creeps along with an apologetic air, cringing to this name and ducking to that opinion, and hoping that it is not too presumptuous in him to beg the right to exist, — why, it is a spectacle piteous to gods and hateful to men ! Yet think of the many knots of mcnitory truisms in which activity is likely to be taught and entangled at the outset, — knots which a brave purpose will not waste time to untie, but in- stantly cuts. First, there is the nonsense of students killing themselves by over-study, — some few instances of which, not traceable to over-eating, have shielded the shortcomings of a million idlers. Next, there is the fear that the intellect may be developed at the expense of the moral nature, — one of 'hose truths in the abstract which are made to do tne office of lies in the application, and which are calculated not so much to make good men as goodies, — persons re- joicing in an equal mediocrity of morals and mind, and pertinent examples of the necessity of personal force to convert moral maxims into moral might The truth would seem to be, that half the crimes and INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 89 lutFei-ings which history records and observation fur- nishes are directly traceable to want of thought rather than to bad intention ; and in regard to the other half, which may be referred to the remorseless selfishness of unsanctified intelligence, has that selfish- ness ever had more valuable allies and tools than the mental torpor that cannot think and the conscientious stupidity that will not? Moral laws, indeed, are in- tellectual facts, to be investigated as well as obeyed ; and it is not a blind or blear-eyed conscience, but a conscience blended with intelligence and consolidated with character, that can both see and act. Bu* curtly dismissing the fallacy, that the moral and spiritual faculties are likely to find a sound basis in a cowed and craven reason, we come to a form of fear that practically paralyzes independent thought more than any other, while it is incompatible with manliness and self-respect. This fear is compounded of self-distrust and that mode of vanity which cowers beneath the invective of men whose applause it nei- ther courts nor values. If you examine critically the two raging parties of conservatism and radicalism, you will find that a goodly number of their partisans are men who have not chosen their position, but have oeen bullied into it, — men who see clearly enough that both parties are based on principles almost 90 INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. equally true in themselves, almost equally false bj being detached from their mutual relations. But then each party keeps its professors of intimidation and Btainers of character, whose business it is to deprive men of the luxury of large thinking, and to drive all neutrals into their respective ranks. The missiles hurled from one side are disorganize^ infidel, disun- ionist, despiser of law, and other trumpery of that sort ; from the other side, the no less effective ones of murderer, dumb dog, traitor to humanity, and oth- er trumpery of that sort ; and the young and sensi- tive student finds it difficult to keep the poise of his nature amid the cross-fire of this logic of fury and rhetoric of execration, and too often ends in joining one party from fear, or the other from the fear of being thought afraid. The probability is, that the least danger to his mental independence will proceed from any apprehension he may entertain of what are irreverently styled the "old fogies"; for if Young America goes on at its present headlong rate, there is little doubt that the old fogy will have to descend from his eminence of place, become an object of pathos rather than terror, and be compelled to make the inquiring appeal to his brisk hunters, so ofteu made to himself in vain, " Am I not a mau and a Brother ?" But, with whatever association, politic*. INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 91 i>r moral, the thinker may connect himself, let him yo in, and not be dragged in or scared in. He certainly can do no good to himself, his country, or his race by being the slave and echo of the heads of a clique. Besides, as most organizations are con- stituted on the principles of a sort of literary social- ism, and each member lives and trades on a common capital of phrases, there is danger that these phrases may decline from signs into substitutes of thought, and both intellect and character evaporate in words Thus, a man may be a Union man and a National man, or an Anti-Slavery man and a Temperance man and a Woman's-Rights man, and still be very little of a man. There is, indeed, no more ludicrous sight than to see Mediocrity, perched on one of these re- Bounding adjectives, strut and bluster, and give it- self braggadocio airs, and dictate to all quiet men its maxims of patriotism or morality, and all the while be but a living illustration through what grandeurs of opinion essential meanness and poverty of soul will peer and peep and be disclosed. To be a states- man or reformer requires a courage that dares defy dictation from any quarter, and a mind which has tome in direct contact with the great inspiring ideas of country and humanity. All the rest is spite, and lpleen, and cant, and conceit, and words. 92 INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. It is plain, of course, that every man of large and living thought will naturally sympathize with those great social movements, informing and reforming, which are the glory of the age; but it must always be remembered that the grand and generous senti- ments that underlie those movements demand in their fervid disciple a corresponding grandeur and generos- ity of soul. There is no reason why his philanthropy Bhould be malignant because other men's conserva- tism may be stupid ; and the vulgar insensibility to the rights of the oppressed, and the vulgar scorn of the claims of the wretched, which men calling them- selves respectable and educated may oppose to his own warmer feelings and nobler principles, should be met, not with that invective which may be as vulgar as the narrowness it denounces, nor always with that indignation which is righteous as well as wrathful, but with that awful contempt with which Magnanim- ity shames meanness, simply by the irony of her lofty example and the sarcasm of her terrible si- lence. In these remarks, which we trust our readers hava at least been kind enough to consider worthy of an effort of patience, we have attempted to connect al genuine intellectual success with manliness of charac* ter; ha\e endeavored to show that force of indivioV INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 93 aal being is its primary condition ; that this force is augmented and enriched, or weakened and impover- ished, according as it is or is not directed to ap- propriate objects ; that indolence, conceit and fear present continual checks to this going out of the mind into glad and invigorating communion with facts And laws ; and that as a man is not a mere bundle of faculties, but a vital person, whose unity pervades, vivifies, and creates all the varieties of his manifesta- tion, the same vices which enfeeble and deprave character tend to enfeeble and deprave intellect. But perhaps we have not sufficiently indicated a dis- eased state of consciousness, from which most intel- lectual men have suffered, many have died, and all should be warned, — the disease, namely, of mental dis- gust, the sign and the result of mental debility. Men- tal disgust "sicklies o'er" all the objects of thought, extinguishes faith in exertion, communicates a dull wretchedness to indolence in the very process by which it makes activity impossible, and drags into its own slough of despond, and discolors with its own morbid reveries, the objects which it should ardently leek and genially assimilate. It sees things neither »s they are, nor as they are glorified and transfigured by hope and health and faith ; but, in the apathy of that idling introspection which betrays a genius foi 94 INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. misery, it pronounces effort to be vanity, and d©» Bpairingiy dismisses knowledge as delusion. " De« spair," says Donne, " is the damp of hell ; rejoicing is the serenity if heaven." Now contrast this mental disgust, which proceeds from mental debility, with the sunny and soul-lifting exhilaration radiated from mental vigor, — a vigot which comes from the mind's secret consciousness that it is in contact with moral and spiritual verities, and is partaking of the rapture of their immortal life, A spirit earnest, hopeful, energetic, inquisitive, mak- ing its mistakes minister to wisdom, and converting the obstacles it vanquishes into power, — a spirit in- spired by a love of the excellency and beauty of knowledge, which will not let it sleep, — such a spirit soon learns that the soul of joy is hid in the austere form of Duty, and that the intellect becomes brighter keener, clearer, more buoyant, and more efficient, as it feels the freshening vigor infused by her monitions and menaces, and the celestial calm imparted by her soul-satisfying smile. In all the professions and oc- cupations over which Intellect holds dominion, the student will find that there is no grace of character without its corresponding grace of mind. lie will find that virtue is an aid to insight ; that good and •weet affections will bear a harvest of pure and higk INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 95 .noughts ; that patience will make the intellect per* listent in plans which benevolence will make benefi- cent in results ; that the austerities of conscience will dictate precision to statements and exactness to argu- ments ; that the same moral sentiments and moral power which regulate the conduct of lite will illumine the path and stimulate the purpose of those daring spirits eager to add to the discoveries of truth s nd the creations of art. And he will also find that this purifying interaction of spiritual and mental forces will give the mind an abiding foundation of joy for its starts of rapture and flights of ecstasy; — a joy in whose light and warmth, languor and discontent and depression and despair will be charmed away ; — a joy, which will make the mind large, generous, hopeful, aspiring, in order to make life beautiful and sweet; — a joy, in the words of an old divine, " which will put on a more glorious garment above, and taa joy superinvcsted in glory i " TV. HEROIC CHARACTER. ri^HE noblest and most exhilarating objects ol -*- human contemplation are those which exhibit human nature in its exalted aspects. Our hearts instinctively throb and burn in sympathy with grand thoughts and brave actions radiated from great char- acters ; for they give palpable form to ideals of con duct domesticated in all healthy imaginations, and fulfil prophecies uttered in the depths of all aspiring souls. They are, in fact, what all men feel they ought to be. They inspire our weakness by the energy of their strength ; they sting our pride by the irony of their elevation. Their flights of thought and audacv lies of action, which so provokingly mock our wise Bin can be applied to him without doing injustice to the dignity of evil and the respectabilities of the Satanic. Mean as this poisonous bit of humanity is, he still wields a wide influence over opinion by creeping Btealthily into the recesses of other and larger minds, and using their powers to give currency to his sen- timents, lie thus dictates no inconsiderable portion of the biography, criticism, history, politics, and belles lettres in general circulation ; and, by a cunning 100 HEROIC CHARACTER. misuse of the words prudence and practical wisaom^ impudently teaches that disinterestedness is selfishness in disguise, poetry a sham, heroism craft or insanity, religion a convenient lie, and human life a cultivated bog. We detect his venomous spirit in all those eminent men whose abilities are exercised to degrade man and wither up the springs of generous action. Thus Dean Swift, in his description of the Yahoos, combines the sentiment of the sneak with the faculty of the satirist ; Rochefoucauld, in his " Maxims," the sentiment of the sneak combined with the faculty of the philosopher ; and Voltaire, in his " Pucelle," pre- sents a more hideous combination still of sneak and poet. Having thus ruled out the evidence of this carica- ture and caricaturist of humanity against the reality of the heroic element in man, ,we may now proceed to its analysis and description. And first, it is ne- cessary to state that all vital ideas and purposes have their beginning in sentiments. Sentiment is tho living principle, the soul, of thought and volition, determining the direction, giving the impetus, and constituting the force, of faculties. Heroism is nc extempore work of transient impulse, — a rocket rush ! ng fretfully up to disturb the dargn(.6S by which after a moment's insulting radiance, it 'a ruthlessly HEROIC CHARACTER. 10} ■wallowed up, — but a steady fire, which darts forth tongues of flame. It is no sparkling epigram of ac- tion, but a luminous epic of character. It first ap- pears in the mind as a mysterious but potent senti- ment, working below consciousness in the unsounded depths of individual being, and giving the nature it inhabits a slow, sure, upward tendency to the noble and exalted in meditation and action. Growing witli the celestial nutriment on which it feeds, and gaining strength as it grows, it gradually condenses into con- Bcious sentiment. This sentiment then takes the form of intelligence in productive ideas, and the form of organization in heroic character ; so that, at the end, heart, intellect, and will are all kindled in one blaze, all united in one individuality, and all gush out in one purpose. The person thus becomes a living Boul, thinking and acting with the rapidity of one who feels spiritual existence, with the audacity of one who obeys spiritual instincts, and with the intelligence cf one who discerns spiritual laws. There is no break or flaw in the connection between the various parts of his nature, but a vital unity, in which intellect iseems to have the force of will, and will the insight and foresight of intellect. There is no hesitation, no stopping half-way, in the pursuit of his lofty aim, partly because, his elevation being the elevation of 102 HEROIC CHARACTER nature, he is not perched on a dizzy peak of thought, hut is established on a table-land of character, and partly because there plays round the object he seek* a light and radiance of such strange, unearthly lustre, that his heart, smitten with love for its awful beauty. is drawn toward it by an irresistible fascination. Disappointment, discouragement, obstacles, drudgery, only sting his energies by opposition or are glorified to his imagination as steps ; for beyond them and through them is the Celestial City of his hopes, ghining clear to the inner eye of his mind, tempting, enticing, urging him on through all impediments, by the sweet, attractive force of its visionary charm ! The eyes of such men, by the testimony of painters, always have the expression of looking into distant space. As a result of this unwearied spiritual energy and this ecstatic spiritual vision is the courage of the hero. He has no fear of death, because the idea of death is lost in his intense consciousness of life, — full, rich, exulting, joyous, lyrical life, — which ever asserts the immortality of mind, because it feels it- self immortal, and is scornfully indifferent to that drowsy twilight of intellect into which atheism sen da its unsubstantial spectres, and in which the whole flock of fears, terrors, despairs, weaknesses, and doubts •catter their enfeebling maxims of misanthropy, and HEROIC CHARACTER. 103 Insinuate their ghastly temptations to suicide. One ray from a sunlike soul drives them gibbering back to their parent darkness ; for M Whatever crazy sorrow saith, No life that breathes with human breath Hath ever truly wished for death. 4 "T is life of which our nerves are scant, life, — not death, — for which we pant. More life, and fuller, that we want ! " This life of the soul, which is both light and heat, intelligence and power, — this swift-ascending instinct of the spirit to spiritual ideas and laws, — this bold comtu'ttal of self to something it values more than all the interests of self, — attests the presence of the heroic element by indicating an ideal standard of conduct. Let us now contemplate it in the scale of moral precedence, according as it fastens its upward glance on the idea of glory, or country, or humanity, or heaven. This will lead to a short consideration of the hero as a soldier, as a patriot, as a reformer and as a saint. In viewing the hero as a soldier, it must be re- membered that the first great difficulty in human life is to rouse men from the abject dominion of lelfishness, laziness, sensuality, fear, and other forms tf physical existen ;e but spiritual death. Fear ii 104 HEROIC CHARACTER. the paralysis of the soul ; and nature, preferring an- archy to imbecility lets loose the aggressive passions to shake it off. Hence war, which is a rude protest of manhood against combining order with slavery, and repose with degradation. As long as it is a passion, it merely illustrates nature's favorite game of fighting one vice with another ; but in noble natures the pas- sion becomes consecrated by the heart and imagina- tion, acknowledges an ideal aim, and, under the inspiration of the sentiment of honor, inflames the whole man with a love of the dazzling idea of glory. It is this heroic element in war which palliates its enormities, humanizes its horrors, and proves the combatants to be men, and not tigers and wolves. Its grand illusions — fopperies to the philosopher and vices to the moralist — are realities to the hero. Glory feeds his heart's hunger for immortality, gives him a beautiful disdain of fear, puts ecstasy into his courage and claps wings to his aspirations, and makes the grim battle-field, with its crash of opposing hosts and the deafening din of its engines of death, as Bweet to him " As ditties highly penned, Sung by a fair queen in a summer's bower, Wi'± ravishing division, to her lute." This splendid fanaticism, while it has infected suck HEROIC CHARACTER. 105 fije and pure spirits as Bayard and Sir Philip Sid- ney, and thus allied itself with exalted virtues, haa not altogether denied its hallowing light to men stained with Satanic vices. In Hannibal, in Caesar, in Wallenstein, in Napoleon, in all commanders of gigantic abilities as well as heroic sentiments, and whose designs stretch over an extended field of op- erations, the idea of glory dilates to the vastness of their desires, and is pursued with a ruthle.-sness of intellect which, unchecked by moral principle, is in- different to all considerations of truth and humanity which block the way to success. The ravenous hun- ger for universal dominion which characterizes such colossal spirits, though criminal, is still essentially ideal, and takes hold of what is immortal in evil. Such men are the unhallowed poets and artists of action, fiercely impatient to shape the world into the form of their imperious conceptions, — like the usurp- ing god of the old Greek mythology, who devoured all existing natures, and swallowed all the pre-exist- ing elements of things, and then produced the world anew after the pattern of his own tyrannous ideas. But their crimes partake of the greatness of their characters, and cannot be imitated by malefactors of a lower grade. The courage of the devotee of glorj has in it as t* 106 HEROIC CHARACTER. element of rapture which resembles the fine frenzj of the poet. The hero, indeed, has such prodigious energy and fulness of soul, possesses so quick, keen, and burning a sense of life, that when great perils call for almost superhuman efforts, he exhibits flashes of valor which transcend all bodily limitations ; for he feels, in the fury and delirium of imaginative ecstasy, as if his body were all ensouled, and, though riddled with bullets, would not consent to death. It was this sense which made Cajsar rush singly on the Spanish ranks, and carried Napoleon across the Bridge of Lodi. " I saw him," says Demosthenes, in speaking of Philip of Macedon, " though covered with wounds, his eye struck out, his collar-bone broke, maimed, both in his hands and feet, still resolutely rush into the midst of dangers, and ready to deliver up to Fortune any part of his body she might desire, provided he might live honorably and gloriously with the rest." It was this sense also that forced out of the cold heart of Robespierre the only heroic utter ance of his life. In his lust struggle in the Conven- tion, surrounded by enemies eager for his blood, and his endeavors to speak in his own defence drowned by the clamors of the assembly, desperation infused eloquence even into him, and he cried out, in a voice heard above everything else, " President of Assassins bear me ! ' HEROIC CHARACTER. 107 The hero, also, when his inspiration is a thought, has a kind of faith that the blind messengers of death hurtling round bira will respect him who rep- resents in his person the majesty of an idea. " The ball that is to hit me," said Napoleon, " has not yet been cast " ; and this confidence of great generals in a tacit understanding between them and the bullets was quaintly expressed by the brave Dessaix in the presentiment of death which came over him on the morning of the battle of Marengo. "It is a long time," he said to one of his aides-de-camp, " since 1 have fought in Europe. The bullets won't know me again. Something will happen." The audacity and energy of the hero likewise stimulate his intelligence, brightening and condensing rather than confusing his mind. The alertness, saga- city, and coolness of his thinking are never more ap- parent than in the frenzy of conflict. At the terrible naval battle of the Baltic, Nelson, after the engage- ment had lasted four hours, found that an armistice was necessary to save his fleet from destruction, and, in the heat and din of the cannonade, wrote a letter to the Crown Prince of Dermark proposing one. Not a minute was to be lost, and an officer hastily handed him a wafer to seal it. Bu* Nelson called for a candle and deliberately sealed it in wax, 108 HEROIC CHARACTER. * This is no time," he said, " to appear hurried and informal." Gonsalvo, the great captain, in one of his Italian battles, had his powder magazine blown up by the enemy's first discharge. His soldiers, smitten by sudden panic, paused and turned, but he instantly rallied them with the exclamation, " My brave boys, the victory is ours ! Heaven tells us by this signal that we shall have no further need of our artillery." Napoleon was famous for combining daring with Bhrewdness, and was politic even in his fits of rage. In desperate circumstances he put on an air of reck- less confidence, which cowed the spirits of his adver- saries, and almost made them disbelieve the evidence of their senses. Thus he induced the Austrian am- bassador to commit the folly of signing the treaty of Campo Formio, by a furious threat of instant war, which, if declared at that time, would probably have resulted to Austria's advantage. Seizing a precious vase of porcelain, a gift to the ambassador from the Empress Catherine, he exclaimed passionately, " The die is then cast ; the truce broken ; war declared. But mark my words ! before the end of autumn I will break in 'pieces your monarchy as I now destroy this porcelain " ; and, dashing it into fragments, he bowed |nf the hero as a soldier. The great conservative instinct of patriotism is io 110 HEROIC CHARACTER. all vigorous communities, and under its impulse whole nations sometimes become heroic. Even its prejudices are elements of spiritual strength, and most of the philosophic chatterers who pretend to be above them are, in reality, below them. Thus the old Hollander, who piously attempted to prove that Dutch was the language spoken by Adam in Para- dise, and the poor Ethiopians, who believed that God made their sands and deserts in person, and contempt- uously left the rest of the world to be manufactured by his angels, were in a more hopeful condition of manhood than is the cosmopolitan coxcomb, who, from the elevation of a mustache and the comprehen- siveness of an imperial, lisps elegant disdain of all narrow national peculiarities. The great drawback on half the liberality of the world is its too fre- quent connection with indifference or feebleness. When we apply to men the tests of character, we often find that the amiable gentleman, who is so blandly superior to the prejudices of sect and coun- try, and who clasps the whole world in the mild embrace of his commonplaces, becomes a furious bigot when the subject-matter rises to the importance of one-and-sixpence, and the practical question is wheth- er "he or you shall pay it. The revenge of the little V »oul and the w°ak in will is to apply to the strong HEROIC CHARACTER. Ill in character the tests of criticism ; and then your un- mistakable do-nothing can prattle prettily in the pa- tois of the giants, and, with a few abstract maxims, that any boy can grasp, will smirkingly exhibit to you the limitations in thought of such poor creatures bs Miltiades, Leonidas, Fabius, Scipio, of Wallace, Bruce, Tell, Hofer, of Joan of Arc, Henry IV., Turgot, Lafayette, of De Witt and William of Or ange, of Grattan, Curran, and Emmett, of Pym, Hampden, Russell, Sidney, Marvell, of Washington, Adams, Henry, Hamilton, and all the rest of the heroes of patriotism. The idea these men represent may, doubtless, be easily translated into a truism, and this truism be easily overtopped by some truism more general ; but their faith, fortitude, self-devotion, their impassioned, all-absorbing love of country, are, unhap- pily, in the nature of paradoxes. Patriotism, indeed, when it rises to the heroic standard, is a positive love of country, and it will do all and sacrifice all which it is in the nature of love U) do and to sacrifice for its object. It is heroic on- ly when it is lifted to the elevation of the ideal. — when it is so hallowed by the affections and glorified by the imagination that the whole being of the man is thrilled and moved by its inspiration, and drudgery Deeomes beautiful, and suffering noble, and death 112 HEROIC CHARACTER. gweet, in the country's service. No mere intelligent regard for a nation's material interests, or pride in its extended dominion, is sufficient to constitute a patriot hero. It is the sentiment and the idea of the country, "felt in his blood and felt along his heart " ; it is this which withdraws him from self, and identifies him with the nation ; which enlarges his personality to the grandeur and greatness of the na- tional personality ; which makes national thoughts and national passions beat and burn in his own heart and brain, until at last he feels every wrong done to his country as a personal wrong, and every wrong com- mitted by his country as a sin for which he is per- sonally responsible. Such men are nations individ- ualized. They establish magnetic relations with what is latent in all classes, command all the signs of that subtle freemasonry which brings men into instant communion with the people, and are ever impatient and dangerous forces in a nation until they reach their rightful, predestined position at its head. " As in nature," says Bacon, " things move more violent- ly to their place and calmly in their place, so vir- tue in ambition is violent, in authority settled and calm." As long as Chatham is out of office, Eng- land must be torn with factions, in his furious endeav t>re to upset the pretenders to statesmanship who HEROIC CHARACTER. 113 •coudv the official station* ; but, the moment he is minister, the nation comes to self-consciousness in him, and acts with the promptitude, energy, and unity of a great power. Though his body was shattered and worn with illness, his spirit — the true spirit of the nation — was felt at once in every department of the public service ; timidity, hesitation, intrigue, mediocrity, disappeared before his audacious intelli- gence ; and India, America, the continent of Europe, soon felt the full force of the latent energies of the na- tional soul. The word impossible was hateful to Chat- ham, as it is to all vigorous natures who recognize the latent, the reserved power, in men and nations. u Never let me hear that foolish word again," said Mirabeau. " Impossible ! — it is not good French," said Napoleon. My Lord Anson, at the Admiralty, Bends word to Chatham, then confined to his chamber by one of his most violent attacks of the gout, that it is impossible for him to fit out a naval expedition within tin; period to which he is limited. " Impossi- ble '"cried Chatham, glaring a 1 the messenger; "who talks to me of impossibilities?" Then starting to his feet, and forcing out great drops of agony on his brow with the excruciating torment of the effort, he pxclaimed, "Tell Lord Anson that he serves under a ttlinister who treads on impossibilities!" One of hiu 114 HEfcOlC CHARACTER. contemporaries calls all this ranting. " Lord Clmt« ham's rants," he says, " are amazing." But a states- man who indulged in such fine rants as Quebec and Minden, who ranted France out of Germany, Amer- ica, and India, and ranted England into a power of the first class, is a ranter infinitely to be pre- ferred to those cool and tasteful politicians who ruin the countries they govern with so much decorous duncery and grave and dignified feebleness. Patriotism, to the patriot hero, does not consist in aiding the government of his country in every basfc or stupid act it may perform, but rather in paralyz- ing its power when it violates vested rights, affronts instituted justice, and assumes undelegated authority. Accordingly, Chatham, the type of the patriot, but •vhose patriotism comprehended the whole British empire, put forth the full force and frenzy of his £ mius and passions against the administrations who taxed America ; gloried, as an English patriot, in the armed resistance of the Colonies ; gave them the ma- terial aid and comfort ( t his splendid fame and over- whelming eloquence ; became, in the opinion of all little-minded patriots, among whom was King George the Third himself, a trumpet of sedition, an enemy to his country ; and, with the grand audacity of hi» character, organized an opposition, so strong in rea- HEROIC CHARACTER. llo »oi» and moral power, and so uncompromising in its attitude, that it at least enfeebled the efforts of the gov- ernments it could not overturn, and made Lord North more than once humorously execrate the memory of Columbus for discovering a continent which gave him and his ministry so much trouble. Fox and Burke, as well as Chatham, viewed the Americans as Eng- lish subjects struggling for English legal privileges; they would not admit, even after the Colonists had revolted, that they were rebels ; and Lord North was near the truth, when, interrupted by Fox for using the offensive word, he mockingly corrected himself, and with an arch look at the Whig benches, called the American army and generals, not rebels, but " gentle- men of the Opposition over the water." In after years, when Fox and Burke had quarrelled, Fox, referring, in the House of Commons, to old memories of their political friendship, alluded to the time when they had mutually wept over the fall of Montgomery, and mu- tually rejoiced over a victory by Washington ; and one of the noblest passages in literature is the mem- orable sentence with which Burke concludes his address to the electors of Bristol, in defence of his con- duct in regard to the American war and the govern- ment of Ireland. It just indicates that delicate line nhizh separates, in great and generous natures, the 116 HEROIC CHARACTER. highest love or country from the still higher lov° ot mankind. "The charges against me," he says, "are all of one kind, — that I have carried the principles of general justice and benevolence too far, — further than a cautious policy would warrant, — further than the opinions of many could go along with me. In every accident which may happen to me through life, in pain, in sorrow, in depression, in distress, — I wil! call to mind this accusation, and be comforted." It is a great advance, morally and mentally, when a man's heart and brain reach out beyond the sphere of his personal interests to comprehend the nation to which he belongs ; but there are men whose ascending and widening natures refuse to be limited even by the sentiment and idea of country, whose raised conceptions grasp the beauty of beneficence, the grandeur of truth, the majesty of right, and who, in the service of these commanding ideas, are ready to suffer all, in the spirit of that patience which St. Pierre finely calls he " courage of virtue," and to dare all, in the spirit c r that self-devotion which is certainly the virtue of courage. This class includes all reformers in society, in government, in philosophy, in religion, whose po sition calls for heroic acts, resolutions, sacrifices, — for manhood as well as for mental power. Thus Milton, whose whole nature was cast in an heroic HEROIC CHARACTER. 117 mould, who felt himself not merely the countryman of Shakespeare and Cromwell, but of Homer and Sophocles, of Dante and Tasso, of Luther and Me- lancthon, — of all men who acknowledge the sway of the beautiful, the noble, and the right, — could not, of course, write anything which was not dictated by an heroic spirit; all his sentences, therefore, have the animating and penetrating, as well as illuminating power of heroic acts, and always imply a character strong enough to make good his words. Still, in some respects, we may doubt whether the mere writing his " Defence of the People of England," rises to the dignity of heroism ; but, when his physician told him that if he did write it he would lose his eyesight, his calm persistence in his work was sub- limely heroic. Freedom demanded of the student his most precious sense, and he resolutely plucked out his eyes, and laid them on her altar, content to abide in outward night, provided with the inner eye of the soul he could see the stern countenance of inexora- ble Duty melt into that approving smile which re- wards self-sacrifice with a bliss deeper than all joys >f sense or raptures of imagination. There are occasions, also, where mere intellectual hardihood may be in the highest degree heroic That peculiar nwal fear which is involved in intellectual 118 HEROIC CHARACTER. timidity is often harder to overcome than the physi- cal fear of the stake and the rack. There are men who will dare death for glory or for country, who could not dare scorn or contumely for the truth ; and people generally would rather die than think. Noth- ing but that enrapturing sentiment and vivid vision implied in the love of truth, nothing but that trans- porting thrill which imparadises the soul in the per- ception of a new thought, can lift a wise and good man above the wholesome prejudices of prudence, custom, country, and common belief, and make him let loose the immortal idea his mind imprisons, and send it forth to war against false systems and te- nacious errors, with the firm faith that it will result in eventual good, though at first it seems to trail along with it the pernicious consequences of a lie. Such a man feels the awful responsibility laid upon that soul into whose consciousness descends one of those revolutionizing truths, " Hard to shape in act : For all the past of time reveals A bridal dawn of thunder-peals. Wherever thought has wedded fact." Thus heroic resolution, as well as wide-reaching thought, is often indispensable to the philosophic thinker ; but when to the deep love of truth is added HEROIC CHARACTER. Hi* the deeper love of right, and the thinker standi boldly forth as a practical reformer, the obstacles, internal and external, to brave and determined effort are multiplied both to his conscience and his will. A prophet of the future, with his eager eyes fixe4 on hope, — " The burning eagle, Above the unrisen morrow," — he has to labor in the present on men whose inspi- ration is memory. The creative and beneficent char- acter of his aggressive thought is at first concealed by its destructive aspect. His light seems lightning, which irradiates not to bless, but to smite. As regards his own life and comfort, he may be ready, in every exigency, to say, with the hero of Italy, " I had rather take one step forward and die, than one step backward and live " ; but he often has also to resist the tormenting thought that he is sacrificing himself only to injure others, and is preparing to go triumph- antly through the earthly hell of the martyr's stake, only to pass into that hotter hell which is paved with good intentions. A universal yell denounces him aa the apostle of anarchy, falsehood, and irreligion ; and nothing but the faith which discerns and takes hohi of the immortal substance of truth can enable him. not only to withstand this shock of adverse opinior 120 HEROIC CHARACTER. but to deal his prodigious blows with the condensed energy of unhesitating, unweakened will. This is true strength and fortitude of soul, reposing grandly on unseen realities above it, and obstinately resisting the evidence of the shifting facts which appear to cast doubt on the permanent law. It is probable that Wickliffe, Huss, Luther, all heroic men who have brought down fire from heaven, the light and the heat of truth, had, in moments of despondency, a sly and sneering devil at their elbow, mocking them with the taunt by which the scoffing messenger of Jove adds keener agony to the sufferings of the chained Prometheus : — " Those who do endure Dsep wrongs for man, and scorn, and chains, but heap Thousand-fo'd torment on themselves and him." In these remarks, so far, we have laid stress on the principle that the inspiration of the hero is the positive quality of love, not the negative quality of hatred. ror example, Carlyle, always writing of heroism, is rarely heroic, because he hates falsehood rather than loves truth, and is a disorganizer of wrong rather than an organizer of right. His writ- ings tend to split the mind into a kind of splendid disorder, and we purchase some shining fragments of ihought at the expense of weakened will. Being REROIC CHARACTER. 121 negative, he cannot communicate life and inspiration to others ; for negation ends in despair, and love alone can communicate the life of hope. His negative thought, therefore, can never become a positive thing ; it can pout, sneer, gibe, growl, hate, declaim, destroy ; but it cannot cheer, it cannot create. Now men may be soldiers, patriots, and reformers, from the inspira- tion of hatred ; but they cannot be heroic. It is love, and love alone, whose sweet might liberates men from the thraldom of personal considerations, and lifts them into the exhilarating region of unselfish activity. It is not the fear of shame, but love of glory, which makes the purely heroic soldier. It is not hatred of other nations, but love of his own, which makes the heroic patriot. It is not hatred of falsehood and wrong, but love of truth and right, which makes the heroic thinker and reformer. And it is not the fear of hell and hatred of the Devil, but the love of heaven, which makes the heroic saint. All the hatred, all the fear, are incidental and acci- dental, not central and positive. We should hardly style old King Clovis a saint on the strength of the passion he flew into when the account of the Crucifix ■ ion was read to him, and of his fierce exclamation, u I would I had been there with my valiant Franks ! I would have repressed his wrongs ! " « 122 HEROIC CHARACTER. The heroism of the saint, the last to be considered here, exceeds all other heroism in depth, intensity, comprehensiveness, elevation, and wisdom. The hero soldier, the hero patriot, the hero reformer, each is groat by detaching one idea from the sum of things, and throwing his whole energies into its realization ; but the hero saint views all things in relation to their centre and source. He brings in the idea of God, and at once the highest earthly objects swiftly recede to their proper distance, and dwindle to their real dimensions. But this heroism, though it exhibits human nature reposing on an all-inclusive idea, the mightiest that the heart can conceive or the mind dimly grope for on the vanishing edges of intelligence, is still not a heroism eagerly coveted or warmly ap proved. It is recorded of Saint Theresa, that, after she had become old and poor in the service of the Lord, and Vivid only two sous left of all her posses- sions, she sat down to meditate. " Theresa and two sous," she said, " are nothing ; but Theresa, two sous, and God, are all things " ; on which Pierre Leroux makes the bitter comment : " To the young bucks of Pans, Theresa, young and handsome, and worth buf two sous, would be little ; and Theresa, two sous, and Sod, would be still less ! " The mental phenomena implied in the acta, or r» HEROIC CHARACTER 123 forded in the writings, of the heroes of religion are Df so grand and transcendent a character that one can hardly have patience with Mr. Worldly Wise- man, — the worthy gentleman who writes history and explains the problems of metaphysics, — when, with his knowing look, he disposes of the whole matter by Borne trash about fanaticism and disordered imagina- tion. Now glory, country, humanity, are realities only to those who love them ; and the all-compre- hending Reality the saint seeks and adores, is but a faint star, " Pinnacled dim in the intense mane," to the wisest of the worldlings. By what right does he sit in critical judgment on the saints and martyrs, when his point of view is earth, and their point of view is heaven ? Religious heroism, indeed, in its gradual growth from religious sentiment, is a feeling before it is an idea ; but what the heart wishes the mind soon discerns ; and the marvellous experiences which visit the consciousness of the saint are logical results of the gravitation of his nature to its source, and are as valid as other facts of immediate per- ception. Once roused, this divinizing sentiment kin- dles the whole solid mass of his being with its penetrating and purifying fire ; carries his thoughts, affections, passions, to higher levels of character; L24 HEROIC CHARACTER. converts faith into sight, so that at last the mys- teries of the supernatural world are partially unrolled to his eager gaze ; he catches glimpses of gloriea almost too bright for the aching sense to bear ; dis- cerns right, truth, beneficence, justice, as radiations from one awful loveliness ; and sees " Around His throre the sanctities of heaven Stand thick as stars ; and from His sight receive Beatitude past utterance." Filled and stirred with these wondrous visions, " Which o'erinform his tenement of clay," he becomes a soldier of the chivalry of spirit, a pa- triot of the heavenly kingdom, — the true " pilgrim of eternity," burdened beneath the weight of his rapture until it finds expression in those electric deeds whose shock is felt all over the earth, amazing Time itself with a thrill from Eternity. The still, deep ecstasy which imparadises his spirit can but imperfectly ally itself with human language, though it occasionally escapes along his written page in fit- ful gleams of celestial lightning, touching such words as "joy," and "sweetness," and "rest," with an un- earthly significance, a preternatural intensity of mean- ing; but the full power of this awful beauty ot holiness is only seen and felt in the virtues it creates HEROIC CHARACTER. 125 tn the felicity with which it transmutes calamities into occasions for the exercise of new graces of char- acter; in the sureness of its glance into the occult se- crets of life ; in the solid patience which exhausts all the ingenuity of persecution ; in the intrepid meekness which is victorious over the despotic might of unhal- lowed force ; in the serene audacity which dares all the principalities of earth, and defies all the powers of hell ; in the triumphant Faith which hears the choral chant amidst the torments of the rack, and sees the cherubic faces through the glare of the fires of martyrdom ! But perhaps there is nothing more exquisitely simple and touching in the experience of the hero of religion, nothing which more startles us by its confident faith, than the feeling which animates his colloquies and meditations when the spiritual home- sickness, the pang of what Coleridge calls the senti- ment of " other worldliness," presses on his soul, and he confesses to the weakness of desiring to depart. Thus figure to yourselves Luther, as he is revealed to us in his old age, sitting by the rude table in his humble house, and, with a few dear veterans of the Reformation, gossiping over the mugs of ale on the affairs of the celestial kingdom, while the thunders if papal and imperial wrath are heard muttering 126 HEROIC CHARACTER. ominously in the distance. Luther tells them that he begins to feel the longing to leave their camp on earth, and to go home. He is not without hope that the Lord, in view of his protracted strugpVa and declining energies, will soon recall him. He is resigned, not to die, but to live, if such be the order from head-quarters ; but if it be not presumptuous in him to proffer a petition, he could wish it to be considered that he had sojourned here long enough, and should have permission to depart, it mattering little to him whether the medium of transfer from >ne world to another be the bed of sickness or the Martyr's stake. At any rate, however, age is doing Its sure work even on his stalwart frame ; and he closes with the consoling sentiment so finely embod- ied by the Christian poet : " Within this body pent. Absent from Thee I roam : But nightly pitch my moving tent A day's march nearer home." We have thus attempted to picture, with a few rude scrawls of the pencil, the heroic spirit, as its creative glow successively animates the soldier, the patriot, the reformer, and the saint, painfully con- Bcious all the while that we have not sounded its depth of sentiment, nor measured its height of char HEROIC CHARACTER 127 icter, nor told its fulness of joy. We have seen that this spirit is a spirit of cheer, and live, and beauty, and power, giving the human soul its finest and amplest expression ; and that, while its glorious in- spiration illuminates history with the splendors of romance, it is the prolific source, in humble life, of heroic deeds which no history records, no poetry cel- ebrates, and of which renown is mute. This spirit is everywhere, and it is needed everywhere. It is oeeded *"> resist low views of business, low views of polities, low views of patriotism, low views of life. ft is needed in every situation where passion tempts, sloth enfeebles, fear degrades, power threatens, and interest deludes. And it is not without its band of witnesses to sound their everlasting protest against meanness, cowardice, baseness, and fraud, and tc shield in their sustaining arms, and invigorate by their immortal presence, the sorely-tempted novices of heroic honor and virtue. They rise before the soul's eye, a glorious company of immortals, from the battle-fields of unselfish fame ; they come from the alls where patriotism thundered its ardent resolves, and from the scaffolds which its self-devotion trans- figured into sacrificial altars; they issue from the hissing crowd of scorners and bigots through which the lon« Reformer urged his victorious way ; and thej 128 HEROIC CHARACTER. come from that promised heaven on earth, beami ; from the halo which encircles the head and beatill ^s the countenance of the saint, smiling celestial disdain of torture and death. From all these they come, — they press upon the consciousness, — not as dea«J memories of the past, but as living forces of tlu, present, to stream into our spirits the resistless «u 9rgies which gladden theirs : — " Filling the soul with sentiments august ; 'Xh» beautiful, the orave the holy, and th* jftflfc THE AMERICAN MIND. IN studying literature and history, we are at first attracted by particular events and individual minds, and we rise but gradually to the conception of nations and national minds, including, of course, under the latter phrase, all the great moving, vital powers ex- pressed in the phenomena of a nation's life. The external history, the political institutions, the litera- ture, laws, and manners of a people, are but its thoughts in visible or audible expression, and ever carry us back to the Mind whence they proceeded, and from which they received their peculiar national character. We cannot form just notions even of in- dividuals without viewing them as related to their age and country, as expressions, more or less emphatic, of the National Mind, in whose depths their personal being had its birth, and from whose vitality they drew the pith and nerve of character. Thus Pericles, Scipio, and Chatham lose much of their raciness and genuineness if not considered as related in this waj 6» I 130 THE AMERICAN MIND. lo Greece, Rome, and England, who bore them, nur- tured them, colored and directed their thoughts and passions, clothed them with power as with a garment; bo that Greece saw in Pericles the mirror of her own Bupple strength and plastic intellect ; and Rome be- held in Scipio the image of her own tixed will and large reason ; and England recognized in Chatham's